Sherlock Detects Strauss's Secret

In defending "Darwinian natural right" and "Darwinian conservatism," I show the influence of Leo Strauss and his students. But my effort to ground "natural right" in a scientific understanding of human nature is scorned by most Straussian scholars.

This points to the fundamental ambiguity in the legacy of Strauss. On the one hand, the powerful appeal of Strauss came from his warning that modern relativism and nihilism had created a crisis for the West by denying natural right or natural law as the ground for any natural standards for the true and the good. On the other hand, Strauss and his students have not offered any explanation for how exactly natural right or natural law can be defended in the modern world.

In a recent issue of Modern Age (Summer 2006), Richard Sherlock reflects on this ambiguity as manifesting "The Secret of Straussianism." Strauss's Natural Right and History is a profound account how how the premodern conception of natural right was subverted by modern relativism and nihilism. But then, as Sherlock indicates, the reader is left at the end of the book waiting for a philosophic grounding of natural right that will withstand the attack from modern traditions of thought. Strauss's silent refusal to satisfy this expectation indicates the true secret of Straussianism.

Contrary to the common assumption that Strauss was arguing for a return to classic natural right, Strauss was actually teaching--even if only by his silence--that a grounding of natural right is impossible. Consequently, Sherlock suggests, Strauss's appeal to premodern natural right was more rhetorical than philosophic. He thought it was morally and politically salutary to attack modern relativism and nihilism as inferior to classic natural right. But even as he did this, he left clear indications to his careful readers that there really was no ground in nature for natural right.

Sherlock rightly points to the most popular Straussian book--Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind--as conveying the secret teaching. Bloom scorns the debilitating effects of modern nihilism, and yet he praises Nietzsche as Socratic in his skepticism. Bloom's passionate devotion to philosophy as perpetual openness manifests the very nihilism that he supposedly rejects. (As I have indicated in some previous postings, Harvey Mansfield shows a similar skepticism about natural right, in his book on manliness, when he asserts "manly nihilism.")

Sherlock concludes, "the secret of Strauss's teaching is that there is no philosophic answer to the fundamental problems of human existence: What is the good? How shall I know it? How shall I live in its light?"

What could Strauss have done to ground natural right? Sherlock suggests that he should have followed the path taken by one of his fellow German Jews--Simone Weil--and turned toward faith or theology as the ultimate ground of moral and political judgment. I agree that such an alternative must be taken seriously, because it satisfies the natural human desire for religious understanding by moving beyond nature to nature's God as the uncaused cause of the cosmos, including the moral order of the whole.

But Sherlock also recognizes other possibilities. Strauss could have tried "to ground natural right in the scientific study of human nature, as some of his extended followers, such as Roger Masters and Larry Arnhart, have done."

As Strauss and many of his students have suggested, the problem of natural right could be solved only if we could defend a teleological conception of nature against the apparent denial of teleology in modern natural science. Natural right seems to require a cosmic teleology so that that the order of the whole universe supports human goodness.

But I would argue that natural right could be grounded in a biological teleology that does not require a cosmic teleology of the whole universe. Strauss points to this possibility in Natural Right and History: "For, however indifferent to moral distinctions the cosmic order may be thought to be, human nature, as distinguished from nature in general, may very well be the basis of such distinctions" (p. 94).

While Bloom seemed to endorse the idea of natural teleology as rooted in human biology, he also suggested that such natural teleology is only an illusion., even if a noble illusion. "I mean by teleology," Bloom wrote, "nothing but the evident, everyday observation and sense of purposiveness, which may be only illusory, but which ordinarily guides human life, the kind everyone sees in the reproductive process" (pp. 110, 130-31). The qualifying phrase--"which may be only illusory"--allowed him to simultaneously deny and affirm the truth of natural teleology, which creates a strangely ambiguous position that one can find among many of Strauss's students, wanting to root Aristotelian natural right in a science of human nature, but also wanting to adopt a Kantian dualism that separates nonhuman nature and human culture.

One reason for this Straussian ambiguity is that Bloom and others think that the teleology required for natural right is a cosmic teleology that has been rendered implausible by modern science. But as I have argued, Aristotelian natural right requires only an immanent teleology--the observable goal-directed character of living beings--that is supported by Darwinian biology. Here I agree with Leon Kass that a crucial part of a "more natural science" would be a Darwinian understanding of teleology as rooted in "the internal and immanent purposiveness of individual organisms" (Towards a More Natural Science, pp. 249-75).

Antony Flew's Review

Antony Flew, emeritus professor of philosophy at Reading University in the U.K., has written a review of Darwinian Conservatism in the October-November issue of Right Now!, a British conservative journal.

Flew is famous as a philosopher who has written some of the classic philosophic texts arguing for atheism. He was an active participant in C. S. Lewis's Socratic Club. But while he was impressed by Lewis's thoughtful and fair-minded defense of theism, he was not persuaded.

So when he began a few years ago to suggest that the argument for "intelligent design" had led him to change his mind and question his atheism, this became an international news story. The history of Flew's thinking can be found in various places, including this Wikipedia article. It seems, however, that even if Flew is no longer a strict atheist, he has moved more towards deism rather than theism. He wonders whether the complex order of the universe doesn't point to God as First Cause. But he doesn't see this God as having the personal attributes of the Biblical God, and he doesn't believe in an afterlife.

This resembles my position, which is that the quest for ultimate explanations--the search for an uncaused cause--leads us to a fundamental choice between Nature or Nature's God as the unexplainable ground of all explanation.

Since Flew's review is not available online, I will quote it in its entirety here:

"The author of the present book is an American with, primarily, American readers in mind. He therefore, when thinking about Darwin's theory of the origin of species, cannot fail to be reminded that when, early in the 20th century that theory began to be taught in public schools, William Jennings Bryan supported legislation in the State of Tennessee prohibiting any teaching of evolution as denying the Biblical teaching that human beings were directly created by God. Today's well financed campaign to establish that the universe itself is the product of intelligent design points to the fabulous integrated complexity of the world of living creatures as itself the strongest evidence of intelligent design.

"Larry Arnhart's thesis in this book, which I think he proves abundantly, is that the constraints of our biological nature explode the most persistent delusion of the Left: 'that man is so malleable that he can be reshaped or transformed through political actions.' Consequently, a Darwinian politics is a largely conservative politics.

"When Harvard University biologist Edward Wilson argued that sociobiology should study the biological roots of human nature, he was attacked by those on the Left. What bothered the Leftists, Wilson explained, was 'the threat perceived to the core concept of their belief system--namely, that there is no human nature, that human behaviour and human social institutions are entirely the product of economic forces and culture; in other words, that human beings can be shaped by imposing an ideal social order.'

"Larry Arnhart is to be commended for producing an excellent book about conservative thought."

Peter Lawler and the Conservatism of Manly Nihilism

Many conservatives reject Darwinian science not because they believe that it's false, but because they fear that it's true.

In The Use and Abuse of History, Friedrich Nietzsche declared: "If the doctrines of sovereign becoming, of the fluidity of all concepts, types and species, of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal--doctrines that I consider true but deadly--are thrust upon the people for another generation with the rage for instruction that has now become normal, no one should be surprised if the people perishes of petty egoism, ossification and greed, falls apart and ceases to be a people."

Unlike other animals, Nietzsche believed, human beings cannot live without giving their lives meaning and importance--the meaning and importance that come from creating transcendent values as artistic illusions that elevate human life by giving it cosmic significance. In support of this tragic view of mythic art as necessary to create value and conceal the meaningless chaos of the world, Nietzsche criticized "scientific Socratism" for seeking pure knowledge through science and philosophy, which fails to see the need for artistic illusion to make human life meaningful and important.

Many conservatives have implicitly adopted this Nietzschean position in warning against Darwinian science as a "deadly truth." This is evident in a recent article by Peter Augustine Lawler--"Real Men Prove Darwin Wrong (Again)"--in the fall, 2006, issue of The Intellercollegiate Review. Identifying Harvey Mansfield and Tom Wolfe as "America's two most astute social commentators," Lawler praises them for their manly rejection of Darwinian science.

