On Darwin Day I attended Mike Reid talk on the history of Darwinian thought (further details at: http://mdc.wash.org/). One of the questions that came up was that of Social Darwinism. Mike rightly pointed out that Darwin had nothing to do with this political movement and that Science can be used for bad as well as good. Recently I posted an article on shallow skepticism. One area that illustrates a shallow, skeptical attack on Science concerns Science’s imperfections. In truth there are certainly limits to what we know scientifically and there may be misapplications. But many criticisms of Science are shallow and misguided. For example, some of the more philosophical critics reject evolutionary theory on the basis that it is unproveable, if for no other reason that one can’t go back in time. It fixes on a type of data gap we have to live with. It is true that the theory of evolution may not be completely verified by direct observation of every part of the process. This is true of all theories that provide explanations for processes that involve immense periods of time.
