Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: Prudent Statesmanship or a Big Mistake?

I have argued that a Darwinian view of morality explains the moral sense as expressed at three levels of human experience: moral sentiments, moral traditions, and moral judgments. To illustrate this, I have offered a Darwinian assessment of Abraham Lincoln's handling of the moral debate over slavery. Lincoln appealed to those natural moral sentiments that recognize the evil of slavery. He also appealed to the moral traditions of the United States--particularly, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence--as denying the moral claims of slavery, even as he recognized that the legal traditions of the Constitution would not sanction the immediate abolition of slavery in the South. As constrained by these moral sentiments and moral traditions, Lincoln had to exercise practical moral judgment in deciding how best to handle the slavery issue in the particular circumstances he faced.

He judged that he had no constitutional power to abolish slavery in the South, and he reassured the proslavery Southerners that he would abide by the constitutional compromises protecting slavery in the South. But he never wavered in his affirmation of the wrongness of slavery and his commitment to promoting the ultimate extinction of slavery as quickly as circumstances permitted. By the summer of 1862, he concluded that he could constitutionally emancipate slaves in those regions of the nation in rebellion, although this could be justified only as an act of military necessity exercised by the Commander in Chief in time of war. He believed that the permanent and complete abolition of slavery would require the passage of the 13th Amendment, which he supported.

The problem with such a practical moral judgment, however, is that it is always contestable and uncertain. A prudential judgment about practical circumstances can never be proven by pure logical demonstration from abstract principles. So there will often be deep controversy as to whether a judgment in complex, contingent circumstances is correct or not.

That is true for Lincoln's judgments about the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. We still debate the wisdom of what he did. This continuing debate is clear in two recent books--Michael Knox Beran's Forge of Empires, 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made and Jim Powell's Great Emancipations: How the West Abolished Slavery. Comparing the statesmanship of Lincoln, Tsar Alexander II, and Otto von Bismarck, Beran argues that Lincoln's leadership in the Civil War to defeat the Southern rebellion and abolish slavery saved free government against the threat of a new philosophy of authoritarian coercion. Powell argues, on the contrary, that the Civil War was a big mistake, because slavery could have been peacefully abolished in the United States, which would have avoided the Southern resentment that slowed the progress toward racial equality. Powell's criticisms of Lincoln are made by many paleoconservatives and libertarians who scorn Lincoln and show their sympathy for the "lost cause" of the South. Beran and Powell have briefly summarized their arguments in essays found here and here.

In this debate, I am on the side of Beran. The major weakness in Powell's book is that he never shows any understanding of Lincoln's reasoning about slavery, and therefore he never really responds to Lincoln's position.

Powell insists that abolishing slavery peacefully--as was done in much of South America and the Caribbean--is much better than trying to abolish it through war. But he doesn't realize that Lincoln agrees! Throughout his career up to the end of 1862, Lincoln argued for peaceful, gradual emancipation of slaves with compensation for slaveholders and voluntary colonization in Africa for freed slaves who would consent to this. But the proslavery leaders of the South repeatedly rejected this. In fact, as early as 1833, the Virginia legislation rejected a plan for the gradual emancipation of slaves, the same kind of plan that Powell thinks worked so well elsewhere.

Powell notes that although compensation for Southern slaveholders would have been expensive, the Civil War was much more expensive. But this is exactly what Lincoln argued in his 1862 Annual Message to Congress! And yet the Southerners rebuffed his proposals.

Powell speculates that if the Southern states had been permitted to leave the Union in 1861, they eventually would have abolished slavery on their own. This shows one of the fundamental problems with moral judgment: we can never know for sure how history might have turned out if some judgments had been made differently. In 1861, Lincoln could have yielded to the demands of many to allow the Southern states leave without war. We don't know what would have happened. But Lincoln judged that this would have jeopardized the cause of freedom in the world, because he saw a powerful move in the South towards authoritarian coercion and away from the libertarian principles of the Declaration of Independence. Beran sees this as well, and he suggests that if Lincoln had not done what he did, the American South would have joined the forces of authoritarian paternalism in other parts of the world, and history might have shifted in that direction. Proslavery Southerners had dreamed of joining with slaveholders in the Caribbean to promote a growing empire of slave societies to challenge the free societies based on free labor. Powell does not explain why this would not have been a realistic possibility.

In fact, Powell never confronts the growing intellectual movement in the South toward a proslavery paternalist philosophy of coercion. In his book, Powell devotes one paragraph to the philosophical defense of slave society coming from John Randolph and John C. Calhoun (124). But he never says anything more about the pervasive Southern philosophy of paternalism based on the claim that all great civilizations required the rule of a few over the forced labor of a subordinated class--John Henry Hammond's "mud-sill" society. Lincoln saw this as a fundamental challenge to principles of a free society. Powell does not see this because he never really examines it. Beran shows how this kind of thinking was part of a world-wide counterrevolutionary movement of grandees to preserve their dominance against the revolutionary challenge of modern liberty.

At the end of his 1862 Annual Message to Congress, Lincoln claimed that the American Civil War would be a turning point in world history:

"Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save it. We--even we here--hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free--honoring alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth."

Similarly, of course, at the end of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln hoped that the Civil War would bring a "new birth of freedom" so that popular government "shall not perish from the earth."

To many readers today, this sounds like rhetorical exaggeration. But the whole point of Lincoln's view of the debate over slavery and Union was that this really was a critical historical moment in which the modern principles of the free society were being challenged by the ancient principles of authoritarian paternalism. Beran's book brings this out very well by putting Lincoln's statesmanship into the world-wide historical setting of 1861-1871.

For Lincoln, this great historical debate would turn on whether the principles of the Declaration of Independence would be taken seriously or not. In his speech of July 10, 1858, Lincoln warned that the arguments of Douglas for denying the equal liberty of all human beings would tend "to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this government into a government of some other form."

"They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of kingcraft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn it whatever way you will--whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent."

Similarly, in his letter of April 6, 1859, Lincoln affirmed that the principles of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence are "the definitions and axioms of a free society."

"And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success.

"One dashingly calls them 'glittering generalities'; another bluntly calls them 'self-evident lies'; and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to 'superior races.'

"These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect--the supplanting of the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the vanguard--the miners and sappers--of returning despotism."

David Christian's book The Maps of Time--the subject of a recent post--allows us to see that Lincoln understood that the modern commercial republic was a radical break with five thousand years of human history dominated by agrarian, tributary states in which a ruling few lived by exploiting the labor of the many. The Southern "mud-sill" theory of government, based on the idea that human civilization required a ruling elite exploiting the labor of a subordinate class, was a restatement of the argument for the agrarian state based on class privilege.

Beran's book shows that the various modern expressions of authoritarian paternalism--in the proslavery South, in Bismarck's welfare state, in Russian autocracy, or in Marxist socialism--were all extensions of the premodern agrarian state tradition.

In resisting this tendency to return to the ancient tradition of statist authoritarianism, Lincoln's statesmanship in the Civil War really did preserve the principles of a free society as the "last best hope of earth."

The Bicentennial of Darwin and Lincoln

Next year will bring the bicentennial of the birthday of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, who were born on February 12, 1809. There are many programs scheduled to celebrate either the Lincoln bicentennial or the Darwin bicentennial, but there are few programs bringing the two together. The only program that I know of that explores the link between Lincoln and Darwin is a program over the academic year--2008-2009--sponsored by the Center for Critical Inquiry at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro on the theme "Identity, Race, and Human Rights: Social Authority and the Legacies of Lincoln and Darwin."

The current issue of Newsweek has a cover article by Malcolm Jones on "Who Was More Important: Lincoln or Darwin?. There's a new book comparing Lincoln and Darwin by David Contosta entitled Rebel Giants. In January, Knopf will publish Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: Lincoln, Darwin, and the Making of the Modern Age.

On this blog, I have often written about the points of intellectual contact between Darwin and Lincoln. Some of these posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. These blog posts along with my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right convey my thoughts about the links between Darwin and Lincoln in their thinking about morality, politics, religion, and the place of human beings in nature.

Here I have one point to add. Lincoln had a remarkably deep understanding of human cultural evolution that follows the pattern of Darwinian universal history set forth by Darwin and by David Christian in the book that was the subject of my last post.

In his "Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions, his "Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society," and in his meeting with some American Indian chiefs, Lincoln laid out his conception of cultural evolution as moving through three stages of society--from foraging societies to agrarian societies to societies based on commercial exchange and free labor. Like Darwin and Christian, Lincoln believed that what made human beings unique in the animal world was the human capacity for symbolic speech, which allowed for collective learning in the artful domination of nature for the material, moral, and intellectual improvement of human life. Originally, all human beings lived by foraging--gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. Some of the native American Indians manifested this way of life. The invention of agriculture--based on the cultivation of domesticated plants and the herding of domesticated animals--supported human civilization as an advance beyond the savage life of foragers. But despite the advance in civilization in agrarian states, such states were founded on slavery and other forms of coerced labor so that rulers lived by exploiting peasant labor. Lincoln saw that the Industrial Revolution based on commercial exchange and free labor was bringing a new revolution in human cultural evolution that promised the physical, moral, and intellectual liberation of labor. He saw the abolition of slavery as the crucial move towards this new state of society that would bring a "new birth of freedom," in which all human beings would have a fair chance in the "race of life."

