The Virtually Universal Applicability of Lamarckian Evolution

Thomas of Endless Rocking recommended this review of this book. As the reviewer explains, one of the themes of the book is the parallel between the evolution of financial instruments and biological evolution:

But how does all of this fit in with the credit crunch, the first phases of which are covered by Ferguson? As ever, there are plenty of lessons from the past. In one of the strongest passages in his book, the author explains how financial history is essentially the result of institutional mutation and natural selection. And just like the mass extinctions that eliminated 85 per cent of the earth's species at the end of the Cretaceous period when asteroids hit the earth, the credit crunch stands out as a period of major discontinuity in the world of finance. Numerous banks and entire sub-species of financial institutions are dying off. This happens regularly in financial history, with the bank panics of the 1930s and the savings and loans failures of 1980s America cases in point.

Ferguson enumerates the common features shared by the financial world and an evolutionary system; in doing so, he paints a remarkable portrait of the past two decades of financial innovation. Finance has its very own 'genes', in the sense of certain business practices, and it boasts a potential for spontaneous mutation thanks to technological innovation. There is competition between firms for resources; a mechanism for natural selection, with weaker practices, firms and individuals wiped out; scope for speciation, with the creation of wholly new species of financial institutions a key feature of the past few years; and scope for extinction, with species dying out altogether.

This is a very interesting analogy. Indeed it's amazing how many interesting analogies with biological evolution and classification there are. One of the most provocative for my work is the three-fold analogy explored by Norman I. Platnick and H. David Cameron in "Cladistic Methods in Textual, Linguistic, and Phylogenetic Analysis," published in Systematic Zoology 26.4 (1977), 380-85. They show that the methods of dealing with textual corruption (i.e. the kind of thing explored here), the evolution of language (i.e. the kind of thing explored here and here), and biological evolution have deep analogies, such that one can fruitfully critique the methodology of textual criticism on the basis of the methodology of biological classification and vice versa. (Perhaps another thing they have in common is that all three are or have been at different times highly problematic for Christian belief.) The analogy has even been drawn with quilts.

Of course what is generally left unsaid is the fact that all of these analogies are drawn between biological evolution and systems that are either Lamarckian or else generated by "moderately intelligent design." That is, the evolution is driven by the efforts of the things evolving to improve their own adaptions (languages, financial systems) or else are material things created by moderately intelligent designers who, working with limited resources on the basis of what they have already, are trying to improve their adaption to the environment. Except for biology, no other evolutionary system seems to be thought to run on random mutation as its basic motor. (And no such system seems fruitfully explored as the result of omniscient intelligent design. The presence of constraint seems fundamental to effective explanation.)

Actually, one could argue that Lamarckianism and "moderately intelligent design" are the same thing, in that the thing seen to evolve -- whether text, language, financial systems, body types, and so on -- is always separate from the constrained will and limited intelligence seeking to maximize its adaption. Either way, it seems to be, all unacknowledged, one of the most powerful tools in the intellectual arsenal today.

Food for thought.

A Somewhat Less Objectionable Form of Darwinism

At skeptic.com, the biologist David Sloan Wilson has published a serious critique of Dawkins's treatment of religion. To understand where Wilson is coming from, note that skeptic.com is devoted to debunking all claims of the supernatural; a further clue is that Wilson's essay was later re-posted for discussion on Democratic Underground. Wilson is the author of Darwin's Cathedral, an effort to explain religion from the Darwinian, evolutionary viewpoint.

So what possible difference could he have with Dawkins? Quite a bit actually, but principally that he endeavors to explain, that is, not explain away religion. In doing so, he also offers a picture of Darwinism that is subtly, but importantly different from Dawkins's view, and which he claims has in fact superseded Dawkins-style "selfish gene" monism.

Wilson has many hard words for Dawkins' utter lack of interest in the actual body of data on religion. When Dawkins claims that religion is not good for the individual or group, Wilson says he's just ignoring the hard, scientific data -- both experimental and that collected by observation and study of religious life and history. Wilson himself sees "religious studies" as a wonderfully full and accurate body of data on religion which can be used to see in what way religion is adaptive for those who practice it. His look at Jainism is a nice, counter-intuitive example of how a religion which enjoins on its priest total celibacy, pure vegetarianism, homelessness, obsessive cleanliness, and even fasting to death can be beneficial for the group (the Jain congregation) as a whole.

Wilson's main theoretical beef with Dawkins is the later's rejection of group selection. In the Dawkins view, expounded in his Selfish Gene, selection works solely and purely at the individual level. The organism is the gene's way of preserving the gene, and societies are simply the individual's ways of preserving himself. To put it differently, all the genes we find in a population are there because they help the spread of individuals, regardless of their effect on social groups. The contrary viewpoint is the idea of group selection, that is, that some genes spread because they promote group survival. As Wilson argues, Dawkins was expressing the reaction against sloppy forms of group selectionism.

The relevance to this is that if religion is not good for the individual then it is good for nothing, because saying the "religion gene" spread because it was good for the group is group selection, which is not allowed. This plays into Dawkins's argument that religion is a selfish meme, a cultural idea that spreads despite being maladaptive for both individuals and groups.

Wilson claims however that today group selection is back in a much more rigorous form. Dawkins's dismissal of group selection is simply out of date. In other words, it is quite possible that the "r gene" spread because the "r gene" formed groups that are adaptive and persistent.

He also adds in the concept of "major transitions" -- such as that between prokaryote and eukaryote, unicellular and multi-cellular, single organism and colony. Whereas Dawkins sees these major transition as making no difference for the basic selfish gene idea, Wilson (following the argument of Lynn Margulis) argues that contemporary biology shows that such "major transitions" can in fact almost completely suppress individual selection. Your mitochondria have different DNA from your cell nucleus and have been argued to be once independent organisms now assimilated into your cells -- but for selection purposes you and your mitochondria are almost entirely one. Could it be that human groups are another such "major transition," such that culturally and genetically selection is (or in some circumstances can be) almost entirely group based?

Now, this is a pretty minimal argument. What it says is merely that a survey of major religions shows that they can all be plausibly argued to be good for their practitioners, usually as individuals, but always as groups. Truth is not at all at issue here.

But it makes slightly more plausible the idea that traditional wisdom (in the broad sense, the right management of life, including the traditional injunctions of morality, such as the Golden Rule) can be explained as the result of the operation of biological laws. It also opens (at least a bit more than Dawkins would admit) the possibility that humanistic learning (comparative religions, for example) may actually have something to say to biology. It also removes to a certain degree the objection I've long felt that the purely individual-selection, selfish gene paradigm of Darwinian explanation involves injecting poisonous sense of deceit in our view of human social relations (see more here and then here). With the concept of "major transitions" and a (revised) group selection, one can possibly say that something like real altruism does in fact exist, that when someone dies "for the group," this could be considered even in the most hard-headed Darwinian analysis, as an accurate description of what is happening.

Now all this does is perhaps put Darwinism about on the level of Neo-Confucianism or Aristotelian philosophy as doctrines that are compatible with some form of traditional wisdom, if not with Christianity. But given the importance of biology -- in which Darwinism is the fundamentally unifying concept -- for any understanding of the world, that's not nothing.

So don't get your hopes up -- if you are looking for a Darwinian who can reconcile Darwin and the supernatural -- let alone true Christian faith -- he's not your man. But if you are looking for a way in which modern biology can be seen as broadly compatible with humanistic wisdom, then his work, as a temporary way station, is worth a look.

