The Mont Pelerin Society in the Galapagos

The Mont Pelerin Society was founded in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek as an organization for promoting classical liberal thought.  For a long time, it seemed to be defending a lost cause.  But by the 1970s, many of its members became prominent in an apparent revival of classical liberalism.  The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Hayek in 1974 and to Milton Friedman in 1976 was one indication of this.  The collapse of the Marxist socialist regimes in 1989 was said by some commentators to be a vindication of Hayek's argument that socialism must fail.

Although the MPS has been dominated by economists, Hayek had always wanted this organization to be a meeting place for people from many intellectual disciplines, because he thought the argument for a free society was not just economic, but also moral and political.  Moreover, Hayek himself saw the free society as the product of spontaneous evolution, and he embraced an evolutionary view of social order that applied biological reasoning to social thought.  In recent years, many classical liberal thinkers have applied new ideas from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology in explaining the spontaneous order of a free society as conforming to evolved human nature.

It is understandable, therefore, that the MPS held a special week-long meeting (June 23-28) on "Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty" in the Galapagos Islands, with the sponsorship of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ).  The meeting was held at the branch campus of the University in the Galapagos, in Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on the island of San Cristobal.  Most of the lectures and discussions were at the Charles Darwin Convention Center in the city.

I will be commenting on all the lectures in a series of posts.  Copies of most of the lectures can be found on the MPS website.

June 23
The conference opened at the Charles Darwin Convention Center with a greeting from the Mayor of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, which is the provincial capital of the Galapagos.

I was impressed by the large mural painting (signed by David Basantes) that covers the entire back wall of the stage of the Convention Center.  It's clearly a depiction of God's creation of the Galapagos.  On the extreme right end of the painting, one sees what looks like the wreck of Noah's Ark, with a Galapagos iguana falling out of it.  On the left and middle part of the painting, there are two giant hands breaking through the sky.  One hand is clinching a line that is pulling up a fish.  The other hand is delivering bags full of Galapagos animals.  A blue-footed booby has walked out of it, and a giant tortoise is tearing his way out of the bag.  Near the middle, there is a vague outline of two naked human figures emerging out of a cloud formation, suggesting the creation of human beings.  Next to the human figures is an erupting volcano, perhaps suggesting that God can use natural processes for his creative purposes.

I was surprised that none of the speakers mentioned this painting.  When I lectured two days later, I drew attention to it as suggesting the question of whether Darwinian evolution could be compatible with the Creation story of the Bible.

Carlos Montufar of USFQ spoke about the remarkable history of the University.  It was founded in 1988 as the first private university devoted to a liberal arts education in South America.  And it is now regarded as one of the very best universities in all of Latin America.  Its campus on San Cristobal is the location for its Galapagos Institute for the Arts and Sciences, which has hosted three major conferences on evolution in 2005, 2009, and 2013.

Diego Quiroga of USFQ lectured on "Darwin and the Galapagos," providing a general view of Darwin's time in the Galapagos (September 15 to October 20, 1835) as part of his long trip around the world on the Beagle (December 27, 1831, to October 2, 1836).

Deepak Lal of UCLA, a former President of the Mont Pelerin Society, gave the welcoming address for the beginning of the conference.  He spoke about Hayek's vision of the MPS as a scholarly society dedicated to a free society of liberalism, but without being propagandistic.  Hayek rejected the common separation between the natural sciences and the social sciences, and he pursued a life-long interest in social evolution.  He wanted the MPS to be an interdisciplinary academy that would not be narrowly economic.  Lal saw this as providing the justification for this MPS conference.

The first lecture of the conference was by David Kohn, speaking on "The Scottish Enlightenment, Malthus, and Darwin's Theory of Evolution."  (Remarkably, Kohn delivered his lecture by telephone, because he had fallen and injured himself earlier in the day.)

Kohn is a professor emeritus of the history of science at Drew University.  He has been an editor with the Darwin Correspondence Project at Cambridge University, and he was a co-editor of Charles Darwin's Notebooks, 1836-1842 (Cornell University Press, 1987). 

In recent years, Kohn has been studying the influence of John Henslow's botany on Darwin, and some of this work was published in his fascinating article "What Henslow Taught Darwin" in Nature, 436 (4 August, 2005): 643-45.  Although Henslow accepted the creationist idea that species can vary only within limits, he emphasized variation in a way that prepared Darwin's mind to see how difficult it was to distinguish varieties and species.  As one might expect, then, Kohn's lecture stressed the importance of Darwin's botanical studies in the Galapagos in showing variation across the islands.

Kohn gave the audience a meticulous examination of how Darwin's notebooks show his slow steps towards his theory of evolution after his return to England.  Kohn emphasized the influence on Darwin of the idea of an "economy of nature," which came from the application of economic thinking to the history of life.  For example, from Henri Milne Edwards, Darwin learned that the division of labor could be seen as a major law of the economy of nature.

Later in the week, Leda Cosmides suggested another connection between economics and evolution.  She observed that one good way to teach school children the idea of Hayekian markets as spontaneous orders would be to connect this to what they might have learned about protecting ecosystems from human interference: markets as spontaneous ecosystems need to be protected from the disruption of governmental attempts at planning.  Indeed, one might think here of how the very ideas of "ecology" and "ecosystems" borrow from economics.

Kohn traced the evidence for the influence of Thomas Malthus on Darwin's development of his theory of evolution.  As I have indicated in a previous post ("James Mackintosh & Darwin's Evolutionary Theory of Morality," June 6), I agree with this, and yet given the topic for this MPS conference--human social evolution--I think Kohn should have given more attention to the influence on Darwin of James Mackintosh as a moral and political philosopher.  Mackintosh was to Darwin's theory of moral evolution what Malthus was to Darwin's theory of organic evolution.

Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and his Notebooks make it clear that Darwin was struggling with two controversial topics--the natural evolution of species and the natural evolution of human society and morality.  Although both were controversial, the second was more controversial than the first. 

This remains true today.  Many people who accept Darwin's general theory of evolution in The Origin of Species are reluctant to accept his theory of human social evolution in The Descent of Man.  One could see this at the MPS conference.  I could not detect among the speakers or the audience any resistance to the idea of organic evolution.  But I could detect some uneasiness about the idea of human social evolution.  In fact, as I indicated in my lecture, even many proponents of evolutionary psychology today assume a fact/value dichotomy in which human morality is understood as transcending evolutionary science.

An Evolutionary Tour of the Galapagos (6): Can We See Evolution in the Beak of the Finch?

June 22
From Genovesa, we navigated overnight to North Seymour Island, where we hiked in the morning before ending our tour on the Cormorant and leaving for the Baltra airport.

From North Seymour, we could see the small island of Daphne Major, which is also easily seen when one flies into or out of the Baltra airport.  This bleak-looking island has become world famous as the main site for the research of Peter and Rosemary Grant in studying "Darwin's finches." 

Almost every high school and college textbook in general biology refers to this research as proof for Darwin's theory of evolution, because it seems that the Grants have actually observed evolution in action.  But does this really prove the evolution of new species by natural selection?

                                                Peter and Rosemary Grant

                                                         Daphne Major

                                         The 14 Species of Galapagos Finches

                         The Adaptive Radiation of Finches in Beak Morphology

In touring the Galapagos, I occasionally asked members of my tour group whether they believed we were seeing proof for Darwin's theory of evolution.  They were puzzled by my question, because it seemed obvious to them that yes, of course, life on the Galapagos demonstrates Darwinian evolution beyond any doubt.  One person who is a public school biology teacher responded: "Haven't you read The Beak of the Finch?"  Jonathan Weiner's book The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time is a popular survey of the Grants' studies of the finches, and it received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1995.  The powerful impact of this research is conveyed in the subtitle--"evolution in our time"--that is, the thought that we can actually see Darwinian evolution occurring among Darwin's finches, and therefore evolution is not just a speculative theory but an observable fact.

And yet a careful reading of Weiner's book suggests an ambiguity in the story of the finches' evolution.  He writes: "It is one thing to demonstrate, as the Grants have done, that natural selection leads to evolution.  It is another and much more complicated thing to demonstrate precisely how this evolution leads to new species; and despite the title of his greatest book, Darwin himself never spells out the details" (128).  Weiner indicates that while many readers will accept the evolution by natural selection of "slight individual differences," they will find it hard to see how this kind of evolution--"as an editor of beaks and bodies"--can create completely new species.

The fundamental ambiguity in the research of the Grants on the finches is that while it clearly shows microevolution within a species, it is not at all clear that it shows the macroevolution of a new species from an ancestral species.  Even some of the most enthusiastic supporters of Darwinian science see this problem in the finch research.  In Darwin in Galapagos, Thalia Grant and Greg Estes provide a favorable survey of the research conducted by the Grants, and yet they observe: "They have not shown speciation (no one has), but they have shown evolution" (151).  In other words, the Grants have shown evolutionary change within a species, but they have not shown macroevolutionary speciation--the evolution from one species to another.  (Thalia Grant has some intimate knowledge of this research, because the Grants are her parents, and she has worked with them in the Galapagos.)

Biologist Kathleen Donohue has edited an anthology of all the major writing on the evolution of the finches--Darwin's Finches: Readings in the Evolution of a Scientific Paradigm (University of Chicago Press, 2011).  Although she generally accepts the conclusions that the Grants have drawn from their research, she observes: "The tenuous link between adaptive microevolution and macroevolution remains one of the greatest challenges in the field of evolutionary biology" (353).

As I have indicated in some previous posts, creationists and intelligent design theorists can accept the finch research of the Grants as showing how evolution by natural selection can create microevolutionary change within a species--such as changes in the size and shape of finch beaks in response to changing ecological conditions.  But they can still argue that this does not support a Darwinian explanation for the origin of species.  For example, intelligent design proponent Jonathan Wells concedes that there is "good evidence that natural selection can produce limited modifications within existing species such as Darwin's finches"  (Icons of Evolution, 245).  But these "limited modifications within existing species" do not show any evolutionary emergence of new species.  If so, then one can accept the research of the Grants while still believing that the creation of species (or of "kinds")  requires a Creator or Intelligent Designer.

I am persuaded that the research of the Grants makes a plausible case for the adaptive radiation of Darwin's finches as a product of Darwinian macroevolution, particularly when one considers that the alternative theories--the theory of special creation and intelligent design theory--offer no testable hypotheses about exactly when, where, and how the Creator or Intelligent Designer brought new species into being.  But the plausibility of the Darwinian case falls short of absolute demonstration, because the Grants have not directly observed the evolution of new species, although they have directly observed evolutionary change within species. 

Thus the Grants are in the same situation as Darwin himself, who admitted in The Origin of Species that while he thought he had made a persuasive argument for the evolutionary origin of species, he had not demonstrated it, because there remained many "difficulties" for his theory (to which he devoted five of the fifteen chapters of his book).

As far as I know, the Grants have never explicitly responded to this challenge.  But they do implicitly recognize the problem in their book How and Why Species Multiply: The Radiation of Darwin's Finches (Princeton University Press, 2008), which is a general survey of all of their research.

The Grants began their study of Darwin's finches on Daphne Major in 1973, and they continued that study for 34 years.  They see themselves as extending the work of David Lack, who died in 1973 just as they were beginning their work.  In 1947, Lack published Darwin's Finches, based on his field research in the Galapagos and analysis of specimens in museums. 

Contrary to a popular legend, Darwin's theory of evolution did not come to him suddenly when he studied the finches during his time in the Galapagos, because it was only after he returned to England that he began to suspect that the different species of finches on the Galapagos might show an evolutionary adaptation by natural selection to the diverse environmental conditions of the islands.  Lack confirmed that this was the case by arguing that the Galapagos finches showed an adaptive radiation from a common mainland ancestor.  Individual finches that were better adapted to the diverse conditions of life in the different islands would be more likely to survive and reproduce, and thus some varieties of the birds would be favored by natural selection, and eventually these varieties could diverge so greatly as to become new species.  When different species competed with one another on the same island, this competition could create even greater divergence through character displacement, so that, for example, different species might evolve different shapes and sizes in their beaks as adaptations for feeding on different kinds of food. 

Lack showed how this illustrated the three principles of Darwin's theory--variation, inheritance, and selection.  There is variation in the morphology of finch beaks.  This variation is heritable, because the beaks of offspring tend to resemble the beaks of their parents.  And, finally, this heritable variation is subject to selection insofar as it confers some advantage or disadvantage in the struggle for life.  Lack's view of the evolution of the finches was then adopted by biology textbooks as the standard example of Darwinian evolution.

Although they disagree with Lack on some points, the Grants have supported his general account of finch evolution with their own meticulous research.  On Daphne Major, they captured each individual finch, measured its weight and beak morphology, and then banded it for identification.  They could then identify individual variations, compare offspring and parents to determine inheritance, and see the consequences for survival and reproduction in the changing circumstances of the island to determine natural selection. 

In 1977, the Grants saw the consequences of a severe drought on Daphne Major.  85% of the medium ground finches (Geospiza fortis) died.  Normally, these birds feed on small and soft seeds, but when the supply of these seeds was depleted by the drought, the birds were forced to try to feed on large and hard seeds, which can be cracked only by large birds with large beaks.  Consequently, the smaller birds with smaller beaks died at a high rate, the larger birds with larger beaks were more likely to survive, and by 1978, the average body size and average beak size of this population of finches had increased.  "Natural selection had occurred," the Grants concluded (53).  By extrapolation, they reasoned, if such droughts occurred at least once a decade for at least 200 years, this could produce a new species of finch.

