Dawkins and Miller Review Behe's Book

The latest reviews of Michael Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution, are by Kenneth Miller, in Nature (June 28), and Richard Dawkins, in The New York Times Book Review (July 1). Although both Miller and Dawkins make some good points, neither one is intellectually rigorous, because their animosity towards Behe leads them to make evasive or even dishonest claims.

Like many critics of "intelligent design theory" (myself included), Dawkins criticizes ID for relying on negative rather than positive arguments. ID proponents challenge Darwinian scientists to present step-by-step evolutionary explanations for complex living mechanisms. Then, whenever there is some difficulty in laying out such precise explanations, the ID proponents declare that this confirms the truth of intelligent design, even though they have not themselves offered any positive explanation of the step-by-step process by which the Intelligent Designer created these living mechanisms.

But then the rest of Dawkins' review is weak. For example, he quotes the statement from Behe's biology department at Lehigh University declaring that "it is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally and should not be regarded as scientific." It's an interesting point that Behe has failed to persuade anyone in his own department to accept his claims. But I don't see how this allows us to dismiss his position without looking at his arguments and evidence for ourselves.

Dawkins goes on to ridicule Behe's argument that random mutation puts severe limits on Darwinian evolution, and Dawkins does this by using the example of how powerful artificial selection has been in breeding hundreds of different breeds of dogs, working upon the random mutational variety present in wolves. But Dawkins fails to acknowledge that Behe concedes that the evolution of species and varieties can be explained by Darwinian means--selection working on random mutation.

Miller, a biologist at Brown University, has been Behe's most persistent opponent. They have debated one another on many occasions. Miller's new review repeats his most common argument against Behe's claim that "irreducible complexity" cannot be explained by Darwinian means. Behe argues that in principle any irreducibly complex mechanism cannot by explained as a result of gradual Darwinian evolution, because any gradual process of assembly would fail since the absence of any one part would prevent the mechanism from functioning, and thus it would not be favored by natural selection. Miller--like most Darwinian biologists--responds to this by insisting that complex biological mechanisms can be assembled by natural selection working indirectly by combining simpler mechanisms that originally served some other function. This might apply, for example, to bacterial flagella--the little rotating tails that propel bacteria--because if we find certain structures within bacteria that have parts resembling the parts of the flagellar system, then we might consider the possibility that natural selection used parts originally adapted for one function to serve a new function within the flagellar system. But Miller and others fail to acknowledge that Behe explicitly recognizes this possibility of an indirect route of evolution through cooptation, so that older mechanisms serving one function might be put to use in newer mechanisms serving a different function. The problem, however, as Behe says, is that the Darwinians must explain step-by-step how such an indirect route could be likely. Behe's complaint is that Darwinians are good at spinning out speculative stories about how this might have occurred without exactly proving that this is really how it did occur. The research that Miller cites in his review suffers from this weakness--we have imaginative scenarios about how complex mechanisms might have evolved through a long, indirect route from simpler mechanisms, but there is no clear evidence that it really did happen this way.

Now, again, the problem is that as long as the Darwinians are put on the defensive and have to provide full step-by-step evolutionary pathways to complex structures, their explanations will often appear highly speculative and thus subject to doubt. But if the proponents of ID are put on the defensive and have to provide full step-by-step explanations of exactly when, where, and how the Intelligent Designer created these complex structures, then the ID position is exposed as resting on negative arguments with almost no positive content.

Miller is dishonest about one point in his review. He writes: "Apparently he has not followed recent studies exploring the evolution of hormone-receptor complexes by sequential mutations (Science 312, 97-101; 2006)." The article to which he refers offers an explanation of how the interaction between a hormone and its receptor could have evolved. When it was published last year, it was widely discussed as a possible refutation of Behe's argument about "irreducible complexity." Miller implies ("apparently he has not followed . . .") that Behe has not read this paper or has not responded to it. But as Miller must know, Behe and others responded to the paper last year on the Discovery Institute website. Behe's response can be found here. First of all, Behe suggests that this simple hormone-receptor interaction is not an example of an "irreducibly complex" system, and so he would see this as probably explainable in Darwinian terms. But he also raises some questions about the plausibility of the evolutionary scenario offered in the article. In any case, Miller leaves his reader with the assumption that Behe is completely ignorant of a widely discussed and publicized article refuting his theory.

Dawkins and Miller acknowledge only in passing what to me is the big story coming out of Behe's book--the extent to which he accepts Darwinian science and rejects Biblical creationism. Dawkins asks, "Do his creationist fans know that Behe accepts as 'trivial' the fact that we are African apes, cousins of monkeys, descended from fish?" Miller comments: "No doubt creationists who long for a scientific champion will overlook the parts of this deeply flawed book that might trouble them, including Behe's admission that 'common descent is true,' and that our species shares a common ancestor with the chimpanzee."

It's not so surprising, then, that one of the customer reviews of Behe's book on the Amazon.com website is entitled "Michael Behe Sells Out to Darwinism!"

Evolution of the Soul in the Brain

This week's "Science Times" section of the New York Times (June 26) is devoted entirely to the subject of evolution. The various articles survey some of the major areas of controversy and research in evolutionary theory today. I found two articles to be particularly good. Carol Kaesuk Yoon's article on evolutionary developmental biology can be found here. Cornelia Dean's article on the "science of the soul" can be found here.

Yoon's article covers the remarkable discoveries supporting "evo-devo," which is based on the idea that major turns in evolutionary history might have arisen from changes in developmental processes governed by a few regulatory genes. Rather than assuming that evolution of new forms requires the gradual accumulation of many small genetic mutations, evo-devo works on the thought that slight changes in the expression of a few regulatory genes could produce dramatic changes in form and even the emergence of new species. It has seemed to me for a long time that evo-devo is likely to answer many puzzles in evolutionary theory. In any case, this illustrates the remarkably rich research being done in evolutionary science today. By contrast, I am unaware of any comparable research being done by proponents of "intelligent design theory" or "scientific creationism." The mere fact that neither ID nor Biblical creationism leads to any novel research to test alternatives to evolutionary science indicates the intellectual poverty of such positions.

Dean's article surveys the implications of research in neuroscience that seems to be uncovering the neural basis of the human soul. In Darwinian Conservatism, I have a section on "The Emergent Evolution of the Soul in the Brain." My position there is very similar to that of Nancey Murphy, who is quoted in the article. Like Murphy, I think Descartes' radical dualism of body and mind makes no sense, because it contradicts our common experience of psychosomatic unity, and because it also contradicts the discoveries of modern neuroscience in showing how mind/consciousness/soul arise from the neural activity of the brain. Moreover, I also believe that this Cartesian dualism contradicts the Bible, which teaches that our minds and bodies are inextricably intertwined. Rather than looking to the immortality of the soul separated from the body, the Bible looks to the resurrection of the enspirited body. Neuroscience explores this psychosomatic unity of mind and body.

This also suggests that the emergence of the human soul arose in primate evolution once the size and complexity of the primate neocortex passed over a critical threshold, which gave human beings a freedom of thought and action that other animals do not have. God could have created human beings in His image by creating the patterns of natural evolution in the primate brain to bring about the emergence of the human soul.

This supports a Darwinian conservatism that recognizes the unique freedom and dignity of the human soul as compatible with modern natural science.

Paper at APSA Convention, Sept. 1

The American Political Science Association will be meeting in Chicago for its 2007 convention from August 30 to September 2. On Saturday, September 1, at 2:00 pm, I will be presenting a panel paper on "Three Levels of History in Darwinian Political Science." In this paper, I will be sketching a theoretical framework for Darwinian political science; and as a practical illustration, I will be applying this Darwinian framework to explaining Abraham Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. A Darwinian political science would be a historical science that would have to move through three levels of history--natural history, cultural history, and biographical history. I will be elaborating some points that are briefly stated in my commentary on Herb Gintis's article in the February, 2007, issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

David Sloan Wilson's EVOLUTION FOR EVERYONE

David Sloan Wilson's new book is a gem. Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives is based on Wilson's general course on the idea of evolution at Binghamton University, which is the one required course for an interdisciplinary program on "Evolutionary Studies." The course and the book survey Wilson's many interests and research topics in evolutionary reasoning. The book organizes all of this into a broad evolutionary view of how human life fits into the order of nature. He aims to show how evolutionary reasoning can provide a common language through which the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities could be unified into a shared vision of liberal education. Previously, I have written about my similar conception of Darwinian liberal education in posts that can be found here and here.

This fall I and Neil Blackstone will be using Wilson's book as one of the readings for our course on evolution, which we hope will eventually lead to an evolutionary studies program at Northern Illinois University. At NIU, we have already moved in this direction in the Department of Political Science through our undergraduate and graduate courses in "Politics and the Life Sciences."

The general theme of Wilson's book is conveyed by the title. It's a book "for everyone," a book that tries to make evolutionary reasoning comprehensible to any human being willing to think about it. And it presents evolution as a way of making sense of our lives as fitting within the natural order of the whole. In that way, it does indeed contribute to the ancient Aristotelian conception of liberal education.

More specifically, Wilson presents a "new way of thought" that advances the evolutionary view of human life as thoroughly part of nature (67). In arguing that we are "100 per cent a product of evolution," Wilson denies both religious creationism and secular creationism. The religious creationist believes that human beings are created in God's image so that their God-given traits set them apart from, and above, the rest of nature. The secular creationist believes that human beings use their uniquely human capacities for rational choice and cultural learning to create a human realm of artifice set apart from the natural world. The religious creationist denies Darwinian evolution completely. The secular creationist accepts Darwinian evolution as explaining the ultimate causes of the living world as including the human body, while insisting that the human mind and human culture transcend Darwinian evolution. Both forms of creationism assume the idea of human beings as "transcendent selves" set apart from the natural world.

To support his claim that Darwinian evolution can explain all of human life as part of nature, Wilson must defend a broad conception of evolution as including group selection as well as individual selection and cultural evolution as well as genetic evolution. He must then show how human evolution working at many levels provides the ultimate explanation for uniquely human traits such as family life, morality, politics, religion, science, and the arts (including dance, music, literature, and the visual arts).

The two crucial elements of this broad conception of evolution is group selection and cultural evolution. From the 1960s to the 1990s, most evolutionary biologists stressed the primacy of individual selection over group selection, because they assumed that in most circumstances the competition between individual units within groups would be stronger than the competition among groups. Wilson was one of the few biologists at this time who argued that group selection could become a powerful evolutionary mechanism, because there were many circumstances in which selection among groups would be stronger than selection within groups. Although there continues to be intense debate over this. Wilson's "multilevel selection theory" of group selection is now generally regarded as plausible.

When Ed Wilson and others argued for "sociobiology" as including the biological explanation of human nature, critics rejected this as ignoring the uniquely human power of culture as transcending genetic evolution. But Ed Wilson responded that we needed to develop a "coevolutionary" theory of human nature as arising from the interaction of genes and culture. David Wilson and others have continued this thought by arguing that culture is itself the expression of genetic propensities for cultural learning, and cultural history shows evolutionary processes in which some cultural traditions prevail over others by enhancing human survival and reproduction.

Wilson develops his arguments across a broad range of topics--too broad for me to cover in one post. But I will indicate that although I find most of his arguments persuasive, I am left with at least 5 questions about points where I would like more elaboration or clarification.

1. How does Wilson account for human dominance hierarchies? Group selection generally requires leadership in which some individuals exercise dominance. And yet Wilson tends to play down the importance of dominance. For example, he contrasts the "despotism" of chimp societies with dominant alpha males and the "egalitarianism" of human hunter-gatherer societies (163). But this ignores the fact that even human foraging societies show leadership, even if the leadership is informal and episodic. Moreover, he does not recognize Frans de Waal's contrast between the "despotic dominance style" of rhesus monkeys and the "egalitarian dominance style" of chimps, with human beings following the chimp model. Moreover, in adopting Chris Boehm's theory of human foragers as showing a "reverse-dominance hierarchy," Wilson does not acknowledge that for Boehm this means that human beings do have a propensity to dominance hierarchy, but the difference is that the desire of subordinates to resist exploitation checks the power of dominant individuals (just as it does among chimps). Wilson speaks about the "admirable qualities" of Abraham Lincoln that make his face appear beautiful to us (124). But Wilson says nothing about the character of Lincoln as an intensely ambitious man who strove for the dominant position that would give him immortal glory and fame.

2. How exactly is cultural evolution constrained or guided by genetic evolution? Wilson agrees with the "social constructivists" about the importance of culture for human life. But he insists that culture itself is a product of evolution, so that what we need is "evolutionary social constructivism" (71). But since Wilson does not believe that this "social constructivism" is completely arbitrary, because it is ultimately constrained or guided by genetic propensities and by selection for survival and reproduction (98-99), he needs to explain exactly how our genetic history shapes, but does not precisely determine, our cultural history. For example, he speaks about the Hutterite communities in which people striving to emulate the cooperativeness of the early Christians act to unify individuals into collective units. But it is noteworthy that the Hutterites have not tried to abolish family life, although attachment to one's family tends to create tensions with the larger community. Those utopian communities that have tried to abolish the family and parent-child bonding--such as the "Biblical communists" in Oneida, New York, in the 19th century and the Jewish kibbutzim in the Middle East--had to give this up when their young women protested that this was against the nature of mothers not to bond with their children. Wouldn't this be an illustration of how an innate desire for parental care constrains cultural reform? (I have argued that parental care is one of the twenty natural desires that constrain and guide cultural evolution.)

3. Is Wilson's "ideal religion" a realistic possibility? Wilson devotes much space to restating his evolutionary account of religion, which he elaborated in his book Darwin's Cathedral. He defends religion as a valuable way by which people can be bound together into groups as collective units. But he is himself an atheist, because he cannot believe in the existence of supernatural agents. The practical success of religion in binding people together for cooperation shows a "practical truth" that Wilson admires. But the theological doctrines of religion contradict the "factual truth" available to natural science. To overcome this problem, Wilson looks for an "ideal religion" that would combine the "practical truth" of religious morality and the "factual truth" of natural science. But the only religious traditions that come close to this for him are Buddhism and Confucianism (261-62), because they do not seem to depend upon any belief in supernatural agents. And yet some people have wondered whether Buddhism and Confucianism are really religions at all, because in some ways, they seem almost atheistic. Similarly, Wilson's "ideal religion" looks like an atheistic religion.