"Infanticide -- A Major Factor in Mammalian Sociology"

I love books on animals. For my birthday last month, I got the beautiful and extraordinarily informative encyclopedia, The Encyclopedia of Mammals, edited by David W. Macdonald. It's an edition with an orangutan on the front -- since a new three volume edition had come out, this older edition was going cheap at Borders. (It's the 2001 edition, ISBN 0-681-45659-0)

One of the hard things to miss, because the book has lots of special sections on it, is the importance of sociobiology as a factor in the evolution of mammals. And a real highlight of contemporary sociolobiological research is the role of what we might call "criminality" in mammal societies. For example, a one page spread on infanticide in mammals in general and a smaller sidebar on infanticide in primates (including us) emphasizes the fascinating role infanticide played in human evolution, possibly being the reason for pair bonding and so on.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (rhymes with "birdie") brought about a revolution in the field with the publication of her book, The Langurs of Abu: Female and Male Strategies of Reproduction, in 1977. She showed how infanticide among langurs can be understood as part of a sociobiological strategy of maximizing reproduction and how female promiscuity can be understood as a response to that. (If male langurs don't know who the father is, they are more likely to tolerate or protect an infant on the chance that it might be his.)

The sheer prevalence of "criminal" behavior among the mammals is rather striking. 13% of all gorilla babies are killed by adult male gorillas. About 50% of all male black rhinos die at the horns of another black rhino. In Borneo, about 90% of all copulations among orangutans are non-consensual (what we would call rape among humans).

Now of course I put "criminal" in quotations here, because animals are not moral beings in the same way people are. But the sheer similarity of animal behavior with the criminal behaviors among H. sapiens is striking. Especially if one believes, as any biologist seeking to unify what we know about the behavior of living creatures (and that includes us) must, that this is our past.

Here are some interesting selections from the Encyclopedia of Mammals:

Fatal clashes among rhinos
Males of all species [of rhinos] are given to vicious fights that inflict gaping wounds. Both African species jab at one another with upward thrusts of their front horns. Black rhinos have the highest incidence among mammals of fatal intraspecies fighting: almost 50 percent of males and 33 percent of females die from wounds [inflicted by other black rhinos]. Why they are quite so bellicose is not known . . . Asian rhino species attack by jabbing open-mouthed with their lower incisor tusks, or, in the case of the Sumatran rhino, with the lower canines (p. 480).

Fatal clashes among hippos
About 10 percent of males are territorial; true to their amphibious nature, they defend not a patch of land but a few hundred meters of river or lake shore. They will tolerate other males in their territory provided they behave submissively, but will expect exclusive mating rights over all the females within it. If a bachelor male does not obey the rules and instead challenges the sovereignty of the territory holder, serious fights can break out. These are often bloody affairs that may result in the death of one of the contestants; most of the damage is done by the animals' razor-sharp lower canines, which may reach a length of 50 cm (20 in). (p. 492).

Infanticide among mammals
Among the subtleties of mammalian sociology is the importance of infanticide -- the killing of young by conspecifics [animals of the same species]. Infanticide has been recorded in over 100 species from at least five orders [of the twenty or so in the class Mammalia] and 18 families. Nor is this habit confined to one sex -- infanticide by females is known for 25 species from three orders: lagomorphs, carnivores, and rodents. [And of course from primates as well, as exemplified by Homo sapiens, us.] However, the potential motives may differ between the sexes -- generally males may be seeking to eat the babies or incease their mating opportunities, whereas females may be after foraging or nesting sites.

Possible benefits of infanticide include: a) securing food (male and female chimpanzees eat their victims);

b) eliminating competitors (among common marmosets [a small New World monkey] subordinate non-reproductive female helpers increase the weaning success of infants born to dominants; infanticide by the dominant female provides her with a bereaved helper and removes rivals to her own offspring);

c) stealing resources (infanticidal female rabbits and Belding's ground squirrels seldom eat their victims but do occupy their burrows);

d) sexual selection -- infanticide is adaptive for the infanticidal male that destroy's a rival's offspring and causes the bereaved mother to stop lactating and come into estrus sooner (e.g. chimpanzees, lions, grizzly bears, and lemmings). Perpetrators reduce the risk of killing their own offspring by being able to recognize their odor, or by sparing offspring of females with which they have mated, or females in places where they have mated (in White-footed mice infanticide is generally by newly-arrived males, since resident males are inhibited from killing pups for the 35-40 days after mating, exactly the time needed for their progeny to mature and disperse);

e) parental manipulation, where parents regulate the sex ratio of a litter; and

f) minimizing the risk of accidentally adopting non-kin and so wasting effort (perhaps applicable to pinnipeds [seal lions, walruses, and seals] which commonly kill pups separated from their mothers) (p. xxiv).

