ABSTRACT
The controversy in the United States concerning the teaching of evolution in the public schools exemplifies, in many ways, the curious state of contemporary intellectual discourse. The arguments surrounding Darwinism range from the passionate traditional creationists to the ardent advocates of natural selection, with a middle camp borrowing from both of these. The traditional creationists want simply to deny Darwin. They assert that the Earth is no more than a few thousand years old and claim that the Biblical account of creation is literally true. In the middle are the new 'intelligent design creationists', many of whom are credentialed biologists (Crews, 2001). They seek to criticise Darwin on scientific grounds and to modify the theory of natural selection in a way that allows for the idea of a divine hand initiating the process. Then, of course, there are the all out evolutionists, who press the point that the design and development of organisms is a random, meaningless process from start to finish. These scientists are often considered to be advocating a kind of 'postmodernist' position. Meanwhile, science overall is moving into a realm of new possibilities, such as bioinformatics and cloning, that exceeds our current frame of reference entirely. Exacerbating the confusion surrounding the new areas of research and their social/technological implications is the fact that the world is rapidly coming under the logic of global market capitalism (Hardt and Negri, 1989).
