Posted on 11/05/2005 6:34:38 AM PST by billorites
Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published 150 years ago, but evolution by natural selection is still under attack from those wedded to a human-centred or theistic world view. Edward O. Wilson, who was raised a creationist, ponders why this should be, and whether science and religion can ever be reconciled
IT IS surpassingly strange that half of Americans recently polled (2004) not only do not believe in evolution by natural selection but do not believe in evolution at all. Americans are certainly capable of belief, and with rock-like conviction if it originates in religious dogma. In evidence is the 60 per cent that accept the prophecies of the Bible's Book of Revelation as truth, and in yet more evidence is the weight that faith-based positions hold in political life. Most of the religious right opposes the teaching of evolution in public schools, either by an outright ban on the subject or, at the least, by insisting that it be treated as "only a theory" rather than a "fact".
Yet biologists are unanimous in concluding that evolution is a fact. The evidence they and thousands of others have adduced over 150 years falls together in intricate and interlocking detail. The multitudinous examples range from the small changes in DNA sequences observed as they occur in real time to finely graded sequences within larger evolutionary changes in the fossil record. Further, on the basis of comparably strong evidence, natural selection grows ever stronger as the prevailing explanation of evolution.
Many who accept the fact of evolution cannot, however, on religious grounds, accept the operation of blind chance and the absence of divine purpose implicit in natural selection. They support the alternative explanation of intelligent design. The reasoning they offer is not based on evidence but on the lack of it. The formulation of intelligent design is a default argument advanced in support of a non sequitur. It is in essence the following: there are some phenomena that have not yet been explained and that (most importantly) the critics personally cannot imagine being explained; therefore there must be a supernatural designer at work. The designer is seldom specified, but in the canon of intelligent design it is most certainly not Satan and his angels, nor any god or gods conspicuously different from those accepted in the believer's faith.
Flipping the scientific argument upside down, the intelligent designers join the strict creationists (who insist that no evolution ever occurred) by arguing that scientists resist the supernatural theory because it is counter to their own personal secular beliefs. This may have a kernel of truth; everybody suffers from some amount of bias. But in this case bias is easily overcome. The critics forget how the reward system in science works. Any researcher who can prove the existence of intelligent design within the accepted framework of science will make history and achieve eternal fame. They will prove at last that science and religious dogma are compatible. Even a combined Nobel prize and Templeton prize (the latter designed to encourage the search for just such harmony) would fall short as proper recognition. Every scientist would like to accomplish such a epoch-making advance. But no one has even come close, because unfortunately there is no evidence, no theory and no criteria for proof that even marginally might pass for science.
In all of the history of science, only one other disparity of comparable magnitude to evolution has occurred between a scientific event and the impact it has had on the public mind. This was the discovery by Copernicus that Earth, and therefore humanity, is not the centre of the universe, and the universe is not a closed spherical bubble. Copernicus delayed publication of his master work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres until the year of his death (1543). For his extension of the idea, Bruno was burned at the stake, and for its documentation Galileo was shown the instruments of torture and remained under house arrest for the remainder of his life.
Today we live in a less barbaric age, but an otherwise comparable disjunction between science and religion still roils the public mind. Why does such intense and pervasive resistance to evolution continue 150 years after the publication of On The Origin of Species, and in the teeth of the overwhelming accumulated evidence favouring it? The answer is simply that the Darwinian revolution, even more than the Copernican revolution, challenges the prehistoric and still-regnant self-image of humanity. Evolution by natural selection, to be as concise as possible, has changed everything.
In the more than slightly schizophrenic circumstances of the present era, global culture is divided into three opposing images of the human condition. The dominant one, exemplified by the creation myths of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - sees humanity as a creation of God. He brought us into being and He guides us still as father, judge and friend. We interpret His will from sacred scriptures and the wisdom of ecclesiastical authorities.
The second world view is that of political behaviourism. Still beloved by the now rapidly fading Marxist-Leninist states, it says that the brain is largely a blank state devoid of any inborn inscription beyond reflexes and primitive bodily urges. As a consequence, the mind originates almost wholly as a product of learning, and it is the product of a culture that itself evolves by historical contingency. Because there is no biologically based "human nature", people can be moulded to the best possible political and economic system, namely communism. In practical politics, this belief has been repeatedly tested and, after economic collapses and tens of millions of deaths in a dozen dysfunctional states, is generally deemed a failure.
Both of these world views, God-centred religion and atheistic communism, are opposed by a third and in some ways more radical world view, scientific humanism. Still held by only a tiny minority of the world's population, it considers humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning. Human nature exists, and it was self-assembled. Having arisen by evolution during the far simpler conditions in which humanity lived during more than 99 per cent of its existence, it forms the behavioural part of what, in The Descent of Man, Darwin called "the indelible stamp of [our] lowly origin".
So, will science and religion find common ground, or at least agree to divide the fundamentals into mutually exclusive domains? A great many well-meaning scholars believe that such rapprochement is both possible and desirable. A few disagree, and I am one of them. I think Darwin would have held to the same position. The battle line is, as it has ever been, in biology. The inexorable growth of this science continues to widen, not to close, the tectonic gap between science and faithbased religion.
Rapprochement may be neither possible nor desirable. There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.
Religions continue both to render their special services and to exact their heavy costs. Can scientific humanism do as well or better, at a lower cost? Surely that ranks as one of the great unanswered questions of philosophy. It is the noble yet troubling legacy that Charles Darwin left us.
Edward O. Wilson is a professor of entomology at Harvard University. He has written 20 books and received many awards, including two Pulitzer prizes and the 1976 National Medal of Science. This is an extract of the afterword to From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's four great books, published next week by W.W. Norton.
Time to cue up the "Deliverance" sound track......
You have to investigate what the stuff is, how it happens, and what happens as a consequence of it happening. When you do that, you learn more than by saying, "I'll never understand it so I reckon God done did it."
Just leave your next few dumb-dumbisms here, Tex, and I'll have a good laugh over them in the morning. Your Nobel Prize awaits.
"My point is this: What good is the study of science if "stuff happens" is the explanation for why things are the way they are and how they came to be?"
That's not what I said. Why must you bear false witness? You asked me,
"Isn't science itself the study of how things work and why they work that way?"
And I said yes. I never said the explanation was *stuff happens*; that's your lie. Do you think lying will get you a better seat by His side? It won't.
Sleep well my fine feathered friend. Perhaps next time you and your fellow scientists get together, you could investigate why we developed a sense of humor and what caused the consequence we call "laughter"
I'll admit up front that I can't understand where it comes from but I reckon it makes a lot more sense to think that God gave us that ability than it came about because "stuff happens".
And, hey, one more thing. God loves you even if you don't give Him credit for all this beautiful and wonderful stuff he gave you to rack (wrack?) your brain over.
I refer you to post #121
I aksed you: "Oh. So under "Natural Selection" nobody actually does any selecting? Stuff just happens?"
And you said:
Yes, in the same way that Angels don't push the stars and planets on their paths. Nature is cool that way. It's what makes science possible.
As your quote of me makes clear, I never said *stuff happens* is the explanation to how things happen. I said in the same way that we don't invoke angels to explain the workings of gravity, there is no need to invoke them to explain how the sum total of an organism's environment constrains it's reproductive success.
Okay. Fair enough. So, using "Natural Selection" as your guideline, what did the cheetah and the gazelle evolve from and how is it that the cheetah evolved to be faster than the gazelle?
The so-called law of faunal succession was known decades before Darwin. This states that a particular kind of fossil is confined to a particular layer of rock, and that as the rocks become more recent, the fossils gradually become more and more like living animals.
Buffon, Lamarck, and others tried to explain this, but without success.
Darwin's observed that 1) by only allowing individuals with desired traits to live to breeed, animal and plant breeders had created innumerable varieties of dogs, pigeons, horses, etc., and 2) in the wild, only a small percentage of animals live to breed.
His great insight was that no other mechanism was necessary to explain the law of faunal succession, and thus to account for the variety of living things today. In fact, he hypothesised that all life could be traced back to a common ancestor.
Combined with modern genetics, voila, the ToE.
There have been faster cheetahs and slower cheetahs.
Slower cheetahs starved to death.
There have been faster gazelles and slower gazelles.
Slower gazelles get eaten by faster cheetahs.
Faster gazelles and faster cheetahs survive to breed.
So, what happens when all the slow gazelles have been eaten?
Fewer, but very hungry cheetahs subsisting on whatever is slower than they are.
More, fat, sassy gazelles, including slow ones that wouldn't have survived before.
Guess what happens next?
Oh, and Texas Eagle, if you'll please move to the front of the room maybe you'll hear the lessons.
Well call it fact or call it theory...dont call it both. Its like calling hot "cold" and cold "hot.
placemarker
Thanks for the ping!
When the stated goal of the proponents of that hypothesis is to use said hypothesis to promote some variety of religion, I think that pretty clearly implicates the First. Now, if it turns out to be good science, as was Lemaitre's hypothesis, so be it - if science happens to confirm your faith, that's not a reason to exclude it, and more power to you. But it should first be shown to be good science, as was Lemaitre's work, and that is so far distinctly lacking in the "replacements or addenda to evolution" field - and note that Lemaitre's work rightly should have been excluded until it was shown to be good science. First Amendment entanglement + bad science (or no science) = bring out the hook. ;)
You'll understand if I don't treat that sentence like it was special delivery from a guy named Moses.
I'm pretty sure it's there somewhere, maybe on the third tabl...oh, crap...
:^)
The victim-hood quotient on FR has been steadily increasing lately. If I wasn't interested in what you had to say I would never have posted to you. You have to admit, there's a certain logic there even if it flows from the keyboard of the dreaded creationist.
Perhaps, but you have to admit that there's a certain "piss off" content to saying that it's none of our business, whether intended or not. As for creationists, other than a vague feeling of dread, I have no particular animus - I just don't think it's science, and I suspect you might think much the same thing...
You telling me that intelligent design doesn't mean intelligent design doesn't get us anywhere.
Sure it does - it gets us right into court, since ID is the proposal to supplement/complement/replace/whatever evolution in science class. I'm heartened that you carry no particular brief for ID, but the fact that you're not advancing it doesn't mean that nobody is advancing it, in which case, it requires a response.
I never said it did. So, in essence, you have engaged yourself in argument. I'm interested in how it will come out. :-}
I always win those discussions, and I have to say that I look darn good while doing it too ;)
Now for the next question. What will be the penalty for school districts describing genetic engineering generically as intelligent design?
I see no need to penalize what is an obvious truth. Unfortunately, to answer my own question, I do not think that limiting "intelligent design" to what biochemists do is quite what proponents of intelligent design theory have in mind.
Did you do a lot of prayer to get that question to appear in front of my eyes? Or did you just type it in on a computer?
Half right - in a kinda sorta way.
Bruno was condemned for his theological thinking.
An infinite number of worlds would require half an infinity of Jesuses to redeem them. (Since half the Adams and Eves wouldn't disobey in the garden they wouldn't require the sacrifice of a Jesus.
But half an infinity of Jesuses can't be reconciled with there being just one God. So Jesus was not God incarnate, but a somewhat lesser being, perhaps a skillful wizard.
And some of his claim like the earth has a soul, the Holy spirit was within animals and trees, Satan would be saved and reunited with God, etc. didn't jibe with the church's doctrine.
And the church had ways of dealing with that.
Oh My ... , did I really type "cheaters". It wasn't me, honest, it was just those fingers of mine.
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