The party poopers at Darwin’s 200th birthday
Following mainstream scientists’ celebration of Darwin’s big birthday last year, two new books argue that Darwin’s theory is not all it’s cracked up to be. Are they on to anything?
John Gillott
Last year was Charles Darwin’s two-hundredth birthday. Scientists across the globe marked this, and the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s seminal work, with a wide range of publications and celebrations of the great man’s life, works and enduring legacy. James Le Fanu, unimpressed by the celebratory mood, asked ‘Why us?’, as the title of his book puts it: Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves. Now, after the guests have left the party, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini have turned up to say that the father of modern evolutionary theory was plain old wrong in their book What Darwin Got Wrong. So, are these critics on to anything?
Darwinism is a thriving research programme for scientists studying evolution, genetics and related fields. It is also so firmly established within the scientific community as a concept with explanatory power that leading evolutionary thinker and writer Jerry Coyne says we should go a step further than saying it is a theory with abundant empirical support to saying, simply, that it is true (see his 2009 book, Why Evolution is True).
Evolutionists today, as in the past, are, typically, concerned with two issues in their popular writings: challenging creationism, especially in its modern guise of Intelligent Design (ID); and dealing with the issue that, implicitly, or explicitly, has always dominated popular if not scholarly thinking in the area – what about us humans?
In challenging ID, one influential strand in contemporary evolutionist writing places particular emphasis on the constructive role of the Darwinian mechanism: natural selection. This is the dominant theme in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, for example. For Dawkins, natural selection ‘shatters the illusion of design within the domain of biology, and teaches us to be suspicious of any kind of design hypothesis in physics and cosmology as well.’ Wound up by the correspondence he receives from religious people (or perhaps working himself up into a fevered state recounting it), he tells us: ‘Darwinism, this person believes, is inherently nihilistic, teaching that we evolved by blind chance (for the umpteenth time, natural selection is the very opposite of a chance process).’ Similarly, for Coyne, ‘if anything is true about nature it is that plants and animals seem intricately and almost perfectly designed for living their lives’, which leads to the idea of ‘a master mechanic’. But this is an illusion; the fit between organism and environment is all the product of evolution guided by the mechanism of natural selection. This mechanism is not the only force in evolution, but it is ‘the only process that can produce adaptation’.
In telling the history of life on Earth, modern evolutionary writers place humans within this process and thus see humans as the product of natural selection. An enduring and influential body of such writing extends this analysis to provide an explanation of our current behaviour and mental architecture. Working within the discipline of evolutionary psychology, researchers have analysed areas such as language, religion, child abuse and many more using Darwinian concepts. As Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (hereafter F & P-P) detail in the appendix to their book, the proponents of this approach today are influential individuals with an ambitious and varied agenda.
In different ways, F & P-P and Le Fanu respond to what they see as flaws and over-confidence in the Darwinian theory of evolution. F & P-P’s appendix on evolutionary psychology is merely an add-on to their main and far more controversial point: in the body of the book they present and concentrate on a full-blown critique of the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Le Fanu’s book is broader in scope – ranging over cosmology, physics, evolution, archaeology, neuroscience and more – and at the same time more explicitly focused on the place of humanity in the natural world.
Fodor is a leading cognitive scientist of his generation, Piattelli-Palmarini a bio-physicist and molecular biologist turned professor of cognitive science. Le Fanu is a medical doctor, and a gifted writer with an interesting track record of critiquing fashionable ideas in medicine and medical practice. Both F & P-P and Le Fanu draw significantly upon contemporary scientific research in the areas relevant to their analysis and argue that their conclusions are a development of that work. Both books have, however, been damned by mainstream scientific researchers and reviewers informed by mainstream thinking.
The theses, in brief
Within populations there exists variation in physical and behavioural traits. Darwin’s theory of natural selection states that if that variation is in turn linked to genetic variation that can be passed on from one generation to the next, then traits that confer greater reproductive success on organisms in a given environmental context will become more frequent in the population over time. As Coyne puts it in Why Evolution is True:
‘Selection is not a mechanism imposed on a population from outside. Rather, it is a process, a description of how genes that produce better adaptations become more frequent over time. When biologists say that selection is acting “on” a trait, they’re merely using shorthand saying that the trait is undergoing the process. In the same sense, species don’t try to adapt to their environment. There is no will involved, no conscious striving. Adaptation to the environment is inevitable if a species has the right kind of genetic variation.’
F & P-P are at pains to emphasise that they are not into Intelligent Design or any other kind of creationism. They are out and proud, card-carrying materialists and atheists. Rather, it is their contention that the variety and forms of order that we find in the natural world are not and could not be the product of natural selection as formulated by Darwin and developed by neo-Darwinism. Early in the book they state: ‘There must be strong, often decisive, endogenous constraints and hosts of regulations on the phenotypic options that exogenous selection operates on. We think of natural selection as tuning the piano, not as composing the melodies. That’s our story, and we think it’s the story that modern biology tells when it’s properly construed. We will stick to it throughout what follows.’
In fact, in what follows the argument is, if anything, hardened up. From the above quote the possibility of natural selection operating in a very constrained way seems to be allowed. Later the argument becomes that natural selection in the Darwinian sense does not exist, that Darwin confused himself and that Darwinists continue to confuse themselves and others through ‘just so’ stories and analogous thinking – comparing natural selection to the artificial selection of the animal breeder and the experimental and conceptual work of the human architect, two processes that involve human agency and thinking.
Furthermore, just as natural selection doesn’t operate, so species aren’t adapted to their environments, argue F & P-P. The following quote brings out this aspect of their argument and is at the same time a good example of their way of thinking:
‘Here’s the point: a creature’s ecology must not be confused with its environment. The environment that creatures live in is common to each and every one of them – it’s just “the world”… By contrast, a creature’s ecology consists of whatever-it-is-about-the-world that makes its phenotype viable. That is to say: it is constituted by those features of the world in virtue of which that kind of creature is able to make a living in the world. In effect, the notions of “ecology” and “phenotype” (unlike the notions of “environment” and “phenotype”) are interdefined. Since they are, it’s hardly surprising that a creature’s phenotype reliably turns out to be in good accord with its ecology. Do not, therefore, be amazed that the seagull’s wings meet with such remarkable perfection the demands that its airy ecology imposes. If seagulls didn’t have wings, their ecology wouldn’t be airy.’
That last sentence encapsulates the change in worldview they want to bring about. ‘If seagulls didn’t have wings…’ But why do they have wings? F & P-P spend most of the book in critical mode. Their alternative, however, is implicit, and they make it explicit in the last chapter. Building on the first half of the book that discusses, among other things, a range of sciences that suggest strong endogenous processes and constraints shape the forms of organisms, they argue that natural history, not natural selection, explains why there are the phenotypes that there are. And by history they do not mean history as understood by Marx and other nineteenth-century writers who looked for patterns and causation in history. They mean history in the sense of one damned thing after another. In this spirit they propose that we abandon any single way of looking at evolution:
‘On the present view, Darwin made the same sort of mistake that Marx did: he imagined that history is a theoretical domain; but what there is, in fact, is only a heterogeneity of causes and effects… Darwin pointed the direction to a thoroughly naturalistic – indeed a thoroughly atheistic – theory of phenotype formation; but he didn’t see how to get the whole way there. He killed off God, if you like, but Mother Nature and other pseudo-agents got away scot-free. We think it’s now time to get rid of them, too.’
Le Fanu does not make his religious beliefs or non-beliefs clear in his book. There is, though, a fairly clear hint that belief is in there somewhere, and his opposition to materialism is overt, as he makes clear in his conclusion and alludes to in the subtitle of the book: ‘How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves.’
