The two essays that I include here are my review of the book, Of Pandas and People, which is a product of the anti-evolution movement in the United States. This book recommends "intelligent design" as a better explanation of biological diversity than the theory of biological evolution.

Many proponents of this movement endeavor to introduce "creation science" or "creationism" into biology courses in the public schools. Although the authors of the book I review do not use these terms, their effort must be viewed as part of the on-going "creationist" movement, which seeks to obstruct the teaching of biological evolution.

For many years I have followed the anti-evolution movement from the perspective of my own specialty, the history of science, and from time to time I have published articles, pointing out its shortcomings. I view creationism, not only as a threat to the integrity of American science education, but also, no less, a caricature of the theological doctrine of creation that is central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In my two essays, herein enclosed, I develop the argument that the only alternative to evolutionary theory available to the champions of "intelligent design" is the pre-Darwinian view, which arose, not from the Bible, but from Greek thought, notably from the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Galen. The historical record affirms moreover that the theory of biological evolution, far from being a denial of theism, is actually a logical extension of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic theological doctrine of creation. Indeed even the title of Darwin's famous book could not have been conceived save in a culture long accustomed to the concepts of divine origin and linear time.

In the first essay, I put forward a definition of "intelligent design" that is consistent with the historical record. Since I am familiar with the views held by evangelicals, I also examine the permutations to be found in the two opposing views held among them--some evangelicals have a liking for creationism, others readily accept evolution. Anti-creationist biology teachers on the university level, however, need not point fingers at any evangelical support they might see; they themselves are not free of complicity in the hold that creationism has on the American public--as I point out in several places.

In the second essay, I take up the time-honored "design argument." I first of all show how the pre-Darwinian view of biology arose from the works of Aristotle and Plato. Then I examine in considerable detail the numerous passages in Of Pandas and People that can easily be traced to these Greek sources, including also to the works of Galen.

In the anti-evolution movement the theological doctrine of creation has been equated willy-nilly with the biology of a by-gone day. In this, theism and biology both suffer misinterpretation.

RICHARD DAWKINS

For example, Pandas (p 67) charges Richard Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker with advancing this view, I think with substantial reason. Take Dawkins' peroration in his Scientific American article, "God's Utility Function," in November 1995 (p 85). He wrote:

The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

There's little doubt that Dawkins--who makes free with the adjective "ignorant" for some creationists--thinks that science leads to this view. But it can be regarded, actually, as a fundamental tenet of the secular religion that is widely practiced today by various opponents of creationism. The statement represents a secular Weltanschauun, does it not, with religious presuppositions. So here we have the premier scientific journal, reaching the general public every month in drug stores and K-Marts everywhere with the latest in science, publishing a statement such as this with no editorial comment. Can there be any doubt why the creationist movement opposes evolution?

Dawkins has the right to promulgate his secular religious sentiment, of course; and Scientific American to display its bias in this matter. But to understand the portent of the Dawkins religious view and the bias to be found in prominent quarters of American science, we need only imagine the clamor that would erupt in the science community, if the editorial staff, having experienced a metanoia, had amended the Dawkins statement to read as follows:

"The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, divine creation, with abundant evidence of design, purpose, good, and nothing but the love of God."

Now, what principle of logic, pray, renders the Dawkins statement scientific, but not my amendment of it? So much for disinterested science. The Dawkins position together with the Scientific American anointment of it go far to account for the hold that creationism has on the American public.

Thus it is that, just as Pandas avoids what is at issue, neither do the aforesaid secular proponents of evolutionism suffer themselves to distinguish between evolution as a scientific theory and evolutionism as the world-life view they espouse. We might regard them as "secular fundamentalists," such as Dawkins; they are to be found primarily in university sanctuaries. This failure to communicate effectively by the "creationists" and the corresponding inability or unwillingness to comprehend their legitimate concerns on the part of secular "evolutionists" forms a disquieting background against which the present-day evolution controversy thrives.

Neither the advocates of creationism nor their secular opponents bother to make the elementary distinction between evolution as the biological theory it is and the naturalistic Weltanschauung that is said to be its inevitable result.

As an index of the importance attached to intelligent design, this word couplet is used some sixty-five times in Pandas. With regard to its meaning, three defining statements go far to reveal the conceptual orientation represented by this term.

First, it is defined (p 150) as

the theory that biological organisms owe their origin to a preexistent intelligence,

God presumably being this preexistent intelligence. Now, all that this definition asserts is that the makers of Pandas subscribe to the Nicene and Apostles' Creed. They join hands therefore not only with Christians but also with Jews and Muslims in affirming the preexistence of the Creator and the divine authorship of all living creatures.

Only when Pandas reaches for precision do we see what its makers have in mind; we see, in fact, the main outlines of what the creationist movement has to offer.

Second, observing that "Darwinian evolution locates the origin of new organisms in material causes," Pandas declares that (p 14):

Intelligent design, by contrast, locates the origin of new organisms in an immaterial cause in a blueprint, a plan, a pattern devised by an intelligent agent.

Taking these first two statements together, I believe that we can infer the principal position taken by Pandas: the biblical doctrine of creation perforce means belief in intelligent design. And it is this position to which evangelicals are committed when they approve of Pandas. That is, those evangelicals who say that creation is opposed to evolution and who see in Pandas a commendable response to what they regard as the evils of evolution in the public schools and a worthy antidote to the cultural ills of our national life, also declare that belief in creation means belief in intelligent design, whatever that is.

And third, in a discussion of fossils, a further declaration offers yet more precision (p 99-100):

Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features intact--fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.

This is an explicit statement and it makes two points: natural causes do not account for the origin of life; and no evolution has occurred. Today, large numbers of evangelicals readily agree--God created the animals and plants in the beginning. There's been no evolution, they'll say, well, maybe a little variation within a species, but there's the end of it--even without inquiring into the meaning of the various terms in this statement. On the other hand, many evangelicals, of course, do not agree.

Aside from its pedagogic merits, which I grant are substantial, Pandas is actually a useful guide that helps us puzzle out the ideological impasse that now separates evangelicals, one from another, in the two camps I've described above. Moreover, the three definitive statements I have quoted define rather well what it is that evangelicals actually believe or do not believe with respect to the question of creation and evolution. Pandas helpfully albeit inadvertently defines what is meant in either case.

For instance, take that large, inchoate, and usually silent group of evangelicals I've described; they see not the slightest antithesis between creation and evolution. We have in Pandas a theological statement of their position when they subscribe to the first statement above, on creation; and in the second and third statements, on creationism, we see what it is they reject. Believing in the doctrine of creation, as do Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, they will never in the world regard "intelligent design" as a credible alternative to the theory of evolution for an explanation of biological diversity.

The evangelicals in my other camp, on the other hand, cannot fathom how any evangelical can possibly believe in creation and accept evolution at the same time. Much less can they possibly accept the historical evidence that the doctrine of creation actually opened the way for the emergence of the biological theory of evolution. Neither can numerous secular evolutionists, for that matter, comprehend such a verdict of the historical record--that the theory of evolution is a logical extension of the theological doctrine of creation. For this particular group of evangelicals, at any rate, opposition to evolution is an index of theological orthodoxy. Their position can be expressed by a rhetorical question: Does not creation by definition foreclose evolution?

In promulgating intelligent design as an alternative to evolution, Pandas I think has rendered an unintended and unforeseen service, not only in reminding us that these two opposing positions are extant among evangelicals today, but also in describing the views to which evangelicals are actually committed when they oppose the teaching of evolution.

VEXING QUESTIONS

While the three statements above qualify as definitions, they reveal surely more than the authors could have anticipated. They do, though, help us understand how the term is used in Pandas. As stated, Jews, Christians, and Muslims subscribe to the first. Then in the second, we learn that apparently this "blueprint" was acted upon by "an immaterial cause," which with its indefinite article would appear to exclude God.

Vexing questions at once arise. What is this "immaterial cause"? And where is this "blueprint"? Does this "blueprint" exist from all eternity as a substance that is separate from God? It is actually a reminder of the nineteenth century archetype which, by means of the Platonic Ideas, existing it was said beyond the natural realm, sought to explain the enigmas of vertebrate homologies. Of this, I shall have more to say anon.

Before proceeding with intelligent design itself, two similar terms, used in the second and third definitions that I have identified above, deserve a moment of scrutiny: "intelligent agent" and "intelligent agency." Possibly they are used as synonyms for God. But I do not think so, inasmuch as "agent" and "agency" also carry the meaning of a person who acts on behalf of another. And since the makers of Pandas hardly have in mind a human person, then, in context, this "agent" and "agency" of theirs seem to suggest that an immaterial and incorporeal divine deputy of some sort is on duty somewhere in nature acting on behalf of God. More precisely, the way these two terms are used raises the question of whether the makers of Pandas are not declaring, if inadvertently, that it was not God acting directly at the creation, but an immaterial and non-spatial entity that brought forth life. Is this the sort of thing that evangelical adversaries of evolution are anxious to believe?

Moreover, the action of "intelligent design" is described as occurring primarily in the origin of living things and their biological systems, but says nothing about its action in present-day organisms. Is one permitted to observe that this emphasis therefore savors of deism? This is a charge that its authors would deny with indignation--as though simply denying deism means making its absence so. And how intelligent design acted in origins, we are not to know.

Whatever the labors, location, or characteristics that Pandas attributes to these terms, they are not without theological difficulties for the consistent theist.