But, then, in 1983, the heavy rainfall of an El Nino event promoted the growth of plants with small seeds, which favored the survival of smaller birds with smaller beaks.  As a result, the average body size and beak size of the birds declined.  "The direction of evolution had been reversed," the Grants concluded (55).  But if this evolution is fluctuating in opposite directions, it's hard to see how this could lead to the evolution of new species. 

In 2004, this story of evolution became even more complicated.  2004 was another year of severe drought, and consequently the numbers of medium ground finches declined even more than they did in the drought of 1977.  But in contrast to 1977, the evolutionary effect of the drought of 2004 was to decrease the average beak size of the medium ground finches after this drought.

To explain this change in selection pressures, the Grants argue that the finches in 2004 were showing "character displacement," in which closely related species living close together must diverge in their foraging behavior to avoid interspecific competition.  In 1982, a breeding population of large ground finches (Geospiza magnirostris) was established by two females and three males.  Large ground finches and medium ground finches compete for the same seeds.  By 2004, this competition had become intense, because the population of large ground finches had grown to 150, while the population of medium ground finches was 235.  The drought severely reduced the numbers of both species, and the medium ground finches with large beaks were more likely to die, because they were competing with the large ground finches for the same seeds (68-74).

So, once again, we see microevolutionary changes within a species, but we still don't see any macroevolutionary emergence of new species.

The research of the Grants also illustrates the unpredictable complexity of evolutionary biology that arises from historical contingency.  In 1978, the Grants could interpret the consequences of the drought of 1977 as an event of natural selection.  But this post-hoc explanation did not allow them to precisely predict the consequences of future droughts.  They could not predict the arrival of 5 large ground finches in 1982, which would lead to a growing population of large ground finches on Daphne Major, which would then so change the ecological circumstances that a drought in 2004 would have an evolutionary effect on the medium ground finches opposite to that of the drought of 1977. 

Evolutionary science is a historical science, and the Grants are historians of the finch populations on Daphne Major.  Like all historians, they can explain the past, but they cannot make precise predictions about the future, because of the irreducible complexity and unpredictable uncertainty of historically contingent events.

The evolutionary history of the finches that the Grants have observed on Daphne Major includes cultural history.  Reproductive isolation is a crucial element of their two-sentence definition of species: "Species comprise one or more populations whose members are capable of interbreeding with little or no fitness loss.  They are reproductively isolated from all other populations, either because there is no interbreeding, or because any interbreeding is rare and usually results in relatively unfit (or no) offspring being produced" (119).  This reproductive isolation can have cultural rather than genetic causes, and this is true for the finches.  Female finches choose their mates based on the songs sung by the males that identify them as members of the species.  Unlike beak morphology, the songs are transmitted not by genetic coding but by cultural learning:  males imprint on the songs they hear sung by their fathers or other males between day 10 and day 40 after hatching.  The songs as sung by mature males are shaped by sexual selection in that they must be attractive to females and effective in repelling male competitors.  There is individual variation in these songs, and in one case, the Grants observed that a single immigrant male large ground finch introduced a new song, and since he was a productive breeder, this song increased in frequency (87).  Here then individual variation can lead to changes in cultural history that determine the patterns of breeding that set the boundaries for species.  Thus, the evolutionary history of natural selection and sexual selection is not only genetic but also cultural.

Consequently, evolutionary science must include cultural evolution as well as genetic evolution.  And, indeed, gene-cultural coevolution has become one of the most vibrant areas of evolutionary theory today.  The importance of cultural evolution was recognized by Darwin, particularly in his Descent of Man, in which he explained the evolution of human morality as the joint product of social instincts, cultural learning, and individual judgments.

But even if human culture is open to evolutionary explanation, we might still wonder whether Darwinian evolutionary science can fully explain every feature of human nature.  Can it explain the human soul?  Or does the soul require a religious understanding that is beyond natural science?

Although David Lack thought evolutionary science could fully explain the finches of the Galapagos, he thought any full explanation of human beings required religious beliefs that transcended science.  In a book published in1957--Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief--he argued that it was possible to be a theistic evolutionist, accepting both the scientific truth of evolution and the religious truth of Christianity.  To take such a position, we must see, on the one hand, that the story of Creation in the book of Genesis is "poetic imagery" that is not meant to be a scientific account of origins, and that God could have allowed Darwinian evolution to govern the history of life without any need for miraculous interventions to create new species.   But we must also see, on the other hand,  that "science has not accounted for morality, truth, beauty, individual responsibility or self-awareness" (36-37, 72, 77, 111-14).  "It seems inconceivable . . . that a soul could be evolved by natural selection," and so the human soul must be understood through religious belief (89).  Lack thus joined a long tradition of theistic evolutionists--from Asa Gray to C.S. Lewis to Francis Collins.

This question of whether evolutionary science can fully explain human life--including our moral, political, and religious experience--was one of the central questions for the Mont Pelerin Society conference on "Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty" on the Galapagos island of San Cristobal.  In my next series of blog posts, I will give my account of the conference.

Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

A POSTSCRIPT
After reading this blog post, Peter Grant sent me a copy of the following paper:  Peter Grant and Rosemary Grant, "The Secondary Contact Phase of Allopatric Speciation in Darwin's Finches," Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 106 (December 1, 2009): 20141-20148.

Here are a few excerpts from that paper, beginning with the abstract.

"Speciation, the process by which two species form from one, involves the development of reproductive isolation of two divergent lineages.  Here, we report the establishment and persistence of a reproductively isolated population of Darwin's finches on the small Galapagos island of Daphne Major in the secondary contact phase of speciation.  In 1981, an immigrant medium ground finch (Geospiza fortis) arrived on the island.  It was unusually large, especially in beak width, sang an unusual song, and carried some Geospiza scandens alleles.  We followed the fate of this individual and its descendants for seven generations over a period of 28 years.  In the fourth generation, after a severe drought, the lineage was reduced to a single brother and sister, who bred with each other.  From then on this lineage, inheriting unusual song, morphology, and a uniquely homozygous marker allele, was reproductively isolated, because their own descendants bred with each other and with no other member of the resident G. fortis population.  These observations agree with some expectations of an ecological theory of speciation in that a barrier to interbreeding arises as a correlated effect of adaptive divergence in morphology.  However, the important, culturally transmitted, song component of the barrier appears to have arisen by chance through an initial imperfect copying of local song by the immigrant.  The study reveals additional stochastic elements of speciation, in which divergence is initiated in allopatry; immigration to a new area of a single male hybrid and initial breeding with a rare hybrid female."

