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.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
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!
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!
Sunday, May 11, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, May 05, 2008
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?
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?
Thursday, May 01, 2008
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.
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.
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.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Connecting Hitler and Darwin (or Luther?): David Berlinski's Sophistry
The last third of Ben Stein's movie Expelled claims that there is a direct connection from Charles Darwin to Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. This is supposed to show how morally corrupting Darwinian biology can be. To support this conclusion, Stein interviews Richard Weikart, the Discovery Institute historian who wrote From Darwin to Hitler. Stein was very careful not to interview any historians who dispute Weikart's claims, because this would have weakened the propaganda value of the movie.
David Berlinski, another Discovery Institute fellow who was in the movie, has now written an article defending this part of the movie. Here is how he puts his argument:
"One man--Charles Darwin--says: 'In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals.'
"Another man--Adolf Hitler--says: Let us kill all the Jews of Europe.
"Is there a connection?
"Yes obviously is the answer of the historical record and common sense."
Really? Is this connection obvious?
In Darwinian Conservatism and in many posts on this blog, I have argued that Weikart's putative connection "from Darwin to Hitler" is very weak. For example, one of the obvious weaknesses in this argument is that there is no anti-Semitism in Darwin's writing. If one were looking for the source of Hitler's anti-Semitism, one might consider Martin Luther. Luther's "On the Jews and Their Lies is one of the most repugnant expressions of anti-Semitism in European history. Scholars such as Richard Steigman-Gall--in his book The Holy Reich--have shown the immense influence of Luther on the Nazis.
So what does Berlinski say about the Luther connection? "A professor of theology at Iowa State University, Hector Avalos, is persuaded that Martin Luther, of all people, must be considered Adolf Hitler's spiritual advisor. Luther, after all, liked Jews as little as Hitler did, and both men suffered, apparently, from hemorrhoids." That flippant comment is all Berlinski says about this. For him, that's enough. There's no need to confront the scholarly record on the history of Luther and anti-Semitism in Germany, because that might upset the rhetorical strategy of the Discovery Institute.
Astonishingly, Weikart never mentions Luther, because this would weaken his argument that Christianity promoted the equal moral dignity of all human beings against the degrading materialism of Darwinism. Of course, Weikart could rightly argue that Luther's anti-Semitism was a distortion of the Christian tradition. But then wouldn't he also have to consider the possibility that social Darwinism was a distortion of Darwinian science?
Weikart has written a hostile review of Steigman-Gall's book. But almost everything he says in criticizing Stegman-Gall's connecting Nazism to Christianity could easily be said in criticizing Weikart's connecting Nazism to Darwinism. For example, Weikart says that if one looks closely as the Nazi interpretations of Christianity, one can see that "their Christianity was always interpreted through the lens of their racial ideology, not vice versa." Yet the same could be said about the Nazi interpretations of Darwinism!
In the movie, neither Berlinski nor Weikart ever mention this debate over whether Luther is a better source for Nazism than Darwin, and Stein never raises this as a question. To have raised such questions would have provoked some deep thought about the issues, and that would have subverted the sophistical rhetoric of this movie.
David Berlinski, another Discovery Institute fellow who was in the movie, has now written an article defending this part of the movie. Here is how he puts his argument:
"One man--Charles Darwin--says: 'In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals.'
"Another man--Adolf Hitler--says: Let us kill all the Jews of Europe.
"Is there a connection?
"Yes obviously is the answer of the historical record and common sense."
Really? Is this connection obvious?
In Darwinian Conservatism and in many posts on this blog, I have argued that Weikart's putative connection "from Darwin to Hitler" is very weak. For example, one of the obvious weaknesses in this argument is that there is no anti-Semitism in Darwin's writing. If one were looking for the source of Hitler's anti-Semitism, one might consider Martin Luther. Luther's "On the Jews and Their Lies is one of the most repugnant expressions of anti-Semitism in European history. Scholars such as Richard Steigman-Gall--in his book The Holy Reich--have shown the immense influence of Luther on the Nazis.
So what does Berlinski say about the Luther connection? "A professor of theology at Iowa State University, Hector Avalos, is persuaded that Martin Luther, of all people, must be considered Adolf Hitler's spiritual advisor. Luther, after all, liked Jews as little as Hitler did, and both men suffered, apparently, from hemorrhoids." That flippant comment is all Berlinski says about this. For him, that's enough. There's no need to confront the scholarly record on the history of Luther and anti-Semitism in Germany, because that might upset the rhetorical strategy of the Discovery Institute.
Astonishingly, Weikart never mentions Luther, because this would weaken his argument that Christianity promoted the equal moral dignity of all human beings against the degrading materialism of Darwinism. Of course, Weikart could rightly argue that Luther's anti-Semitism was a distortion of the Christian tradition. But then wouldn't he also have to consider the possibility that social Darwinism was a distortion of Darwinian science?
Weikart has written a hostile review of Steigman-Gall's book. But almost everything he says in criticizing Stegman-Gall's connecting Nazism to Christianity could easily be said in criticizing Weikart's connecting Nazism to Darwinism. For example, Weikart says that if one looks closely as the Nazi interpretations of Christianity, one can see that "their Christianity was always interpreted through the lens of their racial ideology, not vice versa." Yet the same could be said about the Nazi interpretations of Darwinism!
In the movie, neither Berlinski nor Weikart ever mention this debate over whether Luther is a better source for Nazism than Darwin, and Stein never raises this as a question. To have raised such questions would have provoked some deep thought about the issues, and that would have subverted the sophistical rhetoric of this movie.
The Individuality of Bacteria
One of the most common misconceptions about the biological study of life is that it promotes a determinism that denies individuality and freedom. That's one of the primary reasons why conservatives fear any biological account of human life. They also fear that the genetic determinism of modern biology prepares the way for a genetic engineering of life that will bring a dehumanizing tyranny leading to what C. S. Lewis called "the abolition of man."
Against this misconception, I have argued in a recent post that biological science shows the natural ground for the "Individuality, Contingency, and Historicity of Life." For example, I pointed to the individuality of bacteria: even when bacteria are genetically identical, their behavior differs in ways that show the uniqueness of each bacterium.
Now, in a recent article in the New York Times, Carl Zimmer summarizes some of the recent research confirming this point. E. coli is a species of bacteria that lives in our gut, and it is one of the model organisms for biological research, particularly in genetics. He writes: "A colony of genetically identical E. coli is, in fact, a mob of individuals. Under identical conditions, they will behave in different ways. They have fingerprints of their own."
In a sense, E. coli has "personality"--distinct traits for each individual that cannot be explained by genetics alone. The reason for this is that unlike simple machines, living organisms show an "unpredictable noisiness" in their biological operations so that genetically identical individuals act differently in ways that are not controlled by their genes. Such unpredictable differences are advantageous for evolution, because it allows some individuals to survive in harsh environments when many others die.
If the social sciences and the humanities are to be linked to the natural sciences, that link will come through the life sciences rather than the physical sciences, because the life sciences confront the same individuality, contingency, and historicity that characterize social behavior and human life.
Against this misconception, I have argued in a recent post that biological science shows the natural ground for the "Individuality, Contingency, and Historicity of Life." For example, I pointed to the individuality of bacteria: even when bacteria are genetically identical, their behavior differs in ways that show the uniqueness of each bacterium.
Now, in a recent article in the New York Times, Carl Zimmer summarizes some of the recent research confirming this point. E. coli is a species of bacteria that lives in our gut, and it is one of the model organisms for biological research, particularly in genetics. He writes: "A colony of genetically identical E. coli is, in fact, a mob of individuals. Under identical conditions, they will behave in different ways. They have fingerprints of their own."
In a sense, E. coli has "personality"--distinct traits for each individual that cannot be explained by genetics alone. The reason for this is that unlike simple machines, living organisms show an "unpredictable noisiness" in their biological operations so that genetically identical individuals act differently in ways that are not controlled by their genes. Such unpredictable differences are advantageous for evolution, because it allows some individuals to survive in harsh environments when many others die.
If the social sciences and the humanities are to be linked to the natural sciences, that link will come through the life sciences rather than the physical sciences, because the life sciences confront the same individuality, contingency, and historicity that characterize social behavior and human life.
Monday, April 21, 2008
The Shameful Sophistry of the Intelligent Design/Evolution Debate
As I have indicated in my previous post, Ben Stein's movie Expelled is a crude piece of propaganda for "intelligent design theory" that insults the intelligence of the audience. But the response of the defenders of evolutionary theory is just as crude. Over at the "Panda's Thumb" blog, they're gloating that the box office receipts for the movie haven't made as much money in its first week-end as was expected. It's clear that neither side in this debate cares about the intellectual content of the issues. What they care about is victory over their adversaries.
This is the tradition of the Greek sophists--those who claimed to be philosophers thinking about the deepest issues of human existence, but who really only cared about winning the glory of victory over their opponents.
Does the Discovery Institute want to promote intellectual inquiry into the origins of life and the profound implications of this for human existence? Or does it want to promote the political agenda of intelligent design creationism against its adversaries? Similarly, do people like Richard Dawkins and bloggers like those at "Panda's Thumb" really want to think through these issues and exchange ideas in ways that deepen our understanding? Or do they want to defeat their opponents?
Isn't the answer obvious? There is no interest in carrying on a serious intellectual inquiry into these great human questions. The interest is in winning victory for one's side and defeating the opponents.
There is no evidence in Ben Stein's movie that he wants to think through these questions for himself or help others to think through them. But at the same time, there is no evidence that his opponents--like those at "Panda's Thumb"--want to promote serious thinking about these questions. All these people really care about is claiming some victory for themselves against those opponents.
Am I being naive in thinking that some human beings care more for understanding the deepest human questions than for victory over their intellectual opponents? Is there something in human nature--the desire for dominance over others--that makes the love of victory stronger in most human beings than the love of wisdom?
This is the tradition of the Greek sophists--those who claimed to be philosophers thinking about the deepest issues of human existence, but who really only cared about winning the glory of victory over their opponents.
Does the Discovery Institute want to promote intellectual inquiry into the origins of life and the profound implications of this for human existence? Or does it want to promote the political agenda of intelligent design creationism against its adversaries? Similarly, do people like Richard Dawkins and bloggers like those at "Panda's Thumb" really want to think through these issues and exchange ideas in ways that deepen our understanding? Or do they want to defeat their opponents?
Isn't the answer obvious? There is no interest in carrying on a serious intellectual inquiry into these great human questions. The interest is in winning victory for one's side and defeating the opponents.
There is no evidence in Ben Stein's movie that he wants to think through these questions for himself or help others to think through them. But at the same time, there is no evidence that his opponents--like those at "Panda's Thumb"--want to promote serious thinking about these questions. All these people really care about is claiming some victory for themselves against those opponents.
Am I being naive in thinking that some human beings care more for understanding the deepest human questions than for victory over their intellectual opponents? Is there something in human nature--the desire for dominance over others--that makes the love of victory stronger in most human beings than the love of wisdom?
Saturday, April 19, 2008
The Rhetorical Blunder in Ben Stein's EXPELLED
Ben Stein's movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed opened yesterday in theatres around the nation. This movie is the latest project of the Discovery Institute in promoting the political rhetoric of "intelligent design theory" as the alternative to Darwinian evolutionary science. The National Center for Science Education has set up a good website that corrects the many mistakes in the movie.
The folks at the Discovery Institute have made a big mistake in their production of this movie. The political rhetoric of the Discovery Institute's "wedge strategy" depends upon hiding a fundamental contradiction. But this movie makes the contradiction so evident that any viewer can see it. On the one hand, the rhetorical strategy of the Discovery Institute is to say that "intelligent design" is not a creationist religious belief but pure science, and therefore teaching "intelligent design" in public high school biology classes does not violate the First Amendment's prohibition on establishing religion. On the other hand, the popular success of the Discovery Institute's rhetoric depends on appealing to Biblical creationists who assume that "intelligent designer" is just another name for God the Biblical Creator.
This contradiction--both affirming and denying that "intelligent design theory" is the same as Biblical creationism--became evident in the 2005 case in Dover, Pennsylvania. Leaders of the Dover Area Public School board wanted to teach Biblical creationism. They were warned that this would violate U.S. Supreme Court decisions declaring that teaching creationism as science violated the First Amendment separation of church and state. They then decided to teach "intelligent design theory" as a disguised form of Biblical creationism. The trial made clear their deception, and this also exposed the contradiction in the Discovery Institute's rhetoric.
Rather than covering up this contradiction, this movie makes it hard for any viewer to ignore the contradiction. When Bruce Chapman--President of the Discovery Institute--is interviewed by Stein, Chapman says that journalists distort the true position of intelligent design by saying that it's a creationist religious belief, because the "intelligent designer" is clearly God. Chapman vehemently denies this. But then for the rest of the movie, it's asserted that anyone who denies "intelligent design" is therefore an atheist who denies the existence of God!
Viewers of the movie who know nothing about the debate over intelligent design will easily see this contradiction. Those who do know something about the debate will notice another indication of the contradiction--the absence of Michael Behe. Stein interviews almost all of the major spokesmen for intelligent design. The one remarkable exception, however, is Behe--the LeHigh University biologist who until recently has been the star scientific witness for intelligent design theory.
As I indicated in a blog post last year, Behe's most recent book is is strong attack on biblical creationism. Behe concedes so much to Darwinian science--the limited power of natural selection working on random mutation, evolution by common descent, the evolution of human beings from primate ancestors shared with chimpanzees, rejection of Biblical creationism as "silly," and support for theistic evolution--that Behe actually subverts much of the moral and religious agenda of the Discovery Institute. Behe even questions the goodness and omnipotence of the intelligent designer in deliberately creating malaria! The remarkable absence of Behe from this movie indicates that Behe's positions are no longer helpful to the Discovery Institute's rhetoric.
There are many other weaknesses in the rhetoric of this movie, but they are weaknesses that I have already taken up in many previous posts on intelligent design reasoning. The last third of the movie is devoted to Richard Weikart's "Darwin to Hitler" argument that I have analyzed in various posts. As is usual, a quotation from Darwin's Descent of Man is used to suggest that Darwin promoted something like Nazi eugenics. But the quotation is taken out of context to hide the fact that Darwin rejected the eugenics of Francis Galton. I refer you to my various posts on the issue of Nazi eugenics.
The movie assumes that evolutionary science must be atheistic. To support this assumption, Stein is careful only to interview people like Richard Dawkins who are atheistic evolutionists. He is very careful not to interview theistic evolutionists like Ken Miller or Francis Collins, or even someone like Behe who argues that God might have worked through an evolutionary process. Stein also is careful not to quote from any of Darwin's references to God as Creator.
Consider how different this movie would have been if Stein had interviewed someone like Francis Collins. Collins could have explained how reading C. S. Lewis helped to convert him to Christianity. He could also have explained how he as a geneticist accepts evolutionary science as supported by the evidence and rejects "intelligent design theory" as unfounded. He could have indicated how he sees evolution as compatible with his Christian beliefs and why he rejects Richard Dawkins' atheism as not based on science. Such an interview would have raised some deep questions about the relationship between science and religion--questions that would have been intellectually challenging to the viewers. But Stein chose not to do anything like this. Why? Because it would have subverted his intention in producing a crude piece of propaganda that insults the intelligence of his viewers?
The movie also assumes that evolutionary science denies morality and promotes moral nihilism. To support this assumption, Stein is careful to interview only people like Will Provine who interprets evolution in a nihilistic manner. But this means that Stein has to be very careful not to interview people like David Sloan Wilson who emphasize Darwin's theory of the "moral sense."
A big part of this movie argues that scientists who question Darwinian science or suggest the possibility of intelligent design are censored or otherwise punished and thus their intellectual freedom of thought is denied. The NCSE website surveys the evidence in these cases and indicates how the movie distorts the facts. The one case that might support the movie's argument is that of Guiellermo Gonzalez, an astronomer who was denied tenure at Iowa State University in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. From what little I know of this case, it does appear that Gonzalez has a pretty good record of academic research that might justify tenure, and so it's possible that his support for intelligent design might have provoked some unfair bias against him. The problem, however, is that the policy of confidentiality in academic tenure cases makes it hard to know for sure what motivated the people involved.
I agree on the importance of freedom of thought in these matters. I have argued on this blog and elsewhere that biology classes--both at the high school level and at the college and university level--should be open to discussion of "intelligent design theory" as a possible alternative to Darwinian science. As I have indicated, I don't find the arguments and evidence offered by the ID proponents persuasive. But I see nothing wrong in allowing students to debate this in their biology classes. I have promoted such open debate in my own university classes.
The problem, however, is that both sides of this debate are caught up in a frenzy of rhetorical posturing that makes it impossible to have a thoughtful exchange of competing ideas. I have seen this on those many occasions when I have debated these folks in public. This movie is an example of the rhetorical distortions that make me wonder whether I am being naive in thinking that students and scholars should be able to debate these vital questions in an open and honest manner.
A few of my blog posts relevant to these issues can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
My argument for "teaching the controversy" by teaching Darwin has received some coverage in Inside Higher Ed, which can be found here and here.
One of my first essays on "intelligent design theory" for Salon.com in 2001 can be found here.
I also have a chapter on intelligent design in Darwinian Conservatism.
Last year, I debated intelligent design at the American Enterprise Institute with John West and George Gilder. The New York Times article on the debate can be found here. A podcast of this AEI debate can be found here.
The folks at the Discovery Institute have made a big mistake in their production of this movie. The political rhetoric of the Discovery Institute's "wedge strategy" depends upon hiding a fundamental contradiction. But this movie makes the contradiction so evident that any viewer can see it. On the one hand, the rhetorical strategy of the Discovery Institute is to say that "intelligent design" is not a creationist religious belief but pure science, and therefore teaching "intelligent design" in public high school biology classes does not violate the First Amendment's prohibition on establishing religion. On the other hand, the popular success of the Discovery Institute's rhetoric depends on appealing to Biblical creationists who assume that "intelligent designer" is just another name for God the Biblical Creator.
This contradiction--both affirming and denying that "intelligent design theory" is the same as Biblical creationism--became evident in the 2005 case in Dover, Pennsylvania. Leaders of the Dover Area Public School board wanted to teach Biblical creationism. They were warned that this would violate U.S. Supreme Court decisions declaring that teaching creationism as science violated the First Amendment separation of church and state. They then decided to teach "intelligent design theory" as a disguised form of Biblical creationism. The trial made clear their deception, and this also exposed the contradiction in the Discovery Institute's rhetoric.
Rather than covering up this contradiction, this movie makes it hard for any viewer to ignore the contradiction. When Bruce Chapman--President of the Discovery Institute--is interviewed by Stein, Chapman says that journalists distort the true position of intelligent design by saying that it's a creationist religious belief, because the "intelligent designer" is clearly God. Chapman vehemently denies this. But then for the rest of the movie, it's asserted that anyone who denies "intelligent design" is therefore an atheist who denies the existence of God!
Viewers of the movie who know nothing about the debate over intelligent design will easily see this contradiction. Those who do know something about the debate will notice another indication of the contradiction--the absence of Michael Behe. Stein interviews almost all of the major spokesmen for intelligent design. The one remarkable exception, however, is Behe--the LeHigh University biologist who until recently has been the star scientific witness for intelligent design theory.
As I indicated in a blog post last year, Behe's most recent book is is strong attack on biblical creationism. Behe concedes so much to Darwinian science--the limited power of natural selection working on random mutation, evolution by common descent, the evolution of human beings from primate ancestors shared with chimpanzees, rejection of Biblical creationism as "silly," and support for theistic evolution--that Behe actually subverts much of the moral and religious agenda of the Discovery Institute. Behe even questions the goodness and omnipotence of the intelligent designer in deliberately creating malaria! The remarkable absence of Behe from this movie indicates that Behe's positions are no longer helpful to the Discovery Institute's rhetoric.
There are many other weaknesses in the rhetoric of this movie, but they are weaknesses that I have already taken up in many previous posts on intelligent design reasoning. The last third of the movie is devoted to Richard Weikart's "Darwin to Hitler" argument that I have analyzed in various posts. As is usual, a quotation from Darwin's Descent of Man is used to suggest that Darwin promoted something like Nazi eugenics. But the quotation is taken out of context to hide the fact that Darwin rejected the eugenics of Francis Galton. I refer you to my various posts on the issue of Nazi eugenics.
The movie assumes that evolutionary science must be atheistic. To support this assumption, Stein is careful only to interview people like Richard Dawkins who are atheistic evolutionists. He is very careful not to interview theistic evolutionists like Ken Miller or Francis Collins, or even someone like Behe who argues that God might have worked through an evolutionary process. Stein also is careful not to quote from any of Darwin's references to God as Creator.
Consider how different this movie would have been if Stein had interviewed someone like Francis Collins. Collins could have explained how reading C. S. Lewis helped to convert him to Christianity. He could also have explained how he as a geneticist accepts evolutionary science as supported by the evidence and rejects "intelligent design theory" as unfounded. He could have indicated how he sees evolution as compatible with his Christian beliefs and why he rejects Richard Dawkins' atheism as not based on science. Such an interview would have raised some deep questions about the relationship between science and religion--questions that would have been intellectually challenging to the viewers. But Stein chose not to do anything like this. Why? Because it would have subverted his intention in producing a crude piece of propaganda that insults the intelligence of his viewers?
The movie also assumes that evolutionary science denies morality and promotes moral nihilism. To support this assumption, Stein is careful to interview only people like Will Provine who interprets evolution in a nihilistic manner. But this means that Stein has to be very careful not to interview people like David Sloan Wilson who emphasize Darwin's theory of the "moral sense."
A big part of this movie argues that scientists who question Darwinian science or suggest the possibility of intelligent design are censored or otherwise punished and thus their intellectual freedom of thought is denied. The NCSE website surveys the evidence in these cases and indicates how the movie distorts the facts. The one case that might support the movie's argument is that of Guiellermo Gonzalez, an astronomer who was denied tenure at Iowa State University in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. From what little I know of this case, it does appear that Gonzalez has a pretty good record of academic research that might justify tenure, and so it's possible that his support for intelligent design might have provoked some unfair bias against him. The problem, however, is that the policy of confidentiality in academic tenure cases makes it hard to know for sure what motivated the people involved.
