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.

Eating Involves Killing -- No Matter What

In discussing a recent press statement by PETA about fur Wesley Smith here brought up the rarely discussed deaths of animals during harvesting. As he points out:

Plant agriculture results each year in the mass slaughter of countless animals, including rabbits, gophers, mice, birds, snakes, and other field creatures. These animals are killed during harvesting, and in the various mechanized farming processes that produce wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, and other staples of vegan diets. And that doesn’t include the countless rats and mice poisoned in grain elevators, or the animals that die from loss of habitat cleared for agricultural use. . . . Field animals may flee in panic as the great rumbling harvest combines approach, only to be shredded to bits within their merciless blades; they may be burned to death when field leavings are burned; they may be poisoned by pesticides; they may die from predation when their plant cover has been removed.

One might think this is just some conservative tu quoque argument, or else an artifact of awful, inhuman, industrialized factory farming. But actually the idea of grain agriculture as an animal holocaust is a fixed part of Buddhist belief, at least. In a recent study of Tibetan nomads, who lived off of slaughtering animals, the author Rinzin Thargyal notes:

Most of [his nomad informants] thought that farmers were bigger sinners than themselves as nomads, because the farmers killed countless worms and other living beings in the process of ploughing and sowing their fields. Nomads did not take too many lives and the preference for killing bovines was that one single animal could provide enough meat for many people over a longer period, thus involving much less total life-taking overall (p. 182).

And don't think the slaughtering the nomads did was all that humane:

Suffocating the animal was the standard form of killing. The animal was first hobbled and then felled down on the ground, then a rope was tied around the mouth very tightly. The whole process took about half an hour, after which the eyes of the animal became bluish, indicating a lack of oxygen (p. 87).

And the offspring of ox-yak crossbreeds were starved to death:

All tole or zomo calves were starved when very young [i.e. the people took all the milk and let the calves starve]. My informants hesitated to impart this piece of information to me initially, but they gradually admitted that they sometimes had to resort to what was a sinful act in Buddhist terms in order to survive as they did. Since only a few households kept zomo, most of them could avoid committing this form of killing (p. 83).

Even so, the killings involved in agriculture play a major role in the Buddhist view of the world. Here is a great analysis (from this book) based on field-work in Ladakh:

. . . Monks were discouraged from agricultural labor, and particularly the production of staple crops such as barley and peas. Both monks and laity agreed that such work was digpa (a term often glossed as 'sinful,' but more accurately implying an action which causes negative karma), since it killed many insects and worms, as did any digging or plowing. Normatively, involvement in agricultural activity was expected to decrease as a monk entered more senior ranks . . . Most agreed that it would be out of the question for the head monk to involve himself in any act of agricultural production, with some laity feeling that he should not even enter the fields of the village during the later summer months (p. 70).

Of course the other side of monastic renunciation is social reproduction (i.e. marriage and heterosexual relations). As Mills shows, plowing and sex are both seen as creating wealth (plowing by creating seeds, and sex by creating laborers for the farm). The householder is the wealth creator, producing both the grain to feed the monks, but also the future monks themselves. The practice of farming and sex are necessary to the survival of the monastic community, but the two are separated strictly by rules that separate the two in separate but complementary roles.

Not to speak of the viewpoint of the Manicheans whose founder Mani had a vision of plants suffering from the knife . . .

Like all world-changers, vegetarians are convinced that with a few simple adjustments, a life without inflicting harm on anyone are within our grasp. I have my doubts. Maybe it is because I sometimes feel uneasy swatting mosquitoes or crushing ants in my house. (And then I do it anyway and feel uncomfortable.) And when I have planted a plant, I have a deep-seated reluctance to kill it; especially if it seems to have a strong desire to live, despite frequent blows.

Maybe I'm just nuts, but I also have a feeling that the permission granted men and animals to eat plants worldwide in Genesis 1:29-30, and for Adam to eat Eden's plants in 2:16, and the extension to animals (including creeping things like worms and insects) of Gen. 9:2-3 was not just pro forma, that without God's specific permission it really would be wrong to eat plants. After all He made them and they are also our fellow creation. Do they actually belong to us?

(It's also worth noting that Genesis 1:29-30 and 2:16 are not saying the same thing. One gives all the plants of all the world to all men and animals. The other gives the plants of Eden to Adam alone. If you don't just assume, well, eating plants is always OK anywhere anyway, then that's a pretty big difference. Only by Genesis 3:23 does Adam come into a relation with the plants outside Eden; in Gen. 2:15 he only cared for the plants in Eden. Assuming that caring for is connected to eating, this places the universal permission to eat after the expulsion from Eden. This is grist for my mill that the blessings of Genesis 1:28-30, and the description of the world as "very good" in v. 31 are properly read as describing the situation after the expulsion from Eden, not before.)

One final thought in an incoherent post: as people out to change the world, vegetarians share the key characteristic of moral reformers and activists of all causes: that with a few changes, we can all lead sinless lives -- if we really want to. I appreciate the simplicity and purity of the reformers' zeal, I really do. But somehow I just can't share it. Somehow to me the idea that we are stuck in a world in which we cannot help but sin -- ethical fatalism, the idea that we are not in charge of whether we are good people or not -- seems a lot truer. (Of course moral reformers might say that's because I'm complicit in all sorts of evil I don't want to end, because I benefit from it. Or maybe I'm just passive. I suppose that might be true too.)

Actually Existing Complementarianism

Imagine someone who said to you: "I used to believe that premarital sex was just wrong. Then my daughter started dating and got pregnant. Since then our family has been completely overturned, and my Christian life devastated. As a result of all these troubles, I've realized all that stuff about premarital sex being against God's plan for families is just wrong." If you are like me, you'd think the logic was a bit strange. Isn't the trouble that follows from breaking the law you used to believe in normally seen as confirmation of the law's justice? I mean when violating some rule makes for unhappiness all around, we conclude that the rule might make sense. But if the person saying the opposite seems otherwise intelligent, we might assume that there is something else there, some hidden assumption going unexpressed, that makes the logic make sense. And if scores of other people agreed with the person when he said that, we might conclude that these hidden assumptions are actually widely shared. And that would be so even if those assumptions contradict the explicit theology of those persons.

I am thinking about the iMonk's recent post on his agony attendant upon his wife, Denise, becoming a Catholic (he's a Southern Baptist pastor). I would link to it, but it seems to have been removed by him from his site. I don't want to talk about the personalities and rights and wrongs of it all, but as I remember the post, it did have something of the shape: "I used to believe in a man's spiritual leadership in the home; my wife has rejected my spiritual leadership; my life and family are now in complete chaos; so I realize how wrong I was ever to believe in a man's spiritual leadership in the home." Now since this makes no sense at all logically and since the iMonk is certainly an intelligent person, it's clear that there are some hidden assumptions going unexpressed. And I am going to tell you what they are, and why they are there. And I'll start off by saying that those hidden assumptions are not his, but his quite accurate understanding of the sub-text of what "complementarianism"* means in churches that practice it.

Now, in theory "complementarianism" means something like this: "God has given to men a duty to exercise leadership (especially religious leadership) in the home and in the church." Corollaries include the idea that violation of this cause trouble, and so on. Let's call this "theoretical complementarianism."

But that is not all that "complementarianism" means, and not even the main part. It is certainly not the proposition that the iMonk saw completely shattered by his last year as his wife prepared to convert to Catholicism. Rather what was shattered is a quite different proposition: "When men exercise spiritual leadership in the home and church, women will inevitably welcome and follow this leadership." This would have the corollary that "If women deny male headship in church or home, it is all the fault of the men over them." You could also phrase it as "When men exercise spiritual leadership in the home and church, God hears their prayers and makes those who should follow, do so." Practically the result is the same: where men lead rightly women do, in fact and practice, follow. Let's call this proposition "actually existing complementarianism."

Now this would certainly be shattered by the iMonk's experience. He thought he was a good husband and good Baptist pastor -- and now his wife is rejecting his spiritual headship by becoming Catholic. So he now has two alternatives: 1) continue to accept actually existing "complementarianism" (as opposed to the theoretical version in the paragraph above) and take the blame as the bad husband and bad pastor whose failures drove his wife into Catholicism, and prevented God from responding to his desperate prayers; or 2) reject actually existing complementarianism. Now if theoretical complementarianism has been firmly enough linked to actually existing complementarianism, then rejecting the second will mean rejecting the first.

Now, what is the relationship between these two propositions? It certainly isn't some kind of logical corollary. Let's take an analogy: "God had ordained civil authorities as enforcers of the law and all citizens should obey" and "If civil authorities properly enforce the law, all citizens will obey" are independent propositions. None thinks the second follows from the first as some kind of automatic corollary. Likewise, the idea that good parents, for example, never get grief from teenage kids is not part of usual Christian teaching. So how did the Southern Baptist Church, and other churches teaching the same, get from one to the other in the case of husbands and wives?

Even stranger is that "actually existing complementarianism," despite being taught in Christian churches, seems to contradict Christian teachings about human nature. For example, original sin. How can we believe that an original sinner pastor/husband could ever exercise leadership well enough that "actually existing complementarianism" could be anything other than a purely theoretical issue? And how can we believe that even if the pastor/husband is perfect, an original sinner wife/congregant would inevitably welcome this leadership? I mean, does the Bible really teach that when prophets and priests lead in God's way that people always and inevitably follow? In fact, "actually existing complementarianism" is simply an assertion that both men and women can and will fulfill the law of theoretical complementarianism.

Actually existing complementarianism looks very much like Mencius; you know, the Confucian philosopher who argued that human nature is inherently good. Mencius was asked how a prince should get the common people to observe proper ritual. The answer? Just lead and the people will inevitably follow:

The prince said again to Ran Yu, 'Hitherto, I have not given myself to the pursuit of learning, but have found my pleasure in horsemanship and sword-exercise, and now I don't come up to the wishes of my aged relatives and the officers. I am afraid I may not be able to discharge my duty in the great business that I have entered on; do you again consult Mencius for me.'

On this, Ran Yu went again to Zou, and consulted Mencius. Mencius said, 'It is so, but he may not seek a remedy in others, but only in himself. Confucius said, "When a prince dies, his successor entrusts the administration to the prime minister. He sips the congee. His face is of a deep black. He approaches the place of mourning, and weeps. Of all the officers and inferior ministers there is not one who will presume not to join in the lamentation, he setting them this example. What the superior loves, his inferiors will be found to love exceedingly. The relation between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and grass. The grass must bend when the wind blows upon it." The business depends on the prince.'

Ran Yu returned with this answer to his commission, and the prince said, 'It is so. The matter does indeed depend on me.'

So for five months he dwelt in the shed, without issuing an order or a caution. All the officers and his relatives said, 'He may be said to understand the ceremonies.' When the time of interment arrived, they came from all quarters of the State to witness it. Those who had come from other States to condole with him, were greatly pleased with the deep dejection of his countenance and the mournfulness of his wailing and weeping.

Now Mencius believed firmly in the goodness of human nature and the naturalness of Confucian ethics. And there is something in this that responds to our usual moral intuitions. If the government is good, people will obey -- generally and as a rule. But conservative Presbyterians and Baptists believe just as firmly in original sin and the unattainability of the Christian ethic. So how did this teaching of actually existing complementarianism get established?

Certainly it is not particularly traditional. I have read quite widely in the pre-20th century Christian tradition, and while theoretical complementarianism is virtually universal in it, the actually existing kind seems nowhere to be found. In other words, a model of family life is set out, but there is no real expectation that just because the husband follows it the wife will -- or the other way around. In general if you act well, the other person in the marriage will frequently respond, but there's nothing inevitable about and nothing shocking when he or she doesn't reciprocate. So why is it so important to insist in conservative Christian churches that traditional sex roles is entirely up to the pastor/husband, and that he alone, simply by personal rectification, can inevitably make them welcomed in his household?

Several reasons, I think. One important one is because of the dynamics of the church teaching situation. Most teaching that takes place in Christian churches in a market environment is men teaching women. When a male pastor teaches actually existing complementarianism, he is doing several things: 1) assuring the women in his audience that they will not be, and cannot be, compelled to submit to their husband's leadership; it's purely voluntary. 2) He is building up his own sense of righteousness and manliness. Look at it this way: actually existing complementarianism has as its corollary that any man to whom women submit is exercising leadership properly (OK, it's not exactly a strict logical inference, but it's close enough for real life.) If I as a Southern Baptist pastor tell my mostly female congregation that they should submit to male headship in the family and church -- but only when the man's leadership is godly --, and they prefer my preaching to that of the Methodist church with a woman pastor down the road or to their own good-for-nothing husbands, well then, then my leadership must be godly than theirs. And godly in a specifically male way.

To a certain degree, then, "actually existing complementarianism" is a way of throwing down the gauntlet to other men: if you are a real man, your wife will welcome your leadership, and if she doesn't -- well then, you mustn't be a real man. Now if the iMonk was raised in this kind of environment it's easy to see why his wife becoming Catholic was a shattering humiliation. He could either live with the humiliation or rip up the whole game. No wonder he chose the second.

But this sort of real man one-ups-manship has been going on for a long time, and actually existing complementarianism is a new thing. So there must be something new in the situation to account for it. Here's the new thing: complementarianism has become an "ethnic" marker, a marker that separates the people of God from outsiders. And it is the distinctive feature of such marker-laws that they have to be attainable. Think of it this way, if not eating pork is the mark of a Jew as one of the people of God, then not eating pork has to be a fulfillable command. If somehow it's not possible to not pork, then all kinds of people who want to be Jews will be turned from Jews to gentiles against their will. And if your life is built around your religious community, that's pretty upsetting.

But the use of marital relations as a marker of being part of the people of God is actually pretty new. In 1858, liberal Episcopalians and evangelical Baptists all had pretty much the same view of family ethics. In 1958, differences were there, but with at a fairly high level of abstraction. But today, views on "complementarianism" vs. "egalitarianism" have becoming major denominational distinctives. If "complementarianism" defines the Southern Baptists, then "complementarianism," (like teetotalling, but unlike loving your neighbor, which all denominations try to do and all fail at perfecting) has to be do-able. Otherwise you won't have any credible "witness." If you are a member of, to chose a different example, a conservative PCA church, and want to remain so, having a good "complementarian" marriage, is as important as not eating pork as is to remaining an Orthodox Jew in good standing. (OK, I exaggerate a bit -- but only a bit.)

Now I can't think of anything less well-suited to be a dividing line between the clean and the unclean than marital relations. An insider/outsider marker should be: 1) easily documented, one way or the other; 2) clear-cut at any point whether you are living up to it or not; 3) Not connected to personality. Otherwise you are saying only one personality type is allowed in this denomination, which is going to drive vast numbers of growing children out of your body each generation; 4) individually determined, so that whether you adhere or not is under your own control, not someone else's. Now, you might point out that kosher rules are set by the family; if a wife refuses to keep a kosher kitchen, the Orthodox Jewish husband's stuck. But in this case, Jewish law allows and would even encourage divorce of a spouse who refuses to comply with membership codes. But in Christian churches, divorce is not explicitly recognized as an option (although in reality it plays an important under the table role in border-maintenance). But what you have in "complementarian" churches is a marker of cleanliness that is hard to check, dependent on endless subtle shades of interaction, determined by the interaction of two distinctive individual personalities, and in the end, out of the control of either partner. This can't help but cause anxiety.

(It is also true that explicitly liberal churches who place emphasis on being progressive have the mirror image problem, giving you the widespread figure of the bossy husband and mousy wife in a UU or Episcopalian church desperately denying that their family order is traditional patriarchy. But since liberal churches are in step with the wider society, are in fact the wider society at prayer, ideological consistency lacks the peculiar imperatives of border maintenance. If you admitted you act like a patriarch, despite believing in "a woman's right to chose", you'd just be a jerk, and not a social outcast.)

In this situation you need desperately to avoid the suggestion that justification by this particular Law is out of your hands. You have to believe that "complementarian" marriages are clearly and easily distinguished from "egalitarian" ones. That conscious belief and will, not the myriad shades of in-born personality types built by each person's unique nature and nurture, determines your interaction with your spouse. That husbands as leaders and wives as followers can indeed be close to sinless enough for actually existing complementarianism to apply.

To admit that these beliefs are obviously false, and would sound as strange and contrived in 1858 as they do today, is hard to bear. (Think of it this way -- have you ever read any good literature built on these principles? I thought not. And if it can't make a good novel, it probably can't be lived out in real life.)

But anything else leads to the dreaded condition of ethical fatalism, the believe that whether or not you are a good person and a member in good standing in the church is out of your hands. And that dreaded condition was what giving your life over to Christ was supposed to get you out of.

So my conclusion is, that "actually existing complementarianism" is created not by traditional Christian doctrine ("theoretical complementarianism") itself, but by that doctrine in interaction with a particular sociological situation: gathered congregations in a religious market in a society with serious conflict over marital ideals . Since those sociological features aren't going away, so too actually existing complementarianism isn't going to go away any time soon. But as you could probably tell, I believe it is overall pretty destructive. That is, however, not because traditional Christian teaching on the family is wrong, but rather because this good Law is being misused. I tend to agree with the biologists that people are mammals, and that means that when males are actually in the pack they generally lead it, and that females have a natural connection with child-raising*. People are overall happier and children are overall better raised where our heritage as a particular sort of mammalian creatures is worked with and not fought against. But daily interaction between husband and wife is just not something that can be legislated. If churches want border-markers between "complementarianism" and "egalitarianism" let them use nice and simple devices that are suited for the purpose, such as wives taking their husband's family name, or including "obey" in wedding vows -- do it once, in public, and then you can forget about it and get on with trying to be a good husband and father, wife and mother, without letting -isms get in the way. That's the approach of conservative liturgical churches and while it is less effective at challenging the broader society, it breeds fewer shattered and bitter opponents like the iMonk.

UPDATE: Here it is in black and white, as another comment of Michael Spencer's troubles.

*I must say, the sheer ugliness of this word is something of a tip-off to the absurdity of some of the views associated with it. It reminds me of what Disraeli once said of "conservatism" back when that new word replaced good old "Tory": "It sounds like something made by a pastry chef."
**Spotted hyenas, where females lead the pack, also have pseudo-male genitalia and aggressive temperaments due to an embyonic bath of testosterone. They are the mammalian exception that proves the rule (more here).

A Curious Passage from Joshua on the Environment

A Christian discussion of the environment will usual start with Genesis 1-3, make copious use of the word "steward" and move on from there. It is curious, though, that there is only one passage I know of which gives specific, hand's on advice on how to deal with an problem in a way that takes account of the environment. I've never seen it referred to in that context, so I'll talk about it here.

Here was the problem: the tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim were given land in the forested hills and in the lowlands of Canaan. The uplands were hard to farm because of the trees, while the lowlands were the richest lands and had long been farmed. But, the Canaanites (with, historical research suggests, their Egyptian garrisons) occupied the lowlands and were hard for the Hebrews to dispossess. (A big irony is noted by Barry Beitzel in his Moody Bible Atlas, that distribution of Jews in Israel today and in the Judges period is almost exactly inverse. With the exception of the Gaza Strip, the Jews of modern Israel settled almost entirely the Canaanite/Philistine/Egyptian lowlands, while the Jews of pre-Davidic Israel settled almost exclusively the Palestinian lands of the West Bank, the Nazareth area of Galilee, and Jordan.)

So much of their allotment was inaccessible. What to do? Here is Joshua's advice from Joshua 17:

And the children of Joseph spake unto Joshua, saying, "Why hast thou given me but one lot and one portion to inherit, seeing I am a great people, forasmuch as the LORD hath blessed me hitherto?"

And Joshua answered them, "If thou be a great people, then get thee up to the wood country, and cut down for thyself there in the land of the Perizzites and of the giants, if mount Ephraim be too narrow for thee."

And the children of Joseph said, "The hill is not enough for us: and all the Canaanites that dwell in the land of the valley have chariots of iron, both they who are of Bethshean and her towns, and they who are of the valley of Jezreel."

And Joshua spake unto the house of Joseph, even to Ephraim and to Manasseh, saying, "Thou art a great people, and hast great power: thou shalt not have one lot only; But the mountain shall be thine; for it is a wood, and thou shalt cut it down: and the outgoings of it shall be thine: for thou shalt drive out the Canaanites, though they have iron chariots, and though they be strong."

So here's Joshua's answer: first clear the hill country by cutting down the forests. Then you will get stronger and can eventually subdue the Canaanites (as happened during the days of the monarchy).

