Darwin's Vicar

As we enter the Easter season, we should notice the continuing debate over the relationship between Darwinian science and Biblical religion. For example, last November, Time magazine published a debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, with Dawkins claiming that Darwinism refutes religious belief and Collins claiming that Darwinism and religion are compatible.

The fundamental difficulty manifest in this debate is one that I have taken up in my books and this blog. It's the problem of ultimate explanation. In the search for ultimate causes, we must appeal to some final ground of explanation that cannot itself be explained. Either we look to Nature as the final ground. Or we look to God as the supernatural ground of Nature. I cannot see any way around this problem, which shows the limits of human reason.

As I have argued on this blog, Darwin himself saw no necessary conflict between evolutionary science and Biblical religion. He appealed to the traditional conception of "two books": God speaks both through the Book of Nature as studied by human reason and the Book of Scripture as revealed to the faithful.

In his personal religious views, Darwin moved from being an orthodox Christian in the earlier parts of his life to being a skeptic or agnostic at the end of his life. Unlike Dawkins, Darwin never attacked religion or denied that there were fundamental mysteries that left an opening for religious belief.

Darwin's stance on the relationship between science and religion is illustrated in his personal life by his friendship with the Reverend J. Brodie Innes. When Darwin moved to the village of Downe in 1842, Innes was curate of the adjoining parish of Farnborough, and Innes became the vicar of Downe in 1846. Innes moved to Scotland in 1862. For over 30 years, they were close friends.

The correspondence between Darwin and Innes was published in the Annals of Science (December, 1961), as edited by Robert Stecher. This correspondence shows a remarkable friendship between two men who respected one another despite their disagreeing about almost everything. Innes was a Tory. Darwin was a Whig who supported the Liberal Party. Innes was a devout theologian of the Church of England. Darwin was not a church-goer, although he supported the Church in its parish activities. Innes read Darwin's books with great interest, and he shared Darwin's interest in natural history, but Innes was never persuaded by Darwin's evolutionary theory.

When religious leaders attacked Darwin, Innes defended him by saying, "I never saw a word of his writings which was an attack on religion. He followed his own course as a naturalist, and he leaves Moses to take care of himself." Like Darwin, Innes used the "two books" idea to separate the Book of Revelation from the Book of Nature, so that nature could be studied scientifically without necessarily denying the claims of revelation.

One particularly interesting disagreement between them was on slavery. After Innes had read the Descent of Man, he wrote to Darwin: "I have today finished reading your charming book, . . . full of the most interesting facts of natural history. I am not a convert to the theory you found on them. I hold to the old belief that a man was made a man though developed into niggers who must be made to work and better men able to make them, if those radicals did not interfere with the salutary chastisement needful, neglecting the lesson taught by the black ants slaves to the white." Darwin wrote back: "my views do not lead me to such conclusions about negroes & slavery as yours do; I consider myself a good way ahead of you, as far as this goes."

This exchange shows that Innes recognized that attacking slavery and refuting racist science was one of the main purposes of Darwin's writing in the Descent. It also shows the possible conflict between Biblical morality and Darwin's natural moral sense. As I have indicated in some of my posts, the Bible seems to endorse slavery, and that's why many of the proslavery thinkers could defend slavery as biblically grounded. But Darwin regarded slavery as contrary to natural moral principles of justice as reciprocity (see my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right).

While some Biblical believers claim that morality without Biblcial religion is impossible, this dispute over slavery shows that sometimes we must appeal to our natural moral sense to correct the teachings of the Bible.

D'Sousa's Strange Alliance of Theocons and Islamists

One sign of the present confusion in American conservatism is that the Conservative Book Club is promoting both Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel and Dinesh D'Sousa's The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.

As I have indicated in a previous post, Hirsi Ali defends the Western tradition of liberty and limited government against the oppressive theocracy of fundamentalist Islam, and many American conservatives have rightly embraced her position. But D'Sousa is trying to persuade American conservatives that they should ally themselves with fundamentalist Muslims. I agree with Andrew Sullivan's review of this book as a disturbing attempt to unite American theoconservatism and Islamic fundamentalism.

D'Sousa argues that "conservatives must move closer to the traditional Muslims" (287). His fundamental claim is that moral debate today is divided sharply between two positions. On the one side, conservatives believe in a religious morality as rooted in "an external moral order" and "external commands." On the other side, liberals believe in a secular morality of the inner self, "the morality of self-fulfillment" (18-20). The liberals' secular morality of self-fulfillment promotes moral corruption through hedonistic self-indulgence and materialism. Traditional Muslims believe that this liberal morality will destroy their religion and their way of life. And American conservatives, D'Sousa insists, should admit that they are right. America really is morally corrupt insofar as liberal morality has prevailed in American life. American conservatives should join with fundamentalist Muslims in fighting against the corruption of such secular morality.

I would say, however, that D'Sousa has created a false dilemma in assuming that our choice is between a religious morality of theocracy and a secular morality of hedonism. Darwinian conservatism respects religious belief insofar as it supports our natural moral sense. But that natural morality stands on its own--as rooted in human nature--regardless of our religious beliefs. We do not have to choose between a morality of "external commands" or a morality of "the inner self." We can recognize traditional morality as founded in our evolved human nature.

If our morality is rooted in human nature, then we can trust family life and the mediating institutions of private life to cultivate moral virtue without statist coercion. We do not need a theocratic state to coercively enforce morality.

But, of course, the Darwinian conception of natural morality would be rejected by fundamentalist Muslims who scorn Darwinian science as contrary to their Creationist conception of human origins. Many American conservatives agree with them about this.

It is not surprising, therefore, that D'Sousa's book has been endorsed by George Gilder, a conservative critic of Darwinian science who works for the Discovery Institute. In the New York Times Book Review (February 4), Gilder wrote:

"D'Souza raises the alarm that the anti-religious, sexual liberationist, anti-natalist and feminist thrust of American foreign, cultural, and free-speech global Internet policies threaten and estrange all the traditional cultures of the third world, whether Muslim or Christian, Hindu or Buddhist. Poor people cannot afford the epidemics, abortions, and divorces of Hollywood liberalism, and uphold a monotheist God as the foundation of their moral codes and worthy of respect."

"The American global cultural campaign pushes a billion non-militant Muslims to condone the jihad and thus threatens the existence of Israel and the survival of vulnerable American cities like New York."

That the "American global cultural campaign" is responsible for Islamic terrorism is only one of many absurdities to arise from this proposed alliance of theoconservatism and Islamic fundamentalism.

The Women's War

The New York Times Magazine for March 18 has an article by Sara Corbett on "The Women's War on the experience of women returning from the Iraq war. Corbett reports that many of these women have been thrown into "post-traumatic-stress-syndrome"(PTSD) by the combination of combat violence and sexual assault.

The Iraq war is a remarkable experiment in the attempt to integrate women into combat. According to Corbett, 1 in 10 of the American soldiers in Iraq are women. 160,000 women have been sent to Iraq and Afganistan, as compared with 7,500 female soldiers in the Vietnam war and 41,000 in the gulf war.

In Darwinian Conservatism, I claim that war is predominantly a male activity. My claim would be refuted if this experience of sending so many women to war showed there was no difference between men and women in combat activity. But if this article is accurate, there is some evidence that women suffer from combat in a way that men do not.

Given our evolved human nature, it should not surprise us that when young women are put in military units in combat with young men that the women are exposed to male predatory sexuality. Neither should it surprise us that women are especially traumatized by combat.

If the behavioral differences between men and women are culturally constructed and not natural, then we should expect that eventually women and men will be socialized into a gender-neutral pattern, so that men and women react to war and combat in the same way. I doubt this. The reports in this article suggest that I am right--that the evolved natural differences between men and women make it dangerous for women to be treated the same as men when it comes to war.

The Brain Imaging Fallacy in Neurolaw and Neuroeconomics

The New York Times Magazine for last Sunday (March 11)has an article on "neurolaw" by Jeffrey Rosen. Advances in the technology for brain-imaging seem to allow us to look into the brain as it's working and thus to literally read the minds of human beings as they think. "Neurolaw" is the use of such brain-imaging in the courtroom and in legal discussions of human behavior. Similarly, "neuroeconomics" is the use of the same technology to study economic behavior.

This research suffers from a fundamental fallacy, which I will call the brain-imaging fallacy. The brain-imaging fallacy is the false assumption that brain-imaging techniques explain and predict human thoughts, actions, and consciousness.

One of the most commonly used techniques is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A fMRI machine uses a magnetic field to detect increases in blood oxygenation that show increased blood flow to active areas of the brain. Computer analysis can generate colored pictures showing patterns of blood flow that presumably indicate which parts of the brain are most active at some point in time. As Rosen's article indicates, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that fMRI allows us to read the human mind. But in fact, all that fMRI shows us is patterns of blood flow in the brain. To infer that these patterns of blood flow explain thoughts, actions, and consciousness requires speculation that goes beyond the evidence of the brain imaging.

