Culture

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In light of Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss’ visits here, it seemed appropriate to critically evaluate some putatively rigorous work by dissenting voices. In Science vs. Religion? Fuller argues for “the centrality of intelligent design in motivating the scientific enterprise, in terms of which Darwin's theory of evolution is a historical aberration.” 
Fuller begins with an interesting discussion of how religion and science have interwoven over the centuries, making a good case for the historical importance of theological motivations in driving scientific research. So far, so good. However, Fuller then attempts to argue from the historical importance of the concept of intelligent design to a normative claim about accepting Intelligent Design (ID) theories of biological evolution today. 
Now, unlike most ID defenders, Fuller seems uninterested in discussing empirical evidence. Indeed, Fuller seems uninterested in which theory is more likely to be true. Some Wikipedia-ing shed some light on this: Fuller is a “social epistemologist” who doesn’t view scientific breakthroughs as discoveries about the world we live in, but as inventions that are neither true nor false in the usual sense. 
So, Fuller focuses on discrediting evolutionary biology as a social philosophy, rather than an empirical theory. Neo-Darwinism, Fuller claims, promotes racism (e.g., the British National Party), slavery, genocide, etc. Of course, this doesn’t make neo-Darwinism false, but then Fuller doesn’t think in terms of truth and falsity! Besides these postmodern/social constructivist pontifications, Fuller puts forward several strange complaints about neo-Darwinism: why hasn’t someone won a Nobel Prize in it? Why aren’t there more scientific papers published on it? In response, we might argue that as evolutionary theory is built into ecology, genetics, microbiology, and every other branch of biology, Fuller is just mistaken. There are plenty of Nobel prizes and scientific articles on evolutionary theory. And besides, even a cursory search will produce scores of papers on evolutionary theory in and of itself!
Fuller, a philosopher and sociologist of science at the University of Warwick, is supposed to be a distinguished academic, and one of ID’s most formidable intellectuals. But if this social constructivist crap is the best they’ve got, I’ll take neo-Darwinism any day.