I agree on the importance of freedom of thought in these matters. I have argued on this blog and elsewhere that biology classes--both at the high school level and at the college and university level--should be open to discussion of "intelligent design theory" as a possible alternative to Darwinian science. As I have indicated, I don't find the arguments and evidence offered by the ID proponents persuasive. But I see nothing wrong in allowing students to debate this in their biology classes. I have promoted such open debate in my own university classes.
The problem, however, is that both sides of this debate are caught up in a frenzy of rhetorical posturing that makes it impossible to have a thoughtful exchange of competing ideas. I have seen this on those many occasions when I have debated these folks in public. This movie is an example of the rhetorical distortions that make me wonder whether I am being naive in thinking that students and scholars should be able to debate these vital questions in an open and honest manner.
A few of my blog posts relevant to these issues can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
My argument for "teaching the controversy" by teaching Darwin has received some coverage in Inside Higher Ed, which can be found here and here.
One of my first essays on "intelligent design theory" for Salon.com in 2001 can be found here.
I also have a chapter on intelligent design in Darwinian Conservatism.
Last year, I debated intelligent design at the American Enterprise Institute with John West and George Gilder. The New York Times article on the debate can be found here. A podcast of this AEI debate can be found here.
Monday, April 14, 2008
The Hero with Twenty Faces: Darwinian Literary Studies
In teaching my graduate seminar on "American Political Novels," I have thought about how Darwinian science might illuminate the study of literature. Professional scholars in literary studies usually assume that literature belongs to the humanistic disciplines that must be radically separated from the natural sciences generally and from biological science in particular. But a small group of literary scholars have recently begun to apply Darwinian psychology to the study of literature. A couple of years ago, The New York Times Magazine published an article surveying the work of these folks--D. T. Max, "The Literary Darwinists" (November 6, 2005). One of the best of these scholars is Joseph Carroll, and he offers a good analysis of this research in his contribution ("Literature and Evolutionary Psychology") to The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (2005) edited by David Buss.
I would say that literature is an emotionally-charged imaginative simulation of human experience. Literature has a universal appeal in so far as it explores a universal human nature. A Darwinian science of human evolution would account for human nature as manifested in the twenty natural desires that I have sketched out in various places. Literature engages our interest because it depicts the conflicts that arise within and between individuals as they strive to satisfy those natural desires over the course of their lives.
Literature displays not only the universality of human desires but also the cultural and individual variability in the expression of those universal desires. This creates the interesting complexity in human experience in which natural desires constrain but do not rigidly determine the customary traditions of social life and the variable temperaments of unique individuals. Literature helps us to understand and manage this complex interaction of universal nature, customary traditions, and individual choices.
Joseph Campbell's famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces argues that literature around the world and throughout history portrays certain mythic archetypes that evoke a universal human psychology, which he thought was best explained by Carl Jung's psychoanalysis. I would see this as showing the universality of the twenty natural desires, which could be best explained as arising from the evolved nature of human beings.
In some ways, there is nothing new about this. Beginning with Aristotle's Poetics, students of literature have seen it as an artistic imitation of human nature. But the strength of Darwinian literary theory is that it offers a scientific explanation for the universal human nature that traditional literary scholarship has simply taken for granted.
Moreover, a Darwinian approach to literature can challenge those contemporary schools of literary study that deny human nature. Feminist theorists, for example, have argued that gender identity in European literature is an arbitrary social construction to enforce the patriarchal subordination of women to men. By contrast, Darwinian psychology would predict that although there will be great cultural and individual variation in the sexual differentiation of males and females, this variation will be constrained by the natural differences in the mental and behavioral propensities of men and women. This would predict that across all cultures, there should be certain regularities in the literary depiction of men and women. So even if there is much in the novels of Jane Austen that reflects the peculiarities of courtship and marriage in nineteenth-century Victorian England, her novels should also show some universal patterns of sexual mating that would be found in all cultures throughout history.
I would say that literature is an emotionally-charged imaginative simulation of human experience. Literature has a universal appeal in so far as it explores a universal human nature. A Darwinian science of human evolution would account for human nature as manifested in the twenty natural desires that I have sketched out in various places. Literature engages our interest because it depicts the conflicts that arise within and between individuals as they strive to satisfy those natural desires over the course of their lives.
Literature displays not only the universality of human desires but also the cultural and individual variability in the expression of those universal desires. This creates the interesting complexity in human experience in which natural desires constrain but do not rigidly determine the customary traditions of social life and the variable temperaments of unique individuals. Literature helps us to understand and manage this complex interaction of universal nature, customary traditions, and individual choices.
Joseph Campbell's famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces argues that literature around the world and throughout history portrays certain mythic archetypes that evoke a universal human psychology, which he thought was best explained by Carl Jung's psychoanalysis. I would see this as showing the universality of the twenty natural desires, which could be best explained as arising from the evolved nature of human beings.
In some ways, there is nothing new about this. Beginning with Aristotle's Poetics, students of literature have seen it as an artistic imitation of human nature. But the strength of Darwinian literary theory is that it offers a scientific explanation for the universal human nature that traditional literary scholarship has simply taken for granted.
Moreover, a Darwinian approach to literature can challenge those contemporary schools of literary study that deny human nature. Feminist theorists, for example, have argued that gender identity in European literature is an arbitrary social construction to enforce the patriarchal subordination of women to men. By contrast, Darwinian psychology would predict that although there will be great cultural and individual variation in the sexual differentiation of males and females, this variation will be constrained by the natural differences in the mental and behavioral propensities of men and women. This would predict that across all cultures, there should be certain regularities in the literary depiction of men and women. So even if there is much in the novels of Jane Austen that reflects the peculiarities of courtship and marriage in nineteenth-century Victorian England, her novels should also show some universal patterns of sexual mating that would be found in all cultures throughout history.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Against "the Conservatism of Slavery"
In Darwinian Natural Right, I have a chapter on slavery that shows how a Darwinian view of morality allows us to recognize the immorality of slavery while exercising prudence in managing the tragic conflicts that slavery has created in history. On this blog, I have have posted a series of comments on the similarities between Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin in this opposition to slavery.
Unfortunately, some American conservatives who look to the Southern tradition of political thought try to justify slavery in the American South as a natural and customary institution supporting liberty. In his comments in The Conservative Mind on the Southern conservatism of John Randolph and John C. Calhoun, Russell Kirk observed that "human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon." But, even today, some conservatives disregard Kirk's warning.
For example, the fall 2007 issue of Modern Age has a collection of articles on American intellectual conservatism that includes a section on the "defense of the Old Republic," and the "Old Republic" turns out to be predominantly the "Old South" and its institutions. One of the articles is "The Old Republic and the Sectional Crisis" by Mark Malvasi. According to Malvasi, the demise of the "Old Republic" came with the defeat of the South and the emancipation of slaves in the Civil War. He criticizes Lincoln for leading those Republicans who "knowingly misrepresented" slavery as "a departure from the original intentions of the Founding Fathers." Malvasi quotes a Southern congressman as warning his Northern colleagues that "the conservatism of slavery may be necessary to save you from the thousand destructive isms infecting the social organization of your section." Malvasi notes that the proslavery Southerners were Christians who believed the Bible supported slavery as necessary for a good social order. "For men who took seriously the biblical injunction to be their brothers' keepers, slavery was the best, if not the only, means of preserving a Christian social order in the modern world."
