Excelsior!

One reason I don't see science and religion (or atheism and religion, for that matter) as mutually exclusive alternatives is that much of what I find in religion turns up in its supposed opponents. (This usually bothers religious believers as much as unbelievers when I point it out -- they tend to be invested in seeing themselves as separated from, and incomprehensible to, the worldly herd.) As I noticed when I read A. C. Grayling, there's considerable overlap between the camps; and why not? Religion (a domain notoriously hard to define and delimit), science (ditto), and atheism (megaditto) are all human inventions, part of whose function is to make sense of the universe in human terms. It seems that we have relatively few themes that concern us, and relatively few ways of discussing them, so it's hardly surprising that people keep inventing and re-inventing the same themes no matter how they identify themselves.

In Mary Midgley's Evolution as a Religion (Methuen, 1985), which I'm currently rereading, she shows this clearly. Take this example, from pages 32-34.

It is a standard charge against religion that it panders to wish-fulfilment, consoling people for their present miseries by promising wonders in the future, thus dishonestly gaining support by dogmatic and unwarranted predictions. With this charge in mind, let us look at the concluding passage of an otherwise sober, serious and reputable book on the chemical origins of life on earth. The writer, a molecular biologist, having discussed evolution and described it, tendentiously but unemotionally, as a steady increase in intelligence, turns his attention to the future. Mankind, he says, is likely to throw up a new, distinct and more intelligent type, which will then become ‘reproductively isolated’. He then goes on (and I have not cheated by removing any words like ‘possibly’ or ‘perhaps’):

He [man] will splinter into types of humans with differing mental faculties that will lead to diversification and separate species. From among these types, a new species, Omega man, will emerge either alone, in union with others, or with mechanical amplification to transcend to new dimensions of time and space beyond our comprehension – as much beyond our imagination as our world was to the emerging eukaryotes … If evolution is to proceed through the line of man to a next higher form, there must exist within man’s nature the making of Omega man. … Omega man’s comprehension and participation in the dimensions of the supernatural is what man yearns for himself, but cannot have. It is reasonable to assume that man’s intellect is not the ultimate, but merely represents a state intermediate between the primates and Omega man. What comprehension and powers over Nature Omega man will command can only be suggested by man’s image of the supernatural.

Do any doubts arise? Just one. There may be a problem about timing. Major steps in evolution have been occurring at steadily decreasing intervals, and the next one may be due shortly. It must be the one the writer is waiting for. He adds: ‘On such a shortened curve, conceivably Omega man could succeed man in shorter than 10,000 years.’ Ordinary evolution, however, is too slow to allow of this startling development. So what is to be done? The reply comes briskly.

How then can Omega man arise in so short a time?

The answer is unavoidable.

Man will make him.

This is apparently a reference to genetic engineering, something specially important to those whose faith leans heavily on the dramatic idea of infallible, escalator-type evolution. They demand from that idea, not just an inspiring account of the past, but also hope for continued progress in the future. But the human race cannot be confidently expected to evolve further in a literal, biological sense. Human social arrangements, even in simple cultures, block normal natural selection. And the more elaborate they get, the more they do so. Nineteenth-century Social Darwinists attacked this problem with an axe, calling for deliberate eugenic selection and harsh commercial competition, so that the race could go back to being properly weeded and could continue to progress. As we now know, however, these schemes were not just odious but futile. The scale was wrong. Commercial competition has no tendency to affect reproduction. And as for ‘positive eugenics’, it is not possible to identify desirable genes nor to force people to breed for them. Even if it were, their spread would still be absurdly slow.
The natural conclusion is that such schemes must be dropped, that the human race must take itself as it is, with its well-known vast powers of cultural adaptation, and make the best of its existing capacities. But this thought is unbearable to those who faith in life is pinned to the steady, continuing, upward escalator of biological evolution. ‘If evolution is to proceed through the line of man to a next higher form’, as Day puts it, there simply has to be another way. That wish, rather than the amazingly thin argument he produces about recurrent evolutionary steps, is evidently the ground of his confidence.

Midgley was quoting from William Day, Genesis on Planet Earth: The Search for Life’s Beginning (East Lansing MI: House of Talos, 1979), pages 390-92. The name of the publisher made me wary, so I did some digging and found that Genesis on Planet Earth was reissued in a second edition in 1984 by Yale University Press. Day himself went on to publish some suspiciously New Age-sounding titles, as recently as 2000. Midgley says that the second edition didn't include the material she quoted above, but had a new chapter of "much vaguer but every bit as fervent, intense and evangelical [material], about the new levels to which mankind is just about to ascend" (63).

I've noticed that a lot of people who vigorously support Darwin against Creation in the United States share this fantasy of evolution as an upward "escalator", to use Midgley's word. Despite the efforts of Steven Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, and others to explain to the educated public that Darwin's theory does not entail a linear progression from simple to complex, from lesser to greater intelligence, the fantasy is deeply rooted in many people's consciousness; it's a lot harder to dislodge, apparently, than belief in the creation myths of Genesis.

Excelsior!

One reason I don't see science and religion (or atheism and religion, for that matter) as mutually exclusive alternatives is that much of what I find in religion turns up in its supposed opponents. (This usually bothers religious believers as much as unbelievers when I point it out -- they tend to be invested in seeing themselves as separated from, and incomprehensible to, the worldly herd.) As I noticed when I read A. C. Grayling, there's considerable overlap between the camps; and why not? Religion (a domain notoriously hard to define and delimit), science (ditto), and atheism (megaditto) are all human inventions, part of whose function is to make sense of the universe in human terms. It seems that we have relatively few themes that concern us, and relatively few ways of discussing them, so it's hardly surprising that people keep inventing and re-inventing the same themes no matter how they identify themselves.

In Mary Midgley's Evolution as a Religion (Methuen, 1985), which I'm currently rereading, she shows this clearly. Take this example, from pages 32-34.

It is a standard charge against religion that it panders to wish-fulfilment, consoling people for their present miseries by promising wonders in the future, thus dishonestly gaining support by dogmatic and unwarranted predictions. With this charge in mind, let us look at the concluding passage of an otherwise sober, serious and reputable book on the chemical origins of life on earth. The writer, a molecular biologist, having discussed evolution and described it, tendentiously but unemotionally, as a steady increase in intelligence, turns his attention to the future. Mankind, he says, is likely to throw up a new, distinct and more intelligent type, which will then become ‘reproductively isolated’. He then goes on (and I have not cheated by removing any words like ‘possibly’ or ‘perhaps’):

He [man] will splinter into types of humans with differing mental faculties that will lead to diversification and separate species. From among these types, a new species, Omega man, will emerge either alone, in union with others, or with mechanical amplification to transcend to new dimensions of time and space beyond our comprehension – as much beyond our imagination as our world was to the emerging eukaryotes … If evolution is to proceed through the line of man to a next higher form, there must exist within man’s nature the making of Omega man. … Omega man’s comprehension and participation in the dimensions of the supernatural is what man yearns for himself, but cannot have. It is reasonable to assume that man’s intellect is not the ultimate, but merely represents a state intermediate between the primates and Omega man. What comprehension and powers over Nature Omega man will command can only be suggested by man’s image of the supernatural.

Do any doubts arise? Just one. There may be a problem about timing. Major steps in evolution have been occurring at steadily decreasing intervals, and the next one may be due shortly. It must be the one the writer is waiting for. He adds: ‘On such a shortened curve, conceivably Omega man could succeed man in shorter than 10,000 years.’ Ordinary evolution, however, is too slow to allow of this startling development. So what is to be done? The reply comes briskly.

How then can Omega man arise in so short a time?

The answer is unavoidable.

Man will make him.