4. How does Wilson propose to deal with conflicts of interests? Wilson indicates that every major religious tradition--and even "stealth religions" like Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy--depart from factual realism by assuming that there are no conflicts of interest between self-interest and the interests of others, because they assume that properly serving the interests of others will ultimately serve one's own interests. This implies that the "ideal belief system" would have to recognize and somehow manage inescapable conflicts of interest. "The real world is full of complicated trade-offs, conflicts of interest, and win-lose situations. In principle, a belief system could score high on factual realism by representing all of these complexities and also score high on practical realism by showing how to deal with them" (274-75). But then Wilson never really explains how his "ideal belief system" would deal with such conflicts of interests. Does this hide the ugly fact that sometimes conflicts of interests are so deep that they cannot be resolved by honest negotiation and mutual trust, and consequently, the final resolution comes by force or fraud? Consider, for example, the problem of slavery in American history. As Abraham Lincoln indicated there was a conflict between the moral sense that recognized slavery as evil and the self-interest of the Southerners whose way of life depended on slavery and the self-interest of those in the North who wanted to preserve the Union. Lincoln tried to overcome this conflict of interest by proposing voluntary compensated emancipation with voluntary colonization of the freed blacks somewhere outside the United States. When this proposal was rejected, and the country was thrown into Civil War, the final resolution of the issue came by force of arms. Is there any way of avoiding such tragic conflicts of interest? Or would evolutionary theory teach us that this is part of the tragic character of the human condition?

5. What is the "shared value system" that would make the "global village" a "moral community"? Wilson argues that his evolutionary theory of group selection can be applied to international relations. After all, "nations are nothing more than very large groups that are trying to function as collective units" (283-84). He lays out 14 points for promoting international cooperation. One of his points is that "morality is required for morale," and therefore, "a shared value system is . . . required at the international scale for the global village to become a moral community" (292). But what would this "shared value system" be? International human rights? Universal brotherhood? How exactly would this work? Wilson doesn't say. If he were to say more, he would have to again confront the problem of conflicts of interests. Isn't it utopian to expect that there will be no deep conflicts of interests among nations? Won't such conflicts of interests make war inevitable? Wouldn't Darwinian science support a realistic acceptance of the tragic dimensions of human life as facing deep conflicts of interests at all levels of social life--from the family to the village to the tribe to the nation to the international community?

In raising such profound questions about the nature of human social life as a product of natural evolution, Wilson's book shows the kind of deep thinking that would be promoted by a Darwinian liberal education.

Gnosticism and Existentialist Conservatism

Opposition to Darwinian explanations of human nature is rooted primarily in the idea of the "transcendental self"--the idea that human beings have some psychic or spiritual capacity that sets them apart from and above the rest of nature. Against this idea, Darwinian science explains human beings as fully within the order of nature and thus at home in the universe.

The transcendentalist rejection of Darwinism can be either religious or secular. Religious transcendentalism affirms the uniqueness of human beings as created in God's image and thus set above the rest of creation. Secular transcendentalism affirms the uniqueness of human beings as having the capacity through reason or culture to create themselves as belonging to a realm of freedom beyond the realm of natural causality. Religious conservatives often adopt the first form of transcendentalism. Secular liberals often adopt the second.

The transcendentalism that denies Darwinian naturalism assumes a radical dualism of mind and matter that follows not from orthodox Christianity but from the Christian heresy of Gnosticism. The Gnostics believed that the natural world was a prison into which the human soul had been thrown by the evil god of the Old Testament. The escape from this worldly prison required Gnostic enlightenment by which the redeemed could leave the natural world for their true home beyond the cosmos. Matter is evil. Only spirit is good. Therefore, the Gnostics believed, Jesus as divine was pure spirit without body (contrary to the orthodox Christian doctrine of incarnation). (On this and other points, the depiction of Gnosticism in Dan Brown's novel THE DA VINCI CODE is erroneous.)

Hans Jonas wrote one of the classic books on Gnosticism--The Gnostic Religion. His studies of Gnosticism allowed him to recognize that the modern existentialist tradition--from Pascal to Nietzsche to Heidegger--rested on the Gnostic idea of human beings as aliens in the universe, transcendent selves seeking to escape their imprisonment in nature. He saw this modern existentialist version of Gnosticism as a reaction against the modern Cartesian conception of the universe as a material mechanism without mind or spirit. The existentialist attack on modern natural science as a materialistic reductionism that denies human dignity and freedom was a modern restatement of the Gnostic image of human beings as aliens in a world of dead matter.

This Gnostic attack on modern science and appeal to the transcendent self is evident in the writing of Walker Percy--particularly, his book Lost in the Cosmos. Percy rightly argues that symbolic thought and conceptual speech are uniquely human. But to suggest that natural science cannot explain this, because it is some kind of mysterious miracle that shows a transcendent self beyond nature, ignores the possibility that the human capacity for symbolic thought evolved from the non-symbolic thought of apes.

Percy's existentialist Gnosticism has been the basis for Peter Augustine Lawler's existentialist conservatism. According to Lawler, all human beings are "aliens" in the universe, because their true selves transcend the natural order of the universe, and thus natural science can never truly account for the alienated spirit of humanity. Darwinian science, in particular, denies this reality of the transcendent self. Lawler has been an influential voice among conservatives who reject Darwinian science as a reductive materialism. Some of my posts on Lawler can be found here, here, and here.

These existentialist conservatives fail to see how Darwinian science actually refutes any Cartesian reductionism that separates matter and mind. Although it initially looked like the final triumph of materialism, Darwinian evolution actually rejected the terms of modern materialism by denying the absolute separation of objective matter and subjective mind. Jonas developed this point well in his essay on "Philosophical Aspects of Darwinism" in his Phenomenon of Life. By showing how the human mind could emerge out of nature and by affirming the continuity of human beings and other animals as conscious beings, Jonas indicated, Darwinian science denied the radical transcendence of human beings as set apart from nature. But it also thereby elevated the whole living world by presenting it as the meeting place of matter and mind, and thus it overcame the Cartesian conception of human beings as isolated and alienated thinking beings in an unthinking world. Darwinian science exposed the absurdity of Cartesian dualism as denying organic reality and our psychophysical experience as bodies in which mind emerges naturally.

Darwinian conservatism rejects the existentialist conservatism of Lawler and others who follow the Gnostic tradition of radical dualism in which human beings as transcendent selves feel themselves to be aliens thrown into a cosmic prison.

The secular transcendentalism of the Left shows the same Gnostic dualism in which matter and mind must be forever separated, and any Darwinian explanation of human nature arouses abhorrence as a degrading denial of human freedom and dignity.

Against this Gnostic, transcendentalist assumption that human worth requires that we set human beings apart from nature as if they were aliens from another world, the Darwinian conservative would say that we have not been thrown into nature from some place far away. We come from nature. It is our home.

As a footnote, I should say that there is a lot of scholarly debate these days over the accuracy of Jonas's account of Gnosticism. Some scholars of early Christianity now argue that labeling the Gnostics as "heretics" obscures the similarities between Gnosticism and "orthodox" Christianity. Some of this debate was surveyed last year in an article by Richard Byrne ("The End of Gnosticism?") in The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 5, 2006).

The Failure of Utopian Idealism in the Gaza Strip

The triumph of Hamas in the Gaza Strip is a reminder of the dangerous consequences of the Wilsonian idealism in the Bush Administration's foreign policy.

When Hamas won the parliamentary elections last year, I wrote a post on how this showed the weakness in the utopian idealism of the Bush neoconservatives. To assume that merely holding popular elections will promote liberty and good government shows a utopian view of human nature. The same mistake explains the debacle in Iraq, which has been the subject of some posts that can be found here and here.

At least now more and more people are questioning the utopian assumption of an "end of history" in which democracy and capitalism triumph inevitably through some teleological historical process. Patricia Cohen has a good article on this in The New York Times.

Darwinian conservatism would teach us that achieving ordered liberty is a complex evolutionary process that cannot be rationally designed or assumed to be historically inevitable. The evolution of liberty emerges through a hierarchy of three kinds of order--natural desires, customary traditions, and prudential judgments--that cannot be produced merely by rational design.