Malvasi's defense of "a genuinely Christian slavery" as the foundation for the conservatism of the "Old Republic" is a disturbing manifestation of the intellectual and moral confusion in contemporary conservatism. A Darwinian conservatism would escape such confusion by showing how conservative thought can be rooted in prudence and Darwinian natural right, which allows us to recognize the evil in practices like human slavery.
Some of my posts on Darwin, Lincoln, and slavery elaborate these points. Some of them can be found here, here, here, and here.
Unfortunately, some American conservatives who look to the Southern tradition of political thought try to justify slavery in the American South as a natural and customary institution supporting liberty. In his comments in The Conservative Mind on the Southern conservatism of John Randolph and John C. Calhoun, Russell Kirk observed that "human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon." But, even today, some conservatives disregard Kirk's warning.
For example, the fall 2007 issue of Modern Age has a collection of articles on American intellectual conservatism that includes a section on the "defense of the Old Republic," and the "Old Republic" turns out to be predominantly the "Old South" and its institutions. One of the articles is "The Old Republic and the Sectional Crisis" by Mark Malvasi. According to Malvasi, the demise of the "Old Republic" came with the defeat of the South and the emancipation of slaves in the Civil War. He criticizes Lincoln for leading those Republicans who "knowingly misrepresented" slavery as "a departure from the original intentions of the Founding Fathers." Malvasi quotes a Southern congressman as warning his Northern colleagues that "the conservatism of slavery may be necessary to save you from the thousand destructive isms infecting the social organization of your section." Malvasi notes that the proslavery Southerners were Christians who believed the Bible supported slavery as necessary for a good social order. "For men who took seriously the biblical injunction to be their brothers' keepers, slavery was the best, if not the only, means of preserving a Christian social order in the modern world."
Malvasi's defense of "a genuinely Christian slavery" as the foundation for the conservatism of the "Old Republic" is a disturbing manifestation of the intellectual and moral confusion in contemporary conservatism. A Darwinian conservatism would escape such confusion by showing how conservative thought can be rooted in prudence and Darwinian natural right, which allows us to recognize the evil in practices like human slavery.
Some of my posts on Darwin, Lincoln, and slavery elaborate these points. Some of them can be found here, here, here, and here.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Good Eugenics
Critics of Darwinian conservatism--John West, for example--often argue that the history of eugenics illustrates the morally repugnant consequences of Darwinian thinking. In my chapter on "Social Darwinism" in Darwinian Conservatism and in various posts on this blog responding to West, I have suggested that for Darwin, eugenics--the management of human breeding to promote the physical and mental health of the offspring--can be either good or bad. Eugenics is good when it is based on a realistic understanding of our limited knowledge of biological inheritance, and when it is guided by a moral sympathy for the weaker members of society. Eugenics is bad when it is motivated by a utopian vision of human perfectibility through the breeding of superior races, and when it is unchecked by humanitarian sympathy. Darwin promoted good eugenics, as in his concern about the consequences of incest and cousin marriage. Francis Galton promoted bad eugenics rooted in a tradition of utopian eugenics that began with Plato's Republic. Like Plato, Galton described his eugenics as directed to producing "a race of gifted men," so that "the utopias in the dreamland of philanthropists may become practical possibilities."
Good eugenics would allow parents to exercise prudence in making informed decisions about reproduction to satisfy their natural desire for parental care. We need prudence to decide particular cases where no absolute rule would work because of the contingencies and uncertainties in each decision. And we need to rely on parental care (as one of the 20 natural desires) to guide such decisions as conforming to our human nature.
As an illustration of such good eugenics, consider the recent article by Wesley Smith in The Weekly Standard. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute who campaigns against abortion and what he calls "politically correct eugenics." But in this article, he implicitly supports what I would call good eugenics by supporting some legislation proposed by Senators Edward Kennedy and Sam Brownback. The legislation would require that parents making decisions about pre- and postnatal disabilities be given full information about "life expectancy, development potential, and quality of life" for children born with genetic disabilities such as Down syndrome. Smith hopes this would persuade many parents to care for Down children once they learn that such children can live good lives. He quotes from one parent of a Down child who decided that "Down's syndrome is not an insupportable horror for either the sufferer or the parents." Smith cites this parent's report as showing "the joy that many parents of Down children discover." He supports the Kennedy/Brownback legislation because it would allow parents to make a "fully informed decision," which might be a decision to care for a Down child as a joyful experience.
We allow parents to make such reproductive decisions because we assume that most parents will be motivated by a desire for parental care that considers the best interests of their children. Using governmental coercion to force a decision on them would be bad eugenics. Allowing them to make their own decisions based on the best available information and their natural desire for a healthy family life is good eugenics.
Good eugenics would allow parents to exercise prudence in making informed decisions about reproduction to satisfy their natural desire for parental care. We need prudence to decide particular cases where no absolute rule would work because of the contingencies and uncertainties in each decision. And we need to rely on parental care (as one of the 20 natural desires) to guide such decisions as conforming to our human nature.
As an illustration of such good eugenics, consider the recent article by Wesley Smith in The Weekly Standard. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute who campaigns against abortion and what he calls "politically correct eugenics." But in this article, he implicitly supports what I would call good eugenics by supporting some legislation proposed by Senators Edward Kennedy and Sam Brownback. The legislation would require that parents making decisions about pre- and postnatal disabilities be given full information about "life expectancy, development potential, and quality of life" for children born with genetic disabilities such as Down syndrome. Smith hopes this would persuade many parents to care for Down children once they learn that such children can live good lives. He quotes from one parent of a Down child who decided that "Down's syndrome is not an insupportable horror for either the sufferer or the parents." Smith cites this parent's report as showing "the joy that many parents of Down children discover." He supports the Kennedy/Brownback legislation because it would allow parents to make a "fully informed decision," which might be a decision to care for a Down child as a joyful experience.
We allow parents to make such reproductive decisions because we assume that most parents will be motivated by a desire for parental care that considers the best interests of their children. Using governmental coercion to force a decision on them would be bad eugenics. Allowing them to make their own decisions based on the best available information and their natural desire for a healthy family life is good eugenics.
The Individuality, Contingency, and Historicity of Life
One objection to Darwinian conservatism is that a Darwinian view of evolved human nature opens the way to the use of biotechnology to change, or even abolish, human nature. Some conservatives worry that even if Darwinian biology denies the utopian belief of the left in human perfectibility through social engineering, this still leaves open the possibility of perfectibility through biological engineering. These conservatives share Leon Kass's worry that biotech is leading us to a "posthuman" future that will bring what C. S. Lewis called "the abolition of man."
In response to this objection, I have argued that people like Kass have exaggerated the power of biotech for changing human nature. They fail to see that biotech will always be limited in its power by the historical indeterminacy of living nature.
We commonly classify biology along with physics and chemistry as belonging to the natural sciences, which we distinguish from the social sciences such as economics and political science and the humanistic disciplines such as history. But I agree with biologists such as Ernst Mayr and Jared Diamond who argue that the fundamental distinction is between historical sciences and nonhistorical sciences, and that biology belongs to the historical sciences, along with economics, history, and political science, while physics and chemistry belong to the nonhistorical sciences.