For example, Rosen refers to the famous experiments conducted by Elizabeth Phelps who used brain scans to detect unconscious racism. Individuals were shown pictures of white and black faces. When they saw unfamiliar black faces, the fMRI scans showed high activation in their amydalas, which is associated with fear and other strong emotions. But when they saw pictures of familar black faces (such as Denzel Washington or Martin Luther King, Jr.), there was no increase in amygdala activity. This was interpreted as a sign of unconscious racism. If so, this would have legal implications, because we could identify such unconscious racism as a propensity to illegal racist behavior.

But notice how speculative this is. All that the fMRI scan shows us is patterns of blood flow. Increased blood flow to the amydala can be identified as emotional arousal only if we assume that we know exactly how emotion is localized in the amydala and how exactly specific emotions are activated there. We cannot see racist emotions directly. We can only infer such emotions based on elaborate speculation about the underlying neural circuitry. Do we really understand exactly how blood flow to the amydala causes specific emotions? Aren't emotions likely to arise from complicated interactions of many elements of neural circuitry that are not well understood?

Can we be sure that this amydala activity shows racist emotions? As indicated in Rosen's article, some researchers doubt this. The amydala activity in response to seeing black faces might indicate our awareness that black people are socially disadvantaged.

Moreover, even if we could be certain that we could locate specific emotions in specific brain areas like the amygdala, we still could not be sure that this would predict actions. People might often have racist emotions without ever acting on those emotions.

It is also false to assume that we can see human consciousness in these brain scans. We all have direct access to our own consciousness. But none of us has direct access to the consciousness of others. When people come out of the fMRI machines, they are interviewed. We need their verbal reports about what they were consciously doing, because the machines cannot record consciousness. The machines can only record brain activity that might be correlated with conscious experience. But this correlation is not identity.

Rosen makes a lot of the claim that brain imaging throws doubt on the traditional belief in moral responsibility. If people's thoughts, actions, and consciousness are determined by their brains, then we might conclude that human beings are not capable of free choice.

But as I have argued in Darwinian Conservatism, brain imaging shows that human beings have the power to make choices that actually change their brain circuitry. In the book, I cite the work of Jeffrey Schwartz. Working with patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Schwartz has showed them how to use "directed mental force" to change their brains. Those with this disorder can be locked into repetitive behavior--such as washing their hands over and over again--that they cannot control because the brain's neuronal circuits for this behavior are overactive. Dr. Schwartz has helped these people by training them to concentrate their minds to divert their attention away from the obsessive-compulsive behavior. So when they feel compelled to wash their hands, for example, they might concentrate on an alternative behavior such as tending the flowers in their garden. As this mental exercise becomes habitual, it becomes easier to resist their obsessive-compulsive behavior. Using brain-imaging, Dr. Schwartz has discovered that this therapy actually changes the neuronal activity of the brain so that the activity of the frontal cortex exerts a mental force to activate one circuit rather than another. So it seems that the mind that emerges from the human brain can change the brain itself. This emergent power of the brain for mental attention is the natural ground for human freedom and moral responsibility. Here we see the emergent evolution of the human soul in the human brain.

Conservative Infidel--Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel is a fascinating autobiography that touches on many of the issues that I have taken up in defending Darwinian conservatism. (I have not yet read her other book--The Caged Virgin.)

I agree with her attack on the moral relativism of multiculturalism and her moral defense of individual liberty and limited government against the theocratic tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism. Darwinian conservatism would show how her defense of liberty can be justified as conforming to the natural desires of a universal human nature as shaped by evolutionary history.

But I disagree with her claim that fundamentalist Islam is the only true version of Islam. In taking such a position, she actually agrees with the fundamentalist Islamists that their reading of the Quran is the only correct reading, which is a big mistake.

In this post, I continue with some of the points that I made last year in another post on "Do the Bible and the Koran Support Theocracy?".

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia. She was raised as a Muslim, living in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. As a child, her genitals were mutilated by family members practicing "female circumcision" as a way of ensuring female virginity by excising the clitoris and sewing up the vagina. In 1992, she fled to Holland as she ran away from a forced marriage to a cousin who was a Somali Canadian. Working as an interpreter in Holland, she saw that many Muslim women in Holland were being beaten--and some even killed--by their male relatives who believed that Islam dictated the submission of women as part of an Islamic tradition of male domination and honor. She studied political science and then went to work for the Labor Party in Holland. She became famous as a campaigner for the human rights of Muslim women. She switched to the "People's Party for Freedom and Democracy"--VVD for the Dutch: Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie--which is a "conservative liberal" party in the tradition of classical liberalism that favors free markets and individual liberty. She was elected as a Member of the Dutch Parliament. She worked with Theo van Gogh to produce a short film--Submission--that dramatized the oppression of Muslim women as sanctioned by the teachings of the Quran. This brought death threats from anry Islamic fundamentalists. In 2004, van Gogh was brutally murdered on a street in Amsterdam by a Muslim fanatic, which shocked not only the Dutch, but people across Europe, who had assumed that such violence to suppress free speech was impossible in modern Europe. Hirsi Ali had to be surrounded by body guards. Eventually, she left Parliament, and then left Holland in 2006 to join the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank in Washington, D.C. She calls herself an "infidel," because she has rejected Islam and become an atheist. But as a Fellow at AEI, she might be called a "conservative infidel."

In Darwinian Natural Right, I have a long section on female genital mutilation (pp. 149-160). I use this to illustrate the dangers of multicultural relativism. Multiculturalists argue that since all moral standards are culturally constructed, there is no universal standard for judging cultural traditions as better or worse, good or bad. So if female circumcism is a deeply rooted cultural tradition in some social groups, we cannot properly condemn it without showing the "cultural imperialism" of imposing Western cultural values on a non-Western culture. Against this, I argue that female genital mutilation can be rightly condemned as frustrating the natural desires of the women who suffer from this practice. These natural desires are universal insofar as they manifest a universal human nature. If the good is the desirable, then we can condemn cultural practices that unreasonably frustrate our natural desires.

Hirsi Ali confirms much of what I say about female circumcism being based on false beliefs that impose unnecessary suffering on women who have had this done to them (see, for example, Infidel, pp. 31-34, 112-13, 140). But she seems less inclined than I am to rely on gradual reforms. She notes that the Quran does not mandate female circumcism, and that most Muslims do not circumcise their daughters. To me, this suggests that a reform campaign could stress that this practice is not really dictated by Islam. In fact, Hirsi Ali's father opposed the practice as barbaric and was shocked when he discovered that her grandmother had done this to her. And yet, Hirsi Ali does not see much room for gradual reform, because she is convinced that all of Islam is a brutal denial of human liberty and happiness, particularly the liberty and happiness of women.

Hirsi Ali's father argued that the Quran did not support Islamic fundamentalism, because the Quran could be interpreted as compatible with democratic liberty. But she disagreed, because she had been persuaded by the fundamentalist Muslims--like the Muslim Brotherhood--that the Quran cannot be properly interpreted this way (see pp. 179, 347-48). She is convinced that Islam in its "purest form" as dictated by the actual words of the Quran requires the sort of theocratic tyranny and denial of individual liberty sought by fundamentalist Islam as practiced in countries like Saudi Arabia and promoted by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. This then leads her to the conclusion that to embrace the libertarian principles of the European Enlightenment, which denies theocratic tyranny by promoting religious liberty and toleration, she had to totally reject Islam and become an atheist.

But the Quran is more ambiguous on these matters than she is willing to admit. It declares that "there is no compulsion in religion" (2:256). And some Muslims see this as Quranic authority for religious liberty and toleration. Some argue for "minding one's own business," and they cite the Quranic verse that says: "O you who believe! Guard your own souls: If you follow right guidance, no hurt can come to you from those who stray" (5:108).

The ambiguity of the Quran on whether belief can be coerced by law is similar to the ambiguity of the Bible. A big part of the Enlightenment argument for toleration and religious liberty turned on interpretations of the Bible. Although much of the Old Testament seems theocratic, the New Testament can be read as favorable to religious liberty. The Christians of the New Testament do not use government to enforce their Christian beliefs. Proponents of religious toleration could cite the New Testament as supporting their position, and this was crucial for promoting toleration as compatible with Biblical religion.

By contrast, Hirsi Ali leaves her reader with the impression that the Enlightenment defense of toleration requires atheism. One reason for this is that she seems to identify the Enlightenment with the French Enlightenment and its scorn for religious belief. But this ignores the British and American Enlightenments, which were more favorable to religious belief. (Gertrude Himmelfarb has defended this analysis of the Enlighenment in The Roads to Modernity.)