To return to intelligent design itself. This word couplet has acquired a certain vogue among evangelicals. An entire book has been devoted to the subject: Creation Hypothesis, Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer, edited by J. P. Moreland, in 1994. A chapter is entitled, "On the Very Possibility of Intelligent Design," by William A. Dembski; and Stephen C. Meyer makes frequent use of the term in his chapter, "The Methodological Equivalence of Design & Descent: Can there be a scientific 'Theory of Creation?'" Without doubt Meyer also brought "intelligent design" to the notice of many sympathetic readers of The Wall Street Journal with his Op-Ed piece, "A Scopes Trial for the '90s," of 6 December 1993. (It was this article that first alerted me to "intelligent design.") The next year, on 14 November, a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal, by Eric Larson, heralded Pandas with a headline that trumpeted, "A Textbook Proposes 'intelligent design.'"

Besides appearing in these publications, from time to time intelligent design has been the main subject of a number of seminars and meetings that have been open to the public. One of these was held at Wheaton College in April of 1997. Sponsored by the Science Department, the subject was "Information in the Living Cell--A Question of Design in Nature." Two of the four speakers on the panel were a historian of science and a biochemist from Chicago universities.

I should like to point out that proponents of intelligent design never cite biology textbooks that are used in introductory courses in high school and college. Yet, both in Pandas and in the above books and articles, they seem to think that the theory of biological evolution is taught in the public schools in a way that is inimical to Christian theism. As far as I can see in creationist literature, however, no one ever undertakes to be specific. We are never told which biology department, which public school, or which textbook uses evolution to promote an anti-religious bias. We are not to be made happy with the citation of even one passage in a biology textbook that affirms the alleged terrible things. One is entitled to infer therefore that the intelligent design people do not know how evolution is taught in the public schools.

At any rate, there is little question that "design proponents" feel that they have something worthwhile. For instance, Phillip E. Johnson, taking a liking for intelligent design, has made it familiar to a wide evangelical audience. He used the term five times in his Darwin on Trial (1993, 1994); four times in his Christianity Today article of 10 October 1994; and eleven times in his Reason in the Balance (1995); and again in his Easy to Understand Guide for Defeating Darwinism. Opening the Mind, in 1995. Finding the term entirely agreeable to his purposes, he professes surprise, however, that so many evangelicals of an academic persuasion do not find it agreeable at all. In his view, just because intelligent design implies "a supernatural entity" is no reason why it should not be a candidate for "scientific consideration" (Reason, 1995, p 90-91); especially, one gathers, among evangelicals. Aside from announcing here that God is an "entity," Johnson nowhere indulges his readers with a definition of what he thinks intelligent design might mean.

Of course, Johnson is unhappy with the way he thinks evolution is taught. But he, too, never cites a biology textbook or a biology department, of which he has knowledge, that he finds does not present evolution as the scientific theory it is.

In 1993, two searching critiques from an evangelical point-of-view exposed the philosophical and theological shortcomings of Johnson's position. The one article entitled, "Phillip Johnson on Trial: A Critique of His Critique of Darwin," was by Nancey Murphy, at Fuller Theological Seminary, in the March issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith; the other, "God and Evolution: An Exchange," was by Howard Van Till, at Calvin College, in the March issue of First Things. Both of these articles examine Johnson's understanding of natural selection and "naturalism." Their articles are definitive in their analyses of Johnson's published views, and make plain that his position is far from representing the mainstream of evangelical thought. Murphy, reviewing Johnson's Darwin on Trial, wrote that "it may create an inaccurate impression of the status of evolutionary biology." Van Till, reviewing Johnson's article, "Creator or Blind Watchmaker," wrote that Johnson's view ensures "that the gulf between the academy and the sanctuary will only grow wider." (See references below)

Notwithstanding Johnson's criticism of evangelicals (those described in my second camp above), who otherwise might be his allies, he is performing a much-needed public service by his outspoken critique of the well-connected secular academics who proclaim that science is the only reliable source of knowledge. In books and lectures, in season and out of season, he challenges the assumptions and logic of these apostles of "secularism," among whom he names biologists Francis Crick, the aforesaid Richard Dawkins, Douglas Futuyama, Donald Johanson, and William Provine; physicists Paul Davies and Steven Weinberg; and astronomer the late Carl Sagan (Reason, 1995, p 9, 76, 213, 217). His critique is timely and warranted, even taking into account his uncritical embrace of intelligent design--without troubling himself to vouchsafe a definition of this word couplet--and his fallacious reasoning that "evolutionism" and "naturalism" are the inevitable consequence of evolutionary theory (e.g., in 1993, p 116-117; and 1995, p 211).

HOW DO BIOLOGY TEACHERS REACT?

A pertinent question at once arises. The secularists whom Johnson rightly identifies are widely influential in the public understanding of science. But what effect do their views have on the way the subject of evolution is presented in a biology classroom? My impression is that the effect is minimal. High school biology teachers are busy people. They count it an achievement to get through four or five classes per day. They have no energy and little inclination to add to their work by promulgating an ideology, even if they had the time to read and figure out what those secularists are driving at. Moreover, as I have stated above, neither Johnson nor anyone else among the intelligent design people, as far as I am aware, has troubled to cite a connection between the views of one of these secularists and the actual wording of a passage that can be regarded as anti-theistic in a biology text. One sighs for a citation.

On the other hand, the creationists quite possibly are already capturing wide swaths of science education. High school biology teachers, busy people that they are, feel that they can make do without controversy. Accordingly, to be on the safe side many simply skip the chapters on evolution, and that's that. Those evangelicals who think this is a victory might ponder how the elimination from the science curriculum of the major organizing principle of biology can advance the state of American science education.

While an explicit definition of intelligent design apparently is not to be forthcoming, not from Phillip Johnson, at any rate, and possibly does not exist even among its proponents, anyone who is familiar with the anti-evolution literature of the last quarter-century or who is conversant at all with the historical precursors of creationism should have no difficulty in recognizing the similarity of "intelligent design" to the pre-Darwinian doctrine of "special creation." According to this doctrine, the species we see around us today have not changed appreciably since their creation by the deliberate and special acts of God.

In a series of published studies, I have already examined the historical antecedents of this doctrine (See Aulie 1972, 1974-75, 1982, 1983). In these articles, I took up the design argument, the fixity of species, micro- and macroevolution, and "blueprints" and archetypes, all of which are inherent in Pandas. I pointed out that "special creation," as a scientific concept, arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the work of the naturalists John Ray and Carolus Linnaeus; that the conceptual and philosophical orientation of creationism is rooted, not in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, but in ancient Greek thought, especially in the works of Plato and Aristotle. I showed how Platonic and Aristotelian ideas led to creationism, creatio ex nihilo to evolutionary theory; and observed that orthodox Christian theology in the late nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic offered a congenial reception for Darwin's theory.

My position is that the biological theory of evolution, far from being inimical to theism, is a logical extension of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic doctrine of creation.

One can easily substitute the words "special creation" for "intelligent design" in the three passages I have quoted above with no loss of meaning. While Pandas eschews religious language, "intelligent design" is redolent of the concepts and controversies of pre-Darwinian biology, in which the doctrine of special creation held sway. Whereas the authors have succeeded, as they intended, in avoiding religious language, including the avoidance of the language of Christian theism, they have unknowingly but inevitably attached their anti-evolutionary views to historical roots whose nourishment came, not from Christian theism, as they must surely wish to have been the case, but from ancient Greek thought. Although creationism frequently is chided by its secular opponents for its scientific shortcomings, Pandas merits a more spacious appraisal because it offers a valuable opportunity not only to enlarge upon those historical roots but also to examine in what sense Darwinian evolution constituted a revolution in thought.

In all of this, Pandas marks out the unusually sharp contours of the cardinal dilemma springing up in the present-day evolution controversy: that of balancing the requirements of science education with the necessity of nourishing religious values, and that in a predominantly secular culture.

Withal, the makers of Pandas have prepared for us a surprise, for sprinkled across the pages of their well-crafted book, in a manner that perhaps is a surprise to themselves, are unmistaken artifacts of the achievements of three prominent figures of Greek antiquity. On page after page we can stumble upon remnants of Plato and the Republic; of Aristotle and his Parts of Animals especially, and also his History of Animals and Metaphysics; and, yes, there's Galen and his Uses of the Parts. Actually, emblems of their presence everywhere should not be regarded as a surprise. Plato and Aristotle, whose views were codified and sanctified by the second century physician Galen, are the wellsprings of the conceptual orientation that characterizes the present-day creationism movement with its pre-Darwinian doctrine of "special creation." This is the doctrine that, willy-nilly, perforce had to energize, albeit inadvertently, the making of this attractive book.

It is not too much to say, therefore, that Pandas provides us with the edifying reminder that, absent the biological theory of evolution, the explanation of biological variability that is derived from Greek thought is the only alternative explanation available. Thus it was that the Darwinian revolution was waged indeed between two contending views of nature, not between science and Christian theism, as we are so often asked to believe. Such is the unforeseen and unintended demonstration wrought by Pandas.

But in order to sort out these matters and make them clear we must first acquaint ourselves with some metaphysics and biology from the ancient world. The presence of Plato, Aristotle, and Galen in Pandas will be the subject of my next effort.

To be continued.

FOOTNOTES

1. By "scientific creationism" I mean the views of those who 1. By "scientific creationism" I mean the views of those who oppose the teaching of the theory of biological evolution in the public schools, and who have it in their heads that evolution is against creation. In opposition to evolution, creationists maintain that at the creation God acted in a special way in the origin of the major groups of animals and plants, including humans; and that since the creation species have varied only within limits. Scientific creationism is also called "creationism" and "special creation." Creationism as an ideology represents a complex belief system that frequently goes beyond biblical proof-texts and views about the age of the Earth. Its origin dates from the 17th and 18th centuries and was made possible by the views of John Ray and Carolus Linnaeus, and should be distinguished from the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic doctrine of creation. I therefore reject any evolution-creation dichotomy. One does not "believe in" evolution. One "believes in" God.

