Thursday 16 March 2023
Charles Darwin :champion of abolitionism?
“Sacred Cause”? Reconsidering Charles Darwin as Abolitionist
In 2009, noted Darwinian biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore published Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery, and the Quest for Human Origins. They argued the radical new thesis that Darwin’s species work was primarily motivated by an abolitionist desire to combat racist polygenist views of human origins and instead draw all humans together under the umbrella of common descent. This book has been both widely praised and widely criticized.
But agree with the thesis or not, many view the book as a premier example of historiographical research. The book contains 820 endnotes citing hundreds of primary sources, not the least of which are many hundreds of references to Darwin’s voluminous correspondence. One can always disagree with Desmond and Moore’s interpretation of the evidence, but one would be hard pressed to criticize them for not doing their homework.
Or So I Thought
I have been reading the Darwinian correspondence myself for several years and have never seen anything in Darwin’s letters that would seem to support Desmond and Moore’s thesis about the motivating factor for Darwin’s species work. However, given how deeply their book is rooted in primary source documentation, surely I must have missed something in my own reading. Curious to figure out what, I decided to undertake a careful re-reading of Darwin’s Sacred Cause, paying special attention to places where Desmond and Moore register Darwin’s views on slavery and race. I then checked the references they cite to document this new portrait of Darwin.
Shockingly, it turns out that these highly esteemed scholars play fast and loose with their sources and with basic tenets of historiographical research.
Therefore, I offer a series of posts here designed to lay out the evidence in detail. It is not merely that Desmond and Moore are selective in the sources they cite, filtering out only those which support their thesis. Many historians are selective. What I found in their historiography rises, instead, to a different level.
A Sweeping Statement
For example, let’s consider Desmond and Moore’s sweeping statement regarding the impact on Darwin of his encounters with indigenous peoples during the Beagle voyage:
Interestingly it was in Tierra del Fuego, perplexed and troubled by an alien race, that Darwin decided to spend his life studying natural science (97).
It sounds like Darwin’s scientific work was primarily motivated by anthropological concerns. Let’s check the sources. An endnote points us to Darwin’s autobiography (p. 26) and volume 1 of his correspondence (pp. 305, and 311-12. Desmond and Moore cite the correspondence by volume and page number, never by date and addressee of the letter).
In his autobiography, Darwin does indeed write:
I remember when in Good Success Bay, in Tierra del Fuego, thinking, (and I believe that I wrote home to the effect) that I could not employ my life better than in adding a little to natural science.
Darwin does say he contemplated a career in science while in Tierra del Fuego, but he gives no indication that it was due to being “perplexed and troubled by an alien race,” as Desmond and Moore indicate.
Volume 1 of the correspondence, page 305, reflects a March 1833 letter of Darwin to his sister Caroline written during the Beagle voyage. He makes several references to his growing love for geology, and his ability to withstand the difficulties of the voyage because of his increasing pleasure from natural history, but nothing about alien races. Pages 311-12 reflect a May 1833 letter to another sister, Catherine, in which Darwin says, referring to the numerous invertebrate animals in the intertropical ocean, “If it was not for these & still more for geology — I would in short time make a bolt across the Atlantic to good old Shropshire.”
These references clearly demonstrate that Darwin’s interest in a career in science was stoked by his natural history pursuits during the voyage. The idea that he was motivated by being “perplexed and troubled by an alien race” has no support in the sources that Desmond and Moore cite, a point that undercuts their entire thesis that combatting slavery was his sacred cause.
An Emigration Daydream
As another brief example, consider their story about how Darwin bought his children a copy of Mary Howitt’s book Our Cousins in Ohio, which painted a portrait of “an English family living as neighbors to liberated blacks, their children playing in the lush countryside only miles from the Slave States’ border” (238). Desmond and Moore claim that in response to this book, Darwin also harbored an emigration daydream in which he
plumped for the ‘middle States’ as ‘what I fancy most’ — New York, Pennsylvania, maybe even Ohio; free soil situated between New England’s snobbery and Lyell’s beloved south.
An accompanying endnote refers to volume 4 of the correspondence (p. 362). There we find Darwin writing to his cousin William Darwin Fox in October 1850. In noting that his eighth child was on the way, Darwin made the offhand comment:
I often speculate how wise it would be to start off to Australia, or what I fancy most the middle States of N. America.
He then quickly changes the subject to a question Fox asked about his pear tree.