As Hirsi Ali indicates, the crucial issue is whether morality is separable from religious belief. Fundamentalist Islamists--like fundamentalist Christians--assume that without religious belief, there can be so solid morality. Consequently, the moral order of any society requires the enforcement of religious belief, which then tends to support theocratic tyranny. But if there is a natural moral sense rooted in human nature, then we can judge good and bad without necessarily requiring any specific religious doctrines. In the British and American Enlightenments, it was generally assumed that this natural moral sense would be shared by all healthy religious traditions. We could allow for religious liberty and thus religious multiplicity with the confidence that the natural moral sense would prevail even without agreement on religious doctrines.

Darwin's biological account of the moral sense as a product of natural evolution supports this position. Although some religious believers scorn this Darwinian morality as atheistic, there is nothing in the Darwinian argument that dictates atheism. Saying that morality is part of "Nature's Law" leaves open the possibility that behind this Nature is "Nature's God."

According to Hirsi Ali, "Darwin said creation stories were a fairy tale" (p. 239). But that's not quite right. Darwin certainly denied the theory of "special creation" of each species. But he left open the possibility that the original laws of the universe were impressed on matter by the Creator (as he suggested at the end of The Origin of Species).

Hirsi Ali says that "Spinoza . . . was the first modern European to state clearly that the world is not ordained by a separate God. Nature created itself, Spinoza said" (p. 282).

Perhaps so. But this points to the problem of ultimate explanations. If we ask why nature exists and exists with the kind of order that it has, the naturalist might say that nature is just a brute fact that is self-contained and self-explanatory. That's just the way it is! But such an assumption that "Nature created itself" cannot be proven, because such an assumption is the starting point of any proof. And yet the transcendentalist might appeal to the Divine Creator as the uncaused cause of Nature as an alternative starting point. The choice between these two stances on First Causes cannot be resolved by pure reason alone. And this leaves room for religious faith.

So I generally agree with Hirsi Ali that there is a universal human nature that allows us to judge cultural traditions as better or worse in conforming to that human nature, and therefore that multicultural relativism is wrong. I also agree with her that this gives us a natural ground for morality that does not absolutely depend on religious belief.

But I do not agree with her that this leads us to atheism. Rather than a dogmatic atheism, we might better be left with a skeptical openness to fundamental mysteries that allows for religious faith even as it allows us to condemn theocratic tyranny. Darwinian conservatism neither affirms nor denies the theological truth of religious belief. But it does respect the practical truth of religious traditions that foster social cooperation and healthy morality.

Darwin's God

The New York Times Magazine for March 4th has an article on "Darwin's God", which surveys the current debate over Darwinian explanations for religious belief. This debate supports my claim that the desire for religious understanding is part of the evolved nature of human beings.

It is said that Darwinian scientists studying the evolution of religion "agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain."

The "byproduct theorists"--like Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer--argue that while religious belief has never served any adaptive purpose--it has never enhanced survival and reproduction--it has arisen as an accidental consequence of mental propensities that were adaptive in human evolutionary history. For example, it was probably adaptive for human ancestors to have an evolved capacity for causal reasoning--to be able to explain events in the world through cause-and-effect logic, because this would have allowed them to be more successful in the natural world. But then when they faced unusual or mysterious events, they might have looked for mysterious superpowers to explain these events, and thus they would have found religious belief comforting.

Moreover, it was probably adaptive for human ancestors to detect intentional agents (animals and other human beings) and to be able to imagine what other people were thinking. Such natural tendencies to see the world as governed by intentional agents and thinking beings might then have led human beings to assume the existence of disembodied agents or minds as spiritual beings that intervene in the world.

On the other side of this debate, the adaptationists--like David Sloan Wilson--would say that religious belief was not just a side effect of mental adaptations but was itself an evolutionary adaptation. Wilson would say that religious belief helps to bind believers together into cooperative groups that outcompete groups that are not so tightly bound together. Religious beliefs and rituals are commitment devices by which religious people show that they can be trusted to cooperate with their fellow believers. Such group selection enhances the Darwinian fitness of religious groups.

In arguing for "Darwinian conservatism," I would say that there is some truth in both positions. My list of 20 natural desires rooted in evolved human nature includes the natural desire for religious understanding. Human beings generally desire to understand the world through religion or spirituality. Religious doctrines about human relationships with divine powers or spiritual feelings of self-transcending union with the universe satisfy this longing to make sense of things. Driven to fear and despair by their experience of pain and death, human beings impagine themselves surrounded by mysterious forces that determine their fate. Driven to hope and pride by their feeling of spiritual exaltation, human biengs image that their existence can be redeemed by ecstatic union with the divine.

Religious understanding satisfies our natural desire to make sense of things, to explain the order of the universe in which so much seems mysterious to us. Ultimately, we are driven to ask about the first causes of everything, and such questions have no final answer except by invoking some transcendent causal order of things.

Religious understanding also serves to unite us into a community of believers who can trust one another to be cooperative, even when this requires individual sacrifice for the good of the group. That's why conservatives tend to see religion as necessary for social order. Regardless of what one thinks about the theological claims of religious belief, religion can have a practical benefit in holding believers together in cooperative communities.

That's why even skeptical conservatives (like Friedrich Hayek) paid tribute to traditional religion as an evolved, spontaneous order that supports social cooperation.

Darwinian science sustains this conservative understanding of religion by showing how religion could have evolved as part of human nature to satisfy our natural desires for understanding and cooperation.

Hayek and Fusionism

The TCS Daily has an essay by Edward Feser on "Hayek and Fusionism". I have written some posts on Hayek. And I agree with Feser that Hayek's political thought offers the best ground for "fusionism"--the understanding of conservatism as combining traditionalism and libertarianism. But I would also argue that Darwinian conservatism offers the best way to support this shared commitment to individual liberty and traditional morality that constitutes fusionist conservatism.

Like Feser, I think it's significant that Hayek identified himself as a Burkean Whig, which suggests a union of the classical liberalism that began with the Whigs and the traditional conservatism that began with Burke.

I also agree with Feser in seeing this Hayekian union of liberty and tradition as rooted in Hayek's view of human knowledge as radically limited. Because human knowledge is limited, we cannot rely on central planning to secure either economic order or moral order. Free markets and moral traditions embody the dispersed knowledge and experience of millions of individuals over time in a way that is beyond the rational design of any economic planner or moral innovator.

Feser rightly points to Hayek's fundamental claim that economic and moral order arises from the working out of "the contingent facts of biological and cultural evolution." But Feser objects to Hayek's evolutionary account of order as denying the view "that traditional morality rests on a set of objective metaphysical truths knowable through reason."

As I have argued in previous posts, I don't see that conservatism requires a belief in eternal, cosmic purposes as sustaining economic and moral order. We can defend economic liberty and traditional morality as conforming to our evolved human nature. Whether that evolved human nature manifests the intelligent design of "Nature's God" is an open question that points to a fundamental mystery. Religious conservatives will see that evolved order of nature as manifesting a cosmic teleology of transcendent purposefulness. But skeptical conservatives like Hayek will be content to affirm that "life has no purpose but itself."

Chimpanzee Political Science

In Darwinian Conservatism (pp. 79-84), I write about the "Darwinian politics of chimpanzees and human beings," particularly as it helps us to understand dominance hierarchies among primates and the need for a "balance of power" to avoid despotic dominance.

Most people--and certainly most political scientists--would ridicule the idea that we can understand anything important about human politics from comparing the behavior of human beings and chimps. Most political scientists assume that human beings are so radically unique in their political behavior that comparisons with other primates is fruitless, if not downright silly. But I believe there are important commonalities across the primate species in their propensities to dominance and deference, so that we learn something about the biological roots of politics by seeing human status hierarchies as manifesting patterns shared with other primates.

I would even go so far as to assert that if political science ever becomes a science, it will be a Darwinian science of political animals. Such a political science would be the scientific study of political life across all the species that show political behavior, and especially those primate species most closely related to human beings.

As I argue in Chapter 3 of Darwinian Natural Right, this conception of political science as the study of all political animals--nonhuman as well as human--began with Aristotle. According to Aristotle, some animals are solitary and others gregarious. Of the gregarious animals, some are political. Some of the political animals have leaders, but others do not. The distinguishing characteristic of the political animals is that they cooperate for some common work or function. Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense.

Aristotle believes human beings are more political, however, than these animals because of the uniquely human capacity for language. Other animals can share their perceptions of pleasure and pain. But human beings can use speech to share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good. Human beings are the most political animals, it seems, because through speech human beings cooperate for common ends in ways that are more complex, more flexible, and more extensive that is possible for other animals. Through speech human beings can deliberate about the "common advantage" as the criterion of justice (Rhetoric, 1362a15-63b5). A just political community can be judged to be one that sereves the common advantage of all its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private advantage of its ruling group (Nicomachean Ethics, 1160a13-14; Politics, 1279a17-19).