Darwin saw this same revolution in the cultural evolution of humanity. That's why he followed with great interest the news reports of the American Civil War. We can see this in his correspondence with Asa Gray in the 1860s. Like Lincoln, Darwin was a life-long opponent of slavery who looked forward to its abolition. But like Frederick Douglass, Darwin was frustrated by Lincoln's slowness in attacking slavery, because he did not fully comprehend Lincoln's prudence in working for the "ultimate extinction" of slavery over time. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation illustrates his prudence, because he justifies the emancipation of slaves in the rebellious territories as a military necessity in time of war, while recognizing that the final and complete abolition of slavery would require the 13th Amendment. Here we see the complexity and contingency of moral judgment. It is not enough to appeal to some abstract principle of absolute morality. We must be able to judge what can be done and should be done in the circumstances of action. And since such practical judgment can never be exercised with certainty or precision, we can never be sure that our decisions are correct.

We see here how a Darwinian science of morality and politics would have to account for the complex interaction of natural evolution, cultural evolution, and individual judgment.

Many of these points will surely come up in my seminar on Lincoln this fall at Northern Illinois University.

David Christian's History of Everything

David Christian's Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (University of California Press, 2004) is one of the most intellectually exciting books that I have read in recent years. As a historian specializing in Russian history, Christian taught for many years at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Now he teaches at San Diego State University. In 1989, the faculty in the history department at Macquarie were discussing what kind of introduction to history the department ought to offer their students, and Christian remarked, "Why not start at the beginning?" Traditionally, modern historians have assumed that the "beginning" of history was about 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, where the first cities, states, and agrarian civilizations appeared, and writing was invented. Whatever happened before that was relegated to "prehistory." But Christian decided that a modern scientific view of history should allow historians to start at the real beginning of everything--the Big Bang, the origin of the universe, 13 billion years ago--so that human history would be understood properly as part of cosmic history. He called this "big history," and this book surveys the large patterns in this history from the Big Bang to the present, and with speculations about the future. (Daniel Lord Smail's Deep History and the Brain--the subject of a previous post--belongs to this same genre of historical writing.)

Those of us who take seriously the idea of liberal education as embracing all the intellectual disciplines need to look to Christian's book as a synthesis of knowledge in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities within the framework of universal history. This exemplifies what I have called "Darwinian liberal education," and what Edward O. Wilson has called "consilience"--the unity of all knowledge. Those of us striving to develop a biopolitical science should see Christian's book as a way of framing such a science by putting human political history within the broad sweep of cosmic evolutionary history. I foresee using Christian's book as a main text in my "Biopolitical Theory" class at Northern Illinois University.

After surveying the modern scientific understanding of the origins and history of the universe, the stars, the Earth, and life on Earth, Christian turns to human evolutionary history from the Paleolithic era to the present. He divides human history into three stages corresponding to three major eras of human social life: the foraging era (from 250,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago), the agrarian era (from 10,000 years ago to 1750 A.D.), and the modern era (from 1750 to the present). Christian has written a short summary of this human history for the first volume of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, and this has also been published separately as a short book.

Of course, one of the obvious problems in such a broad view of everything is finding general patterns to sustain a grand narrative. The broadest pattern for Christian's history is taken from Eric Chaisson--the emergence of ever more complex levels of order requires structuring the flow of energy to sustain order against the entropic tendency of the second law of thermodynamics. Within that cosmic pattern, human history's three eras can be seen as three levels of ever more complex order that require ever more complex means for extracting energy to sustain ever larger human populations. Foragers extract energy through hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants. Farmers extract energy through domesticated plants and animals. In the modern era, humans have come to rely increasingly on fossil fuels as sources of energy. The ultimate source of this energy in plants, animals, and fossil fuels is sunlight.

Another general pattern in human history is set by the human capacity for "collective learning." Although many animals have some capacity for learning, human language enhances the human capacity for learning beyond anything seen in the rest of the animal world. This permits human beings to spread widely over varying niches in their ecosystems and even to create new niches. The human history from foraging to farming to modernity is largely the history of human collective learning as human beings learn new ways to extract energy from their environments to sustain ever larger populations of human beings in ever more complex societies--so that now human beings live in a global system that has transformed life on earth.

Another related theme of Christian's history is emergence: at each higher level of complexity, phenomena appear that could not have been predicted from knowledge of the lower levels. This supports my argument that E. O. Wilson's consilience by strong reductionism doesn't work if it ignores the emergent complexity by which novelty arises at higher levels of complexity that cannot be reduced to the lower levels. It is true, however, that these higher levels are constrained by the lower levels--so that, for example, even the highest levels of complex order in the universe are subject to the second law of thermodynamics and the need to extract energy to sustain order.

Like any good book on the biggest questions that human beings can ask themselves, Christian's will stimulate debate and disagreement. Although I generally find his book persuasive, I also find myself arguing with him about some points. Here I will point to only a couple of points of discussion.

As opposed to agrarian states, foraging societies do not have elaborate hierarchies of power. But I think Christian is mistaken to suggest that they have no hierarchies at all. Actually, he indicates in at least one passage that they may well have "personal hierarchies" (240). This is important because it becomes hard to understand how agrarian states could produce such complex hierarchies of rule if there were no natural disposition to status hierarchies at all. From my reading of the anthropological literature on foragers, it seems to me that although foraging societies are roughly egalitarian, this does not mean that there are no distinctions of rank at all. Some individuals in foraging groups have more status than others, and some exercise leadership, but this leadership is ephemeral and informal, and those who become too exploitative in their dominance are subject to social pressure that levels everyone to preserve individual autonomy. In agrarian societies, this natural disposition of some individuals to dominate others is magnified, and much of the rest of the social and political history of human beings is the history of exploitative dominance and of the efforts of subordinates to resist such exploitation. On this point, I follow Chris Boehm on the tension between the desire of some for dominance and the desire of many to resist exploitative dominance. I have developed this point in Darwinian Conservatism.

On a somewhat related point, I think Christian does not give enough attention to the history of political philosophy, and thus he does not see that many of his ideas about human social evolution were well understood by social theorists. Not only that, but some of these political philosophers even tried to consciously shape the movement of that evolution.

Now, of course, I understand that in such a "big history" as Christian's, one must abstract from the details of particular events and individual behavior. But still, as Christian indicates, evolutionary history is contingent in that it often turns crucially on particular events. For example, the asteroid impact that led to the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago altered the whole course of the evolution of life on earth. Similarly, Christian concedes that major political changes often depend on "the decisions and actions of individuals" (481). This would include individual thinkers who understood the general pattern in the natural history of society and who might try to shape that pattern.

For example, Christian notes that the European contact with the New World beginning in the 16th century created the first global exchange network that led to the modern era, and he also notes that this new global knowledge contributed to the intellectual evolution of modern science (393-94). One manifestation of this would be how the traveler's reports from the new world influenced political philosophers like Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. For instance, Locke's Second Treatise of Government lays out the same natural history of society--from foraging societies to agrarian societies to commercial societies--that Christian develops in his book. But what one sees in Locke's work is a conscious argument for moving into the era of commercial society based on private property, free market exchange, and limited government. Political philosophers like Locke did not just see this evolutionary movement at work. They also set themselves to promote it and direct it. Their cultural and political influence on individual thinkers and politicians would explain much of the course of that social evolutionary history that Christian describes. But Christian never ponders the importance of those political thinkers like Locke who understood what was happening and who tried to direct it.

Studying Locke's argument for liberal democratic capitalism might also have led Christian to reconsider his Marxist tendency to disparage "consumer capitalism" (446-457, 472-81). Although he admits that the Marxist regimes of the 20th century did not offer a good alternative to capitalism, he still cannot give up his Marxist scorn for capitalism. He is surely entitled to lay out his criticisms of modern capitalist society. But he doesn't show that he has thought through the classical liberal argument for capitalism and limited government--an argument laid out by thinkers like Locke, Smith, and Hayek.

I should also say, however, that scholars of political philosophy would benefit from studying Christian's "big history" and seeing how it might illuminate the broad historical movements that set the terms for debate in the history of political philosophy.

While conceding that capitalism has been the primary engine for the explosive population growth and technological innovation of the past 250 years, Christian worries that unchecked capitalist growth over the next century could bring environmental and social collapse. The only way to achieve "sustainable development" is for capitalism to be steered by governmental regulation to limit growth. But Christian does not respond to the arguments of those like Terry Anderson who promote "free market environmentalism" based on the idea that the best path to sustainable development is through private property and the rule of law. Christian's worry about a future of depleted resources reflects his devotion to the ideas of Thomas Malthus. But those like Anderson would argue that Malthus failed to see how Adam Smith's vision of capitalism laid out a path to sustainable development that remains as powerful for the future as it has been for the last couple of centuries.

Christian concludes his book by speculating on the future of the universe long after human beings and all life has been extinguished by the expansion and then cooling of the sun. "The universe will be a dark, cold place, filled only with black holes and stray subatomic particles that wander light-years apart from each other" (489). He concludes that while the creation of human beings as the only intelligent species capable of contemplating the universe might appear to be the ultimate purpose of the universe's creation from nothing, there is no scientific justification for this. "Modern science offers no good reason for believing in such anthropocentrism. Instead, it seems, we are one of the more exotic creations of a universe in the most youthful, exuberant, and productive phase of a very long life. Though we no longer see ourselves as the center of the universe or the ultimate reason for its existence, this may still be grandeur enough for many of us."

This sounds a lot like Friedrich Nietzsche in "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense": "In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of 'world history'--yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die."

Nietzsche thought this was a "deadly truth" of modern science. But he also thought that human beings might learn to embrace a "gay science" in which reverence for earthly life in all of its transience and contingency might be enough for them. Is there grandeur enough in this vision?

