Prometheus Unbound

I think that these two questions, when answered with two yeses, represent the thrust of what Intelligent Design proponents are up to in their critiques of evolution, as William Dembski recently (and concisely) stated at his blog:

The theory [of evolution] purports to give a materialistic account of life’s development once life is already here, but it has a gaping hole at the start since matter gives no evidence of being able to organize itself from non-life into life. The fossil record, especially the sudden emergence of most animal body plans in the Cambrian explosion, sharply violates Darwinian expectations about the historical pattern of evolutionary change. The nano-engineering found in the DNA, RNA, and proteins of the cell far exceeds human engineering and remains completely unexplained in Darwinian terms. Darwin lovers are quick to reject such complaints.  After all, as novelist Barbara Kingsolver declares, Darwin’s idea of natural selection is “the greatest, simplest, most elegant logical construct ever to dawn across our curiosity about the workings of natural life. It is inarguable, and it explains everything.”

Dembski seems to be critiquing evolution on solid grounds here. I know he is an Evangelical, and that he is thus highly motivated to make such critiques, but my question is this: do these lines of critique, with regard to evolution, have at least some validity? I think that they have. If I’m wrong about this, what, as an agnostic, am I missing?

Dembski, in the same blog post, continues:

Any theory that explains everything and that can and must be true is either the greatest thing since sliced bread or the greatest swindle ever foisted on gullible intellectuals. The intelligent design community takes the latter view, siding here with Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote: “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.” Still, it’s easy to understand why so flimsily a supported theory garners such vast support. It provides the creation story for an atheistic worldview. If atheism is true, then something like Darwinian evolution must follow.

I’m not sure which side—the Intelligent Design side or the Darwinist side—will be laughed at, say, a century from now. I suspect that it will be the Intelligent Design hypothesis, at least in terms of its current critiques of evolutionary biology, but it’s hard for me, as a nonscientist, to say. My hunch is that the gaps in evolutionary theory that Intelligent Design currently exploit will be filled over the next century in ways that will make the evolutionary conclusion even more compelling than it appears to be now.

But notice that this is merely a prediction, a guess really. And whether you’re a scientist or not, when it comes to the future, that’s really all we have. In the meantime, a bit of humility might suit all of us—religionist, agnostic, and atheist alike. I think that Dembski often comes across as unduly arrogant and overconfident, as do, say, atheists like Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins. Everybody seems just so darn cocksure, as if the other side consisted of fools. But competing confidence poses should not be mistaken for anything other than that. Maybe at profound and fundamental levels, both sides have elements to their arguments that, a hundred years from now, will be shown to be not just wrong, but spectacularly so.

Let’s see what happens. And keep an open mind.

John Calvin was born 500 years ago, in 1509, but I have a hard time understanding what, exactly, we should celebrate about it, or how to celebrate it. John Calvin, afterall, looked askance at merriment, drinking, and dancing, so what exactly do you do to celebrate John Calvin’s birthday? In terms of what to celebrate, I know that John Calvin put quite a spin on the theological world, and I find some of his ideas interesting. I also know that Emile Durkheim used to attribute the evolution of capitalism to Calvinism, but really now! What does one celebrate about John Calvin in the 21st century? A Reader at Trinity Church, Norwich, said this about the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth:

Somewhat to my regret, I’ve made rather more this year of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth than I have of the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’ s birth.

What’s to regret about it? I don’t get it. Some help here? Wasn’t, for example, John Calvin’s Geneva a theocracy? What can be learned from such a social model in the 21st century (except to avoid it)? And Calvin was so retrogressive, even in his own time, that he didn’t even accept Copernicus’s science! I mean, aside from his theology (which you either believe, or you don’t), does Calvin really have anything to teach our global civilization, half a millenium later?

What exactly?

Below is a 16th century image of Calvin’s zealous followers trashing a Catholic cathedral. Do we celebrate John Calvin by simply looking the other way with regards to his actual practice of religion in 16th century Geneva? What does it mean to celebrate a theocrat and iconoclast who had no compunction about cutting off the heads of heretics and murdering “witches”? Maybe I’m missing something simply wonderful about John Calvin, but if so, what is it?

Nope.