In a lecture on "The Human Beast," which can be found here, Wolfe argues that what separates human beings from other animals is the human capacity for speech. He writes: "The Book of John in the New Testament says cryptically: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' This has baffled Biblical scholars, but I interpret it a follows: Until there was speech, the human beast could have no religion, and consequently no God. In the beginning was the Word. Speech gave the beast its first ability to ask questions, and undoubtedly one of the first expressed his sudden but insatiable anxiety as to how he got here and what the agonizing struggle called life is all about. To this day, the beast needs, can't live without, some explanation as the basis of whatever status he may think he possesses. For that reason, extraordinary individuals have been able to change history with their words alone."

So to Wolfe it seems that human beings yearn for a transcendent meaning to life that is created by the words of "extraordinary individuals." Darwinian science threatens that human creation of values by explaining human beings as mere beasts and nothing more. Lawler and other conservatives agree.

Lawler also likes Mansfield's defense of "manliness" against Darwinian thought. While Mansfield opens and closes his book on manliness by apparently endorsing the teaching of Plato and Aristotle that "manly virtue" is rooted in nature, the central chapter of his book (Chapter 4) is devoted to the "manly nihilism" of Teddy Roosevelt and Friedrich Nietzshe. He thus leaves his reader suspecting that the secret teaching of the book is the truth of "manly nihilism."

"The most dramatic statement of nihilism," Mansfield asserts, "would be the one where the man is the source of all meaning." Nietzsche is "the philosopher of manliness in modern times." Teddy Roosevelt is the best political expression of manly nihilism, particularly in the "assertiveness of executive power." Mansfield is famous for his Machiavellian defense of executive prerogative outside the rule of law, which includes some recent articles defending President Bush's displays of the "assertiveness of executive power."

Although the underlying intent of Lawler's article is hard to discern, his praise of Wolfe and Mansfield as the alternative to Darwin suggests something like Nietzsche's position. And just as Nietzsche warned against "scientific Socratism," Lawler warns against Darwinian Socratism. He writes: "There is, after all, something Socratic in evolutionism's and neuroscience's denial of the pretensions of the individual about his soul and his identity, its denial of the very existence of 'the self' that distinguishes you from me, and us from all the other animals."

Against Nietzshce and Lawler, I would suggest that Darwinian science can be true without being deadly. Darwin often asserted (in The Descent of Man, that the mental capacities of human beings and other animals differ immensely in degree but not in kind. Conservatives like Lawler worry that this denies the freedom and dignity of human beings as uniquely spiritual animals with transcendent longings.

But Darwin sometimes spoke of the human difference as a difference in kind and not just in degree. "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them. We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity." He also identified "the habitual use of articulate language" as "peculiar to man." And he observed that "no animal is self-conscious," if this means "that he reflects on such points, as whence he comes or whither he will go, or what is life and death, and so forth."

So here Darwin would agree with Lawler that human beings are unique in their capacities for reflecting on the meaning of life and death, for self-conscious moral choice, and for articulate language, which make human beings different in kind from other animals.

How does one explain the origin of that human difference? In Chapter 8 of Darwinian Conservatism, I explain it as the human soul arising through the emergent evolution of the primate brain. With the increasing size and complexity of the frontal lobes of the primate neocortex, novel mental capacities appear at higher levels that could not be predicted from the lower levels. Even if we see this as the work of God in creating human beings in His Image, we can't deny the possibility that He exercised his creative power through a natural evolutionary process.

My point, then, is that conservatives like Lawler have no reason to fear a Darwinian science of human life as promoting a reductionistic materialism that denies human freedom and dignity. A Darwinian conservatism can explain the unique capacities of human beings for deliberate thought and action as arising from the emergent evolution of the soul in the brain.

So What's Wrong with Incest?

"Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide never to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it ok for them to make love?"

That's the way Jonathan Haidt began an article on the psychology of moral judgment. He reported that most people immediately condemn what Julie and Mark did as wrong, but they struggle to give reasons for this judgment. I have had the same reaction from students in my classes when I present this story. They react with disgust. But it's hard for them to give reasons to justify their disgust.

Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, argues that this illustrates the primacy of emotion in moral judgment. Against the tendency to explain morality as caused by moral reasoning, he suggests that moral reasoning usually comes after we have already made a moral judgment from our emotional reaction. He also claims that such a view of moral judgment as initially caused by emotional intuition is confirmed by biological psychology.

I agree. In fact, I think the incest taboo is one of the clearest illustrations of how a moral rule can be explained by a Darwinian view of human biological nature. In The Descent of Man, Darwin acknowledged that "of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important," and explaining the uniqueness of human moral experience created the "greatest difficulty" for his theory of evolution.

Proponents of the "theory of special creation" would say that that the human moral sense or conscience shows that human beings have been specially created in God's image, so that He has implanted a conscience in them. God's specific commands against incest are found in the Old Testament, in the 18th chapter of Leviticus, which was long adopted in Western legal codes as a set of rules for forbidden marriages.

But Darwin rejected the belief "that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience." He saw the rules for forbidden incestuous marriages as a subject for scientific investigation. During his lifetime, there was an intense debate in England over whether the marriage of first cousins should be prohibited as incest. Darwin had a personal stake in this, since he had married his first cousin (Emma). He proposed that Parliament should authorize a study of cousin marriages to see if their offspring suffered from inherited defects. Although his proposal was rejected, his son George did a study that concluded that the risk for the offspring of cousin marriages was often low.

In his book The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Darwin has a chapter "On the Good Effects of Crossing, and On the Evil Effects of Inbreeding." He surveys the experience of animal breeders in discovering the bad effects of inbreeding. And he wonders whether natural selection could have shaped a natural aversion to incest among human beings. "Although there seems to be no strong inherited feeling in mankind against incest, it seems possible that men during primeval times may have been more excited by strange females than by those with whom they habitually lived. . . . If any such feeling formerly existed in man, this would have led to a preference for marriages beyond the nearest kin, and might have been strengthened by the offspring of such marriages surviving in greater numbers."

In Xenophon's Memorabilia (IV.iv.19-23), Socrates identifies the "unwritten laws" legislated by the gods as laws that could not be disobeyed without natural penalties. He speaks of the incest taboo as one of those "unwritten laws," because those committing incest tend to produce defective offspring. Darwin's evolutionary explanation of this would illustrate, then, how Darwinian science might support the traditional idea of "natural law" or "natural right." (I have argued this in a book chapter: "The Incest Taboo as Darwinian Natural Right," in Arthur Wolf and William Durham, eds., Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo: The State of Knowledge at the Turn of the Century [Stanford University Press, 2005].)

Edward Westermarck elaborated Darwin's reasoning for the biological evolution of the incest taboo in his book The History of Human Marriage (first published in 1889). Westermarck's theory can be summarized in three propositions. First, inbreeding tends to produce physical and mental deficiencies that lower Darwinian fitness. Second, as a consequence, natural selection has favored an emotional disposition to feel a sexual aversion to those with whom one has been raised in early childhood. Third, this natural aversion to incest creates moral disapproval that is expressed as an incest taboo.

This put Westermarck in conflict with Sigmund Freud's Oedipal theory of human psychology and culture, because Freud insisted that the inclincation to incest was natural to human beings, and that the taboo against incest arose as a purely cultural construction that human beings created to repress their natural desires for incest, this cultural repression of human nature being necessary for civilization. So morality, as Freud understood it, required a conquest of human nature by human culture. By contrast, Westermarck believed that morality was a cultivation of natural human emotions, so that the incest taboo was a cultural expression of a natural human disposition shaped in human evolutionary history.

Over the past century, the evidence for Westermarck against Freud has grown. Arthur Wolf's study of "minor marriages" in China is one line of evidence. A traditional form of Chinese marriage was for parents to give their infant daughter to another family to be raised with the family's infant son, so that when the boy and girl reached maturity, they would be married. Wolf showed that these marriages were generally unsuccessful, because children raised together as siblings developed a sexual aversion to one another.

Another line of evidence came from the experience of the Israeli kibbutzim. In the attempt to create a fully socialist community, the kibbutz would have infant children taken from their families and put in the "children's house," where they would be raised together communally. When they reached sexual maturity, the children were encouraged to find marriage partners among those with whom they had been raised. But the children resisted this, because even though they were not biological relatives, they felt as if they were siblings and thus felt revulsion at the thought of sexual mating with one another.

So it seems that these children in China and in the kibbutzim were manifesting the "Westermarck effect": as a result of an innate disposition shaped by evolutionary history, they developed a sexual aversion to the children with whom they had been raised, even though they were not actually biological siblings.