Coyne's Review of Behe

Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, has written a review of Michael Behe's new book for The New Republic (June 18). I generally agree with his assessment.

Like me, Coyne is impressed by how far Behe goes in accepting Darwinian evolution: "Basically, he now admits that almost the entire edifice of evolutionary theory is true: evolution, natural selection, common ancestry." "He even accepts the one fact that most other IDers would rather die than admit: that humans shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees and other apes." As I have indicated in a previous post, I believe this general acceptance of Darwinian science is going to break up the broad coalition that the Discovery Institute has tried to create. Surely, the Biblical creationists are not going to agree that the Intelligent Designer created human beings from apes!

And yet, of course, Behe does argue that Darwinian evolution is severely limited because random mutations cannot create the complex mechanisms of life. But on this point, Coyne shows, Behe's argumentation is weak and even sophistical. For example, he argues that the evolution of precise protein-protein interactions cannot be explained as a product of natural selection working on random mutations, because the simultaneous emergence of three or more mutations to create one protein-protein interaction is too improbable. Coyne rejects this reasoning by indicating that Behe gives no evidence to support his assumption that this could not happen through one mutation after another, involving more and more amino acids, so that a weak interaction favored by natural selection could be followed by ever stronger interactions.

I also agree with Coyne that Behe's rhetoric--and the rhetoric of ID in general--depends on a strategy of negative argumentation, so that one demands that the Darwinian scientists prove the step-by-step pathway of Darwinian evolution for complex biochemical phenomena, but without explaining the step-by-step pathway by which the intelligent designer did this. If one asks the proponents of ID to explain exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer created irreducibly complex mechanisms, they refuse to answer. If they appear to win the debate, it's only because they have applied standards of proof for Darwinian theory that they could never satisfy themselves.

As Coyne indicates, Behe was made to look foolish when he was cross-examined in 2005 at the Pennsylvania trial for the Dover public school case on teaching ID. Behe was forced to admit, for example, that his definition of science was so loose that it would include astrology. It is remarkable that Behe says nothing about the Dover case in this new book, which confirms the impression of many people that the decision against ID in that case was devastating for the entire ID movement.

Coyne's review can be found here.

A strong critique of Coyne's review by a proponent of evolution and critic of ID--Jason Rosenhouse--can be found here. Although Rosenhouse's criticisms are a little too harsh, he is right to point out that Coyne and other critics of ID are often not as rigorous in their argumentation as they should be.

Slavery, Southern Conservatism, and Darwinian Natural Right

"Slavery is a conservative institution."

"Human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon."

The first quotation is from Thomas R. R. Cobb's Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States (1858). The second is from Russell Kirk's Conservative Mind (1953). A Darwinian conception of natural right supports Kirk against Cobb.

Kirk's remark comes in his section on the "Southern conservatism" of John Randolph and John C. Calhoun. Kirk argues that their Southern tradition of conservatism has never recovered from their imprudence in defending slavery. Elsewhere, Kirk praises Abraham Lincoln for his prudent statesmanship in his handling of slavery and the Civil War. But Kirk never explains exactly why the proslavery position was imprudent. I would say that Lincoln was a prudent statesman because he never lost slight of the evil of slavery as violating natural right, while Calhoun defended slavery as a "positive good." This moral blindness on Calhoun's part crippled him in a way that prevented him from being a truly prudent statesman.

Calhoun's "positive good" defense of slavery is elaborated in Cobb's book, which is the only legal treatise on slavery written by a Southerner. Cobb was a prominent lawyer and law professor in Georgia who helped to write the Confederate Constitution. As a summary of the proslavery position, Cobb argues that slavery conforms to both natural law and divine law. Slavery is natural because negroes are natural slaves who are physically, intellectually, and morally inferior to whites, and thus the enslavement of negroes improves them and makes them happy. He finds a counterpart to negro slavery in the slavery of ants. "It is a fact, well known to entomologists, and too well established to admit of contradiction, that the red ant will issue in regular battle array, to conquer and subjugate the black or negro ant, as he is called by entomologists. And, that these negro slaves perform all the labor of the communities into which they are thus brought, with a patience and an aptitude almost incredible." Cobb does recognize the humanity of the negro as "a man, endowed with reason, will, and accountability." And yet he accepts the arguments of the scientific racists who claimed that the black race was naturally inferior in its physical, intellectual, and moral traits.

By contrast, Charles Darwin was a fervent opponent of slavery who rejected the attempts of the scientific racists to justify slavery as natural. Pierre Huber was the first naturalist to observe and write about slavery among ants in 1810. In The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin reported his own studies of ant slavery and offered a theory of how it could have evolved by natural selection. But he did not see this as a natural counterpart to human slavery.

In my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right, I have suggested that considering the similarities and differences between ant slavery and human slavery illuminates the biological nature of slavery. The similarities indicate that slavery among ants and humans is rooted in a natural inclination to social parasitism in which slavemakers exploit their slaves through coercion and manipulation. The differences indicate that the uniquely human opposition to slavery is rooted in a natural moral sense that resists exploitation, because human beings are naturally inclined to detect and punish exploitation. In The Descent of Man, Darwin gives his account of how that natural moral sense evolved as part of human nature.

Some of the opponents of Darwinian moral naturalism insist that morality requires a transcendent source in religious belief. But in this debate over slavery, we see that such religious belief--at least as coming from Biblical revelation--does not provide us reliable moral guidance. Cobb was able to show that the Bible--both the Old Testament and the New Testament--sanctioned slavery. (Recent books by Mark Noll and Eugene Genovese have surveyed the history of Southern proslavery arguments based on the Bible.) If the Bible cannot resolve such a moral debate, then we have to appeal to our natural moral experience that does not depend on religious belief. Darwinian science indicates how such moral experience might be founded in our evolved human nature.

The prudent statesmanship desired by conservatives requires some standard of natural right as providing the moral compass for political judgment about great questions such as slavery. Darwinian natural right sustains such statesmanship.

Behe's New Book--The Discovery Institute's Big Mistake?

The early responses to Michael Behe's new book are predictable--the proponents of intelligent design praising it, the opponents denouncing it. But, as I have indicated in my previous post, I think there's a big story here that people are missing. They're missing it, because most people have not yet read the book carefully.

A careful reading of the book suggests that in sponsoring and promoting this book, the Discovery Institute is making a big mistake. As I have indicated, Behe concedes so much to Darwinian science--the limited power of natural selection working on random mutation, common descent, the evolution of human beings from primate ancestors shared with chimpanzees, rejection of Biblical creationism as "silly", support for theistic evolution--that Behe actually subverts much of the moral and religious agenda of the Discovery Institute. After all, he even questions the goodness and omnipotence of the intelligent designer in deliberately creating malaria!

My prediction is that as people have time to read this book more carefully, it's going to produce a backlash from those who would normally agree with the Discovery Institute/intelligent design program. At the very least, Biblical creationists are going to see Behe as their enemy.

Michael Behe's Attack on Biblical Creationism

Michael Behe's new book--The Edge of Evolution--has just been published, and the most remarkable feature of the book is his attack on Biblical creationism.

Much of the influence of the "intelligent design" movement has depended on Behe's earlier book, Darwin's Black Box, first published in 1996. This new book elaborates some of the reasoning that was only implicit in his earlier idea of "irreducible complexity" as a sign of intelligent design.