 

2. For example, (a) Scientific American, July 1995, Science and the Citizen: "Darwin Denied";

(b) Gould 1992;
(c) Review of Pandas, in Science Teacher, April 1990;
(d) "Why Pandas and People? and "A View From the Past," in BookWatch Reviews, National Center for Science Education, vol. 2, Number 11, 1989 
(e) "Phillip E. Johnson Makes His Case," Newsletter of the California Committee of Correspondence, First Quarter 1994;
(f) Unpublished: Sonleitner, Frank J., "Intelligent Design according to Pandas," and "The New Pandas--Has Creationist Scholarship Improved," University of Oklahoma, Norman; McKown, Delos B., "Of Pandas and People: A Logical Analysis," Auburn University.

3. In chapter four, "Moral Interpretations of Evolution," Toumey elaborated felicitous distinctions among four groups of American Protestants as to their anti-evolutionary views and "different moral interpretation of evolution." Admiring this classification, I came up with my "Two Evangelical Camps--Two Responses to Evolution," which I've vouchsafed above.

Aulie, Richard P., "The Doctrine of Special Creation," American Biology Teacher, April, May 1972.

-----, "The Origin of the Idea of the Mammal-like Reptile," American Biology Teacher, November, December 1974; January 1975.

-----, "'The Post-Darwinian Controversies,'--An Extended Book Review Essay,"Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation (Perspectives of Science and Christian Faith), March, June, September, December 1982.

----, "Evolution and Special Creation: Historical Antecedents of the Controversy," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, December 1983.

Cavanaugh, Michael A., "Scientific creationism and rationality," Nature, May 1985, p 185-189.

Davis, Percival, Dean H. Kenyon, and Academic Editor Charles B. Thaxton, 1993 (1989), Of Pandas and People, The Central Question of Biological Origins, 2nd edition, Dallas, TX: Haughton Publishing Company.

Dawkins, Richard, "God's Utility Function," Scientific American, November 1995, p 80-85.

Gould, Stephen Jay, "Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge," Book Review of Darwin on Trial, in Scientific American, July 1992.

Johnson, Phillip E., "Evolution as Dogma; the Establishment of Naturalism," First Things, October 1990, p 15-28, with replies.

-----, "A Reply to My Critics: The Evolution Debate Continued," First Things, November 1990, p 50-52.

-----, 1993 (1991), Darwin on Trial, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

-----, "Shouting 'Heresy' in the Temple of Darwin, Naturalism has become the civil religion of our universities: A game plan for Christian response," Christianity Today, 24 October 1994, p 22-26.

-----, 1994, Defeating Darwinism: Opening the Mind, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

           -----, "Creator or Blind Watchmaker," First Things, January 1995.

-----, 1995, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law & Education, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

-----, 1995, Defeating Darwinism, Opening the Mind, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

-----, "The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism," First Things, November 1997, p 22-25.
----, 1997, An Easy-to-Understand Guide for Defeating Darwinism

--by Opening Minds, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

 

Larson, Erik, "Darwinian Struggle, Instead of Evolution, A Textbook Proposes 'Intelligent Design,'" Wall Street Journal, 14 November 1994.

Meyer, Stephen C., "A Scopes Trial for the '90s," Wall Street Journal, 6 December 1993.

Moore, James, "Keeping faith with Darwin," reviews of three books, in Times Higher Education, 3 November 1995: (a) Niles Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin: Th,e great Evolutionary Debate; (b) Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life; and (c) David Amigoni and Jeff Wallace, editors, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays.

Moreland, J. P., editor, 1994, The Creation Hypothesis, Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Murphy, Nancy, "Phillip Johnson on Trial: A Critique of His Critique of Darwin," Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, March 1993, p 26-36

Numbers, Ronald L., 1993 (1992), The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism, Berkeley: University of California Press.

        -----, 1993, "The Evolution of Scientific Creationism," p 31-73 in Bauman, Michael, editor, Man and Creation: Perspectives on Science and Theology, Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College Press.

Toumey, Christopher P., 1994, God's Own Scientists: Creationists in a Secular World, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Van Till, Howard J., "Is Special Creationism a Heresy?" Christian Scholar's Review, p 380-395.

-----, "God and Evolution: An Exchange" (Between Van Till and Johnson), First Things, June/July 1993, p 32-41.

-----, "The Creation: Intelligently Designed, or optimally equipped," Manuscript, 1998.

First. What causes the similarities we can observe among animals? For example, why do the vertebrates, such as fish, frogs, reptiles, birds, and mammals, including apes and humans, all possess the same identifiable bones in their skeletons?

And second, what are the causes of the purposive and goal- seeking behavior we can observe among animals? For example, why are the anatomical structures of a person's body, such as the hands, so well constructed for the work they do?

These are the great "why" questions for which inquiring naturalists from time immemorial have sought to find useful answers. My two questions carry entirely separate meanings, of course, as I shall show with the help of my favorite triumvirate of antiquity, Plato, Aristotle, and Galen, yet both are linked with such interrelated notions as order, pattern, purpose, teleology, end, and finalism. In undertaking to provide solutions to these puzzles, Pandas enters a well-travelled road that, retrospectively, begins with Darwin and extends back to Greek antiquity.

I suppose we all know that Darwin's answer posed both by the questions in the Pandas subtitle and by my two questions was descent with modification, producing population change by means of new adaptations; and when the new adaptations have been established in a population, we say that natural selection has occurred. Darwin's answer was a repudiation of the prevailing explanation, with its roots in Greek antiquity. And I suppose we all would agree moreover that Darwin's answer--of natural selection occurring in a nature that does not actually do any selecting--constituted an upheaval and revolution in thought.

Now, in order to satisfy our curiosity about that pre-Darwinian view--what it was and where it came from, the overturning of which constituted the upheaval--a knowledge of the first book in the Bible will not help; even though, as I would be the first to insist, the influence of the Bible has been central not only in the development of western culture as a whole but also in making possible the scientific revolution, which led to evolutionary theory.

What will help is a little metaphysics, which for Aristotle meant the highest principles for understanding the world. For example, in his Metaphysics (Barnes 1988, 980a,1; 982, 5-14), he declared that we all, "by nature desire to know...Since we are seeking this knowledge, we must inquire of what kind are the causes and the principles,...".

My two questions bring us to the design argument, which is very much in Pandas and which has always been a vivid part of the human experience. We do not observe design; rather, our minds are so constituted that we interpret sense experience as representing both order and purpose in nature, and we say that nature is replete with this evidence which our minds integrate as design. Swallows fly north in the spring, the human hand fits the objects it holds, blood nourishes the tissues, and all the rest. The non-theists of Greek antiquity, Plato in particular, were probably the first to formulate the design argument, and their manner of doing so cannot easily be gainsaid by theists of today.

As for theism, design is declared but not argued in numerous passages in the Bible, typically in Psalms 8 and 19, and Romans 1.21; as it is in the Qur'an in surahs 71.15-20 and 21.31-33. Indeed "design" is visible in nature by faith today by anyone with discerning eyes to see; it implies a continuity of knowledge between science and theology. Ancient pagans and modern theists join hands in affirming that order and purpose can be observed in nature, and are analogous and can be referred to the action of intelligence--that's the design argument.

The two questions I planted at the head of this section are separate, yet related. My first question assumes an observer who notices a particular pattern in nature, and wonders why. My second, while requiring an observer to decide what the purpose is, implies an external designing agent. According to theism, God has established the end to precede the means. For instance, in the understanding of religious faith, God designed the tissues to need nourishment, and also designed the blood and circulatory system to supply the effective cause of that nourishment. Of course, that statement would not be a scientific statement.

From antiquity to the present, those who pondered such questions declared that the uniformities and contrivances they admired in nature were produced in one of three ways. First, design was seen as the product of non-theistic agencies either inherent in nature or existing apart from nature. This was the solution settled on by my three ancients, Plato, Aristotle, and Galen, whose presence in Pandas is betrayed, as I shall presently show, by tell-tale phrases and verbal expressions. Then, second, with the advent of monotheism, design was declared to have resulted from causal laws established by the Creator in the beginning, a solution favored by deists in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And last, as implied in Pandas today, design is said to mark the direct and purposive action of the Creator, although the makers of Pandas would substitute the words "intelligent design" for the action and explicit acknowledgement of God.

ASA GRAY and PANDAS

I entered the quotation on the title page as a reminder that all the religious questions arising today concerning evolution were given good answers in the decades after the publication of the Origin of Species, in 1859. We are going over ground already traversed admirably by Asa Gray, conservative Christian, botanist at Harvard University, founder of the on-going Manual of Botany, and friend of Charles Darwin. He led the way in introducing Darwin to the American public, emphasizing as he did so the agreement between evolutionary theory and Christian theology.

In his Darwiniana, in 1872, Gray brought together the numerous articles he had published on behalf of Darwin.(1) In particular, he called attention to the distinction between "finalism" and natural selection (1965, 1872, p 295). Both cases accounted for the appearance of adaptations, or "ends," such as the hand, red blood cells, white feathers, and the like, which are useful to the animal possessing them. Of the two cases, Darwin's theory of natural selection in his view provided the superior explanation; this was so because of the concordance of natural selection he saw, not only with the observed facts but also with the biblical concept of design. "We think that a theistic view of Nature is implied in his book," he said in 1860 (1965, p 119).

As for finalism, Gray held the theological belief that design could be observed in nature. But he rejected the particular view of finalism which I believe is held by Pandas, the view that the "end" somehow preceded the observable biological actions that led to the adaptation in question. That is, he disagreed with the proposition that the purpose of the hand preceded the anatomical and physiological stages that led to it. According to this argument, a biologist, in order to have a scientific explanation, need only say that God was the direct cause of all adaptations, including the hand, which together suggested "design." Gray the Christian said no; to suppose so was "a confusion of thought," which Augustine would have "savored of heterodoxy" (1965, 1972, p 294). But, as said, he did not entirely exclude finalism, only its usage in science to account for adaptations; nature did exhibit manifold evidence of divine design. Darwin's theory, he maintained, left final causes and special design, "just where they were before" (1965, 1972, p 119).

Because Asa Gray believed in design, one would think that creationists would be his devoted followers. But, imperturbed, the creationist movement today neglects his line of reasoning. Nor can I imagine that the secular opponents of creationism would venture anywhere near Gray's conclusions--which imply belief in God. Still, Gray's Darwiniana remains a mute witness of a better way.(2)

The remainder of this study consists of three parts, on Plato, Aristotle, and Galen, as they are reflected in Pandas. The first part is the longest, a discussion of the meaning of Platonic ideas and where they are to be found in Pandas. The second will be on Aristotle's teleology with examples of it in Pandas. And the third will be the Aristotelian influence on Galen, and the reminder of Galen in an anatomical explanation found in Pandas.

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First: P L A T O

eternal ideas and earthly varieties

Plato, in the fourth century B.C., was likely the first to articulate the design argument. To use more precise language, the "argument from design" states that we are able to recognize marks of intelligence in nature, and that from these we can infer the existence of God responsible for what we observe. This argument moreover rests on the premise that the objects we observe in nature are analogous to human artifacts. Pandas exhibits similar reasoning, which appears as a fundamental theme throughout.

In the Timaeus (29d-30a), Plato's "Demiurge" acts like a divine craftsman to impose regularities on pre-existing chaos and does so by using co-existing "Forms" or "Ideas" as models and guides. In the vivid imagery of the Republic (Book VII, 512A-516B), human beings dwelt as prisoners in an underground cave, seeing only images of themselves cast on the walls of their prison by the unseen light behind them. In other words, the world of eternal ideas, the light, was more real than the perishable world of sense experience, represented by the shadows. And the world of sense experience was an imperfect imitation of the eternal Forms.

In a subsequent alteration, one that became crucial for biology and for present-day creationism, Plato's eternal Forms or Ideas were transformed into thoughts of God. I believe this was the doing of Plotinus, who was a rather pleasant pagan of the third century A.D.(Enneads, III,9,i). (I see no connection, by the way, between the incorporeality of Plato's "ideas" and the spiritual immateriality understood by monotheism.)

Even though Plato was not centrally concerned with biological questions, he believed that nature could not be understood in material terms alone. His views exerted a predominant and guiding influence on the development of biology across the ages. The Platonic "Idea" became an explanatory concept with powerful implications and uses, beginning in the Renaissance, when the natural sciences began to take shape as separate disciplines, and extending until the time of Darwin and even beyond.

Anatomists of the Renaissance were among the first to be puzzled by the striking similaritites they noticed among vertebrate skeletons. An illustration published in 1555 by a French physician named Pierre Belon shows skeletons of a bird and a man. Another illustrationn, in 1572, shows side-by-side skeletons of a frog, fox, mouse, squirrel, mole, and hedgehog; it was prepared by a physician in Nuremberg, Germany, named Volcher Coiter. (See Figures 1, 2) These two illustrations are a triumph of the engraver's art, for the anatomical details were carved in wood; the woodcuts reveal the fascination experienced by the Renaissance anatomists and physicians when they were able to identify the same bones in the same locations in dissimilar creatures. Five centuries before the Origin of Species, these two Renaissance pioneers had no explanation, although the Latin translations of Plato, Aristotle, and Galen then beginning to come off the new printing presses would be a help.

Of course, the similarities that aroused curiosity in those days are commonplace in high school biology texts today.

For Plato, the world of eternal ideas was more real than the world of sense experience, more real even than the vertebrate skeletons admired by those Renaissance physicians. If Plato had been a student of comparative anatomy, he might have said that the five classes of vertebrates (fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals) were all of them copies of an eternal Eidos, and that vertebrates were copies made by the Demiurge using chaos as raw material. The eternal "Ideas" gave natural objects their "essences"--meaning that which is invariable in a group--as distinguished from changing appearances or variations; similar members of a group therefore share an "essence."

For the Platonic zoologist, in conceptualizing why similar animals could be placed together in the same group, what was real was not the animals themselves, for they were transient and varying. What was real and unchanging was the eternal "eidos" that existed in the timeless realm beyond nature; animals themselves were but flickering images cast by the light of the Idea on the walls of a cave. In due course botany would be interpreted the same way. Similar plants flourished within discrete groups because they were varying expressions of eternal "Ideas" that existed independently beyond nature, outside our world of sense experience.

In France, Germany, and England in the latter part of the eighteenth century and in the decades before the publication of the Origin, transcendental anatomists, seeking to work out problems of similarity and variability, employed tell-tale language, such as "archetype," "type," and "unity of plan."

In the decades immediately preceding the publication of the Origin of Species, in 1859, Platonism provided the only answer to my first question above, that of interpreting similarities in vertebrate osteologies. And today Platonism is the only answer available to the makers of Pandas to explain vertebrate similarities, or homologies, as I shall show below.

A striking example of Platonic language in biology, turning up in London on the eve of the Origin, appeared in the massive work, On the Nature of Limbs (1849), by the British anatomist Richard Owen, a vigorous opponent of Darwin. Owen employed the expression "archetype" in order to explain why vertebrate skeletons were similar, and as part of his explanation he inaugurated the useful term "homology" for these similarities (1848).

He declared:

The Divine mind which planned the Archetype also foreknew all its modifications (1849, p 46). It represents...what Plato would have called the "Divine idea" on which the osseous frame of all vertebrate animals...has been constructed (1848, p 172).

In these passages, Owen certainly was forthright in crediting the source of his explanation. I sometimes think that creationists today could do worse than to emulate Owen in this respect. He decided that the appendages of all vertebrates, whether a human, lizard, amphibian, or bird, were but varying anatomical expressions of the same eternal "archetype," the same idea modified, as it were, for different locomotor functions. In his view this archetype existed as a divine reality, beyond and wholly apart from nature.(3) He even published a picture of what this archetype of his would look like (See Figure 3; from Owen 1849, p 87).

Owen's work was magisterial; it marked the consummation of a long tradition of European anatomy, which interpreted uniformities in nature by means of transcendent principles. But it was influential only for a relatively short time; it was overtaken and superseded by the Darwinian revolution. Today, the concept "homology" remains useful in biology, of course, but in a different sense: structural similarities denote the same ancestry, not the same archetype; not an imaginary "idea" beyond nature, but a tangible fossil to signify a real ancestor in the past.

We are told on pages 19-20 of Pandas, that Carolus Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist, in connection with his placment of flying insects with other insects, used the term "homology" for "similarity in structure." This is news to me. I thought I had an acquaintance with the literature of Linnaeus, both the Latin and the English translations, sufficient to have run across that particular usage. A specific Linnean citation would have been helpful.

All the same, in 1846 Richard Owen, distinguishing between analogue and homologue, said that: "There exists doubtless a close general resemblance in the mode of development of homologous parts," which generally were determined by their relative position and typically in osseous systems; and he defined a homologue as "the same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function" (in 1847, from 1846, p 174, 175, passim). Panda's reference to botanist Linnaeus notwithstanding, Owen is generally credited with the inaugurating the term homology.

But ideas were in flux, even before the Origin. Thomas Henry Huxley, no Platonist, he, effectively transformed the Platonic "type" into an effective pedagogic device, still used today. When the young Huxley was in the British navy aboard H. M. S. Rattlesnake on a South Seas expedition, in 1846-50, he made a special study of cephalous mollusca. In publishing his results, in 1852, he ignored metaphysics while retaining remnants of the language of metaphysics; he esteemed the "type" as an empiric summary of the structural congruities that unite a group of similar animals. "I make no reference to any real or imaginary 'ideas' upon which animal forms are modelled," he said. Instead, for him the "archetype" was a diagram, as it were "a geometrical theorem, and like it, at once imaginary and true" (Foster and Lankester, 1852, I, p 152-193, quotes: 176,177)

By this means and with his customary skill Huxley introduced a method of exposition that can be found in any biology classroom today.(4)

A Platonic "archetype" in a biology classroom? Today? Yes, on any day of the week and all across the land, industrious biology teachers who have never read a word of Plato or Huxley can be found employing the pedagogic device that was invented by Plato and endorsed by Huxley. Biology teachers render homage when they draw a diagram on the board to summarize the principal traits of a given phylum, and point out that the diagram represents the attributes diagnostic for the phylum in question. In this they become an unconscious disciple of Thomas Henry Huxley; but the priority would be Plato's.

With so much Platonism about, it should not be surprising to stumble over phrases in Pandas that remind us of Plato's "Ideas." In fact Pandas has two sets of tell-tale language--on similaries and species--which illustrate the concept of design in creationism. The first set consists of about seven passages that take part in explanations of similarities: why many biochemical processes are similar, and why the vertebrate skeletons are similar; and the second set, with a more generous helping of some seventeen passages, deals with the nature of species. It is well for us to scrutinize these passages because they illustrate the dependence of present-day creationism for its conceptual orientation, not on Christian theism, but on Greek sources.

BIOCHEMICAL SIMILARITIES

The argument concerning similarities takes shape early on in Pandas when its makers draw an analogy with human artifacts in order to declare, with a certain logic, that all cars, all tools, and all Rembrandts, "are derived from a common design or pattern in the mind of the person making them" (p 32-33). So far so good; one can acknowledge the logic. Then, pressing forward with "Biochemical Similarities" among different living organisms, they state that the actions of "an intelligent agent" are entirely logical in designing these processes. Given the interdependence of ecological webs and food chains in which living things dwell, it was logical and also efficient for this "intelligent agent" of theirs to design the organisms "with a common biochemical base" (p 36).

