Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Back in 2003, an intelligent-design advocate named Francis Beckwith wrote a book, Law, Darwinism, and Public Education, published by Rowman and Littlefield. Although Beckwith was clearly out of sympathy with Darwinism, the point of the book wasn't about biology. It was about the establishment clause of the first amendment of the Constitution. Beckwith's view was that "intelligent design" was an alternative scientific hypothesis, and that accordingly it is appropriate -- and not even remotely an official establishment of religion -- to teach that hypothesis as one distinct from Darwinism within public schools. That book might have gone unnoticed -- like lots of other books saying the same thing -- had it not been taken up by an enthusiastic review (technically a "book note,") in the Harvard Law Review for January 2004. The reviewer, one of the student editors of the HLR, was Lawrence VanDyke. The note, appearing in such a high-visibility periodical...

There is a phenomenon much discussed among biologists called "genetic load." It refers to the reduction in the mean fitness of a population caused by some genetic process. Perhaps most important is mutation genetic load Most mutations are deleterious, even if only slightly, and over geological time the  effect on a gene line of the build-up of a lot of these mutations along the strands of DNA becomes serious. You might consider genetic load the biological equivalent of entropy. A population can only tolerate a certain load before going extinct, though it is difficult to quantify load and that maximum acceptable level. On a prior principles, there ought to be a highest sustainable level of mutation load. Some creationists (intelligent-design theorists, if you prefer) contend that the deleterious nature of most mutations, and thus this "load," is fatal to this damned Darwinian nonsense. They see "Darwinism" as the position that life has been gradual...