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Humanistic Religion
The Rush to Embrace Darwinism
I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.
—Richard Dawkins, professor of zoology,
Oxford University
History will judge neo-Darwinism a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology.
— Lynn Margulis, professor of biology,
University of Massachusetts
Science, Religion, and Logic
Science and religion are both ways of arriving at beliefs regarding things that are true of the world. What distinguishes one from the other? The most common answer would probably be that religion derives its teaching from some kind of supreme authority, however communicated, which must not be questioned or challenged, whereas science builds its world picture on the available facts as it finds them, without any prior commitment to ideas of how things ought to be.
This is pretty much in accord with our experience of life, to be sure. But I would submit that, rather than being the primary differentiating quality in itself, it comes about as a consequence of something more fundamental. The difference lies in the relationship between the things that are believed and the reasons for believing them. With a religion, the belief structure comes first as an article of faith, and whatever the recognized authority decrees is accepted as being true. Questioning such truth is not permitted. Science begins by finding out what's true as impartially as can be managed, which means accepting what we find whether we like it or not, and the belief structure follows as the best picture that can be made as to the reasons for it all. In this case, questioning a currently held truth is not only permissible but encouraged, and when necessary the belief structure is modified accordingly. Defined in that way, the terms encompass more than the kinds of things that go on in the neighborhood church or a research laboratory, and take on relevance to just about all aspects of human belief and behavior. Thus, not walking under ladders because it brings bad luck (belief in principle, first; action judged as bad, second) is "religious"; doing the same thing to avoid becoming a victim of a dropped hammer or splashed paint (perceiving the world, first; deciding there's a risk, second) is "scientific."
Of course, this isn't to say that scientific thinking never proceeds according to preexisting systems of rules. The above two paths to belief reflect, in a sense, the principles of deductive and inductive logic. Deduction begins with a set of premises that are taken to be incontestably true, and by applying rules of inference derives the consequences that must necessarily follow. The same inference rules can be applied again to the conclusions to generate a second level of conclusions, and the procedure carried on as far as one wants. Geometry is a good example, where a set of initial postulates considered to be self-evident (Euclid's five, for example) is operated on by the rules of logic to produce theorems, which in turn yield further theorems, and so on. A deductive system cannot originate new knowledge. It can only reveal what was implicit in the assumptions. All the shelves of geometry textbooks simply make explicit what was implied by the choice of axioms. Neither can deduction prove anything to be true. It demonstrates merely that certain conclusions necessarily follow from what was assumed. If it's assumed that all crows are black, and given that Charlie is a crow, then we may conclude that Charlie is black.
So deduction takes us from a general rule to a particular truth. Induction is the inverse process, of inferring the general rule from a limited number of particular instances. From observing what's true of part of the world, we try to guess on the basis of intuition and experience—in other words, to "generalize"—what's probably true of all of it. "Every crow I've seen has been black, and the more of them I see, the more confident I get that they're all black." However, inductive conclusions can never be proved to be true in the rigorous way that deductions can be shown to follow from their premises. Proving that all crows are black would require every crow that exists to be checked, and it could never be said with certainty that this had been done. One disconfirming instance, on the other hand—a white crow—would be sufficient to prove the theory false.
This lack of rigor is probably why philosophers and logicians, who seek precision and universally true statements, have never felt as comfortable with induction as they have with deduction, or accorded it the same respectability. But the real world is a messy place of imperfections and approximations, where the art of getting by is more a case of being eighty percent right eighty percent of the time, and doing something now rather than waste any more time. There are no solid guarantees, and the race doesn't always go to the swift nor the battle to the strong—but it's the way to bet.
Deduction operates within the limits set by the assumptions. Induction goes beyond the observations, from the known to the unknown, which is what genuine innovation in the sense of acquiring new knowledge must do. Without it, how could new assertions about the world we live in ever be made? On the other hand, assertions based merely on conjecture or apparent regularities and coincidences—otherwise known as superstition—are of little use without some means of testing them against actuality. This is where deduction comes in—figuring out what consequences should follow in particular instances if our general belief is correct. This enables ways to be devised for determining whether or not they in fact do, which of course forms the basis of the scientific experimental method.
Darwinism and the New Order
The Triumph of the Enlightenment
Scientific method played the central role in bringing about the revolutionary world view ushered in by such names as Roger Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo, which by the time of the seventeenth-century "Age of Enlightenment" had triumphed as the guiding philosophy of Western intellectual culture. No longer was permissible Truth constrained by interpretation of the Scriptures, readings of Aristotle and the classics, or logical premises handed down from the medieval Scholastics. Unencumbered by dogma and preconceptions of how reality had to be, Science was free to follow wherever the evidence led and uncover what it would. Its successes were spectacular indeed. The heavenly bodies that had awed the ancients and been regarded by them as deities were revealed as no different from the matter that makes up the familiar world, moved by the same forces. Mysteries of motion and form, winds and tides, heat and light were equally reduced to interplays of mindless, mechanical processes accessible to reason and predictable by calculation. The divine hand whose workings had once been invoked to explain just about everything that happened was no longer necessary. Neither, it seemed to many, were the traditional forms of authority that presented themselves as interpreters of its will and purpose. The one big exception was that nobody had any better answers to explain the baffling behavior of living things or where they could have come from.