Other operative expressions are "design requirements" (p 122), "different engineering solutions" (p 125), and "choices" (p 133). Unfortunately, these terms lack theological precision. Take the declaration on page 125: "...an engineer can choose any of several different engineering solutions to overcome a single design problem." Since in this analogy God is an engineer, do the "solutions" chosen by the engineer exist independently in eternity, or were they created? In other words, is God constrained by necessity? If so, this would undermine His omnipotence. The makers of Pandas have repaired to safer theological ground, on page 138, however, where they attribute the origin of "similarities in biochemical pathways" to the action of "a common designer"; this time the pathways appear to have had an origin and therefore we can rest assured that they can be neither coexistent nor coeternal with the deity. However, they leave safe ground in discovering:

VERTEBRATE SIMILARITIES

The discussion of vertebrate homologies is somewhat mystifying since most of it is devoted to reviewing the shortcomings of the Darwinian explanation. It is only toward the close of the chapter on homologies (also p 27-33), totalling twenty-seven pages that the writers get round to their own explanation, not unlike an afterthought, of what one would think would be a significant element in their argument. Possibly they encountered unforeseen difficulties in formulating a plausible explanation that would fit intelligent design. And when they manage this feat, their choice of words raises interesting questions.

On page 133, for instance, in striving for a suitable alternative to the evolutionary explanation for the similarities to be observed among vertebrate osteologies, the writers declare:

As design proponents look at homology today, it appears likely that there must exist a small vocabulary of forms, a vocabulary limited by the functional constraints of a particular set of design objectives...This vocabulary of forms or structures would be much like our vocabulary of words...choices of individual discretion would remain open to a designing intelligence.

If I understand this passage in context correctly, it is the position of Pandas that when God created the five different classes of vertebrates, these "forms," whatever they are, were already in existence and available for divine consultation. God, seeking guidance during the creation, created the five different classes of vertebrates to match one of these "forms," with appropriate variations, or else one form per vertebrate class, and this is why we find similar skeletons among them.

It is likely that well-meaning Christians who are anxious about evolution these days, on reading the high-sounding passage quoted above, are comforted and impressed, and conclude that they have come upon a worthy support for theism and a good argument against evolution.

But is one permitted to ask a question or two about these "forms"? Were they created? Or do they exist coeternally with God? Or are they thoughts in the mind of God? If they are coeternal or if they are thoughts in the mind of God, do they compromise the oneness of the divine essence? Perhaps God, like the creation, is composed of parts. This is a good place to notice that the "oneness" of God--a fundamental doctrine of Judaism, Christian, and Islam--sometimes has a bearing on the validity of certain concepts that turn up in science, like Platonism. Or don't these questions matter anymore? It would have been well had the makers of Pandas chosen an operative term less ambiguous and less fraught with theological eccentricity. The Dictionary of the History of Ideas devotes ten pages to "form" (1973, II, p 216-225), and yes, Plato's "Ideas" can be translated by "forms." Little wonder that this passage in Pandas was not granted prominence in the explanation of homologies. One can sympathize with the makers of Pandas for the impoverished character of the concepts they were obliged to choose.

Before turning to the Platonic species concept in Pandas, we need a bit more history and metaphysics.

Just as the pre-Darwinian explanation of vertebrate similarity was Platonic in origin and character, the species concept, too, has an ancient and fraught lineage. The literature on Platonic influence upon the biological species concept is vast; what I have to say here in my analysis of Pandas is scarcely original. For instance, Michael T. Ghiselin in his Triumph of the Darwinian Method (1969), in a perceptive section on "A Revolution in Metaphysics," described how Darwin's theory replaced "an intellectual tradition long dominant in Western thought"; an analysis of this tradition, he said, must extend to "the influence of Plato and Aristotle" (p 49-50) in biology.

Moreover, it is with great precision and depth that Ernst Mayr, the peerless authority in Darwin studies, in his Growth of Biological Thought, Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (1982), explores the species concept in its historical context; he points out that Plato "had a particularly deleterious impact on biology," in part because of his "belief in constant eide, fixed ideas, separate from and independent of the phenomena of appearance" (p 304-305). Not least, Michael Ruse, in his Darwinian Revolution, Science Red in Tooth and Claw (1981, 1979), writes succinctly of Platonism in pre-Darwinian biology and analyzes the Platonism in Owen's thought (Ruse, p 122-126, passim).

As far as I can make out, neither Ghiselin, Mayr, nor Ruse, in discussing the influence of Platonism in pre-Darwinian biology, were bent on subverting the Christian gospel.

Actually, from antiquity up to the Renaissance, there was neither need nor possibility to segregate animals and plants into discrete groups, such as species and genera. Botanists collected plants primarily for their medical properties, not to publish taxonomies; in the absence of the printing press illustrated herbals had to be copied by hand, with the risk of errors creeping in, as they did; the term "species" as a category was often used in logic and metaphysics, or it could mean an ill-defined "kind," which could be either animal, plant, or mineral. And with the out-standing folklore belief in spontaneous generation, a precise definition of plant and animal species was further precluded.

IN THE RENAISSANCE

Then, beginning in the Renaissance, four key developments heralded the emergence of the pre-Darwinian species concept. First, the rise of botany and zoology provided multitudes of new and puzzling specimens. Second, translations of Plato and Aristotle offered both coherence and interpretations for these discoveries. Third, the invention of the printing press facilitated for the first time the uniform promulgation of precise descriptions of species. And not least, fourth, was the amalgamation of the Platonic eidos with the doctrine of creation derived from monotheism.

The Platonic exegesis of Genesis was congenial to the seventeenth-century naturalist John Ray, who was the founder of the doctrine of special creation. In 1686 he said: "The number of true species in nature is fixed and limited and, as we may reasonably believe, constant and unchangeable from the first creation to the present day" (quoted in Raven, 1942, p 234). The Platonic conception was congenial especially to Carolus Linnaeus who, in his Critica Botanica, in 1737, declared (Hort, 1938, p 196-197; Larson 1971, p 97):

All the species recognized by the botanists came forth from the Almighty Creator's hand, and the number of these is now and always will be the same, while every day the new and different florists' species arise from the true species so-called by the botanists, and when they have arisen they finally revert to the original forms. Accordingly to the former have been assigned by nature fixed limits, beyond which they cannot go, while the latter display without end the infinite sport of nature.

LOUIS AGASSIZ

Such language was congenial also to the the prominent nineteenth-century Swiss-American naturalist, Louis Agassiz, who was on the Harvard University faculty when the Origin of Species was published, in 1859. Incidentally, he was instrumental behind the scenes in the founding of the Museum of Natural History, in Chicago. Platonist that he was, he declared in his prominent and influential Essay on Classification, in 1859, that (1962, p 136):

"All organized beings exhibit in themselves all those categories of structure and of existence upon which a natural system may be founded, in such a manner that, in tracing it, the human mind is only translating into human language the Divine thoughts expressed in nature in living reality."

Naturally Agassiz did not much care for the Origin of Species when his copy arrived at Harvard. Nor, of course, did he much care for the views of his colleague, Asa Gray. The Agassiz position, as quoted above, illustrates how the Platonic "eidos" became the largely unchallenged leitmotif in the development of the species concept until the publication of Darwin's Origin. And this theme persists today in creationism. We can discern the ghost of "eidos" whenever creationists proffer their understanding of either the species concept or an explanation of what they regard as the biblical "kind." According to this conception, the "kind" means that species are discrete, well-defined, and they are sharply separated from each other. They have no hereditary relatedness among them because each is the lineal descendant of its ancestral first pair that was created ex nihilo. Because the "ideas" are eternal, their temporal representations, though less real, are constant and unchanging. This means that species are "fixed."

A species has varieties, yes; they are retained within the limits of a "kind," and are so maintained because they share an ideal connection with an eternal idea that coexists with the creator. Individuals are defined as members of a "kind," not primarily because they possess any hereditary or reproductive relatedness among them, but because they are varying representations of an incorporeal and unchanging idea in the mind of God.

My interpretation here of the influence of Plato in the history of biology--to be precise, of the Platonic origin of the pre-Darwinian species concept--is not a needless digression from the main business at hand, least of all is it an unwarranted display of erudition. Instead it is intended to bring out a cardinal feature to be discovered in the foundation of present-day creationism, and to show how the image and substance of Platonism have been embraced willy-nilly by the makers of Pandas in their struggle to formulate an alternative to the Darwinian interpretation of species.

Fully to apprehend this embrace, I turn to the handling of the species concept in Pandas.

Some twenty-one passages in Pandas bring us right into the realm of Plato. They employ the same manner of language that characterizes the pre-Darwinian Platonic concept of species. This is the concept, as stated, that took shape and became predominant in biology in the period between the Renaissance and the Darwinian revolution.

First, we are told that speciation produces "only limited change" (p 19, also 20, 75, 78, 85), and much of the variability we see around us "does not indicate even microevolution" (p 75). Second, species are "distinct and stable" (p 88) because they are hemmed in by fixed boundaries, "distinct gaps" (p 40) separate species, change occurs therefore "within limits" (p 67, also 98); this is so because, as it is explained, natural selection "serves as a force, not to change species, but to preserve them" (p 85, also 67, 76). Third, because the "major groups of organisms had their own origins" species have experienced "no significant change since their beginning" (p 78, 85). And fourth, the tell-tale word "type" occurs in seven different places, further disclosing the idealized and pre-Darwinian concept of species found in creationism. For instance, Pandas speaks of "diversity within types of living things" (p 19), and the separate creation of the "basic types of organisms" (p 65), provides as an example "the ideal sparrow body type" (73), emphasizes "different types of living organisms" (p 98), and the organism's "body type" (p 75 [2]).