Behe distinguishes three elements of Darwinism--random mutation, natural selection, and common descent. He accepts common descent, including the descent of humans and chimpanzees from common ancestors (72). He also accepts the Darwinian mechanism by which natural selection works on random mutation. But he insists that that mechanism is severely limited in what it can do. The "edge of evolution" is determined by two criteria. The criterion of "steps" says that "the more intermediate evolutionary steps that must be climbed to achieve some biological goal without reaching a net benefit, the more unlikely a Darwinian explanation" (104). The criterion of "coherence" says that random mutation cannot show "a coherent ordering of steps to a goal," which would be a sign of intelligent planning.

Behe's reasoning turns largely on his elaboration of a few examples of how Darwinian mechanisms work in the evolutionary history of malaria, the HIV virus, the E. coli bacterium, and the notothenioid fish in the Antarctic that have evolved to live at subfreezing temperatures.

In the last chapter of the book, Behe incorporates arguments about the "fine-tuning" of the universe and the "anthropic principle" as extending his biological arguments for intelligent design.

As the reviews of this book come out, the reviewers will be identifying some of Behe's scientific errors. (I have already seen advance copies of the reviews by Neil Blackstone for The Quarterly Review of Biology and Sean Carroll for Science.) For example, there is evidence that the cumulative selection for the sequential addition of favorable mutations is far more common than Behe is willing to admit. There is also evidence against Behe's "two-binding-sites rule"--that Darwinian evolution cannot explain protein complexes with more than two binding sites.

In future posts, I will say more about Behe's scientific errors. But what catches my attention now is how strongly he rejects Biblical creationism--particularly, the sort of creationism manifest in Ken Ham's "Creation Museum."

Behe says that to treat the Bible as a "science textbook" is "silly" (166). And in asserting the purely scientific character of intelligent design reasoning, Behe insists that there must be "no relying on holy books or prophetic dreams" (233).

In embracing Darwinian common descent, Behe accepts the idea that human beings evolved from primate ancestors shared with chimpanzees, because he believes that the genetic similarity between human beings and chimps makes this the only reasonable conclusion. So Behe agrees with Darwin's declaration that the human species was "created from animals." (Keep in mind that some public opinion surveys report that the majority of adults in the United States do not believe that human beings evolved from some earlier species.)

Behe believes that intelligent design is required to explain the emergence of the higher taxonomic levels of life--kingdoms, phyla, classes--but not the lower levels--orders, families, genera, species. So it seems that the evolution of species could be fully Darwinian (218).

Behe also doubts the power and morality of the intelligent designer. He concludes that "an intelligent agent deliberately made malaria," and thus the intelligent designer deliberately decided to kill millions of human beings, including innocent children (237). When we see how "horrific" life on earth really is, Behe suggests, we must wonder: "Maybe the designer isn't all that beneficent or omnipotent" (239). After all, the intelligent designer is responsible for creating "nature red in tooth and claw" (43).

Although Behe seems to reject "theistic evolution" in two passages (210, 229), he generally seems to accept it. Consider, for example, the following passages. "The possibility of intelligent design is quite compatible with common descent, which some religious people disdain. What's more, although some religious thinkers envision active, continuing intervention in nature, intelligent design is quite compatible with the view that the universe operates by unbroken natural law, with the design of life perhaps packed into its initial set-up" (166). "The purposeful design of life to any degree is easily compatible with the idea that, after its initiation, the universe unfolded exclusively by the intended playing out of natural laws. The purposeful design of life is also fully compatible with the idea of universal common descent, one important facet of Darwin's theory" (232).

Proponents of intelligent design theory--particularly, those sponsored by the Discovery Institute--have always tried to distinguish themselves from the Creationists. But Behe's emphatic rejection of Biblical creationism in this book makes me wonder whether we don't see here his reaction against the 2005 court case coming out of Dover, Pennsylvania. He testified in that case in favor of a public school board policy of encouraging biology students to study intelligent design theory. But at the trial, it became clear that the school board members promoting this policy were actually Biblical creationists who thought that intelligent design was virtually the same thing as Biblical creationism. This led Judge John Jones to rule that this policy violated the First Amendment prohibition on government establishment of religion, which became a big loss for the Discovery Institute and the intelligent design movement. Behe's vigorous rejection of Biblical creationism in this new book might reflect his bad experience in that case.

Although I am not fully persuaded by Behe's position, he does lay out his reasoning clearly and forcefully. And he does challenge Darwinian scientists to confront what Darwin himself called the "difficulties" in evolutionary theory.

I have written many posts on this blog related to the creationism/intelligent design arguments. You can also find a pertinent article of mine from way back in 2001 that I wrote for Salon.com. In 2000, my article in First Things on Darwinian conservatism was accompanied by an exchange with Behe and Bill Dembski, which can be found here.

Sam Brownback's Intelligent Design Theory

Senator Sam Brownback has an op-ed piece in today's New York Times entitled "What I Think About Evolution." In the debate among the Republican presidential candidates earlier this month in California, he was one of the three candidates who indicated that they did not accept the theory of evolution. This article is his attempt to clarify his position.

As one could have easily predicted, he endorses what is essentially "intelligent design theory," as promoted by the Discovery Institute. He accepts the fact of "microevolution" as "small changes over time within a species." But he rejects any evolutionary explanation of the emergence of new species from ancestral species. By implication, then, he believes that God created each species separately. He does not explain when, where, or how God did this. He does suggest, however, that God did not necessarily have to do this in "six 24-hour days." This is the way that ID proponents try to separate themselves from literal biblical creationists.

As should be clear from many of my posts, I agree with Brownback that there is no necessary conflict between science and religion. But I do dispute his assertion that science cannot provide "an understanding of values, meaning and purpose," which can only come from religious faith. He thus implies that a natural understanding of the world cannot discover "values, meaning and purpose," so that skeptics or atheists must live without "values, meaning and purpose." He thereby rejects any conception of natural moral law as comprehensible both to religious believers and nonbelievers. He leaves us wondering whether there is any natural ground for "values, meaning and purpose," and thus implies a kind of religious nihilism in which nature apart from God is meaningless.

Brownback does not explain whether he believes that all religions support the proper "values, meaning and purpose," or whether only certain religious traditions do this.

By contrast to Brownback, my argument is that although healthy religious belief can be important in reinforcing morality, there is a natural morality rooted in evolved human nature that can stand on its own even without belief in revelation. To me this seems to be the fundamental precondition for any free society with religious liberty that leaves people free to express their transcendental longings for cosmic purposefulness, with the confident assumption that we can agree on the natural grounds of morality even if we cannot agree on any cosmic teleology.

Mark Henrie's Traditionalist Conservatism

I have defended Darwinian conservatism as a fusion of libertarian conservatism and traditionalist conservatism. Libertarians like Timothy Sandefur have objected that my Darwinian science supports libertarianism but not traditional conservatism. My responses to Sandefur can be found here, here, and here. In general, I have found that traditionalist conservatives are far more suspicious of Darwinian conservatism than are libertarians. And I am sure that Sandefur would say that that confirms his argument. But I persist in my thought that American conservatism really does require a fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism, and that Darwinian science sustains that fusion by supporting the common ground of conservative thought, which is a conception of human nature as imperfect in knowledge and virtue.

Mark Henrie has written an excellent essay on traditionalist conservatism, which can be found here. Much of what I have written in response to Sandefur would apply to Henrie as well.

Although Henrie stresses the differences between the traditional conservatism of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk and the classical liberalism or libertarianism of John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Hayek, Henrie acknowledges that Burke was a Whig, and that Kirk's Burkean tradition is actually a "liberal conservatism" that combines liberty and tradition. To me, this points to conservative fusionism. Despite their personal disagreements, Hayek and Kirk had much in common. After all, Hayek identified himself as a Burkean Whig. And this commonality between Hayek and Kirk was similar to the commonality between Adam Smith and Burke.

