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"Have you seen the cover of the latest National Geographic issue?"

In recent weeks, this question came to me in countless phone messages and e-mails, not to mention a dozen personal encounters. A campus worker in Berlin sent an urgent e-mail after spotting the German edition. My friends and academic colleagues are curious what I—a speaker and writer on the debate between Darwinism and intelligent design theory—thought about the magazine's provocative cover story, which boldly asks, "Was Darwin Wrong?"

Readers were jolted around the world that such a question should leap from the cover of National Geographic. Hopes surged for a few seconds among skeptics of evolution, until they turned to David Quammen's article, which answers with a loud, triumphal "No!" Quammen's piece unfolds as a glittering showcase for Darwinism, a reassuring mini-museum in print. Ten pages of text—more in the genre of high school cheerleading than sober analysis—are embedded in a lush gallery of 22 pages of glossy pictures, including an amazing array of nine separate "sidebar" mini-articles.

If we imagine the "clash of two theories"—the older notion of "separate creations" by a supremely wise designer, versus Darwin's "common ancestry" of all life, driven by natural selection—it appears here that the younger system has utterly crushed the older. Sketched in terms of a basketball tourney, Quammen paints a complete rout—a 118-0 shutout.

One triumphal paragraph, which serves as an opening sketch of Quammen's thrust, refers to Darwinian macroevolution as "deeply persuasive—a theory you can take to the bank. The essential points are slightly more complicated than most people assume, but not so complicated that they can't be comprehended by any attentive person. Furthermore, the supporting evidence is abundant, various, ever increasing, solidly interconnected, and easily available in museums … and a mountainous accumulation of peer-reviewed scientific studies."

The reader, leafing through dazzling color illustrations, tracing a series of arguments, evidences, and historical summaries, is led gently, but steadily, to one "overwhelming" conclusion: Only pitiful ignorance (or worse, religious bias and fear) could keep a normal-thinking adult from embracing Darwinian evolution as FACT.

My emphasis on the word "fact" is designed to convey the sense of brimming confidence which is the article's emotional subtext. The editor's purpose was, quite literally, to overwhelm the reader. In fact, the first page tells us of evolution's "overwhelming evidence"—twice, in headline and text.

Several scholars have noted in recent weeks that throughout the article, small-scale or modest "variations" in animals are treated blithely as evidence for the origin of new organs or body structures—what biologists call "macroevolution." Huge unsolved problems that plague the current gene-centered macroevolutionary theory—revealed in such cutting-edge texts as MIT Press's Origination of Organismal Form—are not mentioned.

Most significantly, there is no hint that intelligent, well-informed dissent exists anywhere in the university world. As I read Quammen's article, I kept looking in vain for his response to the telling critiques of the Intelligent Design Movement. This is puzzling, in light of the conundrum that is confronted in the article: Why so many Americans still doubt Darwinism?

In terms of specific evidences (and "evidence" is a key word for Quammen), major questions are unaddressed: Why not discuss the Cambrian Explosion? Or the mystery of how complex molecular wonders such as the blood clotting system or the flagellum could have possibly formed, step-by-Darwinian-step? Why not confront, at least briefly, the riddle of how the vast quantities of genetic information, sufficient to run even the simplest living system, arose? And most tellingly: Why not reveal the widespread questioning of the creative power of natural selection—a foundational problem now widely admitted even among evolutionary researchers?

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November (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48