Another kind of evidence for Westermarck's theory is that it now seems that many primates show incest avoidance. While Freud thought that incest was common among nonhuman animals, we now know that this is not true. For most primate species, males leave their native troop when they reach sexual maturity, which seems to be a mechanism for avoiding excessive inbreeding. For chimpanzees, the females leave at maturity to join another troop. This means that chimp mothers will be in the same troop with their sons. And their sons often do attempt to mount their mothers and sisters, but when the males reach sexual maturity, their mothers and sisters generally push them away. This is what Westermarck's theory would predict. The human incest taboo is humanly unique as a legal and moral norm, but it expresses a natural emotional disposition that can be found in primate evolutionary history.

Freud may have been fooled by his psychoanalytic experience, because in his Vienna, many of his patients had been raised by nurses rather than their parents, and in these conditions, the "Westermarck effect" would not kick in. After all, Oedipus himself was separated from his mother shortly after birth, and so again the sexual aversion to mating with immediate family members would not have been acquired by the Westermarck mechanism.

This Darwinian theory of the incest taboo goes a long way to explaining marriage law. In the United States today, all states prohibit people from marrying their parents, their children, or their siblings. But there is disagreement over cousin marriages. Early in the nineteenth century, all states permitted cousin marriages (as is the case today in Europe). But now cousin marriages are prohibited in 31 states, while being permitted in 19 states. (The debate over cousin marriage is surveyed in Martin Ottenheimer's book Forbidden Relatives [University of Illinois Press, 1996].) There is a good argument for permitting cousin marriage, because we now know that the genetic risk from deleterious recessive genes is often low for cousins, but high for those more closely related. Further, Westermarck's theory would predict that except in cases where cousins are reared together, there will not be a strong moral emotion against cousins mating.

There is great variation in the incest taboos across cultures depending upon the cultural definition of kinship categories.  But the variable boundaries of the incest taboos are extensions of an invariant core centered on the nuclear family.  The emotional reaction is strongest against incest with one's parents, siblings, and children.  The intensity of this emotional reaction fades as one moves away from the nuclear family.

Of course, incest does occur. But the pattern of incestuous behavior follows the predictions of Darwinian theory. Men are more likely to be the perpetrators of incest than are women, because men, unfortunately, are more indiscriminate in their sexual promiscuity.  The most common form of incest is actually child abuse--fathers abusing their daughters.  And this is more likely to occur if the fathers did not participate in the early rearing of the daughters.

Some people might not feel any moral inhibition against incest because they suffer from a psychopathic poverty of moral emotions. But still, the natural aversion to incest among most human beings is so strong that we formulate moral and legal norms against incest and enforce them as expressions of our natural emotional dispositions.

We can see how reason comes into play here. We might, for example, call on our knowledge of the genetics of inbreeding to rationalize our abhorrence of incest. But this is only a rationalization of a moral abhorrence that causes our moral condemnation of incest as an expression of moral emotion.

For more posts on the laws and moral psychology of incest, go here, here, here, here. here, here, here,  here., and here.  I have written about the flaws in Haidt's use of the "Julie and Mark incest story."

Michael Shermer's Darwinian Conservatism

The October issue of Scientific American has a short column by Michael Shermer on why Christian conservatives should accept Darwinian evolution. A longer statement of Shermer's arguments can be found in Chapter 8 of his new book Why Darwin Matters.

I agree with Shermer. In fact, much of what he says conforms with what I have written in Darwinian Conservatism and elsewhere. But in some ways, Shermer makes his points more clearly and concisely than I have.

As Shermer indicates, many American Christians accept evolution, and this includes those Catholics who follow the lead of Popes such as John Paul II who have endorsed the theory of evolution as true and as compatible with Christianity. And yet opinion surveys indicate that many American evangelical Christians and many conservative Republicans do not recognize the truth of evolution.

In the attempt to persuade these Christian conservatives to accept evolutionary science, Shermer makes seven kinds of arguments. I will summarize each of his arguments in my own words and adding a few points along the way.

His first argument is that Christians should accept evolution for the same reason that they accept any scientific theory--because it is true. The Bible says that God ordered the sun to "stand still" for a day to help Joshua win a battle (Joshua 10:10-15). This was cited by the Catholic church authorities who condemned Galileo's heliocentric theory as contrary to the Bible, which speaks of the sun as moving around the earth. But, of course, now all Christians see this as a misinterpretation of the Bible, because they accept the truth of the Copernican/Galilean theory of the solar system. So why shouldn't this apply to Darwin's theory as well?

His second argument is that the magnificence of God's creation does not depend on exactly how He exercised his creative activity. If He chose to act through natural evolutionary means, His work is still glorious. Darwin himself made this point when He spoke of the grandeur of God in creating one or few forms of life at the beginning and then impressing His laws onto matter so that the formative powers of nature could unfold by evolution.

Shermer's third argument is that Intelligent Design Theory and creationism present a demeaning view of God by conceiving of Him as being like us, but just more powerful and more intelligent. God is reduced to working like a human artisan who must employ whatever materials are available to make his product, just as a watchmaker makes a watch.

Shermer's fourth argument is that the Darwinian account of human morality supports traditional morality by showing how the human dispositions to cooperation, sympathy, reciprocity, and social bonding generally could have become part of evolved human nature. Far from subverting healthy morality, Darwinian science shows how it can be rooted in human nature.

Of course, human beings are naturally bad as well as naturally good, competitive as well as cooperative. Christians would explain this as a result of the Fall and original sin. But as his fifth argument, Shermer suggests that evolutionary theory can explain the negative side of our evolved nature as well as the positive side. Our species has evolved to be both altruistic and selfish, and much of our moral experience has to do with finding ways to overcome the conflicts this creates. Darwin speaks of the moral experience of regret or remorse: we follow some selfish impulse of the moment, only to discover later that this contradicts our social nature, and we regret what we have done, which gives rise to guilt and conscience.

Shermer goes on, as a sixth argument, to indicate how evolutionary theory explains the need for moral and religious codes to manage the conflicts in our evolved natures. We evolved in small bands in which the members had to cooperate with and trust one another in order to compete with those outside the band. Moral emotions, such as love, guilt, and shame evolved to enforce cooperation with one's family and friends. But this cooperative behavior did not extend beyond the band or tribe. We are naturally inclined to cooperate with our in-group but not with out-groups. This is manifest in the Old Testament, which teaches trust and cooperation within the community of Israelites, while also teaching brutal attacks on those outside the community. Gradually, the advantages of extended exchange and cooperation in ever wider circles allowed human beings to live in larger communities. The Christian morality of the New Testament promotes principles such as the Golden Rule to sustain such extended cooperation. But even Christian morality shows in-group/out-group distinctions--as in the depiction of the extermination of the forces of evil in apocalyptic war in the book of Revelation.

We have evolved for monogamous mating. But we have also evolved to have inclinations to opportunistic promiscuity. In the long run, infidelity is harmful because it promotes distrust and conflict. This explains why religious morality gives so much attention to condemning and punishing infidelity and adultery.

Of course, some people think they can cheat without being punished because they think they can lie successfully. But, Shermer notes, if we have evolved to be good liars, we have also evolved to be good lie detectors. And so the best way to persuade others that we are moral people is actually to be moral people!

Not only does Darwinian evolutionary theory support the moral and religious positions of Christian conservatism, Shermer indicates in his final argument, it also supports the economic and political thinking of conservatism. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection parallels Adam Smith's account of economic order as arising spontaneously from competitive markets. Like Darwin, Smith thought that human beings were both cooperative and competitive. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith laid out his account of the moral sentiments as rooted in the natural capacity for sympathy or fellow-feeling by which we share in the experiences of others. Darwin adopted this thinking for his account of the evolution of the moral sense. And yet Darwin also saw the selfish side of human nature, and this would support the Smithian idea of channelling the selfish motives of economic agents through free competition. Moreover, the very idea of economic order as arising spontaneously from free exchange without design by central planners follows the same logic as evolution by natural selection without design. Friedrich Hayek saw this parallel between Darwin and Smith. In fact, he believed that Darwin's insight into evolution by natural selection was simply an application to the biological world of what Darwin had learned from the Scottish moral philosophers about the spontaneous order of social evolution.