". . . it is too early to tell whether reproductive isolation is transitory or likely to be enduring.  The odds would seem to be against long-term persistence of the immigrant lineage as a reproductively isolated population.  First, numbers are small and stochastic fluctuations in population size may result in extinction.  Second, the new populations might run the risk of competitive exclusion from G. fortis  and/or G. magnirostris if the food environment changed.  Third, it might disappear through interbreeding with G. fortis and/or G. scandens, an example of reproductive absorption of one species by another, initiated perhaps by extra-pair mating or misimprinted song.  Fourth, it might suffer from inbreeding depression."

This appears to be close to observing actual speciation, although it also seems unlikely to persist.  Here the Grants are reaffirming what they say at the end of How and Why Species Multiply:  although the speciation of Darwin's finches depends on a combination of behavioral, ecological, geographical, and genetic factors, "behavior plays the key role in birds like Darwin's finches inasmuch as the origin of new species is the origin of barriers to interbreeding, and those barriers are created by behavior" (164-65).  Remarkably, these behavioral barriers to interbreeding are not genetic but cultural, because they are based on the cultural learning of song.  This does not come through in the textbook reports of the Grants' finch research.

An Evolutionary Tour of the Galapagos (5): Sibilicide Among the Boobies

June 20
Overnight, the Cormorant navigated to Marchena, which is one of the most isolated islands and one rarely visited by tour boats.

We hiked over Black Beach.  The beach is black because it's composed of volcanic ash.  The large pieces of driftwood on the beach that have floated in from hundreds of miles away suggest how the islands could have been originally settled by animals floating on wood from the South American mainland.

Reptiles could have survived such a long trip without water better than mammals, which could explain why there are no large land mammals on the Galapagos, and why the reptiles are dominant.

There are marine iguanas here, as there are on all the main islands.  They are the only marine lizards in the world.  They live largely on land, but they feed almost entirely on red and green algae.  They can remain submerged for over 10 minutes.

Here's a video of marine iguanas feeding.

 

 

On Marchena, there are no land iguanas or tortoises, which feed on cacti.  Consequently, as Carlos pointed out to us, the species of cactus on this island grows low to the ground, because it does not need a high stalk to protect itself from iguanas and tortoises eating it.  Opuntia helleri is a low-growing species that grows only in Marchena and other northern islands that have never had a tortoise or land iguana population.

                                                         Opuntia helleri

                                       Opuntia echios, Found on Santa Cruz


June 21
Having navigated overnight to the island of Genovesa, the Cormorant anchored in Darwin Bay, which is an almost perfectly circular bay created when a crater collapsed into the sea.

 

In the morning, we hiked a trail where we were surrounded by thousands of breeding sites for nazca boobies, who make their nests on the ground, and red-footed boobies, who make their nests in trees.  The third species--the blue-footed boobies--is the most famous of the three.

                                                            Nazca Boobies

                                                     Red-Footed Booby

                                                 Blue-Footed Booby

                                    Mating Dance of the Blue-Footed Boobies

The Nazca Booby is a species endemic to Galapagos--that is, it is found nowhere else in the world.  The Blue-footed Booby and the Red-footed Booby are endemic subspecies that are found only in Galapagos, but other closely related members of the species are found elsewhere in the world. 

They all feed by plunge diving for fish.  Although they breed close to one another, they avoid competition in fishing by not fishing close to one another.  Blue-footed boobies fish close to shore.  Nazca boobies fish farther out to sea within the islands.  Red-footed boobies fish even farther out in the open ocean outside the islands.

Although he did not use the terms, Carlos often appealed to what Darwinian biologists call "competitive exclusion" and "niche differentiation."  Where similar species compete for the same food resources, either one will drive out the other, or they will coexist when the species differentiate their niches so that resources are divided between them.  The boobies can coexist and avoid competing for fish by fishing in different spots and thus carving out distinct niches.  So while natural selection is driven by competition between species, natural selection can also favor species finding ways to avoid directly competing with one another for scarce resources.

People are amused by the clownish look of the mating dance of the blue-footed boobies.  Indeed, the name "booby" is derived from the Spanish word bobo--a fool or a clown.  Here's a video of the mating dance.

Despite their clownish appearance, the reproductive and parenting strategies of the boobies are deadly serious.  As Carlos explained to us, the supply of food determines how many offspring they can rear.  Blue-footed boobies lay up to three eggs that are incubated by both parents for up to 42 days.  If the food supply runs short, the young can eat their siblings.  Nazca boobies can lay up to two eggs, but they cannot rear more than one offspring.  Laying two eggs seems to be insurance if one of the eggs is bad.  If both eggs hatch, one sibling will kill the other.  Biological studies have shown that the killers tend to be innately more aggressive, with higher levels of testosterone.  Oddly, those young that are born without siblings have been observed attacking the young of other birds, as though their instinct for sibilicide needs to be satisfied.  Some pictures of Nazca booby sibilicide can be found here.

Some of the people in my tour group had spoken previously about how "cute" the boobies were, but then they were disturbed by these Darwinian explanations about their need for siblicide and cannibalism as reproductive strategies.  This illustrates the point that Darwin made in his debate with Frances Cobbe--that evolutionary science reveals a world that is without moral design, and thus there is no cosmic grounding for right and wrong.  Those with Platonic longings for a moral cosmology conclude from this that Darwinism is nihilism, because they cannot accept the moral anthropology of Darwinian science--that human morality arises from evolved human nature without any cosmic normativity to support it.  Here is where Darwinian science continues the tradition of Lucretian liberalism as revived by David Hume and Adam Smith, which forces us to consider the possibility that Friedrich Nietzsche was right in claiming that we could properly "describe the entire phenomenon of morality as animal."

The Darwinian evolution of family conflict, including siblicide, in birds and other animals has been explained by behavioral ecologist Douglas Mock.  See Mock, More than Kin and Less than Kind: The Evolution of Family Strife (Harvard University Press, 2006), and Mock and Geoffrey A. Parker, The Evolution of Sibling Rivalry (Oxford University Press, 1997).  See also Douglas Mock, Hugh Drummond, and Christopher H. Stinson, "Avian Siblicide," American Scientist, 78 (1990): 438-49, which can be found online.  For some evidence that hormonal changes in Nazca boobies promote the aggression of dominant, first-hatched chicks against subordinate, second-hatched chicks, see Elisa Tarlow, Martin Wikelski, and David Anderson, "Hormonal Correlates of Siblicide in Galapagos Nazca Boobies," Hormones & Behavior 40 (2001): 14-20, available online.

Some posts on related themes can be found here and here.

An Evolutionary Tour of the Galapagos (4): Love, Reproductive Fitness, and Transcendent Longings

June 18
We navigated to Fenandina and explored the Mangle Point area.  In the afternoon, we went back to Isabella to hike around Urvina Bay.

Fernandina is one of the most pristine of the islands, with few introduced species.

Urvina Bay is a special site because one can see the consequences of geological uplift.  In 1954, this area was raised by up to 10 meters.  In 1994, it was raised by 90 cm.  The evidence for this is everywhere--shells, sea urchin segments, and lots of coral heads--which shows the underwater origins of the land.

