It would seem, as with Frank's analysis, that one must simply batten down the hatches and defend Darwinian thinking with die-hard persistence. But a point has been missed. There was a Darwin debate before the Intelligent Design movement, and before the rise of fundamentalism. Religious critics of Darwin may have hijacked that debate, but they didn't invent it, and their particular slant on the issue simply obscures the problems with Darwinism. In fact, the problem is broader than that, since the obstinate refusal, or else inability, of the scientific community to approach evolution critically, has handed the issue to these fundamentalists, whose success lies in a being a social body with enough media power to take on the Big Science establishment. All the original critics of Darwin among scientists have been marginalized. So part of the problem we see lies with the science community itself. The issue is larger than that of evolution. It has to do with the inability of modern science to create a genuine or sound social philosophy of secularism.  

The Darwin debate goes on and on, deadlocked between rival factions. The problem is one of ideology, and the agendas of the parties to the debate. It seems as if modern society is too disturbed by ideology to be able to produce a theory of evolution. The chronic character of Darwin debate reflects this state of affairs, and we see now, not one, but two major factions plying their trade in the ideological sphere. The Intelligent Design movement now joins the lists as the new contender. This is very distracting, and this attempt to hijack the critique of Darwin's theory is almost counterproductive. We are back at square one, trying to resolve the issue of evolution. The issue of design is an old one, and whatever we think of its argumentation, the real issue is the difficulty with Darwinism.

From the very beginning questions of evolution have been contentious, but Darwin's theory made that almost a permanent state of affairs. Darwin's great achievement was to publicize the discovery of 'deep time', the fact of evolution. He did not discover evolution, nor was he the first to propose natural selection. His Origin, however, was decisive in bringing the idea of evolution to the fore. But many critics, from the beginning, including even T. H. Huxley were wary of the question of natural selection. It is worth reviewing Huxley's position here, since he was the preeminent champion of Darwin, and yet might be considered a critic now, due to his reservations about Darwin's core claim. This fact should remind us that the social context has changed.

The generation of Huxley and Darwin saw the triumph of scientific culture, and the discovery of evolution, not just Darwin's theory, was the key component of that change. Confronting the reality of evolution was an immense paradigm  shift, but the issue of Darwin's theory of natural selection was something quite different, almost added on. Darwin succeeded in part because he brought a scientific organization to the newly emerging data, putting the question into another key, but it doesn't follow that this was the same as the issue of natural selection. The theory of natural selection suffers an irony. It is not a very good theory, and many now denounced as his critics saw at once that it couldn't work.

The solution must be a new and better stance toward science, able to critique itself and its methodologies. Such cultural discourses are already in existence, but they became shunted aside in the rise of positivism and the Age of Big Science. The classic distinction of the natural and human sciences that arose in the period of a figure such as Kant should remind us that the Darwin debate is a poor cousin to these classic gestures to reckon with the legacy of wrongly applied scientific thinking. 

Where are the humanists in this debate? They have all been silenced by the polarizing dialectic of scientific and religious fundamentalists. We need to embrace a new and better scientific world view that can learn from something like a Kantian distinction of theoretical and practical reason, the classic rebuttals of the argument by design, and the fundamental critique of an ethics-free science. All the elements are there in our intellectual history, and yet we have somehow allowed the need for critique to become the agenda of the most limited, and reactionary cultural groups from the American Bible Belt. 

That is an odd situation indeed. The Darwin debate has gone on too long, and the scientific community is itself partly to blame for throwing a softball pitch to fundamentalists. Science education has become so rigid that noone is able to handle the methodological difficulties or produce some common sense understanding of the limits of Darwin's theory. While all the critics of Darwin in the science community are suppressed, the baton passes to fundamentalists. Is the science community asleep at the wheel? This has created a very destructive situation that just might wreck the study of science in schools.