I would reinforce this last point by saying that a Darwinian view of human evolution supports a realist view of human beings as limited in both knowledge and virtue, which contrasts with the utopian view of human beings as perfectible. The belief in human perfectibility runs through the history of the Left from the French Revolution to the present. The belief in human imperfectibility runs through the history of conservatism from Adam Smith and Edmund Burke to Friedrich Hayek and Russell Kirk.

So there you have it--seven reasons why Christian conservatives should be Darwinians.

Shermer's column can be found here.

Adam Smith and the Neurology of Sympathy

In 1996, some Italian scientists studying the neural activity of macaque monkeys reported a remarkable discovery. They had been recording the neural activity in the premotor cortex of these monkeys whenever they engaged in a manual behavior such as picking up a raisin with their hands. Then one day, one of the scientists casually picked up a raisin with his own hand, and he was startled to notice that electrodes in the brain of the monkey were showing the same neural activity that appeared when the monkey picked up raisins. This scientific report claimed that there were "mirror neurons" in the brains of these monkeys--neurons that would fire when the monkey performed an action or when the monkey observed the same action performed by some other agent. Ever since then, research has confirmed the apparent existence of such neurons in various parts of the primate brain that suggest a neural basis for imitative learning and social understanding.

Research using brain imaging technology has shown that similar mechanisms exist in the human brain. Recent studies have uncovered a mirror system in the human brain that is more extensive and more complex than that found in other primates. Some areas of our brain become active both in response to our own actions and in response to sensory information about the same actions performed by others. This includes hearing actions or hearing language that resports such actions. If I hear someone eating candy, my brain will show activity in the same area that would be active if I were eating candy. Or if I hear a report of someone eating candy, the same brain area becomes active.

It has been suggested that these mirror systems might explain the capacity for empathy. And, indeed, it has been reported that people who score high on tests for empathy show a stronger activation of these mirror systems than people who scored low for empathy.

It seems possible, then, that our human capacity for "putting ourselves in someone else's shoes (or mind)" is literally just that. We rehearse mentally what another person is doing or experiencing by going through the same mental activity that we would have if we were ourselves doing or experiencing this.

This is what Adam Smith called "sympathy," or "fellow-feeling with any passion whatever," in the first chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In Darwinian Conservatism, I show how this underlies Smith's account of the moral sentiments, and how Charles Darwin adopted this in his biological acccount of morality. Our natural sociality, our natural capacity for imaginatively putting ourselves in the place of others, and our concern for judging how people appear to us as well as how we appear to others provide the natural basis for human morality and culture.

Now, if the research on "mirror neurons" is confirmed and deepened, this would sustain my argument about how morality and culture are rooted in human biological nature, because this would uncover the neural basis for such moral experience. Moreover, this could suggest an evolutionary pathway for human morality--the evolution of mirror systems in the primate brain could have brought about the emergence of human morality in the human brain.

Aristotle declared that human beings are by nature more political than the other political animals because by nature they have capacities for language and reason that allow them to organize communal life around shared conceptions of expediency and justice. Now we are seeing confirmation of Aristotle's biology of political animals by seeing how this political biology arises in the human brain's capacity to imaginatively project itself into the brains of others.

Darwinian Conservatism and Divine Command Theory

In the The American Conservative, Heather Mac Donald has expressed the frustrations of a "skeptical conservative" who cannot understand why so many American conservatives assume that morality and good citizenship require religious belief. Catholic conservative Michael Novak has written a response. This opens up a fundamental issue for conservatives.

In defense of Darwinian conservatism, I have argued that although religious belief can be helpful in reinforcing morality, it is not absolutely necessary, because ultimately our morality depends on a natural moral sense rooted in our evolved human nature. Religious conservatives like Carson Holloway and Peter Augustine Lawler have criticized me for not seeing how morality depends on religious belief.

I have defended my position as a Darwinian version of traditional natural law reasoning. Human moral experience is natural insofar as it arises from those natural inclinations that we can know by reason alone. Of course, that natural moral law can be taught by religion, but it can stand on its own natural ground even without religion. Darwin shows how that natural moral law could have arisen by natural evolution.

Michael Novak seems to agree with my view of natural law when he says it is "the law discovered by reason alone, without revelation," although revelation provides a helpful "short cut" to this natural law. Here then would seem to be common ground for all conservatives: morality can be known by natural experience alone because it is rooted in the natural moral sense, but religion can reinforce this moral law for believers.

And yet there is still a strong inclination among religious conservatives to a divine command theory of morality that drives much of the criticism of my Darwinian conservatism. The assumption of divine command reasoning is that moral obligation must be grounded in the commands of a good and loving God. If God did not exist, there could be no moral obligations.

One of the best statements of this divine command theory of morality is C. Stephen Evans' book Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford University Press, 2004). (A paperback edition of this book is being published this month.). Evans has a chapter criticizing my reasoning in Darwinian Natural Right as an example of "evolutionary naturalism." Evans endorses what he takes to be Kierkegaard's divine command morality as founded on the command of Jesus to love our neighbors, understood as a universal and disinterested love of all human beings equally. Evans then criticizes my reasoning as flawed insofar as I don't acknowledge that all morality must be rooted in such a divine command.

Darwin sees a natural tribalism in human morality. We are inclined to be more cooperative with those close to us--relatives, friends, and fellow citizens--than to those far away. Human beings are naturally inclined to cooperate within groups so as to compete successfully with other groups. Darwin thinks a universal sympathy for humanity is possible, but only as an extension of social emotions cultivated first in small groups. He assumes that as we expand our social sympathies to embrace all of humanity, these sympathies become weaker as we move farther away from our inner circle of family, friends, and fellow citizens. And yet this extension of sympathy to embrace all of humanity is strong enough to support the Golden Rule as the foundation of morality. Still, the tribalism of morality can never be eliminated. Charity starts at home. And in war, we properly celebrate the virtuous courage of soldiers in killing the enemy.

Although Evans does not draw out the full implications of his view of universal love as a divine command, he suggests that this requires absolutely disinterested love for all human beings equally, which would require absolute pacifism (see pp. 319, 328 in his book). To favor our friends, relatives, and fellow citizens over strangers would violate this universal love commandment. To use violence against evil individuals would violate it. And to fight in war would certainly violate it. Such universal love might even require the abolition of private property and family life. Some kind of pacifist socialism would seem to be required. It is hard to see that many human beings could embrace this as morally acceptable.

Evans finds Gods commands in the Bible. But it is not clear that the Bible provides the clear moral teaching of universal love that Evans wants. God commanded Abraham to kill his son Isaac. Evans says that while God might have commanded human sacrifice in the past, we know that God cannot command that "today." He seems to assume that the love command of Jesus in the New Testament overrides the bloody commands of the God of the Old Testament. (The brutal commands of the Old Testament God include orders to slaughter innocent women and children as part of God's conquest of Canaan.) But even the New Testament concludes with the bloodiest book of the Bible--the Bible of Revelation with its vision of the apocalyptic battle of the saints against Satan at the end of history.

Evans criticizes my Darwinian arguments for the abolition of slavery and insists that the immorality of slavery arises only from its violating God's love command. But Evans says nothing about the fact that all the passages in the Bible on slavery endorse it, and thus the antebellum Christians in the American South were justified in believing that slavery was biblically sanctioned. (The recent book by Mark Noll on the theological debates surrounding the civil war tells this story well.)

As I have argued previously on this blog, the Bible lacks the authority, clarity, and reliability necessary for being a source of moral guidance. If the Bible reinforces morality, it is only because we pass it through our natural moral sense. We know that the biblical account of God ordering Abraham to kill his son must be somehow mistaken, because we know by natural moral experience that this is wrong. We know that the Bible's endorsement of slavery is mistaken, because, again, our natural moral sense condemns it. If we elevate the Golden Rule over other teachings in the Bible, its because we have arrived at the rule through natural experience. That experience also teaches us, however, that disinterested, universal love cannot be absolutely observed because we must favor family, friends, and fellow citizens over strangers. The Christian tradition of "just war" reasoning shows how our natural moral sense corrects the dangerous utopianism of a universal love ethic.

Biblical Darwinism

Biblical believers (like Carson Holloway and John West) often criticize Darwin for promoting a materialist view of morality that is morally corrupting. They argue that healthy morality requires biblical religion.

