A poisoned Gift

Last November, Dr Stephan Gift, a lecturer in Electrical Engineering at UWI, sent a letter to Newsday in which he claimed that Darwin’s theory of evolution was wrong. Although he did not say so, this letter was a response to my previously calling him a crank on matters of geology and evolution. I didn’t reply at once, because I was hoping that someone from the UWI’s Natural Sciences Faculty or from Newsday’s readership would point out the flaws in Gift’s supposedly scientific arguments. Nobody did. Maybe the university lecturers found Gift’s arguments too obviously foolish to respond to; or maybe they didn’t want to get into conflict with someone they would meet at faculty tea-with-rum parties; or, most likely, maybe nobody thought the matter important enough to deal with. But I do think it important to respond. For one thing, if some intellectuals show themselves to be crackpots, and other intellectuals allow these crackpots to dominate public discussion on even esoteric issues, then the general public comes to distrust intellectuals or, more frequently, begins to follow crackpot philosophies themselves.

For another thing, I have a perhaps over-zealous regard for fact (though I do make the occasional honest mistake, like writing Clary Benn instead of Hubert Alleyne as I did last week in listing the individuals Prime Minister Patrick Manning has it in for). And for a third thing, I always enjoy exposing people who accuse others of dishonesty while lying through their own yellow teeth. Gift began his letter by writing that “Science is concerned with the truth about nature…” The rest of his letter went on to demonstrate a complete disregard for truth about nature and, indeed, any other kind of truth. Gift asserted that Darwinian evolution is “completely without scientific merit and not even a reasonable hypothesis”. But consider the logic of this argument: it would mean that thousands of biologists both past and present have been involved in a massive conspiracy to cover up the putative falsity of evolutionary theory.

Since he claims to be a scientist, Gift should know that this is hardly possible, especially since any individual who did in fact overturn Darwin (as Gift for years has been trying to do unsuccessfully with Einstein) would immediately become the most eminent scientist on the planet. Gift condemns evolution as an unreasonable hypothesis, but nowhere does he suggest a more reasonable one. This is a standard tactic of creationists, but Gift made the mistake of revealing himself some years ago when he wrote a letter to the editor arguing that the Earth is only 6000 years old (a position, by the way, which requires him to reject one of the fundamental tenets of physics: the rate of decay in radioactive atoms). So here we have a man claiming to adhere to scientific principles, but who apparently views the Bible as scientifically valid. An even more egregious example was the quotes he used to support his position. One such came from Francis Hitching, author of The Neck of the Giraffe, who argues that evolution is not possible because “The genetic system, as its first priority, conserves, blocks and stabilises.” Apart from this being a baseless argument, is Hitching a biologist or even a scientist? Nope: he’s a TV scriptwriter. Moreover, he’s a TV scriptwriter who claimed in his book to have the approval of real biologists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould and to be affiliated to the Royal Archaeological Institute: all lies. If Gift was really as committed to truth as he claims, you’d think he’d have checked on the people he quotes.

Mind you, he did quote scientists, including the late Stephen Gould. But Gould himself was a lifelong opponent to creationists: even in The Mismeasure of Man, a book which has nothing to do with creationism, he wrote, “…Darwinism can provide as good an argument against future episodes of creationism as against the antievolutionists of Darwin’s own day…”, so it seems a case of deliberate misrepresentation on Gift’s part to quote Gould as though he rejected evolutionary theory. But Gift went even further, inventing a conference in Chicago in 1980 where, he says, “the world’s leading evolutionists concluded that natural selection and gene mutation could no longer be regarded as a scientifically tenable explanation for the origin and diversity of life.” Naturally, he did not name the conference or even one of these “leading evolutionists”. He also argued that there is no evidence of evolution having occurred in the past: another boldface lie, since the fossil record amply records many transitional forms. If Gift didn’t have a PhD, it would be possible for me to dismiss all this as mere ignorance. But he obviously has the intellectual capacity to understand evolutionary theory, so I am forced to conclude that he is being deliberately dishonest in arguing that Darwinian evolution is wrong. He concludes his letter by saying, “Name-calling, however, is not science.” That is true but, when I call Gift a crank, I am adhering to one of the basic principles of science: provable fact.

Now if Gift were merely an isolated case, I might have ignored his nonsense. (Well, probably not.) But he does represent a superstitious and dishonest mindset which all too often poisons public debate in this place, not just on scientific issues, but also on matters of public policy. Most of our commentators are quite dependable, but there are only five columnists who actively promote rational thought and ethics: Lloyd Best, Fr Henry Charles (yes, I see the irony), Morgan Job, Julian Kenny, and me. And the few commentators who will readily twist the facts to suit their personal, religious and ethnic agendas are often disproportionately influential because of their organisational backing and because they play to people’s fears. This is a problem of culture, and one way of changing the culture is to show how people like Gift (and his ideological cohorts Selwyn Cudjoe, Devant Maharaj, Anna Maria Mora, Marion O’ Callaghan, all the newspaper-writing pastors) lack respect for the truth. And, like I said, it’s fun.
E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
Website: www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh