Teaching Darwin

Weekly Standars ^ | March 21, 2005 | Paul McHugh

[metacognative]

Teaching Darwin Why we're still fighting about biology textbook. by Paul McHugh 03/28/2005, Volume 010, Issue 26

EIGHTY YEARS AGO THIS SUMMER, the Scopes trial upheld the effort of the state of Tennessee to exclude the teaching of Darwinian evolution from Tennessee classrooms. The state claimed Darwinism contradicted orthodox religion. But times change, and recently a federal judge ruled that a three-sentence sticker stating that "evolution is a theory not a fact" must be removed from Georgia high school biology texts because it contradicts orthodox science and represents an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. Both legal mandates--no Darwin yesterday, nothing but Darwin today--look less like science than exercises in thought control.

Everyone agrees that the Scopes trial (viciously caricatured in the play and movie Inherit the Wind) was a setback for the teaching of scientific reasoning. But the same is true of the Georgia ruling, Darwinism being quite obviously a biological theory and open to dispute. To claim otherwise is to be woefully misinformed.

Science, as high school students need to know, is a logically articulated structure of beliefs about nature that are justified by methods of reasoning one can evaluate. It is whether the methods pass muster that counts for or against a scientific opinion, not how the opinion fits our preconceptions.

Charles Darwin proposed that random variation within life forms, working together with natural selection ("the preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of injurious variations") across the vast expanse of time since the earth was formed, explains "how the universe created intelligence," as Francis Bacon had stated the problem a few centuries before. To judge whether the matter is now closed to all criticism, such that Darwinism stands with scientific facts like "the earth is a planet of the sun" or "the blood circulates in the body," demands we consider Darwin's method of reasoning.

The leading Darwinist in America, Ernst Mayr, describes the method:

Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science--the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain.

Darwin, Mayr goes on, "established a philosophy of biology . . . by showing that theories in evolutionary biology are based on concepts rather than laws."

After noting Mayr's fearless use of the words "tentative," "philosophy," and "theory," one surely is justified in responding: No wonder Darwinism, in contrast to other scientific theories, seems an argument without end! It's history--indeed, history captured by that creative-writing-class concept narrative. If historical narrative--and the "philosophy" it propounds--are what justify the Darwinian opinions, the textbook writers of Georgia can legitimately claim that Darwin's "tentative reconstruction" is not only a theory but a special kind of theory, one lacking the telling and persuasive power that theories built on hypothesis-generated experiment and public prediction can garner.

DARWIN HIMSELF UNDERSTOOD that questions raised about his narrative had substance. In Chapter IX of On the Origin of Species, he noted that the fossil record had failed to "reveal any . . . finely graduated organic chain" linking, as he proposed, existing species to predecessors. He called the record "imperfect" and went so far as to say, "This, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." Darwin presumed that the problem rested on the "poorness of our palaeontological collections" and would be answered when more of "the surface of the earth has been geologically explored."

In the same Chapter IX, Darwin also acknowledged that the fossil record does suggest the "sudden appearance of whole groups of allied species all at once." He noted that if this fact were to stand, and "numerous species belonging to the same genera or families have really started into life all at once, . . . [it] would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection." He forestalled that fatal blow to his theory by asking his readers not to "over-rate the perfection of the geological record."

Any sympathetic reader of Darwin's history would readily allow him the point--that earlier life forms might have all come and gone elsewhere than where later forms emerged and might have done so without leaving a fossil record to demonstrate the smooth gradation between species. But such a reader should admit, as Darwin did, that the absence of the record is a serious matter--especially when it persists to this day, nearly a century and a half after Darwin's book was published. This imperfection of the historical record was, after all, sufficiently embarrassing to provoke some evolutionary biologists nearly 100 years ago to try to improve on the record by manufacturing the counterfeit fossil Piltdown Man.

Even among committed Darwinists, the imperfection of the fossil record has been a source of huge argument. The Darwinian fundamentalist Richard Dawkins of Oxford believes in smooth and gradual evolutionary processes. He became a vicious antagonist to Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, who championed "punctuated equilibrium," with abrupt species generation after millennia of stability. Dawkins attacked Gould in large part because Gould's idea greatly shortened the time evolutionary processes had to generate species.

All the more reason, then, for our sympathetic reader to look for other means of supporting Darwin's narrative. Perhaps the demonstrable variations that occur in species living under altered circumstances might answer objections.

With this in mind, Darwin devotes the very first chapter of On the Origin of Species to describing variations in plants and domestic animals produced over time by methodical selective breeding by farmers and fanciers. Plainly their practice of permitting only the most choice individuals to reproduce and so "enhance the breed" demonstrates how hereditary modification of members of a given species is possible--indeed, it displays the process.

Darwin, however, then makes an extrapolation. Beginning with the reasonable presumption that the hereditary mechanisms involved in producing these enhancements in the barnyard must be available and randomly active in nature, he proposes that from such random variation can spring new species. Variation--repeated ad infinitum down the ages, with its products culled by natural selection rather than by artful human breeding--is the process by which Darwin links up all of biologic creation. This is the Darwinian narrative in its clearest form--history by extrapolation--and it is not problem-free.

MANY OF US were taught these Darwinian extrapolatory links to the evolutionary narrative in high school, usually with photographs of the European peppered moth (Biston betularia), which became darker with environmental pollution and thus less conspicuous to bird predators in industrial areas. The same idea springs up in discussions of the development of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, or of the transformation of the beaks of finches under the pressure of drought. We were taught in high school that these observable biologic changes display evolution "in front of your eyes."

But not everyone agreed with this conclusion. Many criticized the Darwinists for extrapolating too far, and now the Darwinists confess that actual, observable variation--whether in the barnyard or in nature--demonstrates only the capacity of a species population to vary within limits. The original species picture reappears when either the farmer's selective enterprise or the natural environmental pressure on the species population stops and crossbreeding recurs. The finches' beaks never turn into pelican pouches but revert to their original shape when the rains arrive.

No farmer or experimental scientist has ever produced a new species by cultivating variations. The peppered moth didn't become a butterfly, and the closely and repeatedly studied fruit fly, despite gazillions of generations producing varieties in the laboratory, always remains a fruit fly. Again, Darwin himself was more honest than his followers have been. He knew the distinction between variations that could be observed and those posited according to the theoretical extrapolation that was key to his narrative. For this reason he repeatedly notes, as in Chapter IV of On the Origin of Species, that "natural selection will always act very slowly, often only at long intervals of time, and generally on only a few of the inhabitants." In this way he puts the process of species generation outside the reach of experimental demonstration.

At this point, the sympathetic reader eager to secure Darwin's narrative might resort to searching the "biochemical record." Surely the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, and proteins contain the long-sought evidence. Again, though, molecular biology helps in some ways in that it shows commonalities across species--just as other aspects of anatomical structures show commonalities--but again it's the distinctions--and the means by which they are generated--rather than the similarities that must be explained to support the theory.

If one turns to DNA to show how Homo sapiens gradually emerged by small and random variations from predecessors, one faces an immediate problem. At the level of DNA, humans and chimpanzees differ by a mere 1 percent, yet the chimpanzee is not 99 percent human in body, brain, or mental faculties--far from it. We need something more than the DNA record to support a narrative linking chimps and men.

Perhaps it's enough for the friendly guardian of the Darwinian narrative to propose that the genes that control the switching on and off of other genes simply changed in some random way, allowing humans to branch off the primate line. And maybe they did. But again, notice, this is a molecular narrative, not a proposition demonstrable by experiment. It's a story that fits the facts--but so might another.

SURELY AT THIS POINT the friendly reader might agree that, like any historical account, the Darwinian narrative can fairly be challenged--not to say that it must be wrong, only that it needs more supportive evidence. Perhaps there are statistical proofs or engineering concepts that could be found, or something else that might emerge that would be subject to verification by the scientific method.

But our would-be friend to evolution will soon discover that any questioning of the Darwinian narrative, no matter how sympathetic, is shouted down. If mathematicians try to say that even with the immense span of geological time available for random genetic variations to act, there is not time enough to produce the human eye, the response--typical for historians, who routinely argue backward from observations to their causes--is, Since the eye exists the math must be wrong.

If Michael J. Behe, the cellular biochemist who wrote Darwin's Black Box, proposes that the complicated molecular mechanisms sustaining the integrity of the cell seem impossible to explain as the result of random variations, the president of the National Academy of Sciences counters by pronouncing, "Modern scientific views of the molecular organization of life are entirely consistent with spontaneous variation and natural selection driving a powerful evolutionary process." That is, he affirms the Darwinian narrative by restating it, not by offering compelling proof that it is true. Lots of views are consistent with the cell's complexity--including the view Behe explores, that an intelligent creator designed the cell to work. But cellular formation needs identified generative mechanisms, not simply a consistent narrative, to explain it--a problem both for those who call on Darwin and those who call on an "intelligent designer."

Official science is too much at ease with the Darwinian narrative--primarily because it can't come up with anything better. As a result, many scientists are driven by an ideological bias and by fear--the thought that any challenge to the narrative will plunge the republic back into some dark age. Richard Dawkins and his associate Niall Shanks predict that, as Shanks wrote, "discriminatory, conservative Christian values [will be imposed] on our educational, legal, social and political institutions" should the public schools permit any airing of questions about the Darwinian narrative. This fear is way over the top, but it's of long standing, and in the past has provoked some loss of judgment among scientists.

When the most distinguished biological scientist of the 20th century, Francis Crick, saw the same complications as Michael Behe, he also concluded that time on Earth and random variation were not adequate to produce the viable cell. Crick resolved the dilemma, in a fascinating book called Life Itself published in 1981, by suggesting that living cells arrived on an unmanned spaceship from another planet, perhaps sent by intelligent beings facing extinction. He called his concept "directed panspermia," and this strange concept (I prefer to call it "life from Krypton") received a respectful hearing from biologists. With this imaginative device Crick could keep the narrative alive. He explained life's cellular origins without worrying about time, kept the God he hated out of the picture, and preserved the possibility of random variation and natural selection working their magic from these "seedlings" from a "galaxy far far away."

BY NOW, it would seem that a sympathetic reader of Darwin, if honest, could conclude the following. Darwinism is an imperfect theory, based as it is on a historical narrative, and carrying as it does the remarkable capacity to explain anything and exclude nothing. It has great strengths, and it has great evidential lacunae that seem no closer to resolution than when Darwin himself called attention to them 146 years ago.

The biological evidence--life rests on the cellular organization of nucleotides and proteins--compels the conclusion that all the various forms of life on Earth derive from a common source, as Darwin emphasized. Life is not recreated with every new species--this is now undeniable. The Darwinian concept of descent with modification seems the most plausible way to relate life and its varieties. Modifications within species are often responses to environmental challenges, and they sustain a species with the variety of expressions necessary for it to survive these challenges.

But when one tries to grasp how the distinct species, as against varieties, are generated--by what mechanism they separate--a pause to reflect is warranted. Darwin's random variation and natural selection may well offer the best available narrative, the most compelling theory. Yet something seems missing--for example, any sense of what propels life's forms toward a progressive complexity, rather than toward a simplicity of design that would guarantee survival come what may.

The discipline of evolutionary biology today resembles astrophysics when Galileo was attempting to explain the planetary orbits and the oceanic tides but lacked the concept of the force of gravity. His observations were accurate enough, but explanations awaited an Isaac Newton.

Evolutionary biology awaits its Newton. And until such a thinker emerges--to provide a fuller conception of the history of life and especially the forces at play that explain how things happened as they did--those who would expel all challenges to the Darwinian narrative from the high school classroom are false to their mission of teaching the scientific method.

Scientists as they engage in dialogue with others should abhor attempts to close off the conversation by excessive claims for any privileged access to truth. Scientists should tell what they actually know and how they know it, as distinct from what they believe and are trying to advance. If all of us, scientists and non-scientists alike, accepted that guiding principle, the 80-year history of attempts to use law to stifle the teaching of science--stretching as it does from the courtrooms of Dayton, Tennessee, to those of Cobb County, Georgia--could perhaps finally be brought to a close.

Paul McHugh is a university distinguished service professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and former psychiatrist in chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

[Doctor Stochastic]

To get a sense of the intellectual milieu around the 1890 see "The Negro Problem" here (pdf file) .

[js1138]

Can't look at a .pdf right now, but I know what the climate was in 1954, and it was pretty bad.

[Junior]

And yet they'll rale against folks who judge Columbus by today's standards. Go figure.

[Junior]

Ham was cursed (turned black) for his actions. I'm not so sure what's wrong with seeing your dad naked; hundreds of kids are now cursed for going to the pool or gym locker rooms with their dads.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Sure, you can read .pdf. ,"êôM╩jYA>ɧ╙╩▌yëï⌐∙Kåε≈Θ⌂üôÖzuy ôp╦_╚╤Ö,$≥┼,w-╦²¶&

[donh]

Sometimes 'common knowledge' is extremely wrong!

Well, isn't this curious--a fistful of conservatives who don't seem to have the vaguest idea what the communist argument is. How do you except to effectively counter an argument if you don't bother to learn what it is?

[js1138]

How do you except to effectively counter an argument if you don't bother to learn what it is?

That's OK. Most don't know what capitalism is, either. Or liberty.

As John Belushi used to say "Freedom means doing what you're told."

[Doctor Stochastic]

"Freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose."

[VadeRetro]

As that article by Haller points out, some few of the creationists of the mid-19th century, Louis Aggasiz for one, did not interpret Genesis that way. ("Inferior" races are degenerate sons of Noah.) Aggasiz and the other polygeneticists thought the darker races were separately created "kinds." They have no common ancestry with white humans. Whether or not Aggasiz himself felt that way about it, such a model wonderfully allows such races to be considered lower animals with only a superficial, monkey-like similarity to real humans.

Again, the creationists who are supposedly trying to topple "Darwinism" because "Darwin was a racist" favor a model of the diversity of life on Earth utterly the same as the racist creationists Haller describes at the beginning of that article.

[PatrickHenry]

Speaking of racism, Thomas Edison's invention of movies led directly to Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in 1915, a racist film that glorified the Klan. We must stop using light bulbs!

[D Edmund Joaquin]

Ham was cursed (turned black) for his actions.

Are you Mormon? please post the scripture that asserts this, lol, lol, lol

[D Edmund Joaquin]

What do you think of the moral stature of someone who tells me I'm stalking him if I answer, and then turns around and stage-whispers about me?

I learned it from you, on this very thread, so you tell me

[donh]

I learned it from you, on this very thread, so you tell me

Oh, really, I talked about you, D Edmund Joaquin, with someone else, after asking you to leave me alone? you wouldn't care to point out where, would you?

[donh]

I learned it from you, on this very thread, so you tell me

Oh, really, I talked about you, D Edmund Joaquin, with someone else, after asking you to leave me alone? you wouldn't care to point out where, would you?

[Junior]

Ham was cursed (turned black) for his actions.

Are you Mormon? please post the scripture that asserts this, lol, lol, lol

There are a lot of hints throughout the Bible regarding the descendents of Ham:

And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan. And the sons of Cush; Seba, and Havilah, and Sabtah, and Raamah, and Sabtecha: and the sons of Raamah; Sheba, and Dedan. [Gen 10:6-7]

From Wikipedia:

Cush (כּוּשׁ "Black", Standard Hebrew Kuš, Tiberian Hebrew Kûš) was the eldest son of Ham, brother of Canaan and the father of Nimrod, mentioned in the "table of nations" in the Book of Genesis (x. 60) and in I Chronicles (i. 8) as the eponym of the people of Kush.

The locality of this area has been questioned with some believing it refers to countries south of the Israelites and other stating it refers to part of Africa, such as Ethiopia, which in ancient inscriptions was written as Kesh. Samuel Bochart maintained that it was exclusively in Arabia; Friedrich Schulthess and Heinrich Gesenius held that it should be sought in Africa. Others again, like Johann Michaelis and Rosenmuller, have supposed that the name Cush was applied to tracts of country both in Arabia and in Africa.

The existence of a historical Kush between Egypt and Nubia cannot reasonably be questioned, though the term is employed in the Old Testament with some latitude. The African Cush covers Upper Egypt, and extends southwards from the first cataract. That the Biblical term was also applied to parts of Arabia is evident from Genesis where Cush is the eponymous father of certain tribal and ethnical designations, all of which point very clearly to Arabia, with the very doubtful exception of Seba. Even in the 5th century A.D. the Himyarites, in the south of Arabia, were styled by Syrian writers Cushaeans and Ethiopians. Moreover, the Babylonian inscriptions mention the Kashshi, an Elamite race, whose name has been equated with the classical KoaociZot, Kto-crux, and it has been held that this affords a more appropriate explanation of Cush (perhaps rather Kash), the ancestor of Nimrod in Genesis chapter 8.

Although decisive evidence is lacking, it seems extremely probable that several references to Cush in the Old Testament cannot refer to Ethiopia, despite the likelihood that considerable confusion existed in the minds of early writers. The Cushite invasion described in Bible in the book 2 Chronicles is intelligible if the historical foundation for the story be a raid by Arabians, but in a later chapter the inclusion of Libyans shows that the enemy was subsequently supposed to be African. In several passages the interpretation is bound up with that of Mizraim, and depends in general upon the question whether Ethiopia at a given time enjoyed the prominence given to it.

On the other hand, the rhetorical question "Can the Cushite change his skin?" in Jeremiah 13:23 implies people of a markedly different skin color from the Isrealites, probably of African race; also, the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament, which was done by Greek-speaking Jews between ca. 250 B.C. and 100 B.C., translates Cush as "Ethiopia".

Josephus also gives an account of the nation of Cush, who is the son of Ham and the grandson of Noah. "For of the four sons of Ham, time has not at all hurt the name of Chus; for the Ethiopians, over whom he reigned, are even at this day, both by themselves and by all men in Asia, called Chusites." AotJ I:6. In addition, it might behoove one to know that a wife of Moses was a Kushite according to the Book of Numbers -- whether this speaks of Zipporah or of an unnamed second wife remains unclear.

Also from Wikipedia:

Phut (cf. Septuagint Greek Φουδ Phoud) is the term used by the Jewish historian Josephus for biblical פוט pûṭ (Put), the third son of Ham (one of the sons of Noah), in the biblical Table of Nations (Genesis 10:6; cf. 1 Chronicles 1:8). Five other biblical verses refer to the descendants of Put, where they are consistently noted to be warriors. In three cases they are described as being supporters of Egypt, along with Kush (biblical Cush).

Put (or Phut) is consistently associated with Libya. Josephus writes: "Phut also was the founder of Libya, and called the inhabitants Phutites, from himself" (AotJ Book 1:6/2). This is likewise indicated in the biblical account where it is said that "Put and the Libyans" were the helpers of Egypt (Nahum 3:9). The Septuagint and Vulgate substitute "Libya" in Ezekiel 27:10, 35:5, where the Hebrew Bible refers to Put. Furthermore, ancient Egyptian texts dating back as far as the 22nd dynasty, refer to the Libyan tribe of pỉdw, while a Ptolemaic text from Edfu refers to the t3 n n3 pỉt.w "the land of the Pitu(-people)". The word was later written in Demotic as pỉt and paiat in Coptic. Greek language texts from Graeco-Roman Egypt also refer to this Libyan group. Finally, a multilingual stela from al-Kabrīt, dating to the reign of Darius I refers to the Put as the putiya (Old Persian) and puṭa (Neo-Babylonian), but the equivalent text written in Egyptian has t3 ṯmḥw "Libya".

Despite the fact that there is little to doubt that Put was an ancient Libyco-Berber tribe, some scholars have erroneously connected it with Punt or even Phoenicia, though the evidence for such a connection is completely lacking.

And again from Wikipedia:

Mizraim (Hebrew מצרים Mitzráyim or Miṣrāyim/Miṣráyim; cf. Arabic مصر Miṣr) is the Hebrew name for the land of Egypt, with the dual suffix -āyim, perhaps referring to the "two Egypts", Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. Mizraim was Cush's inlaw who, together along with Phut and Canaan, made up the Hamite branch of Noah's descendants.

Some would see supposed similarities with the Egyptian god Asar's name and story with those attributed to the eastern Asshur cannot but suggest a possible Mesopotamian origin for this one from whence came Mizraim. It has been suggested in New Age circles that opposing assimilation into Kush, Meskiagkasher left Kish to the lands of his cousin Asshur where the Uruk-Nimrod dynasty was born before moving with his followers "from Asshur" to establish his own land in the Nile valley.

Are you beginning to see a pattern here (I know creationists are not permitted to see patterns, but this is the Bible we're talking about, so you have special dispensation).  Hell, the Jeremiah quote should clinch it for you (or at least most rational people).  The "Children of Ham" are from Africa, and indeed this is the term 19th century racists (in the meaning of one race being superior to another) called black Africans and used the Biblical references as excuses to keep these people in bondage.  After all, weren't they cursed to be servants of all of Noah's other descendents?

[donh]

And outsider, reading all this stuff, by now has concluded that BOTH sides must take part in a Looking-Glassian response of:

"A word means just what I WANT it to mean."

Point out something I've said that you find unclear--as to the meaning of a word, or otherwise--and I will attempt to make amends.

[PatrickHenry]

The Cushite anti-defamation league will be in contact with you about your inflammatory posts.

[Elsie]

The late term abortion option could be avoided by looking outside one's narrow gene pool.

Oh???

What PROBLEM?

How could we 'avoid' it?

[Elsie]

I don't know whether we can easily raise the maximum IQ, but I suspect we can raise the bottom and mimimize stupidity.

Why not the other way around?

[Elsie]

Ham was cursed (turned black) for his actions.

Oh yeah?

Says who?