But I would say that in The Descent of Man, Darwin lays out a moral psychology that coincides with what one finds in the Bible.

Darwin sees moral progress in human history as a product of the complex interaction of innate sociality, cultural learning, rational reflection, and religious belief. "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" (Penguin Classics edition, p. 157).

In the primeval history of human beings, Darwin sees morality emerging through tribal conflict. Those tribes with more cooperative and courageous members would tend to prevail over those tribes that were less cooperative and courageous. Biblical believers criticize this as endorsing a crude morality of tribal brutality.

But the Old Testament confirms Darwin's history. Moses commands the people of Israel that in conquering the land of Canaan, they must put every town under "the curse of destruction"--every living thing must be killed (Deuteronomy 20:10-20). They must do this if they want to be successful in their conquest. They must cooperate among themselves to compete with enemy tribes with whom they cannot cooperate without being destroyed. Whenever Moses gives the reasons for obeying his laws, he explains that obeying these laws is the condition for the survival and reproduction of the people of Israel (Deuteronomy 30:15-20).

Of course, biblical believers might remind us that in the New Testament, Jesus offers a new moral law surpassing the Mosaic law. He teaches the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you (Matthew 7:12).

But Darwin quotes this verse from the Sermon on the Mount and endorses the Golden Rule as "the foundation of morality" (p. 151). He sees this as a moral conception that human beings had to learn over a long history of moral experience by which they learned to extend their humanitarian sympathy to ever wider communities. "As man advances in civlization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races" (p. 147).

This quotation from Darwin is the epigram for Robert Wright's book Nonzero. Wright argues that the moral and political history of human civilization is a history of cultural evolution in which human beings discover ways of expanding the range of tit-for-tat reciprocity to resolve "prisoner's dilemma" problems. Learning how to cooperate with those who are trustworthy while punishing those who are not trustworthy will be favored by both natural selection and cultural evolution.

Of course, Jesus' commands to "turn the other cheek" and "love your enemies" would seem to subvert the moral logic of tit-for-tat reciprocity, which requires that cheaters be punished by retaliation. But generally Christians have read this non-resistance teaching as a teaching of perfection that is not attainable in earthly life, because most Christians understand the reasonableness of the Darwinian claim that the success of morality depends on punishing the immoral.

So it seems that in some respects, the moral teaching of the Bible is Darwinian.

Has Anyone Seen Evolution?

Has anyone ever seen the evolution of a new species from ancestral species? This question points to the fundamental difficulty in Darwinian evolutionary theory, a difficulty stressed by creationists and intelligent design proponents. If the evolution of new species occurs usually over long periods of evolutionary history, then no human being has ever directly observed this history, and so the evolutionary scientist must spin out scenarios that are more or less plausible, but still open to doubt.

Darwin admitted that he could not lay out the step-by-step pathway of the evolution of species based on clearly observable evidence. In the concluding chapter of The Origin of Species, he wrote: "Any one whose disposition leads him to attach great weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject my theory." Here he foresaw the rhetorical strategy of the intelligent design proponents who rely on negative argumentation--pointing to gaps in Darwinian science and then inferring that ID must be true by default.

Darwin recognized that the ID theorists were unable to offer a positive theory of their own that would explain exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer does his work. He asked: "Do they really believe that at innumberable periods in the earth's history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues? Do they believe that at each supposed act of creation one individual or many were produced? Were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as eggs or seed, or as full grown? And in the case of mammals, were they created bearing the false marks of nourishment from the mother's womb? Although naturalists very properly demand a full explanation of every difficulty from those who believe in the mutability of species, on their own side they ignore the whole subject of the first appearance of species in what they consider reverent silence."

A few years ago, I lectured at Hillsdale College as part of a week-long lecture series on the intelligent design debate. After Michael Behe's lecture, some of us pressed him to explain exactly how the intelligent designer created the various "irreducibly complex" mechanisms that cannot--according to Behe--be explained as products of evolution by natural selection. He repeatedly refused to answer. But after a long night of drinking, he finally answered: "A puff of smoke!" A physicist in the group asked, Do you mean a suspension of the laws of physics? Yes, Behe answered. Well, that's not going to be very persuasive as a scientific answer. And clearly Behe and other ID proponents prefer not to answer the question.

Some Darwinian biologists would say that we have seen the evolution of new species--for example, in the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant studying Darwin's finches in the Galapagos Islands. There are 14 species of finches in the Galapagos. In 1977, there was a severe drought. As a result, finches with small beaks found it hard to eat the hard seeds that were left over from the drought. Finches with large beaks more adapted for eating these seeds were more likely to survive. So here, the Grants proclaimed, was natural selection in action!

The creationists and ID proponents say that this shows microevolution but not macroevolution. Natural selection was favoring some varieties of finches over other varieties. But this did not create a new species. In fact, the Grants saw that in 1983 the rainfall returned to normal, and the effect of natural selection was reversed. And yet they speculated that if there were at least one drought per decade over a 200 year period, this would push natural selection towards transforming the medium-sized ground finches into a new species. But the problem with this scenario is that it is only a speculative extrapolation that has not yet been observed.

Darwinian scientists insist that the difference between microevolution and macroevolution is only a difference in degree. As Darwin argued, every variety is an incipient species. At some point, the evolutionary change in a variety becomes so great that it becomes a new species. It's like the evolution of language. Every human language has various dialects. And eventually the cultural evolution of a dialect can turn it into a separate language, although it may be impossible to say when a dialect becomes a new language.

But then the Darwinians need to shift the burden of proof back on their critics. The species of finches found in the Galapagos are not found anywhere else in the world. But they resemble the finches on the mainland of South America. We might infer, therefore, that the ancestors of the Galapagos finches migrated from the mainland and then radiated out across the islands, so that eventually the evolution of varieties created new species. What's the alternative? If the intelligent designer did it, why did he specially create finch species unique to the Galapagos that resembled the finches on the mainland? Of course, we can't deny the possibility that this reflects some arbitrary choice of the designer that we can't explain. But Darwin thinks that his explanation is more inherently plausible.

As I have argued previously, none of this denies the work of the Creator in his original creation of the laws of nature--including evolutionary mechanisms--that could eventually bring about the evolutionary history studied by the Darwinian biologist. But it throws into doubt the assumption of special creationism and intelligent design theory that the Creator had to repeatedly intervene in the history of life to perform special miracles to create irreduciblly complex structures of life. Why do we have to assume that God was either unable or unwilling to employ the general laws of nature to carry out his creative plan?

I have written a post on the evolution of Darwin's finches in the Galapagos.

Peter Lawler's Review in MODERN AGE

Peter Augustine Lawler has written a review of Darwinian Conservatism in the summer 2006 issue of Modern Age. Unfortunately, that journal of conservative thought is not available online.

Last June 16th, I posted a reply to Lawler's most recent book--Stuck with Virtue. In that post, I anticipated the main ideas in Lawler's review.

In the review, I see again Lawler's ambivalence about Darwinian science--an ambivalence shown by many conservatives. He welcomes the way in which Darwinian science reinforces conservative ideas about traditional morality as rooted in human biological nature. He even rejects fundamentalist creationism as unreasonable. And yet he worries that Darwinism does not properly recognize the transcendent longings of the human soul for immortality as an escape from death.

As he says in his review, the "big issue" is "Darwin and death." Darwin's naturalistic view suggests that death is unavoidable. But human beings have a natural longing to live forever, a longing that is unique to human beings, a longing that leads them to religious belief in an afterlife.

As I indicate, Darwin recognizes that human beings really are unique in the living world in that they are the only animals that reflect on the meaning of life and death. And as I indicate in my books, I believe that the natural desire for religious understanding leads many human beings to long for some transcendent escape from earthly mortality.

But unlike Lawler, I don't see why all human beings must feel such transcendent longings. Some human beings will pursue an intellectual understanding of nature as the comprehensive order of the cosmos, and within that natural order, they will accept their mortality. For Lawler, this is a diversion from the inescapable longing for immortality and redemption from earthly life.

I don't see why conservatives have to agree on Lawler's Heideggerian existentialism and his claim that all human beings are "aliens" in the universe in that they desire a transcendent escape from death through immortality. Certainly, a skeptic like Friedrich Hayek would not agree with Lawler on this.