For each kind of elementary particle studied by physicists and for each kind of molecule studied by chemists, the individual members of the class are identical. And consequently, physicists and chemists can formulate universal deterministic laws, at least at the macroscopic level. But in the historical sciences, the objects of study display a radical individuality in that each member of a class is unique. So, for the social scientist, every human society is unique, and every member of each society is unique. For the biologist, every species is unique, and every member of each species is unique. Even genetically identical bacteria grown in homogeneous conditions show unique individuality in their behavioral movements that persist over their lifespans. Consequently, social scientists and biologists can formulate probabilistic regularities but not deterministic laws. The phenomena studied in the historical sciences show emergent complexity, in that they must be consistent with the deterministic laws of physics and chemistry, but they cannot be reduced to those laws.
Consider, for example, Jane Goodall's magnum opus The Chimpanzees of Gombe. As the title suggests, this book gives a historical narrative of one unique group of chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Preserve in Tanzania, and yet it also generalizes about probabilistic tendencies in all chimpanzee groups. So, for example, she narrates the history of the male dominance hierarchy in Gombe, which reflects the unique personalities and unique social circumstances of the Gombe chimps. She can generalize about how any chimpanzee group will tend to display a male dominance hierarchy, but she cannot predict the precise historical pathway for any particular chimpanzee dominance hierarchy. Moreover, she notices that different chimpanzee groups have different cultural traditions of behavior reflecting unique cultural histories. And now many primatologists have confirmed that chimps show complex patterns of cultural learning and tradition that resemble those of human beings. The uniqueness of each chimpanzee individual and the uniqueness of each chimpanzee group give rise to historical traditions of behavior that cannot be precisely predicted by deterministic laws.
It is true that all life depends on genes and a shared genetic code, which allow us to formulate general laws of life, and that through biotech, we can use our knowledge of those genetic laws of life to gain some power over living nature. But although genes are necessary for explaining life, they are not sufficient. And, furthermore, the complexity of genetic causality introduces historical contingency in ways that make it impossible to develop deterministic laws of behavioral genetics.
From the earliest days of genetics, beginning with T. H. Morgan, the fruit fly has been one of the favored model organisms for studying genetics. Amazingly, many of the genetic mechanisms that shape not only the anatomy and physiology but also the behavior of fruit flies are fundamentally similar to those for more complex animals, including human beings. And yet, even the fruit fly shows a remarkable flexibility in its genetics that comes from the complexity of genetic causality. There are few cases where a single gene has a single function. Most genes are pleiotropic, in that they have more than one effect. And most genes are interactive, in that the action of each gene depends on its interactions with other genes, with other molecules inside and outside its cell, and with the external world generally. Moreover, the action of the gene may depend on the life history of its cell and of the individual organism in which it resides. Rather than acting through linear pathways, as is commonly depicted in textbooks, genes form complex networks. These networks of genes influence behavior only through networks of cellular mechanisms throughout the organism, including the neural networks of the nervous system. These highly integrated networks arranged in nested hierarchies--from genes to cells to tissues to nervous systems--give even a simple fruit fly an adaptive flexibility to respond to contingent events that cannot be predetermined by deterministic laws.
The causal complexity of gene action puts severe limits on the power of biotech for manipulating genes that influence complex traits. So, for example, while we hear a lot of talk these days about "designer babies," there is no reason to believe that we will ever be able to "design" babies if that means controlling complex behavioral traits like intelligence and personality. The complexity of gene networks make it difficult, if not impossible, to use biotech to alter our genes to enhance desirable traits without bringing about undesirable side effects. If we knock out or suppress one gene because it contributes to some undesirable effect, we might discover that the same gene has other effects that are desirable. Or we might discover that the undesirable effect really depends on so many genes interacting among themselves and with so many other factors, that controlling one gene gives us no control over that undesirable effect.
Identical (monozygotic) twins--who have the same genetic constitution--are often remarkably similar, not only in their physical appearance, but also in their emotional and intellectual character. Fraternal (dizygotic) twins--who share only about half their genes--are often quite different from one another. This surely shows the powerful influence of genes on the behavioral propensities of human beings. But still, even identical twins are not really identical. For example, their fingerprints are similar and yet different. Identical twins differ in their character traits in ways that make them distinct persons, because subtle differences in their life-history development give them different traits. These differences start even in the uterus. Most identical twins share the same placenta. But about one-third develop in separate placentas. Those who had separate placentas seem to be less similar to one another than twins who shared a placenta.
Even conjoined twins--those whose bodies are attached--show clear differences in their personalities, even though they have shared virtually identical environments as well as identical genomes. The original "Siamese twins"--Eng and Chang Bunker--were born in Siam (now Thailand) in 1811. They were born joined at the chest by a band of flesh. After their death, an autopsy showed that they had shared liver tissue. They moved to the United States, became successful farmers in North Carolina, and married two sisters. The sisters lived in separate houses. Eng and Chang would divide each week between the two homes. They had 21 children between the two of them. The brothers often fought with one another because their personalities were so different. Eng was quiet, amiable, and a teetotaler. Chang was aggressive, irritable, and inclined to alcoholism. In other words, they were individuals.
The individual uniqueness of living beings--even with individuals having the same genome--denies the popular idea that cloning produces duplicates. One motivation for cloning might be to preserve a loved one that is going to die. But this motivation is misguided because the clone would not really be identical to its progenitor. For example, pet owners might want to preserve their favorite pets by cloning them, but they would discover that the clones were not really replicas of their beloved animal. A company--Genetic Savings and Clone--was set up to sell cloning services to pet owners. They attracted great publicity a few years ago when they announced that they had cloned a cat that they named "Copy Cat." But this turned into a public relations flop when the pictures were widely published around the world. They had cloned a calico cat, and calicos have varying patterns of coloration that depend not just on genes but also on environmental cues in the mother cat's womb. As a result, "Copy Cat" did not look at all like the cat from which she was cloned. The scientists who did this work at Texas A & M University reported: "As with other genetically identical animals with multicolored coats, the cloned kitten's color patterning is not exactly the same as that of the nuclear donor--this is because the pattern of pigmentation in multicolored animals is the result not only of genetic factors but also of developmental factors that are not controlled by genotype." But that suggests that the excitement about cloning as a way of duplicating animals and humans is based on the false idea that identical genes produce identical creatures.
In response to this objection, I have argued that people like Kass have exaggerated the power of biotech for changing human nature. They fail to see that biotech will always be limited in its power by the historical indeterminacy of living nature.
We commonly classify biology along with physics and chemistry as belonging to the natural sciences, which we distinguish from the social sciences such as economics and political science and the humanistic disciplines such as history. But I agree with biologists such as Ernst Mayr and Jared Diamond who argue that the fundamental distinction is between historical sciences and nonhistorical sciences, and that biology belongs to the historical sciences, along with economics, history, and political science, while physics and chemistry belong to the nonhistorical sciences.
For each kind of elementary particle studied by physicists and for each kind of molecule studied by chemists, the individual members of the class are identical. And consequently, physicists and chemists can formulate universal deterministic laws, at least at the macroscopic level. But in the historical sciences, the objects of study display a radical individuality in that each member of a class is unique. So, for the social scientist, every human society is unique, and every member of each society is unique. For the biologist, every species is unique, and every member of each species is unique. Even genetically identical bacteria grown in homogeneous conditions show unique individuality in their behavioral movements that persist over their lifespans. Consequently, social scientists and biologists can formulate probabilistic regularities but not deterministic laws. The phenomena studied in the historical sciences show emergent complexity, in that they must be consistent with the deterministic laws of physics and chemistry, but they cannot be reduced to those laws.
