Of course, if you're a regular reader here you knew that already . . .

David P. Barash, professor of psychology, reflects here on some of the problems with the Darwinian explanation of social behavior (HT: Corner). Just to remind you of my posts on the topic, here and here. Some choice bits:

Although the study of evolution is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting and illuminating of all intellectual enterprises, there is at the same time, and not just in my opinion, something dark about the implications of natural selection for our own behavior.

. . . the individual- and gene-centered view of life offers, in a sense, a perspective that is profoundly selfish; hence Richard Dawkins's immensely influential book, The Selfish Gene. The basic idea has been so productive that it has rapidly become dogma: Living things compete with each other (more precisely, their constituent genes struggle with alternative copies) in a never-ending process of differential reproduction, using their bodies as vehicles, or tools, for achieving success. The result has been to validate a view of human motivations that seems to approve of personal selfishness while casting doubt on any self-abnegating actions, seeing a self-serving component behind any act, no matter how altruistic it might appear.

Enter sociobiology. With its increasingly clear demonstration that Hume, Freud, Brecht, and Nietzsche (also Machiavelli and Hobbes) are basically onto something, and that selfishness resides in our very genes, it would seem not only that evolution is a dispiriting guide to human behavior, but also that the teaching of sociobiology (or evolutionary psychology) should be undertaken only with great caution. The renowned primatologist Sarah Hrdy accordingly questioned "whether sociobiology should be taught at the high-school level ... because it can be very threatening to students still in the process of shaping their own priorities," adding: "The whole message of sociobiology is oriented toward the success of the individual. ... Unless a student has a moral framework already in place, we could be producing social monsters by teaching this."

Which seems open to all the objections C.S. Lewis discussed in The Abolition of Man: to Drs. Barash and Hrdy, as for the writers C.S. Lewis discussed (long before the concept of the selfish gene, by the way) moral training is in some sense conditioning, and to that degree deceptive.

He tries to conclude with some good news, like that altruitic actions at least are part of our basically selfish purposes.

For one thing, a deeper grasp of the evolutionary biology of altruism reveals that even though selfishness may well underlie much of our behavior, it is often achieved, paradoxically, via acts of altruism, as when individuals behave in a manner that enhances the ultimate success of genetic relatives. Here, selfishness at the level of genes produces altruism at the level of bodies. Ditto for "reciprocity," which, as Robert Trivers elegantly demonstrated more than three decades ago, can produce seemingly altruistic exchanges and moral obligations even between nonrelatives. Yet genetic selfishness underlies it all.

He also tries to get out of this by completely detaching our ethics from any concept of nature:

the real test of our humanity might be whether we are willing, at least on occasion, to say no to our "natural" inclinations, thereby refusing go along with our selfish genes. To my knowledge, no other animal species is capable of doing that.

This doesn't seem very convincing. A morality that can't answer "why," is morality based on irrationality. Some concept of the Fall, that we are not as we were created to be and that hence morality is both difficult and natural at the same time, is essential for making any sense of our own moral condition.* And what Dr. Barash is trying to say is that he can't see any way in which "modern biology" can agree with that idea.

*You can find this even in some form even in non-theistic religions such as Buddhism. You can rephrase it thusly: somehow we are out of tune with the way things at a deep level are, but that through moral training we begin to become in tune with the way things are. Of course Buddhism resembles Christianity in finding the relation of morality to liberation/salvation as being paradoxical, rather than straight forward.

UPDATE: Mario Loyola at the Corner finds that Dr. Barash is off base. On the other hand, the basic issue revolves around sincerity 誠 , and when the issue is sincerity of belief, a guy who wrote this is not a very reliable authority.

More on Darwin and Apostasy

I made three long responses to the good feedback I've gotten in the comment box, but I think it would be simpler to pull them all out and make a single post.

The most important thought the comments remind me is how many issues are involved in the "Bible vs. Darwin" debate, and how necessary it is that they be treated separately.

Among the issues are:
1) Biblical authority vs. any account that doesn't look very similar
2) Total common ancestry vs. special creation of each species
3) Darwinism vs. the other possible evolutionary "motors" that have been proposed.

What I'm talking about is 3), and I am talking about it because (to go back to how this started) John Derbyshire's apostasy was not caused by learning that the Biblical account read literally was not true, nor was it caused by learning that we are related to apes, but by learning that natural selection working through genes explains such vast swathes of our behavior that we can no longer conceive of ourselves as being creatures made in the image of God.

Rick's comment, for example, about how to read Scripture is important but basically about 1)

In responding to JS Bangs' comment, I think it is very important to separate TCA (total common ancestry of all living things) from the idea of natural selection/inclusive fitness etc.

All Darwinian systems, indeed any conceivable modern biological system, is going to involve TCA, simply because, as I said, TCA gives unity to the biological world and science demands unity. But, not all TCA systems involve Darwinism. Lamarck, for example, was a non-Darwinian TCA-er. Lynn Margulis is a major evolutionary thinker whose idea of symbiosis is at least partly non-Darwinian (see here.) If I was a biologist, I would find engaging with the thought of people like Lynn Margulis to be very important.