No Connection at All
Darwin’s brief speculation about possibly moving to America is not connected at all to the difference between slave or free states and he makes no mention of Howitt’s book. But more problematic is Desmond and Moore’s gloss, “New York, Pennsylvania, maybe even Ohio; free soil situated between New England’s snobbery and Lyell’s beloved south.” Darwin neither said nor implied this. Desmond and Moore, with brief phrases actually quoted from the letter, give the impression that they are paraphrasing Darwin’s words. In reality, Darwin was simply concerned about finding economic opportunities for his many children and thought Australia or America might provide them.
These are just two of many examples of Desmond and Moore creating a portrait of Darwin as abolitionist that is poorly supported by their intimidating apparatus of primary source citations which are mostly irrelevant to their argument. Readers have a right to trust that the sources cited support the claims made in the text. But most readers will not check obscure references buried in over 800 endnotes at the back of the book. They haven’t met me!
In future posts, we will see many more illustrations of Desmond and Moore’s historiographical methodology, and how that bears on Darwin’s “sacred cause.”
Darwinism is the fittest? III
Peer-Reviewed Paper Cites Stephen Meyer to Critique Darwinian Evolution
In an article yesterday I noted that a peer-reviewed paper published last year in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, titled “Neo-Darwinism Must Mutate to survive,” offered potent probability arguments against the Darwinian evolution of a complex molecular pathway. These arguments, presented by authors Olen R. Brown and David A. Hullender, in many respects resemble intelligent design probability arguments.
Importantly, the authors seem aware that intelligent design offers similar arguments, and they appear to agree that these hold some merit:
Probability reasoning has been applied to the evolution alternative known as intelligent design by Elliott Sober who argued that ‘Darwinian gradualism’ and ‘random genetic drift’ are reasonable ‘evolutionary processes’ to overcome weaknesses in natural selection by survival of the fittest (Sober, 2007). We challenge these assumptions. Stephen Gould, and Niles Eldredge initiated a controversy described in the book Punctuated Equilibrium (Gould, 2007). Their proposal was widely ridiculed but the problem they addressed was real and continues today e survival of the fittest is not a satisfactory explanation for macroevolution.
Indeed, the authors cite Stephen Meyer’s 2013 book Darwin’s Doubt and his arguments about “the combinational problem of the Cambrian explosion”:
There is much published evidence that Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theories are probabilistically extremely improbable. Stephen Meyer in his book Darwin’s Doubt (S. C. Meyer, n.d.) has intelligently examined the meaning of the rapid expansion of life forms that appeared in what is known as the Cambrian explosion. Many life forms with essentially new body types appeared quickly and without precursors in the Burgess Shale discovered in Canada’s Kicking Horse Valley in British Columbia in the 1880s.
Mainstream biologists have maintained that up to 20 million years was provided during this ‘explosion’ which they maintain is adequate for the presumed process of change with selection to have accounted for Neo-Darwinian Evolution as typified in a critique of Meyer’s book published in 2013 in the New Yorker (Cook, n.d.). Myer also has spoken about the combinational problem of the Cambrian explosion, including: “… the mystery of how the neo-Darwinian mechanisms of natural selection and random mutation [emphasis added] could have given rise to all these fundamentally new forms of animal life.” (S. Meyer, n.d.).
In this perspective, we seek to promote a sea change in mainstream biology to follow the evidence. We do not propose that probability alone is a solution, but that it is a useful initiative for redirecting prior efforts that have too often been met, unfortunately, with a mental shrug and the statement ‘we are here’.
The authors seem to have appreciated Meyer’s message — namely that some factor other than standard evolutionary mechanisms is needed to produce life’s complex features.
Others Calling for New Models
The paper further notes that many sources are calling for new models of evolution, as it quotes Corning (2020) stating that there is no valid replacement paradigm for the Modern Synthesis:
Many theorists in recent years have been calling for evolutionary biology to move beyond the Modern Synthesis — the paradigm that has long provided the theoretical backbone for the discipline. Terms like ‘postmodern synthesis’, ‘integrative synthesis’, and ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’ have been invoked by various critics in connection with the many recent developments that pose deep challenges — even contradictions — to the traditional model and underscore the need for an update, or makeover. However, none of these critics, to this author’s knowledge, has to date offered an explicit alternative that could provide a unifying theoretical paradigm for our vastly increased knowledge about living systems and the history of life on earth.
Similarly they quote Noble (2021)
[T]he illusions of the modern synthesis … something has gone deeply wrong in biology … [there is] the difficulty of trying to ‘break out of its attractive simplicity’ as it is still routinely taught in schools and universities … This is a serious and unnecessary situation that urgently needs rectifying … We have reached a critical turning point in evolutionary biology.
