Auster, Raymond, and Darwinism
By • 1/30/08Lawrence Auster posted a long comment by Sam Raymond, who has written for The Inverted World (see here and here), on the dispute over evolution that the Auster and I have been carrying on (see here and here). The comment raises new dimensions of the debate, and prompts me to develop my views on religion, as well as to correct some misconceptions about Darwinism. Again, I’ll recommend my article “The Truth about Human Nature” as background.
I wholeheartedly agree with Raymond that Darwinists should not take a contemptuous or dismissive attitude towards the Christian tradition. Although Christianity is a poor foundation for science, it has produced a rich and profound ethical theory that everyone should appreciate. Moreover, Christianity is the worldview on which Western civilization is based, and therefore merits the respect of everyone who loves the West and wishes to defend it. Indeed, Christian philosophers laid the basis for the scientific revolution, of which Darwinism was perhaps the consummate expression.
I have discussed Christianity frequently on this website, and, outside of this debate with Auster, my assessment has always been positive. I argued here that Christian philosophers maintained and developed the Western tradition of innovation and freedom that is the source of our success.
Unfortunately, too many Darwinists give a one-sidedly negative portrait of Christianity as a force of backwardness, darkness, and bigotry. For example, in the The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, the great popularizer of modern biological theory, links Christianity with the abuse of children and warns direly that the words of American religious leaders “recall the narrow bigotry, heartless cruelty, and sheer nastiness of the Afghan Taliban.”
I’ve actually been in sympathy with Auster when he’s taken on such “village atheists.” One example is Auster’s argument with Heather Mac Donald, whose view of Christianity is as one-sidedly negative as Dawkins’s, though more moderately expressed. As long as Darwinists smear Christianity, I’ll always be glad we have people like Auster to enlighten them about the West’s Christian heritage.
While I agree with Raymond on this point, his comment contains two crucial and common misconceptions about Darwinism that should be cleared up. Both misconceptions are implicit in the paragraph in which Raymond says that the writings of Christian thinkers and artists like Milton, Dante, and Bach should “move … even the most ardent Darwinian atheist beyond mere biological reductionism.”
First, Darwinism does not necessarily entail atheism. The scientific worldview, of which evolutionary theory is one small part, requires that we conceive of the world as being governed by natural laws without the intervention of an external power. So a theism that did not require God to interfere with natural law would be quite compatible with Darwinism. What I’ve been objecting to in my debate with Auster is not theism per se, but the idea that God is intervening in the world by creating life forms or actively directing evolution.
Second, when Raymond says that the music of Bach should move us beyond biological reductionism, he is implying that some human behaviors and mental states are less rooted in biology than others. However, this is basically nonsensical from an evolutionary perspective. Darwinists don’t believe that any aspect of human nature is any “less biological” than any other. How could they, since they think human beings are “biological” through and through?
Raymond’s mistake has its origin in the classic Christian distinction between the animal and the spiritual, according to which some behaviors, like eating and sex, belonged to man’s animal nature, and others, like appreciating Bach and cathedrals, to man’s spiritual nature. Many people, I believe, think that Darwinists, in seeking to provide evolutionary explanations of human existence, are saying that the only behaviors that are real and genuine are the behaviors that Christianity labeled animal and that the spiritual or transcendent aspects of human life are somehow imaginary, artificial, or “unreal” in some other sense. Auster, who frequently says that Darwinism denies the transcendent, seems to suffer from this misconception as well.
There have been some forms of biological reductionism that did take this view of human nature. Freudianism, for example, posited that man’s only real instincts were sex and aggression, and that all other behaviors the artificial creations of a repressive “civilization” that was unnatural to man.
But evolutionary psychologists totally reject this outlook. For them, our love of Bach is every bit as instinctual and natural as our love of steak. It is for this reason that a Darwinian aesthetics has been emerging in recent years that sought the biological origins of the human taste for art. Though it has been a few years since I paid attention to developments in this field, Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind is the most interesting work in this area that I know of. The point is that Darwinists do not deny the existence of the aspects of human experience traditionally called “spiritual” or “transcendent” and are indeed avidly interested in them.
Can Darwinists explain why we have the aesthetic reactions we do? Can they explain why we find one painting or building beautiful and another ugly? Not to my knowledge. As I explained in a previous post, however, the mere fact that a theory’s adherents cannot explain everything about their subject matter does not, of itself, invalidate the theory. Nevertheless, I think it more likely that the Darwinist approach to these questions will yield more interesting and convincing explanations than creationism ever could. Creationism does dispense with the need for the labor of scientific inquiry, but at what a price! For the only explanation creationists that can ever ultimately give is “that’s how God wanted it.”
