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Transcript
The Darwin Agenda The heated words within recent issues of HaKehila on the subject of Darwin and Hitler have contrasted sharply with the arctic chill in the economy and the atmosphere. They have also warmed my heart. I’ve been interested in, and worked professionally on, questions of evolution for thirty years. As a graduate student, I wrote my dissertation at Yale on the molecular evolution of leghemoglobin. At present, as a Research Director for Genomics and a Professor of Biotechnology, I work on genome dynamics and the role of transposons in genome evolution. What is leghemoglobin, you ask? “Blood in a bean,” is the answer. What is blood doing in a bean, how did it get there? The answer to that question provides, in its details, explicit support for evolutionary theory. Klinghoffer and Stein, however, try to get blood from a stone, rather than a bean, when they attempt to blame Darwin for the Holocaust. There are several important and distinct issues in Klinghoffer and Stein and their attempts to connect Darwin to Hitler and the Holocaust, and also in theological responses to Darwin, which need to be teased apart. First, did Hitler interpret Darwin correctly? Were Hitler’s ideas as manifested in the Holocaust actually based on Darwin, or do they have other origins? Third, can Darwin be held accountable for Hitler and the Holocaust? Fourth, does the theory of evolution offer the best current explanation for the biological world? Fifth, if it does, what motivates Klinghoffer and Stein? Last, what implications do Darwin and evolution have for faith? Regarding Hitler’s interpretation of Darwin, we must be clear. Hitler confused natural selection with artificial selection. Darwin described artificial section long-known to breeders and proposed that the section at work in the natural world, natural selection, could explain biological diversity. He did not propose that man apply the process to humans, nor that in any sense there was a perfection that could be reached. Hitler falsely believed in directionality in evolution and confused selected traits with “strength.” He was influenced by Social Darwinism, in which biological Darwinism was misapplied to social conflict. He mixed this with 19th Century racism, so that history was seen as a struggle among unequal races. He fully misunderstood hybridization, speciation, selection, fitness, and competition. Moreover, Hitler’s use of Darwinian terminology was so flawed, and his view of Jews so twisted (“cancer”, “infection”) that there was very little Darwin in them. He missed the key point: natural selection is a process in nature and not a tool for man to be applied to mankind. Nevertheless, we can ask: What happens when societies are under Darwinian selection? The answer is far from clear. “Fitness” in a Darwinian sense means the ability to produce offspring that are themselves fit to produce offspring. Given that brain chemistry and structure is at least in part genetically determined (as we know from the differing behaviors of various breeds of dogs), the evolution of altruism per se in human populations has interested evolutionists. In this sense, cooperative societies and altruism appear much more effective than warfare and social conflict as a way of insuring the fitness of individuals in a human population. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, indeed, socialist interpretations of Darwin were common. One may well argue that the historical course of Nazism shows that Hitler’s own attempt to apply Darwinian principals was tragically misguided: Germany was destroyed, its reproductive capacity reduced by death and starvation, and its gene pool (the “racial purity” that Hitler strove for) disturbed by the mass rape of German women that followed in the wake of the Soviet invasion. At the very least, Nazism cannot be justified on a Darwinian basis and Darwinism does not contain the seed for fascism generally. 1 If we are not to look to Darwin for the origins of Nazism and the Holocaust, where shall we turn? The idea of breeding a superior race that Hitler espoused was derived more from Eugenics than Darwin per se. However, the idea of eliminating weak children was common already in ancient times. The concept persisted in one form or another through the Renaissance and Enlightenment until the 20th century, when it gained currency due to the discoveries of Mendel, Darwin, and others. In fact, between the world wars, 27 countries accepted the principle of voluntary eugenic sterilization. The 19th century racism as such has thoroughly non-scientific origins, within the writings of Gobineau and Schopenhauer and various fantasies concerning Aryanism. Add to racial triumphalism and German romanticism the social disruptions of 19th century industrialization, the German military defeat in the First World War, the economic collapse of the 1930s, the political chaos and polarization, the need to find a scapegoat for these troubles, longstanding church-based hatred of Jews combined with their recent social emergence, and one comes to racial anti-Semitism and perhaps to the Holocaust in the end. However, one has moved a long way from Darwin. Eugenics, when mixed with racial theory and applied by fascists, had dire consequences. However, the early eugenicists had a tragically flawed understanding of inheritance and genetics. Firstly, races do not exist in a genetic sense, only in a social sense. Tiger Woods and Barack Obama are not “black” genetically, and there is more genetic diversity within Africa than outside