Brain Imaging Is Not Mind Reading

Last November 11th, The New York Times published an op-ed article with the title "This Is Your Brain on Politics." The authors--neuroscientists and political scientists--reported that they had done brain scans of 20 swing voters responding to images of the leading American presidential candidates. For example, they wrote: "Mitt Romney shows potential. Of all the candidate's speech excerpts, Mr. Romney's sparked the greatest amount of brain activity, especially among the men we observed. His still photos prompted a significant amount of activity in the amygdala, indicating voter anxiety, but when the subjects saw him and heard his video, their anxiety died down. Perhaps voters will become more comfortable with Mr. Romney as they see more of him." They also reported that John McCain and Barack Obama elicited "a notable lack of any powerful reactions, positive or negative." This article provoked a letter to the editor signed by 17 neuroscientists who protested the publication of such a crude brain imaging study that had no scientific basis. They noted that "a one-to-one mapping between a brain region and a mental state is not possible." They also indicated that the amygdala cannot provide a brain marker of anxiety, because the amygdala is activated not just by anxiety but also by various kinds of arousal and positive emotions.

This illustrates what I called last year "the brain imaging fallacy." That post can be found here. The fallacy is the assumption that a brain image--as in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)--is a photograph of the mind at work. Almost every day, there is a new report from proponents of "neuroeconomics," "neurolaw," or "neuroethics" who claim to have brain scans showing the mental activity associated with economic, legal, or ethical behavior.

There seems to be a growing recognition in the scientific community about the serious ramifications of this brain imaging fallacy. Recently, the two most important journals of science have published articles on this problem. Nature (June 12, 2008) has published an article by Nikos Logothetis on "What we can and what we cannot do with fMRI." Science (June 13, 2008) has published an article by Greg Miller on "Growing Pains for fMRI." The scientific and philosophical difficulties with brain imaging have been surveyed recently in an article by Adina Roskies in the journal Neuroethics. The winter, 2008 issue of The New Atlantis has articles by O. Carter Snead and Matthew Crawford on the implications of "neuro-talk" for law and morality.

Here are some of the difficulties that contribute to the brain imaging fallacy.

1. Functional neuroimaging is not a direct measure of neuronal activity because it measures only indirect surrogates--particularly, the flow of oxygenated blood.

2. The interpretation of these brain scans depends on elaborate theoretical assumptions about the relationships between blood flow and neural activity.

3. Many different kinds of brain activity can produce the same fMRI signal.

4. No two brains are alike in their structure or functioning, and therefore brain scans require an averaging procedure.

5. Interpreting these brain scans assumes that mental activity can be decomposed into distinct parts corresponding to distinct parts of the brain, although the interconnectedness of brain activity make this unlikely to be completely true.

6. Although the sensory and motor activities of the brain do seem to be clearly localized in identifiable parts of the brain, it is much more speculative to assign the higher cognitive activities to particular parts of the brain.

7. Although brain scans and neuroscience generally show clearly that the brain supports mental activity, this does not show how the brain does this.

8. Since the mind is an emergent property of the brain, the mind depends on, but is not simply reducible to the brain; and this gap is most evident in the contrast between our subjective experience of consciousness and the objective study of the brain in neuroscience. There will always be a gap between our scientific observation of brains at work and our introspective knowledge that comes from our first-hand experience.

As I have argued on this blog and in Darwinian Conservatism, the scientific study of the human mind can clarify but not resolve one of the deepest mysteries of human experience--the emergence of the soul in the brain.

Those who interpret brain imaging as supporting a reductionist materialism conclude that this denies the traditional moral and legal standards of individual choice and responsibility. But once we recognize the brain imaging fallacy, and see the mind as an emergent product of the brain, it becomes clear that neuroscience does not contradict our traditional understanding of moral choice and legal responsibility as rooted in the power of the mind for deliberate thought and action.

Are Conservatism and Liberalism Genetically Inherited?

In 2005, the American Political Science Review published an article by John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing entitled "Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?." Relying on studies of twins that compare the traits of monozygotic (identical) twins and dizygotic (fraternal) twins, they concluded that propensities towards "conservatism" or "liberalism" are indeed strongly influenced by genes, because genetics accounts for approximately half of the variance in ideology. This article received wide coverage in the popular press, including an article in the New York Times.

Now, in the June 2008 issue of Perspectives on Politics--published by the American Political Science Association--there is a critique of this article by Evan Charney along with responses to Charney by Alford, Funk, and Hibbing in one article and by Rebecca Hannagan and Peter Hatemi in another. The debate in these articles provides a good introduction to some of the controversies surrounding behavior genetics, particularly as applied to the social sciences.

Unfortunately, one sees here a recurrent problem in the debate over the genetics of human social behavior--both sides in the debate tend to employ "straw man" arguments. Like many critics of behavior genetics, Charney attacks this field of study for promoting genetic determinism. Like many proponents of behavior genetics, Alford, Funk, Hibbing, Hannagan, and Hatemi attack their critics as environmental determinists. But when one looks carefully, one can see that no one is defending genetic determinism, and no one is defending environmental determinism. In fact, everyone in the debate agrees that human behavior arises from a complex interaction of genes and environment. But instead of trying to work through this interactionist complexity, the participants in the debate ridicule their opponents by attributing to them positions that they don't really take.

Charney says that he is resisting the tendency "to view ever more complex attitudes or systems of belief as in some sense genetically determined (or 'heritable')" (299). He disagrees with the article by Alford, Funk, and Hibbing as claiming "that political orientations are genetically determined" (300). But this is not what Alford, Funk, and Hibbing say. Instead, they say that they have presented evidence "that political orientations are transmitted genetically as well as culturally" (321), and they emphasize that "genes and the environment interact in a complex fashion." Similarly, Hannagan and Hatemi say that "genetic factors exert their influence on an organism in a particular environment such that any trait must be a combination of the two factors," and so "it may be the case that the more we learn about genes the more we discover the importance of relevant environmental influences on behavior" (332-33). It seems then that Charney's attack on genetic determinism is an attack on a straw man.

But the same rhetorical strategy is employed by the other side. Alford, Funk, and Hibbing say that they are challenging "environmental determinism," which claims "that genes are irrelevant to human behavior" (321, 325). They also attack Charney as a "dualist" who assumes an absolute separation between mind and body. Similarly, Hannagan and Hatemi criticize Charney's "exclusively environmental explanations" as assuming a "social determinism" that is implausible (330, 333). But then Charney says that any claim "that genes are irrelevant to human behavior" is "preposterous" and is not the claim he has made (339-40). He also indicates that nowhere in his article does he endorse the "dualism" attributed to him by Alford, Funk, and Hibbing.

This straw-man argumentation rests on a false dichotomy of nature and nurture. Almost no one believes that human behavior is determined completely by genetic nature. And almost no one believes that human behavior is determined completely by social nurture. Almost everyone who examines the relevant evidence and argument would have to conclude that for complex human behavior the causes must be both genetic and cultural.

There are good reasons to agree with Alford, Funk, and Hibbing that there are some genetically inherited propensities of temperament that influence one's political ideology. But what one inherits directly is not the tendency to "conservatism" or "liberalism," but "orientations to bedrock principles of group life" that might have an evolutionary history going back to our earliest evolutionary ancestors (324-25).

For example, one distinction between liberalism and conservatism made by Alford, Funk, and Hibbing is that conservatives tend to be pessimistic about human nature, while liberals tend to be more optimistic. This conforms to what I have said in Darwinian Conservatism about the "realist" view of human nature in conservative thought as opposed to the "utopian" view in liberal thought. But, as Charney indicates, the detailed elaboration of conservative and liberal thought is a product of culturally contingent circumstances that arose over the history of Europe and the United States over the last two centuries (for instance, the divergent reactions to the French Revolution). Consequently, the political debate between conservatives and liberals will manifest a complex interaction of inherited temperament and cultural experience.

Daniel Smail and the Neuroscience of History

At the end of August, I will be presenting a paper in Boston at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association on "Biopolitical Science: Darwin, Lincoln, and the Deep History of Politics." This paper will be part of a series of panels on "Evolution and Morality" sponsored by the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. For my paper, there will be written responses from Daniel Lord Smail, a historian at Harvard, and Richard Richards, a philosopher at the University of Alabama.

The very idea of "deep history" is one that I have borrowed from Smail, particularly as he develops it in his recent book On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press, 2008). Smail points out that historians today assume that the true "history" of humanity began about 5,000 years ago with the invention of writing, and so everything else that happened to human beings prior to that is dismissed as "prehistory." Noting that there is plenty of evidence for human life prior to writing, Smail suggests there is no good reason why historians shouldn't develop a grand historical narrative that would encompass the whole of human experience from the Paleolithic era to the present.

That few historians today can even conceive of this reflects what Smail calls "the grip of sacred history." In the Western world, the influence of biblical religion led historians for many centuries to assume that history began about 6,000 years ago with the divine creation of Adam and Eve. Even when secular historians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries began to break away from the biblical creation story, they still held onto a secular version of this story: they assumed that history began about 6,000 years ago with the invention of agriculture and writing in Mesopotamia. Whatever happened to human beings prior to this was set aside as "prehistory."

In his new book, Smail argues for rejecting the chronological limits of sacred history and pursuing the study of deep history as including the entire genetic and cultural history of humanity. This would require interdisciplinary research combining traditional history and biological science. He offers an outline of how this could be done by concentrating on neurohistory--the history of humanity based on the evolution of the human brain. For this, historians would apply contemporary neuroscience to the study of human history. Historians must always employ psychological assumptions about human motivations in their historical explanations. Smail suggests that neuroscience would provide historians a psychological science rooted in modern biology.