Darwinian biology and the study of primate social systems essentially confirm Aristotle's insights. Although Aristotle did not identify chimpanzees as political animals, he did recognize that the apes were closely related to human beings, because the apes "share in the nature of both man and the quadrupeds," and he supported this with extensive anatomical comparisons of monkeys, apes, and human beings in his biological works.

Despite the common assumption that dominance structures among nonhuman animals are determined purely by physical combat and the rule of the stronger over the weaker, chimpanzees show a primate tendency towards forming dominance structures cooperatively and peacefully rather than through violent competition. Although physical strength is important, the dominance of an alpha male depends on forming coalitions with other adult males and winning the support of the females and the children. (This is made clear in the writings of Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall.)

The tendency to form face-to-face groups organized around a structure of dominance and deference is evident across the primate species, including human beings. A good survey of the evidence for this is Allan Mazur's book Biosociology of Dominance and Deference (2005). But even as he shows the commonality of human beings and other primates in their dominance hierarchies, Mazur also shows the uniqueness of human beings in their capacity for language.

When human beings acquired the capacity for language about 200,000 years ago--perhaps because of the evolution of a few genes supporting neural mechanisms for speech--they then had a capacity for complex cultural learning far surpassing the other primates. Then, with the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, the warmer climate provided the conditions for the development of agriculture--with domestication of plants and animals. This allowed for a settled urban existence rather than the unsettled, hunting-gathering way of life of the earliest human ancestors. Human beings could then live in large civizations with millions of people, and they could use language to elaborate cultural rules of formal organization and socioeconomic stratification. Such formal and socioeconomic hierarchies are not found among nonhuman primates.

But even in such civilizations, human beings still show the same face-to-face dominance hierarchies that they share with other primates. The functioning of large organizations depends upon the behavior of small groups within the organization that structure themselves through face-to-face interaction.

Although the formal, bureaucratic structure of government transcends anything found among nonhuman primates, political rivalry as the competition for control of the government shows the same pattern of dominance contests that human beings share with other primates. Sometimes that rivalry for dominance is violent--as in wars, revolutions, and assasinations. But in a stable political community, most of the political rivalry for power can be channelled peacefully through institutional procedures such as elections and debate.

The comparative study of chimpanzee and human politics should show us that in every community there will be a few people with a strong dominance drive that can become despotic if their ambition is not checked by the ambition of others. That's why I defend balanced and limited government as a fundamental principle of "Darwinian conservatism."

The fundamental insight of conservative constitutionalism is that because power-seeking is rooted in human nature, the power of one person or group can only be controlled by the power of another. Conservatives reject the principle of sovereignty--the idea that in any social order there must be some one supreme power. Instead, conservatives defend the principle of countervailance--the idea that social order can arise from a network of independent entities that check and balance one another. To secure liberty, it is not enough that the people be sovereign, because any power that is sovereign will be abused. That's the lesson of the French Revolution, which brought about the popular election of Napoleon as Imperial Emperor. Liberty requires a system of limited government based on countervailing powers.

This principle of balance is manifested in chimpanzee groups in which the alpha male is checked by the power of others. But human beings can use language to elaborate this principle of balance as a constitutional regime that allows the ambitious few to fill the highest offices while protecting the multitude of people from being exploited by those ruling few. And thus, as Aristotle suggested, human beings can devise constituional arrangements for promoting the common good of all rather than just the private interests of the few.

Lectures for Philadelphia Society and AEI

On April 28, I will be lecturing at the national meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Philadelphia. My lecture will be entitled "Darwinian Conservatism as the New Fusionism." I will elaborate some points I have made on this blog about how Darwinian conservatism could support a fusion of libertarian and traditionalist principles in conservative thought. John West will be on the same program to debate me.

On May 3, West and I will continue our debate at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. On the side of anti-Darwinism, West will be joined by George Gilder. On the side of defending Darwinism, I will be joined by John Derbyshire.

Incest and Human Kin Detection

Previously, I have written a post on the incest taboo, which can be found
here. My argument is that the moral abhorrence aroused by incest is one of the clearest examples of a moral judgment that can be explained as rooted in human evolutionary nature. We are naturally inclined to abhor sex with those with whom we have been raised, and this natural propensity was probably shaped in evolutionary history as a mechanism to avoid the deleterious effects of inbreeding. Edward Westermarck elaborated this Darwinian account of the incest taboo, and a wide range of evidence supports it.

Now we have an article in the February 15th issue of the British science journal Nature that adds more evidence and reasoning in favor of the Westermarck hypothesis. The article is Debra Lieberman, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides, "The Architecture of Human Kin Selection." The abstract of the article can be found here.

At the University of California at Santa Barbara, Debra Lieberman conducted studies of over 600 students, measuring their reactions to sibling incest and sibling altruism. (I first met Debra in 1998 in Helsinki, Finland, at a conference on Westermarck; and I have been following her work ever since.) From these studies, she concludes that human beings have an evolved system for detecting genetic relatedness. Older children identify younger children as their siblings if the younger children have been associated with their mother from birth. Younger children identify older children as their siblings if they have lived together over a long time. Lieberman discovered that these kin detection cues were correlated with feeling disgust at sibling incest and feeling inclined to give altruistic help to siblings.

An interesting finding is that even when the students believed that their siblings were step-siblings or adoptive-siblings, they still felt a strong repugnance towards sibling incest and a strong propensity towards altruistic behavior with their siblings.

The assumption is that the human brain is endowed with a kin recognition mechanism that works through these two cues--association with one's mother in infancy and living together in childhood--to prompt the moral emotions of the incest taboo and sibling altruism.

There remain many gaps in this research. We don't know exactly the genetic basis for this or the precise neural mechanisms for it. But still this looks like a scientifically plausible account of how a natural moral judgment that is universal to all human societies has been shaped by our evolved human nature.

The Islamic Creationist Attack on Darwinism

For some years now, Islamic creationists have been attacking Darwinian science as atheistic and immoral. One of the leaders in this movement is the Turkish author Harun Yahya. His website can be found here.
Like the Discovery Institute historian Richard Weikart, this Islamic creationist insists on the connection "from Darwin to Hitler." Beyond that, he even blames Darwinism for terrorism, because he claims that this follows from Darwin's "survival of the fittest" thought. Islam is a religion of peace, he argues, but Islam has been distorted as promoting terrorism by people shaped by Darwinian ideas.

Recently, there has been a controversy in France over the distribution of Harun Yahya's writings in French schools. A story on this can be found here.

This fanatical fear of Darwinian science as contrary to a literal reading of both the Bible and the Koran is misguided, but it seems to have a broad popular appeal to many Muslims as well as Christians.

Darwin, Lincoln, and Slavery

At this time of the year, we celebrate the remarkable coincidence of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin being born on the same day--February 12, 1809. Last year, I wrote a post on their intellectual similarities, which can be found here.

As I said then, there are at least five points of similarity between Darwin and Lincoln. (1) Both believed in a universe governed by natural causes. (2) Both were accused of denying the Biblical doctrine of Creation. (3) Both spoke of God as First Cause. (4) Both appealed to the Bible as a source of moral teaching, even as they also appealed to a natural moral sense independent of Biblical religion. (5) And both abhorred slavery as immoral.

From his voyage on the "Beagle," Darwin was horrified by the brutal treatment of slaves in South America, and this reinforced an abolitionist disposition that ran through his family.

Proslavery fanatics in the American South and elsewhere found support for slavery in the Bible and in science. The argument for scientific racism rested on the claim that the human races were actually separate species, and that the black species was naturally inferior to the white species. In March of 1861, Alexander Stephens, the new vice-president of the Confederate States of America, insisted that Thomas Jefferson's belief in natural equality had been refuted by modern science. "Our new government," he declared, "is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not the equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition."

Against this "polygenist" claim of the scientific racists that the human races were separate species, Darwin defended the "monogenist" position that the races are only varieties or sub-species of the same race. This meant that he had to explain the evolution of racial differences. And he tried to do this by developing his idea of "sexual selection": just as human plant and animal breeders can select for desirable traits, animals act as self-breeders in selecting mates. So the observable differences in the human races could be the product of aesthetic differences in human racial populations.

The importance that Darwin gave to sexual selection is indicated by the fact that over half of The Descent of Man is devoted to sexual selection. In the Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Descent of Man, James Moore and Adrian Desmond argue that Darwin's primary motivation for writing the whole book was to attack slavery and racist science.

The Rev. John Brodie Innes--Darwin's vicar--saw this when he first read Darwin's book. He wrote to Darwin: "I hold to the old belief that a man was made a man though developed into niggers who must be made to work and better men able to make them, if those radicals did not interfere with the salutary chastisement needful, neglecting the lesson taught by the black ant slaves to the white." To which Darwin replied: "my views do not lead me to such conclusions about negroes & slavery as yours do: I consider myself a good way ahead of you, as far as this goes."