it. Modern population genetics shows that “hidden genes,” i.e., recessive traits, are very slowly eliminated from a population by selection, natural or otherwise. Darwin, on his part, was unaware of Mendel’s discovery of genetics. Mendel read Darwin (I have seen Mendel’s notes in his copy of The Origin of the Species in Brno), but did not bring Darwin’s ideas together with his own. Today’s diagnostic tools allows us to make, in some cases, the connection between certain forms of genes and birth defects, e.g., the Tay-Sachs disease. This has enabled genetic counseling, a form of eugenics. Use of the data produced by genetic screening is an ethical and moral issue and not a scientific one when applied to humans (not to plants). In this way, we cannot hold Mendel responsible for the Holocaust any more than we can Darwin. In a larger sense, we can question the validity of blaming the misuse of ideas for political purposes on the originators of those ideas. Beyond Darwin, we have many examples. Marx, arguably, was misused by Lenin and then Stalin to create a totalitarian regime. The Scandinavian “well-being” society owes as much to Marx as to the Judeo-Christian tradition, but has remained thoroughly democratic. The USSR abused Freud and psychiatry generally, using diagnoses of schizophrenia as a tool of oppression; should we blame the psychiatrists for this? Should we blame Einstein for the use of atomic weapons to kill civilians and the consequent existential threat of the arms race? Finally, should we blame Jesus, who taught as a Jew in the Essene tradition and died as a Jew, for the subsequent medieval and modern oppression of Jews? For that matter, was Martin Luther responsible for the Holocaust when he advised (1543), in “The Jews and their Lies,” to “set fire to their synagogues” among seven means to destroy their religion, culture, and livelihoods? If so, why was did the Nazis get their start in Catholic Munich and not Lutheran Helsinki or Stockholm? The anachronism, hindsight, and simplifications required in placing blame seem to better serve political aims than the search for truth. There is no harm in criticizing scientific theories, but this must be done on the basis of the science itself and with scientific evidence. Calling something a theory does not make it random speculation, but refers to it as a body of hypotheses and an organizing framework for data. Indeed, critical examination of scientific evidence is a fundamental principal of science. 2 When sufficient data come to light that does not fit the theory, a new theory is proposed that better accounts for the data. This is the essence of scientific revolutions. Since Darwin, our understanding of evolution has been enhanced by the interaction of many scientific fields, ranging from Mendelian genetics and population biology to high-resolution paleontology, developmental biology, and especially molecular biology and genomics. Rather than these new steams of information and perspectives raising irreconcilable differences with Darwinism, they have provided independent confirmations of its ideas. The problem with Intelligent Design is that it is no scientific theory, because it does not put forward a set of testable hypotheses for the role of G-d in the creation and progression of biological diversity. Evolution is in essence ecology over time. Ecosystems and the environment change, and organisms track this, with species appearing, hybridizing, and disappearing. “Designs” for bat wings would have better applied the well-suited bird model than used webbed mammalian fingers. Pandas would have got a thumb like other mammals and not the strange wrist-bone structure they have. Horses would not have needed fused fingers to make a hoof. Any woman who has given birth, or any man with a bad back, knows human design is not intelligent. The Engineer was somehow constrained by history and could not use the best design. Perhaps the best argument for evolution, though, comes from the transposons mentioned at the beginning. These mobile bits of DNA mostly have no function regarding the making of an organism, yet they comprise most of the genome. They move around, but their unpredictable locations show no evidence of design. In whales and horses, we can see old transposon insertions (we can tell they’re old by their mutations) in identical chromosomal positions. This offers very good evidence, supported by other data, that whales and horses have diverged from common ancestors. A study of their bones supports the idea that whales returned to the sea, but their ancestors walked on the land. An Intelligent Designer would have built fishes, whales, and sharks in the same way, but shark fins, whale fins, and fish fins are not anatomically the same.. Moreover, the small, random mutations that occur throughout the genome give rise to versions of genes that confer variations in traits. These are sometimes useful if environmental conditions change in such a way that they are advantageous. However, mostly they are not particularly worthwhile. Mutations, or mistakes in DNA copying, occur because of the deep physics of the process – random motion and quantum chemistry. Perhaps the Designer made the physics, but not the whales and horses. What of Social Darwinism, then? Let’s assume that groups within human society, Germans or French, upper class or lower classes, Protestants or Jews compete for limited resources, one more successfully than another, leaving more offspring who are again more successful in reproducing. Even if one group came to predominate by numbers, would the group remain