On the origin of life, the authors note that key problems are unsolved, quoting Mariscal et al. (2019) who offer a forceful critique of the state of the field of origin of life research:
[W]e provide brief summaries of debates with respect to (1) definitions (or theories) of life, what life is and how research should be conducted in the absence of an accepted theory of life, (2) the distinctions between synthetic, historical, and universal projects in origins-of-life studies, issues with strategies for inferring the origins of life, such as (3) the nature of the first living entities (the “bottom up” approach) and (4) how to infer the nature of the last universal common ancestor (the “top down” approach), and (5) the status of origins of life as a science. Each of these debates influences the others. Although there are clusters of researchers that agree on some answers to these issues, each of these debates is still open.
Opposition from Mainstream Biology
They know these are serious challenges, that they are in for some tough sledding, and that their claims may not be well received. So the introduction to the paper contains a pre-emptive statement expressing their awareness of the “opposition” their claims will face:
The central thesis of this perspective is that reasonable scientific challenges to evolutionary theories, like other theories in science, should be explored. We focus on assessing the weaknesses of survival of the fittest, evaluating alternatives, and proposing new ideas. Mainstream biology remains opposed to any opposition to the central concepts of evolution.
It’s quite striking to see a mainstream scientific journal acknowledging that “Mainstream biology remains opposed to any opposition to the central concepts of evolution.” They further state that they “are critical of accepting without question Darwinian evolution and Neo-Darwinism including what is generally referred to as the modern synthesis”— the implication being that many accept it uncritically. But they haven’t given up on mainstream biology, and thus attempt to remind readers of the scientific virtues of humility and openness to new ideas:
[T]he Templeton Foundation on its website in January 2022 described the ‘Joy of being wrong’ and said that Saint Augustine called humility the foundation of all other virtues. “Psychologists and philosophers are working to tease apart the ways we respond to new ideas and information — and the possible benefits of intellectual humility … a mindset that guides our intellectual conduct … it involves recognizing and owning our intellectual limitations in the service of pursuing deeper knowledge, truth, and understanding.”
Again, I had not heard of these authors prior to the publication of this paper — but their courage and boldness inspire confidence that there are still people within the scientific community willing to follow the evidence where it leads.
Darwinism is the fittest? II
Peer-Reviewed Paper: “Neo-Darwinism Must Mutate to Survive”
A peer-reviewed paper published towards the end of last year in the Elsevier journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology has a provocative title: “Neo-Darwinism Must Mutate to survive ” The paper’s abstract opens with points that few would dispute:
Darwinian evolution is a nineteenth century descriptive concept that itself has evolved. Selection by survival of the fittest was a captivating idea. Microevolution was biologically and empirically verified by discovery of mutations.
However, there then comes a major “but”:
There has been limited progress to the modern synthesis. The central focus of this perspective is to provide evidence to document that selection based on survival of the fittest is insufficient for other than microevolution.
And according to authors Olen R. Brown and David A. Hullender, just what is the basis for saying this? It’s calculations showing that the likelihood of microevolutionary processes adding up to macroevolutionary changes is highly improbable:
Realistic probability calculations based on probabilities associated with microevolution are presented. However, macroevolution (required for all speciation events and the complexifications appearing in the Cambrian explosion) are shown to be probabilistically highly implausible (on the order of 10-50) when based on selection by survival of the fittest. We conclude that macroevolution via survival of the fittest is not salvageable by arguments for random genetic drift and other proposed mechanisms.
They go on to state, “We are critical, as previously explained, of the position that macroevolution is sufficiently explained by the processes useful for microevolution — in particular that mutations and survival of the fittest are adequate to the task,” and argue that “Microevolution does not explain speciation — only smaller changes.”
A Familiar Critique
Prior to the publication of this paper I was not familiar with these authors (though Olen R. Brown contributed an article to Evolution News while I was in South Africa completing my PhD). But clearly they share a critical perspective on neo-Darwinism that is very similar to that of the intelligent design community. Consider this striking passage:
Survival of the fittest is adequate to select for such changes (gains) which occur within one genome primarily by single fixed mutations (and perhaps sometimes by horizontal gene transfer). Macroevolution, however, requires major changes necessitating multiple changes that logically most frequently occur in multiple genomes. Therefore, the concept survival of the fittest is inadequate to conserve individual changes in multiple genomes where the individual changes generate no increased fitness. … Thus, survival of the fittest is illogical when proposed as adequate for selecting the origination of all complex, major, new body-types and metabolic functions because the multiple changes in multiple genomes that are required have intermediate stages without advantage; selection would not reasonably occur, and disadvantage or death would logically prevail.