Innes' reference to ant slavery is revealing. In my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right, I argue that considering the similarities and differences between ant slavery and human slavery illuminates the biological nature of slavery. The similarities suggest that in both cases slavery arises as a natural form of social parasitism in which slavemakers exploit their slaves through coercion and manipulation. But the differences between ant slavery and human slavery suggest that human beings are naturally inclined to detect and resist exploitation through slavery.

Among human beings, the coercion of slaves by masters cannot be based on a natural complementarity of desires. The master's desire to exploit the slave clashes with the slave's desire to be free from exploitation.

Darwin and Lincoln saw this as showing that slavery is contrary to human nature and thus contrary to natural right.

Politics, Spiritedness, and Utopian Anarchy

Kent Guida has written a good comment on my post about "Herbert Spencer's Utopian Anarchism." I suggested that Spencer and Murray Rothbard were similar in their utopian vision of anarchy as a stateless society without political rule. Against such utopian anarchism, Darwinian conservatism would assume that political rule cannot be abolished because it expresses the evolved nature of human beings as political animals. David Gordon commented that Rothbard was not a utopian in the same way as Spencer. But Guida observed that there was a kind of "end-of-history" utopianism in Rothbard insofar as he foresaw the disappearance of the thumos--male assertiveness or spiritedness--that drives political ambition and the love of glory.

Darwin rightly saw that the tribal conflict in human evolutionary history had shaped the political nature of the human animal. Human beings naturally live in social systems that require (at least occasionally) central coordination. In primitive human communities, such as foraging bands, this centralized coordination of society is informal and episodic. In civilized human communities, such as bureaucratic states, this centralized coordination is formal and enduring.

Darwin argued that the history of tribal group selection as well as male competition for females created a male propensity to assertiveness and spiritedness that would manifest itself as the pursuit of military glory and political leadership.

Rothbard was right to see that primitive human communities--like the ancient tribes of Ireland--could organize their social lives without centralized states. But he was wrong to infer from this that those primitive communities had no political rule at all. Even in such primitive tribal groups, men competed for dominant positions as chiefs and war leaders.

Darwinian conservatism supports the principles of limited government as necessary for checking and structuring male political rivalry. But to assume that political rivalry could be abolished in an anarchic society is utopian because it denies the desire for dominance and distinction as rooted in evolved human nature.

Some of these points have come up in previous posts, particularly in my response to Harvey Mansfield's Manliness, which can be found here.

John West's Final Response

John West has written his final response to me, which can be found here.

He hasn't added anything that can't be found in his book. But I would like to make a few points.

I have said that blaming Darwin for the eugenics programs of the Social Darwinists is like claiming that "Christianity was responsible for Hitler's anti-Semitism because Martin Luther's anti-Semitism was often cited by the Nazis." West's response is to say that "The Luther comparison is inapt. Martin Luther was not the founder of Christianity, and so any claims he may have made are not necessarily authoritative interpretations of the Christian tradition. But Charles Darwin was most certainly the founder of his own theory." But that's exactly my point. Just as so-called Christians have distorted the teachings of Jesus, so have so-called Darwinians distorted the teachings of Darwin.

Now, of course, West would say that these are not distortions because Darwin provided "a logical rationale for eugenics." But to support this, West has to selectively quote Darwin. He quotes Darwin's remark about how allowing the weak members of society to breed must be "highly injurious to the race of man." Yet he does not quote the immediately following passage where Darwin says that supporting the helpless expresses sympathy, which is "the noblest part of our nature."

Nor does West acknowledge Richard Weikart's admission that the title of his book--From Darwin to Hitler--is inaccurate, because there is no direct connection "from Darwin to Hitler." Of course, Hitler and others were able to use vaguely Darwinian language to rhetorically justify their morally abhorrent policies, just as Luther was able to quote from the New Testament to justify his anti-Semitism. But in both cases, we can see that such rhetoric is deceptive.

Herbert Spencer's Utopian Anarchism

Having just participated in a Liberty Fund conference on Herbert Spencer, I am prompted to comment on how Spencer's evolutionary ethics and politics compares with Darwinian conservatism.

One of the most common complaints about my conception of Darwinian conservatism is that it's only a restatement of Spencer's social Darwinism, which has been generally discredited as morally repugnant.

Spencer's classical liberalism contributes to libertarian conservatism through his defense of the principle of equal liberty--that each individual is entitled to the fullest liberty compatible with the same liberty for every other individual. Spencer supports that principle as the fulfillment of human evolutionary nature. And so, Spencer's evolutionary liberty looks a lot like the Darwinian conservatism that I have proposed.

The crucial difference from Darwinian conservatism, however, is that Spencer is a utopian anarchist, because he assumes that human nature is perfectible and that the evolutionary changes in human nature will inevitably bring about an anarchistic society with perpetual peace where human beings can cooperate without any need for government. By contrast, my Darwinian conservatism assumes that the evolutionary nature of human beings is imperfectible in ways that dictate limited government to secure individual liberty.

Spencer's evolutionary theory is orthogenetic or teleological in that he assumes that evolutionary history is the unfolding of a cosmic pattern of progress that is inevitable. This teleological evolutionary history moves through four stages. In the first stage, human beings lived as savage foragers in anarchic societies without government. In the second stage, the predatory warfare of human beings drove them into militant statism, in which order was based upon "status." Most recently, human beings have evolved into a third stage of industrial statism, in which order is based on "contract" or voluntary association. In modern free market societies, individuals are largely free to associate with one another on the basis of voluntary exchange. To secure the conditions for such freedom, government is needed to secure domestic peace, enforce contracts, and defend society against external threats. The need for military defense requires severe restrictions on individual liberty.

Eventually, human beings will become so cooperative that they will enter a state of perfect and permanent peace. And without the threat of war, they can enter the final stage of evolutionary history--a civilized anarchy in which human beings can organize their societies spontaneously without government.

Spencer's naive utopianism turns on his assumption that human nature can be radically transformed by the conditions of evolution so that human beings become perfect in their cooperative sociality. As he says in The Study of Society (chap. 14), "human nature will slowly adapt itself" to the conditions of harmonious life."

A Darwinian conception of evolution would agree that human nature has changed in evolutionary time, but this change has occurred very "slowly." So the present nature of human beings will be stable for tens of thousands of years. By contrast, Spencer's Lamarckian understanding of evolution presumes that human nature can change quickly and radically in response to changing social conditions. In this respect, Spencer is close to the utopian historicism of Marx. And like Marx, he forsees an evolutionary transformation of the human condition with the achievement of a stateless society.

Some libertarians--like Murrary Rothbard--have shown a similar utopianism in arguing for anarchy and the complete abolition of the state.

Darwinian conservatism assumes a realist conception of human nature in which government will always be required to restrain human imperfection. But that very imperfection dictates a limited government based on the principle that power corrupts and therefore we need a government of limited and balanced powers to minimize the dangers of absolute power.

John West's Response, Part 3

My replies to John West's book Darwin's Conservatives can be found here and here. West has been writing responses to my comments. I have commented on Parts 1 and 2 of his responses. Now, he has written Part 3, which can be found here.

West does not introduce anything new in this response. I would suggest that readers look back at my replies, as well as my book, to see the points in dispute.

I would draw your attention to West's admission that proponents of ID cannot satisfy the high standards of proof that they apply to Darwinian science. ID cannot offer any testable explanations for exactly how, when, and where the intelligent designer created "irreducibly complex" mechanisms of life.

Proponents of ID do not have to do this, West says, because it is enough for them to show that "we have overwelming evidence from the natural and social worlds that intelligent causes are routinely capable of creating structures that exhibit the complex and purposeful arrangement of parts." This sentence illustrates the fallacy of equivocation that I identified in the chapter on intelligent design in my book. The equivocation is using the term "intelligent design" without specifying whether the "intelligent design" is natural or supernatural. It is true that we have overwelming evidence for human beings acting as natural intelligent causes that are routinely capable of purposeful designs. But it is not true that we have overwelming evidence for supernatural intelligent causes that routinely create purposeful designs. By using the term "intelligent design" without distinguishing between natural or human intelligent design and supernatural or divine intelligent design, the proponents of ID employ equivocal language to make it look as though inferring supernatural causality in the natural world were a matter of "routine" experience, when in fact, of course, it is not.

John West's Response, Parts 1-2

My previous replies to John West's book Darwin's Conservatives can be found here and here. West is now writing a response in four parts. The first two parts can be found here and here. I will comment now on these first two parts. I will comment on the second two parts as soon as they appear.

One remarkable feature of this continuing debate with West is that although we disagree strongly with one another, we can discuss our disagreements in a civil and reasonable way. This is rarely the case in the debates over Darwinism and intelligent design, because those on both sides of this debate are often so emotionally aroused that they cannot speak to one another in a tone of mutual respect and rational inquiry. I am grateful to John for his willingness to engage in a civil discussion about issues that deserve serious thought.