Darwinian science does not either support or refute Lawler's religious transcendentalism, which lies beyond the realm of natural human experience.

It's not clear to me why conservatives shouldn't embrace Darwinian conservatism as a position that all conservatives--religious believers as well as skeptics--can embrace

Was Charles Darwin Responsible for Adolf Hitler and the Columbine Killings?

To see the hysterical fear of Darwinian science, go here.

James Kennedy of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church has produced a television documentary entitled "Darwin's Deadly Legacy," which was shown on television stations across the United States over the past weekend. He has interviews with many of the leading proponents of creationism and intelligent design theory and critics of Darwinism, including Michael Behe, Ann Coulter, Ken Ham, Phillip Johnson, Carson Holloway, and Richard Weikart.

The documentary claims that Darwin was responsible for Adolf Hitler and for the killings at Columbine High School in 1999. The reasoning is that Darwin rejected all morality in teaching "survival of the fittest" in which the strong would destroy the weak. Hitler put this teaching into practice in his eugenics, his racism, and his anti-Semitism. The high school boys who killed 12 people and themselves at Columbine High School were also motivated by their belief in Darwinian science. One of them left a message on his website: "You know what I love? Natural selection! It's the best thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid organisms."

Darwin's responsibility for all this is supported by the interviews. Richard Weikart repeats the claim of his book FROM DARWIN TO HITLER that Hitler adopted Darwin's science. Ann Coulter says that Weikart's book opened her eyes to this ugly fact. And Carson Holloway speaks about how Darwin's science subverted traditional morality.

I have posted responses to Weikart, Coulter, and Holloway. I have pointed out that Darwin defended morality as rooted in a natural moral sense, and that he looked to the Golden Rule as the highest expression of this morality. Of course, none of this is mentioned by anyone in this documentary.

It is very disturbing that the people interviewed for this documentary would support such a crude and vulgar piece of propaganda.

Biological Conservatism?

Many conservatives who object to Darwinian conservatism seem to be open to a biological conservatism that does not assume the truth of Darwinian evolution. I wonder whether this might offer a ground of compromise.

Although the proponents of intelligent design object to evolutionary explanations of the distant causes of human biological nature, they do not seem to object to biological explanations based on more proximate causes. To find common ground among conservatives for accepting a biologically rooted natural law, we could set aside the arguments from evolutionary biology and rely only on arguments from behavioral biology. Even if we cannot agree on the evolutionary causes of human nature, we might still agree on the proximate causes of human behavioral biology.

Evolutionary causes are difficult to judge because they often are not directly observable, and we have to infer evolutionary history from indirect evidence (such as the fossil record). By contrast, proximate causes are often open to direct observation. For example, we can measure fluctuations in hormonal levels and correlate that with behavioral changes.

So, for instance, we might get general agreement among most conservatives that the human propensities to sexual differences, sexual mating, familial bonding, and parental care are rooted in human biological nature, and this challenges the radical feminist's quest to establish androgynous behavior as the norm for human beings. Such propensities of human biology are directly observable. For example, we might study the differences in male and female brains that support differences in male and female behavior. Some of us would see this as a product of Darwinian evolution. But others would see it as the work of the intelligent designer. And yet we could agree on the observable proximate causes of human sexual biology.

Conservatives such as Harvey Mansfield, Peter Lawler, Carson Holloway, and John West all seem to agree with me that there are natural norms for human conduct rooted in human biological nature, even as they disagree with me about the evolutionary causes of this biological nature. Holloway can accept the fact of evolution by natural selection. He even asserts that "religious believers can accept that the physical and even the emotional and moral constitution of human beings has been shaped by natural selection." But where Holloway departs from my Darwinian conservatism is that he believes morality cannot be secure if it is not founded on a "religiously-informed cosmic teleology." So while Holloway might accept the Darwinian account of human evolution as true, he would want to see this evolutionary history as guided by a divine intelligence directing it to some cosmic purpose. In fact, theistic evolutionists believe that Darwinian evolution is compatible with a religious belief in God as the ultimate source of evolutionary order.

Those like John West won't concede this much to Darwinian science. They insist that the intelligent designer could not, or would not, employ evolutionary mechanisms to execute his divine purpose. But even West would say that the observable biological nature of human beings supports a biologically grounded natural law in which natural human desires become normative because they manifest the moral will of God.

In a way, Holloway and West fundamentally agree with me. We all agree in that we are biological conservatives, because we believe that human biological nature supports conservative principles such as traditional morality, family life, property, and limited government.

We disagree, however, about the Darwinian basis of biology. My biology is completely Darwinian. Holloway's biology is partially Darwinian. West's biology is completely anti-Darwinian.

I argue that for a biologically based conservative morality, Darwinian biology is sufficient in providing an immanent teleology. But Holloway and West argue that this is not sufficient. No healthy morality can survive, they believe, without a religiously-grounded cosmic teleology. Holloway provides that cosmic teleology by adopting the position of theisitic evolution. West provides that cosmic teleology by adopting the position of intelligent design theory that denies Darwinian evolution completely.

Some of this might come up at the APSA panel in Philadelphia with me, Holloway, and West as participants.

The Evasive Rhetoric of NCSE

The National Center for Science Education is the leading organization in the United States that defends the teaching of evolution in public school biology classes against creationists and proponents of intelligent design. I agree with the NCSE position that the evidence and arguments for the theory of evolution support this as strongly as any theory in science. I also agree that both young-earth creationism and intelligent design theory lack the support that would justify treating them as a plausible scientific theory.

I disagree with NCSE, however, in that I see nothing wrong with allowing students to study this debate and decide for themselves whether the weight of the evidence and arguments favor evolution over creationism and intelligent design. Although I believe that evolution can be compatible with religious belief, because it is quite reasonable to be a theistic evolutionist, I understand that some people who interpret the Genesis story of creation as a literal six-day creation cannot accept Darwinian evolution. So why shouldn't students with creationist beliefs be permitted to at least discuss this in a biology class? After all, Darwin himself framed his theory as an alternative to the theory of "special creation." So if students were reading Darwin, they could examine his reasoning and consider the implications for biblical religion.

The folks at NCSE are horrorified by my proposal. They insist that both creationism and intelligent design are positions of religious faith that have no place in a science class, because we need to keep religion and science clearly separated.

But in taking this position, NCSE has to employ an evasive rhetoric. On the one hand, they insist that the Darwinian theory of evolution is not contrary to religious faith. On the other hand, they implicitly concede that the theory of evolution really does deny some kinds of religious faith--such as the biblical literalist faith in a six-day creation.

This evasive rhetoric can be seen in the latest "evolution education update" at the NCSE website. They quote from Lawrence Krauss's New York Times op-ed column about the recent state school board elections in Kansas. According to Krauss, "the battle is not against faith, but against ignorance." Teaching the truth of evolution is simply a matter of overcoming ignorance, and this does not deny religious faith at all. But then in the story about the SCIENCE magazine article about "the public acceptance of evolution," it is noted that a substantial portion of the American public does not accept the idea that human beings developed from other animal species. The explanation for this is that they believe in a literal six-day creation by God, in which God created human beings separately. But here it is clear that there really is a conflict between the creationist faith and the theory of evolution. Biblical literalists cannot believe in human evolution by natural means from other animal species without denying their version of biblical faith. So here, contrary to the rhetoric of NCSE, the battle is against faith, not just ignorance.

The fundamental problem is the naive assumption that science and religion can be kept absolutely separated. It seems clear to me that while Darwinian science is compatible with some kinds of religious belief, it denies a biblical literalist belief in special creation. To refuse to face up to this problem in the biology classroom is dishonest and evasive.

Darwinian Liberal Education

We should 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 education. 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 undergraduate student at the University of Dallas in the late 1960s. My youthful excitement about philosophy was stirred by Aristotle's declaration that all human beings by nature desire to understand, a desire tht 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.

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

This Darwinian view of liberal education has guided my teaching. At Northern Illinois University, I helped to organize "Politics and the Life Sciences" as a field of study at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the Department of Political Science. Some of the courses in the program are cross-listed as biology courses. So my undergraduate courses typically enroll a large number of students majoring in biology along with others majoring in the social sciences and humanities. My graduate students apply Darwinian reasoning to issues in political philosophy and other areas of political science. All the students see how liberal learning at its best brings together ideas and methods from all the intellectual disciplines to illuminate the deepest questions of human life and its position in the universe.

