"New pope questioned over evolution" (2005)

New pope questioned over evolution

THREE prominent US scientists have asked the new pope, Benedict XVI, to clarify the Roman Catholic church's views on evolution, and to reject a piece in The New York Times last week by Austrian cardinal Christoph Schönborn, a close associate of Benedict, which said that the church does not accept "neo-Darwinian dogma".

A 1996 statement by the late Pope John Paul II seemed finally to mark the church's acceptance of evolution. But while common ancestry for life "might be true", Schönborn wrote, "an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection is not". Denial of the "overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science", he added. Most biologists would question that such evidence exists.

The cardinal's language is highly reminiscent of intelligent design activists in the US, with whom he has links. Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, and prominent Catholic evolutionists Francisco Ayala of the University of California at Irvine and Kenneth Miller of Brown University in Rhode Island have asked Benedict not "to build a new divide, long ago eradicated, between the scientific method and religious belief".