Recent controversy over the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the schools has been understood in the press to be a struggle of religion and science. It is to some extent. However, it is unfortunate that the pro-Darwinians write as though the theory of evolution should be understood to be quintessentially a science. For the standoff with religion, this is an unfortunate identification. Evolution, particularly in the form that Darwin left it, is more of a descriptive and philosophical study than a "science" in the modern sense of the word.

To get a perspective on the issues, let us divide intellectual activity along a continuum from hard science through knowledge to simple ignorance. Over their time on Earth, people have developed increasingly sophisticated "libraries" of practical knowledge. But until very recently, theoretical understanding has been based on ignorance, on the development of complex sets of plausible relationships that simply did not exist. Primitive society was a magical world in which events could be coerced by incantations or sticking pins in a doll. In more recent times, sages such as Marx and Freud developed elaborate theories that passed the plausibility test for some, but ultimately failed to demonstrate their validity in the practical world.

Throughout history, knowledge continued to grow. Humanity could not have survived without it. But this was knowledge largely confined to the particular. Ancient peoples came to understand in great detail the waxing and waning of the seasons, to develop calendars, even to predict eclipses (on the basis of their calendrical repetition). To take the example of commonplace biology, people have long understood the relation of sexual behavior to the bearing of young (at least among animals, strangely some did not see this relationship for human beings), and the tendency of certain characteristics to be inherited from generation to generation. This latter knowledge made it possible for domestic breeds of animals to be developed or superior plant strains to emerge. But theoretical understanding of what was going on in this biological world was very slow to develop. This made it possible for Mendel's simple experiments in the nineteenth century on the inheritance of characteristics in peas to be seen in retrospect to have been a major scientific breakthrough.

But science as we understand it today is primarily experimental science, and/or science understood within a mathematical superstructure. This means that to be scientific, a theory should be constructed of parts that fit together in such a way that practitioners can predict reliably that action A will be followed by action B, then X, etc. I like to use the example of landing a man on the moon. This complex achievement was based on many interrelated scientific theories (developed and expressed as engineering). There is a stark contrast between such achievements with the lack of achievement in the so-called social sciences.

The overwhelming impression that a review of the history of most social sciences reveals is that they have not been additive. After centuries of development and the spawning of endless theories, their practitioners (social engineers?) cannot do anything analogous to landing a person on the moon. An example is education, which we can think of as an applied branch of the social sciences. Educators, basing their work on a plethora of theories are still unable to reliably produce results. Repeated failure to retrain young people in our prisons has often led to a near abandonment of the effort. Much the same can be said of individual psychotherapy. There are many theories, some of them appear to work some of the time. But they are so unreliable that courts and police departments often find them and their authorities less than useful.

As another example, I read in a recent New York Times Magazine (February 5, 2006) a long discussion of attempts to tell when one is lying. In spite of a great deal of study, and some useful advance beyond the folk superstitions of the past, the equipment used and the training available to policemen to detect lying is still woefully inadequate.

There are, of course, many reasons for such failures. But the primary reason is that it is simply much easier to study inorganic nature with careful scientific tools than organic. And it is much easier to use careful analysis, including high quality experimentation, in the organic area than it is in the human. Part of the problem is that of complexity. But the social sciences also suffer from reasonable and necessary moral constraints on experimentation.

Until very recently biology has drifted between the true "hard sciences" and the social sciences. With the rapid development of knowledge of basic building blocs of organisms, such as proteins and DNA, this is beginning to change. But even here, progress is dogged by the sheer complexity of organic life. In Darwin's time, this problem was more acute.* He started a tradition of evolutionary understanding of the biological world that has been developed and extended over the years. Scientifically it is the only game in town for understanding how biological forms came to be. Yet most evolutionists have spent their lives collecting information on life forms and their relationships. The effort has been largely retrospective, piecing together a story of what appears to have happened in evolution. Progress in biology has not led to an ability equivalent to landing a person on the moon, although with the genetic revolution and increasing experimentation, the field is getting there.

* An excellent discussion of the massive achievement of Darwin and the gaps that remained in his theoretical work, especially in his own lifetime, can be found in Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, 1995.