This is apparently a reference to genetic engineering, something specially important to those whose faith leans heavily on the dramatic idea of infallible, escalator-type evolution. They demand from that idea, not just an inspiring account of the past, but also hope for continued progress in the future. But the human race cannot be confidently expected to evolve further in a literal, biological sense. Human social arrangements, even in simple cultures, block normal natural selection. And the more elaborate they get, the more they do so. Nineteenth-century Social Darwinists attacked this problem with an axe, calling for deliberate eugenic selection and harsh commercial competition, so that the race could go back to being properly weeded and could continue to progress. As we now know, however, these schemes were not just odious but futile. The scale was wrong. Commercial competition has no tendency to affect reproduction. And as for ‘positive eugenics’, it is not possible to identify desirable genes nor to force people to breed for them. Even if it were, their spread would still be absurdly slow.
The natural conclusion is that such schemes must be dropped, that the human race must take itself as it is, with its well-known vast powers of cultural adaptation, and make the best of its existing capacities. But this thought is unbearable to those who faith in life is pinned to the steady, continuing, upward escalator of biological evolution. ‘If evolution is to proceed through the line of man to a next higher form’, as Day puts it, there simply has to be another way. That wish, rather than the amazingly thin argument he produces about recurrent evolutionary steps, is evidently the ground of his confidence.

Midgley was quoting from William Day, Genesis on Planet Earth: The Search for Life’s Beginning (East Lansing MI: House of Talos, 1979), pages 390-92. The name of the publisher made me wary, so I did some digging and found that Genesis on Planet Earth was reissued in a second edition in 1984 by Yale University Press. Day himself went on to publish some suspiciously New Age-sounding titles, as recently as 2000. Midgley says that the second edition didn't include the material she quoted above, but had a new chapter of "much vaguer but every bit as fervent, intense and evangelical [material], about the new levels to which mankind is just about to ascend" (63).

I've noticed that a lot of people who vigorously support Darwin against Creation in the United States share this fantasy of evolution as an upward "escalator", to use Midgley's word. Despite the efforts of Steven Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, and others to explain to the educated public that Darwin's theory does not entail a linear progression from simple to complex, from lesser to greater intelligence, the fantasy is deeply rooted in many people's consciousness; it's a lot harder to dislodge, apparently, than belief in the creation myths of Genesis.

Hey, You -- Out Of The Meme Pool!

I can’t see any good reason why Creationist or Intelligent Design research shouldn’t be done. It’s probably a waste of money and time, but so is most scientific research.

Science cultists rant and rave and tear their hair, but there’s no good reason for their wrath. Creationism and Intelligent Design are certainly religiously based, but they are not anti-scientific. In fact their concession that they have to present a science-like case is a surrender to secular science. It’s even remotely possible that some ID researcher will serendipitously make a real discovery. Weirder things have happened – that’s science!

Sure, the premises and motives of the ID research are completely bogus; so what? There’s a lot of secular research being done to prove – excuse me, demonstrate – that women can’t learn math, that men of African descent are biologically capable only of playing basketball and singing spirituals, that gay men are really women’s minds encased in male flesh, and so on. This kind of biological determinism has been discredited many times, yet its proponents don’t seem to have any trouble getting funding or publicity for their latest results. It’s also more harmful socially than Creationism or ID, being used to lend scientific respectability to all kinds of bigotry, and yet it doesn’t seem to rouse the same hysterical derision that Creationism does. My own criticisms of scientific racism in online debate have often been met with the argument that we should just let science run its course, and let the bad ideas and research fall by the wayside, as they assuredly will thanks to the self-correcting nature of science.

If it were up to me, if I were sitting behind a desk at the NIMH, would I provide funding for the next born-gay study? Probably not. At the very least, I’d return the proposal with some suggestions that the researchers correct their assumptions and methodology. But if that happened, none of this research would get done, because it is based on flawed assumptions and crummy methodology. As the biologist Ruth Hubbard wrote in Exploding the Gene Myth (1997, page 98, italics mine):

Given the publicity accorded to such studies, more research will undoubtedly be done on this subject. Molecular biologists are now soliciting participants from extended families with “at least three gay men or lesbians,” hoping to find DNA sequences they can link to homosexuality. In view of the complexities of doing accurate linkage studies and necessarily small size of the samples, such studies are bound to come up with plenty of meaningless correlations, which will get reported as further evidence of “genetic transmission of homosexuality.

I don’t think it would be a great loss if such research were strangled in its cradle, but hundreds of thousands of my fellow queers would be upset, because they are waiting for Science to prove, erm, demonstrate that we can’t help ourselves, we were born this way, we’re prisoners of our genes; and if we could just prove that, then Fred Phelps would like us and let us into his church.