Henrie speaks about the need for "boxing in liberalism," which resembles Peter Lawler's phrase about "putting Locke in the Locke box." A traditionalist like Henrie is not a complete reactionary (like Joseph de Maistre), who would go back to medieval absolutism and theocracy. But neither is he a complete liberal who erects liberal individualism as the only principle of the good. Henrie writes: "Liberal conservatism does not dogmatically reject the role of individual consent in politics, but nevertheless retains a conviction that the human world cannot be wholly reconceived or reconstructed on that principle."

I agree with this, and I would say that this is what Hayek called "true individualism" as opposed to "false individualism." "True individualism" recognizes the need for private property, religious liberty, and limited government as conforming to the imperfections of human nature. We cannot trust anyone with absolute power, which tends to corrupt. But individual liberty is a means rather than an end. It provides the conditions within which human beings can pursue the human good as the satisfaction of their natural human desires. Darwinian science confirms this by showing that human beings by nature pursue a wide range of natural desires, and thus a good society is one that allows human beings to pursue that human good.

As Henrie indicates, a traditionalist conservative believes that the pursuit of the human good requires family life, moral education, religious belief, and private property. Darwinian conservatism shows how those conditions are rooted in the evolved nature of human beings.

Henrie indicates that traditionalist conservatives like Kirk often expressed a nostalgic sympathy for the cause of the antebellum South. And yet he insists that Southern conservatives do not lament the passing of slavery. Is that true? Kirk often praised John C. Calhoun, and Calhoun praised slavery as a "positive good." In fact, he insisted, the liberty of the slaveholders depended on the existence of slavery. Did Kirk ever denounce slavery? Did he ever explain why the proslavery Southerners were wrong? Did he ever indicate how they were mistaken in appealing to Biblical religion as supporting slavery? Why is Henrie so evasive about this great moral issue?

With respect to foreign affairs, Henrie suggests that traditionalist conservatives are suspicious of the Wilsonian idealism and messianic rhetoric that have led to the Iraq war. But, again, here is another point of agreement with the libertarian conservatives, because they too have been deeply skeptical about the democratic imperialism of Bush's foreign policy. And, as I have indicated in various posts on this blog, Darwinian conservatism would tend to recognize the Iraq war as a utopian folly that caters to the glory-seeking ambition of the presidency--or what Harvey Mansfield foolishly praises as "manly nihilism."

The Creation Museum

As a Southern Baptist kid growing up in Texas, I was taught that every good Baptist should read through the entire Bible at least once a year. So I methodically added up all the chapters in the Bible and divided by 365 to see how many chapters I had to read each day. For three years, I began each New Year's Day by reading the opening chapters of Genesis, and I began each December 31st by reading the last chapters of Revelation. Of course, I read only the King James Translation, because Southern Baptists knew that this was the only divinely inspired English translation of the Bible.

I remember one New Year's Day noticing the date at the top of the first page of my Bible: "4004 B.C." I wondered where this came from, because I couldn't see this date given anywhere in the Biblical text. Years later, I learned that this date was set by James Ussher, who was an Anglican Archbishop in 17th century Ireland. In his book "Annals of the Old Testament," he had used chronological evidence from the Bible and from ancient historical texts to infer an exact chronology of the history of the world that began with the Creation of the world in 4,004 B.C.

I have been reminded of this by the news stories about the opening of the "Creation Museum" in Kentucky built by the "Answers in Genesis" organization directed by Ken Ham. Two good articles can be found
here and here. The website for "Answers in Genesis" can be found here. A good article on Ussher's chronology by Stephen Jay Gould can be found here.

Ken Ham is a leader of the Biblical literalists who read the book of Genesis as a science textbook that proves that Darwinian science must be false. Following Ussher's chronology, Ham believes this Biblical science shows how everything was created in 4004 B.C. and how almost all of the fossil record and the geology of the earth was shaped by the catastrophe of Noah's flood in 2348 B.C. So all of the scientific evidence that the earth is billions of years old must be false. And since human beings were created on the same day as the animals, all of the scientific evidence for species existing before the emergence of human beings must be false. So, for example, human beings must have coexisted with dinasaurs. Ham's museum presents this story in dramatic ways. Although I have not seen the museum, I have seen Ham present his vision at a convention for Illinois homeschooling parents meeting at my university a few summers ago. In fact, much of the homeschooling movement is motivated by the desire of parents to teach Biblical creation science as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.

The reasoning of people like Ham is often remarkably clever. For example, one has to be impressed by how carefully he has thought about how Noah's ark could hold a pair of each "kind" of animal, including dinasaurs.

Although I could say a lot about this, I will only briefly make three points. The first point is that in the popular debate over evolution, people often confuse "creation science" with "intelligent design theory." Actually, Ham denounces the idea of "intelligent design," because its proponents don't rely on a literal reading of the Genesis Creation story. So, as far as Ham is concerned, the folks at the Discovery Institute are actually promoting disrespect for the truth of the Bible. And yet almost all of the proponents of intelligent design are motivated by Biblical religious beliefs, and some of them are "young earth creationists" who see "intelligent design" as pointing to the truth of the Genesis Creation story. This was evident at the Dover, Pennsylvania, trial in the fall of 2005. Initially, the public school board members challenging the teaching of evolution wanted creationism taught. But when they were told this would be rejected by the courts as an unconstitutional establishment of religion, they turned to "intelligent design theory" as a way of promoting creationism without explicitly bringing up the Bible. At the trial, this deception became so obvious that they lost their case.

My second point is that this Creation Museum and the whole "creation science" movement violates the content and spirit of the Bible. That date of "4004 B.C." at the beginning of my old King James Bible was not found in any Bibles until 50 years after the death of Ussher. This dating scheme came not from the text of the Bible but from Ussher's chronology. Ken Ham's organization has published a beautiful new edition of Ussher's ANNALS OF THE WORLD. I encourage you to order a copy and study Ussher's meticulous scholarship. You will notice, however, that most of Ussher's evidence for his chronology comes from outside the Bible--from classical authors like Xenophon and Herodotus, for example. The Bible manifests little concern for such a chronology. If God wanted to reveal a scientific chronology of the world, why is the Bible written so as to force Ussher to go outside the Bible--to pagan authors like Xenophon and Herodotus--to try to piece together this chronology? Trying to pull a scientific chronology out of the Bible denies the real purpose of the Bible, which is to say something about the spiritual condition of humanity under God. For this purpose, there is no need to interpret the story of Creation as a literal process of 6 days of Creation. In fact, most Biblical believers don't read Genesis as a literal, science textbook.

My third point is that the real issue here is not scientific but moral and religious. As the stories about Ham's museum indicate, the ultimate message is that doubting his Biblical science and accepting Darwinian evolution will promote atheism while destroying morality and destroying the traditional family. Visitors at the museum look into the house of the American family under the influence of Darwinian science, and what they see is a boy at his computer staring at pornography. It's all Darwin's fault!

As is clear from many of my posts on this blog, I disagree. Although Darwinian science cannot decide the theological truth of Biblical religion, Darwinism is compatible with religious belief, and this is the position taken by many theistic evolutionists (Mitt Romney and others). And insofar as Darwinian science supports the idea of a natural moral sense rooted in the evolved nature of human beings, Darwinism provides a natural ground of morality, while recognizing that religious belief can reinforce that natural morality.

The complexity of the debate among Christians over the Creation story is evident in the hundreds of comments on a recent post on the Touchstone magazine blog, which can be found here.

Allan Bloom, Nietzschean Nihilism, and Darwinian Natural Right

This year is the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, which was first published in 1987. There have been a few conferences to reconsider Bloom's book and the public debate that it stirred.