homogeneous? Darwinian processes are about gene frequencies, not social status or identity. Human talents, whether for playing piano or making money, are notoriously poorly heritable; hence, there would be little real Darwinian evolution. Perhaps only the genes for very general human traits, such as sociability, cooperation, and language, have been, or can be, under selective pressure. Social Darwinism is therefore not really Darwinism, but Lamarckianism. Lamarck espoused the inheritance of acquired characteristics (e.g., giraffes have long necks from stretching to reach tree leaves). Culture is nothing if not acquired, through nurture not nature, and passed on relatively well. Unsurprisingly, Lamarck was a favorite of Stalin, and Lamarckian ideas were influential in the USSR, where Darwin was the enemy. Stalin wanted to create a new man, Homo sovieticus, and have his traits heritable. I will not hold Lamarck personally responsible for Stalin, however. The issue appears, then, not 3 to be about Darwin but about why certain ideas have been misused for politically expedient reasons in Germany, or for that matter the USSR or even the USA. Ultimately, the question of whether Darwin or Lamarck was scientifically correct seems irrelevant to the politics of Darwin in the USA. Klinghoffer, Stein, and company confuse the validity of a scientific idea with its misapplication. Klinghoffer and Stein both attempt to use the worst excesses of the 20th century (both Nazi and Soviet) to smear Darwin while they simultaneously pump “Intelligent Design.” What better way to discredit a scientific idea then to label it dangerous by falsely connecting it with the Holocaust, one of the great evils of all time? By this logic, we should ban modern physics and Pasteur’s microbiology from schools, because they made possible weapons of mass destruction. Darwin is being used as a whipping boy by the Christian Right in the USA. Anti-Darwinism is a cloak for attempts to impose Christian values on American society. They find a welcoming atmosphere: survey data (2006) showed that in Scandinavia about 80% of the public accept some form of evolution, the highest in Europe; at the bottom of the list (33rd and 34th) are the USA and Turkey, with less than 40% acceptance of evolution. The efforts of the anti-Darwinist, Intelligent Design advocates are part of the ongoing culture wars that include skirmishes over abortion rights and gay marriage, school prayer, school sex education, availability of contraceptives, and the general vision of America as a Christian, in particular Protestant, society. It is important to note that the American political landscape is shifted considerably to the right from that of Finland. The “left-wing” Democratic Party of Obama is closest to Kokoomus. The Discovery Institute is indeed a rightwing think tank, a driving force behind “Intelligent Design, ” and has been credited with creating the notion that evolutionary theory is “in crisis” due to “controversy” over its veracity among the scientific community. Intelligent Design is a Trojan horse for bringing the bible into biology classes. Klinghoffer, holding a basic degree (baccalaureate) from Brown University, is himself is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a former Reform Jew who became ba’al tshuva (newly religious). Indeed the AAAS (American Association for Advancement of Science), the largest American scientific organization, has publicly stated that, “…there is no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of the theory of evolution. The current controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution is not a scientific one.” Must a religious person, however, support Intelligent Design? Not only is there no controversy over the validity of evolution within the scientific community, but also there is no conflict with either Judaism or religion as such. Indeed, no less an eminence than Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, as quoted by Rabbi Larry Yudelson, saw Darwin’s theory in terms of “the unfolding of the spiritual dimension of existence, which does not show a hiatus of a single wasted step.” Kook saw no conflict between evolution and the basic truths of Judaism. Nevertheless, it is clear that Genesis, taken literally, conflicts with the facts. There are basically two alternatives: twist the facts and make Hashem, as does Intelligent Design, a puny “G-d of the Gaps” in scientific knowledge, which are constantly shrinking; accept the Torah as a moral and ethical guide and not as the reference book on the physical world. Of course, fundamentalists of any religious persuasion would not agree with this view. However, a basic lesson of philosophy is that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” A statement on the nature of the biological world cannot be translated into a moral dictum. Likewise, it is intellectually dishonest to allow a moral or political vision of the human world to blind us to the facts that surround us, whether in fossils or in DNA. The Bible offers moral illumination; however, we should not lean too heavily on the lamppost and expect biological truth to shine forth as well. Indeed, to quote Dobzhansky, “Nothing in 4 biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Ultimately, we ought to be able to imagine a G-d who could see within the Big Bang the evolution of mankind and his debates on theology and biology. Sources: Knibiehler Y. Agressologie. 1987 Jun;28(7):765-7. R. Weikart. 2002. J. Hist. Ideas 63: 323. http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2006/pdf/0219boardstatement.pdf 5