Consider, for example, Jane Goodall's magnum opus The Chimpanzees of Gombe. As the title suggests, this book gives a historical narrative of one unique group of chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Preserve in Tanzania, and yet it also generalizes about probabilistic tendencies in all chimpanzee groups. So, for example, she narrates the history of the male dominance hierarchy in Gombe, which reflects the unique personalities and unique social circumstances of the Gombe chimps. She can generalize about how any chimpanzee group will tend to display a male dominance hierarchy, but she cannot predict the precise historical pathway for any particular chimpanzee dominance hierarchy. Moreover, she notices that different chimpanzee groups have different cultural traditions of behavior reflecting unique cultural histories. And now many primatologists have confirmed that chimps show complex patterns of cultural learning and tradition that resemble those of human beings. The uniqueness of each chimpanzee individual and the uniqueness of each chimpanzee group give rise to historical traditions of behavior that cannot be precisely predicted by deterministic laws.
It is true that all life depends on genes and a shared genetic code, which allow us to formulate general laws of life, and that through biotech, we can use our knowledge of those genetic laws of life to gain some power over living nature. But although genes are necessary for explaining life, they are not sufficient. And, furthermore, the complexity of genetic causality introduces historical contingency in ways that make it impossible to develop deterministic laws of behavioral genetics.
From the earliest days of genetics, beginning with T. H. Morgan, the fruit fly has been one of the favored model organisms for studying genetics. Amazingly, many of the genetic mechanisms that shape not only the anatomy and physiology but also the behavior of fruit flies are fundamentally similar to those for more complex animals, including human beings. And yet, even the fruit fly shows a remarkable flexibility in its genetics that comes from the complexity of genetic causality. There are few cases where a single gene has a single function. Most genes are pleiotropic, in that they have more than one effect. And most genes are interactive, in that the action of each gene depends on its interactions with other genes, with other molecules inside and outside its cell, and with the external world generally. Moreover, the action of the gene may depend on the life history of its cell and of the individual organism in which it resides. Rather than acting through linear pathways, as is commonly depicted in textbooks, genes form complex networks. These networks of genes influence behavior only through networks of cellular mechanisms throughout the organism, including the neural networks of the nervous system. These highly integrated networks arranged in nested hierarchies--from genes to cells to tissues to nervous systems--give even a simple fruit fly an adaptive flexibility to respond to contingent events that cannot be predetermined by deterministic laws.
The causal complexity of gene action puts severe limits on the power of biotech for manipulating genes that influence complex traits. So, for example, while we hear a lot of talk these days about "designer babies," there is no reason to believe that we will ever be able to "design" babies if that means controlling complex behavioral traits like intelligence and personality. The complexity of gene networks make it difficult, if not impossible, to use biotech to alter our genes to enhance desirable traits without bringing about undesirable side effects. If we knock out or suppress one gene because it contributes to some undesirable effect, we might discover that the same gene has other effects that are desirable. Or we might discover that the undesirable effect really depends on so many genes interacting among themselves and with so many other factors, that controlling one gene gives us no control over that undesirable effect.
Identical (monozygotic) twins--who have the same genetic constitution--are often remarkably similar, not only in their physical appearance, but also in their emotional and intellectual character. Fraternal (dizygotic) twins--who share only about half their genes--are often quite different from one another. This surely shows the powerful influence of genes on the behavioral propensities of human beings. But still, even identical twins are not really identical. For example, their fingerprints are similar and yet different. Identical twins differ in their character traits in ways that make them distinct persons, because subtle differences in their life-history development give them different traits. These differences start even in the uterus. Most identical twins share the same placenta. But about one-third develop in separate placentas. Those who had separate placentas seem to be less similar to one another than twins who shared a placenta.
Even conjoined twins--those whose bodies are attached--show clear differences in their personalities, even though they have shared virtually identical environments as well as identical genomes. The original "Siamese twins"--Eng and Chang Bunker--were born in Siam (now Thailand) in 1811. They were born joined at the chest by a band of flesh. After their death, an autopsy showed that they had shared liver tissue. They moved to the United States, became successful farmers in North Carolina, and married two sisters. The sisters lived in separate houses. Eng and Chang would divide each week between the two homes. They had 21 children between the two of them. The brothers often fought with one another because their personalities were so different. Eng was quiet, amiable, and a teetotaler. Chang was aggressive, irritable, and inclined to alcoholism. In other words, they were individuals.
The individual uniqueness of living beings--even with individuals having the same genome--denies the popular idea that cloning produces duplicates. One motivation for cloning might be to preserve a loved one that is going to die. But this motivation is misguided because the clone would not really be identical to its progenitor. For example, pet owners might want to preserve their favorite pets by cloning them, but they would discover that the clones were not really replicas of their beloved animal. A company--Genetic Savings and Clone--was set up to sell cloning services to pet owners. They attracted great publicity a few years ago when they announced that they had cloned a cat that they named "Copy Cat." But this turned into a public relations flop when the pictures were widely published around the world. They had cloned a calico cat, and calicos have varying patterns of coloration that depend not just on genes but also on environmental cues in the mother cat's womb. As a result, "Copy Cat" did not look at all like the cat from which she was cloned. The scientists who did this work at Texas A & M University reported: "As with other genetically identical animals with multicolored coats, the cloned kitten's color patterning is not exactly the same as that of the nuclear donor--this is because the pattern of pigmentation in multicolored animals is the result not only of genetic factors but also of developmental factors that are not controlled by genotype." But that suggests that the excitement about cloning as a way of duplicating animals and humans is based on the false idea that identical genes produce identical creatures.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Elizabeth Blackburn and Leon Kass
Recently, MIT Press published Catherine Brady's biography of Elizabeth Blackburn--Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA. Blackburn is famous among biologists as the leading researcher in the study of telomeres. Telomeres are those regions of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes. As cells divide, these telomeres tend to shorten, and eventually this shortening of the telomeres leads to the death of the cells. Some cells--such as cancer cells--continue dividing endlessly because of the enzyme telomerase that slows the shortening of telomeres. Blackburn's research on telomeres has become important both for aging research and cancer research.
In the fall of 2001, when President Bush established his Council on Bioethics with Leon Kass as the Chair, Blackburn was appointed as one of the original 17 members. Although Kass was careful to appoint members who would generally support Bush's political agenda--particularly, his opposition to embryonic stem cell research--Blackburn emerged as one of a group of four members who argued with Kass and criticized the President's agenda.
Early in 2004, Kass demanded that Blackburn be removed from the Council. She and two others--William May and Stephen Carter--were removed and replaced by three new members--Peter Lawler, Diana Schaub, and Benjamin Carson. This provoked a public controversy because it seemed that Kass was manipulating the membership of the Council to weaken any opposition to Bush's political agenda on bioethics. Although Kass tried to argue that there was no political motivation behind his moves, he was unpersuasive, particularly since the three people joining the Council--Lawler, Schaub, and Carson--were friendly to Kass's positions. (In 2005, Kass resigned as Chair of the Council, although he remains a member of the Council.)
Brady recounts this controversy, with a clear bias towards Blackburn and without much intellectual depth. Blackburn herself is a great scientist, but she lacks any understanding of the deep philosophic implications of the debate surrounding Kass and the Council. For example, she was baffled by Kass's assertion that there is "a disjunction between the way science understands things and the way human beings on the plane of human experience understand things" (p. 280 in Brady's book). Blackburn was unfamiliar with the intellectual legacy of Kass as influenced by Martin Heidegger, Jacob Klein, Leo Strauss, and Hans Jonas--particularly, the legacy of phenomenological philosophy and its account of early modern science as abstracting from the common sense experience of human beings for the sake of fostering a technological conquest of nature.
The serious flaws in Kass's reasoning arise from his dubious assumption that Descartes's materialist reductionism "sets the program of all modern science" and his failure to see how Darwinian biology refutes Cartesianism. Some of my blog posts on these points can be found here, here, and here. I also have an entry on the President's Council on Bioethics in the Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics (4 vols., 2005) and a chapter on Kass and biotechnology in Darwinian Conservatism. Some of the material in the book chapter can also be found in my article for The New Atlantis (summer 2003), which can be found here.
In May, I will be directing a Liberty Fund colloquium in New Orleans on "Biotechnology and Liberty." We will be reading Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, one of the reports of the President's Council edited by Kass, and Ron Bailey's Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution. There is a good debate between these two books. Kass's book reflects neoconservative fears about the dehumanizing effects of trying to use biotech to conquer nature for human benefit. Bailey's book is a libertarian defense of biotech as a tool for advancing human liberty through the scientific mastery over nature.
In the fall of 2001, when President Bush established his Council on Bioethics with Leon Kass as the Chair, Blackburn was appointed as one of the original 17 members. Although Kass was careful to appoint members who would generally support Bush's political agenda--particularly, his opposition to embryonic stem cell research--Blackburn emerged as one of a group of four members who argued with Kass and criticized the President's agenda.
Early in 2004, Kass demanded that Blackburn be removed from the Council. She and two others--William May and Stephen Carter--were removed and replaced by three new members--Peter Lawler, Diana Schaub, and Benjamin Carson. This provoked a public controversy because it seemed that Kass was manipulating the membership of the Council to weaken any opposition to Bush's political agenda on bioethics. Although Kass tried to argue that there was no political motivation behind his moves, he was unpersuasive, particularly since the three people joining the Council--Lawler, Schaub, and Carson--were friendly to Kass's positions. (In 2005, Kass resigned as Chair of the Council, although he remains a member of the Council.)
Brady recounts this controversy, with a clear bias towards Blackburn and without much intellectual depth. Blackburn herself is a great scientist, but she lacks any understanding of the deep philosophic implications of the debate surrounding Kass and the Council. For example, she was baffled by Kass's assertion that there is "a disjunction between the way science understands things and the way human beings on the plane of human experience understand things" (p. 280 in Brady's book). Blackburn was unfamiliar with the intellectual legacy of Kass as influenced by Martin Heidegger, Jacob Klein, Leo Strauss, and Hans Jonas--particularly, the legacy of phenomenological philosophy and its account of early modern science as abstracting from the common sense experience of human beings for the sake of fostering a technological conquest of nature.
The serious flaws in Kass's reasoning arise from his dubious assumption that Descartes's materialist reductionism "sets the program of all modern science" and his failure to see how Darwinian biology refutes Cartesianism. Some of my blog posts on these points can be found here, here, and here. I also have an entry on the President's Council on Bioethics in the Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics (4 vols., 2005) and a chapter on Kass and biotechnology in Darwinian Conservatism. Some of the material in the book chapter can also be found in my article for The New Atlantis (summer 2003), which can be found here.
In May, I will be directing a Liberty Fund colloquium in New Orleans on "Biotechnology and Liberty." We will be reading Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, one of the reports of the President's Council edited by Kass, and Ron Bailey's Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution. There is a good debate between these two books. Kass's book reflects neoconservative fears about the dehumanizing effects of trying to use biotech to conquer nature for human benefit. Bailey's book is a libertarian defense of biotech as a tool for advancing human liberty through the scientific mastery over nature.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Ben Stein's Movie on the Evolution Debate
Ben Stein has made a documentary movie--"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"--criticizing universities for suppressing the academic freedom of those promoting "intelligent design" as an alternative to Darwinian biology. Although the movie will not be released for public viewing until April 18, it is already creating controversy because critics charge that it's a biased piece of propaganda advancing "intelligent design theory."
Today's Inside Higher Ed has published an article on the movie by Andy Guess, who interviewed me for the article. Unfortunately, he doesn't make clear in the article that I argue for allowing university students to have an open debate in their biology classes over Darwinism and "intelligent design theory." But my argument is set forth in an article published by Inside Higher Ed a few years ago, which can be found here.
Today's Inside Higher Ed has published an article on the movie by Andy Guess, who interviewed me for the article. Unfortunately, he doesn't make clear in the article that I argue for allowing university students to have an open debate in their biology classes over Darwinism and "intelligent design theory." But my argument is set forth in an article published by Inside Higher Ed a few years ago, which can be found here.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
John Adams--Ambition and Limited Government
The $100 million HBO mini-series on John Adams has prompted questions as to why this most-neglected of America's Founding Fathers has now suddenly become famous. I have personal reasons to agree with the conclusion in the recent issue of The Economist that "sometimes short bald men are right"!
But what was he right about? In Darwinian Conservatism, Adams is prominent in the chapter on "Limited Government." In that chapter, I suggest that in some ways, Adams was the deepest thinker among the American Founders. He was an intensely ambitious man. But he was also a well-read scholar and serious thinker who understood that the ambition of the sort of people who strive for power would become tyrannical if it was not properly channelled. He understood that in every society, there will be a rivalry for power between those few who want to be dominant, while the multitude of people will look to the leadership of the few, even as they resist being exploited by the ambitious few. Adams indicated that this structure of rule--the one, the few, and the many--could be found among many animals with dominance hierarchies. And in my chapter, I suggested that his political anthropology was confirmed by modern ethological studies of "chimpanzee politics."
From his reading of political philosophy--from Aristotle to Cicero to Machiavelli to Adam Smith--and from his own political experience, Adams rightly concluded that the best form of government was a "mixed regime" that allows the few to strive for dominance, with one person rising to the top, but with a system of divided powers balanced against one another so that no one person or group can become despotic. I argue that studies of primate politics confirms the practical wisdom of Adams' political thought.
If the HBS television series turns the attention of the public to Adams, and if it directs a few serious readers to read Adams writings (including the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780) and biographies of Adams like that by David McCullough, this could promote a renewed appreciation for Adams' argument for balanced government, which figures prominently in Darwinian conservatism.
But what was he right about? In Darwinian Conservatism, Adams is prominent in the chapter on "Limited Government." In that chapter, I suggest that in some ways, Adams was the deepest thinker among the American Founders. He was an intensely ambitious man. But he was also a well-read scholar and serious thinker who understood that the ambition of the sort of people who strive for power would become tyrannical if it was not properly channelled. He understood that in every society, there will be a rivalry for power between those few who want to be dominant, while the multitude of people will look to the leadership of the few, even as they resist being exploited by the ambitious few. Adams indicated that this structure of rule--the one, the few, and the many--could be found among many animals with dominance hierarchies. And in my chapter, I suggested that his political anthropology was confirmed by modern ethological studies of "chimpanzee politics."
From his reading of political philosophy--from Aristotle to Cicero to Machiavelli to Adam Smith--and from his own political experience, Adams rightly concluded that the best form of government was a "mixed regime" that allows the few to strive for dominance, with one person rising to the top, but with a system of divided powers balanced against one another so that no one person or group can become despotic. I argue that studies of primate politics confirms the practical wisdom of Adams' political thought.
If the HBS television series turns the attention of the public to Adams, and if it directs a few serious readers to read Adams writings (including the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780) and biographies of Adams like that by David McCullough, this could promote a renewed appreciation for Adams' argument for balanced government, which figures prominently in Darwinian conservatism.
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