What they are saying is that when some feature requires multiple changes before providing an increase in fitness, the changes cannot be produced by mutation and selection alone. Their subsequent comments, read carefully, almost sound like an implicit endorsement of intelligent design:
It is our perspective that the burden is too great for survival of the fittest to select evolutionary changes that accomplish all evolutionary novelty. Thus, evolution lacks a sufficient mechanism for multifactorial selections because a process that looks forward, is nonrandom, deterministic, or occurs by an unknown biological process, is required. The position of mainstream biologists regarding this aspect of evolution is that nature is always non-purposeful and, therefore, the proposed selection (process, force, tendency), could not possibly be natural (scientific). However, our perspective is that this is a supposition of necessity rather than an established principle. Logic demands that it be open to investigation. This first requires an openness to ideas and science must be open to new ideas.
They thus propose that evolution is only possible if it is “nonrandom, deterministic, or occurs by an unknown biological process” — something that some would reluctantly conclude “could not possibly be natural.” They continue:
Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species… : “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.” Today, Darwin’s missing cases are abundant including each complex transition to a new body type, metabolic cycle, or metabolic chain. Multi-step processes are routinely required at every evolutionary step.
They then perform a probability calculation which shows that the likelihood of producing a necessary pathway would require such multi-step processes leading to probabilities below the plausibility bound they had previously set.
Origin of the Krebs Cycle
They use a case study of the origin of the Krebs cycle — a metabolic pathway involving 12 enzymes that is necessary for life. They believe that this is a useful test for evolution. They assume that the genome is “ripe” to produce each enzyme where a minimal number of mutations is needed for a gene to suddenly become functional. They therefore choose an incredibly generous value of 0.00001 as the probability that a given enzyme can be created by a single mutation.
They calculate the likelihood of producing all 12 enzymes needed to produce a selectable function as 10-51. They note this is below 10-50, a probability that was called “negligible” by Émile Borel, the French mathematician, who stated “this process of evolution involves certain properties of living matter that prevent us from asserting that the process was accomplished in accordance with the laws of chance.”
They also reject co-option and exaptation as possible explanations for the origin of the Krebs cycle:
The idea that the complete, functioning Krebs cycle arose by purloining each intermediate step from other uses (Meléndez-Hevia, 1996) lacks empirical support. The discoveries that genes can be switched on and off, that codes read forward and backward, gene duplication, and the homeobox, are helpful but inadequate to save evolutionary theory without modification.
In the end, producing a complex feature like the Krebs cycle is just too improbable because “Selection based on survival of the fittest, for anything beyond single mutational changes in a genome, is insufficient scientifically and biologically.” They conclude, “there is something besides mutations and survival of the fittest needed to explain evolution.”
The Junk DNA trope further exposed as Junk science.
More Jobs for “Junk” DNA
It turns out the mouse endogenous retrovirus L (MERVL) is essential for embryogenesis, according to a recently published article in Nature Genetics. From the Discussion
We provided functional evidence that transcriptional activation of MERVL is essential for progression of development in mouse preimplantation embryos. Depletion of MERVL transcripts results in embryonic lethality with profound defects in development and is associated with dysregulation of MERVL including their adjacent transcripts, and retaining two-cell-like transcriptome and chromatin state (Fig. 6i). These findings suggest the possibility that MERVL transcription in totipotent cells may act as a switch for the transition from totipotency to pluripotency and is responsible for the onset of differentiation and ontogeny.
For more, see “Transcription of MERVL retrotransposons is required for preimplantation embryo development” (open access).
Biology's lexicon and the design inference.
Mapping the Pleiotropic Network of Human Cells
If you think about how you use English words, you quickly realize that words are polyfunctional. “House,” for instance, can be a noun, a verb, or an adjective (“house music,” “house money,” etc.).
Thus, if you imagine eliminating the word “house” from your daily-use lexicon, a wide range of different propositions would be affected, many having no apparent semantic relation to each other.
Genes and proteins are remarkably similar to natural-language words in this polyfunctional respect. For many decades, “pleiotropy” has been the term describing the multiple-system consequences of genetic mutations to a single locus, where the functional consequences can be wide-ranging, and often surprising in their diversity.
For more on the subject, here is an open access article at Nature Genetics: “Network expansion of genetic associations defines a Pleiotropy map of human cell biology.”
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