Thousands of scientists would also be upset, because you're not supposed to deny funding to any research program, no matter how worthless, unless it's ... erm ... well, the wrong worthless research program.

Please note again: I don’t think Creationism contains even a grain of truth, but the same can be said of many beliefs and ideas that don’t have hundreds (thousands?) of websites dedicated to ridiculing them. There’s something about Creationism that really gets into the craw of secularists, much as the idea that human beings evolved from monkeys outrages Creationists. Richard Lewontin pointed out:

Neither the Vatican nor much of quite conventional Protestant theology demands that one take the story in Genesis 1 literally. Even William Jennings Bryan, famous as the prosecutor in the Scopes trial in 1925, when called as a witness for the defense, confessed that he did not much care whether God took six days or six hundred million years to create the world. Moreover, even the minimalist Christian position does not require the abandonment of the neo-Darwinian view of the mechanism of evolution. It is quite possible to argue, as some of my believing religious colleagues do, that God set the stage for evolution by natural selection of undirected mutations, but that He reserved the ancestral line destined to become human for special preservation and guidance.

What, then, is the source of the repeated episodes of active political and social agitation against the assertions of evolutionary science? One apparent answer is that it is the expected product of fundamentalist belief, which rejects the easy compromises of liberal exegesis and insists that every word in Genesis means exactly what it says. Days are days, not eons. But there's the rub. A literal reading of Genesis tells us that it took God only three days to make the physical universe as it now exists, yet nuclear physics and astrophysics claim a very old stellar system and provide the instruments for the dating of bits and pieces of the earth and of fossils spanning hundreds of millions of years. So why aren't Kansas schools under extreme pressure to change the curriculum in physical science courses? Why should physicists be allowed to propagate, unopposed, their godless accounts of the evolution of the physical universe? Something more is at stake than a disagreement over the literal truth of biblical metaphors.

He’s right, and it works both ways. It’s a popular trope in science circles that Science has dethroned “Man”: first Copernicus showed that We are not at the center of the universe, then Darwin showed that We are not the crown of creation (though we are at the top of the evolutionary ladder; see below). A lot of science cultists really get into the idea of punishing Man’s sinful pride, as much as any Grand Inquisitor. They still think that Man is pretty special, though, because He can do, like, y’know, Science, and strip Nature nekkid and probe her secrets, and someday He will have, like, total knowledge and total domination of the Universe!

In principle I favor teaching the conflicts between Darwinian evolution and Creationism/ID. I’m as opposed to Sam Harris’ demand that public schools teach “God Is Dead” as I am to the schools’ teaching any other religious position as fact; I think the most important thing schools can teach students is how to research controversies and make up their own minds.

Yes, I know that “teaching the controversy,” as they call it, has been co-opted by the Creationist Discovery Institute. But just because the Ku Klux Klan appeals to the First Amendment’s protection of free speech doesn’t invalidate the principle. (Have you ever noticed that the same people who attack the ACLU for defending free speech are the first to run to it for help when they get into trouble themselves?) But I’m with Gerald Graff: “I’m a believer in the pedagogical and civic value of bad argument. I think a culture of crude and crudely polarized debate is an advance over the Eisenhower era I grew up in, where conflicts were mushed over in a haze of evasive rhetoric.” The fact that so many people apparently believe that free speech doesn’t include bad arguments as well as good, offensive speech as well as nice speech, shows just how poorly educated they are. Hazing over conflict with evasive rhetoric is exactly what I see in most “diversity” education, however.

In practice, though, I doubt that most biology teachers understand Darwinian theory well enough to present it accurately. I know that a good many “reality-based” pro-science liberal types are not really Darwinians at all; rather, they are Spencerians, who believe in a linear, upward march of evolution from the lowly amoeba to Man. I’ve heard enough of them say that less-educated or less “intelligent” people are less evolved than their own superior selves, to be wary of just how well Darwinian evolution is understood by its advocates and supporters. While writing this post I found quite a number of science-related websites and blogs criticizing the March of Evolutionary Progress as a “myth,” but it wasn’t always so – as some of these writers concede. One even admits that St. Carl Sagan’s PBS television account of the glory of science “is at least suggestive of a branching process [instead of a Great Chain of Being], but it still does not fully drive home the diversity of life as it trails our own lineage primarily to the exclusion of others.”

In this clip, Sagan scrupulously mentions evolutionary branching, but his story is about Us and “who our ancestors were,” resulting in a linear narrative. That’s a feature of narrative and language, rather than of the theory, but it shows the pitfalls of trying to come up, as Sagan was, with a new Creation myth to replace the old one. (The same blogger links to an apparently similar clip – no longer available, alas -- featuring Richard “I Am The Antichrist, I Am a Scientist” Dawkins.) That famous image used to be Science; now it’s a Myth. How soon we forget.

(The image below of The Great Chain of Being comes from Dangerous Intersection, whose author erroneously assumes that only opponents of Science still think in those terms.)

Hey, You -- Out Of The Meme Pool!

I can’t see any good reason why Creationist or Intelligent Design research shouldn’t be done. It’s probably a waste of money and time, but so is most scientific research.

Science cultists rant and rave and tear their hair, but there’s no good reason for their wrath. Creationism and Intelligent Design are certainly religiously based, but they are not anti-scientific. In fact their concession that they have to present a science-like case is a surrender to secular science. It’s even remotely possible that some ID researcher will serendipitously make a real discovery. Weirder things have happened – that’s science!

Sure, the premises and motives of the ID research are completely bogus; so what? There’s a lot of secular research being done to prove – excuse me, demonstrate – that women can’t learn math, that men of African descent are biologically capable only of playing basketball and singing spirituals, that gay men are really women’s minds encased in male flesh, and so on. This kind of biological determinism has been discredited many times, yet its proponents don’t seem to have any trouble getting funding or publicity for their latest results. It’s also more harmful socially than Creationism or ID, being used to lend scientific respectability to all kinds of bigotry, and yet it doesn’t seem to rouse the same hysterical derision that Creationism does. My own criticisms of scientific racism in online debate have often been met with the argument that we should just let science run its course, and let the bad ideas and research fall by the wayside, as they assuredly will thanks to the self-correcting nature of science.

If it were up to me, if I were sitting behind a desk at the NIMH, would I provide funding for the next born-gay study? Probably not. At the very least, I’d return the proposal with some suggestions that the researchers correct their assumptions and methodology. But if that happened, none of this research would get done, because it is based on flawed assumptions and crummy methodology. As the biologist Ruth Hubbard wrote in Exploding the Gene Myth (1997, page 98, italics mine):

Given the publicity accorded to such studies, more research will undoubtedly be done on this subject. Molecular biologists are now soliciting participants from extended families with “at least three gay men or lesbians,” hoping to find DNA sequences they can link to homosexuality. In view of the complexities of doing accurate linkage studies and necessarily small size of the samples, such studies are bound to come up with plenty of meaningless correlations, which will get reported as further evidence of “genetic transmission of homosexuality.

I don’t think it would be a great loss if such research were strangled in its cradle, but hundreds of thousands of my fellow queers would be upset, because they are waiting for Science to prove, erm, demonstrate that we can’t help ourselves, we were born this way, we’re prisoners of our genes; and if we could just prove that, then Fred Phelps would like us and let us into his church.

Thousands of scientists would also be upset, because you're not supposed to deny funding to any research program, no matter how worthless, unless it's ... erm ... well, the wrong worthless research program.

Please note again: I don’t think Creationism contains even a grain of truth, but the same can be said of many beliefs and ideas that don’t have hundreds (thousands?) of websites dedicated to ridiculing them. There’s something about Creationism that really gets into the craw of secularists, much as the idea that human beings evolved from monkeys outrages Creationists. Richard Lewontin pointed out:

Neither the Vatican nor much of quite conventional Protestant theology demands that one take the story in Genesis 1 literally. Even William Jennings Bryan, famous as the prosecutor in the Scopes trial in 1925, when called as a witness for the defense, confessed that he did not much care whether God took six days or six hundred million years to create the world. Moreover, even the minimalist Christian position does not require the abandonment of the neo-Darwinian view of the mechanism of evolution. It is quite possible to argue, as some of my believing religious colleagues do, that God set the stage for evolution by natural selection of undirected mutations, but that He reserved the ancestral line destined to become human for special preservation and guidance.