It has always seemed odd to me that conservatives have praised Bloom's book, because far from being conservative, Bloom's book promotes Nietzschean nihilism. Nietzsche receives more attention from Bloom than any other author, and Bloom never criticizes him. He often adopts Nietzschean readings of other philosophers even when this distorts their original meaning. For example, he asserts that Plato and Nietzsche agree that music expresses our terror before a chaotic universe and our need to create an irrational image of order (pp. 70-81).

In embracing this Nietzschean "tragic sense" of the terrifying chaos of the universe, Bloom affirms nihilism. "It is the hardest task of all to face the lack of cosmic support for what we care about" (pp. 60, 270, 277).

I suspect that some of the conservatives who have embraced Bloom are actually nihilists themselves, because their fear of the nothingness at the heart of things drives them to conservative traditionalism to cover up the lack of natural support for human life and morality. Harvey Mansfield shows this in affirming the "manly nihilism" of Nietzsche and Teddy Roosevelt.

Bloom intimates that the crucial question is whether "natural teleology" is still defensible; and he also suggests that the clearest manifestations of teleology are biological--particularly, the reproductive process, child care, and family life (pp. 110-18, 125-27, 130-31, 181, 300-301). "The attachment of mother and child," he asserts, "is perhaps the only undeniable natural social bond" (p. 115).

But then he often indicates that this biological teleology might be illusory: "I mean by teleology 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" (p. 110). "Which may be only illusory"?

Of course, one might wonder whether Bloom's fervent homosexuality might have made him doubt the biological teleology of reproduction.

The alternative to Bloom's Nietzschean nihilism is Darwinian natural right--that is to say, a conception of natural right rooted in the immanent teleology of evolved life. Although Darwinian science cannot support a cosmic teleology in which the whole universe is directed to some end or purpose, it can support an immanent teleology in which all species are evolved to have natural ends that are specific to each species. Leo Strauss points to such an immanent teleology 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).

If human beings have a species-specific nature that includes a range of natural desires, then we can judge moral and political order by how well it conforms to those natural desires. This natural teleology of natural human desires supports conservative social thought.

I have elaborated some of these points in other posts here and here.

As is characteristic of Strauss and the Straussians, Bloom embraced the Dionysian aristocratic radicalism of Nietzsche's early and late writings, but he passed over in silence the Darwinian aristocratic liberalism of Nietzsche's middle writings, which has been the subject of some posts here and here.

The Libertarian Vote and Darwinian Conservatism

It is regrettable that Ron Paul has been so inept in presenting his libertarian position. But still there is plenty of evidence that the Republican Party cannot win without the libertarian vote. David Boaz and David Kirby made this clear last fall in a paper for the Cato Institute on "The Libertarian Vote." They showed that 10 to 20 percent of the American voters are libertarians, and that they can determine the outcome of elections by shifting their votes between the Republican and Democratic parties. So it seems clear that if the Republican presidential candidate in 2008 does not win the votes of the Ron Paul libertarians, the Democrats will take the White House.

There is a deeper intellectual issue here. Boaz and others at the Cato Institute emphasize the differences between conservatives and libertarians, and thus reject the conservative "fusion" of traditionalist and libertarian thought. But my argument for Darwinian conservatism assumes a "fusionist" conception of conservatism. Some libertarians like Timothy Sandefur have responded by claiming that my Darwinian arguments support libertarianism but not traditionalist conservatism. My responses to Sandefur can be found here, here, here, and here.

Actually, the paper by Boaz and Kirby implicitly suggests that the distance between libertarians and traditionalist conservatives is not as great as they assume. For example, they indicate that conservatives agree with libertarians that it would not be proper to legally prohibit "blasphemous" speech, because Americans generally accept the principle of free speech in religious matters. On this and other issues, even the most traditionalist conservatives--like Russell Kirk, for example--would reject theocratic government, because they recognize that given the imperfection of human nature, no one can be trusted to exercise theocratic power. Boaz and Kirby also indicate that many of the libertarians who voted for Bush rather than Kerry in 2004 did so because they thought fighting terrorism was the most important issue. So even though libertarians want the power of government to be limited, they recognize the need for strong government in war and national security. In other words, most American libertarians are not anarchists, because they are not so utopian as to think that government can be completely abolished.

Traditionalists can be tempted by utopian visions of theocracy. Libertarians can be tempted by utopian visions of anarchy. But as conservatives, both traditionalists and libertarians accept a realist view of human nature that rejects the utopianism of leftist thought. And this realist view supports neither theocratic order nor anarchic liberty but ordered liberty with limited government under the rule of law. A Darwinian science of human nature supports this conservative stance on human nature as the shared ground between traditionalists and libertarians.

My posts on Herbert Spencer's utopian anarchism can be found here and here.

"Fair Game" Interview

This afternoon, I was interviewed by Faith Salie for the "Fair Game" PRI radio program, which is produced at WNYC in New York City and broadcast by some of the NPR stations in the United States. The podcast will be available at the "Fair Game" website, which can be found here. My interview is 10 minutes of a one hour program.

Faith identifies me as the "silverback" and "paterfamilias" of Darwinian conservatism. But then she draws attention to the fact that I'm too short to be a really dominant male!

I liked her joke: "Darwinian conservatism. That sounds like a Gary Larson cartoon with a chimpanzee driving a pickup with a gun rack."

Philadelphia Society Lectures

The lectures from the 2007 national meeting of the Philadelphia Society are now available on the Society's website. You can find audio recordings as well as written texts for the lectures.

This includes the text for my debate with John West. My lecture for the AEI debate was only a slightly revised version of this lecture for the Philadelphia Society.

While I'm at it, I would draw your attention to the fact that I emphasize in this lecture, as I do in all of my speaking and writing about Darwinian conservatism, that a Darwinian view of human nature is not based on genetic reductionism. On the contrary, a Darwinian account of human nature and social order requires three levels of explanation: natural desirs as shaped by genetic evolution, customary traditions as shaped by cultural evolution, and deliberate judgments as shaped by individual experience. These three levels are in a nested hierarchy so that custom is contrained by nature, and judgment is constrained by both nature and custom.

It is remarkable that no matter how much I emphasize that "genes are not enough," many people always assume that I am promoting a genetic reductionism that denies the importance of culture and judgment. Biology is much more than genetics. A biological account of evolved human nature must explain how the natural propensities that emerge from genetic evolution are expressed and shaped by cultural evolution and individual judgment.

This conforms to the conservative analysis of social order (from Burke to Hayek) as a complex interaction of nature, tradition, and deliberation. This trichotomy of order, which was first employed by Aristotle, is elaborated in both Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism.

Mitt Romney's a Theistic Evolutionist

In defending Darwinian conservatism, I have tried to persuade religious conservatives that there is no necessary conflict between Darwinian science and religious belief. Although the science cannot judge the theological truth of any religious belief, it can judge the practical truth of religious traditions that support social order. And although the science cannot answer ultimate questions of First Cause as to the origin of nature or the origin of life, evolutionary science is compatible with a religious belief in God as the Creator of nature. In fact, many religious believers have become theistic evolutionists.

I am pleased, therefore, to see that Matt Romney identifies himself as a theistic evolutionist. In the first debate between the Republican presidential candidates, Romney was one of the seven who indicated that they accepted evolution as a true scientific theory. Now, in a NEW YORK TIMES interview, he has explained his position. He says: "I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe. And I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body. . . . I've never found a conflict between the science of evolution and the belief that God created the universe. He uses scientific tools to do his work."