June 19
During the night, the Cormorant navigated to the Espinosa Point area of Fenandina, where we saw lots of sea lions, and Carlos explained their breeding behavior.  The mature females must find suitable areas for breeding--such as a protected tidal pool where the young can swim safely until they are old enough to swim farther out in the sea.  The sea lions are serial polyandrists.  A dominant male will fight for dominance over the breeding territory, but the male's dominance is brief, often only a few weeks.  The females then move on to a new breeding territory with a new dominant male.

We saw more flightless cormorants, and Carlos explained their courtship behavior, which includes the male presenting the female with pretty ornaments for the nests.

We also talked about the frigate birds, who inflate their red neck pouch for sexual display, which seems to be an example of sexual selection.  Males with such inflated pouches cannot even feed themselves.

Repeatedly, Carlos brought up the courtship and breeding behavior of the animals we saw, and he explained it in Darwinian terms as evolved adaptations for reproduction.  This fascinates us because we see how similar this is to our human behavior in courtship, conjugal bonding, and parental care, although the behavioral reproductive patterns differ for different animals in ways that are adaptive for them.  This intimates to us that our deepest desires for loving and being loved might be explained scientifically as evolved strategies for reproductive fitness.

Of course, many people deny this Darwinian explanation of human behavior.  As I have noted in some previous posts, existentialist conservatives like Peter Lawler argue that Darwinism is only partly true, because while it explains our animal sociality, it cannot explain our deepest existential longings for love and meaning in our lives and our fear of death.  We cannot live with the Darwinian teaching that we are just very smart social mammals who live for a time and then die, in a universe that does not care for or about us.  We are moved by transcendent longings for a universe in which we are the center of attention:  It's all about me!

A tour of the Galapagos does not support such transcendental human narcissism.  This is a world that evolved for millions of years without any human beings present.  In fact, much of the charm of the Galapagos, as Darwin noted, is that since the animals did not evolve any instinctive fear of humans, they seem remarkably tame--we can move among them, and they do not hide or run away.

Galapagos is a world born out of volcanic fire, a world of great beauty, but also a world of suffering and death.  It is a world indifferent to our human cares.  But it is also a world that appeals to us: we care about this world, and we want to preserve and cultivate its biodiversity, because we find deep satisfaction in seeing it, studying it, and pondering how it illuminates the cosmic process of evolution that gave birth to us, and to our capacity for seeing, studying, and pondering the meaning of it all during the brief lives that we have on this Earth.

An Evolutionary Tour of the Galapagos (3): Flightless Cormorants and Creationism

June 17
Overnight, the Cormorant navigated to Punta Moreno, an area on the southwestern coast of Isabella.  After hiking there in the morning, we sailed farther north to Elizabeth Bay on Isabella.

We saw lots of wildlife--pink flamingos, flightless cormorants, marine iguanas, penguins, sea turtles, and pelicans.

The Galapagos penguins are unique to the islands.  It's remarkable to see a species of penguins at the Equator!

The flightless cormorants and marine iguanas are also unique to the Galapagos.  The flightless cormorants are a remarkable example of evolutionary adaptation.  They are only found in the northern and western areas of Isabella and in Fernandina.

Like all cormorants, the Galapagos cormorants dive deep in the sea for fish, eels, and octopus.  But unlike all other cormorant species, the Galapagos cormorants have wings that they cannot use for flying.  Notice how puny their wings are and how they have to spend long periods drying their wings.  Why would God or the Intelligent Designer create birds with wings that serve no purpose?  Doesn't this look like unintelligent design? 

The evolutionary explanation is that when the flying cormorants came to the Galapagos, they found themselves in an environment in which they were not threatened by any major predators that would make flying advantageous for them.  Consequently, natural selection might favor those birds with wings that were not well adapted for flying, and eventually the whole species would become flightless.  This would be an example of the evolution of a new species, in which organs that once had a purpose evolve into vestigial organs with no purpose.

So how would the creationists explain this?  Some would say that God simply chose to create flightless cormorants in the Galapagos and nowhere else for His own inscrutable reasons.  But this is not very satisfying as an explanation, particularly if there is no explanation as to exactly where, when, how, and why the Creator did this.  These creationists accept the idea of change within species (microevolution) but deny the idea of changing from one species to another (macroevolution).

And yet some creationists accept the evidence for the emergence by natural selection of new species--like the flightless cormorant.  But then they argue that this actually supports creationism and not Darwinism.  According to the first chapter of Genesis, God created all living beings "after their kind" (in the King James translation).  But what is a "kind"?  In Darwin's time, many creationists interpreted "kind" to mean "species" in the modern sense of Linnean taxonomy.  If so, then the natural evolution of new species would contradict the creationist belief in the special creation of each species by God.  But now some creationists--like those represented by "Creation Ministries International" and "Answers in Genesis"-- argue that Biblical "kinds" are general groups of similar animals that correspond to higher levels of taxonomy above the species level.  So, for example, one "kind" of animal might be the "family" of canids, which includes different species--foxes, wolves, dogs, jackals, and coyotes.  Part of the reasoning here is that Noah's Ark was not large enough to include two of each species, but it could have been large enough to include two of each "kind."  Then, each "kind" could diversify by mutation and natural selection into many new species.

As you can see in the link to "Creation Ministries International," these creationists insist: "It can hardly be over-emphasized: natural selection is not evolution; indeed, natural selection was discovered by creationists before Darwin, and is now an important part of the biblical creation model."  Their argument is that adaptation and natural selection occur when genes are removed from a population.  But this is not Darwinian evolution, which would require new genetic information, which can only come by God's creative activity.

They argue that Darwinian evolution requires change from one kind to another.  But creationism allows natural selection for adaptation to bring change within kinds.  So, for example, flightless cormorants arose by natural selection as a new species of cormorant in the Galapagos.  But still, the flightless cormorant is a cormorant; it is the same kind of animal as all other cormorants.

Consequently, these creationists have expanded the notion of "microevolution" to include the evolution of new species, which they affirm as compatible with the Biblical story of God's creation of "kinds."  But they deny that there has been any Darwinian "macroevolution," understood as evolutionary change from one kind to another kind.

Aren't these creationists conceding a lot to Darwinian evolution by conceding that there has been a natural evolutionary emergence of new species without God's miraculous intervention?

Some of the intelligent design proponents go even further in their concessions to Darwinian evolution.  For example, Michael Behe--the leading proponent of intelligent design theory among biologists--accepts as scientific fact that human beings evolved from ancient primate ancestors.

An Evolutionary Tour of the Galapagos (2): Invasive Species and Anthropocentric Morality

June 16
After an overnight navigation to the island of Isabella, the Cormorant was anchored at Puerto Villami, the only permanent settlement on the island.  Although it is the largest of the Gallapagos Islands, Isabella is inhospitable to human settlement, because it has the ruggedness of one of the newer islands shaped by geologically recent volcanic activity.  The Sierra Negra volcano erupted as recently as 2005, and it has the largest caldera in the Galapagos.

                                Eruption of the Sierra Negra Volcano in 2005

Isabella is one of the four islands visited by Darwin, who went from San Cristobal (Chatham) to Floreana (Charles) to Isabella (Albermarle) to Santiago (James).

The geological history of the Galapagos Islands has made them a natural laboratory for the study of evolution.  The islands lie about 600 miles from the mainland coast of Ecuador.  The geological science of plate tectonics allows us to see that the islands lie at the meeting point of two submarine ridges--the Carnegie Ridge and the Cocos Ridge.  This meeting point of the two ridges is known as the Galapagos Hot Spot because of its volcanic activity.  The islands lie at the northern edge of the Nazca Plate, which is moving eastward at a rate of 2 cm per year.  This movement is responsible for the building of the Andes mountain range--the longest mountain range in the world--and for the volcanic and earthquake activity through the western edge of South America.  As the plate moves eastward, while the Hot Spot remains stationary, a series of volcanic islands are formed, and thus the western islands are newer than the eastern islands.  The older islands in the east--like San Cristobal--have a longer history of erosion, which produces more vegetation and makes them more hospitable to human settlement.  The newer islands in the west--like Isabella and Fernandina--are largely uninhabitable because of rugged lava landscapes. 

Carlos told us a story of the Ecuadorian special forces military unit that decided to use one of the most rugged areas of lava for their training.  They planned to march across it in a few days.  But their boots were soon lacerated by the sharp lava, and they had to be rescued by helicopter.

Since lava is usually too porous to hold rainwater, the lack of freshwater makes the islands even more inhospitable to life.  Carlos pointed out the lichen on the lava fields as being possibly the first form of life that would develop after the lava flows had cooled.  More complex forms of life would have arrived by migration from the mainland, and then by evolution they would be adapted for the diverse environments of the islands.

We visited a tortoise breeding center run by the National Park Service not far from Puerto Villamil.  When Darwin visited the islands in 1835, there were probably hundreds of thousands of giant tortoises.  Today, the total population is estimated to be around 15,000 individuals.  In the 19th century, many of the tortoises were taken onto whaling boats as a good source of food, because the tortoises could survive for many months without food or water.  Today, the biggest threat to the tortoises are the black rats that eat tortoise eggs and young tortoises.  That's why an artificial breeding program is necessary to preserve the tortoises.  The black rats are identified as an "invasive" species introduced by human beings.  Similarly, feral goats are another "invasive" species that threatens the tortoises by eating the vegetation that they feed on. 

 

 

The National Park Service has eradicated the feral goats from some parts of the islands, and now there is a program for eradicating the black rats.  As I have suggested in a previous post, this illustrates the evolutionary basis of morality as rooted in human desires.  There is no cosmic standard by which we can say that giant tortoises are "better" or "higher" than black rats and goats.  But if we take an interest in the tortoises, if we want to see them and study them, and if tourists come to the Galapagos to see them, then we can decide that the tortoises should be protected and the black rats and goats should be eradicated.  Here we appeal not to some ecocentric or biocentric standard of value--as some "deep  ecologists" have asserted--but to our anthropocentric desires.  Strictly speaking, even the distinction between "native" or "endemic" species and "invasive" species is a human value judgment, because even the "native" species were originally "invaders" from the mainland.  Our management of the distribution of life forms in the Galapagos Islands is an exercise in human niche construction, by which we construct the environment of the Galapagos to create a cognitive and aesthetic niche to satisfy our natural desires.

An Evolutionary Tour of the Galapagos

This is a picture of the Cormorant, the boat on which my wife Mary and I sailed around the Galapagos Islands for 8 days (June 15-22).  It's only slightly larger than Darwin's ship, the Beagle, which was 90-feet-long and 25-feet-wide.

When I learned that I would be lecturing on Darwinian liberalism at the Mont Pelerin Society conference in the Galapagos, sponsored by the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, I decided that I wanted to extend my travelling in South America in ways that would help me think about evolution and liberalism.  So my wife and I scheduled a 4-week-long trip to Peru (a week in Cuzco and Machu Picchu) and Ecuador (2 weeks in the Galapagos, a few days in Quito, and 1 week in the rainforest at Sacha Lodge).

In preparing for our trip to the Galapagos, I found four books to be instructive: Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle (especially chapter 17 on the Galapagos); Thalia Grant and Gregory Estes, Darwin in Galapagos: Footsteps to a New World (Princeton University Press, 2009); Edward Larson, Evolution's Workshop: God and Science on the Galapagos Islands (Basic Books, 2001); and Julian Fitter, Daniel Fitter, and David Hosking, Wildlife of the Galapagos (Princeton University Press, 2000).  Grant and Estes use Darwin's published and unpublished writings as well as other documents on the voyage of the Beagle to retrace Darwin's steps through the Galapagos and to recreate his thinking about evolution during and after his time in the islands.  Thalia Grant is one of the daughters of Peter and Rosemary Grant, who are famous for their studies of "Darwin's finches" in the Galapagos.  Larson's book is a comprehensive history of the study of the Galapagos from the first European arrival by Father Tomas de Berlanga, the bishop of Panama, in 1535 to the research of the Grants at the end of the 20th century.  As his subtitle suggests, Larson stresses the theme of how the study of life in the Galapagos supported a scientific view of the cosmos that challenged the traditional view of the world as divinely or intelligently designed.  Wildlife of the Galapagos is a complete guide to the plants and animals of the Galapagos.

Most of the photographs that you will see in my posts were taken by my wife.

The Site of Darwin's First Landing in the Galapagos, September 16, 1835, on the Island of San Cristobal, Near What Is Now Puerto Baquerizo Moreno


June 15
We entered the Galapagos by flying from Guayaquil to the Baltra airport, which is near the island of Santa Cruz.  We were met at the airport by Carlos Mosquera, our naturalist guide.  Carlos was born and grew up on the island of San Cristobal.

                                             Carlos and Me on the Cormorant

                                                                Carlos

We travelled on a bus across Santa Cruz to meet our boat in Puerto Ayora.  This trip across the island allowed us to see the full range of ecological zones in the islands from the arid coastline to the wetter highlands. 

All around us, we could see the lava rocks that reminded us that all of these islands were created by volcanic eruptions.  The western islands are the newer islands that sit on a volcanic hot spot.  The eastern islands are the older islands that have moved on tectonic plates towards the South American mainland.  Eventually, these eastern islands will sink back into the ocean from which they originally arose.

As we entered the moist zone in the highlands, we stopped to hike through a Scalesia cloud forest.  Scalesia is a genus of trees endemic to Galapagos.  The 15 species and 6 subspecies have adapted to different vegetation zones on different islands, varying in size from 1 meter to over 15 meters in height.  Scalesia pedunculata is the dominant species in the Scalesia Zone on Santa Cruz.

