Why We Are Still Arguing About Darwin

TCS Daily ^ | 10 Jan 2008 | Lee Harris

[neverdem]

Today, almost one hundred and fifty years after the publication of The Origin of Species, we are still arguing about Darwin. How is this possible? If Darwin's theory of natural selection is a scientific theory, as its defenders claim, then why hasn't it been able to establish itself securely in the public mind? Why, in short, is Darwin still the subject of continuing controversy and acrimonious debate?

Contrast this on-going battle over Darwin with the fate of the other great scientific revolutions. The same Christian fundamentalists who argue that public school should teach creationism have no quarrel with the Copernican revolution. No one argues that public schools should be forced to teach the Ptolemaic system because it permits Joshua to make the sun stand still. Yet polls in the USA show that a large segment of American society continues to reject Darwin's scientific revolution.

Modern proponents of Darwin, like Richard Dawkins, have an elegant explanation for this puzzling phenomenon. Those who reject Darwin are ignorant boobs who take the Bible literally. The Bible says God created man in his own image, and so that is what they believe, despite the evidence that shows that human beings share more than 98% of their genes with chimpanzees. Therefore, in order to get people to accept Darwin, you must first destroy their adherence to Biblical fundamentalism. Once people see that the story of Adam and Eve is simply a fairy tale, they will be in a position to embrace the idea that we all descended from lower primates. But is this interpretation really psychologically plausible? Is it only the second chapter of Genesis that stands in the way of a universal acceptance of Darwin's theory that we descended from creatures far more monkey-like than us-like?

The stumbling block to an acceptance of Darwin, I would like to submit, has little to do with Christian fundamentalism, but a whole lot to do with our intense visceral revulsion at monkeys and apes. This revulsion, while certainly not universal, is widely shared, and it is a psychological phenomenon that is completely independent of our ideas about the literal truth of the Bible.

Our visceral revulsion at the mere sight of lower primates has been noted by the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal. Observing the visitors to the chimpanzee colony at the Arnhem Zoo, de Waal noticed a frequent pattern among them. Many people would stare at the chimps for a few minutes, then, after saying, "Oh I could watch them all day," they would swiftly make their way to the nearest exit. They had had enough monkey business. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, another great naturalist, was equally aware of this deep-seated revulsion against monkeys. In his novel Elective Affinities, a character declares her feelings about monkeys in no uncertain terms: "How can anyone bring himself to expend such care on depicting horrid monkeys! It is debasing simply to regard them as animal [!], but it is really more malicious to succumb to the temptation of seeking in them the likeness of people you know."

This visceral revulsion against monkeys explains why so many people prefer to hold on to the far more flattering mythology of man's creation as it was presented in Genesis. It is not Genesis that turns them against Darwin; it is Darwin that makes them turn to Genesis.

Now the proponents of Darwin will argue that a visceral revulsion is not a logical argument, and the proponents of Darwin will of course be right. From the fact that most people are horrified to think of themselves as descending from the lower primates, it does not follow that they must have arisen from a more respectable ancestry.

At the same time, those who accept Darwin (as I do) need to understand the true origin of the revulsion so many people feel against his theory. For the basis of this revulsion is none other than "the civilizing process" that has been instilled into us from infancy. The civilizing process has taught us never to throw our feces at other people, not even in jest. It has taught us not to snatch food from other people, not even when they are much weaker than we. It has taught us not to play with our genitals in front of other people, not even when we are very bored. It has taught us not to mount the posterior of other people, not even when they have cute butts.

Those who are horrified by our resemblance to the lower primates are not wrong, because it is by means of this very horror of the primate-within that men have been able to transcend our original primate state of nature. It is by refusing to accept our embarrassing kinship with primates that men have been able to create societies that prohibit precisely the kind of monkey business that civilized men and women invariably find so revolting and disgusting. Thou shalt not act like a monkey - this is the essence of all the higher religions, and the summation of all ethical systems.

Those who continue to resist Darwin are not standing up for science, but they may well be standing up for something even more important - a Dawkinsian meme, if you will, that has been instrumental in permitting mankind to transcend the brutal level of our primate origins. Our lofty humanitarian ethical standards have been derived not by observing our primate kin, but by imagining that we were made in the image of God. It was only by assuming that we were expected to come up to heavenly standards that we did not lower our standards to those of our biological next of kin. The meme that asserts that we are the children of God, and not merely a bunch of wild monkeys may be an illusion; but it is the illusion upon which all humane civilizations have been constructed. Those who wish to eliminate this illusionary meme from our general meme pool may be acting in the name of science; but it is by no means obvious that they are acting in the name of civilization and humanity.

[From many - one.]

Wrong on two counts

1. Wishing or preferring will not change grass to the more general vegetation:
The Hebrew word translates as grass.

2. Fungi are not plants or vegetation.

[bvw]

That suggests your Hebrew is zilch.

[metmom]

I didn’t say, or imply, that rot was a terrible thing. Better rot that being buried up to our eyeballs in dead stuff. It was just used as an example to show that the 2nd law does apply to living, or better, previously living organisms.

The length of the lifespan is irrelevant. Compared to insects and small mammals, humans and some larger mammals have incredibly long lifespans. Other animals have longer ones yet, but they do age.

The point is, is that degeneration still occurs within an organism that is still living. Metabolism may be similar to evolution in appearing to work against the 2nd law, or maybe actually working against it for short periods of time, but ultimately, it can’t continue.

Those articles about senescence are interesting. One of the things that has occasionally come up in the evo debates is the longevity of man before the Flood. The Biblical record indicates a far greater lifespan. Perhaps it’s possible that humans once had this ability and lost it through one of those harmful mutations that’s known to occur. Perhaps the characteristic was lost, or maybe it got turned off and is now part of what is referred to as *junk DNA*; that stuff nobody sees any use for. Either way, it places the whole issue in another light; one of it being possible instead of a topic of mockery.

[metmom]

A year is certainly not an unreasonable amount of time for seeds to survive. Many seeds have a shelf life of much longer than that.

[js1138]

BVW, totally aside from your credentials, I am curious as to what law you think is violated by evolution and how you would show that to be true.

I think the Second Law argument has been put on the back burner. No one has been able to suggest what physical law is violated by evolution that would not also apply to metabolism.

Nor has anyone responded to the fact that evolution is an example of learning, and is neither random nor, in the strictest sense, unintelligent.

[From many - one.]

Hebrew Transliterated and English Translated Torah

http://headcoverings-by-devorah.com/HebEngTaNaKh1.html

[From many - one.]

Degeneration may, but does not necessarily, occur in living organisms, at least not during any span we are able to measure.

Second Law is simply irrelevant in this context.

[From many - one.]

We are talking about water-soaked seeds.

Moisture is usually a stimulus for germination. Oops.

Some seeds barely make it to a year.

Epiphytes need “phytes” (plants, usually big, tall ones) on which to grow. Takes time.

[Manly Warrior]

A General comment:

The basis of Darwinism (yes “ism”- a belief system) is one that attempts to deny any responsibiity to fellow man or God and is a thinly veiled attempt to elevate (or in reality, devalue) man from one of a created being with a moral compass embedded by the Creator, to that of being just a little higher than the animals by virtue of reasoning (humanism).

If we “share 98% of genetic material with primates”, then by God 2% is a world of difference!

The article states “we ‘decended’ from lower primates”- so, by this reasoning, lower primates are “higher” than us.

Hmm, okay, praise be the monkeys!

An evolutionist always has to defend “origins” of not only mankind, but also the very existence of, well, existence. Yes, I know, big bang, super molecule etc. I still beg the wisened to ‘splain what came prior and how did it come to origin?

If “something” went bang, what was “it”, where did “it” come from, what force made “it” go bang?

Evolution and other “other than creation” origin theories are just methods of replacing God as the prime ordinate, which is necessary for men that deny responsibility to a higher authority, deeming to make themselves free of obligation to the “creator” (swamp muck cannot possibly require subordination...).

This is just another attempt to be free from the choice of serving good or evil. Denial. Too bad it is in vain.

I do not see how I can be criticized for accepting the concept that an eternal, self-existant God simply spoke the world and time into existence from out of eternity, but the idea that “everything” just kinda exploded w/o any causal force has scientific merit is just plain obnoxious and devoid of reason or logic-oh yeah, that’s right, is is a Belief” system as well... oops.

I have an advantage-I can account for the creation/origins event by attributing it to a personal, loving Creator-God who gives me purpose and value, while evolutionists must rely on vague unscientific pre-cosmic drival (what was pre-pre-cosmic and how did that-oh, never mind).

God Bless

Romans 1:20 “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities-his eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so men are without excuse”.

1:25 “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator-who is forever praised. Amen.

1:28 “Furthermore, since they did not think it worthy to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not be done.”

[metmom]

I know that. But I also know that a lot of seeds would have to be released from their fruit before they could germinate. The fruit would have had to, well, rot, first to release the seeds.