The Original in "Origins": Something for Everyone
A widely held view is that Charles Darwin changed the world by realizing that life could appear and diversify by evolution. This isn't really the way it was, or the reason he caused so much excitement. The notion of life appearing spontaneously through some natural process was not in itself new, being found in such places as the Babylonian creation epic, Enuma Elish, and ancient Chinese teachings that insects come from nothing on the leaves of plants. Ideas of progressive development are expressed in the philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus, while Amaximander of Miletus (550 b.c.) held that life had originated by material processes out of sea slime—in some ways anticipating modern notions of a prebiotic soup. Empedocles of Ionia (450 b.c.) proposed a selection-driven process to account for adaptive complexity, in which all kinds of monstrosities were produced from the chance appearance of various combinations of body parts, human and animal, out of which only those exhibiting an inner harmony conducive to life were preserved and went on to multiply. The line continues down through such names as Hume, who speculated that the random juggling of matter
must eventually produce ordered forms adapted to their environment; Lamarck, with his comprehensive theory of evolution by the inheritance of characteristics acquired through the striving of the parents during life; to Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who studied the similarities of anatomy between species and speculated on common ancestry as the reason.
The full title of Charles Darwin's celebrated 1859 publication was The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The case it presents hardly needs to be elaborated here. Essentially, species improve and diverge through the accumulation of selected modifications inherited from common ancestors, from which arise new species and eventually all of the diversity that makes up the living world. The solution that Darwin proposed was simple and elegant, requiring three premises that were practically self-evident: that organisms varied; that these variations were inherited; and that organisms were engaged in a competition for the means of survival, in the course of which the better equipped would be favored. Given variations, and given that they could be inherited, selection and hence adaptive change of the group as a whole was inevitable. And over sufficient time the principle could be extrapolated indefinitely to account for the existence of anything.
None of the ingredients was especially new. But in bringing together his synthesis of ideas that had all been around for some time, Darwin provided for the first time a plausible, intellectually acceptable naturalistic and materialist explanation for the phenomenon of life at a time when many converging interests were desperately seeking one. Enlightenment thinkers, heady with the successes of the physical sciences, relished the opportunity to finish the job by expelling the last vestiges of supernatural agency from their world picture. The various factions of the new political power arising out of commerce and manufacturing found common ground from which to challenge the legitimacy of traditional authority rooted in land and Church, while at the same time, ironically, the nobility, witnessing the specter of militant socialist revolution threatening to sweep Europe, took refuge in the doctrine of slow, imperceptible change as the natural way of things. Meanwhile, the forces of exploitation and imperialism, long straining against the leash of moral restraint, were freed by the reassurance that extermination of the weak by the strong, and domination as the reward for excellence were better for all in the long run.
There was something in it for everyone. Apart from the old order fighting a rearguard action, the doctrine of competitive survival, improvement, and growth was broadly embraced as the driving principle of all progress—the Victorian ideal—and vigorously publicized and promoted. Science replaced the priesthood in cultural authority, no longer merely serving the throne but as supreme interpreter of the laws by which empires and fortunes flourish or vanish. Darwin's biographer, Gertrude Himmelfarb, wrote that the theory could only have originated in laissez-faire England, because "Only there could Darwin have blandly assumed that the basic unit was the individual, the basic instinct self-interest, and the basic activity struggle."1
A Cultural Monopoly
Since then the theory has become established as a primary guiding influence on deciding social values and shaping relationships among individuals and organizations. Its impact extends across all institutions and facets of modern society, including philosophy, economics, politics, science, education, and religion. Its advocates pronounce it to be no longer theory but incontestable fact, attested to by all save the simple-minded or willfully obtuse. According to Daniel Dennett, Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and a staunch proponent of Darwinism, "To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant."2
And from Oxford University's professor of zoology, Richard Dawkins, one of the most vigorous and uncompromising popularizers of Darwinism today: "It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)."3
Dennett also expresses reservations about the suitability of anyone denying Darwinism to raise children.4
Like the majority of people in our culture, I suppose, I grew up accepting the Darwinian picture unquestioningly because the monopoly treatment accorded by the education system and the scientific media offered no alternative, and the authority images that I trusted at the time told me there wasn't one. And nothing much had happened to change that by the time of my own earlier writings. The dispute between Hunt and Danchekker in Inherit the Stars 5 isn't over whether or not the human race evolved, but where it happened. And eleven years later I was still militantly defending the theory. 6 By that time, however, my faith in many of the things that "everyone knows" was being eroded as a result of getting to know various people with specialized knowledge in various fields, who, in ways I found persuasive, provided other sides to many public issues, but which the public weren't hearing. Before long I found myself questioning and checking just about everything I thought I knew.
