Evolutionary Psychology and Free Will

The most recent issue of the Reports of the National Center for Science Education (May-Aug 2005) contains an essay by British evolutionary theorist James Miles entitled, "The Accidental Creationists: Why Evolutionary Psychology is Bad for the Teaching of Evolution." Among other things, here is what Dr Miles says:

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As Darwin lay dying in March 1882, the last words he wrote to zoologist Thomas Huxley, his disciple of 30 years, were: "I wish to God there were more automata in the world like you" (Desmond 1997: 519). "Darwin's bulldog" as Huxley was known, had fought for Darwin in public for a quarter of a century while the reclusive Darwin stayed silent. Huxley fought to combat the idea that we were not animals, and the idea that we were not biochemical machines, the "automata" of nature. Darwinism has no room for free will; it is what Darwin called a "delusion" (see Barrett and others 1987: 608), wishful thinking akin to the belief that God made the world in 6 days and the earth is just 6000 years old.

But a century and a quarter after Darwin penned these final words to Huxley, evolutionary psychology appears to have resurrected free will. Despite professing to be a passionate evolutionist, Cronin is careful to delineate the Darwinian kingdom: "we should not look on free will and biological 'constraints' as pulling in opposite directions" (1991: 377). Vocal evolutionary psychologist Matt Ridley is keen to tell us there is nothing inconsistent with free will within EP (1994). Free will, says David Barash, is a "useful inconsistency" (2003: 222; see also Pinker 1997b). In Miles (2004) I described using belief in free will as the litmus test of a true Darwinian, as the litmus test to see who will cut and run from the implications of evolutionary theory. There is no room for free will in a theory which connects us in an unbroken four-billion*year chain of evolution. Even Darwin's greatest 19th-century critics, like "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce, accepted this truth: "man's free-will!
 * [is] utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God" (Wilberforce 1860: 258).

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The entire essay is well written and provocative. I recommend that interested parties read it and comment here. Dr Miles is not saying anything new or unusual--I know of highly similar statements going back to at least the 1920s if not further--but his application to the current controversy is illuminating and stimulating. With his permission, I have made available a copy of the essay on my webpage:

http://home.messiah.edu/~tdavis/James%20Miles%20Essay.htm

I invite us to discuss it!

Ted
Received on Mon May 1 13:24:27 2006