Hi VadeRetro! Actually, I agree with this statement. I downloaded Dobzhansky’s article by that name, and enjoyed it very much. Basically, I agreed with everything he said – up to page 4. You can probably pick out the offending passage readily enough. Lurkers who want to follow along, the article can be found here: Dobzhansky on Evolution
The passage reads: “Only a creative and blind process could produce, on the one hand, the tremendous biologic success that is the human species and, on the other, forms of adaptedness as narrow and as constraining as those of the overspecialized fungus, beetle, and flies mentioned above.” Actually, Dobzhansky is less than clear about what he means by a “blind” process; for he goes on to say, “I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God’s, or Nature’s method of creation.”
Yet the choice of “God” or “Nature” would seem to make a very great difference in the type of evolutionary theory that would follow from that choice. Bear in mind that on the basis of the extant human cultural record to date, “God” and “blindness” have been universally considered as mutually-exclusive terms. I am not aware of any exception to this rule. So if Nature is “blind,” then I guess that just tells you that she isn’t God: She is not “sui generis,” but goes by a rule….
Dobzhansky oddly, but very graciously concludes his article by citing “one of the great thinkers of our age,” Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “a creationist, but one who understood that the Creation is realized in this world by means of evolution.”
I suspect this is a mere tip of the hat to Father Pierre on Dobzhansky’s part; for Teilhard’s evolutionary theory stands Darwinist evolutionary theory on its head. Mind you, both agree on the idea of evolution; but there is virtually no correspondence whatever in the details of their two theories.
Plus I do not see any possible correspondence between their respective fundamental premises. Darwin, in effect, is a material determinist; Teilhard, in effect, a spiritual determinist. Darwin is functioning on the uncreated, eternal-universe model, in which infinite amounts of time make it possible for “Nature” – a kind of God-substitute – to “create” everything that ever was, is, or will be by means of random material processes constrained only by the requirements of successful natural selection for survival fitness – of optimal “fit” between living organisms and the (also randomly changing) ecological niches they exploit. His “survival of the fittest” model is premised on the existence of discrete living bodies in constant competition – intraspecies, interspecies, and with the environment in toto.
For Teilhard, on the other hand, evolution is essentially teleological -- it is ultimately goal-directed and, as such, purposeful. He speaks of the “Omega point” toward which all of evolution is inexorably proceeding, which is, at the same time, identical with God’s willed intent for nature in the original Creation event that began the universe and all things in it. It is clear that a purposeful process cannot be a random one. And yet Teilhard speaks of energy in its motions as the most fundamental substrate of cosmic nature, and “radial energy” as the source of the self-transformation of individual living forms. That is, directed energy – respectively both divine and innate in creatures -- not natural selection, is the essential driver of all creation, self-organization, and “self-transcendence” – that is, of all natural evolution. And for Teilhard, energy has another name: Spirit.
Yet Teilhard never extends his energy concept to the idea of a universal field. Darwin doesn’t speak of energy at all as relevant to this evolutionary theory: He was still very much a thinker on the model of classical mechanics, which focuses on the interactions of bodies, rather than on any putatively deeper level of reality. Teilhard lived in the post-relativity and post-quantum theory world; but apparently he distrusted Einstein’s field theory, and did not take quantum theory into effect; so he seems not to have made the connection between energy and a putative universal field.
Anyhoot, as you can see, we may have two “evolutionists” here; but they don’t seem to agree about anything! So I wonder why Dobzhansky, advocate of the Darwinist view, would bring up Teilhard de Chardin in the first place….
Yet, even though Darwin and Teilhard mainly disagree, they might agree that one of Dobzhansky’s statements is penetrating and most germane: “What do these biochemical or biologic universals [e.g., DNA, basic amino acids, proteins, etc.] mean? They suggest that life arose from inanimate matter only once and that all organisms, no matter how diverse in other respects, conserve the basic features of the primordial life.”
For the Darwinist, the “primordial life” is the ancient trace back to the Common Ancestor, and even way back before its emergence, to the one spontaneous abiogenesis that resulted in the rise of organic life from inorganic matter by means of random processes. For Teilhard, on the other hand, it looks like the “primordial life” would be the ancient trace back to the Logos of God, Alpha and Omega.
And thus in this case we have two men who are able to agree on the validity of a statement, and yet radically disagree on what the statement actually means.
VR, you argue for the Darwinist position on the strength of the following:
“A fossil series from land animals to whales and Precambrian life come to mind. Essentially any new fossil that falls upon and further outlines the generally accepted phylogenetic tree of life is a Darwinian prediction fulfilled.
“Then you have the new lines of evidence confirming the old. In particular, the convergence of independent phylogenies (molecular, morphological, paleontological).
“Then there's the data from embryology, these days being examined at the genetic/molecular level in the discipline of evolutionary developmental biology.”
I do not mean to suggest that these things do not fulfill the Darwinist prediction. It seems to me they do.
Notwithstanding, my perception is that Darwin’s predictions rest on a partial view of nature. As Dobzhansky himself points out, “A theory can be verified by a mass of facts, but it [then] becomes a proven theory, not a fact.” I gather he recognizes that, unless one knows absolutely everything – which is impossible -- then one really can’t even speak of “certain” facts. It seems human beings have to theorize – from partial knowledge of the world – in order to get along.
Still, I think of what Ernst Mayr said about living systems – that they “almost always have the peculiarity that the characteristics of the whole cannot (not even in theory) be deduced from the most complete knowledge of components, taken separately or in other partial combinations.”
If Mayr is right, then you can pile up fossils from now to kingdom come, and you still will not have come up with a single definitive or “certain” fact. Fossils are not only parts; they are long-dead parts and signally mute. As living parts, we humans do not ever see the “whole” of which we are parts either. And therefore we do not and cannot know everything: We are contingent beings, and captive in 4D space-time (as it were).
And yet even as parts, living organisms coordinate and comprise greater wholes. The model of the human body or of cellular life in general shows this. The model of human thinking shows this. The model of society – human and non-human – shows this same pattern.
And the insight has biological significance, as Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau point out (The Non-Local Universe, 1999):
“DNA is the whole within the part that sets the boundary condition of cells… a complete master strand of the master molecule of life exists in the nucleus of each cell…. The boundary conditions within each cell resonate with the boundary conditions of all other cells and maintain the integrity and uniqueness of whole organisms.”
Seems to me there has to be a whole lot of “successful communication” going on in order for such things to occur. And that means there had to have been an exchange of information and, thus, there also had to have been a means for the transmission of information to sites where it’s needed, etc.
I figure you need a field for that.
I have (as you know) deep reservations about the Darwinist evolutionary model. Don’t get me wrong, as micro-evolutionary theory, I think it’s got plenty to recommend it. But to say it is “macro” strikes me as quite a stretch. FWIW.
But neither am I thrilled by Teilhard’s model: It seems to me he doesn’t leave enough “wiggle room” in there for contingency, for chance.
I think a state-of-the-art evolutionary theory these days would require the adoption of a field model, and also the recognition that intelligence -- in the form of successfully communicated information -- is everywhere at the bottom of living forms; and that non-living, inorganic forms also are constituted from the same information source….
Anyhoot, it looks to me like, one way or another, evolutionary theory has a future as a “going concern.”
Thanks so much for writing, VR.
Dobzhansky explains this in some detail. As it happens, I cited his title but not his text. It's a good article but itself a bit out of date. We have even more evidence now that Darwin was on the right track.