At the core of my thinking is the idea of human nature. In today's academic world, it is common for postmodernist relativists to assert tht liberal education cannot be directed to the study of human nature, because the idea of human nature is an arbitrary social construction. But I believe that there really is a universal human nature that is constituted by at least twenty natural desires that manifest themselves throughout history in every human society, because these desires belong to the evolved nature of the human species.

These natural desires direct human behavior into regular patterns. Men and women will marry and form families. Mothers will care for their children. Young males will compete for mates and status. Societies will organize themselves as male dominance hierarchies. Competing societies will go to war. And human beings will use language and other symbols to try to figure out what it all means.

A broader model of this kind of Darwinian liberal education is David Sloan Wilson's Evolutionary Studies Program (EvoS) at Binghamton University. The website for the program can be found here. This is 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 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.

Over 50 faculty members representing 15 departments are involved in the program. As a result, both faculty and students from across the 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.

I hope to help organize a similar program at NIU. In the fall of 2007, I will be team-teaching a course on evolution with a philosopher and a biologist. We then will try to build an evolutionary studies program around this course.

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

Carson Holloway in SCIENCE & THEOLOGY NEWS

Carson Holloway's book The Right Darwin? is a general criticism of any attempt to ground morality in human biological nature. His main idea is that there can be no morality without religious belief, and therefore any purely natural morality rooted in natural desires cannot work, because the natural desires are both moral and immoral. In particular, he criticizes my defense of Darwinian morality.

On January 9th, I posted a response on this blog to Holloway's book. Recently, he wrote a brief summary of his book's argument for Science and Theology News, which can be found here.

He implies that a Darwinian view of morality rejects religion as a source of moral instruction. This is not true, because as I have said on various occasions, Darwin emphasizes the importance of religious traditions as a source of moral principles. But insofar as morality is natural for human beings, morality can stand on its own natural ground even without religious belief. By contrast, Holloway insists that morality is impossible without religious belief. So it would seem that, for Holloway, atheists or those who don't have the right kind of religious beliefs cannot be moral. I disagree.

In this commentary, as in his book, Holloway is vague about what he means by "religion" and about exactly how religion supports morality. The only specific example he provides in his commentary is the moral debate over slavery. Darwin was a vigorous opponent of slavery. And I have argued that the human moral resistance to slavery was rooted in a natural human resistance to exploitation. Holloway suggests that this natural resistance is not enough without a religious ground for opposing slavery.

Holloway does not explain how exactly religion condemns slavery. He says nothing about the debate in the United States over the Biblical basis of slavery. The debate was so intense that some of the major Protestant denominations--such as the Baptists and Methodists--were split into northern and southern schisms, because southern Christians thought the Bible supported slavery, while northern Christians thought slavery was contrary to the Bible.

Slavery is never clearly condemned in the Bible. On the contrary, there are many passages that seemingly endorse slavery. Some recent books--such as Eugene Genovese's The Mind of the Master Class and Mark Noll's The Civil War as a Theological Crisis--have surveyed the Biblical arguments for slavery in the American South before the Civil War.

What would Holloway say about this? Would he say that the proslavery Christians misinterpreted the Bible? But where then does the Bible clearly condemn slavery? Does he really want to say that without the Bible it would be impossible to recognize the immorality of slavery?

This illustrates the implausibility of Holloway's argument. He assumes that religious texts such as the Bible provide a clear, reliable, and authoritative set of moral teachings that cannot be known by natural human experience. But it's hard to see how we could rely on the Bible for moral instruction if we could not pass it through that natural moral sense that Darwin saw as rooted in our evolved human nature.

Do the Bible and the Koran Support Theocracy?

In his prophetic essay from 1990, Bernard Lewis warned that Islamic fundamentalism would bring a "clash of civilizations" with radical Islamists promoting theocracy and attacking the Western tradition of religious liberty and toleration. In this essay, Lewis argued that Islam did not share the Christian tradition of separating Church and State, a tradition based on the New Testament teaching about rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and rendering to God the things that are God's (Matthew 22:20-22).

Conservatives generally accept this principle of separating Church and State and support the idea that a free government of limited powers will leave people free to exercise religious liberty without enforcing any particular religious beliefs by law. But some Christian conservatives now reject the idea of Church/State separation as a "myth." And some--like the "Christian Reconstructionists"--want to establish a theocracy based on the Mosaic laws of the Old Testament. Recently, there have been a half-dozen books warning that the Christian Right promotes theocracy. Richard John Neuhaus and others at the journal First Things dismiss this fear of Christian theocracy as ridiculous. (An example can be found here.) But Damon Linker, a former editor at First Things claims in a recent article that Neuhaus's vision of a Catholic Chrisian America really is theocratic.

Some Christian conservatives are suspicious of the idea of religious liberty and toleration because they fear that it promotes atheism. They suspect that the philosophic defenders of toleration--like John Locke--were secretly engaged in an atheistic attack on Christianity.

But I would argue that Lewis is right in suggesting that the idea of religious liberty really is rooted in the New Testament, and therefore Christians should support it. I have come to this conclusion after spending the past academic year teaching a series of three graduate seminars on the political teaching of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran.

From these studies, I have been persuaded that Roger Williams was right in reading the New Testament as teaching that Christians must defend religious liberty and reject theocracy or any governmental supervision of religion. Williams was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century for making this argument. In 1644, he published The Bloody Tenent of Persecution, in which he laid out his theological arguments for religious liberty as rooted in Christian doctrine. He established the colony of Rhode Island as a place where such religious liberty would be secured.

Williams rightly recognizes that the Old Testament is theocratic, because the Mosaic law enforced religious belief and practice by coercion. But he points out that the New Testament sets aside Mosaic theocracy by declaring that the spiritual salvation of Christians does not depend upon assuming earthly political power. The New Testament never presents the Christians as using political power to enforce Christian doctrine. Rather, the Christian churches enforced their beliefs on their members and expelled those that refused to obey, but they never used legal coercion.

Williams' point becomes clear when one notices that Christian theocrats--from the Puritans to the Christian Reconstructionists--always have to go back to the Old Testament to get their laws, because the New Testament provides no guidance for theocratic politics. (The early American Puritan laws drawn from the Old Testament can be found here.)

As only one example of how the doctrine of religious liberty enters the New Testament, consider Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians. He advises the Corinthians to enforce their Christian morality within the assembly of believers, but without trying to coerce those outside the church. "For what is it for me to judge those outside? Is it not for you to judge those inside? But God is to judge those outside" (I Cor 5:12-13).

Consider the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament in handling homosexuality. The Old Testament prescribes that homosexuals must be killed (Lev. 20:13). The New Testament condemns homosexuality but does not order that they be killed (Romans 1:26-27). The New Testament Christians have no desire to use the legal and political power of the state to enforce their religious prescriptions against homosexuality. By contrast, the Christian Reconstructionists want to restore the Mosaic law for stoning homosexuals to death.

Williams rightly reads the New Testament as separating civil authority and spiritual authority. All citizens, regardless of their religious beliefs, are subject to the civil authority of the state to enforce a peaceful social order (as indicated by Romans 13:1-7). But the spiritual authority of God over the believer is a matter of individual conscience that cannot properly be dictated by the legal power of the state (as it was in the Mosaic regime of the Old Testament).

Christian conservatives should look to Williams as providing a Christian understanding of religious liberty based on a strict separation of Church and State.

So what about the Koran? It's ambiguous on this issue. It declares that "there is to be no compulsion in religion" (2:256). And some Muslims see this as Koranic authority for religious liberty and toleration. Some argue for "minding one's own business," and they cite the Koranic 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). But the Koran also speaks of the unquestionable authority of the Prophet in a manner that can be read as suggesting the rule of the Caliphate--the merging of political and religious authority (2:30, 4:59, 4:80, 38:26). And, of course, Muhammad--unlike Jesus--combined military and political power with religious authority.