Canto 56 is part of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a long poem of 131 cantos, and it was written in 1850, fully nine years prior to the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species  (1859). Why, then, is Canto 56 linked in the public mind with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution? Richard Dawkins, for example, writes at the beginning of his brilliant and disturbing classic, The Selfish Gene (1976), and with his characteristic sharpness,

I think ”nature red in tooth and claw” sums up our modern understanding of natural selection admirably. (2)

But Tennyson, as I say, wrote his phrase before Darwin’s great book.

So what gives?

Might it be that Tennyson, being a poet, felt, ahead of others, in his muse’s bones, the philosophical (and therefore, emotional) implications of what the new biological and geological sciences were discovering about the Earth, and anticipated the sublime horror and terror to which they were beginning to testify?

Below is Tennyson’s Canto 56 in full. Notice that it begins with Nature giving witness, by the fossils buried in her rocks, of vast ages of birth, death, and extinction:

‘So careful of the type?’ but no.

        From scarped cliff and quarried stone

        She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.

 

‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:

        I bring to life, I bring to death:

        The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more.’ And he, shall he,

 

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,

        Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

        Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

 

Who trusted God was love indeed

        And love Creation’s final law—

        Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—

 

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,

        Who battled for the True, the Just,

        Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal’d within the iron hills?

 

No more? A monster then, a dream,

        A discord. Dragons of the prime,

        That tare each other in their slime,

Were mellow music match’d with him.

 

Of life as futile, then, as frail!

        O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

        What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

I hear in this poem a kind of Western version of Nature anthropomorphized into a Hindu god, a Shiva, indifferent to the shrew of the self, dancing upon it, and creating and uncreating worlds over vast eons. Tennyson saw, via hints from the new discoveries of science, what Darwin’s book would make explicit a few years hence, and what the continental Indian poets intuited long before: a very old universe had arranged and unarranged worlds and multitudes long before us, and would unarrange us as well anon.   

Your own. From a long time ago. Here.

Biologist Richard Dawkins, the author of the God Delusion, will be coming to speak (in early October) in my neck of the woods (Southern California), and his soon visit prompts me to ask a simple question:

• What might it actually be like to live in a world that is completely disillusioned?

In other words, what might it be like to live in a time where everybody lives in high irony and sees the wires behind all of the Great Oz’s curtains? When Richard Dawkins’s “disillusionment movement” succeeds, what then? Personally, I don’t think we would find ourselves in anything like a utopia. I suspect that, rather than humans collectively facing existence in this disillusioned mode, and living with it happily ever after, that we would instead put up different kinds of curtains against reality. Maybe they wouldn’t be religious curtains, but they would still be curtains of concealment from the full implications of the meaninglessness of human existence in a universe devoid of telos. 

Put simply, a world of atheists might well be a world in collective performance of Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot. Godot in this case is not God, but death. What does one do while waiting for death? Well, you have a meal, and then talk a bit, and perhaps have children, or start a war, or a blog, or maybe pursue a career, or jerk off. In short, you get entangled in diversions (as the characters in Beckett’s play do). And this, ladies and gentleman, is what Nietzsche called “the last man”—the kind of person that he believed the God-disillusioned West would culminate in producing. Comfy. And pathetic.

In short, diversion and delusion share a lot in common, and in an atheist world scrubbed of religion, there will be a good deal of neurotic deck chair shuffling on that Titanic, accompanied by the popping of a lot of anxiety reducing pills. Religion just won’t be in the mix of anxiety reducing agents. The God delusion will be replaced by the Huxlian SOMA illusion. Further, I suspect that most people in the atheist future (it’s coming, right?) will not be able to tolerate this entirely disillusioned world for too many decades, and will start getting out of line—creating new religions, returning to old religions, and starting eccentric mass movements—to overcome their outrage at being sensitive consciousnesses condemned (by no one in particular) to the limitations of life in a body, and to mortality. In other words, the atheist world of the future will probably start to look basically like the predominantly religious world of today. If you could buy stock in book futures, here’s a tip: Franz Kafka will sell well in our collective atheist future.

