Via Matt Yglesias and Chris Mooney, I came across an ongoing war of words over “Intelligent Design“, a relatively more nuanced challenge to Darwinian evolution than traditional Biblical creationism. This particular exchange started with an anonymous student book review in the Harvard Law Review which uncritically rehearsed the arguments of a Discovery Institute book by Francis Beckwith, Darwinism and Public Education. One Brian Leiter, blogger and University of Texas Law and Philosophy professor took the review to task for sloppy standards and for legitimizing what is in fact, crank science. His first post is well worth the read - a sharp refutation of the intellectual dishonesty of Intelligent Design advocacy.
In addition to crazy emails that Leiter received, the National Review jumped on the issue with an article defending the review and decrying leftist academic McCarthyism:
[Student reviewer] VanDyke’s temerity in giving prime real estate in one of America’s most respected legal publications to Beckwith’s work was particularly galling to Brian Leiter. Intelligent design? Francis Beckwith? In the Harvard Law Review? It was all too much for Leiter, which may be why he risked his prestige to make this petty, but deadly serious attack on VanDyke….Leiter seems to be threatening VanDyke’s career if he should dare to set foot in the academy.
You can read Leiter’s response or his followup more generally on his blog. But two points are worth mentioning. First, the NRO review was written by one of Beckwith’s teaching assistants, an undisclosed conflict that casts doubt over any hope of journalistic sincerity on the part of National Review. Second, the right-wing critics of orthodoxy don’t seem to have a clue about how the academy works. They can only imagine that it’s a matter of sinister evolutionists using their personal prestige to wreck careers in Machiavellian fashion. As Leiter puts it, “Pointing out that someone who is a scholarly incompetent has no prospects in the legal academy is not a “threat”; pointing out that someone is a scholarly incompetent is not a matter of attacking someone because they “dared to differ.”
This exchange may seem arcane, even petty, but I find it a fascinating read in part because Leiter and Mooney are smart writers and in part because it seemed to lay bare an anti-intellectualism that’s stretching across conservative thinking in several areas from macroeconomic policy to environmental study to recent “social science” on the impact of gay marriage. Now, I realize that there’s a realm of difference between the easily shattered positions of the Not Your Grandfather’s Creationism* ID-ers and the fuzzier evidence from economics or environmental science. And of course there are many, many conservatives who have no truck with anti-evolutionism.
But the Intelligent Design folks should give other would-be heterodox “scientists” pause. Here you have people learning science not to explain the world but to serve as intellectual dressing for a position they held before their inquiry began. Here you have critics decrying academic prestige on the one hand as a sinister tool of leftist strongarming and on the other hand trying to coopt prestige by planting student reviews in major journals and citing dubious credentials left and right. Here you have charges or academic McCarthyism from those who haven’t bothered to learn what constitutes an academic discpline or intellectual rigor.
What’s more it reveals where the arch conservative press comes down. Leiter puts it best: “this is not the first time [the National Review] have cast their lot with pseudo-science. I fear it won’t be the last.”
*Speaking of which, perhaps I should note that my own grandfather attended the Scopes trial, though I don’t know what his thoughts on the matter were.
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