We then continued our trip with a stop to see some of the famous giant tortoises.  We saw them on a private farm that sells admission to tourists to see the tortoises, which illustrates the importance of free enterprise ecotourism in preserving endangered species for tourists who will pay to see the species.

Unlike most of the rest of the world, the dominant land animals in the Galapagos are reptiles rather than mammals.  And like Scalesia and many other plants and animals, the giant tortoises are endemic to the Galapagos and no where else in the world, and they show adaptive radiation--different species are adapted for different islands.  The tortoises are generally considered to be 14 or 15 distinct species.

But if these different kinds of tortoises are not distinct species, but varieties or subspecies of the same species, as some scientists believe, then it's not clear that this is evidence for the evolutionary origin of species.  This might show microevolution (evolutionary change within a species) rather than macroevolution (evolutionary change from one species to another), and if so, creationists could accept this.  This is a crucial issue for how one interprets the evidence in the Galapagos.  To support Darwin's theory, one must find evidence not just of microevolution but of macroevolution.  Darwinists argue that varieties are incipient species, and that microevolutionary changes within a species can eventually bring the macroevolutionary emergence of new species.  But proving this is difficult.  One can see this, for example, in the debate over the famous studies of the finches in the Galapagos by Peter and Rosemary Grant.  I will return to this in another post.

Many of the first Europeans who landed in the Galapagos were shocked to see plants and animals that could be found nowhere else in the world.  Moreover, the differences between the islands was hard to explain.  Why would God choose to create these species here and nowhere else?  And why would He choose to create different species for different islands?  If one is a Biblical creationist who believes that the opening chapters of Genesis provide a literal history of life's origins, then one would have to explain how the giant tortoises and other endemic species moved from Noah's Ark to the Galapagos.  If one believes in intelligent design theory, one would have to explain exactly when, how, and why the intelligent designer chose to create the species endemic to the Galapagos and no where else in the world.

Darwin saw that the species endemic to Galapagos were somewhat different for the different islands while resembling species found on the South American mainland.  Eventually, he inferred that the species on the Galapagos had migrated to the islands from the mainland sometime after the islands had formed by volcanic activity.  This would explain the dominance of large land reptiles rather than mammals, because reptiles were more likely to have survived a long trip by sea to the islands.  This theory is open to testing.  For example, Darwin experimented at his house in Down to see how long seeds could float in seawater while retaining their power for germination.

By contrast, it is not clear whether creationism and intelligent design theory are open to empirical verification or falsification.  As I have observed on this blog, the proponents of intelligent design theory are careful to employ a purely negative style of rhetorical argumentation--looking for difficulties in Darwin's theory and demanding clear step-by-step evolutionary explanations that can be demonstrated, while refusing to offer any testable explanations of their own as to exactly where, when, how, and why the intelligent designer creates new life forms.  Actually, the Biblical creationists are better at offering testable theories.  If the story of Noah's Ark is literally true, then this suggests falsifiable predictions about how species on the Ark moved out from Mount Ararat after the Flood subsided.

After we arrived in Puerto Ayora, my wife and I walked down Charles Darwin Avenue, the main street along Academy Bay, and we noticed that at one end was the Charles Darwin Research Station and at the other was a Seventh Day Adventist Church and School.  The church and school have murals that teach creationism--one shows the animals of Galapagos praising their Creator.

We questioned Carlos about whether there was any debate among the people living in Galapagos about the truth of Darwin's science.  He thought that while some religious believers rejected Darwin's theory as a threat to the power of their churches, there were some who saw no necessary conflict here, because we might conceive of God as originally creating the laws of evolution as the way to execute His creative design.  As I have noted previously on this blog, there have been many theistic evolutionists ever since Darwin first formulated his theory.  And even some of the intelligent design theorists--such as Michael Behe--have embraced some form of theistic evolution.

The primary reason why some religious believers object to Darwin's theory is not, I think, the worry about whether it is scientifically true, but the worry about its moral and political implications.  If human beings are to be explained as purely products of a natural evolutionary process, what does that mean for human morality?  Can our human moral sense be explained empirically as rooted in our evolved human nature?  Or does that moral sense point to some transcendent or cosmic standard of right and wrong?  This was one of the main issues in my lecture at the Mont Pelerin Society conference, where I argued that a Darwinian liberalism could be founded in a moral anthropology rather than a moral cosmology.

In future posts, I will continue my evolutionary tour of the Galapagos.  I will also write a series of posts on the lectures and discussions at the Mont Pelerin Society conference.

Some related posts can be found here, here, here, and  here.

Darwinian Liberal Ecotourism in South America

                                        The Tree of Souls in the Film Avatar

                                    A Kapok Tree in the Sacha Lodge Reserve

When my wife and I travelled recently to the Sacha Lodge reserve in the Ecuadorian rainforest, we saw this kapok tree on one of our hikes.  This tree is over 160 feet tall. Our naturalist guide identified this as the "Avatar tree"--the Tree of Souls that is connected to the mother goddess Eywa worshipped by the Na'vi tribe of Pandora, a lushly forested moon of a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri star system in the mid-22nd century.  James Cameron's 2009 film is an environmentalist statement on how the sacred order of nature is threatened by human beings who destroy nature through their brutal extraction of natural resources.  Our guide at Sacha Lodge often reinforced this lesson during our hikes--telling us that while the indigenous people of the Ecuadorian rainforest have a religious respect for nature, the oil companies extracting oil from the rainforest are destroying the sacred balance of nature. 

And yet this same guide explained the forest and everything in it as a product of Darwinian evolution.  Every plant and animal was explained as shaped by an evolutionary process of competition for survival and reproduction.  For example, we saw kapok trees being covered by "strangler" fig trees.  Trees in the rainforest compete for sunlight by expending great energy in growing tall to reach the sunlight in the high forest canopy.  Some species of fig trees have evolved an exploitative strategy by which they grow around tall kapok trees to reach the canopy, and eventually they will kill the kapok trees that they have exploited. 

This made me wonder:  if the "Avatar tree" is part of the sacred balance of nature, why would the mother goddess allow it to be killed by a strangler fig tree?

                                                           Sacha Lodge

                                               Breakfast at Sacha Lodge

Throughout my trip to spots in Peru and Ecuador, as I talked with guides and fellow ecotourists and read various guide books, I noticed repeatedly a remarkable contradiction between the reliance on Darwinian science and the appeal to a religious cosmology of ecocentric environmentalism.  The idea of a "balance of nature" that is threatened by human interference implies some kind of cosmic design or sacred order that is morally superior to human desires.  But from a Darwinian point of view, there is no fixed balance of nature, but rather a perpetual flux in an evolutionary process of life and death that shows no cosmic design.  Far from being in balance, evolving nature is perpetually out of balance.  (See John Kricher, The Balance of Nature: Ecology's Enduring Myth [Princeton University Press, 2009.)