In sum, I don’t think that whatever atheist utopia some of us think that we are aiming for is inherently stable, or even all that much more desirable than the situation we’re in now. Our existence is a flungness into we-know-not-what. How do you ever get used to that, and acclimate and normalize that, without illusions, repressions, dissociations, and, yes, even delusions? So welcome, Richard Dawkins, you great slayer of delusions, you! Welcome to Southern California, the home of, well, Hollywood!

You’re not against Hollywood, too, are you? I didn’t think so.

Barry Arrington is an intelligent design advocate, and he recently offered a detective analogy for thinking about the tensions between strict materialists and intelligent design advocates. His analogy seems pretty sound to me. Imagine a scene where someone is killed by a blunt object and two detectives are talking over the body:

Columbo:  “I am a materialist.  Therefore, given my premises I know for a certain fact that this person’s death must have been caused by blind, unguided natural forces.  Therefore, I already know that all of the data I find will support that conclusion.  Moreover, the certain knowledge I have before I ever even look at the data means I will never even have to consider the possibility that this person’s death was caused by the acts of an intelligent agent, and I can safely ignore any data that might tend to disprove my starting point or confirm an “intelligent agent” theory.  My theory is that a rock fell from above and hit him in the head.  Probably the rock was dislodged from the side of a hill by the wind or rain and rolled down the hill and smacked him.  Bad luck all around.  By the way, I call the rolling rock theory a “theory” only for form’s sake.  We both know it is a fact! fact! fact!  Bad luck all around.  Case closed.”

Holmes:  “I am not going to make up my mind in advance about whether this death resulted from blind, unguided and exceedingly bad luck or whether it is the result of the acts of an intelligent agent, that is to say, murder.  By the way, I am willing to assume materialist premises too, at least on a methodological basis, but you are wrong to say that assumption precludes the act of an intelligent agent. 

Was the following said by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, or Hitler:

Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself.

Answer: Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Self Reliance” (1841).

How about this one:

It is absolutely true that first of all the law of selection exists in the world, and nature has granted the stronger and healthier the right to life. And rightly so. Nature knows no weakling or coward, it knows no beggar, etc., but rather nature knows only those who stand firm on their soil, who sacrifice their life, and indeed sacrifice it dearly, and not those who give it away. That is an eternal law of nature. You see it if you gaze into the forest, you see it in every meadow, you see it in the struggle of individual organisms in the world, and you see it throughout the millennia of human history . . .

Answer: Hitler, in an address to construction workers, cited in Richard Weikart’s new book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress  (Palgrave Macmillian 2009).

And while we’re having fun, who said this:

[I]f the prudent avoid marriage, whilst the reckless marry, the inferior members will tend to supplant the better members of society. Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence consequent on his rapid multiplication; and if he is to advance still higher he must remain subject to a severe struggle.

This one belongs to Charles Darwin. It’s among his concluding observations in the last chapter of his Descent of Man  (1871).

Illustra Media is the outfit that produced the two Intelligent Design DVDs: Unlocking the Mystery of Life  and The Privileged Planet. As an agnostic who is open minded with regards to Intelligent Design arguments, I found both of these documentaries stimulating. And now, as a kind of completion of a trilogy, Illustra Media is about to release its documentary on the Cambrian Explosion titled Darwin’s Dilemma. Here’s the trailer:

The trailer is a bit on the melodramatic side, but the subject is inherently interesting, and perhaps the film itself will be good.

Scientist Elaine Morgan, now in her 80s, has long been advancing her theory that humans evolved from aquatic apes. She recently gave a talk succinctly defending her views. Is it pseudoscience? She certainly hasn’t persuaded more than a handful of her scientific colleagues. But it is intuitively interesting. Might we at least give her an audience, and think about what she has to say?

In one respect, the tension between evolutionists and creationists is not over the nature of science, but over the nature of genre. In other words, did the author of Genesis 1 mean to write something in the genre of POETRY—or was he attempting to set down an account of HISTORY—of the literal beginnings of time? There is a very good reason to think that the author meant to write poetry, as a simple look at the structure of the text reveals, for the first three days of creation MIRROR the second three days of creation:

• On the first day of creation God said “let there be light,” as well as darkness, and on the fourth day of creation he made the moving inhabitants of those realms (the sun, moon, and stars).
• On the second day God separated the waters above the earth from the waters below the earth, and on the fifth day he made the moving inhabitants of those two realms (the birds and sea creatures).
• On the third day God made the dry land and plants appear, and on the sixth day he made the moving inhabitants of that realm (the animals and man).

