Download 1 The Darwin Agenda The heated words within recent issues of

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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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