When he says that God used evolution "to create the human body," he might be implying that the creation of the human soul requires something more--perhaps the "ontological leap" that Pope John Paul II spoke about in his 1996 endorsement of evolution.

It's clear that Mitt has been reading this blog, such as the posts that can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

By the way, a Darwinian would notice that Mitt has an obvious advantage over his competitors for the Republican presidential nomination--he is the tallest and best-looking of them all. As is the case for all primates, we expect dominant individuals to have the physical appearance of dominant men. In his profile of Mitt for National Review (April 30), Richard Lowry sees this: "It is impossible to be around Romney and not be impressed--by his obvious intelligence, by his fluid speaking style, by his accomplishments in business and government, by his appearance."

Being a short guy myself, it's hard for me to accept the fact that tall, dominant-looking men attract attention. But I'll have to accept it as part of the realism of my Darwinian conservatism. That's why I'm a college professor and not a Presidential candidate.

Mansfield, Nietzsche, and Strauss

In the central chapter of Harvey Mansfield's Manliness, he identifies two personifications of "manly nihilism"--Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodore Roosevelt. Now, in two recent statements, Mansfield has elaborated his defense of these two sides of "manly nihilism." In his Wall Street Journal article defending George Bush's "one-man rule" and "imperial ambition," Mansfield shows the Teddy Roosevelt side of "manly nihilism." In his Jefferson Lecture, he shows the Friedrich Nietzsche side of this "manly nihilism."

In his defense of executive power outside the rule of law, Mansfield asserts the need for Machiavellian princes to exert leadership through force and fraud to impose their forms on the otherwise formless matter of history. The "people" will allow such tyrannical rule, he suggests, as long as the fear of formless flux in times of war drives them to yield to the spirited energy of presidential war leaders. This is the Teddy Roosevelt side of "manly nihilism."

In his Jefferson Lecture, Mansfield asserts the primacy of thumos--the spirited contest for domination--as the essence of politics, and he warns against science as the enemy of thumotic politics. Here he restates the position of Friedrich Nietzshe in The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche criticized "scientific Socratism" for destroying the tragic view of life that had developed in ancient Greek art and music. According to the Dionysian "tragic world view" that Nietzsche defended, the world is not rationally comprehensible, and thus we need human art to contrive those illusory appearances that make it possible for us to live in this incomprehensible world. In the modern world the threat to Homeric tragic manliness comes from the Socratic science of Darwinism. In The Use and Abuse of History, Nietzsche warns: "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 which I consider true but deadly--are thrust upon the people for another generation with the rage for instruction that has by 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."

Similarly, in the Jefferson Lecture, Mansfield warns against Socratic science as a threat to the tragic spirit of thumotic politics. "Socrates said that reasoning means following the course of the argument regardless of where it goes, and of how much it might hurt you: this is the dispassionate spirit of science. But in politics, people make assertions that they try to control; the argument goes where you want it to go."

And, again like Nietzsche, Mansfield sees Darwinian evolution as the new threat to thumos coming from Socratic science. In explaining human beings as evolved products of a natural order that embraces all life, Darwinian science seems to deny the importance of human beings and thus the importance of asserting one's importance. Such a science is "true but deadly." As the antidote to such deadly science, Mansfield urges us to turn to literature and history as artistic depictions of human life that escape the despiriting effect of science.

This same Nietzschean fear of Darwinian biology as Socratic science that denies the spiritedness of human pride is expressed in Peter Lawler's Heideggerian/existentialist conservatism. I have noted this in some of my posts on Lawler, as in the one from October of last year.

In all of this, Mansfield follows a line of thought that has become common among those influenced by Leo Strauss. The Straussians fear modern science--and particularly modern biology--as a reductionistic understanding of human life that denies that sense of human importance that sustains political ambition and nobility. That's why many Straussians will speak favorably about alternatives to Darwinian science based on "intelligent design theory" or cosmic teleology. But even as they do that, they imply that although these alternatives are not scientifically true, they need to be asserted as "noble lies."

Darwinian conservatism as based on Darwinian natural right would show that a Darwinian science of human nature is both scientifically true and morally healthy. Darwinian science affirms thumos as expressing the natural desires for status and political rule, desires that belong to our evolved human nature. But Darwinian science would also affirm the natural desire to be free from the exploitative dominance of thumotic men, which supports the need for limited government under the rule of law.

When Mansfield says that rule by "the living intelligence of a wise man" is superior to the rule of law, he repeats one of the commonplaces of Straussian thought. But a Darwinian conservatism would see this as a utopian conception that ignores the imperfection of human beings in both knowledge and virtue, because not even the wisest man can be trusted with absolute power. The silliness of Mansfield's argument becomes evident when one notices that his "wise man" turns out to be George Bush!

Well, at least now I understand why they're called the Mayberry Machiavellis.

Mansfield's Jefferson Lecture

Harvey Mansfield's Jefferson Lecture--"How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science"--can be found here.

Mansfield advances five main ideas. 1. Politics is about thumos or "spiritedness," which makes politics a contest for importance. 2. The biology of Plato and Aristotle could explain thumos. 3. Modern science--and particularly modern evolutionary biology--ignores thumos. 4. Modern political science ignores thumos. 5. Political scientists need to look to literature and history to help them understand thumos.

I disagree with the third idea. But I agree with the others. I agree that manly ambition and striving for importance drive politics as a contest for dominance. Plato and Aristotle saw this as rooted in human biology, especially male biology. Literature and history explore such spirited rivalry in the stories of assertive individuals in politics and war. Modern political science, however, has little to say about this, because political scientists pursue a science of abstract generalizations and mathematical formulas where personal rivalry has no place.

But unlike Mansfield, I think modern Darwinian biology confirms the biology of Plato and Aristotle in showing how politics as a spirited contest for dominance manifests human natural desires. In his book Manliness, Mansfield claims that Darwin does not recognize manly assertiveness and how such assertiveness supports male dominance in politics. And yet I have shown in some previous posts that this shows Mansfield's ignorance of Darwin, who speaks in The Descent of Man of how men display "ambition" and "rivalry" in the pursuit of "victory" and "eminence." For one of those posts, go here.

Mansfield says that "science is indifferent to proper names, and confines itself to common nouns." But in fact scientists like Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal studying the political behavior of animals do regularly use proper names to distinguish individuals as they compete for status in the hierarchy of their groups.

While refering to "the biology of Plato and Aristotle," Mansfield never comments specifically on that ancient biology. He does not, for example, notice that Aristotle identified various species of animals as "political," and explained human beings as political animals with similarities to these other political animals. He also saw human politics as unique insofar as human politics employs reason or speech. Darwin continued in this tradition of comparative animal behavior.

Mansfield writes: "Modern biology, particularly the theory of evolution, is based on the overriding concern for survival in all life. This is surely wrong in regard to human life. If you cannot look around you and must insist on indulging a taste for the primitive, you have only to visit the ruins of an ancient people and ponder how much of its GNP was devoted to religion, to its sense of the meaning of human life rather than mere survival."

This is incorrect. Of course, human survival and reproduction is required for both genetic and cultural evolution. But this does not mean that survival is the only human motivation. As I have argued, a Darwinian view of human nature would indicate that there are at least 20 natural desires that drive human conduct. These desires can be seen in Darwin's account of human life in The Descent of Man. But as far as I can tell, Mansfield has not read Darwin. Darwin and other evolutionary biologists have given a lot of attention to the importance of religion, for example. One possible explanation for Mansfield's claim that evolutionary biology is concerned only with survival as the only human motivation is that he has adopted a caricatured version of Darwinian biology as explaining everything through "selfish genes."