In other words, the author clearly structured his creation story in such a way that the “stage elements” were created on the first three days (light, waters above and below, and the land and plants) and the “actors”—the things that move about—on the second three days (sun, moon, stars, birds, fish, animals, man). Put another way: the author poetically structured his narrative around things that “are” and things that “move”—between stage and actors. Shakespeare, if he had ever noticed this element to the first chapter of Genesis, would have liked it, for:

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players thereof.

And why would the author of Genesis structure his narrative thus? For one very good reason: He lived in a largely oral culture—that is, one low in literacy—and seems to have felt the need to make his story memorable—and thus easy to be told by a storyteller to a group. A simple memnonic device such as that described above would assure that the story could be recalled easily. If you just remember, for example, on what day the dry land appears (the third day), then you can remember on what day the “actors”—the animals and man—show up (the sixth day).

I’d like to note that I wrote this entire blog post without looking at the first chapter of Genesis. I didn’t need to. Once you know the “trick” of the story—its poetic structure—you can’t forget it. And there is an obvious benefit to reading Genesis poetically, for it frees one from all the knots of difficulty that the text implies from a literal reading (such as how the earth and plants could have arrived in the universe before the sun, moon, and stars). After learning that the structure of Genesis 1 is poetically motivated, it is very difficult to go back to an insistence on reading the text literally—and weakens the tension inherent in trying to arbitrate between the demands of science and the demands of faith in the Bible. Clearly, the author of Genesis did not intend for his story to be read literally.

But if one nevertheless still posits a literal reading of Genesis, even in the face of its evident poetic structure, one is in the peculiar position of claiming, not just that Genesis is right and conventional science wrong about the origin of the universe, but that God made the universe to match a small group of people’s oral poetic storytelling structure.

Is that really a viable position?

This past week, atheist biologist Jerry Coyne posted at his blog a letter that Steven Pinker wrote in response to President Obama’s appointment of geneticist Francis Collins to be head of the NIH (National Institutes of Health).  The full letter is rather long, and can be read in full at Coyne’s blog here, but I’d like to highlight at this site the opening and closing of Pinker’s letter. The letter begins this way:

I have serious misgivings about Francis Collins being appointed director of NIH. It’s not that I think that there should be a religious litmus test for public science administrators, or that being a devout Christian is a disqualification. But in Collins’s case, it is not a matter of private belief, but public advocacy.

Notice Pinker’s emphasis on “public advocacy.” Hidden religious beliefs are tolerable, but not publicly expressed ones. Collins has a foundation (The BioLogos Foundation) that explores issues surrounding the relationship of science to religion. Pinker doesn’t like the premise underlying the foundation (that science and religion can be compatible), or the content of the site, and so he returns to the issue of Collins’s “public advocacy” at the end of the letter as well:

Again, it’s important that there not be an atheist-litmus-test for science administrators. A person’s private beliefs should not keep him from a public position. But Collins is an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs, and it is reasonable for the scientific community to ask him how these beliefs will affect his administration of the Institute and his efforts on the behalf of the scientific enterprise in Congress and in public.  At the very least, he should distance himself from the BioLogos Foundation and any other advocacy group.

Once again, notice Pinker’s hang-up with Collins’s “public advocacy.” Pinker wants those who hold a science position in the US government to be of only two sorts: (1) those who are atheists; or (2) those who are privately religious, but engage in no outside public advocacy. Here Pinker’s last sentence again:

“At the very least, he [Collins] should distance himself from the BioLogos Foundation and any other advocacy group.”

I’d ask those who call themselves liberals (as well as agnostics and atheists) to absorb the implications of that statement. Pinker is saying that to work for the US federal government you should drop the private projects that give your life meaning. This is, to put it bluntly, what is said by somebody who is a totalitarian of the spirit. If Steven Pinker truly believes that Francis Collins should step away from his BioLogos Foundation advocacy as part of the terms for Collins’s accepting of Obama’s appointment, then Pinker is simply being a Iago-like asshole towards Collins as a human being, or Pinker is an illiberal who treats such a move as necessary on principle (which is really scary).

