On Wed, 04 Mar 1998 17:48:00 -0600, J.D. Guzman wrote:
JG>I'm new to the list, and I hope that my time here is an enjoyable one.
Welcome. Perhaps you would tell us more about yourself?
JG>I was wondering if any of you all had read the article in the Febuary
>edition of Discover magazine, the one about the Academic right wing and
>their teaming with the fundamentalist left. Well I was just wondering what
>your thoughts were on that.
Thanks for mentioning this. I had downloaded the article "Oppressed
by Evolution" in the March 1998 Discover magazine:
http://www.discover.com/cover_story/comment.html
but I was waiting to see the hard copy first before I posted it. It
hasn't yet arrived in the Antipodes yet, but since you have
mentioned it, I will post it to the Reflector (see below).
I found it a remarkable article, which indicates that it is finally
sinking in that creationists are not going away and that the
evolutionist minority, if they want to survive in the 21st Century,
had better start trying to understand them.
The following excerpt deserves repeating for emphasis:
"Evolutionists seem to be especially prone to this mistake. The
claim that evolution is purposeless and undirected has become almost
an article of faith among evolutionary biologists. For example, the
official "Statement on Teaching Evolution" from the National
Association of Biology Teachers describes evolution as "an
unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process." That
pretty much rules God out of the picture. One popular book on
evolution, Richard Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker, is subtitled Why the
Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. In his
book Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould argues that the evolution of
human beings was fantastically improbable and that a host of
unlikely events had to fall out in just the right way for
intelligent life to emerge on this planet. One might well take this
as a sign of God's hand at work in the evolutionary process. Gould,
however, bends his argument to the opposite conclusion that the
universe is indifferent to our existence and that humans would never
evolve a second time if we rewound time's videotape and started
over.
But to reach this conclusion, you have to assume the very thing that
you are trying to prove: namely, that history isn't directed by
God. If there is a God, whatever he wills happens by necessity.
Because we can't really replay the same stretch of time to see if it
always comes out the same way, science has no tests for the presence
of God's will in history. Gould's conclusion is a profession of his
religious beliefs, not a finding of science. The broad outlines of
the story of human evolution are known beyond a reasonable doubt.
However, science hasn't yet found satisfying, law-based natural
explanations for most of the details of that story. All that we
scientists can do is admit to our ignorance and keep looking. Our
ignorance doesn't prove anything one way or the other about divine
plans or purposes behind the flow of history. Anybody who says it
does is pushing a religious doctrine. Both the religious
creationists of the right and the secular creationists of the left
object and say that a lot of evolutionists are doing just that in
the name of science and to this extent they are unfortunately right.
Fortunately, evolutionary biologists are starting to realize this.
Last October, after considering several such objections, the
National Association of Biology Teachers deleted the words
unsupervised and impersonal from its description of the evolutionary
process. To me, this seems like a step in the right direction. If
biologists don't want to see the theory of evolution evicted from
public schools because of its religious content, they need to accept
the limitations of science and stop trying to draw vast, cosmic
conclusions from the plain facts of evolution. Humility isn't just
a cardinal virtue in Christian doctrine; it's also a virtue in the
practice of science."
(Cartmill M., "Oppressed by Evolution", Discover, Vol. 19 No. 3
March 1998)
Steve
------------------------------------------------------------------
DISCOVER Vol. 19 No. 3 (March 1998)
Oppressed by Evolution
BY MATT CARTMILL
As far as we can tell, all of earth's living things are descended from a
distant common ancestor that lived more than 3 billion years ago. This is
an important discovery, but it's not exactly news. Biologists started
putting forward the idea of evolution back in the 1700s, and thanks to
Darwin's unifying theory of natural selection, it's been the accepted
wisdom in biology for more than a hundred years. So you might think that by
now everyone would have gotten used to the idea that we are blood kin to
all other organisms, and closer kin to great apes than to spiders. On the
face of it, the idea makes a certain amount of plain common sense. We all
know that we share more features with apes than we do with spiders or
snails or cypress trees. The theory of evolution simply reads those shared
features as family resemblances. It doesn't deny that people are unique in
important ways. Our kinship with apes doesn't mean we're only apes under
the skin, any more than the kinship of cats with dogs means that your cat
is repressing a secret urge to bark and bury bones.
