Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
up when they claim that all these proposals rest on a scientific ground.
What
will
sound conspiracy-like is my supposition that scientists are almost
certain to deny that they are rhetorical Darwinists—and of course many are
not. But while I am fairly certain that they do actively promulgate evolution-
ism, I doubt whether they are truly aware of the pseudoscientific charac-
ter of these efforts. Rhetorical Darwinists, rather, are true believers. They
belong to an academic culture that socializes its members to be insensible to
the difference between evolutionary science and evolutionism. As products
of a scientistic movement that was beginning to break off from the rest of
intellectual culture a century and a half ago, they have lost the capacity to
look critically at the positivist underpinnings that sustain their faith. When
C. P. Snow decried this split fifty years ago, it was largely because he was
concerned about the intellectual deprivations suffered by humanists once
they had lost touch with science.
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In evolutionism we see the flip side of
this, a scientific culture tempted by the interests of self-preservation to resist
any meaningful conversation with the broader world of thought.
