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Richard Sternberg is a heretic. Shunned by his brethren
and now at risk of total excommunication, Sternberg committed the
unforgivable sin of questioning holy scripture.
Charles Darwin is the “third rail” of the church of
science: Touch him and you die, or at least your career does
according to a complaint filed by Sternberg with the U.S. Office of
Special Counsel. Dr. Sternberg is a zoology researcher at the
Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in
Washington D.C. and until recently edited a scientific journal
published there called Proceedings of the Biological Society of
Washington. It was there that he committed his blasphemy.
A Wall Street Journal editorial by David Klinghoffer
notes the trouble began in August 2004 when Sternberg approved the
publication of a peer-reviewed paper defending the theory of
intelligent design. The paper was written by Stephen Meyer, who
holds a PhD from Cambridge University, and references
the work of biologists and
paleontologists from decidedly non-crackpot institutions such as the
University of Chicago, Yale University, Oxford University, and
Cambridge.
Intelligent design is the
theory that life on Earth is too complex to have developed without a
guiding intelligence. Much of mainstream science thinks of
intelligent design as little more than a stand-in for Biblical
creationism, and I’m sure it is for some. (Shame on them. They
should say what they mean.) And creationism, in some circles, is
the only sin greater than questioning St. Darwin.
This explains the witch
hunt. Sternberg’s complaint claims that Jonathan Coddington, the
chairman of the museum’s zoology department, contacted Sternberg’s
supervisor and asked “whether Sternberg was a religious
fundamentalist.” Told no, Coddington asked if Sternberg was
“affiliated with or belonged to any religious organization.” The
complaint alleges Coddington also demanded to know Sternberg’s
political affiliation and whether he was a “right-winger.”
In October, Coddington
evicted Sternberg from his office and confiscated his keys to the
departmental floor and the specimens he needs for his work.
Sternberg has been reduced to begging for work space from
colleagues, most of whom shun him for fear of the same treatment.
The irony here, the Wall
Street Journal editorial points out, is that opponents of
intelligent design have argued against it in part because no
supporting research had been published in a peer-reviewed scientific
journal. “Now that it has,” the editorial notes, “they argue that
it shouldn’t have been because it’s unscientific.”
I have had my own brushes
with this brand of scientific zealotry, though at much less cost
than Dr. Sternberg. A column I wrote last year about a federally
funded pro-evolution website set off an email exchange with a
retired biology professor who declined to address the holes in
Darwin’s theory by saying, in essence, that I was too stupid and/or
uneducated to understand. That cannot be said of Dr. Sternberg, and
in any event I’m more of the Albert Einstein school: Einstein once
said “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t
understand it yourself.”
The problems with the theory
of evolution are well known, though the high priests of science
prefer symbolic stake burnings to any kind of dialog. In my earlier
column I wrote that evolutionists ask us to believe organic
molecules developed and sprang to life by themselves, with the
spontaneous ability to eat or otherwise absorb energy. This happy
accident of nature also had to have the ability to reproduce, or
somehow evolved that ability while it was still just a random
collection of chemicals.
No wonder the retired biology professor preferred to
just call me names. But I suspect the real resistance stems from
the fact that if we acknowledge where we came from we must also
admit life has meaning beyond what we might decide for it. In the
ego-ocracy that dominates much of the scientific establishment,
that’s going to take a bigger miracle than evolution.
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