Yet many people don't accept the idea of evolution, and even feel downright
threatened by it. Conservative Christians, in particular, have opposed it;
to them, science ran off track in 1859 when Darwin's Origin of Species
first hit the bookstores. Over the decades, we biologists have become
accustomed to this opposition, but in recent years there has been a change
in the antievolution camp. Now we find ourselves defending Darwin against
attacks not only from the religious right but from the academic left as well.
In the United States the religious opposition to Darwin is chiefly made up
of evangelical Protestants. Some of them are smart, savvy, angry, and well
organized, and they have been working here for almost a hundred years to
stop biologists from telling people about the history of life. In the
early part of this century they persuaded the legislatures of several
states to pass laws against teaching evolution. When the courts threw out
those laws, the antievolutionists tried a different strategy: fighting for
laws giving equal classroom time to "creation science" that is, Bible-based
biology. That didn't work, either. Now they're trying to compel teachers to
present evolution as a mere theory rather than a fact. So far they haven't
succeeded, but they're still working at it.
It seems clear that these religious antievolutionists aren't going to go
away in the foreseeable future; biologists will have to fight them for
another century or two to keep them from outlawing Darwin. But if we are to
succeed, I think we'll need to give serious thought to our opponents'
motives. I suspect they are deeper and subtler than most scientists like to
think or than most crusaders against evolution themselves believe.
One reason I believe this is that the motives publicly claimed by Christian
antievolutionists don't make sense. Many will tell you that the evolution
issue is a religious struggle between a godless scientific establishment
and so-called creationists that is, themselves. But a lot of evolutionary
biologists are creationists, too devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims, who
believe in an eternal God who created the world. They just don't see any
reason to think that he created it as recently as 4000 B.C.
Many opponents of the idea of evolution say they reject it because it
contradicts the Bible. They claim to believe that every word in the Bible
is literally true. But no one really believes that. We all know that when,
in John 7:38, Jesus said, "He that believeth on me . . . out of his belly
shall flow rivers of living water," he didn't mean it literally. It's a
figure of speech. Practically every book of the Bible contains some such
passages, which have to be read as either figures of speech or errors of
fact. Consider Biblical astronomy. The Old Testament depicts the
"firmament" as a strong dome or tent spread out above the Earth. It has the
sun, moon, and stars set in it and water up above it, and windows in it to
let the water out when it rains (see Gen. 1:6-8, 1:14-17, 7:11, 8:2; Job
37:18; Ps. 104:2; Isa. 24:18; and Mal. 3:10). This is a lovely picture. If
you read it as poetry, it's gorgeous. But taken literally, it's just plain
wrong. There isn't any firmament or any water above the firmament, and the
sun, moon, and stars aren't attached to anything. And if we can all agree
that there isn't any firmament, then we can all agree that the literal
truth of the Bible can't be the real issue here.
Some religious people say they reject the idea of evolution because it
lowers human beings to the level of the beasts and blinds us to the
nobility of man. In his closing speech for the prosecution in the 1925
Scopes monkey trial, William Jennings Bryan pointed angrily to a
high-school textbook that classed Homo sapiens as a mammal. "No circle is
reserved for man alone," Bryan protested. "He is, according to the diagram,
shut up in the little circle entitled Mammals,' with thirty-four hundred
and ninety-nine other species of mammals. . . . What shall we say of the
intelligence, not to say religion, of those who are so particular to
distinguish between fishes and reptiles and birds, but put a man with an
immortal soul in the same circle with the wolf, the hyena, and the skunk?
What must be the impression made upon children by such a degradation of man?"
What, indeed? But if you are going to classify living things at all, you
have to group people and wolves together in some category, since they are
both living things. Actually, the classification that Bryan railed against
was in place a century before Darwin published his ideas on evolution. It
was the pious creationist Carl von Linn, not some atheistic evolutionist,
who named the Mammalia and classed Homo sapiens among them, back in 1758.
And even then, in the mid-eighteenth century, classifying people as animals
was an ancient idea. The Old Testament itself says bluntly that human
beings are beasts, and no nobler than any of the others (Eccles. 3:18-21).
Yes, of course we are mammals: hairy, warm-blooded vertebrates with milk
glands and big forebrains, like wolves and hyenas and skunks. What's so
awful about that? What else could we possibly be? Insects? Plants? Seraphim?
Most religious antievolutionists recognize that people resemble animals,
but they refuse to believe it's a literal family resemblance. They think it
insults human dignity to describe people as modified apes. But the Bible
says that God made man from the dust of the ground (Gen. 2:7). Why is
being a made-over ape more humiliating than being made-over dirt?
Given such patent contradictions, it seems apparent that there must be
something else about Darwinian evolution that bothers antievolutionists.
And I think we can get some idea of what it is by studying the strange
alliance against Darwin that's emerged in recent years between the forces
of the religious right and the academic left.
The academic left is a diverse group. It includes all shades of opinion
from the palest pink liberals to old- fashioned bright red Marxists.
Probably no two of them have the same opinions about everything. But a lot
of them have bought into some notions that are deeply hostile to the
scientific enterprise in general and the study of evolution in particular.
Although these notions are often expressed in a mind-numbing "postmodern"
jargon, at bottom they're pretty simple. We can sum them up in one
sentence: Anybody who claims to have objective knowledge about anything is
trying to control and dominate the rest of us.
The postmodern critique of science runs something like this: There are no
objective facts. All supposed "facts" are contaminated with theories, and
all theories are infested with moral and political doctrines. Because
different theories express different perceptions of the world, there's no
neutral yardstick for measuring one against another. The choice between
competing theories is always a political choice. Therefore, when some guy
in a lab coat tells you that such and such is an objective fact say, that
there isn't any firmament, or that people are related to wolves and
hyenas he must have a political agenda up his starched white sleeve.
"Science is politics," writes Robert Young, editor of the journal Science
as Culture. "Recent work has made it clear to those with eyes to see that
there is no place in science, technology, medicine, or other forms of
expertise where you cannot find ideology acting as a constitutive
determinant."
To those who see it through a postmodernist lens, science as currently
practiced is pretty bad stuff. Science is oppressive: by demanding that
everyone talk and argue in certain approved ways, it tries to control our
minds and limit our freedom to question authority. Science is sexist:
designed by males and driven by domineering male egos, it prefers facts to
values, control to nurturance, and logic to feelings all typical
patriarchal male hang-ups. Science is imperialist: it brushes aside the
truths and insights of other times and cultures. ("Claims about the
universality of science," insists historian Mario Biagioli, "should be
understood as a form of cognitive colonialism.") And of course, science is
capitalist (and therefore wicked): it serves the interests of big
corporations and the military-industrial complex.
The scholar Ania Grobicki summed it up this way: "Western science is only
one way of describing reality, nature, and the way things work a very
effective way, certainly, for the production of goods and profits, but
unsatisfactory in most other respects. It is an imperialist arrogance which
ignores the sciences and insights of most other cultures and times. . . .
It is important for the people most oppressed by Western science to make
use of what resources there are, to acquire skills and confidence, and to
keep challenging the orthodox pretensions of scientific' hierarchies of
power."
In this view, science is really aiming at a totalitarian control over our
lives and thoughts. And though all fields of science are suspect, what most
left-wing anxiety centers on is biology. You can get an idea of the fear
that pervades this literature and a taste of the convoluted prose some of
these people write by reading what the philosopher Jean Baudrillard has to
say about biochemistry. "That which is hypostatized in biochemistry," he
writes, "is the ideal of a social order ruled by a sort of genetic code of
macromolecular calculation . . . irradiating the social body with its
operational circuits. . . . Schemes of control have become fantastically
perfected . . . to a neocapitalist cybernetic order that aims now at total
control. This is the mutation for which the biological theorization of the
code prepares the ground. . . . It remains to be seen if this
operationality is not itself a myth, if dna is not also a myth."
I don't know exactly what it means to have a genetic code irradiating
things with its operational circuits, but it sounds pretty nasty. And
Baudrillard isn't the only one who has it in for nucleic acids. Last year
in the Nation, author Barbara Ehrenreich and anthropologist Janet McIntosh
recounted the story of a psychologist who spoke at an interdisciplinary
conference on the emotions. When several audience members rose to criticize
her use of the oppressive, sexist, imperialist, and capitalist scientific
method, the psychologist tried to defend science by pointing to its great
discoveries for example, dna. The retort came back: "You believe in dna?"
Why this suspicion of genetics? One reason is its political history.
Defenders of privilege have always argued that the people below them on the
social ladder deserve their lowly status because they're innately inferior;
and scientists who believe this sort of thing haven't been shy about
invoking biology to prove it. From the social Darwinists of the nineteenth
century, the eugenics movement of the 1920s, and the race- hygiene savants
of the Third Reich, down to the psychologists who today insist that social
status is determined by our genes, there has always been an abundant supply
of rich white male professors gathering data to demonstrate that rich
people, white people, and men are biologically superior to everyone else.
No wonder genetics is greeted with raised eyebrows and snickers on the left.
But more fundamentally, many people see the biological worldview as a
threat to the ideal of human freedom. If people are animals, and animals
are machines driven by instinct and conditioning controlled by genes, then
the way things are is pretty much the way they have to be. Consequently,
trying to transform the world by human action is likely to be a futile
undertaking. Those who don't much like the world the way it is a group that
includes most left-wing academics naturally find this view abhorrent.
As a result, in academic circles outside the natural sciences today, any
mention of human genetics is likely to arouse protests and angry
accusations of "biological determinism," especially if you mention genes in
the same breath as human psychology or behavior. In its extreme form, this
left-wing hostility to biology amounts to what Ehrenreich and McIntosh call
"secular creationism" a creed that denies our biological heritage has
anything to do with what people want or how they act. "Like their
fundamentalist Christian counterparts," they write, "the most extreme
antibiologists suggest that humans occupy a status utterly different from
and clearly above' that of all other living beings."
In north carolina, where I live, we recently saw how this attitude can
cause the academic left to line up with the religious right. Last spring
the lower house of the state legislature passed a bill requiring that
"evolution shall be taught as a scientific theory, not as a proven fact" in
the state's public schools. The bill eventually died in the senate. But
while it was still on the table, conservative evangelicals lobbied hard for
it, local evolutionists lobbied hard against it, and the newspapers were
flooded with outraged letters from both sides. At the height of this
dustup, Warren Nord, head of the program in Humanities and Human Values at
the state university in Chapel Hill, suddenly jumped into the fight on the
creationists' side in the name of multiculturalism.
Darwin's theory, Nord complained, "undermines religious conceptions of
design or purpose in nature. As we teach it, modern science is not
religiously neutral. . . . [It] conflicts not just with Protestant
fundamentalism . . . but with many traditional Native American, African,
and Eastern religions." Nord's conclusion: "If we teach neo-Darwinian
evolution and secular accounts of nature in science classes, we must also
teach religious accounts of nature. . . . The only constitutional way to
teach students about origins that is, the only way to be truly neutral is
to let the contending parties (all of them) have their say."
In one sense, there's nothing wrong with Nord's argument. Of course
evolution is a theory. We can imagine findings that would cause us to
reject the whole idea. But that's just as true for every other big idea in
science and nobody is demanding an equal-time approach to any of the
others. There are no bills cooking in America's state legislatures that
will order the schools to teach the germ theory of disease and the atomic
theory of matter as open questions. That might be an interesting and
stimulating approach, but given that, for decades, the evidence that has
come in consistently supports these two theories, the schools don't have
time for it.
And nobody really wants to see science taught that way. Trying to present
all ideas impartially without judging them would mean the end of science
education. Like it or not, science is judgmental. It undertakes to weigh
all the conflicting stories and find tests that will tell us which one is
the least unlikely. If no such tests can be found, then science has nothing
to say on the issue.
The idea that people evolved from apes millions of years ago is a testable
scientific hypothesis. The idea that humankind was specially created in
4000 b.c. is also a testable hypothesis, and it happens to be wrong. But
the idea that Nord and his evangelical allies want to introduce into
biology classes that nature expresses God's purposes isn't a scientific
issue at all, because there's no way to test it. People have been arguing
about it for millennia and getting nowhere. The creationists point to all
the things in nature that look beautiful, orderly, and efficient. The
skeptics respond by pointing to other things that look ugly, messy, cruel,
and wasteful. The creationists retort that they only seem that way to the
finite human mind. Maybe so. But since no tests are possible, all that
science can do is shrug.
That shrug is really what distresses the crusaders against science, on both
the left and the right. Both camps believe passionately that the big truths
about the world are moral truths. They view the universe in terms of good
and evil, not truth and falsehood. The first question they ask about any
supposed fact is whether it serves the cause of righteousness. Their
notions of good and evil are different, but both see the commonplace
surface of the world as a veil of illusion, obscuring the deeper moral
truths behind everything that give life its meaning. "Commonsense
reality," insists the left-wing anthropologist Nancy Sheper-Hughes, "may be
false, illusory, and oppressive. . . . [We must] work at the essential task
of stripping away the surface forms of reality in order to expose concealed
and buried truths."
For many people on the academic left, the facts reported by science are
just the surface layer that has to be scraped off to expose the underlying
moral and political reality. This postmodern approach to facts is a lot
like that of the premodern St. Augustine, who wrote in the fifth century
a.d. that we should concern ourselves with what Bible stories signify "and
not worry about whether they are true."
Science, however, worries only about whether things are true and has no
opinion about what they signify. In so doing, it offends both the religious
right and the academic left. Both camps reject its claim to being objective
and morally neutral. Because they don't think such a thing is possible,
they see the pretended objectivity of science as a cover for ulterior
motives. The idea of evolution is especially offensive in this regard
because it implies that the universe has been value-free through 99.9
percent of its history, and that people and their values were brought into
being by the mechanical operations of an inhuman reality. Both the
religious and the secular creationists see human life as defined by the
moral choices we make. Naturally, they shrink from the biologists' vision
of people as animals (since animals don't make moral choices). The
right-wingers think Darwinism promotes atheism, while the left-wingers
think it promotes capitalism; but both agree it's just another competing
ideology, which deserves to be cast down from its high seat of intellectual
privilege.
Well, is it? Having offended both the fundamentalists and the
postmodernists, I am going to annoy my scientific colleagues by admitting
that the antievolutionists of left and right have a point nestled deep in
their rhetoric.
Science has nothing to tell us about moral values or the purpose of
existence or the realm of the supernatural. That doesn't mean there is
nothing to be said about these things. It just means that scientists don't
have any expert opinions. Science looks exclusively at the finite facts of
nature, and unfortunately, logical reasoning can't carry you from facts to
values, or from the finite to the infinite. As the philosopher David Hume
pointed out 250 years ago, you can't infer an infinite cause from a finite
effect. But science's necessary silence on these questions doesn't prove
that there isn't any infinite cause or that right and wrong are arbitrary
conventions, or that there is no plan or purpose behind the world.
And I'm afraid that a lot of scientists go around saying that science
proves these things. Many scientists are atheists or agnostics who want to
believe that the natural world they study is all there is, and being only
human, they try to persuade themselves that science gives them grounds for
that belief. It's an honorable belief, but it isn't a research finding.
Evolutionists seem to be especially prone to this mistake. The claim that
evolution is purposeless and undirected has become almost an article of
faith among evolutionary biologists. For example, the official "Statement
on Teaching Evolution" from the National Association of Biology Teachers
describes evolution as "an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and
natural process." That pretty much rules God out of the picture. One
popular book on evolution, Richard Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker, is subtitled
Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. In his
book Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould argues that the evolution of human
beings was fantastically improbable and that a host of unlikely events had
to fall out in just the right way for intelligent life to emerge on this
planet. One might well take this as a sign of God's hand at work in the
evolutionary process. Gould, however, bends his argument to the opposite
conclusion that the universe is indifferent to our existence and that
humans would never evolve a second time if we rewound time's videotape and
started over.
But to reach this conclusion, you have to assume the very thing that you
are trying to prove: namely, that history isn't directed by God.
If there is a God, whatever he wills happens by necessity. Because
we can't really replay the same stretch of time to see if it always
comes out the same way, science has no tests for the presence of
God's will in history. Gould's conclusion is a profession of his
religious beliefs, not a finding of science. The broad outlines of
the story of human evolution are known beyond a reasonable doubt.
However, science hasn't yet found satisfying, law-based natural
explanations for most of the details of that story. All that we
scientists can do is admit to our ignorance and keep looking. Our
ignorance doesn't prove anything one way or the other about divine
plans or purposes behind the flow of history. Anybody who says it
does is pushing a religious doctrine. Both the religious
creationists of the right and the secular creationists of the left
object and say that a lot of evolutionists are doing just that in
the name of science and to this extent they are unfortunately right.
Fortunately, evolutionary biologists are starting to realize this. Last
October, after considering several such objections, the National
Association of Biology Teachers deleted the words unsupervised and
impersonal from its description of the evolutionary process. To me, this
seems like a step in the right direction. If biologists don't want to see
the theory of evolution evicted from public schools because of its
religious content, they need to accept the limitations of science and stop
trying to draw vast, cosmic conclusions from the plain facts of evolution.
Humility isn't just a cardinal virtue in Christian doctrine; it's also a
virtue in the practice of science.
images/illustrations courtesy: David M. Salazar
Related Web sites
General Evolution/Creationism Resources:
Evolution Homepage compiled by Laurence Moran of the University of
Toronto
Origins of Humankind
Talk.Origins Archive
Dialogue Between Science and Religion from the American Association
for the
Advancement of Science
The Institute for Creation Research
Statement on Teaching of Evolution from the National Association of
Biology Teachers
Evolution History:
Charles Darwin includes complete text of On the Origin of Species
Evolution: Theory and History from the University of California at
Berkeley
Science on Trial: Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes from the University
of South Florida
Individual Researchers and Papers:
Robert M. Young's homepage
"Why Creation Science' Must Be Kept Out of the Classroom" by Robert
Young
"The New Creationism" by Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh
"Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism" by Stephen Jay Gould
Frequently Encountered Criticisms in Evolution vs. Creationism from
Mark I. Vuletic
of the University of Illinois
Creation, Creationism, & Empirical Theistic Arguments compiled by Dave
Armstrong
Richard Dawkins unofficial homepage
Philosophical Resources:
Buadrillard on the Web
The Hume Archives
http://www.discover.com/cover_story/comment.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen E (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ sejones@ibm.net
3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ Steve.Jones@health.wa.gov.au
Warwick 6024 ->*_,--\_/ Phone +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, West Australia v "Test everything." (1Thess 5:21)
--------------------------------------------------------------------