One example of neurohistory for Smail is explaining the human dominance hierarchies that arose after the agricultural revolution allowed small groups of elite individuals to rule over large groups of subordinates. Dominant individuals must employ whatever devices they can to induce submissive dispositions in their subordinates. In matriarchal baboon societies, high-ranking females harass subordinate females in ways that create high levels of stress. Similarly, we might expect that in human dominance hierarchies, high-ranking individuals would intimidate their subordinates in ways that would generate stress hormones that make them feel submissive.

At one level, such an explanation might seem so obvious as to be trivial. After all, if subordinate individuals are submissive towards dominant individuals, one would assume that there must be some kind of biochemical state in the brains of the subordinates associated with a psychic state of submission. But at another level, such a explanation might seem dubious insofar as they are untestable. Because there is no way to gather neurophysiological data from the distant past to support the explanations. Smail admits this, but argues that even without direct tests of his neurophysiological hypotheses, we might find support in the historical sources for such neurohistorical reasoning. Knowledge of human neurophysiology offers an interpretive framework within which we might generate historical explanations that are heuristically powerful.

More generally, Smail argues for viewing cultural history as depending on "psychotropic mechanisms"--behavioral practices and institutional structures that have neurochemical effects that shape human moods. We might view each kind of social order as having a distinct psychotropic profile. For example, we might explain the medieval church as shaping the behavior of believers through ceremonial rituals and religious practices that modulate the chemical messengers in the brain in ways that sustain dependence on the church. But then in the eighteenth century, there was a clear decline in religious activities, which might be correlated with the popularity of new psychotropic commodities like coffee, tobacco, and alcoholic drinks like gin and rum. In fact, much of the public life of European cities in the eighteenth century was centered in coffeehouses and cafes.

To be persuaded of Smail's specific explanations, I would need more evidence and argumentation than he provides in his book. But I can accept his general idea--that every form of social order must appeal to the human nervous system by shaping the neurochemical activity of individuals to support the behavioral patterns of that society. I have argued that there are at least twenty natural desires that are universal to all human societies because they are rooted in human biological nature, and these twenty natural desires provide a universal basis for moral and political experience. These natural desires constrain but do not rigidly determine the customary traditions of social life. And within the constraints of natural desires and customary traditions, there is still some freedom for the exercise of prudential judgment by individuals. I would say that what Smail calls "psychotropic mechanisms" are the various means by which a social order modulates the neurochemistry corresponding to the twenty natural desires.

Although Smail's neurohistory has much in common with evolutionary psychology, he criticizes the evolutionary psychologists in the tradition of Cosmides and Tooby for being too ahistorical in their reasoning, because they jump from the "environment of evolutionary adaptation" as shaped in the Paleolithic era to the modern present without any account of the historical development from one to the other. Although Smail agrees with the evolutionary psychologists that the genetic evolution of the human species has shaped the human brain to manifest the predispositions of human nature, he thinks the evolutionary psychologists don't go far enough in recognizing the plasticity of that brain and how that neural plasticity makes possible cultural history. Like David Sloan Wilson, Smail emphasizes the need for explaining human behavior as shaped by gene-culture coevolution, and for that we need neurohistory.

I would say that what we need here is a theoretical framework of constrained plasticity that moves through three levels of social order--the natural history of the human species, the cultural history of human groups, and the individual history of the human beings in each group.

Smail has been influenced by David Buller's critique of evolutionary psychology in his book Adapting Minds. Stressing the diversity and contingency of human behavior and thought over evolutionary time, Buller concludes that "human nature is a superstition" (480). But I would say this is just as mistaken as concluding that since no two human beings have exactly the same anatomical structures, human anatomy is a superstition. While recognizing the anatomical diversity and contingency of human beings, the science of human anatomy presumes only that there is sufficient regularity in the patterns of human anatomical structure to warrant the generalizations of anatomy. Similarly, the science of human behavioral nature presumes that there is enough regularity in the patterns of human behavioral nature to warrant the study of human nature. In fact, Smail speaks about the need for broad categories of patterns or tendencies in studying human nature to support any deep history of human life. My account of the twenty natural desires specifies such patterns as manifesting a human nature grounded in the regularity of human neurophysiology.

Stephen Morse and the Neuroscience of Law

It seems that recent research in neuroscience is challenging traditional conceptions of free will and legal responsibility. Neuroscience shows that the brain is a physical entity governed by natural causes and is thus just as deterministic as the rest of the physical world. Neuroscience also shows how the brain determines the mind. It seems to follow that the mind's thoughts and choices are determined. But if that is so, then it seems that free will is an illusion, because no one is really responsible for his or her choices. This would deny the traditional understanding of responsibility in morality and law. People cannot be held morally or legally responsible for their choices, because they can always say, My brain made me do it!

If this were true, it would be a social catastrophe unprecedented in human history, because it would abolish the psychological foundations of our moral and legal systems. The fear of such a catastrophe motivates much of the fear of modern biological explanations of human nature. One can see that fear, for example, in the writing of intelligent design creationists like John West. (West has been the subject of many of my posts on this blog.) These folks assume that we cannot hold people morally and legally responsible for their behavior unless we invoke the idea that human beings have been created in God's image with a spiritual soul that cannot be explained as a product of natural evolutionary causes, because only such a supernatural soul can exercise free will in acting as an uncaused cause that transcends the realm of natural causes as studied by science.

But as I have argued in Darwinian Natural Right, in Darwinian Conservatism, and on this blog, this fear is unwarranted, because biological explanations of human nature in general and of the human brain in particular are fully compatible with traditional conceptions of moral and legal responsibility.

I agree with Jonathan Edwards, David Hume, and others who argue that moral responsibility and natural causation are compatible. But to see this compatibility, we must reject the idea of "free will" as uncaused cause. Whatever comes into existence must have a cause. Only what is self-existent from eternity--God--could be uncaused or self-determined. The commonsense notion of liberty is power to act as one chooses regardless of the cause of the choice. Human freedom of choice is not freedom from nature but a natural freedom to deliberate about our natural desires so that we can organize and manage our desires through habituation and reflection to conform to some conception of a whole life well lived. This is how Aristotle understood moral choice.

Similarly, Darwin believed that "every action whatever is the effect of a motive," and therefore he doubted the existence of "free will." Our motives arise from a complex interaction of innate temperament, individual experience, social learning, and external conditions. Still, although we are not absolutely free of the causal regularities of nature, Darwin believed, we are morally responsible for our actions because of our uniquely human capacity for reflecting on our motives and circumstances and acting in the light of those reflections. "A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives--of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals."

If we understand moral responsibility in this way, and see this as the conception of responsibility assumed in the law, then neuroscientific research on the natural causality of the brain is no threat to moral and legal responsibility. Stephen Morse--a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who specializes in psychology and law--has laid out the case for this conclusion based on a "compatibilist" view of moral choice. He has done this in "New Neuroscience, Old Problems," a paper published in two books--Neuroscience and the Law (2004), edited by Brent Garland, and Defining Right and Wrong in Brain Science (2007), edited by Walter Glannon, both published by Dana Press.

As Morse indicates, the "hard determinists" and the "metaphysical libertarians" agree that "free will" would require a "contra-causal freedom." But while the determinists deny there is such a thing. The libertarians affirm its existence as an uncaused cause beyond natural causality. If we had to choose between these two positions, neuroscience would favor the determinists.

But Morse rightly argues that the law's conception of responsibility does not require a "contra-causal freedom." It requires only that human beings have sufficient practical rationality to understand their choices and to act on their deliberate decisions. When rationality is so diminished that someone cannot understand or act on his choices--a child or someone who is insane, for example--then we excuse their behavior and do not hold them fully responsible for their actions. But this conception of moral and legal responsibility as based on the capacity for practical deliberation or rationality does not require any transcendence of natural causality.

Under the "compatibilist" conception of responsibility that Morse, Darwin, and I defend, research in neuroscience can have some interesting implications for law, but it poses no fundamental challenge to the traditional understanding of legal responsibility. Neuroscience can tell us a lot about the natural causes in the brain that predispose human beings in one direction or another. But this does not deny what Darwin recognized as the uniqueness of a human beings as moral beings capable of reflecting on their circumstances and acting on the basis of past experience and future expectations. This is not free will as an uncaused cause, but it is the natural freedom that human beings have as a product of their evolved nature.

Louann Brizendine and the Neuroscience of the Female Brain

A few decades ago, the prevailing opinion among academic intellectuals in Western societies was that men and women were born with the same brains, but that the patriarchal socialization of children by cultural learning created stereotypical differences in male and female thought and behavior that favor male oppression of women. This suggested that social reformers could liberate women from patriarchal oppression by changing the environment of social learning to promote an androgynous society in which men and women would learn to think and act in virtually identical ways. But in recent decades, research in the biology of sex differences has challenged this position by showing how the biological nature of men and women differ in ways that are not explainable as products of social construction, and thus there is a natural limit to how far cultural changes can go in creating an androgynous society.

In Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, I have drawn from that new research on the biology of sex differences to support my claim that men and women really are different by nature, but that those natural differences suggest not the superiority of men over women but the complementarity of male and female norms, in which the sometimes predatory propensities of men might be moderated by the civilizing prudence of women.