Sweeping Claims—and Reservations
As far as I recall, doubts about evolution as it was taught began with my becoming skeptical that natural selection was capable of doing everything that it was supposed to. There's no question that it happens, to be sure, and that it has its effects. In fact, the process of natural selection was well known to naturalists before Darwin's day, when the dominant belief was in Divine Creation. It was seen, however, as a conservative force, keeping organisms true to type and stable within limits by culling out extremes. Darwin's bold suggestion was to make it the engine of innovation. Observation of the progressive changes brought about by the artificial selection applied in animal and plant breeding led him—a pigeon breeder himself—to propose the same mechanism, taken further, as the means for transforming one species into another, and ultimately to something else entirely.
But on rereading Origin, I developed the uneasy feeling of watching fancy flying away from reality, as it is all too apt to do when not held down by the nails of evidence. The changes that were fact and discussed in great detail were all relatively minor, while the major transitions that constituted the force and substance of the theory were entirely speculative. No concrete proof could be shown that even one instance of the vast transformations that the theory claimed to explain had actually happened. And the same pattern holds true of all the texts I consulted that are offered today. Once the fixation on survival to the exclusion of all else sets in, a little imagination can always suggest a way in which any feature being considered "might" have conferred some advantage. Dull coloring provides camouflage to aid predators or protect prey, while bright coloring attracts mates. Longer beaks reach more grubs and insects; shorter beaks crack tougher seeds. Natural selection can explain anything or its opposite. But how do you test if indeed the fittest survive, when by definition whatever survives is the "fittest"?
By Scaffolding to the Moon
All breeders know there are limits beyond which further changes in a characteristic can't be pushed, and fundamental innovations that can never be induced to any degree. Some varieties of sheep are bred to have a small head and small legs, but this can't be carried to the point where they reduce to the scale of a rat. You can breed a larger variety of carnation or a black horse, but not a horse with wings. A given genome can support a certain amount of variation, giving it a range of adaptation to alterations in circumstances—surely to be expected for an organism to be at all viable in changeable environments. But no amount of selecting and crossing horses will produce wings if the genes for growing them aren't there. As Darwin himself had found with pigeons, when extremes are crossed at their limit, they either become nonviable or revert abruptly to the original stock.
Horizontal variations within a type are familiar and uncontroversial. But what the theory proposes as occurring, and to account for, are vertical transitions from one type to another and
hence the emergence of completely new forms. It's usual in the literature for these two distinct types of change to be referred to respectively as "microevolution" and "macroevolution." I'm not happy with these terms, however. They suggest simply different degrees of the same thing, which is precisely the point that's at issue. So I'm going to call them "adaptive variation" and "evolutionary transition," which as a shorthand we can reduce to "adaption" and "evolution." What Darwin's theory boils down to is the claim that given enough time, adaptive variations can add up to become evolutionary transitions in all directions to an unlimited degree. In the first edition of Origin (later removed) he said, "I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale." But, unsubstantiated, this is the same as seeing no difficulty in adding to scaffolding indefinitely as a way to get to the Moon, or changing a Chevrolet a part at a time as a workable way of producing a Boeing 747. Regarding the generally held contention that there are limits to natural variation, he wrote, "I am unable to discover a single fact on which this belief is grounded."7 But there wasn't a single fact to support the belief that variation could be taken beyond what had been achieved, either, and surely it was on this side that the burden of proof lay.
And the same remains true to this day. The assurance that adaptations add up to evolution, presented in textbooks as established scientific fact and belligerently insisted on as a truth that can be disputed only at the peril of becoming a confessed imbecile or a sociopath, is founded on faith. For decades researchers have been selecting and subjecting hundreds of successive generations of fruit flies to X rays and other factors in attempts to induce faster rates of mutation, the raw material that natural selection is said to work on, and hence accelerate the process to observable dimensions. They have produced fruit flies with varying numbers of bristles on their abdomens, different shades of eye colors, no eyes at all, and grotesque variations with legs growing out of their heads instead of antennas. But the results always remain fruit flies. Nothing comes out of it suggestive of a house fly, say, or a mosquito. If selection from variations were really capable of producing such astounding transformations as a bacterium to a fish or a reptile to a bird, even in the immense spans of time that the theory postulates, then these experiments should have revealed some hint of it.
Kicking the Sacred Cow Page 2
