les sciences face aux créationnismes [book review]

I spotted this small book during my last visit to CBGP in Montpellier, and borrowed it from the local librarian. It is written (in French) by Guillaume Lecointre, who is professor of Biology at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, specialised in population evolution and philogenies. The book is published by Editions Quae, a scientific editor supported by four founding French institutes (CIRAD, IFREMER, INRA and IRSTEA), hence no wonder I would spot it in an INRA lab. The theme of the book is not to argue against creationism and intelligent design theories, but rather to analyse how the debates between scientists—interestingly this term scientist sounds much more like a cult in English than the French noun scientifique— and creationists are conducted and to suggest how they should be conducted. While there are redundancies in the text, I found the overall argumentation quite convincing, with the driving lines that creationists are bypassing the rules of scientific investigation and exchange to bring the debate at a philosophical or ideological level foreign to science definition. Lecointre deconstructs the elements put forward in such debates, from replacing the incompleteness of the scientific knowledge and the temporary nature of scientific theories with a total relativism, to engaging scientific supporters from scientific fields not directly related with the theory of evolution, to confusing methodological materialism with philosophical materialism and more fundamentally to imply that science and scientific theories must have a moral or ideological content, and to posturing as anti-establishment and anti-dogmatic free minds… I also liked the points that (a) what really drives the proponents of intelligent design is a refusal of randomness in the evolution, without any global or cosmic purpose; (b) scientists are very ill-prepared to debate with creationists, because the later do not follow a scientific reasoning; (c) journalists are most often contributing to the confusion by picking out-of-their-field “experts” and encouraging the relativity argument. Hence a reasonable recommendation to abstain from oral debates and to stick to pointing out the complete absence of scientific methodology in creationists’ arguments. (Obviously, readers of Alan Sokal’s Beyond the Hoax will be familiar most of the arguments produced in les sciences face aux créationnismes.)