Dr. Collins gives me every impression of being a mild-mannered and calm man, and I suspect his response would not be mine, but anyone who said to me—”The condition of your taking a job with the American government is that you relinquish the meaning making public projects that you engage in apart from your government job”—my response would be “F-u!”

Then I would be on the phone to my lawyer.

What an ugly, ugly thing for Pinker to say to a fellow human being, suggesting that Collins’s public service should be conditional to the relinquishing of his First Amendment guaranteed public advocacy practices. Even to suggest that Collins should voluntarily do this is gross.

I’ll give you a straightforward analogy, and ask what atheists or agnostics would feel on hearing it. Obama offers the NIH director job to Jerry Coyne, but then Intelligent Design advocate, William Dembski, writes a letter saying that the job ought to be conditional upon this: Coyne, if he accepts the job, should shut down his blog and cease association with atheist advocacy and humanist organizations. Imagine, for instance, the rhetorical hell to pay from atheists and agnostics if Jerry Coyne were given this appointment, and Dembski wrote:

“At the very least, Jerry Coyne should distance himself from his Why Evolution is True blog and any other advocacy group.”

Any. Other. Any other! Any other advocacy group! Has Steven Pinker ever read the First Amendment? What kind of totalitarian of the spirit says something like this in the United States of America?

Can you imagine having Steven Pinker on your tenure committee! You better not do or say anything off campus that doesn’t conform to his ideology because he’s watching, and he clearly doesn’t think that your public role at a public institution can be separated from your private meaning-making advocacy outside of that institution.

I feel strongly that Steven Pinker crossed a line of the spirit, trying to drive another human being into a “private-practice only” space with regard to something central to that person’s identity. It’s no different from a homophobe telling a gay person to stay closeted. Pinker is suggesting to Dr. Collins: “If you must be a Christian, Francis, please don’t carry a Bible in front of the children!” It’s patronizing not just to Collins, but to the American people. It presumes that we can’t be trusted to make up our own minds about Collins’s private obsessions and activities outside of his government job. And it’s a suggestion to Collins that is more than cruel. It’s ugly and illiberal.

You know, John Stuart Mill was an unbeliever. I can’t imagine Mill endorsing Pinker here. What’s happened to the liberalism and openness of spirit that ought to go with lack of religious faith? I think I prefer Mill’s atheism to Pinker’s. Pinker should read Mill.

And frankly, it’s a gauge of the liberalism of those of us who call ourselves agnostics or atheists if we don’t sass our fellow secularists, even otherwise beloved ones like Steven Pinker, when they try to put hindrances or obstacles before another person’s liberty of expression.

If metaphysical naturalism is true, this tidbit from Wikipedia:

What all metaphysical naturalists agree on, however, is that the fundamental constituents of reality, from which everything derives and upon which everything depends, are fundamentally mindless. So if any variety of metaphysical naturalism is true, then any mental properties that exist (hence any mental powers or beings) are causally derived from, and ontologically dependent on, systems of nonmental properties, powers, or things.

Mind ontologically dependent upon, and causally derived from, the mindless? Very, very strange! I mean, how weird is that, such a coupling? Ontologically dependent. Causally derived. Let those two ideas sink in a bit. It recalls for me a passage (as best I can quote it by memory) from the gnostic Gospel of Thomas:

If matter was born of mind, how strange! But if mind was born of matter, how much stranger still!

Michael White, a biologist with training akin to Michael Behe’s, explains why Behe’s anti-evolution follow-up book to Darwin’s Black Box is almost certainly flawed in its fundamental arguments:

[Sean] Carroll [in the magazine Science ] goes on to make this important point: “Behe seems to lack any appreciation of the quantitative dimensions of molecular and trait evolution.” This is because Behe, like me, is a biochemist—biochemists learn about the physics and chemistry of proteins. The kind of math we use to do our work consists primarily of differential equations that describe the kinetics and thermodynamics of proteins and nucleic acids. Biochemists generally do not study mutation rates, evolving populations, or the heavy statistics behind natural selection. That’s a whole separate field, called quantitative genetics, founded primarily by the pioneering scientists Sewall Wright and Ronald Fisher, whose work is usually not that familiar to biochemists. (As someone who did a PhD in a biochemistry department, but now works in a genetics department, and in a lab that does serious quantitative genetics, I have acutely, even painfully, experienced this difference in training firsthand.) Behe’s problem is that he’s tried to jump into this field without any serious background knowledge; it’s like a chemist or engineer trying to tackle research problems in quantum gravity – the chances of producing anything worthwhile are essentially zero. Behe’s efforts at modeling mutation and selection on protein function have thus been amateurish, and not taken seriously by people who work on these problems professionally.