Not to mention that Noah likely had seeds with him in the food he stored on the ark. Not EVERY single species/kind/whatever or seed bearing plants needed to be able to survive the flood waters.

[From many - one.]

Most grains wouldn’t have made it, except for agricultural ones.

At least half (the not in fruit ones) of annuals wouldn’t have made it.

Soft fruits with seeds that need to pass through an animal’s digestive tract wouldn’t have made it.

[bvw]

That’s one translation, but like I said you have shown you know “zilch” about Hebrew. You do know how to use a search engine though.

[From many - one.]

I’ll remember that I know “zilch” about Hebrew at my next seder. :)

It’s not just “one” translation, it’s the translation. Challengers are limited to Biblical literalists with little faith, so they try to change the plain meaning of words to cover perceived possible “errors” in Genesis.

You’d do better to note that the plants God is listed as having created are the ones of agricultural note: grains, soft fruits and veggies, tree crops.

[gondramB]

>>Nor has anyone responded to the fact that evolution is an example of learning, and is neither random nor, in the strictest sense, unintelligent.<<

In physics we run into people all the time who don’t understand the difference between chaotic versus macroscopically random.

One of the best analogies was by a professor at Georgia Tech they call “The evangelist of Chaos” who wrote an early paper “How Random is a Coin Flip.” People who don’t understand it any other way can often get that a coin flip is random in a way the number of heads in a billion flips is not.

[bert]

To reiterate, we are not arguing about Darwin, we are arguing about Biblical myths

[bvw]

Then you could learn that "deshe" means things that sprout and also has a suggestion of things that get trod upon. Just as grass sprouts, and grass is trod upon.

BTW, how much plant is in astro turf? After all it is "turf", right?

[metmom]

How do you know they’re myths? Care to show us what you have to disprove things in the Bible?

We’ll just jump right in and start at the beginning. Gen 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Go ahead, tell us that the universe having a beginning is a myth. Give us your evidence that God had nothing to do with the existence of the universe, but that it’s a completely naturalistic phenomena.

[gondramB]

>>How do you know they’re myths? Care to show us what you have to disprove things in the Bible?

We’ll just jump right in and start at the beginning. Gen 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Go ahead, tell us that the universe having a beginning is a myth. Give us your evidence that God had nothing to do with the existence of the universe, but that it’s a completely naturalistic phenomena.<<

I prefer the term “parable” - a way of explaining to our ancestors those things they did not yet have the math and science to understand the full scope of.

For that matter, we don’t have the science now to understand the full scope and may never. But we are making progress.

[betty boop]

Radical materialism transforms science from a thing of beauty to a dull, lifeless, empty void. In it there are no explanatory theories. It can only describe and never explain.

Great post, unlearner! Thank you so much!

On another thread we've been arguing against the notion that the mind is an emergent property of the physical brain. The poster who advanced this proposition evidently did so on the analogy that the brain is a machine and the mind a kind of software that somehow the material brain spontaneously constructs.

But I really wonder why the poster chose the machine analogy, which seems spectacularly inapt for the simple reason that all machines that we humans have ever seen are intelligent designs, and so is the software created to run on them. We have never observed a machine constructing itself out of matter; machines are creations of intelligent agents. Matter per se does not appear to be an intelligent agent.

This emergent mind business is reminiscent of the doctrine of abiogenesis. In the latter case, life is thought to be an emergent property of matter also. Matter, you see, is astonishingly "clever."

I like what Chandra Wickramasinghe had to say about this: “The chances that life just occurred are about as unlikely as a typhoon blowing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747.”

Thanks again for your very fine essay-post!

[bvw]

What did YOU understand that Georgia Tech Professor to mean by the word "random"? And what is the definition of "chaotic randomness"? And just to be certain -- when you say "macroscopic randomness" I understand you to mean that there is a set of individual events which is very large and we observe and derive some single summarizing measure of randomness. Of course, then we'd need to know what YOU mean by randomness.

BTW, js has made a claim that is foolish, and not deserving of a response. It is NOT a fact that evolution is an example of learning. It may be a posited for the sake of discussion that there are some aspects of learning that are evolutionary, but it is unhelpful to make such a nonsense assertion that "as a fact evolution is an example of learning". I mean, what the heck does that statement mean?

And the coda to js's statement "is neither random nor, in the strictest sense, unintelligent.": how is that even parsed, much less understandable?

Of course it does explain why it draws responses with further gibberish.