One of the characteristics of a civil discussion is that the participants often discover important grounds of agreement. That is the case here. As West indicates, he agrees with me that evolutionary explanations are persuasive in many respects. He also agrees with me that there are biological grounds for certain traits of human nature, which would support "biological conservatism," although he doubts that Darwinism provides a good explanation for such biological traits. And, finally, he agrees with me that Biblical religion is not necessary for morality, because there is a natural moral sense or natural law that can be known "through reason and conscience" without any necessity for Biblical revelation.

These points of agreement are not as clear in his book as they are in his blog posts. In his book, he refers to "traditional Judeo-Christian morality" (21) and the Biblical teaching "that human beings are created as the result of God's specific plan" (143), as if morality would not be possible without Biblical revelation. But his blog posts now make it clear that he believes in a natural moral law rooted in human nature that does not require religious belief. Although religious belief can often confirm or reinforce our natural moral sense, our natural morality stands on its own natural ground, even without religious belief.

This would seem to be very close to Darwin's position in The Descent of Man: "Ultimately, our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment--originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit." Moreover, Darwin suggested, "any animal whatever, endowed with well marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man."

But it is unclear to me whether West would fully embrace this Darwinian account of the natural moral sense, because he appeals to the "natural law/natural justice tradition" as if it were different from Darwin's "moral sense or conscience." He suggests that Darwinian morality cannot support "permanent moral standards." But he never explains exactly what he means by these "permanent moral standards," or how they differ from a moral sense rooted in human biological nature.

I would say that there are "permanent moral standards" insofar as there is an enduring human nature that supports morality as a condition for the fullest satisfaction or flourishing of that human nature. So, for example, marriage and family life are "permanent moral standards" insofar as they satisfy the natural human desires for sexual mating, parental care, and conjugal bonding.

I cannot be sure whether West would accept this or not. He seems to believe that the "permanent moral standards" are somehow rooted in human nature in such a way that they can be known naturally without any need for religious belief. He also agrees with me, however, that all universal moral rules require the variability that comes from practical judgment. "Deciding how to apply an abstract principle of morality to any particular situation can be difficult and requires the ability to engage in prudential reasoning."

Consider three of the moral issues that come up in our exchange--polygamy, slavery, and infanticide. A Darwinian account of morality woud suggest that although polygamy is common in human history, it is less satisfactory that monogamy, because of the disruptions that arise from the sexual conflicts of the co-wives. We can see this without any religious belief that monogamy has been divinely commanded. Would West agree?

Darwin condemned slavery as a violation of our natural moral sense, because it violates our natural desire for justice as reciprocity. The Bible allows for slavery. But West argues that this is only a concession to sin, and that in fact the Biblical teaching that all human beings were created equally in God's image implicitly condemns slavery as immoral. And yet, if West believes in a natural moral law that does not require religious belief, then he believes that the immorality of slavery arises from its being contrary to human nature, regardless of any religious teaching. So would West agree that slavery violates our natural moral sense?

The natural desire for parental care inclines human beings to feel deep attachments to their children. In difficult circumstances, however, parents have sometimes killed their infants. Our concern for protecting helpless offspring and our judgment that in modern societies there is no need to kill deformed newborns leads us to condemn infanticide as a crime. How would West account for this? He speaks of "the intrinsic value of handicapped infants or adults." I would explain this as an expression of our moral sympathy and our moral reasoning about the conditions for preserving respect for human life. Would West have a different explanation?

On the matter of explaining the origin of the mind, West rejects my claim that the mind evolves as an emergent product of the brain. But what is his explanation? And how can he explain this as a purely natural process of natural law that does not depend on religious belief?

On the matter of "free will," I repeat my claim that if "free will" means "uncaused cause," then human beings do not have "free will," because human beings are not self-subsistent beings that create from nothing. But if "free will" means only acting to satisfy our natural desires through our deliberate choices, then we are free in that sense. West does not explain whether he agrees with this or not.

John West's Response

In his book Darwin's Conservatives, John West of the Discovery Institute has criticized my arguments for Darwinian conservatism. In my postings of November 12 and 22, I replied to his book. Now he has begun a series of postings with his response, the first of which can be found here. I will be writing my response soon.

This is a warm-up for a session in April at the meeting of the Philadelphia Society where John and I will debate the relationship between conservatism and science.

A Reply to Denyse O'Leary

Denyse O'Leary shares a blog on "intelligent design" with Bill Dembski. Recently, she wrote a post criticizing some of my arguments, which can be found here.

It is hard to respond to her comments because she tries so hard to be humorous that I'm not sure that she's serious about anything she says. But here goes . . .

"Family values conservatives" cannot accept Darwinian conservatism, she claims, because they must reject the reductionisitic materialism of Darwinism. "They believe that mind comes first and produces matter. Darwin and his followers believe that matter comes first and produces mind."

In Chapter 8 of Darwinian Conservatism, I have rejected both reductionism and dualism, while arguing for a Darwinian account of the soul or mind as an emergent product of the brain. Some religious conservatives object to this idea of the soul as the emergent capacity of the brain, because they think that the spiritual freedom and dignity of the human soul as the image of God requires that the soul be immaterial and separable from the body. But I have suggested that Biblical religion points to an emergent unity of body and mind in the Biblical teaching that immortality requires a resurrection of the body to sustain the soul (I Corinthians 15).

O'Leary rejects this by claiming that orthodox Christians must believe that the immortal soul is utterly free from the body. She cites Revelation 6:9, but she ignores the fact that the souls referred to in that passage are destined to come back to life through the resurrection of their bodies (Revelation 20:4-6).

In assuming that the perfection of the soul requires a complete separation from the body, O'Leary implicitly adopts the Gnostic heresy that denied the resurrection of the body. This heresy was rejected by orthodox Christians like Augustine (City of God, bk. 22, chaps. 15-16, 25) and Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, suppl., qu. 75, a. 1; qu. 81, a. 1). The resurrection of the body of Jesus and the promise of the resurrection of the believers affirm the goodness in the unity of body and mind. As Aquinas indicated, "the soul is united to the body as form to matter."

My point, again, is that the Biblical teaching of resurrection is compatible with a conception of the soul/mind as emergent from the body/brain. O'Leary's Cartesian dualism of mind and body rejects this tradition of Biblical thought.

O'Leary also repeats the common claim that Darwinian science supports all of the immoral policies associated with "social Darwinism." My response can be found in Chapter 9 of Darwinian Conservatism and in various posts on this blog. To associate Darwinian science with Nazi eugenics and genocide requires a gross distortion of what Darwin actually said and what his science requires. In fact, even Richard Weikart has admitted that there is no direct line "from Darwin to Hitler," although the crude rhetoric of social Darwinism exploited vague slogans of evolution to support morally reprehensible conclusions. One might as well cite Martin Luther's virulent anti-Semitism and then conclude that Christianity was responsible for Hitler's genocide.

In Chapter 3 of Darwinian Conservatism, I argue that Darwin's account of family life as rooted in human biological nature supports "family values." O'Leary rejects this conclusion, but since she doesn't indicate where she thinks I have gone wrong in my reasoning in that chapter, she doesn't give me anything to which I can respond.

She writes: "Darwinism predicts absolutely nothing of substance for family values, which normally derive from philosophical or spiritual beliefs about correct relationships. This is true whether given beliefs are widely held or wisely held or linked in any obvious way to health, wealth, or fertility."

I don't understand what she's saying here. It would help me understand if she could explain what she means by "philosophical or spiritual beliefs about correct relationships." I would say that such "beliefs" about family life must be judged by how well they conform to human nature. So, for example, if monogamy is good, it's because in the long run it satisfies the natural sexual, conjugal, and parental desires of human beings in such as way as to promote human flourishing. She seems to reject such reasoning, but I am not sure what alternative kind of reasoning she is proposing.

Darwinian Liberal Education

My article on "Darwinian Liberal Education" will be published soon in the fall 2006 issue of Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars. Here I will provide a few excerpts.

We all know what's wrong with higher education today. Teaching and research have become so specialized, fragmented, and incoherent that we cannot see that unity of knowledge necessary for sustaining general or liberal eduction. To renew the tradition of the liberal arts, we need a new unifying framework of thought. As far as I can tell, there is today only one plausible source for such a common ground of knowledge, and that is Darwinian evolutionary biology.

I began to move towards this conclusion as an undergrduate student at the University of Dallas in the late 1960s. My youthful excitement about philosophy was stirred by Aristotle's declaration in his Metaphysics that all human beings by nature desire to understand, a desire that leads natural philosophers to search for the ultimate causes or reasons for all things. Fascinated by Aristotle's comprehensive investigation of nature and human nature, I noticed that much of his writing was in biology, and that even his moral and political works assumed a biological understanding of human nature. So I wondered whether Aristotle's biological naturalism could be compatible somehow with modern Darwinian biology, and whether this might support a general study of human life within the natural causal order of the whole.