Richard Weikart, the historian and Discovery Institute ally who wrote From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (Palgrave Macmillan 2004), in a new book (coming out in two weeks) pushes forward with his thesis that “Darwinism” is inextricably linked to 20th century eugenics and, ultimately, the Holocaust.

His new book focuses in on Adolf Hitler (yes, that Adolf Hitler) and is titled, Hiter’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Palgrave Macmillan, July 21, 2009).  The book in hardcover is pricey ($68 bucks), but I was rather impressed with his From Darwin to Hitler when it first came out, and so I may consider buying it. Weikart is obviously a conservative historian, but he’s also a very careful one, and he writes well. Here, from The Journal of Modern History, is part of a review of his earlier book, From Darwin to Hitler :

Weikart offers a well‐written and succinct summary of German Darwinian theory that is useful in many ways. But it is marred by a tendency to overgeneralization. His definition of “Darwinism” is based not on the ideas of Darwin himself—which are never carefully analyzed—but on the reception of these ideas by a wide range of speakers. As he himself admits, Darwinian rhetoric was pressed into the service of many different agendas—socialism, liberalism, and conservatism; feminism and antifeminism; natalism and Malthusianism; pacifism and patriotic saber rattling. For Weikart, this is not a problem—even speakers who were “poles apart politically … had more in common than we may have suspected at first glance” (9). All Darwinian thinkers advocated the violation of the “right to life” through measures such as birth control, abortion, voluntary and compulsory “euthanasia,” voluntary and compulsory sterilization, infanticide, and genocide. And all Darwinian thought led inevitably to Auschwitz. This is a value judgment that some readers will accept, and others (myself included) will oppose. At the turn of the twentieth century, all biomedical issues were seen in the context of the decline in birthrates, which seemed to threaten the military readiness and cultural vitality of Western European nations. Natalism—which was based chiefly on nationalist and military, not eugenic, considerations—was the reigning obsession. Some of the figures mentioned by Weikart—for example, Alfred Ploetz—were indeed hard‐hearted opponents of social policies that might have the effect of enabling the “unfit” to survive and reproduce. But many others, such as the socialist physician Alfred Grotjahn, recognized the importance of environment as well as heredity to the building of a healthy population. Although they supported some “negative eugenic” measures that were designed to prevent the birth of “unfit” offspring, their major efforts were devoted to “positive eugenics,” which promoted the health of the younger generation by improving the health and living conditions of mothers, children, and families.

Weikart’s new book, focused specifically on Hitler, better have its end notes thoroughly clean and tied-up nicely, and he better render measured and defensible judgments, because if he doesn’t, you can be sure that his colleagues will eat him for lunch. In any case, this upcoming book should generate a lot of interesting discussion, and no doubt a good deal of vigorous mudslinging between evolutionists and creationists (as his previous book did). I think it’s a topic that’s important, however. Eugenics, afterall, is not just a historical curiosity. It’s an issue that shows signs of reasserting itself as we move deeper into the 21st century. And if you don’t think hard about history, you run the risk of repeating it. Can the 21st century ride the tiger of eugenics any better than the 20th?

Theologian N.T. Wright thinks about Charles Darwin in the light of Lucretius, Epicurianism, and 18th century Deism:

It turns out that goose bumps are an evolutionary holdover from when we had fur. Here’s Harvard’s Steven Pinker:

Our own bodies are riddled with quirks that no competent engineer would have planned but that disclose a history of trial-and-error tinkering: a retina installed backward, a seminal duct that hooks over the ureter like a garden hose snagged on a tree, goose bumps that uselessly try to warm us by fluffing up long-gone fur.