This is also a nice illustration of the peculiar mix of confirmation and incongruities that reading the Bible against archeology gives. As I mentioned before, the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition (what I would correlate with the Deborah age of the Biblical record) is marked by a dramatic increase in dispersed settlements in the upland areas, establishing the Israelite distribution pattern. This reference to clearing the upland forests and then dominating the lowlands is archaeologically confirmed; that is indeed how Israel grew (The upland nature of Israel was observed by those around: see 1 Kings 20:23 And the servants of the king of Syria said unto him, Their [i.e. Israel's] gods are gods of the hills; therefore they were stronger than we; but let us fight against them in the plain, and surely we shall be stronger than they. Cf. Judges 1:19: And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.)

But as Donald Redford would undoubtedly note, the "Canaanites" here are, if this account is to be fitted into any plausible historical framework, ruled by the Egyptians of the New Kingdom. So how come Egyptians aren't mentioned? Huh? And the iron chariots seem anachronistic as well. What we seem to have is an account in which real historical realities are being phrased in language that makes sense to the writers, probably in the seventh century.

But back to the environment. Here is a case where clearing forests is seen as a proper response to lacking farmland. Presumably, if we wish to turn to the Bible for teaching on environmental issues, this passage should be front and center.

Spontaneous Generation

Joel Hunter and Josh S have been sparring over the theological significance of the -- somewhere between "alleged" and "unconfirmed" -- discovery of microbial life on Mars. Here's the news article that started it off, and here's some of the commentary: Joel Hunter starts, John H, Matthew Johnson, Joel's questions on its significance, and Josh S and Matthew Johnson's answers.

This is a strange debate that would have made no sense before Louis Pasteur. Let's review the history of belief in spontaneous generation among natural philosophers. Aristotle and many others believed in it for insects, fleas, mice, and so on. FThis seems to be the pretty general folk belief of unreflective humanity absent any modern biological education.

But a minority current, wielding the slogan omnium vivum ex ovo ("everything living from an egg, i.e. from something already living") began to make headway against this belief, based on purely scientific arguments in the late 1600s -- until the discovery of microscopic life. That pretty much sealed the case for spontaneous generation. Microbes appeared everywhere touched by air, no matter how you sealed it.

But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, spontaneous generation died for three reasons:

1) Louis Pasteur's famous experiment disproved it empirically, at least for the present and short spans of time, and demonstrated that air was full of living spores.

2) Similarly, the unified field theory of biology (otherwise known as Total Common Ancestry) relied on the fact that when life had appeared once, it could no longer appear spontaneously again. This meant that all living creatures could be treated as descended from a single common ancestor.

3) Finally, increasing knowledge of the complexity of even prokaryote cellular life began to open up the possibility of arguments like those of Michael Behe, that even bacterial cells show irreducible complexity.

Suddenly the way was open, as it had never been before, to see any form of life, even bacterial, as a unique creation of God, in a way that a quartz crystal or a nebula isn't. The origin of life for the first time became a topic on which Christian theologians were generally expected to have a different viewpoint from natural philosophers. But this is a development which I think has no foundation in the text of Genesis 1 at all, and was purely governed by the scientific developments I listed above.

Let's look at Genesis 1 on the origin of plants:

And God said, "Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth." And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

For comparison, let's look at the following passage on the origin of the sun, moon, and stars:

And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth." And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars.

Contrast the two bolded phrases. Reading it without Louis Pasteur and Michael Behe in mind, they can naturally be read as saying that God's creation of plants was mediated by natural processes: He spoke (primary cause) and the earth brought forth (secondary cause). But with the sun and moon, He spoke (primary cause), and He made (no secondary cause). This is in fact the argument made by Gerald Schroeder in his books, Genesis and the Big Bang and The Science of God: although science cannot show any case, or even any genuinely plausible scenario, of life originating from inorganic matter, it must be so because the plain word of Scripture teaches it.

But why is it that the average Christian today is convinced that the origin of life is a miracle that demands God's direction intervention, but that the sun could have been naturally formed by a contracting cloud of gases? Not because of anything in Genesis, but because science has so far not been able to successfully explain the origin of life, but it has successfully (more or less) explained the origin of nuclear fusion.

As for me, I'll stick with Schroeder's reading.

P.S. If there IS life on Mars, it still might be of terrestrial origin -- and unless it is chemically radically different almost certainly is.

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.

A garden, not a jungle

I've often toyed with writing a post about how pets, at least the better sort, like dogs, parakeets, and horses, and even (I'm gulping hard here) cats are an important part of the theology of nature. How raising pets is in some sense participating in Adam's command, his naming of all the animals. How it is only in that way that we achieve our right relation with the non-human world, and the non-human world receives some surcease, a drop of water in their ceaseless toil of want and ignorant sufferings.

But I don't have to write it because Stephen Webb just wrote it for me -- and thanks to Lee at verbum ipsum who brought it to my attention:

It starts off slow. The first half is stuff that is good and right to say, but has been said before. But the second half gives voice to things I've never heard anyone say before:

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, I was never a nature lover. I began my thinking about animals, in fact, purely by happenstance. I had a dog, a dachshund named Marie, and I loved her more than my friends thought I should have. . . .

In Marie’s eyes I saw the glimmer of freedom, the first movements of spirit emerging from matter, wounded by what we humans had demanded of her species. Her eyes demanded responsibility, and even more, mutuality. Howard, our cat, would only glance at me, while Marie stared. Cats have a haughtiness that makes them hard to understand. They embrace their animality in spite of their freedom. Dogs plead, and thus risk losing everything. Dogs demand; cats indict, and turn away. Dogs are creatures in transition, incomplete without us. To hold a dog’s gaze is to set the dog free. The fragility of this dependence is easily abused, of course, but I was convinced that dogs say something not only about us but also about the origin and destiny of all animals.

. . . Perhaps Hegel spoke more truly than he understood when he argued that Schleiermacher's famous definition of religion as `absolute dependence' turned the dog into the best Christian. I too wanted to write a theology for the dogs.

I probably loved Marie too much, but then again, there is something excessive in all true love. I was convinced, in fact, that excessive love is what enabled both humans and dogs to overstep their species boundaries in the adventure that we call domestication. . . . Dogs made humans out of us, just as we have gone a little way toward making honorary humans out of dogs. . . .

I know that many of you will suspect that my relationship with Marie was more pathological than the typical environmentalist’s love for nature. Nonetheless, it seems to me that loving individual animals—and loving them for what they will yet become, rather than pretending that they are enough like us to merit equal consideration—is a more Christian gesture than loving nature as a whole.

. . .

Getting kicked out of my own organization only confirmed for me that Christianity was right to value vegetarianism in monasteries and on fast days but not to require it for everyone. For Christianity, compassion should be rooted not in dogmatic claims about the equality of humans and animals, or in an escapist flight from the realities of this world, but in our ability to be compassionate, to reach out and care for another being. Loving a dog, to return to my relationship with Marie, would not be such a bad way to begin and practice that compassion. Until the church can articulate an alternative to the modern animal rights movement, Coetzee's story demonstrates that the gnostic version of vegetarianism is still very much alive and well.

. . .

Christians have no business promulgating the aesthetic appreciation of coherence—a part of the whole is good as long as it contributes something to that whole—which reflects the old idea that this is the best of all possible worlds. The world is fallen, and nature is not what God intended it to be. The violence of nature is not all our fault, either, because the world into which Adam and Eve were expelled was already at odds with the peaceable harmony of Eden. If nature is fallen and its fall preceded our own, then there is little we can do to change nature in any dramatic way. Yet we can, like Noah with his ark, save a few fellow creatures from suffering as we try to warn others about God’s impending judgment.

. . . .

Nature cannot be a source of Christian morality, but it can be an object of Christian compassion. Yet it is impossible to have empathy for all of the animals that must become meals for others. Such sacrifices are biologically necessary, and to mourn necessity is foolishness. Perhaps this is why so many people today admire wild, carnivorous animals. It is easier to admire predators than their victims when there is nothing that we can do to change the one and save the other. Besides, wild animals confront us as something inassimilable to human measure, caring not for our help or sentiment. These animals follow their nature in beautiful, effortless and dignified ways, so that our inability to make moral judgments about them tempts us to romanticize them instead. The Christian idea that God sides with the victims somehow gets lost when we watch nature documentaries, wincing but marveling at a fearsome display of power that seems innocent and natural.

. . .

Traditionally, Christian theology portrays heaven as a garden, not a wild jungle, a place, like the original Garden of Eden, where God allows life to grow without the countless sacrifices of violent death. It is thus possible to argue that pets are the paradigm for the destiny of all animal life. In other words, according to the Christian myth, animals were originally domesticated, in the sense of being nonviolent and being in a positive relationship with us, and they will be again.

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.

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.