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In “The Festering Problem of Indian ‘Sovereignty’” (September), Jan Golab has condensed the monumental mess that is federal Indian policy into a six-page eye-opener that all members of Congress should read and heed. The problems outlined by Golab are going to get progressively worse until Congress can find within itself the courage and integrity to act. Fixing, or better yet, totally eliminating, federal Indian policy is no longer a question of if, but when.
Scott Peterman
Oneida, New York
We have the same worries in Britain as the ones presented in Samuel Huntington’s “One Nation, Out of Many” (September). The elite, often self-styled, are pushing for multiculturalism. The large numbers of Muslim immigrants are usually keeping themselves together as a separate nation. (Chinese, Hindus, and Sikhs are eager to integrate and are generally welcome.) Any expression of disquiet is trashed as racialism. That is unjust. There is a problem here, and it should be addressed.
Brian Gunn
Nottingham, England
Rodney Stark’s “Fact, Fable, and Darwin” (September) claims incorrectly that, “There is no plausible scientific theory of the origin of species.” Variation from one generation to the next, combined with the geographical isolation of groups, can be expected to give rise to the development of new species. Not only are there firm theoretical foundations for believing this; there is direct evidence, in the form of laboratory experiments and field observations. A quick Internet search on “observed instances of speciation” will take you to several Web sites presenting such evidence.
Stark’s statement, “The boundaries between species are distinct and firm—one species does not simply trail off into another by degrees,” is similarly incorrect. In some families of tropical butterflies, for example, over a quarter of the species are known to hybridize with each other. To give a more familiar example, lions and tigers are able to interbreed, despite the fact that they are different species. How can this be, if the boundaries between species are, as Stark claims, “distinct and firm”? The boundaries between species are “leaky” if species share a recent common ancestor (as is the case with lions and tigers) and firm if the common ancestor was less recent (as in cats and dogs).
Robert Stovold
Brighton, England
Rodney Stark’s conclusions about evolution are merely a 3,000-word confirmation of the notion he inappropriately chides his antagonist Richard Dawkins for holding—that if any scholar criticizes any detail of Darwinian theory, “that
fact is seized upon and blown up out of proportion.”
How else to explain the fact that, aside from its discussion of Bishop Wilberforce, his column is a virtual reprint of the standard, shopworn, disproven creationist attacks on evolution, from its simplistic invocations of chance, mathematical probabilities, gaps in the fossil record, and Popperian philosophy of science, down to its closing suggestion that something other than evolution be taught in public schools?
I am but a layman, yet judging from the rubbish Stark asserts about the status of evolutionary biology, I can only conclude that he is—like those whom he alleges helped the legend of the Wilberforce-Huxley debate grow—one of those academics who knows nothing outside his own special subject.
Mark Lowe
Rancho Cucamonga, California
Rodney Stark's "Fact, Fable, and Darwin" (September) ranks with the work of Bishop Berkeley , whose Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician found the Principia Mathematica filled with" much emptiness, darkness, and confusion" and Cardinal De Polignac, who warned that the theory of gravitation "bordered on atheism." Neither bothered to inform his opinions by actually learning Newtonian mechanics.
Stark's exegesis is likewise untroubled by evolution's roots in molecular biology, the punctuated evolution of artificial life, the heuristic growth of genomics or the paradox of his embroilment in a biotechnology debate arising directly from the evolutionary biology whose existence he denies. He presents instead a catalog of 19th century objections as far removed from contemporary Darwinism as a Durer woodcut of the crystalline spheres from a Hubble telescope image of galaxies in collision.
Republicans who take science seriously may recognize that materialism is too important to be left to the Marxists, and that faith-based policy is the nemesis of science and religion alike. But to judge by Stark's essay, it is beyond their power to arrest the devolution of neoconservative anti-Darwinism into the teleology of fools.
Russell Seitz
Watertown, Massachusetts
Rodney Stark replies:
My article sought to make only two points. 1) All prominent biologists agree that there is no theory of the origin of species. 2) As these writers demonstrate, those who claim that there is such a theory are zealous true believers.
I’ve just finished reading “Go Ahead—Call Us Cowboys,” by Andrew and Judith Kleinfeld (July/August). I enjoyed the article very much and found their observations on the American way of life insightful and refreshing. I would like, however, to point out one error. John Butler Yeats was Irish, not British, as the article claims. As an Irishman myself, I should know.
Robert Clancy
Dublin, Ireland
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