My wife says Steven Pinker has a lewd name.

Oh, and Thomas Jefferson had a fur coat (to replace the one that he lost from evolution):

This month’s Wired is reporting on a shocking scientific finding:

A self-assembling molecule synthesized in a laboratory may resemble the earliest form of information-carrying biological material, a transitional stage between lifeless chemicals and the complex genetic architectures of life. Called tPNA, short for thioester peptide nucleic acids, the molecules spontaneously mimic the shape of DNA and RNA when mixed together. Left on their own, they gather in shape-shifting strands that morph into stable configurations.

The article quotes one scientist on the implications of the discovery, not just for life’s evolutionary origins, but for creating completely different life forms in the laboratory:

According to University of Manchester organic chemist John Sutherland, who co-authored the Nature study showing how RNA’s ingredients could have formed, the new research is less important in providing primordial insight than in furthering the eventual creation of life in a laboratory.

“Ghadiri’s important and highly innovative new work potentially relates to the origin of life as we don’t yet know it,” said Sutherland. Life’s emergence took billions of years, a process now being compressed into the passage of a few human generations. “The possibility that humans could come up with an alternative biology that outdoes that which produced us is a mind-freeing and mind-bending concept,” he said.

Just three years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, in Part 1 of his First Principles, sought to make a truce between science and religion. His attempt began with this rather beautiful, open-minded, and calm appeal:

We too often forget that not only is there “a soul of goodness in things evil,” but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.

In other words, Spencer suggests that, as a general principle, there may be in things that appear erroneous some important grains of truth. From this Spencer insists that, when it comes to religion, the empiricist ought not to throw all the fanciful ideas born of religion out with the intellectual bathwater:

While many admit the abstract probability that a falsity has usually a nucleus of verity, few bear this abstract probability in mind, when passing judgment on the options of others. A belief that is proved to be grossly at variance with fact, is cast aside with indignation or contempt; and in the heat of antagonism scarcely any one inquires what there was in this belief which commended it to men’s minds. Yet there must have been something. And there is reason to suspect that this something was its correspondence with certain of their experiences: an extremely limited or vague correspondence perhaps, but still, a correspondence. Even the absurdest report may in nearly every instance be traced to an actual occurrence; and had there been no such actual occurrence, this preposterous misrepresentation of it would never have existed. Though the distorted or magnified image transmitted to us through the refracting medium of rumour, is utterly unlike the reality; yet in the absence of the reality there would have been no distorted or magnified image. And thus it is with human beliefs in general. Entirely wrong as they may appear, the implication is that they originally contained, and perhaps still contain, some small amount of truth.

Some small amount of truth. On this Spencer hangs his argument for the retention of at least some religion in a scientific age. For Spencer, beneath all the outward and diverse forms of religion there is a grappling by humans with an Ultimate Mystery that resists explication, and consists of only three possibilities, all of them equally mind-boggling: The universe is self-existent, and has always been here; the universe had a beginning, but it made itself; or something external to the universe made the universe. Religion, however complicated its forms, is a wrestling with this mystery, this truth. Here’s how Spencer puts it:

Respecting the origin of the Universe three verbally intelligible suppositions may be made. We may assert that it is self-existent; or that it is self-created; or that it is created by an external agency. Which of these suppositions is most credible it is not needful here to inquire. The deeper question, into which this finally merges, is, whether any one of them is even conceivable in the true sense of the word.

In other words, both science and religion come up against an impasse, an aporia , when it comes to comprehending certain ultimate things (one of them being the origin of the universe). In Part 1 of his First Principles, Spenser then discusses other conceptual impasses (or aporias) in turn (such as the relation of matter and consciousness). Science can reach only so-far when it comes to even comprehending, in any ultimate way, such impasses, and must therefore yield the field to religious representation at a certain point. This thus strikes me as an early formation of Stephen Gould’s notion of science and religion being two “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA). In short, Spencer was one of the first intellectuals after Darwin to attempt a Gould-like move to reduce the tensions between science and religion.

To read the rest of Spencer’s humane and sensible arguments for making peace between science and religion, see here.

And I like this image of Spencer. He’s kind of interesting looking: