NeuroReview

Evolutionary biologists today are not actually Darwinists, they are what is called Neo-Darwinists. Neo-Darwinism is a synthesis between Darwin's idea of descent with modification and the monk Gregor Mendel's discovery of the mechanism of genetics. Mendel's published his work in an obscure Austrian journal in 1865, but, it lway there unnoticed until its importance was appreciated around the turn of the century. It took several decades to consolidate this new synthesis, but the basic framework used today, has been the same since the 1940s.

What are the mechanisms of evolution?

Natural Selection. The first fundamental idea is actually quite simple (as Darwin writes on p. 127 of Origin of Species):

"If during the long courses of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organisation, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometric powers of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; …[and] if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance (genetics) they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection."

When TH Huxley heard this he is said to have written in his diary: "Why didn't I think of that!"

So this, then, is Darwin's first great idea, not the idea of evolution, but the idea of evolution by natural selection, an idea he could never formulate with sufficient rigour and detail to prove, though he presented a brilliant case for it. What it really is, is a handy, almost sterile, term for a profoundly disagreeable aspect of life on earth: the fact that there are only so many resources and an abundance of organisms wanting to make use of it. This is exactly what Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), meant when he wrote, in 'In Memoriam':

Who trusted God was love indeed/ And love Creation's final law/ Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw/ With ravine, shriek'd against his creed --

Ravine here means the act of seizing something as prey. Predators preying on herbivores are "nature red in tooth and claw". This sentence succinctly sums concentrates on the instruments the carnivores are born with - the teeth of sharks and claws of hawks, for instance -- who use them to seize and kill other creatures. In the course of killing, red blood will flow. But there are inborn instruments for killing far more ingenious and deadly than these. The Guinness Book of Records, which is my primary scientific reference work in this respect, thinks it is pretty much a tie which is the most venomous animal in the world. "Both the blue-ringed octopus" (which contains a neurotoxic venom), it says, "and the box jellyfish can kill in a matter of seconds" (it can suddenly release a collagenous stinging thread, which contains a cardiotoxic venom). The basic problem is this: Carnivores have a lust to kill. They enjoy the feeling of sinking their teeth into a helpless pray. This is the sad fact: that the premise of life is violence, suffering, and competition. We are only complex organisms today because an incalculable number of our predecessors were torn to shreds by wild beast or suffered unimaginable terrors and pain. In order to produce one television-watching, potato-chips-crunching, baseball-cap-wearing humanoid, Nature has killed off, not hundreds and not thousands, but millions upon millions of perfectly innocent creatures who were in the unfortunate position that his siblings were slightly more aggressive than him, that they had slightly sharper elbows or possibly even bigger mouths or stomachs than him. This is the ugly truth concealed by the nice, tidy term Natural Selection.

(By the way: Why do rabbits run faster than foxes? Answer: because the rabbit is running for its life where as the fox is running for its dinner. )

Random Mutation. It also has another, maybe even scarier key mechanism:

Darwin writes on Random Mutation:

"More individuals are born than can possibly survive. A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die, - which variety or species shall increase in numbers, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct."

Darwin's theory says that the appearance of purpose in the intricate design of living things and in their exquisite adaptation to their environments is an illusion: the whole plant and animal creation is a cosmic accident, or rather the result of a very long chain of accidents, explainable only in terms of the non-purposive laws of particle physics. That the process ever got started, with the formation of a suitable self-replicating molecule, seems to have depended on a chemical accident. And it seems radically contingent, although with one occurrence its probability cannot be accurately estimated, that, having begun, the process should have followed a path that included the appearance of vertebrates, mammals and ourselves.

What Darwin saw was that if there is a constant pressure of survival that means that there is actually a selection mechanism built into the world: if there is diversity, variation among individuals and there are pressures on their survival, the characteristics that these individuals have will play a role in whether or not they will be successful in withstanding the pressures. Examples of selection pressures and random selection: spider, insulin, camouflage... Evoution is strong in childhood (cases of progeria, a disease that occurs only in childhood, causing rapid deterioration of the body, are rare), but powerless against late afflictions (Alzheimers, a neurodegenerative disorder that typically arises in middle age, is the third most common killer. Why? Because natural selection is powerless against it; by the time victims become symptomatic, they have usually passed the destructive gene on to half their offspring).

The resulting process would necessarily lead in the direction of individuals in future generations who tended to be better equipped to deal with the problems of resource limitation that had been faced by individuals in their parent's generation. These two key concepts then, Natural Selection and Random Mutation, together constitute Darwin's Dangerous Idea, the idea that generates so much insight, turmoil, confusion, anxiety….

What are the implications of evolution?

Why is it dangerous: Because it threatens to destroy the foundations of our society and the things we believe in. Darwinism is not 'just a theory'. It really does have far-reaching implications for our vision of what the meaning of life is or could be. I will here consider three ways in which Darwinism may be perceived as dangerous: (I) as an argument for atheism; (II) as an excuse for reductionism; and (III) as proof for relativism.

Now some people would argue that science is objective and religion is subjective, relying on faith. They say that science is purely descriptive and not prescriptive, whereas religion is metaphysical and purely metaphorical. Well, they haven't seen how science is conducted then… Contemporary biologists who write for the general public usually have more to impart on their audience than scientific information. They have lessons to teach us about how to think of ourselves and our relation to the universe. Like Copernicus' discovery that the Earth was not the centre of the solar system, evolution forces people to reconsider their place in the Universe. Whenever Darwinism is the topic, the temperature rises, because more is at stake than just the empirical facts about how life on earth evolved, or the correct logic of the theory that accounts for those facts. One of the precious things that is at stake is a vision of what it means to ask, and to answer, the question "Why?" Darwin's new perspective turns several traditional assumptions upside down, undermining our standard ideas about what ought to count as satisfying answers to this ancient and inescapable question. Here science and religion become completely mixed up. Scientists sometime deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical or cultural ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to their confusions and influences. But there is no such thing as value-free science; there are only scientists who are unaware of the baggage they have taken on without examination. And Darwin's idea of the origin of the world is precisely the kind of theory that is both constituted by and the inspiration for cultural prejudice and religious inclination. This, unfortunately, does not make it untrue… It seems clear that Darwinism has spilled over the narrow confines of the scientific perspective, and infested or inspired almost every other realm of human thought.

Human beings are obsessed with 'purpose'. They are different from the animals in this respect. If a ball was suddenly thrown into a room, a cat would start playing with it. Unfortunately, this easy life is not granted human beings (some would say not bestowed upon anyone but university students). We would at once start to ponder and hypothesise as to why there all of a sudden appeared a ball in the room, who might have thrown it, what does a ball mean anyway, etc. Human beings, especially small ones, e.g. kids, love to play the 'why-game'. Because to every statement there appears to be a sensible reason to ask 'Why?'. And the greatest why of all, the why of creation, of humankind, has prompted the invention of whole belief systems (not Judaism of course, hmm, but… all the other ones…) in order to satisfy the relentless assault of "Why?" Almost always these belief systems and religions presume the Ultimate Why to be more intricate and sophisticated than the resulting why. A doll cannot make a man but a man can make a doll, because he is cleverer. A bird can make a nest, but not the other way around. This is the basis for two of the most infamous philosophical arguments for god: the argument for a Great Designer and the Ontological argument. The Argument from Design basically says that a complex universe requires an even more complex designer, in much the same way as a complex watch requires a skilled watchmaker. The ontological argument, both more sophisticated and demonstrably more fallacious, says that if we, the products of creation can fathom in our minds the idea of the divine, then that means that there must (by definition) be something divine that has produced us. If that seems to you like a non sequitur, don't be alarmed, you are not alone in thinking that. In both cases, the arguments seem to rely on the humankind's insatiable curiosity and its longing for an ultimate why.

Darwinism, on the other hand, -presents a theory that - in one great swoop -abolishes the need for a cause to be more complicated than its effect. This is the idea behind the very simple, and seemingly very dangerous, idea of gradual accumulation. You start out with a single, innocent molecule, and you end up with you and me… This notion is one of Darwin's most fundamental contributions. It shows us that complex things can arise from simple processes and that there is no reason to presume that that for something complicated to be around, something even more complex needs to have created it.

So Darwinism challenges some of the bad arguments for the existence of god. In fact it may have been responsible for the abolishment of the ideas of natural theology, the idea that you could deduce god logically from the world, which occurred in the end of the 19th century as the ideas of Darwin became more widely known. But there is no reason why our belief in god should rest on this or any philosophical construct. There is no reason on earth why logic should be an adequate means of ascertaining the existence of god. After all, as every evolutionary biologist would assure us, logic is just a contingent feature of the mind which , in turn , is a contingent feature of blind evolutionary processes. How could one trust such a precipitous process? The evolutionary argument ultimately falls down because of what Martin Buber called 'the radical uncertainty' of inferring from experience. Buber called this 'the cosmic ray of light in the world', because it frees us from the chains of reason and experience.

Reductionism and Relativism

Modern science is very often, purposely or not, reductionistic. First, Galileo displaces us from the centre of the Universe. Then, Darwin shows we were not fallen angles but actually risen apes, and Freud, whose ideas are only controversially scientific, but whose impact made him a household name in the West, informs us that we are not even masters in our own minds. Pavlov, moreover, attempts to show us that we can be conditioned like dogs. This is the familiar litany of our dispossession. Some would say it is the story of how we acquired a sense of proportion. But crucially, it reinterprets what it means to be human. EO Wilson, in his infamous book, Sociobiology, shows this most clearly by comparing us to ants. Now it has to be said that Mr Wilson holds ants in very high regard, he has spent his life investigating them, but his views nonetheless shock us, and rightly so, in my view, as being terribly reductionistic.

But the fear that Darwinism will tear apart every human endeavour is profoundly misguided. The activists who poured water on EO Wilson's head forgot in what high regard, Wilson hold ants. There is no reason to suspect it would. Shakespeare will be Shakespeare, humankind will still be a sophisticated, family of individuals. Just because we can describe some of the basic biological processes that lead to the complex thing we call a human being, does not mean that we are nothing but basic biological processes. The fact that you can write out Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in ink, after all, doesn't mean that it is 'only ink'! Evolution seems to be a necessary element in explaining how human beings develop, but it is hardly sufficient. This, however, does not stop the popularisers of evolution to claim that the end of human creativity is nigh. Their apocalyptic sentiments seem to evoke a deep-seated irrational fear in people, and this is apparently good for the sales. It is not so good, however, for the soul.

From the outset there have been those who have thought they saw Darwin letting the worst possible cat out of the bag: nihilism. Can any sense of wonder and purpose be sustained in the face of Darwinism? If Darwin is right, is not the implication that nothing is sacred? To put it bluntly, could anything have any point?

Relativism, the beolief that all criteria of judgment are relative to the individuals and situations involved. Moral relativism, as opposed to other forms of relativism, is the view that moral standards are grounded only in social custom. The most famous statement of relativism in general is: "Man is the measure of all things," Both scientists and philosophers have advocated moral relativism. For example, anthropologist William Graham Sumner dramatically expresses the notion of moral relativism thus:

"The 'right' way is the way which the ancestors used and which has been handed down. The tradition is its own warrant. It is not held subject to verification by experience. The notion of right is not outside of us, of independent origin. Whatever is, is right." ('Folkways', 1906)

Arguments for moral relativism often involve two principal contentions:

(I) Primacy of de facto values: Our conceptions of morality should be based on how people actually behave (de facto values), and not on an ideal standard how people should behave (ideal values).

(II) Cultural variation: Main moral values vary from culture to culture.

Regarding the second of these claims, moral relativists emphasise the variation in values that we see in cultures around us. It is indisputable that some value vary from culture to culture, such as wearing clothes, child marriages, and eating the bodies of dead relatives. However, many of these values are more like rules of etiquette than rules of morality.

Dostoevsky, in his book The Brothers Karamazov, asks whether life has any meaning at all. He is struggling to maintain the idea of the Absolute. Alexei Fyodorovich, the advocate of the Absolute, struggles against a powerful contemporary cultural shift in Russia which included a growing disdain for church and state, perhaps because of an increasing acceptance of the theories of Darwin. The Cardinal Grand Inquisitor presents the most developed and complete formulation of Dostoevsky's vision of a godless, eternal city of Babel. The Tower of Babel is, for Dostoevsky, built "precisely without god" and for the purpose of bringing heaven down to earth. This is Dostoevsky's expression of the mood of his times. god, after all, is dead. Many believed that they could create a perfect society "precisely" because god is dead. Science promised to solve every material problem imaginable. And there are no problems but the material to be solved, since, as the Inquisitor puts it:

"…there is no sin, but only hungry men…Mankind in its entirety has always yearned to arrange things so that they must be universal… Instead of the firm ancient law, man has henceforth to decide for himself, with a free heart, what is good and what is evil..." (p. 255)

Before long, however, this vision shows itself as being disasterously wrong.

Nietzsche, another troubled poet, because it is the poets, not the pure philosophers, that express these sentiments most clearly, who wrote that he was aroused from his dogmatic slumber by Darwin, seems to be intoxicated by this relativistic reasoning. This is how he describes it in his account of the Madman:

"[An] insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. "Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? … What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it"? (Section, 125, The Gay Science)

If Nietzsche is the father of existentialism, then Darwin seems to be its grandfather.

Common to both these authors is a wholesale acceptance of moral relativism. They base this on the sudden lack of the 'ground of meaning', be it god, goodness or any other euphemism for purpose in the world. This sudden emptiness, this 'unbearable lightness of being', is exposed by Darwin, because the god-is-dead theme is really a metaphor for the general corrosion of old, absolute values.