Literature

Francisco Ayala is the chair of the Committee that has produced the booklet Science, evolution, and creationism published this month by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He has contributed the editorial for the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, explaining why this publication is deemed so important.
Various high-profile legal battles provide the backdrop for the editorial. The booklet is designed to counter the influence of Creationism and Intelligent Design in state education programmes in the US. The editorial highlights several emphases of the booklet, and these are the briefly noted here.
Ayala traces the "Argument from Design" back to the "English clergyman William Paley". Whilst Paley is rightly associated with design arguments, it is noticeable that design deniers characteristically by-pass the earlier arguments of John Ray, one of the pioneers of botanical science in the 17th Century. Here is a scientist arguing that design is pervasive; intelligent design is there for everyone to see. The neglect of Ray's emphasis (as a scientist) on design is a sad reflection on the way contemporary evolutionists use history.

The section of the Editorial on "Evolution and Natural Selection" follows familiar ground in arguing for the centrality of evolution as an organising principle in biology. Evolutionists have got past finding compelling evidence for the theory, and they now research how the process occurs. "Biological evolution is part of a compelling historical narrative that scientists have constructed over the last few centuries".

"Biological evolution is part of a compelling historical narrative" - Ayala

This section concludes thus:

"Darwin's greatest contribution to science is not that he accumulated evidence demonstrating the evolution of life, but that he discovered natural selection, the process that accounts for the design of organisms and their wonderful adaptations to survive and reproduce in the environments where they live, including wings for flying, legs for running, eyes to see, and kidneys that regulate the composition of the blood."

Although presented as confirmed science, this paragraph is actually highly controversial. Ayala has certainly said things like this before, as is blogged here, but he is out-of-step with many of his peers. At the same conference where he promoted this view of Darwinism, Michael Lynch made this protest:

"the myth that all of evolution can be explained by adaptation continues to be perpetuated by our continued homage to Darwin's treatise in the popular literature. For example, Dawkins' agenda to spread the word on the awesome power of natural selection has been quite successful, but it has come at the expense of reference to any other mechanisms, a view that is in some ways profoundly misleading."

The final section is devoted to the thesis that there is no conflict between the evidence for evolution and belief in God. According to Ayala, "Science and religion concern different aspects of the human experience." This was called the NOMA hypothesis by Stephen Jay Gould, and there is no doubt it has had a long history. But today the majority of leading evolutionary biologists do not hold these views: they are adopting a position of overt atheism. For more on this, go here.
Furthermore. Ayala and his colleagues are defining the terms of the truce between science and religion: religion is exclusively concerned with life's purpose and with values. However, this betrays a gross misunderstanding of Christianity, which, apart from being rooted in history, also makes truth claims outside the boundaries of purpose and values.

The NAS booklet has been critiqued by Casey Luskin of the IDEA Center. This covers numerous points not mentioned here. If anyone is tempted to think the booklet is a product of science, their time would be well spent digesting what Luskin has written. What many of us are concerned about is that a naturalistic world view has been turned into a "compelling historical narrative" and nothing is being allowed to undermine that narrative. But there is a scientific debate about all the elements of the story, and that debate must go ahead even though the establishment gatekeepers are trying to close it down.

Science, evolution, and creationism
Francisco J. Ayala
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 8, 2008, 105(1), 3-4 | doi 10.1073/pnas.0711608105

On December 20, 2005, John E. Jones III, federal judge for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, issued a 130-page-long decision (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District) declaring that "The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID [intelligent design] is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory ... ID is not supported by any peer-reviewed research, data, or publications."
In 1984, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences. A second edition was published in 1999. A third edition, sufficiently modified to deserve a new title, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, published on January 4, 2008 (1). [snip].

The Facts about Intelligent Design: A Response to the National Academy of Sciences' Science, Evolution, and Creationism
Casey Luskin
The IDEA Center, January 2008

A 1982 poll found that only 9% of Americans believed that humans developed through purely natural evolutionary processes. Two years later, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued its first Science and Creationism booklet, stating that science and religion occupy "separate and mutually exclusive realms."[1] Public skepticism of evolution remained high - a 1993 poll found that only 11% of Americans believed that humans developed through purely natural evolutionary processes. [snip]