Reading Leo Strauss helped me to see how the fundamental dilemma of modernity explained the loss of liberal education as a comprehensive study of the whole. The natural sciences assume a materialist reductionism that cannot account for the human mind or spirit. The humanities assume a radical dualism that treats human consciousness and conduct as autonomous in their separation from the causal order of the natural sciences. The social sciences are then torn between these two contradictory positions.

We might overcome this dilemma, I thought, if we could see Darwinian biology as a comprehensive science that would unify all the intellectual disciplines by studying human experience as part of the natural whole. This would continue the Aristotelian tradition of biology, because, as Strauss observed, Aristotle believed that biology could provide "a mediation between knowledge of the inanimate and knowledge of man."

The aim of liberal education is to use all the intellectual disciplines to probe how the complex interaction of natural propensities, cultural traditions, and individual choices shapes the course of human experience within the order of nature. Darwinian theory provides a general conceptual framework for such liberal learning grounded in the scientific study of genetic evolution, cultural evolution, and cognitive judgment.

In my teaching and my research, I have tried to answer the intellectual objections to grounding liberal learning in Darwinian evolution. Those people who deny the truth of Darwinian science should be free to dispute it as best they can, while recognizing the weight of the evidence and arguments favoring it and the difficulty of developing alternative explanations that are scientifically testable. Those people who fear Darwinian reductionism should see how Darwinian biology recognizes the emergent evolution of complexity. Those people who fear Darwinism as morally subversive should see how Darwinian reasoning supports morality by rooting it in human nature. Those people who fear Darwinian atheism should see that Darwinian explanations leave open the question of whether the evolution of nature is ultimately the work of nature's God. At all of these points, a Darwinian pursuit of liberal education directs us to think about the fundamental questions of human existence in the world. Isn't that what a liberal education is supposed to do?

But still many people will object that integrating the liberal arts curriculum through the idea of Darwinian evolution is impracticable, because this would require a radical restructuring of academic procedures and institutions, which is unlikely. My response here is to suggest three small steps that we can take that don't require radical change.

The first step is for college and university teachers to develop courses in their departments that incorporate Darwinian ideas. Many professors are starting to do that, because they are finding that evolutionary theory offers them fruitful lines of research that they can introduce in their regular teaching. I teach courses in biopolitical theory at Northern Illinois University that attract students from many departments across the university.

The next step is for faculty members in different departments to cooperate in interdisciplinary teaching. Next year, I will be team-teaching a course on evolution with a philosopher and a biologist. Students will register in one of three coures in the Department of Political Science, the Department of Biological Sciences, or the Department of Philosophy. But the three classes with the three professors will meet together. We will explore the general ideas of evolutionary theory and then apply them to various topics crossing the fields of biology, philosophy, and political science. The different viewpoints of the three professors in each class will surely stimulate lively discussions.

A third step would be to expand this into a general curriculum that would bring together courses in many departments. The best model for this would be David Sloan Wilson's Evolutionary Studies Program at Binghamton University. (The website for Wilson's program can be found here.) This program was started by Wilson in 2002, and it is already being adopted at other schools. He has designed an integrated curriculum with a required introductory course--"Evolution for Everyone"--and a list of courses across the university from which students must earn a minimum number of credits. Wilson teaches "Evolution for Everyone" as the course in which all students in the program are introduced to the central concepts of evolutionary theory as well as some illustrative application of those concepts to various fields of study. He emphasizes the application of evolutionary ideas to human nature. In addition to the undergraduate program, there is a similar program for graduate students with the same structure. In this way, both faculty and students from across Binghamton University in many different departments are brought together with Darwinian reasoning as their common language to talk about questions of human nature and the natural world.

At Northern Illinois University, I have helped to develop "Politics and the Life Sciences" as a field of study at both the undergraduate and graduate levels within the Department of Political Science. With the help of my colleagues in other departments, I hope to eventually organize a university-wide program in evolutionary studies following the lead of Wilson's program at Binghamton.

Through such a Darwinian liberal education, we could renew the quest that began with Aristotle to satisfy our natural human desire to understand the causes or reasons for all things.

Sandefur's Rejection of Fusionism

In response to my continuing defense of ordered liberty as the common ground for libertarian and traditionalist conservatives, Timothy Sandefur has a post on the Positive Liberty blog entitled "My Rejection of Fusionism."

I will have to think more about his comments. But my first reaction is that I generally agree with his particular points. I agree that Rothbard's alliance with the paleoconservatives led him into incoherent positions contrary to his libertarianism. I also agree that Kirk's writing was often obscure and confusing.

Fusionism, Again

I have been responding in various ways to Timothy Sandefur's claim that my account of conservatism as a fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism must be incoherent.

I agree that if one looks superficially at the debates between extreme libertarians like Murray Rothbard and extreme traditionalists like Russell Kirk, there seems to be a great gulf between them. But if one looks more carefully at some of their writings, such as those that can be found here, here, and here, one begins to see that they share much in common.

The problem is that both sides in this debate tend to criticize straw-men. In fact, Rothbard complains that to say that libertarians elevate individual liberty to "the status of an absolute end" is "an absurd straw-man." "Only an imbecile could ever hold that freedom is the highest or indeed the only principle or end of life," Rothbard explains. "Freedom is necessary to, and integral with, the achievement of any of man's ends. The libertarian agrees completely with Acton and with Meyer himself that freedom is the highest political end, not the highest end of man per se; indeed, it would be difficult to render such a position in any sense meaningful or coherent."

Similarly, for the libertarians to criticize the traditionalist conservatives like Kirk as "statists" who would allow an authoritarian state to suppress individual liberty is also a "straw-man" argument. After all, Kirk is clear in stating that libertarians and traditionalists agree in their distaste for statist collectivism. "They set their faces against the totalist state and the heavy hand of bureaucracy."

Unfortunately, Kirk creates confusion when he writes: "The libertarian takes the state for the great oppressor. But the conservative finds that the state is ordained of God." This seems to support the idea that Kirk's traditionalism is "statist." But then a few pages later in the same essay, Kirk rejects "the pretensions of the modern state to omnicompetence." He goes on to explain: "The primary function of government, the conservatives say, is to keep the peace: by repelling foreign enemies, by maintaining the bed of justice domestically. When government goes much beyond this end, it falls into difficulty, not being contrived for the management of the whole of life."

The fundamental point here is to distinguish society from the state and to see that between the individual and the state is the realm of civil society--the realm of families, churches, economic associations, social groups of all kinds--all of those natural and voluntary groups in which the natural sociality of human beings is expressed.

Darwinian science supports the primacy of civil society as the fullest manifestation of the social instincts of human beings--instincts of attachment that arise first in the family and then extend outward to ever wider circles of social bonding. The bureaucratic state can, at best, secure some of the conditions for the cooperative relationships of civil society by keeping the peace, protecting private property, and enforcing a general rule of law.

But to assume that moral community has to be artificially created by the social engineering of a centralized, bureaucratic state is dangerously utopian, because it ignores the fact that since human beings are imperfect in their knowledge and virtue, they cannot be trusted with centralized power. Moreover, we should assume that the natural desire for political rule and high rank will incline those with power to be ambitious in their quest for domination. What John Adams called "the principle of balance" should lead us to separate and balance political powers so that ambitious people can satisfy their natural desire to rule, while being checked in their power so as to minimize the danger of tyranny.

The enforcement of morality comes best from the social sanctions of family life and civil society rather than the political sanctions of a centralized state. Thus, libertarians and traditionalists can agree that the highest end of politics is liberty, while the highest end of civil society is the ordering of liberty through moral habituation.

Conservatism and the Iraq War

In Darwinian Conservatism, I assume a "fusionist" view of conservatism as combining a libertarian emphasis on liberty and reason and a traditionalist emphasis on order and tradition. Timothy Sandefur and others have criticized me for this by claiming that libertarians and traditionalists are not in the same camp at all. But I have argued that libertarian conservatives and traditionalist conservatives agree in their realist view of human nature and ordered liberty, and that Darwinian science supports that conservative realism.

A good illustration of this is how libertarians and traditionalists agree in their realist view of foreign policy as opposed to the utopian idealism of "neoconservative" foreign policy. The folly of the American war in Iraq vindicates conservative realism and exposes the flaws of neoconservative idealism.

