Is This a Paradigm Shift?
My latest previous post, with David Klinghoffer, was about the “tipping point” in dissent from neo-Darwinism observed by Oxford physiologist Denis Noble, which he pin-pointed as occurring when the Royal Society convened in 2016 for the purpose of rethinking evolutionary theory. From Noble’s viewpoint, since 2016 defenders of neo-Darwinism have gotten very quiet, and young researchers in the emerging generation of scientists are happily working outside the framework of neo-Darwinism.
Not long ago at all, that sort of change seemed like a distant dream. As Douglas Axe put it in 2016, the academe had become a “self-righteous monoculture,” and I think Axe’s comment expressed how many people felt: “Maybe this regrettable situation will change, someday.”
“Maybe…someday.” Implied was: But don’t hold your breath.
The Zeitgeist is dead.
But that’s always how it feels when a certain climate of opinion is dominant and in line with the current zeitgeist. The dogma seems utterly unshakeable.
Until, one day, it doesn’t. C. S. Lewis (one of the most vehement critics of the zeitgeist qua zeitgeist) wrote
Nor can a man of my age ever forget how suddenly and completely the idealist philosophy of his youth fell. McTaggart, Green, Bosanquet, Bradley seemed enthroned forever; they went down as suddenly as the Bastille. And the interesting thing is that while I lived under that dynasty I felt various difficulties and objections which I never dared to express. They were so frightfully obvious that I felt sure they must be mere misunderstandings: the great men could not have made such very elementary mistakes as those which my objections implied. But very similar objections — though put, no doubt, far more cogently than I could have put them — were among the criticisms which finally prevailed.
An idea sits on its glorious throne. None dare question it. All its critics are doomed to perpetual quackdom. And then — just like that! — the zeitgeist changes. Suddenly, that “indisputable” idea is old-fashioned, out-of-date. People forget that they ever believed in it. Another philosophy takes its place, and it seems indisputable.
If Noble is right, that’s happening with neo-Darwinism. And it may be too much to hope, but there is some evidence the shift goes even beyond neo-Darwinism. Even Darwinism itself (without the “neo-”), maybe even the overarching philosophy of methodological naturalism, could be approaching a fall from power.
For example, Stephen Meyer perceives a shift in the public reception of intelligent design. In 2019, there was already a lot of interest in pro-ID content, but the responses tended to be very vicious. By 2023, the interest was still there, but the reactions seemed overwhelmingly positive. Meyer thinks this is a ripple effect from the deeper change that is underway, as arguments that have been percolating for decades begin to shift opinions in higher intellectual circles.
John West, meanwhile, has noted that opponents of intelligent design seem to be devolving in quality. Follow the downward trajectory from Darwin himself, to Stephen Jay Gould, to Richard Dawkins, to “loudmouth atheist” Jerry Coyne and P. Z. “hammer on the lunatics and idiots” Myers, to the likes of the YouTuber “Professor Dave” … The best of the best in the biology world just don’t seem that invested in attacking intelligent design or defending Darwinism anymore.
Meanwhile, in the broader philosophical scene, two of the New Atheist “four horsemen of the apocalypse” (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris) have passed away, and no one seems queued to replace them. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once a contender for fifth horseman (or first horsewoman?), has converted to Christianity. Dawkins himself recently commented that he doesn’t want to be remembered for being “vehement and an atheist.”
Something is changing.
...Long live the Zeitgeist!
But let’s not get too excited. Just because the paradigms are shifting does not mean that intelligent design is going to suddenly take the throne. There are other options. Panpsychism is on the rise. Vitalist theories are coming out of the shadows. Denis Noble’s methodologically naturalist Third Way group are trying hard to carve out a theory of biology that is independent of both neo-Darwinism and intelligent design, placing their hopes in various versions of teleonomy (internal teleology) and autopoiesis (self-construction) as explanations for biological complexity. Whatever emerges victorious from the milieu is likely to be neither intelligent design nor old-fashioned neo-Darwinism — just as whatever emerges from the larger philosophical debates will probably be neither crude materialism nor old-fashioned religious theism. There are other options there, too.
On that note: the lack of will among Dawkins and his sort to fight against ID may be mostly due to the fact that the shifting winds of culture have tossed many of the ID people and Darwinists (including Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne) onto the same side of some of the most heated debates. It’s not 2005 anymore, and the center of the “culture war” is no longer between the Religious Right and the New Atheists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for her part, has said that one reason she became a Christian was because “secular tools alone can’t equip us for civilizational war.”
Of course, not all proponents of intelligent design are religious, or politically on any particular side, or interested in civilizational wars. But atheist opponents of ID typically associate ID with religion, so if they find themselves on the same side as religious people in other ideological battles, they are naturally going to have less enthusiasm for attacking ID.
Get ready for...something.
It isn’t necessarily a positive development. While it’s encouraging that unquestionable tenets of Darwinism are now becoming questionable, and while there are some genuinely encouraging signs of a new openness to the theory intelligent design in many circles, it’s important to realize that the new zeitgeist will not necessarily be any better than the old one. If old enemies are forced to be friends, that could be because they’re having to deal with something worse than either of them.
For example, a power-driven post-truth paradigm could be worse than the old materialist paradigm. Stephen Meyer recently commented that he feels in a sense like a kindred spirit with Richard Dawkins, because both men care intensely about the big questions of life. I saw what Meyer meant when I watched Dawkins’s recent debate with the ex-atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Dawkins brushed aside the critique that the ideas he promoted might have undermined Western civilization with the response that, essentially, that was none of his business: as a scientist, he cared about what was true, consequences be damned.
It sounded … old-fashioned. And that’s worrisome, because a post-truth paradigm is not likely to yield either truth or good pragmatic outcomes. If a post-truth attitude becomes entrenched in the new paradigm, we might look back nostalgically to the days when materialism was the main intellectual competitor.
At any rate we don't get a choice.
Whatever the new paradigm looks like, ID theorists are going to want to be at the cutting-edge of engaging with it. Right now, it may be tempting to treat panpsychism, self-construction, teleonomy, and whatever else comes up as frivolous distractions from the real intellectual opponent of Darwinism. But I think that would be a mistake.
As Denis Noble says, “neo-Darwinism is dead,” or at least dying. In the coming decades, the debate may be between, say, intelligent design and some sort of quantum physics-inflected marriage of scientism and spiritualism, not genuinely materialist, though haunted by the ghost of materialism. Because the coming victor is hard to see before it arrives, ID theorists need to be assessing new theories carefully as they emerge, not relegating them to mockery and dismissal. It would be a mistake to keep beating a dead horseman, and miss what’s coming up from behind.
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