Robert Shedinger, a religion prof at Luther College in Iowa with a background in engineering, has spent some years studying Charles Darwin, Darwinism, and the intelligent design controversy.

One of his recent books was Darwin’s Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished published earlier this year by Discovery Institute. In it, he tackles the title question of why Darwin never published the book that was supposed to provide evidence that natural selection could produce the intricacies of life in an unintelligent universe.

In an account of his sabbatical in the fall of 2023 for his colleagues in his university’s fall newsletter, Shedinger explains that he read both pro- and anti-design books, to try to understand the underlying controversy better:

What I discovered shocked me. First, while I expected intelligent design books to be filled with biblical quotations and tendentious religious arguments, I found them instead to be scientifically substantive. They seemed to be raising significant questions about the sufficiency of the modern Darwin-inspired evolutionary theory, questions without easy answers. Second, as I read the literature of evolutionary theory from the perspective of a humanities scholar, I began to tease out a grand narrative of Darwinian triumph that consistently overrides any attempt to engage with the very real challenges to modern evolutionary theory discussed in the intelligent design literature. I eventually formulated this insight into a 2019 book The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms: Darwinian Biology’s Grand Narrative of Triumph and the Subversion of Religion. (Cascade Books)

The research for this book introduced me to the correspondence of Charles Darwin, the official publication of which the Luther library had begun collecting in the 1980s. Just for fun I began reading this correspondence, not knowing if it would lead to anything. But I was quickly hooked and ended up reading the first eleven volumes (the collection is now over 30 volumes!), over four thousand pages worth of letters written both by and to Darwin by family members and scientific associates. Volume 11 took me up to the year 1863, four years past the publication of the Origin of Species. To my surprise, these letters revealed a Darwin very different from the Darwin that emerges from most biographies and textbook summaries. These latter serve the aforementioned grand narrative of Darwinian triumph, but the Darwin who narrates his own life through his letters turns out to be a far more ambiguous figure.

“Intelligent Design—It’s Not Just for Conservatives,” Fall 2024

The book offers considerable, fascinating, but easy-to-read scholarship. But it does not provide simple answers:

Why Darwin let his readers down has never been adequately answered. Most of Darwin’s unfinished Big Book manuscript survived among his papers and was published by Cambridge University Press in 1976, making it readily available to scholars. But it has been widely ignored. Why? Highlighting it, I believe, would undermine the carefully guarded myth that the Origin of Species was Darwin’s magnum opus, when in fact its own author viewed it as an imperfect abstract of a much larger work that he promised but never delivered. Having myself read the criticisms leveled at the Origin by Darwin’s scientific correspondents, and having compared the Origin with the Big Book manuscript, I have concluded that Darwin knew the Big Book would not adequately answer these criticisms and he therefore abandoned its publication. Fall 2024

A follow-on question might be, why were so few prominent scientists concerned about the gap, then or now? But that is a question for another day.

Changed perceptions of the controversy

Shedinger’s findings overall certainly changed his perception of the nature of the controversy over Darwinism, as he tells his colleagues:

After a decade of immersing myself in Darwin studies, evolutionary theory, and intelligent design, I find myself unexpectedly supportive of the intelligent design position. I say unexpectedly, because the prevailing stereotype holds that intelligent design is merely religiously-motivated pseudoscience pushed by conservative Christians. The institutional home of the modern intelligent design movement, The Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, is itself a politically and socially conservative think tank. I consider myself very liberal politically, socially, and religiously, so I have found myself in the awkward position of supporting an idea—intelligent design—almost universally understood as explicitly connected to religious, political, and social positions diametrically opposed to my own. But upon further investigation, this awkwardness has dissipated as I have come to realize that the stereotype about intelligent design is just that, a stereotype; it does not accord with reality.

While some high-profile supporters of intelligent design are evangelical protestants (Stephen Meyer) or conservative Catholics (Michael Behe), the religious profile of the ID movement is far more diverse than usually presented. It would also include figures like David Berlinski (secular Jew), Leif Jensen (secular Dane with an interest in Hinduism), Michael Denton (agnostic), and a host of others who fail to fit the stereotype. I now realize that I can engage with intelligent design on its scientific merits without giving up my liberal commitments in other areas of life. It turns out that intelligent design is not just for conservatives. Fall 2024

During his sabbatical, Shedinger was planning another book, tentatively called Why Liberals Should Ditch Darwin and Consider Intelligent Design. One reason he gives is this:

Darwin was also no fan of multi-culturalism. He was horrified by the sight of the indigenous peoples he met on the Beagle voyage. Yet he wrote to Charles Kingsley on February 6, 1862, “In 500 years how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.” Darwin’s thinking on human evolution had a deep impact on the development of the eugenics movement founded by his cousin, Francis Galton, from which German Nazis borrowed much of their racist ideology. Fall 2024

It’s curious that Darwin’s racism and that of many of his fans is very well known among sympathizers of intelligent design in nature. See, for example, Richard Weikart’s Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism (2022). But it rarely seems to be even addressed by those who, claiming to espouse liberal values, try to Cancel any Darwin doubters they encounter.

If Shedinger could get a serious discussion about that started in liberal circles, it would be a real help.

Here, by the way, is a Mind Matters News review of Darwin’s Bluff, “Darwin’s Bold Bluff: He Never Demonstrated His Evolution Theory.”