Most recently, advances in neuroscience have deepened our knowledge of how the differing neural and hormonal systems of men and women shape somewhat differing brains. Much of this new research come from improvements in brain-imaging technology. (Actually, there are some problems coming from reading too much into these brain images. But that's a post for another day.) Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain (New York: Morgan Road Books, 2006) surveys this research refuting the idea of the "unisex brain" and supporting the idea that female brains differ biologically from male brains.

The popular success of Brizendine's book comes from her combining impressive credentials and a lively writing style. She is a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, and the founder of the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic. She has advanced degrees in medicine and neurobiology from Yale and the University of California, Berkeley. She translates her expert knowledge into engaging writing by using anecdotes about the women she has counseled and by adopting a light and witty style. The main text of the book is written without any footnotes. But it's followed by 80 pages of citations and references to the scientific research supporting her claims.

Some of Brizendine's academic critics are put off by the cutesy style of the writing. For example, she identifies the hormone oxytocin as "fluffy, purring kitty; cuddly, nurturing, earth mother; the good witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz; finds pleasure in helping and serving; sister to vasopressin (the male socializing hormone), sister to estrogen, friend of dopamine (another feel-good brain chemical" (xv). Of course, this is not the language of scientific research reports. But I can't see what's wrong with such language in a book written for a wide, popular audience, as long as the clever writing is not deceptive.

A more serious criticism is that sometimes the citations in the back of Brizendine's book don't clearly support the claims she makes in her main text. For example, in speaking about how women tend to be more talkative than men, she writes: "Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty thousand" (14). Readers who wonder where she got these numbers might check the notes, where they discover that they come from a self-help book that cites no specific research to sustain this claim. Similarly, she writes: "Girls speak faster on average--250 words per minute versus 125 for typical males" (36). Readers who consult the notes will see a reference to an article about "speaking rates" among "20 pre-school stuttering and non-stuttering children and their mothers," which actually says nothing about differences between girls and boys in their speaking.

Here's one more example of the dubious connection between Brizendine's text and her citations. She says that one of the reasons why women have a better memory for emotional details than do men is that "a woman's amygdala is more easily activated by emotional nuance" (128). Her supporting reference is an article by Stephen Hamann, "Sex Differences in the Responses of the Human Amygdala". If you read the article, you will see that the conclusions of the article are much more complicated than what Brizendine reports. Accoring to Hamann's survey of the research, high amygdala activity is related to emotional memory for both man and women; but for men, it's the right amygdala, while for women its the left amygdala. And yet, Hamann notes, conscious ratings of emotional arousal correlate with the left amygdala for both men and women. Hamann then suggests that women's greater emotional memory might be a product of the fact that there is more overlap of brain regions for the women. Moreover, Hamann also shows that men manifest greater amygdala activity in response to visual sexual stimuli, in contrast to women. This is, I think, a typical example of how Brizendine often oversimplifies the research she's citing to make it sharper for her purposes.

Another example of this runs throughout the book, and it can be seen easily by an attentive reader, even without checking her citations. Oxytocin is one of the main protagonists in Brizendine's story. The Greek etymology of "oxytocin" denotes "quick delivery," because this hormone stimulates contractions of the uterus during child birth. Farmers inject their pregnant animals with oxytocin to induce delivery. But Brizendine speaks of oxytocin as associated not just with child birth but also with love, trust, orgasm, hugging, calming breast-feeding babies, and monogamous pair-bonding. But she never acknowledges what should be evident here to any careful reader: oxytocin does nothing by itself, because its diverse effects depend upon the diverse contexts in which it appears. This sort of causal complexity and contextuality is common in biology. But Brizendine tends to play it down in order to tell a clear, engaging story.

At the root of this problem is the big issue of nature versus nurture. Brizendine is sometimes confusing in how she approaches this issue. In her Introduction, for example, she says that female aptitudes are naturally "hardwired into the brains of women" (8). This suggests that she is a biological determinist, and it opens her up to all of the reasonable criticisms of such determinism. But then on the next page, she speaks of how the female brain is shaped "by a combination of nature and nurture" (9). Elsewhere in the book, she writes about how female propensities reflect the complex interaction of genes, hormones, life history, and social interactions (20, 27, 55, 68-69, 74, 100, 110, 133, 136-37, 147).

Here she comes close to the idea of "nurturing nature" that I lay out--in Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism--as an alternative to the false dichotomy between nature and nurture. To fully account for human nature, we need to see human thought and action as arising from the complex interaction of natural propensities, cultural traditions, and individual judgments. In fact, many of Brizendine's stories about the women she counsels illustrate that complexity of human experience.

This certainly holds true, for example, in what she says about the "mommy brain." Most women are naturally inclined to reproduction and child care, and that natural inclination is evident in their brains as evolved products of human evolution. But the specific expression of that natural propensity will vary according to the social circumstances of life and the individual judgments of the women making the best of their lives facing the sometimes difficult trade-offs presented to them.

As I indicated a few weeks ago in my post on Wendell Berry and E. O. Wilson, I agree with Berry that to understand the human mind we something more than the formula "mind = brain = machine." We need the more complex formula "mind = brain + body + world + local dwelling place + community + history," with "history" encompassing "the whole heritage of culture, language, memory, tools, and skills."

If one keeps in mind the emergent complexity of human life--and thus rejects any reductionist determinism--then one can read Brizendine's book as a rich survey of the female brain, the male brain, and the human brain shared by both men and women.

Adam Zeman and the Neuroscience of the Soul

For those of us working in biopolitics--the study of the biological roots of political life--the most exciting area of biology right now is neuroscience. Understanding how the brain enables the mental activity and social behavior of human beings promises to provide a scientific basis for political science and the social sciences generally.

But when I try to introduce neuroscience into my biopolitics courses at Northern Illinois University, it is often hard to find good readings that provide an elementary introduction to the science in a way that engages the students, even those with little expertise in biology. I have had a similar problem in finding appropriate readings for a proposed Liberty Fund conference on "The Neuroscience of Law and Morality" that will appeal to conferees from a wide range of intellectual backgrounds.

Recently, I have found a few new books that might satisfy my needs. One of them is Adam Zeman's A Portrait of the Brain (Yale University Press, 2008). Zeman is a clinical neurologist and professor of neurology at the Peninsula Medical School in Great Britain. Like Oliver Sacks, he teaches us about the brain by telling stories about his patients suffering from neurological disorders. And thus he engages the reader through vivid stories just as does Sacks. But Zeman's book is also clearly structured to move from the simplest elements of the brain to its most complex mysteries. Its ten chapters correspond to ten levels of organization in the brain: atom, gene, protein, organelle, neuron, synapse, neural network, lobe, psyche, and soul.

Although Zeman does not mention Julien de La Mettrie, I see Zeman's book as a modern restatement of La Mettrie's claim in Man a Machine (1747) that "all the faculties of the soul depend so much on the proper organization of the brain and of the entire body, since these faculties are obviously just this organized brain itself." La Mettrie and those in his intellectual tradition have been criticized as crudely reductionistic materialists who deny the existence of the mind or soul as anything other than organized matter. Zeman is likely to face the same criticism, especially when he concludes: "I am firmly convinced that the comforting and tenacious idea that we possess an invisible, immaterial, imperishable soul is no more than a wonderful fiction" (187).

In my chapter on "Emergence" in Darwinian Conservatism, I argue for the "emergent evolution of the soul in the brain," and I defend the idea of emergence as an alternative to both reductionism and dualism. The simplest expression of the idea of emergence is that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. Emergent phenomena are those complex wholes with properties that we could not explain or predict from our knowledge of the parts. For example, when hydrogen and oxygen combine chemically to form water, we see emergent properties in water that we could not have predicted from the properties of hydrogen and oxygen. This emergence of novelty is manifested throughout the evolution of the universe. As we pass through levels of complexity, we find new properties at higher levels that are not fully reducible to the lower levels. This idea of emergence denies strong reductionism, because it denies that the higher levels of organization can be completely reduced to the lower levels. But the idea of emergence also denies dualism, because it denies any radical separation of matter and mind.

Although Zeman does not make the idea fully explicit in his book, he implicitly embraces emergence when he says that the "brain is more than the sum of its parts," and when he speaks of how "the mind emerges from matter" (5, 183, 188, 193). He also appeals to the idea of emergence when he says that we are more than our brains, because the activity of the brain is "always 'embodied, embedded, and extended'--the activity of an embodied creature, embedded in a culture, engaging in an interaction with surroundings and other people which extends over space and time" (196). Here Zeman moves into the realm of biopolitics: since human beings are by nature social and political animals, their brains are shaped by a complex social interactions of their individual life histories in particular social groups. This idea is now being developed in the field of "social neuroscience," which includes "neuroeconomics." As I understand it, biopolitics should eventually encompass all of these areas of study as part of a comprehensive natural history of human beings as political animals.

The emergent complexity of the human soul cannot be understood through a strongly reductionist approach. Rather, what is required is what Zeman calls a "biopsychosocial" approach that sees that human beings live through the interaction of three dimensions--as bodies, minds, and social animals (175-76). This is manifest in cases of "hysteria," where some distress in the psychic life of a patient has created physical disorders that have no clear neurological causes. Such psychosomatic illnesses show that the mind can act on the brain. This interaction of mind and brain is also shown by the human ability to use mental force to direct a disordered brain into more healthy functioning. In my chapter on emergence, I use the example of how Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz teaches his patients with obsessive compulsive disorder to used "directed mental force" to overcome or at least mitigate their disorder. This emergent power of the brain for mental attention is the natural ground for human freedom.