What, then, is the source of the repeated episodes of active political and social agitation against the assertions of evolutionary science? One apparent answer is that it is the expected product of fundamentalist belief, which rejects the easy compromises of liberal exegesis and insists that every word in Genesis means exactly what it says. Days are days, not eons. But there's the rub. A literal reading of Genesis tells us that it took God only three days to make the physical universe as it now exists, yet nuclear physics and astrophysics claim a very old stellar system and provide the instruments for the dating of bits and pieces of the earth and of fossils spanning hundreds of millions of years. So why aren't Kansas schools under extreme pressure to change the curriculum in physical science courses? Why should physicists be allowed to propagate, unopposed, their godless accounts of the evolution of the physical universe? Something more is at stake than a disagreement over the literal truth of biblical metaphors.

He’s right, and it works both ways. It’s a popular trope in science circles that Science has dethroned “Man”: first Copernicus showed that We are not at the center of the universe, then Darwin showed that We are not the crown of creation (though we are at the top of the evolutionary ladder; see below). A lot of science cultists really get into the idea of punishing Man’s sinful pride, as much as any Grand Inquisitor. They still think that Man is pretty special, though, because He can do, like, y’know, Science, and strip Nature nekkid and probe her secrets, and someday He will have, like, total knowledge and total domination of the Universe!

In principle I favor teaching the conflicts between Darwinian evolution and Creationism/ID. I’m as opposed to Sam Harris’ demand that public schools teach “God Is Dead” as I am to the schools’ teaching any other religious position as fact; I think the most important thing schools can teach students is how to research controversies and make up their own minds.

Yes, I know that “teaching the controversy,” as they call it, has been co-opted by the Creationist Discovery Institute. But just because the Ku Klux Klan appeals to the First Amendment’s protection of free speech doesn’t invalidate the principle. (Have you ever noticed that the same people who attack the ACLU for defending free speech are the first to run to it for help when they get into trouble themselves?) But I’m with Gerald Graff: “I’m a believer in the pedagogical and civic value of bad argument. I think a culture of crude and crudely polarized debate is an advance over the Eisenhower era I grew up in, where conflicts were mushed over in a haze of evasive rhetoric.” The fact that so many people apparently believe that free speech doesn’t include bad arguments as well as good, offensive speech as well as nice speech, shows just how poorly educated they are. Hazing over conflict with evasive rhetoric is exactly what I see in most “diversity” education, however.

In practice, though, I doubt that most biology teachers understand Darwinian theory well enough to present it accurately. I know that a good many “reality-based” pro-science liberal types are not really Darwinians at all; rather, they are Spencerians, who believe in a linear, upward march of evolution from the lowly amoeba to Man. I’ve heard enough of them say that less-educated or less “intelligent” people are less evolved than their own superior selves, to be wary of just how well Darwinian evolution is understood by its advocates and supporters. While writing this post I found quite a number of science-related websites and blogs criticizing the March of Evolutionary Progress as a “myth,” but it wasn’t always so – as some of these writers concede. One even admits that St. Carl Sagan’s PBS television account of the glory of science “is at least suggestive of a branching process [instead of a Great Chain of Being], but it still does not fully drive home the diversity of life as it trails our own lineage primarily to the exclusion of others.”

In this clip, Sagan scrupulously mentions evolutionary branching, but his story is about Us and “who our ancestors were,” resulting in a linear narrative. That’s a feature of narrative and language, rather than of the theory, but it shows the pitfalls of trying to come up, as Sagan was, with a new Creation myth to replace the old one. (The same blogger links to an apparently similar clip – no longer available, alas -- featuring Richard “I Am The Antichrist, I Am a Scientist” Dawkins.) That famous image used to be Science; now it’s a Myth. How soon we forget.

(The image below of The Great Chain of Being comes from Dangerous Intersection, whose author erroneously assumes that only opponents of Science still think in those terms.)