As I indicated in my lecture on "The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism" at the Mont Pelerin Society conference in the Galapagos Islands, there is a fundamental contradiction between the traditional Platonic and religious conception of a moral cosmology and the Darwinian conception of a moral anthropology.  A moral cosmology assumes that moral order is ultimately cosmic in conforming to some cosmic moral order--a cosmic God, a cosmic Nature, or a cosmic Reason.  A moral anthropology assumes that moral order is ultimately relative to each species, and thus our human morality expresses our human desires that do not necessarily have any cosmic normativity. 

Darwin showed the moral anthropology of his evolutionary science in his debate with Frances Cobbe, who was shocked by Darwin's claim that the "moral sense" would be different for each species that might evolve a capacity for morality.  Against this Darwinian claim that human morality is necessarily anthropocentric, the environmentalist conception of a balance of nature assumes an ecocentric morality of cosmic design.

The ecotourism that I saw in South America manifests a Darwinian liberalism, but it also shows a cosmological environmentalism that is neither Darwinian nor liberal.  Most ecotourists come from Western Europe, North America, and Australia.  Most of them are Darwinian liberals--Darwinian in that they assume that evolutionary science can explain the origins and purposes of all living beings, liberal in that they assume that all human beings should be free in their moral and cultural choices as long as they do not initiate coercive violence against others.  Darwinian liberal ecotourists take pleasure in exploring the natural and cultural variety of the world in ways that satisfy their bourgeois desires for comfort and security. 

Sacha Lodge hires a private security agency to patrol its land to protect the tourists from any human threat.  It also provides plenty of good food and drinks and luxurious cabins that are regularly sprayed with insect repellent.  The trails and creeks at Sacha Lodge are carefully maintained by the staff workers who build boardwalks and use chainsaws to cut up fallen trees and brush that would impede the tourists hiking through the forest.  The electricity comes from generators powered by fuel from the oil companies.  Some of the guides are members of indigenous tribes who explain the cultural traditions of their people.  And, of course, all of this is supported by the willingness of the tourists to pay for it.

Rainforests should be preserved, but not because they belong to some sacred order of the cosmos.  They should be preserved to satisfy human desires, including the aesthetic and intellectual desires of ecotourists like me who enjoy seeing and understanding the extraordinary biodiversity found in rainforests.  In fact, one reason that I went to Sacha Lodge was because it is across the Napo river from the Yasuni region of Ecuador, which is reputed to have more species of plants and animals than anywhere else on Earth of comparable size.  I would be saddened, therefore, if the extraction of oil from that region resulted in the destruction of the rainforest.

But to express moral disgust with the human "interference" with wild nature, as many of my fellow ecotourists do, is incoherent and unsupported by Darwinian science.  The ecotourism that one sees in the Sacha Lodge reserve and elsewhere in South America is a display of what some biologists call human niche construction.  In some manner, most plants and animals construct the niches that they occupy to satisfy their needs.  For example, in the rainforest, one sees many huge termite nests in the trees.  These nests are built by the termites as architectural constructions that become part of the niche to which they are adapted.  Similarly, human beings construct places like Sacha Lodge as niches in which we can satisfy our natural desires for comfortable self-preservation, aesthetic beauty, and intellectual understanding.  If the good is the desirable, then the human good is relative to the evolved natural desires of the human species.

But many ecotourists are not satisfied with this Darwinian view of morality as rooted in human evolution, because they yearn for a cosmic morality expressed as a religious environmentalism that invests cosmic nature with a sacred value.  For example, some of the ecotourists visiting Quito, Ecuador, are attracted to the Casa del Alabado Museum in the Old Town area of Quito, which is a museum of Precolumbian art.  In explaining the meaning of this art of the indigenous people of South America prior to the European invasion, the museum guidebook claims that "the religious thinking of these peoples, developed by wise men and women in the past" shows their "ancient, sophisticated, dynamic and impressive philosophy" (21).   The guidebook transforms the Amerindian moral cosmology into an environmentalist moral cosmology.  It explains: "In the past, our world was understood as an ecological system in which the flow of energy supported all life and where all the elements, living or not, intercommunicated.  It was always necessary to resort to the primordial world, in order to ensure the flow of vital energy" (34).  It observes: "Humans have developed many rituals that fostered communication between three parallel worlds: the world above, or celestial realm, the world beneath or the underworld, and our world in the middle.  These rituals perpetuated the flow of vital energy, the dynamic balance of nature and the renewal of life" (57).  By implication, the religious cosmology of these "wise men and women" is endorsed because it rightly respected the flow of energy through the "balance of nature."  It seems that the Amerindians were like the Na'vi of Avatar in their cosmic religion of environmental reverence for nature.

One has to read this museum guidebook carefully to notice a few references to the Amerindian practice of human sacrifice as one of the rituals necessary for maintaining the flow of energy in the balance of nature.  One can also notice that these rituals were carefully managed to sanctify the rule of elites over their subordinates. 

Shouldn't a Darwinian liberal ecotourist ponder the question of whether the falsity of the Amerindian moral cosmology promoted the immorality of human sacrifice and exploitative elite rule?

Kenneth Minogue, 1930-2013

Kenneth Minogue died on June 28.  He died from a heart attack that he suffered on a plane while flying out of the Galapagos Islands to Guayaquil, after he had participated in a conference of the Mont Pelerin Society on "Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty."  Father Robert Sirico, who had lectured at the conference, was permitted by the police to enter the plane at Guayaquil to administer the last rites.

The MPS conference was organized around a series of lectures in which each lecturer was paired with another lecturer taking an opposing point of view.  My lecture was on "The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism," and Ken's lecture was to offer an alternative to mine.  Indeed, he expressed his skepticism about my argument for Darwinian science as supporting classical liberalism.  I will be writing a series of posts on the MPS conference in the Galapagos, which will include an account of my discussions with Ken.  I am deeply saddened that he is not alive to respond to my comments.

Previously, I had known Ken only by reputation, and I was pleased to meet him for the first time and talk with him at the conference, including a conversation over breakfast only a few hours before his death.

Ken was a professor emeritus of political science at the London School of Economics, where he had been a professor since 1959.  He was a prominent scholar of the history of political philosophy.  At LSE, he was one of a small group of academics (including Michael Oakeshott) defending conservatism and classical liberalism.  He was on the board of the Centre for Policy Studies, founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher in the mid 1970s, and thus he was one of those who participated in the resurgence of classical liberalism associated with Thatcher's leadership.

Although Ken was not persuaded by my argument, it is significant that classical liberals like Ken and others at the MPS/Galapagos conference were willing to devote an entire week in the Galapagos pondering the possible implications of evolutionary science for the moral and political thought of liberalism.