Darwinists Cannot Deny Disturbing Implications
A common attitude among scientists is that they are not responsible for what people do with their discoveries. Facts are facts, after all, and nuclear energy can be used to power a city as well as destroy it. Is this a truism or a half-truth? Are there cases where a scientist is responsible for what he or she proclaims as a fact about the world?
In its continuing celebration of Darwin, Science magazine printed an article about “Darwin’s Originality” by Peter J. Bowler.1 This philosopher from Queen’s University of Belfast described how Darwin’s theory of evolution had “disturbing” ramifications. “In this essay,” he began, “I argue that Darwin was truly original in his thinking, and I support this claim by addressing the related issue of defining just why the theory was so disturbing to his contemporaries.” He used the word disturbing five more times.
Bowler elaborated on what was most disturbing. It’s not that Darwin invented or discovered evolution – evolutionary thinking was already in the air in Victorian Britain. “Most thinkers—including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and [Robert] Chambers—took it for granted that the development of life on earth represents the unfolding of a coherent plan aimed at a predetermined goal,” he said. Darwin was different. Darwin attributed all the “unfolding” (which is what evolution means) to result from the environment. His critics understood what this implied:
Darwin’s world view was profoundly different because he argued that the adaptation of populations to their local environment was the sole cause of transmutation. Many people found it hard to see natural selection as the agent of either divine benevolence or of a rationally structured cosmic teleology. Selection adapted species to an ever-changing environment, and it did so by killing off useless variations in a ruthless “struggle for existence.” This did not seem the kind of process that would be instituted by a benevolent God, especially because its essentially “selfish” nature meant that a parasitic way of life was a perfectly natural adaptive response in some circumstances.
More seriously for the idea of cosmic teleology, Darwin’s supposition that the production of the individual variants in a population was essentially undirected ruled out any possibility that evolution could be shaped by a predetermined developmental trend. There was no obvious goal toward which it was aimed, and it did not produce an orderly pattern of relations between species. The accusation that the theory depended on “random” variation indicated the concerns of his opponents on this score. As Darwin himself made clear, variation was certainly caused by something (later identified as genetic mutations), but it was not aimed in any one direction and, thus, left adaptive evolution essentially open-ended.
Bowler delved into the history behind this idea, the responses of Darwin’s contemporaries, the battle over natural theology, the Victorian mindset, motivations and influences in Darwin’s life, the 19th-century debates on teleology vs the undirected character of natural selection, and the reluctance with which Darwinism became accepted in the scientific community. The reader might be tempted to ask whether the discussion is merely academic. If, after all, this is the way the world works, all Darwin was doing was lifting a corner of the veil. This is reality. Mankind will just to have to learn to deal with it.
In his final section, “The Struggle for Existence,” Bowler is not so keen to let Darwin and the modern Darwinists off the hook with a “Get out of jail free” card just for being scientists. In the first place, the Malthusian idea of struggle for existence, which was pervasive in Victorian England, could have been applied in different ways. Bowler argues that Spencer applied it to individual effort to succeed. “Much of what later became known as ‘social Darwinism’ was, in fact, Spencerian social Lamarckism expressed in the terminology of struggle popularized by Darwin,” he claimed. What Darwin did, though, was make this struggle metaphor something ruthless and impersonal:
This point is important in the context of the charge raised by modern opponents of Darwinism that the theory is responsible for the appearance of a whole range of unpleasant social policies based on struggle. Darwin exploited the idea of the struggle for existence in a way that was unique until paralleled by Wallace nearly 20 years later. Their theory certainly fed into the movements that led toward various kinds of social Darwinism, but it was not the only vehicle for that transition in the late 19th century. It did, however, highlight the harsher aspects of the consequences of struggle. The potential implications were drawn out even more clearly when Galton argued that it would be necessary to apply artificial selection to the human race in order to prevent “unfit” individuals from reproducing and undermining the biological health of the population. This was the eugenics program, and in its most extreme manifestation at the hands of the Nazis, it led not just to the sterilization but also to the actual elimination of those unfortunates deemed unfit by the state. Did Darwin’s emphasis on the natural elimination of maladaptive variants help to create a climate of opinion in which such atrocities became possible?
It has to be admitted that, by making death itself a creative force in nature, Darwin introduced a new and profoundly disturbing insight into the world, an insight that seems to have resonated with the thinking of many who did not understand or accept the details of his theory.
Darwin himself, of course, could not have known what was coming. Lest anyone misunderstand, Bowler states clearly that “Darwinism was not ‘responsible’ for social Darwinism or eugenics in any simple way.” In fact, some eugenicists and social Darwinists denied the mechanism of natural selection. The Nazis did not want to believe that Aryans had evolved from apes. There were a variety of views about evolution and the struggle for existence. Nevertheless, Bowler is not ready to let Darwin off the hook so easily:
But by proposing that evolution worked primarily through the elimination of useless variants, Darwin created an image that could all too easily be exploited by those who wanted the human race to conform to their own pre-existing ideals. In the same way, his popularization of the struggle metaphor focused attention onto the individualistic aspects of Spencer’s philosophy.
This brings us back to the original question: can scientists distance themselves from their findings? Keep in mind that Darwinism goes beyond a discovery of facts about the living world. The Origin did not really catalog any new facts of biology that were not already known. What he did was put them together into “one long argument” that presented an entire history of life, a world view, that generated all the variety of living organisms via selfishness and struggle. When any scientist proposes to change the way we think about the world, Bowler argues that he or she must be willing to take responsibility for the consequences. Let’s listen to his closing paragraph, where he generalizes the Darwin saga to all of science.
Modern science recognizes the importance of Darwin’s key insights when used as a way of explaining countless otherwise mysterious aspects of the natural world. But some of those insights came from sources with profoundly disturbing implications, and many historians now recognize that the theory, in turn, played into the way those implications were developed by later generations. This is not a simple matter of science being “misused” by social commentators, because Darwin’s theorizing would almost certainly have been different had he not drawn inspiration from social, as well as scientific, influences. We may well feel uncomfortable with those aspects of his theory today, especially in light of their subsequent applications to human affairs. But if we accept science’s power to upset the traditional foundations of how we think about the world, we should also accept its potential to interact with moral values.
Let’s apply what Bowler just said to another current issue. Robert Roy Britt wrote on January 6 in Live Science that man may be causing “Reverse evolution” by culling the biggest trophy animals out of populations. Forward and reverse, however, only makes sense within a concept of progress. “Survival of the smallest is not exactly what Darwin had in mind, but in some animals species, humans may be forcing a smaller-is-better scenario, and the ultimate outcome may be species demise.” It’s a macho thing to go for the big trophy. Britt seemed to dodge the question though, whether in evolutionary terms this is good or bad, though he spoke of elephant poaching as a “dastardly” form of selection. His article relates to a paper in PNAS that shows “Human predators outpace other agents of trait change in the wild.”2 The authors warned that human trophy hunting eliminates the big animals, and “might imperil populations, industries, and ecosystems.” National Geographic news chimed in, asking if hunters are speeding up the evolution of trophy prey. It seems they can’t decide if evolution is going in forward or reverse. Either way, there seemed to be an implicit call to do something moral about it. One natural history museum curator said that sustainable management “requires that people stop preferentially removing the larger and most [fertile] animals from populations, and focus more on a strategy that preserves the historic size-structure of the species.” He left it unexplained why a theory of undirected change over time in a struggle for existence and the pursuit of fitness would require one species to care about another species on which it does not depend; see the 11/21/2008 entry.
1. Peter J. Bowler, “Darwin’s Originality,” Science, 9 January 2009: Vol. 323. no. 5911, pp. 223-226, DOI: 10.1126/science.1160332.
2. Darimont et al, “Human predators outpace other agents of trait change in the wild,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Published online before print January 12, 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0809235106.
First, regarding the hunting article, care for the ecology makes perfect sense to Christians, who believe humans are God’s stewards to care for the animals and plants, because they display God’s creativity and sovereignty. It makes no sense in a Darwinian world view. Trophy hunting just shows that humans are more fit. Lots of animals get smaller through evolution. So what? If you believe in an undirected process, with no morals and values, who cares if the big bucks are on the decline? Must be consistent. No fair borrowing Christian ideals. Remember what Fern Wickson told Nature? (11/09/2008) “If nature is somewhere that humans are not, we lose sight of the fact that we are just another species intimately intertwined in the complex web of biological systems on this planet. However, if we place ourselves within a definition of nature, the definition then becomes essentially meaningless by extending to everything on Earth.”
Now, regarding Bowler’s essay, wow. Did you get that? The Darwin Party officials usually turn beet red when anyone tries to link their beliefs to the Holocaust. They became unglued when Expelled drew a connection. Now, this philosopher, writing in Science, said the same thing. Understand that Richard Weikart and the other commentators in the film did not make any kind of simplistic linkage. They did not blame Darwin for the Holocaust, or say that Hitler’s primary motivation came from Darwin’s book, or any such thing. They said that Darwin’s world view in which nature ruthlessly destroys the “unfit” in an unending struggle for existence was used by later political leaders to justify their atrocities as a rational outworking of the laws of nature. That’s what Bowler is admitting here. Come on, Eugenie and Ken and Barbara and all you other Darwin attack dogs: unleash your venom on this guy, too. He doesn’t understand what a sweet, gentle, loving theory Darwinism is.
Notice that Bowler called Darwinism a world view, not a scientific theory. He spoke of Darwin’s supposition that the world operated in an undirected manner. He depicted Darwin applying a metaphor of struggle in a particular way. These are instances of the use of scientific rhetoric, not empiricism. The rhetorical character of Darwin’s presentation of natural selection in The Origin has been described in an excellent interview by John Angus Campbell, PhD in Rhetoric, one of the founders of a post-Kuhnian discipline called the Rhetoric of Science. The recorded interview is available from Access Research Network and is well worth watching and thinking about. It will give you a whole new understanding of the Darwinian revolution.
The slogan ideas have consequences is so commonplace, we won’t harp on it. Instead, we’ll offer the hard core Darwinists a proposition. We know you are never going to change your world view, but like it or not, you know that Darwinism was used by some of the worst despots in the 20th century to wipe out millions of people. We know you don’t want that to happen again. To save the world from the next Pol Pot, Mao or Stalin, how about joining with us in promoting Christianity as an antidote to the selfish tendencies of humans? You don’t have to believe it, but certainly you can see in retrospect that mankind needs such a world view to provide a moral foundation for the life, liberty and happiness that you enjoy so much. After all, even Richard Dawkins admitted he would rather live in a Christian society than a Darwinian one. You guys are obligated to think Christianity provides fitness, because you believe religion evolved (05/27/2008, 10/26/2008). So here’s our proposition: join a Christian missions team and help spread the gospel. Save the world from Darwinism!