What JS is saying, I would contend, is the TCA is completely compatible with an attitude of gratitude and reverence. I agree. In fact, I will go so far as to say that I find TCA is in fact desirable theologically, for precisely the reasons Rick touched on -- the redemption of Jesus then involves not just the redemption of all human flesh, but of all flesh, all life, even all matter. (Whether it is true or not, however, is a question to be decided by scripture.)

I do think there is a real difference of viewpoint. Lynn Margulis and Edmund O. Wilson both agree that TCA is the "story line" of modern biology, if you will. They differ not because one is a scientist and one not, but because they differ on who the main character is (the gene vs. community), and what the protagonist's motivation is (purely selfish or partly selfish and partly communitarian). Or to use a different metaphor, they agree on the road, but differ on the nature of the "motor."

Jeremy's objection relates to the whole question of what attitude we are to adopt to all this.

Maybe I have a hard time explaining this because it's more intuitive than well thought out. I would strongly suggest a read of "The Abolition of Man." But here goes . . .

The presupposition of Jeremy's question is that fact and sentiment are by nature separate (the famous fact-value distinction). What we have between me and God is a chain of morally neutral causes. Only by adding God's intent, at the top of the chain, does one then have a basis for objectively correct moral feeling. The chain goes like this: God's love >> mechanics >> me.

Now let me add, that if that's the case, then no matter how important the "mechanics" are, they do not provoke any moral sentiments. Even if parents are "incredibly important" to how God makes us us, that importance doesn't provoke moral sentiments unless we somehow get our parents out of the category of mechanics.

Let's examine closer the attitude one should have towards one's parents. Are they just "mechanics"? I don't think so and I know Jeremy doesn't either. Why not? Because we all accept the (prima facie) idea that parents gave birth and raised us because they loved us and wanted us. Reproduction was due to intent. In other words, the chain goes: parental love >> mechanics >> me. Fold this into the previous one and you get: God's love >> mechanics >> parental love >> mechanics >> me.

What I see as problematic with Darwinian explanation is the splitting off of the causal nexus of love from creation. A Darwinian explains both the actions of creation (and I'll use that term because I don't just mean egg and sperm, I mean the whole deal, mothers and fathers sacrificing their life for their children, etc.) and the sentiments associated with those acts are both themselves caused by the process of natural selection which mechanically resulted in the replication of genes.

Let's use a sci-fi nightmare. What if, one day, you discovered that your mother was actually a robot? That for reasons unknown, but certainly having nothing to do with you personally, she had been programmed to take care of you. Would that change your attitude towards her? My argument is that the "Darwinian attitude" (not the evolutionary attitude, not the TCA attitude, but the Darwinian attitude) is one that says, we do not have an adequate scientific explanation of human/animal/whatever child-rearing attitudes until we have done the mental equivalent of turning parents and children into robots created by the necessity to replicate genes. Incredibly important robots, quite possibly. But still robots.

This last point raises the issue: To what extent can Darwinism make good its claim to be able to actually explain behavior? If some Darwinists believe parental influence is incredibly important, and some believe it is of little importance, and both can create natural selection "just so" stories to back it up, then is there actually any cognitive content to Darwinism, or is it just "attitude" in the negative sense?

Now, I'd be the first to admit that when it comes to explaining human behavior, "attitude" (in this negative sense) is most of what it is. How important human parents are for children, for example, is an empirical question, and adding fantasy stories about "cave men" (one way or the other) is to try to explain the brightly lit by the almost completely obscure. (You have to always keep in mind how immense, profound, and far-reaching is the ignorance of even the best anthropologists on, say, the Neolithic Middle East, let alone Paleolithic Europe or Africa.)

But the fact that people tell such stories should lead us to ask why? Why tell such "just so" stories? (I mean apart from the idea of trying to get around brightly-lit facts today by appealing to obscure suppositions about a virtually unknown stone age.)

One reason is the desire to turn human beings into "robots" -- this is the emotional derangement that wants the Darwinian picture to be true.

But I don't think that's the only reason. Another reason is that inclusive fitness, the whole deal, etc. has done some very solid work in explaining animal behavior. One big breakthrough, for example, was when observation showed that worker ants feed larvae in exact proportion to how many genes they might be expected to share with the larvae. (In ants, larval workers, drones, and queens from the same hive all look different and share different percentages of genes). You can read all about it in Edmund Wilson's "Sociobiology." Only if you do, don't do what every journalist did and skip to the human behavior part. Stick with the ants and Cape hunting dogs -- because if you don't you won't get any sense of the intellectual power of inclusive fitness and so on to explain some examples of animal behavior.

So if we can explain ant behavior by inclusive fitness, a "unified field theory" of biological behavior would push us to believe, as a hope, even if not a fact, that inclusive fitness can explain chimpanzee behavior, and even H. sapiens behavior. Even scientists without the emotional derangement that leads to liking Darwinian explanation, will be sympathetic because it gives unity to the study of animal behavior.

Yes, I'd agree, but at a very high cost.

What Apostasy Looks Like

John Derbyshire has a fascinating, if typically grim, column up on National Review describing how he lost his Christian faith. Now, one may argue that he never had it very much, but since he has accurately identified its core, believing that Jesus of Nazareth is divine and was bodily resurrected, and says that before the fall of 2004 he shakily believed in that, and now definitely does not, I think this can be taken as a description of apostasy.

It is an interesting confirmation. Back when I first began to go online, I liked Derbyshire, while sometimes disagreeing with him. Since then, particularly since about 2004, in fact, I've found the cast of his thought increasingly alien and indeed repulsive to me.

The culprit in his apostasy that he identifies is modern biology, and specifically the idea that humanity has no fixed nature because of its constantly evolving genome. It would not be too strong, I think, to say Darwinism killed his Christianity. (What he would rather say perhaps, and does in almost those words, is that modern biology killed his residual, lingering creationism.)

What lessons can we learn from this?

1) Darwinism is indeed an anti-Christian viewpoint.

2) Pascal's wager still holds. At least as a writer and thinker, John Derbyshire seems to have become a significantly less pleasant figure for losing his Christian faith. To that extent, his own case seems to disprove his contention that "Mostly, I think [religious faith] makes no difference. Evelyn Waugh would have been no more obnoxious as an atheist."

3) Even so, we need to remember that the core of the Christian faith is not measurable progress in sanctification, but in the forgiveness of sins. We believe mostly by faith and only partly by sight that people do get better by being Christians, but that is not why we should be Christians. We should be Christians even if we can't see ourselves getting better at all, because if we believe in Jesus we still have the forgiveness of our sins. (I've talked about this here.)

4) We need to properly relate nature and grace. This comment is striking:

[The experience of raising two kids] made me realize how perfectly natural religion is. We have a religious module in our brains, and with little kids you can actually watch it waking up and developing, like their speech or social habits. The paradox is, that to the degree that you see religion as natural, to the same degree it becomes harder to see it (and by extension its claims) as supernatural.

Again, Pascal's wager still holds. Assuming the truth of this statement, going from being a Christian to being a Darwinist involves the disabling of a natural part of the brain, something like being no longer able to see colors or (to use the analogy he gives) being no longer able to experience sexual arousal.

Of course the point here is a old one that only religion which is completely disfunctional in one's life can be trusted. (I've touched on that here). Now, one can point out first off that we don't use this standard with any other brain function ("It is so natural to exercise vision, which casts serious doubt on whether objects exist"; "You can actually see sexual interest being aroused in boys; clearly girls don't exist," etc.), why should we use it with this part of the brain (if part of the brain for religion there indeed be?)

Remember, that this whole way of reasoning began as a Christian (esp. Augustinian and Reformed) critique of idolatrous religion: that which helps us achieve our natural desires can only be a product of wish-fulfillment. Harriet Beecher Stowe has something of a novelistic riposte to this that begins with Jacob at Bethel. For now, it is worth repeating that while to say we all naturally believe in the Christian religion is to deny the Fall, to say that the Christian religion has no positive relation to our pre-redemption existence is to deny the fundamental doctrine of recapitulation (that redemption involves re-doing, right this time, the creation in Eden).

5) Yet at the same time, the Evangelical teaching of the bondage of the will and the answer of incarnation in resolving theodicy (again, summarized here), is an important part of our response. The theodicy of free will assumes that 1) free will exists and that 2) in some minimal sense all have "a chance" to exercise it in matters of faith, that is, that in some basic sense we are all equally able to be saved, that the God of nature has not placed such fundamental blocks so as to defeat the God of grace. This seems to me far more vulnerable to "modern biology" than the Evangelical presentation of the issue (one which John Derbyshire obviously never heard or assimilated in any way).

6) The "image of God," and hence our special creation, is not primarily (pace Reformed and Catholic emphases) the reasoning faculties, knowledge, freedom, etc., we possess (of which Derbyshire points out, grossly inferior, but not necessarily qualitatively different forms can be found in lower mammals like apes, elephants, and parakeets). Rather it is our inborn "bright light in the heart to know God and His work": the fear, love, and trust in God. This has been lost in the Fall, from which time on all humanity has been born in the image of Adam, not God. Thus the only true proof of the image of God in humanity, is that all humanity is capable of knowing and believing in Jesus, something which no animal, even in the most rudimentary way, can do.

What relation the innate religiosity of fallen man has to this true image of God is a theological question that really needs addressing.

7) Obviously, the final lesson for baptized Christian who mean to stay so is that the third commandment is to be obeyed ("Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy") in the New Testament sense, and the means of grace are to be attended to -- preaching, Bible reading, confession, and Holy Communion.