For Le Fanu, it is scientific advances of the recent period that have revealed just how mysterious we are. In this way he distinguishes himself from those of a religious persuasion who are indifferent to science while also making some telling points against those who proclaimed in the 1990s and more recently that genetics and neuroscience in particular would tell us what it is to be human. Indeed, it is the hubris of some associated with the Human Genome Project and the ‘Decade of the Brain’ that provides the starting point and perhaps the motivation for Le Fanu’s book. According to Le Fanu, the reality is that the findings of researchers working in genetics and of those studying the human brain present a setback to the modern scientific enterprise’s aspiration to understand and explain:
‘When cosmologists can reliably infer what happened in the first few minutes of the birth of the universe, and geologists can measure the movements of vast continents to the nearest centimetre, then the inscrutability of those genetic instructions that should distinguish a human from a fly, or the failure to account for something as elementary as how we recall a telephone number, throws into sharp relief the unfathomability of ourselves. It is as if we, and indeed all living things, are in some way different, profounder and more complex than the physical world to which we belong… The ramifications of the seemingly disappointing outcomes of the New Genetics and the Decade of the Brain are clearly prodigious, suggesting that we are on the brink of some tectonic shift in our understanding of ourselves.’
Le Fanu distinguishes between a ‘philosophic’ view, which is ‘the aggregate of human knowledge of the world as known through the senses, interpreted and comprehended by the powers of reason and imagination’, and the ‘second order’ scientific view which ‘is limited to the material world and the laws that underpin it as revealed by science and its methods.’ For Le Fanu, the philosophic view is superior in that it encompasses the scientific view whereas the latter does not encompass the former. Accordingly:
‘It would thus seem a mistake to prioritise scientific knowledge as being the more “real”, or to suppose its findings to be more reliable. But, to put it simply, that is indeed what happened. Before the rise of science, the philosophic view necessarily prevailed, including the religious intimation from contemplating the wonders of the natural world and the richness of the human mind that there was “something more than can be known”.’
From this starting point Le Fanu develops a bold and extensive interpretation and reinterpretation of the history of humankind and our theories of that history. Like F & P-P, Le Fanu is interested in endogenous constraints on the forms that organisms could take and believes that natural selection could not possibly account for the complexity of life. Specifically, the ascent of man is, argues Le Fanu, ‘a riddle in two parts’. The first riddle is anatomical and begins with the observation that our evolutionary forbears stood up and walked on two feet. This, argues Le Fanu, makes no sense in Darwinian terms – it required a sudden wholesale redesign of anatomy, contradicting the Darwinian emphasis on small and steady changes that yield at each stage an adaptive advantage. What is more, the riddle is only deepened by the findings of what he calls the recent science of the New Genetics – that the genetic differences between knuckle-walking chimps and us are small. The second riddle is what Le Fanu calls the ‘cultural explosion and the origins of language’:
‘The most striking feature of the arrival of modern man is its suddenness and completeness, epitomised most obviously by the beauty and originality of those artefacts he left behind: the “pride of lions” portrayed in perspective on the walls of the Chauvet cave; the beads and jewellery for self-adornment in this and the “next” world… All the features in short – artistic, technical, economic and religious – that can be found in contemporary society.’
As with the ‘sudden’ appearance of the upright stance, for Le Fanu the sudden appearance of language is a riddle because, drawing on Chomsky, he believes that language is an all or nothing system of meaning that imposes order on the world: ‘Rules and meanings cannot evolve from the simple to the complex, they just “are”. The structure of sentences is either meaningful or meaningless.’ And for Le Fanu, just as the New Genetics only reinforces the mystery of our anatomical development, so neuroscience reinforces the mystery of our linguistic development.
Le Fanu believes that not only the New Genetics and neuroscience, but also gravitational theory, show that rather than materialism being triumphant, it is the opposite that is the case – non-material processes bring order to the world. From this perspective, ‘the great drawback of Darwin’s simple, all-encompassing evolutionary theory has always been that it robs the living world of its unknowable profundity’. But thanks to the New Genetics we are led to the ‘necessity to set aside Darwin’s evolutionary doctrine’; further, ‘we are left to stare into the abyss of our ignorance of virtually every aspect of the complexities of the living world and its evolutionary history’.
Like F & P-P, Le Fanu concludes by linking Darwinism with Marxism and judges them to be failed universal theories. Unlike F & P-P, Le Fanu sees the failure of both as indicating the failure of materialism. He also links Darwinism to Freudianism. His observation is that in the current intellectual world Marx and Freud are discredited. His hope is that others will soon join him in negative judgment on the third member of what he dubs the materialist science triumvirate.
Are they on to anything?
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