Consider the following passage from Russell Kirk's essay "Prescription, Authority, and Ordered Freedom" (published in What Is Conservatism?, edited by Frank Meyer, in 1964):

"To impose the American constitution upon all the world would not render all the world happy; to the contrary, our constitution would work in few lands and would make many men miserable in short order. States, like men, must find their own paths to order and justice and freedom; and usually those paths are ancient and winding ways, and their signposts are Authority, Tradition, Prescription. Without the legal institutions, rooted in common and Roman law, from which it arose, the American constitutional system would be unworkable. Well, take up this constitutional system, abstractly, and set it down, as an exotic plant, in Persia or Guinea or the Congo, where the common law (English style) and the Roman law are unknown, and where the bed of justice rests upon the Koran or upon hereditary chieftainship--why, the thing cannot succeed. Such an undertaking may disrupt the old system of jsutice, and may even supplant, for a time; but in the long run, the traditional morals, habits, and establishments of a people, confirmed by their historical experience, will reassert themselves, and the innovation will be undone--if that culture is to survive at all."

This is one of the fundamental insights of traditionalist conservatism: since social order must evolve out of the habits and customs of a people over a long time, it is foolish to try to impose on a people some abstract conception of order that is utterly foreign to their local traditions. Conservatives appeal to universal principles of reason, but they see this--in Frank Meyer's words--as "reason operating within tradition."

Murray Rothbard--in an essay on Meyer--criticized this stress on tradition as contrary to his libertarian principles, because libertarians want to appeal to abstract principles of liberty that allow them to judge social traditions as good or bad. And yet, even Rothbard acknowledged the importance of customary order. As opposed to the artificial order imposed by a centralized state, Rothbard thought that liberty was better secured by local communities that enforce norms of cooperation through customary traditions. He often cited the history of "stateless societies" like ancient Ireland as showing how legal order could arise through voluntary agreement as manifested in customary norms that expressed the moral experience of the community. And for that reason, Rothbard defended an isolationalist foreign policy, because he denied that an imperialistic foreign policy could succeed in promoting free institutions that were not rooted in the local traditions of a people.

To see how conservative social thought combines reason and tradition, we need to understand how social order arises as the product of three kinds of order: natural order, customary (or habitual) order, and rational (or deliberate) order. This analysis of order as natural, customary, and rational was first stated by Aristotle and later adopted by philosophers such as Cicero and Thomas Aquinas. It is also implicit in Darwin's account of the human moral sense.

We should see a three-level nested hierarchy in which custom presupposes nature, and reason presupposes both nature and custom. The fully developed order in a community or an individual arises as the joint product of natural propensities, the development of those propensities through habit or custom, and the rational deliberation about those propensities, habits, and customs.

This same trichotomy of order is implicit in Darwin's biological account of the human moral sense. As naturally social animals, human beings are endowed with social instincts, so that they feel a concern for others and are affected by social praise and blame. As animals capable of learning by habit and imitation, human beings will develop habits and customs that reflect the social norms of their community. And as intellectual animals, human beings can rationally deliberate about their social instincts and social customs to formulate abstract rules of conduct that satisfy their natural desires as social animals.

Consider, then, how this trichotomy of order was manifested in the framing of the American constitutional order. The Constitution had to conform to universal human nature, because it had to recognize natural propensities such as ambition and self-interest that would need to be channelled through the constitutional system. And yet the structure of the constitutional system also had to conform to the customary experience of the Americans during the colonial period and under the Articles of Confederation. But while the constitutional framers were thus constrained by both universal human nature and particular human customs, they also had some freedom to deliberate about particular provisions of the new constitutional scheme.

The Iraqi people might learn much from the experience of American constitutional republicanism. For example, they might learn about the importance of the separation of powers, the rule of law, and private property in securing the conditions for ordered liberty. But any successful constitutional scheme for the Iraqis must be rooted in their own local traditions. For instance, they will have to struggle to develop their Islamic traditions of religious law in ways that reconcile moral community and individual liberty.

The Discovery Institute's Use of Weikart's FROM DARWIN TO HITLER

Richard Weikart's book From Darwin to Hitler is often cited by proponents of intelligent design theory to show that Darwinian science leads to Nazism and other evils.

In Darwinian Conservatism, and on this blog, I have argued that Weikart's book doesn't really show a direct path "from Darwin to Hitler." In fact, the social Darwinists discussed by Weikart actually distorted or denied Darwin's teaching.

In his response to my criticisms, Weikart has accused me of distorting his book. He says that I "incorrectly allege that I argue a straightforward 'Darwin-to-Hitler'thesis." He accuses me of reading the book with "the (false) preconceived idea that my book argues for a direct line from Darwin to Hitler." To support this claim, he quotes from page 4 of his book: "Darwinism does not lead inevitably to Nazism." In other words, he argues that the thesis of his book is not accurately conveyed in the title--From Darwin to Hitler--which he says is "ambiguous."

But now in a recent blog post at the Discovery Institute website, Jonathan Witt says that Weikart's book shows "a straightforward path to horror." He writes: "What is striking is how straightforwardly many of the horrors documented in Weikart's book follow from Darwinian principles." This directly contradicts Weikart's response to me saying that it is wrong to see his book as arguing for "a straightforward 'Darwin-to-Hitler' thesis."

I hope that Weikart will correct this interpretation of his book, and that the Discovery Institute will issue a retraction of its claims about his book.

Sandefur on Hayek

In our exchanges, Timothy Sandefur has indicated that he doesn't regard Hayek as the best representative for libertarian thought. He refers to a post of his from last year summarizing his criticisms of Hayek. Actually, I agree with him on this. I make some similar criticisms in Darwinian Conservatism (pp. 20-26).

My main point is that we need to explain social order as the product of three kinds of order: natural order, customary (or habitual) order, and rational (or deliberate) order. Hayek's stress on custom--"between instinct and reason"--as the ultimate source of order goes too far in elevating social tradition over natural propensities and deliberate judgments. So, for example, while he is right to stress the customary character of common law, he fails to give enough weight to the way in which common law had to be altered by deliberate judgments of judges and lawmakers.

This trichotomy of order is clear in property law--as I indicate in chapter 4 of Darwinian Conservatism--where we need to see three levels of property law: natural property, customary property, and formal property.

Another Response to Sandefur

Timothy Sandefur has a post on my reply to his review of Darwinian Conservatism.

He elaborates his argument that libertarianism and traditionalist conservatism are incompatible, and that Darwinian naturalism supports libertarianism but not traditionalist conservatism. His main point is that while the libertarian believes that social order is to be judged by how well it serves the happiness and flourishing of individuals, the conservative believes that individuals are to be judged by how well they serve the stability of social order.

I will concede that Russell Kirk's deep scorn for libertarian thought drove him to describe his Burkean conservatism in a way that drove a wedge between conservatism and libertarianism. But as I have argued in my previous post and in my book, the libertarianism of people like Hayek is actually compatible with Burkean conservatism. Although Hayek did not like to call himself a "conservative," he appealed to Burke throughout his writing, and he insisted that "true individualism" (as opposed to "false individualism") was consistent with Burkean thought.

Like the Burkean conservatives, Hayek repeatedly stressed the need for moral order rooted in tradition or custom to secure the social conditions for liberty. In Individualism and Economic Order, Hayek observed that "coercion can probably only be kept to a minimum in a society where conventions and tradition have made the behavior of man to a large extent predictable" (p. 24). In support of this idea, he quotes Burke: "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites." Moreover, Hayek writes, "It must remain an open question whether a free or individualistic society can be worked successfully if people are too 'individualistic' in the false sense, if they are too unwilling voluntarily to conform to traditions and conventions, and if they refuse to recognize anything which is not consciously designed or which cannot be demonstrated as rational to every individual" (p. 26).

For Kirk, the necessary moral traditions were ultimately rooted in some permanent order of the universe manifested in enduring human nature and religious belief in a transcendent order. By contrast, Hayek was a skeptic. And yet he saw no necessary conflict between his classical liberalism and religion. "Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism. . . . What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different spheres which ought not to be confused" (The Constitution of Liberty, p. 407).

This last point leads Sandefur to warn against Kirk as a "theocrat" who "called for an established religion in America." But here I would say that he is not being fair to Kirk. Kirk accepted the First Amendment principle that Congress should not establish a national church. "Christian teaching," Kirk claimed, "is intended to govern the soul, not the state." He warned that it was a mistake for the church to usurp the powers of the state. Although Kirk thought religion was essential for social order, he thought that no particular church should be established by the state, because he believed in religious liberty as a hard-won legacy of the Western tradition.

In listing his "Ten Conservative Principles", Kirk began with the principle of "an enduring moral order" rooted in a constant human nature. Darwinian science supports that principle by accounting for human nature, including the natural moral sense.

As Sandefur indicates, some conservatives are suspicious of Darwinian accounts of human nature as a product of evolutionary history, because they fear that this falls short of the eternal order that they seek. But my claim is that even if Darwinian human nature is not necessarily a fulfillment of some eternal, cosmic purpose, this human nature is still an enduring ground for moral judgment. Moreover, the question of whether this evolutionary nature is guided by some supernatural cause is left open for those who would move beyond nature to nature's God.

Some skeptical libertarians see no need for such a move beyond nature. But shouldn't they see the openness to divine mystery as one of the deepest expressions of individual liberty?