Infanticide among primates
Infanticide has since been document in many primates, among them several lemur species, howler monkeys, leaf monkeys, the guenon monkey group, and savanna baboons, as well as among mountain gorillas and common chimpanzees. Infanticide is usually, although not always, carried out by males, and happens most often when new males move into a group. On a day-to-day basis, infanticide is rare and not easily witnessed -- only about 60 episodes have been well described to date -- but its apparent rarity should not obscure its significance. In primates such as red howler monkeys, mountain gorillas, and chacma baboons, infanticide is a major source of infant mortality, accounting for 25-38 percent of infant deaths. In other words, about 13 percent of the infants born in mountain gorilla and red howler monkey groups are killed by males. (p. 392).

Infanticide not only has fascinating origins; its repercussions are also far-reaching. One compelling possibility is that the cohesive social bonds that exist between males and females evolved as a deterrent to infanticide. Around the time a chacma baboon gives birth, she typically seeks out a particular adult male within the group and establishes a "friendship" with him. She sticks close by the chosen male, following him around incessantly, grooming him much more than he grooms her, and allowing him alone to touch and handle her baby. Why do nursing mothers associate with a male in this way? The answer, in chacma baboons at least, may be to gain protection from infanticide, for a female's male friend is more likely to actively defend her offspring than other group males. (p. 393).

Fratricide/sororicide among spotted hyenas
Spotted hyenas are unusual amongst carnivores in that cubs are born with their eyes open and their teeth erupted. Litter mates, which are normally twins, engage in high levels of aggression within minutes of birth, which quickly leads to the establishment of a dominance hierarchy between siblings, allowing the dominant cub to control access to maternal milk. Sometimes this aggression will lead to the death of the smaller cub. This appears most likely to happen when resources are in short supply and probably insufficient to sustain two cubs (p. 144).

Aggressive war and raiding among chimpanzees
Male chimpanzees also cooperate with each other in aggression between communities, which takes two forms. When parties from neighboring communities meet during the course of normal activities, they usually display excitedly and may charge at and chase each other . . . Sometimes males patrol the boundaries of their ranges and even make incursions into those of neighbors. Patrollers are conspicuously silent and wary and are looking for neighbors. If they hear or meet some, their response depends largely on relative numbers: they quietly leave, or even flee, if outnumbered . . . but they attack when they greatly outnumber their opponents. Attacks are severe and can be fatal; males are known to have killed adult and adolescent males, infants, and even nonfertile adult females.

Lethal aggression by male coalitions is unusual in mammals; among primates it occurs only in chimpanzees and humans. (p. 411)

Hunting [of other species for meat], male bonding, cooperative intergroup raiding, and the making and using of tools are all traits that chimpanzees share with humans and that might also have characterized our last common ancestor. If so, we need to explain why male bonding and intergroup raiding are absent in bonobos [the so-called lesser chimpanzee of the Congo]. (p. 412).

Rape among orangutans
Subadult males try to associate with potentially receptive females whenever the opportunity arises, but a female that is ready to conceive seeks out the local dominant adult male, which generally succeeds in preventing most subadult males from mating with her. The nonpreferred males, adult or subadult, therefore tend to force matings when they encounter a lone female, often viciously biting the fiercely resisting female to restrain her.

Female-initiated courtships with the dominant adult male last a few days in Borneo, but may last weeks in Borneo. Probably related to this is the fact that over half of Sumatran matings are cooperative, whereas some 90 percent of those in Borneo are forced. (p. 423).

For the benefit of any non-human mammals who might read this, now and in the future, I of course concede that this is of course only part of the story. Cooperation, devotion, and care are common in social mammals.

In the sphere of mating, for example, some mammals show quite different behaviors, forming monogamous pairs, such as the South American titi monkey (xxii), or the mara, a big rodent of South America that lives in strict monogamous pairs that come together to raise their young in communal creches (pp. 676-677). Most wolf and wild dog packs are centered on a alpha male and female pair that alone mate. Even stranger are the colonies of naked mole rats where only one "queen" breeds, and in which the "workers" care for her young (p. 693).

But note that there is no tendency toward "nicer" social behavior as intelligence increases, in fact, to the extent that social behavior involves group activity the interweaving of "naughty" and "nice" seems to grow increasingly tight and extreme.

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.

Darwin and Design

1) I read a lot of Kant in high school, when I was an atheist. I'm not sure what I think about his thought generally now, but one thing in it can be certainly accepted: that the understanding which animates science seeks unity above all. Kant had his little table of the different ways in which unity is sought, but the big daddy of them all is cause and effect: the aim of science is to link all the events of the world in a branching and expanding cause and effect chain. (In Kant this has all kinds of implications about the status of cause and effect, the first cause, and so on, but let that slide.) In the long run, a theory that brings lots of isolated facts together exemplifies the scientific understanding more than one that leaves them isolated. Total common ancestry is one such a theory for biology, and like the unified theory in physics it will stand as either proven or else be seen as the single great desideratum of the field.

2) In one sense any guidance in evolution makes phylogeny (the science of constructing family trees of living and fossil creatures) impossible to do. Look at it this way: fossils don't come with little labels saying (for example): "Mesohippus, ancestor of Equus, and descendant of Eohippus." In theory, any fossil type could be the ancestor of any later one, and the descendant of any previous one. Unless you want all the thousands upon thousands of (for example) more or less horse-like skulls to just sit in their cabinets as unconnected species, you have to conjecture relationship, and to make the conjecture workable, you have to find some parsimonious way of excluding the alternatives. Natural selection, Darwinism, whatever, does that, but only as long as it is unguided. Natural selection tells you not only that all changes must be relatively small (relative here is the word, and people often talk past each other in terms of scales on this point), but also that every change must be plausibly explainable in terms of some immediate advantage. That immediately constrains the possibilities. This is the condition of any hope of sorting the thousands upon millions of fossils into anything like orderly family trees (phylogeny).

An analogy: let's say I showed you a bumpy slope, and gave you the complete topography. Let's say I then showed you three points and said water had been flowing past that point, and then told you that all three points were part of one stream. Could you reconstruct the course of the stream? Maybe, but only if you are assured that water can't flow uphill. The second you admit water can flow uphill, the course of the stream becomes unreconstructable. Ditto. for phylogeny. For a phylogenist, admitting that anything other immediate survival advantage causes changes from one species/type to another is the same as giving up.

Some Thoughts on Darwinism and Apostasy

Why is Darwinism (which I'll use as a short hand for the point of view advocated by John Derbyshire here and discussed here) so contrary to Christianity? The two usual answers are that 1) it involves facts which contradict the facts taught by the Scriptures; and 2) it presumes there is no God -- maybe at first as just an aspect of your method, but then increasingly as a way of thinking, and finally a conviction.

There is a lot of truth to both of these points, particularly the first, but I think there is more to it. I think Darwinism is considerably more poisonous than most other naturalistic, non-Scriptural natural philosophies out there. Here's why.

Let's compare Darwinism to, say, the naturalistic philosophy of creation found in Neo-Confucianism. As found in this book, this goes like this:

The Ultimate of Non-being (wuji 無極 also called the Great Ultimate, or taiji 太極)* produces yin and yang 陰陽; yin and yang produce the five phases (or agents): water, fire, wood, metal, and earth. The five phases (or agents) coalesce into material forces (qi 氣, also called chi): a masculine Heaven，tian 天, and a feminine Earth, di 地 (represented by the trigrams qian 乾 and kun 坤, respectively). The interaction of these two material forces, then produces the 10,000 material things in the world in unending transformation. As the result of being born in this way, human affairs can be understood, and even by the especially subtle predicted to some degree, through the transformations of yin and yang, the five phases, Heaven and Earth, and the trigrams.

Note that a personal God nowhere appears here. Everything can be understood by the human intellect. Nor does any fall, or the specific narratives of Genesis. But it is my feeling (which I suppose could be wrong) that this narrative is far less objectionable than the "Darwinist" narrative on the "Human Biodiversity" mailing group. What I am trying to do here is just to define and explore that gut feeling.

Let's start with something we can all agree on: parents and children. Neo-Confucianism, Christians, and Darwinists all believe that parents exist. We all believe that we exist through a long stream of conception and nurture that brought us into existence without any effort or merit on our part. As a matter of fact, most people will continue that chain, more or less, by having children, giving life and nurture to them without any payback up front. One could say that acknowledging and making sense of these facts is pretty important to all of these systems, and central, at least to Neo-Confucianism and Darwinism.

Let's ask, what is the attitude that each system generates towards this bundle of facts?

In Neo-Confucianism, the primary attitude is one of gratitude. The child has received infinite kindness (en 恩, which could also be translated as grace in the good Protestant sense of "unmerited favor") from his parents, and must return (bao 報）that kindness by taking care of his parents in old age and also by procreating in turn, so that the spirits of his parents will be taken care of after his death by his own children. This gratitude extends to all the conditions that have allowed one to be so nurtured, particularly the ruler of one's state. It extends beyond ruler and parents to everything that has gone before, but in a degree diminishing with distance. One is vaguely grateful to Heaven and Earth, but one does not pay them concrete hommage (worshiping Heaven is a prerogative of the emperor). Similarly, the degree of personhood diminishes as one goes up the scale: mother and father are persons, as is the ruler, but Heaven and Earth are only ambiguously persons, and the Great Ultimate certainly not.

In Christianity (and here of course I will base my discussion on Luther's small catechism, which I assume all fair-minded observers will agree is the best post-Scriptural exposition of the religion), again gratitude is the primary note. One must be grateful to parents (see the exposition of the fourth commandment and commentary in the Large Catechism -- scroll down), but also to all the other things that assist in life (see the exposition of the fourth petition; my own crude commentary here). But there is one great difference. Here, one must ascend immediately to the highest creator and see one's parents, rulers, heaven, and earth as signs of God's love and care for us. We must have children, not just because we wish to continue the gift we have received from our forefathers, but because God, the prime cause, has commanded us to be fruitful and multiply. God must be the object of a direct cult by all persons, and is absolutely and overwhelmingly personal.

In other words, while Christianity and Neo-Confucianism disagree on how and why grateful piety should be expressed towards who and what created us, they agree that appropriate understanding of creation/nature should lead to feelings of being a creature who owes love, honor, and obedience to what created him.

Now when we come to Darwinism, things are quite different. As far as I know, no exposition of Darwinism has used the fact of procreation to derive the value of gratitude to parents. Nor, curiously, does one see any discussion of the duty to procreate and continue the line, let alone any practice of the same.

Why not? I think it is not just because ultimately reality is unplanned, impersonal, and indifferent (after all, one could say the same of the Great Ultimate), but because Darwinism views the procreation of life as in some sense deceptive. The concept of deception is fundamental in all higher-order reflection in the Darwinist vein. The world looks designed, but really isn't, babies look cute, but really such cuteness is a way to stimulate appropriate reactions in the parents, and so on. Fundamental to this mode of explanation is the idea that what superficially seems a diverse set of qualitative relations, beauties, cruelties, and so on, are in fact all simply quantitative manifestations of one simple principle of inclusive fitness.** And in inclusive fitness, it is not even the person that is the unit, but the gene. As was expressed in the Selfish Gene, the organism is simply the gene's way of replicating more genes.

In short, to feel metaphysically grateful to one's parents is, in some sense, to fall victim to a misunderstanding (at best) and a fraud at worst. Parents are independent being themselves, like you, responding to genetic cues. Derbyshire's famous/notorious comments on the Corner on the relative unimportance of parental nurture in childhood development (first post here, last post here) is just one manifestation of the same viewpoint that fundamentally parents and children are each pursuing their own agenda. That those who believe in it are not, on average, noticeably more eager to have children than others, despite their fundamental principle of survival of the fittest, is not then surprising. On one cognitive level "survival of the fittest" is exactly equivalent to being commanded to "be fruitful and multiply" in a world where "by the sweat of your brow you shall eat your bread." But on another level, accepting Darwinism offers you an explanation of why you feel that command "to be fruitful," while at the same moment releasing you from that command's hold on your mind as a command. Why? Because this command has nothing to do with me, as a person (or indeed as a giraffe or a frog or a lobster), but is only a by-product of genetics.

The problem with Darwinism, then is that its explanations of the natural world are always to some degree efforts to see through the natural world. (Readers may recall C.S. Lewis's points in the Abolition of Man; still one of my highest recommendations for reading in natural philosophy.) It is worth noticing that whenever scientists of an atheist persuasion speak of the emotions aroused in them by nature, they always speak of "awe" or "wonder," never of gratitude. This is the fundamental ethical problem with Darwinism, that it is an intellectual system which holds that the correct view of nature allows no room for gratitude towards our creation. As a result, it banishes piety and filiality, the well-spring of our moral sentiments. Again, this is not an inevitable feature of non-Christian naturalistic systems: it is a particular feature of the Darwinian mode of explanation.

To me then, the question is very simple, can there by a modern biology that encourages not "awe" and "wonder" at the "beauties of the natural world," but "gratitude" and "veneration" to one's creation for receiving life as a gift? Whether that gratitude and veneration stops at parents and ancestors to the fifth degree, or goes on to God the Creator of all, is not, for the purposes of evaluating the fundamental direction of any natural philosophy, the main issue.

Science demands unity. Just as physicists want a unified field theory, so biologists will never give up a theory that unifies all the different qualitative manifestations (social behavior in ants, biochemistry of bacteria in termite guts, fossils collected in sediments in Mongolia, the coloration of bird feathers) of biology into one theory. The current unification of biology by evolution will not be given up without an alternative theory that unifies all that is within our experience without reference to what is beyond our experience. (The echoes of Kant are deliberate here.) In the meantime, this leaves us with the question: are the anti-filial conclusions drawn from the current mode of unification simply an adventitious execrescence, to be explained by the history of science and philosophy? Or are they an inherent out-working of the basic idea that all qualitative biological features can be explained in the final analysis by the quantitative imperative to multiply copies of DNA?

I must say, I rather tend to the latter case. Let me finish by comparing Darwinism to Lamarckianism -- the idea that evolution proceeds by the inheritance of acquired characteristics. (You know, generations of okapis stretch their necks to reach ever-higher leaves and so over eons upon eons turn into giraffes). Lamarckianism could be just as naturalistic and just as contrary to a prima facie reading of Scripture as Darwinism, but I doubt that had Lamarckianism triumphed in modern biology that we would be feeling the same degree of conflict. Darwinism answers the question "why do giraffes have long necks?" by saying, "because that way giraffe genes could multiply themselves more effectively." Were a giraffe to learn of this explanation, I suppose they'd feel great consternation as giraffes realized that what they once regarded as their pride was a mere side-product of some double-helix inside them replicating. But what is Lamarck's answer? "Because over generations, in some obscure way, giraffes wanted to have long necks." Now that's an answer that gives dignity to a giraffe! And if the difference is this clear, then I have grave doubts about whether the deceptive aspects of Darwinism are not in fact built deep into the system.

Of course a Darwinist reading this will regard everything I have said as simply wishful thinking. Reality is deceptive, he will insist. No sentiments of filial piety towards parents, creation, God can be derived from a just understanding of the way nature works. As usual, when anyone demands that I must share in a knowledge that they embrace precisely because it is so inhuman, I suspect a personal motivation. But the irony is, that this very viewpoint, by revealing the fraud supposedly behind the "be fruitful and multiply" command brings about its own extinction. Even on the best showing of Darwinists, we are left with an inescapable antinomy of facts and morals: "You shall know the truth and the truth will kill you off."

*It is probably best to think of this as non-being not in the sense of being nothing, a vacuum, but as the absence of any specific, defined thing.
**The Wiki here is a bit misleading by the way. While inclusive fitness as an explanation of human behavior may be controversial or hard to detect, in the explanation of ant or ape behavior it is no more controversial than natural selection itself

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.