Of course, this emergent conception of the soul leaves us with some mysteries. One of those mysteries is the introspective subjectivity of consciousness that cannot be directly studied by empirical observation. For example, if I were suffering from OCD, I might go to Dr. Schwartz, and he might persuade me to adopt his techniques. I might decide to concentrate my mind and will in ways that would alter the neural circuitry of my brain so as to manage my OCD behavior. Dr. Schwartz might employ brain imaging technology to show that my brain circuitry really had changed. But this imaging would show only the effects of my conscious mental decision. It would not show my actual conscious experience. I would know this by my own introspective activity, and I might testify to it by telling Dr. Schwartz about my mental decision. But my conscious activity would not be directly observable to Dr. Schwartz or any other observer. Zeman acknowledges this problem (190-93), and yet he quickly dismisses it.

This contrast between our inward personal experience and the outward world of observational science underlies what Zeman says about art and science as complementary approaches to human mental experience (196-98). Art evokes the living presence of personal experience. A novel, for example, can give us the imaginative simulation of the inward conscious life of its unique characters. But science provides an abstract likeness to experience. Thus, neuroscience might explain brain activity associated with someone's conscious experience, but the neuroscience by itself would not capture the specificity of that person's consciousness. That's why any attempt to bring together the "two cultures"--the humanistic disciplines and the natural sciences--will have to recognize that each approach has something distinctive to contribute to our understanding of human life. In fact, Zeman's book itself combines art and science by combining the impersonal abstractness of science with the personal specificity of his clinical stories.

There is much to think about here. But the one key point for me is that we need not fear a Darwinian science of human life as promoting a reductionist materialism that denies the freedom of the human soul. A Darwinian science can explain the unique freedom of human beings for deliberate thought and action as arising from the emergent evolution of the soul.

Overcoming the "Two Cultures"

On this blog, I have often written about what seems to me to be the fundamental problem with higher education today--the fragmentation and specialization of academic disciplines so that the unity of knowledge through liberal learning has been lost. I have also written about how I see "Darwinian liberal education" as the solution to this problem, because Darwinian biology broadly conceived can be the intellectual link between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. I have written about David Sloan Wilson's "evolutionary studies" program at Binghamton University in New York as a good model of how this might work.

Today's issue of the New York Times (May 27) has an article by Natalie Angier on the "New Humanities Initiative" at Binghamton, which seems to be an extension of Wilson's "evolutionary studies" pedagogy.

Traditionally, the modern university is divided between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Within these broad boundaries, each discipline is further divided into fields of specialization. Both students and scholars are taught to assume that there is no connection between these various areas of research. Of course, administrators and professors often speak about the importance of interdisciplinary research and teaching. But usually this just means collecting various courses scattered across the university and classifying them as "general education." This is a fraudulent exercise because there is no real intellectual conversation across the many diverse fields of academic scholarship.

"Darwinian liberal education" would create some common ground of intellectual discussion that would bridge what C. P. Snow famously characterized as the opposition between "two cultures"--"natural scientists" versus "literary intellectuals." Actually, I would say there are at least "three cultures," because the social scientists commonly have little to say to either the "natural scientists" or the "literary intellectuals."

Unfortunately, the unification of knowledge through "Darwinian liberal education" suffers from the seduction of reductionism. Darwinian theorists--like E. O. Wilson in his book Consilience--want to unify all knowledge by reducing all knowledge to physics, chemistry, and genetics. But, as I have argued on this blog and in Darwinian Conservatism, the only defensible ground for unifying all knowledge is the biological idea of "emergence"--so that higher levels of organization bring novelties that are consistent with the lower levels but not determined by those lower levels.

In Angier's article, this problem is captured by her reference to English Professor George Levine:

"Dr. Levine has criticized many recent attempts at so-called Literary Darwinism, the application of evolutionary psychology ideas to the analysis of great novels and plays. What it usually amounts to is reimagining Emma Bovary or Emma Woodhouse as a young, fecund female hunter-gatherer circa 200,000 B.C.

"'When you maximize the importance of biological forces and minimize culture, you get something that doesn't tell you a whole lot about the particularities of literature,' Dr. Levine said. 'What you end up with, as far as I am concerned, is banality.'"

I agree because such crude reductionism overlooks the complexity of multi-leveled explanations of gene-culture co-evolution that respects the particularities and contingencies of human cultural and individual history.

To show what I mean by this, I am now beginning to work on a book that might be entitled Biopolitical Science: Darwin, Lincoln, and the Deep History of Political Life. This book will develop a theoretical framework for a Darwinian political science that would be a science of political animals. Such a science would move through three levels of deep political history--the universal political history of the species, the cultural political history of the group, and the individual political history of animals in the group. To illustrate the particular application of this Darwinian political science, I will show how this science would help us to understand Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. We need to understand such events as historically contingent phenomena that cannot be predicted exactly by a science of natural causes. But still we can see how such unique events fit within the natural history of the human species and the cultural history of human politics.

I will be laying out some of what I have in mind in a paper for the American Political Science Association convention in Boston at the end of August. This will be part of a series of three panels sponsored by the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy on "Evolution and Morality." The papers for these panels will be the basis for a volume of the ASPL's annual publication Nomos.

Honesty and Forgiveness in Biomedical Ethics

About four weeks ago, my wife underwent surgery on her face for melanoma. What initially appeared to be a pimple on her left cheek had been identified as cancerous. The purpose of the surgery was to remove tissue from her cheek and from sentinel lymph nodes to which the cancer might have spread. We were happy when tests showed that there were no cancerous cells in this tissue. But she will have to undergo extensive tests every two months for years to look for any reappearance of the cancer. We were also happy with the surgical work of Dr. Tapas K. Das Gupta, the 76-year-old chairman of surgical oncology at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago. We discovered that Dr. Das Gupta is a master cancer surgeon who was able to do the surgery so that the scars on my wife's face will eventually be hardly noticeable.

We were very interested, therefore, when we saw the front page article on Dr. Das Gupta in the Sunday New York Times (May 18). This article by Kevin Sack was entitled "Doctors Start to Say 'I'm Sorry' Long Before 'See You in Court'." The article opens with the story of Dr. Das Gupta making a serious surgical mistake two years ago. He was supposed to remove a sliver of tissue from a woman's ninth rib. But instead he removed the tissue from her eighth rib. When he discovered his mistake, he told the patient what he had done and apologized to her. He told her: "After all these years, I cannot give you any excuse whatsoever. It is just one of those things that occurred. I have to some extent harmed you."

This is not standard practice for doctors. Most medical malpractice lawyers would advise doctors and medical administrators never to admit their mistakes. Because it has been long assumed that to avoid expensive malpractice suits, medical personnel should refuse to acknowledge their mistakes.

But according to this article, a few hospitals have adopted a new policy of honesty and forgiveness. Patients are told about the medical mistakes that have harmed them, and they receive an apology from the doctors. And contrary to what the malpractice lawyers have assumed for years, there is evidence that this has reduced the number and expense of medical malpractice lawsuits in the hospitals adopting the new policy.

In Dr. Das Gupta's case, the patient decided not to sue, and accepted compensation of $74,000 from the hospital. Her lawyer said: "She told me that the doctor was completely candid, completely honest, and so frank that she and her husband--usually the husband wants to pound the guy--that all the anger was gone. His apology helped to get the case settled for a lower amount of money."

For many decades, doctors and hospitals have been receiving ethical advice from professional bioethicists. Why has it taken so long to recognize the moral benefits from honesty and forgiveness? They might have seen this sooner if they had followed the tradition of moral philosophy from Aristotle to Adam Smith and Charles Darwin that stresses the importance of moral emotions. Reasoning is important for moral judgment because we need to deliberate about our moral decisions. But some moral philosophers (like Immanuel Kant, for example) assume that morality requires a dispassionate, abstract rationality that suppresses the emotions. But in the Aristotelian tradition that includes Smith and Darwin, morality rests in a complex interaction of reason and emotion.

I saw this many years ago when I wrote my book on Aristotle's Rhetoric. I noticed that most scholars interested in Aristotle's moral and political philosophy ignored or disparaged Aristotle's Rhetoric, because it gave so much weight to persuading people through their emotions. But for me, this pointed to a fundamental insight running through all of Aristotle's moral and political writings--that "reason by itself moves nothing," and that reason moves us only insofar as it elicits some emotional motivation. This is particularly true in politics, because political debate always turns on emotional appeals. Adam Smith developed this same insight in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Darwin deepened this tradition of thought by showing--in The Descent of Man--how the moral emotions could have arisen in the evolved human nature of the moral sense. Most recently, neuroscientists have uncovered the neural roots of the moral emotions in their complex interaction with cognitive reasoning. As I have argued in both Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, this new research on the neurological basis of moral emotions and moral judgment confirms Aristotle's moral psychology.

For example, Aristotle in the Rhetoric analyzes the rhetorical psychology of anger. He defines anger as a desire for vengeance for an undeserved slight. Starting with this definition, he can then explain the various ways that anger is aroused or calmed. One way to calm people's anger is to apologize and ask for their forgiveness, because this removes the feeling of being slighted.

When medical patients think they have been harmed by medical mistakes, they become angry if they think the doctors are being dishonest in covering up their mistakes, because this insults the patients. If the doctors honestly admit their mistakes and ask for forgiveness, this act of humble confession of fallibility can calm the anger of the patients.

