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again, it's the case tht darwinian evolution is a theory, but it's a theory that functions as explanatory within certain rules---so within a social & cognitive environment defined by interaction with a genre of thinking. creationism simply does not function as a scientific explanation of fuck all. but it also doesn't and can't operate by the same rules concerning evidence, fit between explanation and evidence, etc. it just doesn't. intelligent design was an attempt to adapt creationism to a more scientific type of explanation & it's a pretty dismal failure.
that said, it is simply not the case that darwinian evolution is not without its problems. for example, the underlying problem that darwin confronted in assembling the narrative followed from the nature of classifications--genus species etc--which posited each bio-system as a discrete thing or object. the question was how to account for one type of object giving way to another in the context of a developmental history that was understood as single. that there'd be a single history is a residuum of christianity--why should that be the case? that biological systems are comprehensible as types of objects (so that the transformation of one type to another becomes a permuation question really, in the way that one could make a table into a hat by introducing elements of hat into a set of features table and eliminating features of table to accomodate them)...alot of recent work in dynamical systems theory has pushed thinking about biological systems pretty far away from the paradigm of objects and in doing that has opened up space for thinking biological evolution in quite different terms than did darwin. it enables an abandonment of the assumption that the history of biological evolution is single, and has undermined the sense of separateness system/environment and has made the timeline required to explain evolution into something quite different. but it also pushes the whole way of thinking of biological systems even further away from the residual christianity that informs what darwin was thinking in the middle of the 19th century--so it'd be even more unacceptable for creationists than the relatively positivist model of evolution that darwin outlined.
the point is that evolution as darwin outlined it is a theory, tied to particular philosophical assumptions and certain ambient socio-cultural factors which are written directly into the theory itself.
but the conclusion is not therefore science is bunk--the conclusion is that scientific theories are heuristics that guide particular types of investigation, that science is really a form of practical philosophy that requires critical engagement.
there's more, but i gotta go.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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