As the video podcasts will show, in addition to the talks by Ron Numbers and Eugenie Scott that focused specifically on "anti-evolution" (which meant anything other than undirected, fully materialistic evolution), several speakers brought up ID, or dissent from Darwinian theory, if only to ridicule it.

 

This attention to the black hats was, I think, considerably greater than what was said about "anti-evolution" in 1959. In her detailed study of the 1959 conference, historian of science Betty Smocovitis observes that the organized attention give to doubts about Darwinian theory amounted to minor "sideshows" in 1959 (1999, p. 294). Instead, "the supremacy of natural selection was a dominant theme in all panel discussions bearing directly on the subject of biological evolution" (1999, p. 298). Evolutionary theory was seen as completely unified around natural selection and inexorably expanding in its sphere of cultural triumph.

 

There is something of an irony in this. One wonders what the 1959 panelists, now all deceased, would have said, not only about the Numbers and Scott 2009 lectures -- "anti-evolutionists" exist in the year 2009? are you quite serious? is it really necessary to address this? -- but the frequent jabs at ID in the other 2009 lectures. At the 1959 event, Julian Huxley predicted the demise of the idea of a transcendent personal cause of the universe, to be replaced by the "new religions" that were evolving to the fore. Goodbye, design.

 

Didn't happen. (The fact that you're reading this blog -- well, you can do the math.) Smocovitis notes that the 1959 Darwin centennial prompted the rise of "scientific creationism" in the United States: