Darwinism at AEI

Early in May, the American Enterprise Institute held a debate about Darwinism, a faith embedded in many debates, whether scientific, religious or political. The recent irruption of atheism can be traced to the Darwinian creed, for the well publicized testimonials of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens all have recourse to Darwinism at various points.

It purports to explain how we got here without any need for God or gods. Darwinism is best seen as 19th century philosophy—materialism—dressed up as science, and directed against a theological argument for the existence of God. (The only one of St. Thomas Aquinas’s “proofs” that resonates with us today is the “argument from design.”) Richard Dawkins famously said that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

Political theory was uppermost at AEI—it is, after all, a public-policy think tank. The question before the house: “Darwinism and Conservatism: Friends or Foes?” The main combatants were Larry Arnhart, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois University, and John West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. Also on the podium were John Derbyshire who writes books about mathematics and is the “designated point man” against intelligent design at National Review; and George Gilder, the well known writer who is also with the Discovery Institute.

Arnhart, the author of Darwinian Conservatism (2005), has carved out a nice niche for himself by arguing that conservatives need Darwin. He makes his case by presenting conservative political ideas and arguing that Darwin’s theory of natural selection supports them. Darwinian mechanisms give rise to a “spontaneous order,” he said at one point, contrasting it favorably with the “utopian vision” of liberals.

West argued that the issue is not really amenable to a left-right analysis. He quoted the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut, a self-described secular humanist, who said last year that our bodies are “miracles of design,” and faulted scientists for “pretending that they have the answer as to how we got this way.”

In Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest (2006), and in his talk, West rejected the claim that Darwinism supports traditional moral teachings. Darwin’s Descent of Man, published 12 years after The Origin of Species, overflows with arguments embarrassing to conservatives and liberals alike. “Maternal instinct is natural, but so is infanticide,” West writes, describing Darwin’s explicit position. “Care toward family members is natural, but so is euthanasia of the feeble, even if they happen to be one’s parents.”

The truth is that Darwinism is so shapeless that it can be enlisted in support of any cause whatsoever. Steven Hayward, a resident scholar at AEI, made this clear in his admirable introduction. Darwinism has over the years been championed by eugenicists, social Darwinists, racialists, free-market economists, liberals galore, Wilsonian progressives and National Socialists, to give only a partial list. Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer, Communists and libertarians, and almost anyone in between, have at times found Darwinism to their liking. Spencer himself first used the phrase “survival of the fittest,” and Darwin thought it an “admirable” summation of his thesis.

Both selfishness and (with a little mathematical ingenuity) altruism can be given a Darwinian gloss. Any existing psychological trait, from aggression to pacifism, can be deemed adaptive by inventing a just-so story explaining how genes “for” that trait might have arisen. The genes themselves do not have to be identified, nor does the imagined historical scenario have to leave any trace behind.

The underlying problem is that a key Darwinian term is not defined. Darwinism supposedly explains how organisms become more “fit,” or better adapted to their environment. But fitness is not and cannot be defined except in terms of existence. If an animal exists, it is “fit” (otherwise it wouldn’t exist). It is not possible to specify all the useful parts of that animal in order to give an exhaustive causal account of fitness. If an organism possesses features that appear on the surface to be inconvenient—such as the peacock’s tail or the top-heavy antlers of a stag—the existence of stags and peacocks proves that these animals are in fact fit.

So the Darwinian theory is not falsifiable by any observation. It “explains” everything, and therefore nothing. It barely qualifies as a scientific theory for that reason. The impact of Darwinism on any and all political groups can be argued any way you want and it’s not very illuminating for that reason. So the AEI discussion frequently veered off into related areas.

Inevitably, the subject of intelligent design came up. The National Review’s John Derbyshire right away sought to conflate it with creationism. Someone in the front row reminded him that there were no creationists present. Derbyshire replied that a judge had equated intelligent design with creationism and that was good enough for him.

There is considerable confusion about the relationship between the two so let me try to elucidate. Creationists for the most part say: “When it comes to origins, we take our guidance from the Bible. What others say about natural selection, shared ancestry and so on is of little importance to us. We already have our faith and our Book and we are sticking to it.” It is separatist in spirit. “You scientists can do your thing, just let us do ours, which is study Genesis and pray.”

That was a deal as far as the Darwinians were concerned. The creationists could be ignored.

Intelligent Design is not like that. It is aggressive and therefore potentially dangerous. It says to the Darwinians: “You don’t have the evidence to support your claims. Your lab results and fossils don’t support your theory. Organisms are way too complex to have arisen by chance. Take all the time you want, it won’t be enough. Even though we don’t know how it happened, these critters must have been designed somehow.”

It takes the war to the enemy, in other words. So it can’t easily be ignored. It is informed by science, not religion. That is why it has made Darwinians angry, and why they try to identify it with creationism. They have also imposed a rigid orthodoxy upon all whose hiring, credentialing and promotion they can control. They are not interested in any debate. Discovery Institute people told me that last year a group of graduate students from prestigious universities wanted to learn more about intelligent design. A conference was arranged in which these young people showed up and wore name tags with pseudonyms and all papers were collected up at the end. The students were afraid that their identities would be leaked to their professors. That’s the intellectual climate surrounding this issue today. There are parallels with the Soviet dissidents in the 1970s, who had to communicate by samizdat.

In the question period, I asked Derbyshire if he could think of any observation that would count as falsifying Darwinism. He said: “I think miraculous creation would do it. The miraculous appearance of an entirely new species.”

That answer at least points us in a useful direction. Pursue it, and we might be able to clarify the Darwinian conundrum. The point is that in Darwinism a philosophical assumption, rarely explicit, circumscribes the “scientific” conclusions that are permitted. The assumption is this: Only naturalistic explanations can be allowed within biology. Naturalism implies the exclusion of mind, intelligence, or absolutely anything except atoms and molecules in motion. Nothing else exists. Everything must be explained in terms of physics and chemistry and anything beyond that will be derided as “creationism.” Good Darwinians are not allowed by their own rules even to entertain the possibility that intelligence was involved in the origin or development of life. No research is needed to come to that conclusion. It is axiomatic within the theory.

Derbyshire responded: “Scientists embrace naturalism because science is a naturalistic pursuit. A working scientist is by definition naturalistic.”

That is incorrect. From scraps of unearthed rubble, archeologists infer design when no trace of the designer remains. A scientist investigating how automobiles are made goes to a factory and learns that the assembly-line originated in plans and blueprints, which in turn originated in the minds of men.

Ah yes, the mind! But that, too, consists of nothing but atoms and molecules in motion, no? Which brings us to the Inner Sanctum of the materialist dogma: Mind itself is nothing but matter. Free will is an illusion, and so on. (Darwin accepted these propositions, noting “the general delusion about free will.”)

There is no reason in the world to accept the materialist faith, but once you do, then something very much like Darwinism has to be true. Life exists—we got here somehow, along with billions of other organisms. So how did it happen? Must have been that animals self assembled a little bit at a time, in a long chain of accidental survivals.

The scientists Derbyshire talks to at Cold Spring Harbor Lab say there is no controversy about Darwinism and so he counseled that “we can only defer to that consensus.” Because every observation they ever make seems to corroborate the Darwinian tautology, most scientists probably do believe that the theory is universally true. But as the philosopher of science Karl Popper saw, the same was true of Freudianism. For good Freudians, everything seems to confirm the theory because it is protected against falsification by its own logic. Likewise Darwinism. “To say that a species now living is adapted to its environment is, in fact, almost tautological,” Popper wrote. “There is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this.”

Derbyshire displayed a distressing willingness to slander those he disagrees with. He said of the Intelligent Designers: “You don’t do any science. You go around the country on your expense accounts, which is one of the things I kick them about. You don’t do any research.” (Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman says this is just plain false and lists several ID researchers.)

Derbyshire even accused Michael Behe of Lehigh University of recommending to a hypothetical student with a research proposal that he not carry it out.

Derbyshire recalled that he said to Behe: "If a graduate student came to you and said: 'You know, I've got this great idea for a possible evolutionary pathway for the bacterial flagellum. I think I could figure it out and I've got an idea for some experiments that would test this. Would you recommend me to go along with that?' And Michael said no. Which left me stunned. This is obscurantist."

Gilder, who was there, questioned whether Derbyshire had given us a correct account.

(The curious can listen to the “audio” of the whole conference on the AEI website.)

I sent Behe an email. Could he verify this account? No, he could not. “John Derbyshire is imagining things,” he wrote back. “I would never have said such a thing. I welcome experiments into evolutionary pathways. It has been my experience that the more we know, and the more experimental work is done, the less and less plausible Darwinian mechanisms become.”

Incidentally, Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism is now out, it reports on new intelligent design research, but I have only started to read it.

I have left Gilder to the end. As always, it was intriguing to hear him grope his way through ideas that he was discovering even as he spoke. “The word comes first,” he said at one point. “The information precedes the proteins.” He has been studying information theory for years, and one of his conclusions is that the information carried by a channel must be distinct and separate from the channel itself. DNA—a string of nucleotides—does not explain how the information (needed to construct proteins) got into that DNA in the first place. That, we know nothing about.

He flailed at the “materialist superstition.” He castigated the idea that thought and speech, “originating in human minds, can be reduced to various secretions of the brain.” Emphasizing the hopeless fluidity of Darwinism, Gilder joked that Arnhart has found himself “a beautiful Darwinism, a James Dobson Darwinism, a supply-side Darwinism.” If it’s true, it’s also “trivial.” It fits neatly inside any and every box. Like Freudianism, it’s a philosophy—a worldview disguised as a science.

You’ve got your chronology wrong.

Popper, who is probably the most influential 20th century philosopher of science, contributed to our understanding of quantum physics through his skepticism of the Copenhagen Interpretation and along with his great friend F.A. Hayek inspired Margaret Thatcher, was no ID theorist or creationist and made his famous criticisms of the “new synthesis” of Darwinism long before “Intelligent Design” became a buzzword.

In fact, Popper’s argument against materialism in cognitive science depended upon natural selection being the primary source of change in species-— that is, Popper was a stronger Darwinist in that sense than, say, Stephen Jay Gould, who along with many other paleontologists placed a bigger premium on mutation than the rest of the mainstream of evolutionary biology.

Popper’s criticism of Darwinism, then, was not of the idea of natural selection itself, but of the sloppy way that idea had tended to be formulated, revealing complacency where there should have been questioning. Thus Behe in his book “The Edge of Evolution” in examining what might be the limits of natural selection follows Popper, much as, in that sense, Stephen Jay Gould and Michael Polyani did.

One significant difference is that the words "God," "creationism," and "Genesis" have been systematically purged from ID explanations, and replaced by an unnamed "designer."

Seems like this would make it less specific to any religion.

Should the courts overturn laws against murder if one successfully demonstrates they were simply a relabeling of one of the Ten Commandments?

So you’re comparing the Church of Darwin to other religions?

The absurdity of your comment aside, do you think that referring to a scientist as a Church somehow belittles the scientist? If so, what does that say for all the non-scientific charlatans who create churches out of mythology?

Of course, dear js1138, you are free to disagree with me.

Of course I disagree with you. I consider most of the chatter on evolution threads by creationists and ID advocates to be devoid of reason and content, and mainly comprised of ridicule and baseless ad hominem references to Hitler homosexuality and communism. Even the article that begins this thread is full of venom, implying that the majority of biologists are part of some militant anti-God cabal.

There are exceptions, but they are uncommon. As recently as yesterday I asked several posters -- people who are obviously educated and capable of reason -- to provide evidence or concrete examples backing up their assertions. They chose rather to stop posting to me.

==The absurdity of your comment aside, do you think that referring to a scientist as a Church somehow belittles the scientist? If so, what does that say for all the non-scientific charlatans who create churches out of mythology?

It’s enough for me that he admits that the Church of Darwin is in fact a religion. And thus, we must lump Darwinists in with the rest of the people you describe as charlatans. Am I correct to presume that you also include yourself in that description?

We have public and parochial schools now.

Would it be OK for the government to add a special tax to fund the provision of a government manufactured car to everyone?

Either way we are being forced to pay for a government product, and have to pay all over again if we want a good product.

One significant difference is that the words "God," "creationism," and "Genesis" have been systematically purged from ID explanations, and replaced by an unnamed "designer."

Seems like this would make it less specific to any religion.

Should the courts overturn laws against murder if one successfully demonstrates they were simply a relabeling of one of the Ten Commandments?

Seems like you are deliberately missing the point.

The evidence shows that creation "science" evolved into ID because of the U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing creation "science" in schools.

Read my post again with particular attention to the word changes in Pandas. If you want more evidence, read either the court decision, to which I linked, or you could read all of the court transcripts.

The evidence rebutts the claim that ID is science, and not related to the creation movement. That was the point of my post.

==Even the article that begins this thread is full of venom, implying that the majority of biologists are part of some militant anti-God cabal.

Hmmm...Don’t you guys claim that the majority of IDers are part of some militant pro-God cabal?

That is incorrect. From scraps of unearthed rubble, archaeologists infer design when no trace of the designer remains.

The artifact remains, and that is a trace of the designer.

Archaeological artifacts are assumed to be the product of humans because we have observed humans making similar products and have never observed similar products made without human intervention.

The principle involved is best illustrated by seeing what happens when the difference isn't clear. It is possible to find sharp pieces of flint that are the result of natural processes, and when this happens, there is controversy. The critical issue here is that we know the capabilities, motives, limitations, and quite a bit of the history of humans. We infer design because we can directly study the behavior of the designer.

In the case of evolution, we also know a great deal about the capabilities and limitations of the designer. We have observed every action and every aspect of variation and selection, both in the wild and in the laboratory. We know how the algorithm behaves and we know its limits and capabilities.

We have, of course, not directly observed the entire history of life. But then we have not observed a redwood grow from a seed to a giant. We have seen snapshots in the life of a redwood, but no one has seen the entire process. It is reasonable to infer the process from the snapshots?

i>Hmmm...Don’t you guys claim that the majority of IDers are part of some militant pro-God cabal?

I fail to see how lying is pro God. The ID advocates at the Dover trial were admonished for lying under oath. Among other things they lied about was the history of the Pandas textbook. They denied it was originally written as a creationist textbook.

One of the school board members denied under oath that he knew who paid for fifty copies of this textbook. His signature was on the check that paid for the books.

The assumption is this: Only naturalistic explanations can be allowed within biology. Naturalism implies the exclusion of mind, intelligence, or absolutely anything except atoms and molecules in motion. Nothing else exists.

And the funny thing is, naturalism is ONLY an assumption. There's no basis for it at all.

On the contrary, since we know that intelligence can produce both order and complexity, AND randomness, when necessary, randomness is no evidence for mindlessness.

I’m not familiar with your allegations. Feel free to post a link. However, I am familiar with the lies and outright falsehoods issued by the Church of Darwin at the Dover trial:

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/07/ken_millers_random_and_undirec.html

I say put an end to government funded science. If the government wishes to obtain the many benefits of science, they can purchase them from the private sector. Then science and scientists will be forced to compete with each other in the free market (just like every other endeavor worth its salt).

OK. And you think this is the likely means by which this will be resolved, and you're sure it will be?

I have to admit, the idea of private sector nuclear weapons development is kind of interesting.

Either way we are being forced to pay for a government product, and have to pay all over again if we want a good product.

I agree there's some inequities in the current system. Heck, as a property owner who's kids are all grown, I'm being forced to pay for a "government product" I'm not even using.

==we are flogging ID now and if that fails we’ll come up with something else

Careful, you might wind up offending the Church of Darwin:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1856701/posts

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