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Here’s a cool bit from John Derbyshire:
Here is Sam Brownback talking about evolutionary biology. That’s a bit like saying: “Here’s Paris Hilton talking about partial differential equations”… from which you can deduce that I don’t feel much inclined to offer a detailed critique of Brownback’s position.
I would though like to draw attention to the following bit of weaseling.
“If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.”
What’s going on here is that Brownback has got a whiff of the notion that living species indisputably do change over time. This is so well established that the old creationist position—that species do not change over time—has had to be abandoned. Creationists have retreated to this new position: “Yes, OK, a given species does change over time, but never into a new species.” You could summarize this as “micro-evolution yes, macro-evolution no.” It’s a common creationist line of argument.
The problem with this position is, that you need to observe—or at least, darn it, hypothesize—some mechanism that stops the micro before it goes macro. (Not to mention that you have to posit some mechanism, other than macro-evolution, for the origin of species… But leave that aside for the moment.)
Take, for example, allopatric (“different homeland”) speciation. You have a population of living, sexually-reproducing organisms, all belonging to the same species (i.e. able to mate with each other). You observe variations within the population. You further observe, watching across several generations, that some variations (red hair, schizophrenia) are heritable in whole or part, some (appendectomy scars) are not heritable at all.
Now you divide your population in two: Population A and Population B. You separate them geographically. (Hence “diferent homelands.”) You observe that A and B have different “menus” of heritable variation (A has more redheads, B more schizophrenics). You further observe that A’s and B’s environments are different—A’s is hot and dry, B’s cool and wet.
You sit back and observe for a few thousand generations. Yep, microevolution goes on. A changes, B changes. Because they started out with different menus of heritable variations, and because environmental pressures in the two places are different, they change differently. They diverge. A thousand generations on, the two populations look and behave differently from each other. Ten thousand generations on, they look and behave way differently. Orthodox biology (“Darwinism”) says that eventually they will be so different, they can no longer interbreed. Speciation will have occurred. A and B are now two species.
Under Brownbackian evolution—micro yes, macro no—this can’t happen. They can’t go on diverging. They can only get so different, no more. The divergence must slow down and stop. But… what stops it? What’s the mechanism?
I’m not expecting Sam, or any other creationist, to give me an answer. I do wish Sam had at least confronted the question honestly, though. Like this, perhaps:
If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to macroevolution, those small changes accumulating all the way to speciation, then I reject it.
And Sam at least has the interests of scientists at heart.
While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man's origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome.
With certainty! Well, that should spare biologists a lot of futile research work!
By on 2/1/08 at 5:24 pm
LA is at it again, commenting on a passage from Dawkins:
Some frog species have made interesting transitions in the direction of true viviparity—live birth. The female of the South American marsupial frog … transfers her fertilised eggs to her back, where they become covered by a layer of skin. [A female marsupial frog developed, by a chance random mutation, the instinct to place her eggs on her back, and the same frog also had a chance random mutation which made the skin on her back grow over the eggs, in precisely a manner that would protect the eggs without killing them.]
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/009825.html
Ignorance and arrogance are never a happy combination (as I’ve found when I’ve succumbed to the two). He doesn’t understand Darwinism, but thinks he’s striking deadly blows at it.
By on 2/1/08 at 7:16 pm
Tecs08,
Yes, Auster seems incapable of grasping that the complex sexual adaptations he notes could have evolved in a piecemeal fashion, although, in the example you give, it is plausible that the frog could first have evolved to put the eggs on its back and then evolved the skin flap.
Here’s another question, relative to this passage that Auster quotes from Dawkins:
>Male African grey free frogs, Chiromantis xerampelina, co-operate to whip up a thick white foam, with their back legs, from the liquid secreted by the females.
Why would God create such a horrid creature? What is the divine plan that this frog is fulfilling by whipping up thick white foam? Darwinists provide an explanation of why life is the way it is, but the creationists have no overarching interpretation of life beyond “that’s how God wanted it.”
By on 2/2/08 at 11:45 am
Auster had a post of “miscellany” including an e-mail from Terry Morris who discussed how every time science reveals something there are still more things left to be explained. I left a comment on his blog telling him that idea is known as the God of the Gaps.
By on 1/30/08 at 10:04 pm