Following my exposition of Platonism, it now remains a question whether these references to species I have identified in Pandas are not consonant with the Platonic conception of species that characterized pre-Darwinian biology.

Moreover, it would appear on page 78 that the makers of Pandas acknowledge the influence that I have been expounding when they refer to "Plato's concept of changing essences, or types." In the same passage, however, they promptly forsake this morsel of historical rectitude in exchange for a dubious assertion that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was believed by some that species were "unchangeable." While this statement is no doubt technically correct, some there were who believed as much, it is certainly misleading. They neglect to say who they think might have held this view. Did they mean Linnaeus?

It is true that Linnaeus declared, in 1737, that "all the species recognized by the botanists came forth from the Almighty Creator's hand." But Linnaeus, excellent botanist that he was, did not stop there; he spent the next forty some years accommodating his initial view to the accumulating evidence that species could and did change. Although in 1753 Linnaeus listed a relatively small number of species in his Species Plantarum, as time went on both the number of species and instances of their intermingling rapidly multiplied. Not only Linnaeus but naturalists on both sides of the Atlantic noticed cases of intermediacy. The literature of the period is rife with such reports.

Beginning with the unsubstantiated claim in Pandas that naturalists of the past considered species to be "unchangeable," this misleading theme runs through the chapter on "The Origin of Species," ending with another deceptive statement that the world is "filled with distinct and stable species" (p 88). Here is another case where neglecting the historical record leads to a serious mistake in explaining a present-day biological problem.

TEACHING PLATONISM IN BIOLOGY

But then, multitudes of biologists who arraign creationists these days for their scientific shortcomings are actually in league with creationists in the belief that nothing important happened before the time of Darwin. While the genesis of this state of affairs lies in part in poor biology teaching in the universities, in poor or no theology preached in the churches, and not least, in the declarations of secular biologists that science provides the only reliable source of knowledge, the outcome of these transactions is plain.

what happens in science education can be seen in the picture in the 18 March 1996 issue of Time magazine in the article entitled, "Dumping on Darwin," on page 81 (See Figure 4). On the blackboard behind the students is the word "creation" in large letters, written there no doubt to symbolize true science, and the caption explains that public schools teach creationism subtly with books like Of Pandas and People, the cover of which is shown in an insert. Bad theology no less than bad science are misleading those unfortunate students.

The pre-Darwinian idealogical insistence on distinct boundaries between species, held tenaciously by the creationist movement today, contrasted with the numerous and accumulating examples of hybridization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perhaps ironically, this insistence on boundaries stimulated efforts to explain the unmistakable evidence of hybridization; this contradiction between the expected and the observed achieved fruition and resolution with the publication, in 1859, of Darwin's Origin of Species.

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Second: A R I S T O T L E--

goal-seeking and final causation

At the head of this section, I identified two questions that have been central to biology since antiquity, the first, dealing with similarities and species, the second, with purpose and goal-seeking behavior; and I contend that Pandas treats these two questions in the context of the time-honored design argument. In my discussion of the first, I identified Platonism as the source of the interpretation we find in Pandas for both similarities and the species concept.

Admitting the Platonic influence in Pandas, the overlap between my two questions continues as we make inquiry whether the explanation advanced by Pandas for purposive and goal-seeking actions attributed to animal behavior (the subject of my second question) might also have its source in Greek antiquity.

ARISTOTELIAN FINALISM

I now wish to assemble evidence I find in Pandas for a basically Aristotelian explanation for so-called purpose in nature, which can also be called "teleology" or, as I prefer, "finalism." This concept, "finalism," means that a structure or function has been designed to benefit an organism, or that a behavior is directed toward a particular future goal. Finalism or teleology becomes a mysterious business when we stop to think about what it actually means; it means that a future and unfulfilled condition is the cause of a present action. But how can the future be a cause of the present? How can a future condition be both cause and effect?

Pandas endorses teleology as a proper biological concept with the definition: "an organism is designed for certain functions or purposes" (p 122). In other words, the function or purpose precedes the organism. Thus we are informed on page 144 that "... the purpose of the blood clotting system is to quickly form a clot at the sight [sic] of a cut ..." That is, the purpose precedes and causes the clot, and is also the effect of the preceding clot-making sequence. I've no doubt that many sincere Christians, reading such a beguiling statement as this in Pandas, will conclude that they are reading a strong, scientific argument against evolution.

In the "Note to Teachers," Mark D. Hartwig and Stephen C. Meyer ask their readers to believe that their "design hypothesis" is not intended to be religious (p 161). In a sense they are correct, for it has more to do with Aristotle than with the Bible. My contention is that, while such design arguments as the blood clotting statement above are perfectly consonant with belief in Providence, as biological reasoning the arguments are Aristotelian.

But to sort that out, to distinguish the Aristotelian from the theistic, we need more metaphysics from Aristotle, that great biologist of all time, especially the metaphysics to be found in his biological treatises, History of Animals and Parts of Animals (see Barnes 1988). Believing as he did that the world was eternal, Aristotle did not have to bother himself with the origin of species, as did Darwin, but he did wonder why animals behaved as they did and why they possessed so many different kinds of structures. Parts of his inquiry are to be found in his masterpiece, History of Animals, where he brings out the functional integrity of many different animals with accounts of how their anatomical parts work together.

It is in his Parts of Animals, however, where he gave system to the observations he made of marine and land animals, and where we can find an elaboration of his system of causation. This work is especially pertinent to our understanding of why Darwin's theory was revolutionary and why Pandas stands in opposition.

When Aristotle wanted to know why an animal has a particular structure and behaves as it does, he had two queries from which to choose: a) What purpose does a particular organ or function serve, and b) What antecedents led to the particular organ or event? The first query represents the teleological explanation by means of "final causes," which remained unchallenged until the Renaissance, while the second, which took hold during the Renaissance, we would call "scientific." Why he chose the first query I do not know, although, as certain passages in the Parts make clear, he was aware of the second option; for example, his references to Empedocles in 640a22, and to Democritus in 641a5015 (see Barnes 1988).

AND PROVIDES ANSWERS

In order to illustrate Aristotle's teleology, I have chosen seven examples from among the myriad explanations he gives in the Parts of Animals (Barnes 1988) to show how he answered the query he chose.

(One) Among humans, eyelashes are "like palisades," he said; "their purpose is to keep out things that try to get in" (658b18-21). (Two) All human viscera are covered by protective membranes. The heart and brain have the "biggest and strongest membranes" because these organs "have the supreme controlling power over the life of the body," and "need the most protection" (673b4-11). (Three) In humans, "in making the buttocks fleshy, Nature made them useful for resting the body" (689b12-15). (Four) Humans have hands, Aristotle maintained, because they are the most intelligent animals. "Hands are an instrument; and Nature, like a sensible human being, always assigns an organ to the animal that can use it" (687a12-17). (Five) Among viviparous quadrupeds, whose jaws project forward to form a snout, the organs of smell occur in the snout, "this being the only possibility" (658b27-30). (Six) Some vivipara do not have horns, but "Nature has given them claws or teeth to fight with" (662b25-35). (Seven) Some birds have long legs because they live in marshes. This shows that "Nature makes the organs to suit the work they have to do" (694b12-14).

I trust that by now we would all agree that, of the two queries above, Darwin chose the one about antecedents, and that his answer was wholly non-Aristotelian; he eschewed finalism. I am sure that creationists will disagree with me, but I think that Aristotelian finalism constitutes one of the chief ingredients of creationism. They would declare that, on the contrary, their answers to the query about purposes are perfectly scientific. I think further that the views of the non-theist Aristotle are actually the only alternative for many well-meaning evangelical Christians today who are uneasy about Darwin.

Now, in aspiring to see what connection might exist between Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. and both creationists and evolutionists today, clarity requires that we understand what is meant when we say that Aristotelian "final causes" are not scientific; why biology chooses the second query above, about antecedents, and not the first. Don't birds have long legs because they live in marshes? Don't eyelashes keep out the dust? As for the posture of birds, Aristotle explained that "Nature has made the ischium long" (Barnes 1988, 695a11). Final causes are not treated kindly these days in biology departments, possibly because the works of Aristotle are not widely read.

Aristotle discussed the building of a house as an example of what he meant (Parts of Animals, Barnes 1988, 639b26-640a4). A carpenter sets materials into such and such a position until he produces a desired "End," which is the house he lives in and the future existence or plan of which is the cause of the foregoing. It is the same in "Natural science"; we deal "with what is going to be." Aristotle arrived at his conclusions, he said, by observing many examples of animals with the same structure and living habits. "To study Nature we have to consider the majority of cases, for it is either in what is universal or what happens in the majority of cases that Nature's ways are to be found" (646a21, 663b26-29). You can scarcely argue with that; we call it induction. Many observations therefore gave him the warrant to say that: "Whatever Nature makes she makes to serve some purpose"(Barnes 1988, 641b12,13).

ARISTOTLE'S HAND

The discussion of the human hand (Barnes 1988, 687a2-687b26) in the Parts of Animals I think is a good example of the Aristotelian concept of final causation. Why do humans have hands in the first place, he wondered? Their existence did not make humans intelligent, he was sure of that; no, it was because humans are the most intelligent animal that they have hands. Nature gave the organ to the animal that could use it. We'd expect an intelligent animal to have many abilities, and "Nature" indeed has provided an instrument, the hand, with many uses. It can be a weapon or a tool; it can seize and hold; it can press and lift up. It is not in one piece, but comes in five branches. One finger is sideways and is short and thick, not long, and so the hand can grasp. Fingernails also are "a good piece of planning" (687b23).

Thus, by the final cause Aristotle meant the purpose of an anatomical structure or the end result of a process; the hand can grasp. He called this the telos, whence comes our teleology. And his other three causes, the Efficient, the Formal, and the Material, served to fulfill that end; that is, the growth of the hand, its shape, and the bones and connections themselves were directed toward the telos. In the Parts of Animals Aristotle makes clear that "the 'Final' Cause" is the most important in his system of causation; it "is the Cause for the sake of which [sic] the thing is formed, and the Cause to which the beginning of the motion [sic] is due" (639b14-18). "Nature has admirably contrived the actual shape of the hand" (687b5-6).

In other words, Nature never does anything in vain. Aristotle uttered this pleasant aphorism so often it was as though he was afraid that the future would forget his lesson.(4) There was little risk of that. His doctrine of "finalism" became a central feature of the "design argument," which was embraced by Christian theology and which guided biology until the time of Darwin. And it enjoys a renaissance of sorts today in creationism.

"NATURE"

But what did Aristotle mean by "Nature"? Not surely, one might notice, what is meant today. I think we would say that "nature" means a collection of objects that we can investigate empirically--atoms, mountains, stars, plants, animals, and the like--all of which are open to our sense experience; and "natural history" would be a descriptive account of live animals and plants.

But this is not, I think, what we have in Aristotle. The History of Animals and Parts of Animals are something more than a descriptive account of live animals, although the two books are supremely that. He is concerned, rather, with whatever makes an animal behave as it does; something inside the animal, as distinguished from an external constraint. A corpse is not a man, he explained, even though it has the same shape; neither was a hand made of bronze a hand (Barnes 1988, 640b35-37). He first asked the question that is with us today: What does it mean to be human?

We have again the commonsense Aristotle, for whom the essence of an animal is even more important than its Material Cause. We use Aristotle's way of speaking when we say, for intance, that a neighbor is affectionate by nature; or that it is in the nature of cats to fight. And what was this essence that gives an animal its character? This I think is the meaning of his explicit statement: "a thing's 'nature' is much more a first principle (or 'Cause') than it is matter" (642a17-20).

"SOUL"

This brings me back to what Aristotle did with Plato's "Idea." Believing that matter alone could not account for purpose, Aristotle reached for the eternal Ideas in Plato's transcendant realm, and lodged them in the temporal and natural realm. What he did was to transform Plato's eidos into "Soul," which in his view accounted for an animal's behavior and its essence, and which he located within the animal body. This, I believe, is the meaning of the numerous references to Soul in the Parts of Animals.

It was "Soul" that gave an animal its characteristic essence, that which was its distinguishing trait. Humans were distinguished by the possession of a Rational Soul, which therefore placed them "above" all other animals. Plants had a Vegetable Soul, and Animals, existing on his scale of nature, had an Animal Soul. As employed by Aristotle, Soul was a non-material and non-spatial agency or entity residing within a living organism--not, by the way, the "immortal soul" of later Christian theology.

ANIMISM

In consequence of his use of Soul, Aristotle promulgated an immanent view of teleology; he did not infer from an orderly nature to a source of order beyond nature (a kind of pantheism). Nor did he distinguish between living and non-living nature, as we do today. In the Physics he gave an example of what he meant (Barnes 1988, 199b30-31):

The best illustration is the case of a man being his own physician, for Nature is like that--agent and patient at once.

In other words, the source of the orderliness of nature was within nature, and that source was animistic in character.

ARISTOTLE and PURPOSE in PANDAS

With this long introduction to Aristotelian "finalism" as a guide, one should be able to quickly identify phrases concerning "purpose" that can be regarded as Aristotelian. I find seven tell-tale phrases that bring out the Aristotelian orientation of Pandas, two of which I shall bring out in my section on Galen. The other five are as follows.

On page 33, the authors reason analogically from how the human mind works; this is "an indication of how a primeval intellect might have worked." Hello, is God primeval? Do we find out what God is like by studying how the human mind works? I had thought that "My thoughts are not your thoughts, saith the Lord" (Is 55.8). I am mindful that we reason analogically in science all the time, but it can be a quicksand. Anyway, we find five telling phrases: "patterns," "mosaic," "discrete blocks," "subroutines," "preassembled" to account for similar behavior in different animals, all of which of course savor also of Platonism. Then, at the end of the page, Pandas says that these units can be matched to fit "an organism's need to perform particular functions"; the "need" here is Aristotelian, existing prior and external to the structure of the organism.

The Aristotelian connection occurs again on page 122, to which I've already called attention, with an admission of the "idea teleology: an organism is designed for certain functions or purposes." Here one should notice again that the function or purpose exists in advance of the organism. On page 144 we learn that "protein machine is on standby"; is it? This is teleological, like the passage on the same page concerning "the purpose of the blood clotting system..." On page 145: "a whole entity with a separate purpose," and "what the final result will be."

- - -

Third: G A L E N

Mortimer Adler often quoted Alfred North Whitehead's observation that the history of western philosophy is mostly a series of footnotes to Plato, adding his own view that Aristotle wrote most of the footnotes (Adler, 1993, p 45; Whitehead, 1959, p 63). I'd like now to amend Adler's compliment by adding the name Galen to my list to complete my triumvirate of ancients whose views turn up in creationist literature.

A few comments about Galen, the renowned anatomist and physician of the ancient world, are appropriate because he was the great exponent of Aristotle's design argument, and also because an explanation reminiscent of Galen popped out from the pages of Pandas.

Ask a medical school graduate or an intern making rounds in a hospital these days "who was Galen," and rare is the freshly-minted physician who recognizes the name. Yet there is scarcely a name more celebrated in all the history of medicine, with the possible exception of Hippocrates. Galen's system of medical thought predominated for over a thousand years, until it was superseded by the revolution in medicine that occurred during the Renaissance.

GALEN and PANDAS--A CASE STUDY

I see an analogy between the Renaissance revolution that overthrew the Galenic system to usher in modern medicine, and the Darwinian revolution that brought in modern biology. Resistance to both revolutions was significant. For this reason, Galen might be regarded as a case study to help us understand the appeal of Pandas and why a book of this genre has a devoted following.

A BRILLIANT CAREER

Galen lived during the time of the emperors Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, and the Christian theologian Tertullian. He was Greek, born in about A.D. 130 in Pergamum, a city in Asia Minor renowned for its culture, and for one of the seven churches identified twice by John in the book of Revelation. John wrote that even though Pergamum was "where Satan has his throne" (CEV, 2.13), meaning it might have been a center of Emperor worship, its Christians remained faithful to Christ. We don't know whether Galen knew of that early Christian community, although he was the first pagan to write agreeably about Christians.

Talented, energetic, and innovative, Galen would have stood out in any age. He began writing as a teen-ager, travelled widely across the Mediterranean world, practiced medicine in Rome, and based his medical ideas on dissections of animals, mostly the Barbary ape (Macaca inuus), but not, as far as we know, of humans. He also experimented on live animals, always observing, writing, arguing, lecturing, and becoming famous and influential in the doing. When Galen became a surgeon to the gladiators in Pergamum he learned human anatomy a practical way, by treating wounds. He learned about bones, muscles, viscera and blood flow from the bodies of Christians wounded or killed in those contests, although the martyred Antipas, mentioned by John in Revelation 2.13, was before his time. He was the personal physician to Marcus Aurelius. A follower of Stoicism, he was a man of letters, philosophy, and science, and ended his days at age 70, probably in Pergamum, in the reign of the infamous Commodus. Today, some 120 treatises with his name have survived, bearing witness to his genius.

A GALEN INDUSTRY

Galen's Greek manuscripts were translated first into Arabic by the remarkable Nestorian Christian, Hunain ibn Ishaq, who was employed by the enlightened Arabs of 9th century Baghdad; then the Arabic went into Latin, mostly by Gerard of Cremona in 12th century Toledo (Sarton 1961, p 17-23; May 1962, I, p 5-8). Following the invention of the printing press, in about A.D. 1456, a thriving Galen industry took hold in Europe with the publication of marvelous Latin editions and commentaries, which are a glory of the Renaissance. Galen was revered. For a time, Renaissance physicians believed that a golden age of medicine was at hand. Even today, the Galen industry continues to attract customers. Present-day translations are based on editions brought out in Leipzig, by Georg Helmreich in 1907-1909 or by Karl Gottlob Kühn in 1822.

Two easily accessible English translations reveal the essential Galen and the unique ideas that commanded medicinal practice for a thousand years. These are Galen's Natural Faculties (Brock 1952) and his Uses of the Parts (May 1967), both of which I used in preparing these paragraphs. At first glance, these works might appear to be texts of physiology and anatomy, respectively. They are neither, although they contain a good deal of both. Yes, a biology student today can recognize ordinary topics of human physiology and anatomy--digestion, nutrition, blood, bones, muscles, and all the rest. But Galen's explanation of these topics is entirely mystifying to twentieth-century eyes.

WHY GALEN WAS REJECTED

For instance, take Galen's description of the hand. In the first book of his Usefulness of the Parts he first of all discusses why we have hands (May 1968, I, p 69, 108):

Man is the most intelligent of the animals and so, also, hands are the instruments most suitable for an intelligent animal. For it is not because he has hands that he is the most intelligent, as Anaxagoras says, but because he is the most intelligent that he has hands, as Aristotle says....

Notice the Aristotelian finalism, which is one of the two main themes in his work. Now, no anatomy text today, that I know of, has a passage like that. This is because the scientific revolution of the Renaissance provided a completely different manner of explaining the same topic. As a result, Aristotelian finalism has disappeared from explanations in medical texts--or we hope it has. The images and thought patterns by which we organize sensory impressions have changed. We do not think the same thoughts; the method of explanation itself has changed.

Similarly, because of the Darwinian revolution--which might be regarded as a postponed revolution in biology--we look at the same topics concerning species in an entirely different way. One might notice in passing that had Galen embraced the view of Anaxagoras, to him an ancient personage, instead of the Aristotelian view, the history of medical explanation might have taken a different turn.

I think I have already hinted that we should take care to view the present-day evolution controversy with a steady eye, and deny ourselves the propensity to favor one side or the other with either undue sympathy or censure. With evolution today, as with Galen, it is not altogether easy to explain why intelligent people look at the same facts and embrace one explanation and not another.

In the case of Galen, were the facts of anatomy the primary cause of the rejection of the Galenic system? I think not. Ignoramuses did not predominate either in the thousand-year reign of Galen or in the Renaissance. Andreas Vesalius, who in the sixteenth century led the way in uncovering the anatomical mismatch between his own dissections of cadavers and Galen's simian anatomy, insisted on calling Galen the "prince of physicians." And there were physicians of the time who thought that any human structure found to differ from the Galenic description was proof of human decadence and degeneration since Galen's day (Saunders and O'Malley, p 13). A perusual of Uses of the Parts shows that Galen was extremely accurate in his anatomical descriptions, albeit of non-human specimens.

If advances in anatomy were not sufficient to bring down the Galenic system, perhaps the advent of the experimental method, instead of reliance on Galen's authority, was sufficient to bring down his medical system. Experiments were certainly a new departure in the Renaissance. But Galen's experiments on the function of the ureters, on the recurrent laryngeal nerve, and on transections of the spinal cord were first class. (Brock, p 57-61; May I, p 352 passim; Singer, p 116)

The Renaissance revolution in dissections and experiments were significant, but not sufficient, for the emergence of modern studies of the human body.

Is Pandas' advocacy of "intelligent design" wrong if its facts are found to be wrong? What does "wrong" mean?

GALEN'S TWO THEMES

Herbert Butterfield (1965), in his epochal Origins of Modern Science, made clear how difficult it was for modern science to take hold during the Renaissance. Is it possible for a belief to be metaphysically correct, that is, coherent and consistent, yet empirically false? Renaissance anatomists certainly had reason to wonder when they had to contend with the two prevailing themes that characterized the Galenic system. First, Galen maintained that the human body was governed by "Nature." He personified Nature, for which he idiosyncratically employed the terms who, whom, he, or her, and even Creator, and whose "faculties" he insisted it was the business of physiology to explore.

The second theme is especially pertinent to our understanding of Pandas. It appears in the quotation I chose above and appears throughout the Uses of the Parts. According to Galen, every part of the human body, every organ, every bone, and the entire human body acting as a unit, is perfectly constructed for the work it does, so that the least change harms the whole. This interpretation arises, of course, from Aristotle's teleological pronouncement that "Nature does nothing in vain." Nature has designed every animal in the best possible way for the work it does. Galen wrote: "Aristotle is right when he maintains that all animals have been fitly equipped with the best possible bodies" (May 1968, I, p 108).

In other words, Galen's influential Uses of the Parts is a long design argument, employing Aristotle's finalism. We should notice straightaway that Galen developed a perfectly good design argument without being a theist. True, he did use the term "Creator," but he used it idiosyncratically, without implying that he had picked up any beliefs from the Christians in Pergamum.

Many years ago, Charles Singer, the influential historian of medicine, thought that Galen might be called "a modern" because he emphasized anatomy in the practice of medicine (1962). Taken alone, this accolade, while doing honor to the great physician of antiquity, misses the Aristotelian finalism that gave the Galenic system not only its metaphysical coherence for all those centuries but that also constituted a giant impediment to change.

We must give Galen his due. He is entitled to our admiration for his prowess in dissecting a wide variety of animals, for his experiments, and for his explanations of physiology. True, he did not dissect cadavers, as far as we know, and he was vastly mistaken in attributing simian anatomy to the human body. His mistakes notwithstanding, we can only stand in awe at the brilliant edifice of medical thought he erected on Aristotelian teleology. Because this edifice lasted for a thousand years, does it follow that physicians during that time were all benighted?

THE RETE MIRABILE in PANDAS

One can imagine my delight therefore when I came upon the passages in Pandas on the rete mirabile in the giraffe; on how this structure helps to regulate blood pressure in its long neck, and how the presence of the rete mirabile can be explained by intelligent design (p 12-13, 69-71). The passages sent me flying to my copy of Galen's Uses of the Parts to see what he had to say about this "marvelous net."

The rete mirabile is a tangled knot of blood vessels, much like an intricate mesh or net; it is found in ungulates, such as pigs and giraffes, but not in humans. It is located at the base of the brain, where in humans the same location is occupied by the "circle of Willis."

Galen, intrigued by the rete mirabile, performed many dissections of it; numerous passages in his Uses of the Parts shows its prominence in his system of physiology. He did not mention the giraffe in his Uses, although in his day this animal was certainly known throughout the Mediterranean world. Instead, he probably based his ideas on his dissections of the pig. Nor did he distinguish between arterial and venous blood flow; therefore his explanation had nothing to do with blood pressure. This plexus was "most wonderful," he said.

Then comes the Aristotelian teleology. "What is this wonderful thing," he asked, "and for what purpose has it been made by Nature who does nothing in vain?" Notice the personification of Nature in the pronoun "who." Of course, Galen said nothing about the regulation of blood flow, not knowing that the blood circulates; he claimed that the net was necessary for the "concoction" of something called the "pneuma," which in Greek biology was a kind of non-material substance necessary for life (May I, 430-432, passim).

In describing how this "marvelous net" helps to maintain blood pressure in the long neck of the giraffe, Pandas observes that blood is forced upward in its neck, and when the animal reaches down to drink water blood is prevented from rushing down to the head. This is accomplished by a coordinated system of interrelated structures. According to the Pandas' interpretation, the rete mirabile, acting with pressure sensors in the neck, shunts blood away from the head when the giraffe stoops and allows blood to flow to the head when standing upright or when reaching upward to eat foliage. In this way, the regulation of blood pressure is controlled by these interrelated structures--the pressure sensors and the rete mirabile--that form an "adaptational package." (See Warren 1974)

In a number of passages, the makers of Pandas employ the term "adaptational package" to denote a group of interdependent structures that act together, such that damage to one structure must damage the whole; moreover the importance of this "package" is such that it must have been present and functioning from the beginning (p 13, 23, 71-72, 103). For optimal functioning, one adaptation requires another adaptation. Pandas is quite correct in noticing that: "Scientific literature often reports such interdependence of structures" (p 13). This theme, that certain anatomical structures must act together in the life of an animal, is prominent, indeed, in Aristotle's History of Animals, but without any suggestion of an origin; and Aristotle was aware that damage to one part would diminish the integrity of the whole.

Galen, the great physician of the second century, made numerous references to the rete mirabile (or "retiform") in a context of his own reliance on Aristotle. We can discern a similar reliance on Aristotelian teleology, presumably unintended, in the handling of this structure by Pandas. I find two such passages.

In drawing attention to the long legs and long neck of the giraffe, Pandas declares, on page 13:

The giraffe requires a very special circulatory system.

Then, after pointing out that the rete mirable is a necessary part of this system, Pandas declares, on page 71:

Proponents of intelligent design maintain that only a consummate engineer could anticipate so effectively the total engineering requirements of an organism like the giraffe.

Aside from the curious analogy, whereby God is made out to be an engineer, the words "requires" and "requirements" deserve scrutiny. Besides Aristotle, there is a whiff of Plato in this invocation of ideas that are separate from the animal itself, and even from God! Do they not imply that a future condition is the cause of a present action? In other words, the engineer knows what the giraffe will require, and presumably provides the structures at the proper time.

I am aware that biology teachers in both high schools and colleges use this sort of finalistic language every day in the week, even by those who hold "creationism" in disdain; and they can do so with no loss to science education. Perhaps we can press too far for linguistic precision. Perhaps Aristotle had something when he said that the "final cause" was the most important, for it was the reason for the existence of a thing--"for the products of Nature as well as for those of Art" (Parts, 639b).

Notwithstanding Aristotle's insight, when we stop to think about the meaning of those words, "requires" and "requirements," we are at once up against a mystery, are we not? How can a thing not yet in existence direct and cause a present action? How can a disembodied idea, existing apart from nature, have anything to do with the development of an animal?

My only point here is that in explaining the rete mirabile, the makers of Pandas were obliged willy-nilly to rely on teleological ideas whose source was in Greek biology.

GALEN, and PANDAS in PANDAS

Before leaving Galen and Pandas, I should comment on the title of this book I have been examining. First of all, its makers critique the application of the concept of homologies to the classification of the giant panda and the lesser or red panda, and whether they should be classified with bears (p 31, 32). Both animals, they then point out, are known for their so-called "panda's thumb," a structure in the fore paw that is not present in bears. Panda's "thumb" is not really a thumb but is an enlargement of the radial sesamoid bone in the wrist. This "thumb" is only partially opposable, not like a true thumb, but it enables the panda to grasp bamboo shoots while eating. Stephen Gould has worked-out the present-day evolutionary explanation (1982).

The human "hand" caught the fancy of the ancients, who asked themselves this question: why is the hand so well-constructed for the work it does? Aristotle gave an answer for which there was no suitable alternative for more than twenty centuries. Said he: it occurs in humans because they are humans, and need it. Galen, the devoted follower of Aristotle, thought the hand so important that he devoted the entire first chapter of his Uses of the Parts to a teleological explanation of its structure and function.

And to judge from the title and contents of a book published in 1837 by a certain Charles Bell--The Hand, Its Mechanical and Vital Component--Aristotle's explanation lasted until the time of Darwin.

FROM ARISTOTLE TO DARWIN AND BACK AGAIN:

A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution

This is the unusual title of a remarkable book that is a big help in understanding how Darwin--without even reading Aristotle--insured the eclipse of Aristotelian teleology in biology. Its author was Etienne Gilson, late of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, where he enjoyed an illustrious career