Darwin on Trial

Johnson's take on the issues may be often superficial and inaccurate, but any book that spawns a heated and extensive discussion is, in my opinion, a good book. However, Johnson describes a debate where everyone, from Christian fundamentalists all the way to dogmatic materialists, seems to relie on aprioristic semantic models. Such models may appear unwarranted to someone who does not share the core beliefs of their supporters and is willing to question their adequacy. Someone who regards both God and Nature as cultural constructs finds her/himself in a very small minority here, especially if s/he regards science's task as working out effective predictive models rather than providing rethorical explanations. Specifically, one can regard evolution as a viable, if incomplete, model for certain classes of observations, without relying on Christian faith or on Darwinist ideology-loaded tautologies.
The following statement by Niels Bohr may be relevant here, "Darwinian theory in its present form makes two independent assertions. On the one hand, it states that, through the process of heredity, nature tests ever new living forms, rejecting the great majority and preserving a few suitable ones. This seems to be empirically correct. But there is also the second assertion: that the new forms originate through purely accidental disturbances of the gene structure. This claim is much more questionable, even though we can hardly conceive of an alternative". The semantic ambiguity of "accidental" events, which directly relates to probability and to the complementary notions of chaos-form and randomness-intelligence, still haunts the discussion about evolution. I suggest to anyone interested in this topic to have a look at the ongoing debate about the anthropic principle in cosmology, mentioned only passingly by Johnson. S/he may find similar underlying issues at stake there, notably around the crucial, problematic notions of probability and randomness, and learn something by looking at them from a somewhat different perspective.