The most disturbing part of the Koran to me is that the Old Testament stories are altered to remove any indication of the immoral weaknesses of those who ruled over the people of Israel. For example, the Koran speaks of King David without ever speaking about his commiting adultery and murder in the service of his sexual lust for Bathsheba. The Koran repeatedly denounces the people of Israel for their sinfulness, while praising their leaders as morally perfect (27:15-44, 38:26-40). This denies the fundamental premise of limited government--that human beings are too limited in their virtue to be trusted with absolute power. The Old Testament supports limited government by depicting the rulers of Israel as having all the moral defects of power-seeking men. The warnings about the despotic character of kingship (I Samuel 8) have often been quoted by the critics of monarchy. The Old Testament fails, however, to see that imperfect human beings are not to be trusted with political power over the religious beliefs of the citizens.

Strauss, Darwin, and the Bible

Heinrich Meier's new book--Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (Cambridge University Press, 2006)--includes two unpublished lectures by Strauss. One of them is a lecture--"Reason and Revelation"--that was delivered in 1948 at the Hartford Theological Seminary. One point of interest for me in this lecture is that is contains some remarks by Strauss on the Bible and Darwinian evolution.

The general theme of this lecture is summarized as follows:
"Why revelation cannot refute philosophy, and vice versa. Generally: a) human knowledge is always so limited that the possibility of revelation cannot be refuted, and need for revelation cannot be denied. b) revelation is always so uncertain that it can be rejected, and man is so constructed that he can find his satisfaction, his happiness, in investigation, in the progress of clarity" (p. 174).

Finding satisfaction in investigation is for Strauss the philosophic life, understood as the highest life for human beings. As he understands philosophy, it includes science, because he criticizes the modern distinction between philosophy and science (p. 144). If philosophy is the quest to understand the whole by reason alone, then science is part of philosophy.

This irreconciliable conflict between philosophy or science and revelation is manifest, Strauss suggests, in the conflict between the Biblical story of Creation and Darwinian evolutionary science (see pp. 155, 160, 171, 173).

One way to overcome this conflict is to say that the Bible is not a scientific book, but a book concerned with matters of faith, and therefore it need not contradict the Darwinian account of evolution. Strauss rejects this solution. If we cannot take the Bible seriously in its claims about the physical world--such as the stories of God's miraculous creation of the world in the book of Genesis--then we would have to dismiss the Bible as merely a mythic text.

And yet, Strauss says, neither side in this conflict--the Bible and Darwinian science--can refute the other, because both sides beg the question at issue. Darwinian science assumes that miracles are not possible. The Bible assumes that miracles are possible. The Darwinian scientist might present evidence from the geological record that life evolved over millions of years. But this would not refute the possibility that God created life in a few days through miraculous causes that are not detectable by science.

Strauss also suggests that the Darwinian account of human evolution must contradict the Biblical teaching about Adam and Eve and the Fall. If human beings evolved from lower animals, then there was no original state of perfection from which they fell.

It is hard for me to understand the implications of what Strauss is saying. He seems to claim that there can be no reconciliation between science and the Bible. But what he says about the mutual irrefutability of philosophy and revelation suggests that thoughtful human beings must be open to both.

Moreover, a fundamental assumption of Strauss's position here is that to take the Bible seriously as revelation, we must read it absolutely literally--so that, for example, the Genesis story of Creation in six days must be read as literal history. This seems dubious to me. Inevitably, even the most serious Biblical believer must distinguish between the literal and the poetic or metaphorical writing in the Bible. For example, Pope John Paul II endorsed Darwinian evolution as compatible with the Bible, while still insisting the the divine creation of the human soul required an "ontological leap" beyond natural causes.

What Strauss describes as the fundamenal alternative between philosophy and revelation--with neither side being able to refute the other--seems similar to what I describe in Darwinian Conservatism as the problem of ultimate explanation. The ultimate ground of explanation cannot itself be explained. The philosopher or scientist will appeal ultimately to the order of nature as the final ground of explanation. The Biblical believer will appeal ultimately to God as the final ground of explanation. The uncaused cause of everything is either nature or nature's God. Appealing to nature as ultimate satisfies our natural desire for intellectual understanding. Appealing to God as ultimate satisfies our natural desire for religious understanding. As far as I can see, there is no way to resolve this dispute by rational proof.

But it is not clear to me that this is what Strauss has in mind. I would be happy to receive help from others who know Strauss better than I do.

Interview by Jamie Glazov

Jamie Glazov has posted an interview with me. The interview along with many comments can be found at the Free Republic. The comments show the wide range of conservative reactions to the idea of Darwinian conservatism.

The Desire for War

Of the desires on my list of 20 natural desires, none is more controversial than the desire for war. On page 31 of Darwinian Conservatism, I write: "Human beings generally desire war when they think it will advance their group in conflicts with other groups. Human beings divide themselves into ethnic and territorial groups, and they tend to cooperate more with those people who belong to their own group than with those outside their group. So when the competition between communities becomes severe, violent conflict is likely. Human beings desire war when fear, interest, or honor move them to fight for their community against opposing communities. War shows the best and the worst of human nature. War manifests the brutal cruelty of human beings in fighting those they regard as enemies. Yet war also manifests the moral sociality of human beings in fighting courageously for their group. One of the prime causes for the emergence of large, bureaucratic states is the need for increasing military power. War is an instrument of politics, and like political rule generally, warfare is a predominantly male activity."

In Chapter 5 of The Descent of Man, Darwin saw warfare as a crucial factor in the evolution of "the social and moral faculties" through "natural selection, aided by inherited habit." "When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if the one tribe included (other circumstances being equal) a greater number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danager, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would without doubt succeed best and conquer the other."

In recent years, a small but growing number of political scientists have applied this Darwinian view to explain war and international relations. This can be seen in three recent books: Bradley Thayer's Darwin and International Relations (2004), Stephen Rosen's War and Human Nature (2005), and Dominic Johnson's Overconfidence and War (2004).

War poses special puzzles for political scientists who employ "rational choice theory," which views human beings as rational maximizers of their self-interest. If human beings are rational egoists, it is hard to see why they would fight wars, because it would seem that rational egoists would negotiate a peaceful resolution of conflicts based on a rational assessment of comparative power, so that the weaker side would yield to the stronger. But instead, nations often show an irrational confidence in going to war and suffering losses that could have been avoided by a rational calculation of interests. It is also hard to see why rational egoists would risk their lives in warfare. Dying in war would seem to be the ultimate sacrifice of one's self-interest to others.

War might also be a puzzle for the Darwinian. After all, why would natural selection favor courage in war if this means that the dead soldier gives up his reproductive fitness?

The writing of some Darwinian political scientists explores these puzzles in ways that confirm Darwin's view of war as a factor in the social and moral evolution of the human species.

In a recent article, Dominic Johnson reports that some wargame experiments show that males show an overconfidence that inclines them to launch unprovoked attacks. Some Darwinian theorists have argued that a disposition to "positive illusions" might have been favored by the evolutionary history of human beings, particularly males. In any case, as Stephen Rosen has argued, a Darwinian view of human nature suggests that human beings are moved not just by a rational calculation of interests but also by emotional impulses inclining them to risky behavior.

In an unpublished paper, Johnson has shown that computer simulations of human evolution suggest that the disposition to heroic sacrifices in war would have been favored by group selection working through genetic evolution, cultural evolution, or gene-culture coevolution. Under certain conditions of competition for scarce resources, groups with courageous members would prevail over other groups with less courageous members. This seems to be exactly what Darwin suggested in his account of the evolution of war "through natural selection, aided by inherited habit."

This also indicates how our moral dispositions--courage, sympathy, cooperation for the good of society--might have been shaped by competition in war. We evolved to cooperate with people in our group in order to compete with others outside our group.

This evolutionary origin of morality in war is confirmed by the Bible, because Mosaic morality was shaped by the need to cooperate in war (see Deuteronomy 20:10-20, 30:15-20).

American Political Science Association Convention Panel

The 2006 meetings of the American Political Science Association will be in Philadelphia, August 31 to September 3. At 8:00 am, August 31, I will be presenting a paper on "Darwinian Conservatism" as part of a panel on "Darwinism, Religion, and the American Regime," co-sponsored by the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. Carson Holloway and John West will be presenting papers, and Joseph Bessette will be a commentator. Since Holloway and West are fervent critics of my position, it should be a lively session.

My paper summarizes my arguments for Darwinian conservatism and responds to criticisms from Holloway, Harvey Mansfield, Peter Lawler, and Ann Coulter. You can download a copy of my paper by going here.