There is another lesson here. We often assume a conflict between morality and expediency, so that one's self-interest conflicts with one's moral duties. The Kantian tradition of moral philosophy makes that assumption about true morality as absolute selflessness. But the Aristotelian-Smithian-Darwinian tradition would question this assumption by suggesting that in the long run morality and expediency coincide. And so, in this case of medical malpractice, honesty really is the best policy, because honesty and forgiveness can calm the moral indignation of patients in ways that reduce the economic costs of malpractice lawsuits.

I can testify to this in a personal way, because in learning about how Dr. Das Gupta handled his surgical mistake two years ago, my wife and I found that we gained more respect for our doctor, with the knowledge that he was willing to honestly recognize his fallibility and ask for forgiveness.

The Stupidity of Steven Pinker

Actually, I don't think Steven Pinker is stupid. I admire his writings, which I often use in my teaching and research. But his article in the new issue of The New Republic (May 28, 2008), entitled "The Stupidity of Dignity," which can be found here, is remarkable for its shallowness.

This spring, the President's Council on Bioethics issued a 555-page report on the idea of "human dignity" in bioethics. Pinker's article is supposedly a response to this report. But anyone reading his article along with the report would suspect that he has not actually read the report. In his determination to attack Leon Kass and the neoconservative opponents of biotechnology, Pinker has skimmed over the report to support his intemperate scorn.

Here's an example. Pinker writes that in the report, many of the authors "assert that the Old Testament is the only grounds for morality (for example, the article by Kass claims that respect for human life is rooted in Genesis 9:6, in which God instructs the survivors of his Flood in the code of vendetta: 'Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God was man made.')"

Now, if one actually reads Kass's contribution to this report, which can be found here, one sees the following passage that Pinker is citing: "Human life is to be respected more than animal life--Why?--because man is more than an animal; man is said to be god-like. Please note that the truth of the Bible's assertion does not rest on biblical authority." Notice that Pinker ignores Kass's disclaimer that the truth of this assertion does not depend on biblical authority alone--in contrast to Pinker's claim that the authors of the report are asserting "that the Old Testament is the only grounds of morality."

There is a serious point here. In Kass's book on Genesis, and in some of his other writings, Kass does sometimes suggest that the Bible might provide a moral teaching that goes beyond secular reasoning. But Kass is rather evasive about this. And Pinker has no interest in probing into the complexity of Kass's writing. All that Pinker cares about is condemning Kass as a conspirator in promoting theocracy in America.

In some of my blog posts on Kass--which can be found here, here, here, and here--I have criticized Kass on many points.

But I have also indicated that my defense of "Darwinian natural right" agrees with Kass's early writings in which he sought a Darwinian basis for a naturalistic ethics, following in the tradition of Hans Jonas. Even in his latest contribution to the PCB report, Kass writes that the natural ground of human dignity is to be found in the human "powers of reason, freedom, judgment, and moral concern." But he does not indicate to the reader--as he did in his earlier writings--that Darwinian biology would agree with this, and that Jonas saw Darwinian biology as showing the natural biological roots of these distinctively human powers.

In recent years, Kass has moved away from this biological naturalism--grounded in the tradition of Aristotle, Jonas, and Darwin--while moving towards a purely religious morality rooted in the Bible. But he never explicitly explains the change in his position. Pinker rightly sees this reliance on Biblical religion. But Pinker does not help us to understand what exactly is going on in Kass's intellectual development.

By the way, I agree with Pinker about the silliness of Kass's disgust with licking ice-cream cones. In his book The Hungry Soul, Kass has a chapter on "civilized eating," in which he condemns "those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice-cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know why eating in public is offensive," and he goes on to describe the "doglike feeding" of those who eat in public (pp. 148-49).

Well, I personally prefer to eat my ice cream (preferably Baskin-Robbins' mint chocolate chip) in a bowl in the privacy of my home. But I will defend to the death the right of every American to lick an ice-cream cone in public!

MacIntyre and Darwinian Natural Right: A Reply to Christopher Toner

I believe that the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition of ethical naturalism is rooted in a biological understanding of human nature that is confirmed by modern Darwinian science. I have elaborated my reasoning for this conclusion in Darwnian Natural Right, Darwinian Conservatism, and "Thomistic Natural Law as Darwinian Natural Right" (published in Natural Law and Modern Moral Philosophy, edited by E. F. Paul, F. D. Miller, and J. Paul, Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Alasdair MacIntyre has recently taken a similar position despite his earlier disagreement. In his remarkably influential book After Virtue (1981), MacIntyre tried to defend an Aristotelian and Thomistic view of ethics as founded on the moral and intellectual virtues, but he wanted his ethical view to be independent of Aristotle's "metaphysical biology" (56, 139, 152, 166-67, 183, 220). Almost twenty years later, however, in Dependent Rational Animals, he conceded that "I was in error in supposing an ethics independent of biology to be possible" (x). He generously cited my work as helping to persuade him that the Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding of the animal nature of human thought and action is confirmed by modern Darwinian biology (5-6, 11-12).

And yet in a recent article in Metaphilosophy (vol. 39, no. 2, April 2008)--"Sorts of Naturalism: Requirements for a Successful Theory"--Christopher Toner criticizes my Darwinian naturalism as a foundation for virtue ethics and argues that MacIntyre's approach is superior, because it recognizes how our "first nature" of natural desires needs the moral development that comes through the "second nature" of practical reasoning and cultural learning. In reply to Toner, I would point out that what he attributes to MacIntyre is fully compatible with my position.

Following John McDowell, Toner argues that the most defensible sort of moral naturalism is a "second-naturalism" that recognizes the importance of practical reasoning and human culture as the "second nature" for human moral development. This "second-naturalism" satisfies what Toner takes to be the four criteria for a good moral naturalism:

"1. Natural norms must be intrinsically able to motivate the bearer of the nature.

"2. Natural norms must be intrinsically able to justify themselves to the bearer of the nature.

"3. Natural norms must be anchored in and express universal human nature.

"4. First and second nature must be related so that the second is a natural outgrowth of the first, and so that that in our given makeup, it is (first) natural which does tend toward an ethically mature second nature."

Toner argues that while McDowell tends to sharply separate our second nature from our first nature, which suggests cultural relativism, MacIntyre is more successful in his moral naturalism because he sees our second nature as a natural outgrowth of our first nature.

According to Toner, MacIntyre's approach "steers clear of the trouble invited by Arnhart's reliance on brutely given natural desires. In their place it puts, as natural norms, the requirements of the virtues that are integral to human flourishing, where the virtues are seen as acquired traits that fit human beings for the exercise of practical rationality toward which their shared nature directs them" (243).

But in thus trying to separate MacIntyre's position from mine, Toner distorts both positions. He fails to see that MacIntyre's view of our second nature as the natural outgrowth of our first nature depends on the claim that our uniquely human capacities for reason, language, and culture are actually extensions of capacities found in some form in other animals, so that our second nature is rooted in our biological first nature as a product of Darwinian evolution (see Dependent Rational Animals, 53-64).

Here MacIntyre is agreeing with what I say about the need for "nurturing nature." While we commonly separate nature and nurture or nature and art, animal nature--including human nature--must be nurtured if it is to reach its natural completion. Not just human beings but other primates as well are by nature such intensely social animals that their natural development depends on social learning and cultural traditions. Human beings have natural desires for practical habituation and practical reasoning that are fulfilled through cultural learning and deliberative reasoning. That's why I argue that explaining the human nature of social and moral order requires three levels of order--nature, custom, and reason--so that our natural inclinations constrain but do not exactly determine our cultural traditions and our rational choices. (See Darwinian Natural Right, 35-49, and Darwinian Conservatism, 14-45.)

The crucial point here is that the opposition to Darwinian natural right rests on a series of antithetical dichotomies posed by Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant: biology versus culture, nature versus nurture, instinct versus learning, emotion versus reason, and facts versus values. Underlying all of these is the fundamental dichotomy between animality and humanity. Human beings, Hobbes and Kant argue, transcend their animal nature by using their unique rationality to construct a cultural world of moral values based on social learning; this world suppresses the biological emotions that would otherwise render human life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

I reject all of these dichotomies. I acknowledge the uniqueness of human beings as rational moral agents, but I believe that even in their uniqueness, human beings are fully integrated within the natural world. Given this, I see the moral nature of human beings as rooted in their animal nature. In its account of that animal nature of morality, Darwinian biological reasoning supports the tradition of ethical naturalism begun by Aristotle and continued by Aquinas and MacIntyre.

E. O. Wilson, Wendell Berry, and the Question of Reductionism

The Bible teaches us that human beings were created by God in His image, and thus God set them above all of His other creatures. Intelligent design theory teaches us that human beings were designed by an Intelligent Designer. For many conservatives, such explanations of human origins are better than a Darwinian account of the human species as having evolved from ancestral animal species by material causes, because the Darwinian view seems to promote a reductionistic materialism that is morally degrading.

My response to this worry is to insist that a Darwinian conservatism can recognize the special capacities of the human soul as manifesting the emergent complexity of life, in which higher levels of organization produce mental abilities that cannot be found at lower levels. In contrast to the reductionism often associated with modern science, Darwinian conservatism affirms the idea of emergence. I have elaborated my reasoning on this point in my chapter on emergence in Darwinian Conservatism.

Those looking for evidence of Darwinian reductionism can easily find it in the writings of Edward O. Wilson. In Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), Wilson argues for unifying all knowledge--the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities--by reduction to physics: "all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics" (266).

In his book Life is a Miracle (2000), Wendell Berry--a poet, novelist, and conservationist writer--challenges Wilson's reductionism by asserting that "life is a miracle," because of the mystery that comes from the unfathomable individuality of each living creature. But what I find most interesting about Berry's argument is how he counters Wilson's reductionism by appealing to the emergent complexity of biological phenomena. Against reductionism, some people argue for a dualist view that the soul or spirit of a human being is not physical, and so it cannot be explained by a reductionist physical science. But Berry rejects dualism, because he thinks the true mystery of life is the inextricable unity of mind and body.

Berry sees in Wilson a reductionistic formula for explaining mind: "mind = brain = machine." But as Berry indicates this makes no biological sense. "Is there such a thing as a mind which is merely a brain which is a machine? Would one have a mind if one had no body, or no body except for a brain (whether or not it is a machine)--if one had no sense organs, no hands, no ability to move or speak, no sensory pains or pleasures, no appetites, no bodily needs? If we grant (for the sake of argument) that such may be theoretically possible, we must conclude at the same time that it is not imaginable, and for the most literal of reasons: Such a mind could contain no image" (47).

Berry adds: "one can't be a brain without a body, or a body (for very long) without a familiar homeland. To have one mind you have got to have at least two (and undoubtedly many more) and a world. We could call this the Adam and Eve theory of the mind. The correct formula, in fact, is more like this: mind = brain + body + world + local dwelling place + community + history. 'History' here would mean not just documented events but the whole heritage of culture, language, memory, tools, and skills. Mind in this definition has become hard to locate in an organ, organism, or place. It has become an immaterial presence or possibility that is capable of being embodied and placed" (48-49).

What Berry misses, however, is how Wilson contradicts his own reductionism in recognizing the same emergent complexity of life and mind that Berry emphasizes. This contradiction runs throughout Wilson's Consilience. On the one hand, he insists on reduction of everything to the laws of physics. On the other hand, he insists that emergent phenomena at higher levels of organization cannot be predicted by the laws of physics. "Biology is almost unimaginably more complex than physics," Wilson writes, "and the arts equivalently more complex than biology" (67). "It is not even possible to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein from a complete knowledge of its constituent atoms" (83). Biologists suffer from "physics envy," which is frustrating, because "they invariably encounter emergence, the appearance of complex phenomena not predictable from the basic elements and processes alone" (86). Although constrained by genes, culture has acquired a "life of its own," Wilson observes, so that we cannot understand human life without understanding both genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Consequently, we must reject the genetic determinism that would assume that genes dictate the specific forms of culture (163, 166).

Moreover, in his intellectual biography--Naturalist (1994)--Wilson describes his long battle in the Biology Department at Harvard against the reductionism of James Watson. Watson argued that modern biology could be a true science only insofar as it could be reduced to molecular biology. Those areas of biology that did not lend themselves to such reductionism--such as ecology, evolutionary biology, and animal behavior--were to be rejected as not truly scientific. Wilson--who studied insects--was dismissed by Watson as a "bug collector." But eventually, Wilson and his allies were able to win some respect from their colleagues in molecular biology. Now, Wilson observes, "only hard-shelled fundamentalists among them think that higher levels of biological organization, populations to ecosystems, can be explained by molecular biology" (231).

So although Wilson sometimes endorses the idea of unifying all knowledge through strong reductionism, he also sees that such unification might be achieved only through the idea of emergent complexity, by which higher levels of organization are constrained by, but not fully determined by, lower levels. The human mind and human culture belong at the highest levels of complexity that cannot be completely reduced to physics and chemistry. In this recognition of emergent complexity, Wilson and Berry agree.

Why Was Michael Behe Expelled by Ben Stein?

Ever since the publication in 1996 of his book Darwin's Black Box, Michael Behe has been the most prominent biologist supporting "intelligent design theory." It is not surprising, therefore, that he was interviewed by Ben Stein for his movie Expelled, as indicated at the website for the movie. But it is surprising that this interview was cut out of the movie before its public release.

Or maybe this isn't so surprising if one considers how Behe's new book--The Edge of Evolution--subverts some of the crucial points in the Discovery Institute's rhetorical strategy, which would explain why Behe has fallen from favor with the folks at the Discovery Institute.

Was Behe expelled from Stein's movie for saying that "it's hard to imagine how there could be stronger evidence for common ancestry of chimps and humans" (p. 72)?

Was he expelled for suggesting that the evolution of orders, families, genera, and species could be explained in a Darwinian manner through random mutation and natural selection (pp. 217-20)?

Was he expelled for saying that "treating the Bible as some sort of science textbook" would be "silly" (p. 166), and that in science there should be "no relying on holy books or prophetic dreams" (p. 233)?

Was he expelled for saying that "the purposeful design of life to any degree is easily compatible with the idea that, after its initiation, the universe unfolded exclusively by the intended playing out of natural laws" (p. 232), which would support theistic evolution?

Was he expelled for saying that "an intelligent designer deliberately made malaria" to kill millions of innocent children, and therefore we should consider the possibility that "the designer isn't all that beneficent or omnipotent" (pp. 237, 239)?

Of course, Behe still supports "intelligent design" reasoning. But he is enough of an independent thinker in his assessment of the scientific evidence and arguments that he can move away from the prescribed doctrines of the Discovery Institute. Was that independence of thought the reason he was expelled from Stein's movie?

Has Michael Behe Fallen From Favor at the Discovery Institute?

As I noted in my first post on Ben Stein's movie Expelled, the absence of Michael Behe was remarkable. After all, Stein interviewed most of the "senior fellows" at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. So why didn't he interview the most famous one and the one who has been the leading scientist for "intelligent design"?

It is now almost a year since the publication of Behe's new book The Edge of Evolution. The Discovery Institute funded the writing of that book, and it heavily promoted the book when it first appeared. But now if you go to the website for the Center for Science and Culture, there are few references to Behe's new book. The lists for "Essential Readings" and "Books by Center Fellows" include Behe's Darwin's Black Box, published in 1996, but not his new book. Ever since the end of November, the blog for the CSC has given almost no attention to Behe's new book.

I now suspect that my early predictions last year have come true--the folks at the Discovery Institute now realize that Behe's new book subverts their rhetorical strategy, and that it was a big mistake for them to promote it.

In my first posts on the book, I noted at least four points on which Behe's position might be disturbing for the proponents of "intelligent design." (1) Behe accepts the Darwinian evolution of species by common descent, including the evolution of the human species from ancestral species shared with chimpanzees. (2) Behe rejects any attempt to treat the Bible as a "science textbook" as "silly," and he insists there should be "no relying on holy books or prophetic dreams." (3) Behe argues that "intelligent design" is not required to explain the emergence of the lower taxonomic levels of life--orders, families, genera, and species; and so the evolution of species could be fully Darwinian. (4) Behe endorses a version of theistic evolution, because he says that after the "initial set-up" by the intelligent designer, "the universe operates by unbroken natural law," with no need for miraculous intervention in nature.

Behe's Edge of Evolution is a serious intellectual retreat from the strong versions of intelligent design creationism, because he concedes so much to Darwinian evolution on so many crucial points. I suspect that for this reason, he has fallen out of favor at the Discovery Institute because he no longer serves their rhetorical purposes.

I should say that ever since I first read Darwin's Black Box, I have thought that Behe is a serious thinker. Even though I don't always agree with him, his reasoning is always worth confronting. He has an intellectual depth that none of the other proponents of intelligent design have.

Some of my posts on his new book can be found here, here, and here.

Why Eugenics is Good for Jews

Proponents of "intelligent design" at the Discovery Institute and elsewhere have charged that Darwinian biology is immoral because of its association with eugenics. This is part of the rhetoric of Ben Stein's movie Expelled.

But as I have indicated in some previous posts, this crude attack on eugenics as evil fails to consider the sort of good eugenics that Darwin favored. Darwin was worried, for example, about the deleterious effects of inbreeding, and so he wanted the British Parliament to sponsor some studies of the effects of first cousin marriages. (Darwin had a personal interest in this, because his wife Emma was his first cousin.)

The crude propaganda of the "intelligent design" proponents (like John West and those in Ben Stein's movie) assumes that eugenics is purely evil because of its abuse by the Nazis in their attack on the Jews. But this ignores the benefits of eugenics for Jews.

Most American Jews are Askenazim. The Askenazi Jews come from Eastern Europe, and because they were a small breeding population in the Middle Ages, many deleterious genes were propagated in the population. For example, about one in 25 Ashkenazi Jews is a carrier of Tay-Sachs disease, which causes the progressive degeneration of the central nervous system in infants, who usually die by the age of 4. It is a horrible disease, and parents would surely want to minimize their chances of producing children with such a disease. To deal with this problem, there are now many Jewish organizations in the United States that provide genetic screening programs so that Jews can determine the likelihood of their being carriers of such diseases, and then they can try to avoid mating with other carriers. As a result of this, the rate of Tay-Sachs and other diseases among Jews has declined dramatically.

This is what I call "good eugenics." Participation in these counseling and screening programs is voluntary. It is not forced on anyone. But it's available for people who want to make good decisions about reproduction and the prospects for their children. It's eugenics, because it is designed to improve the genetic health of offspring.

What's wrong with this? Isn't it good for Jews to be able to participate in such eugenic programs? Doesn't this show how genetics and Darwinian science can improve human life? Rather than denouncing eugenics as evil, wouldn't it be better to distinguish good eugenics from bad eugenics? Why don't the proponents of "intelligent design" do this? Is it because they are advancing a rhetorical strategy that does not favor intelligent thought about the issues?

For more information about genetic testing and family-planning decisions among American Jews, you can go to the website for the Victor Center for Jewish Genetic Diseases at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia.