If you think the celebrity sniping in Heat magazine is bitchy, it has nothing on a good old academic slanging match. The pages of New Humanist magazine this month are filled with one of the best intellectual cat-fights I've seen in ages.

It starts with the philosopher Prof AC Grayling's less than congratulatory review of sociologist Prof Steve Fuller's book Dissent over Descent or "nearly 300 pages of wasted forest" as Grayling puts it.

Fuller has form on this topic. He appeared as a witness for the defence in the infamous trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, in December 2005 over the teaching of intelligent design - he was there to advocate the teaching of ID in science lessons.

Fuller describes ID as an effort to establish that life was purposefully designed by an intelligent agency that works "by the usual scientific appeals to reason and evidence".

"No," cries Grayling, as he wades into a "swamp of BS".

It starts from a fixed conclusion, and looks for evidence to support it. Does it specify what would refute the fixed belief in a designing intelligence that is its starting point? Does it tell us what would count as a test of what it has already accepted in advance, before the search for allegedly supportive evidence begins? It does not.

Fuller emphasises science's religious roots, while Grayling champions the atheist contribution to science.

Well, let's see: it removed the risk of scientists being burned at the stake for controverting the divinely revealed truth that "the lord hath laid the foundations of the earth so that it shall not be moved for ever" (Psalm 104)...It removed the necessity of having to distort observations, facts, experimental results and observations to fit an antecedent doctrine as far from what observation and experiment revealed as one could possibly get.

Fuller's come-back is that Grayling simply "does not know what he is talking about".

In light of this modus operandi, I conclude that either Grayling simply did not "read" the book as ordinarily understood, or he was afraid to admit he was not up to the job of reviewing it, and so he figured he could bluff his way by saying philosophy-looking things that effectively preached to the converted (ie "new humanists").

And what of the status of design?

To be sure, the design inference has been strongly contested, but the dispute ranges over who bears the greater burden of proof: defenders of design or chance. Which general form of explanation is simpler? Intuitions have varied across history, but what comes through clearly in these debates is that some combination of chance and necessity of the sort associated with Neo-Darwinism are today presumed to be more plausible than Intelligent Design until shown otherwise. This distribution of the burden of proof reflects little more than a bias in favour of the scientific orthodoxy, whose relationship to the beliefs of rank-and-file trained scientists we simply do not know.

The folk at New Humanist helpfully stoked the ideological flames further by giving Grayling another chance to respond.



"Steve Fuller complains, as do all authors whose books are panned, that I did not read his book properly (or at all). Alas, I did."

Ouch!!

In his retort he cleverly lists a few of the countless examples of spectacular mal-design in nature. Painful errors that surely an omniscient being or beings would have avoided. He concludes: