It's bomb thrower David Berlinski again.

 Listen: In a New Book, David Berlinski Gives the Devil His Due

Evolution News

On a new episode of ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid rings up Science After Babel author David Berlinski in Paris to discuss the philosopher’s latest Book

. Berlinski is at his cultivated best as the two discuss everything from the biblical Tower of Babel as a metaphor for modern materialistic science, to his friendship with the brilliant and colorful French intellectual Marcel Schützenberger, a world-class mathematician who was self-taught and, as we learn here, came within a hair’s breadth of being swept up in the Chinese Revolution. Berlinski also reflects on the seminal 1966 Wistar  Symposium , which laid out some mathematical challenges to Darwinism, challenges that Berlinski says remain unanswered to this day. At the same time, Berlinski gives the devil — here Darwinism — its due. Download the¹ podcast or listen to it Here.

Will it be the noble savage or savage noble who saves civilization?

 The Barbarian Within: Darwinism and the Secular Script for Masculinity

Nancy Pearcy

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a preview adapted from Nancy Pearcey’s forthcoming book The Toxic War on Masculinity. The book will be published on June 27, but you can pre-order now!

Civilization has degenerated into a “mawkish sentimentality,” complained a writer in 1888. “In Heaven’s name, leave us a saving touch of honest, old-fashioned barbarism!” 

How did barbarism come to be seen as a positive trait for men — “a saving touch,” a remedy for Victorian sentimentality?…

A new concept of masculinity took hold after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859). His evolutionary theory inspired the idea that, at the core, men are animals — and that to recover their authentic masculinity, men need to reconnect with their inner beast. For example, Zane Grey said that in his Westerns he was trying to recapture the experience of our evolutionary ancestors. “Nature developed man according to the biological facts of evolution,” he wrote. “Something of the wild and primitive should forever remain instinctive in the human race.” 

Male writers began to claim that civilization was merely a thin veneer over our animal nature. A book titled Savage Survivals (1916) said, “Civilization is only a skin. The great core of human nature is barbaric.” A book titled The Caveman Within Us (1922) argued that the human organism has only “a slight coat of cultural whitewash, which may be called the veneer of civilization.” 

In fact, any man not primitive or barbarian enough risked being judged as a failure as a man. The most prominent psychologist of the age, G. Stanley Hall, remarked that “a teenage boy who is a perfect gentleman has something the matter with him.” 

In this chapter, we will investigate the application of Darwinism to human behavior, which is called Social Darwinism. How has it shaped the public discourse on masculinity right up to our own day? How has it contributed to the secular script for the “Real” Man.

The “Blessings” of War

In the nineteenth century, due to industrialization and urbanization, a new word entered the English language: overcivilized. People began to worry that city boys were becoming soft and emasculated. They were no longer the strapping young men produced by harsh pioneer days or rugged farm life. The three principal institutions that dominate early childhood socialization — family, religion, and education — were increasingly staffed and run by women. Men began to cast about for ways to retrieve a sense of robust manhood.

Social Darwinism came in handy in several ways. Take militarism: If life evolved through the struggle for survival, then applying that principle to nations suggests that the way to produce strong, vigorous manhood is through warfare. 

“War is a blessing for humanity,” wrote a German anthropologist, “since it offers the only means to measure the strengths of one nation to another and to grant the victory to the fittest. War is the highest and most majestic form of the struggle for existence.” A biologist agreed: 

According to Darwin’s theory, war has constantly been of the greatest importance for the general progress of the human race, in that the physically weaker, the less intelligent, the morally inferior or morally degenerate peoples must clear out and make room for the stronger and better developed. 

Theodore Roosevelt was a Social Darwinist and famously said in 1895, “The country needs a war.” He argued that the current generation of young men needed to test their mettle in battle: 

No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war. The courage of the soldier, the courage of the statesman who has to meet storms which can only be quelled by soldierly virtue — this stands higher than any qualities called out merely in times of peace. 

G. Stanley Hall even cast militarism as a “manly protest” against the influence of women: “War is, in a sense, the acme of what some now call the manly protest. In peace, women have invaded nearly all the occupations of man, but in war, male virtues come to the fore, for woman cannot go ‘over the top.’” War was depicted not as a necessary evil but as a positive strategy for restoring virile manhood. 

Your Inner Barbarian 

Social Darwinism was also used to support a sports and fitness craze that swept over the nation toward the end of the nineteenth century. As middle-class Americans left behind the rigorous life on the farm to become a nation of sedentary office workers, they began to turn to sports and exercise to rebuild their physical health. The first tennis court in the United States was built in 1876, the first basketball court in 1891. 

Sports were touted not only as a way to get physically fit but also as a way for boys to reconnect with their evolutionary origins. In 1866, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, a devotee of Darwin, proposed a theory called recapitulation, claiming that each human embryo replays the entire history of evolution (from one-celled organism, to fish, to amphibian, to mammal, to human). Social Darwinists concluded that boys continue the process of evolution by “recapitulating” the history of the human race as they pass from childhood to adulthood. 

For example, William Forbush, a child development specialist, wrote a highly influential book titled The Boy Problem (1902) claiming that each boy repeats “the history of his own race-life from savagery unto civilization.” Joseph Lee, a social reformer who founded a movement to build playgrounds in cities, said play arose from an earlier stage of human evolution — from the “barbaric and predatory society to which the boy naturally belongs.” A pioneer in the Boy Scout movement said athletics were reminiscent “of the struggle for survival, of the hunt, of the chase, of war.” 

The idea was that even as boys grew up to become refined Victorian gentlemen, they should always retain a core of wildness and savagery. When Ernest Thompson Seton founded the Boy Scouts of America, he said that his goal was to rekindle in boys “the power of the savage.”

Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation was eventually discredited. (He had supported the theory with falsified sketches of embryos; already in his own day, he was accused of fraud.) Yet the idea that humans arose from animal origins and are barbarians at heart was becoming part of the socially constructed definition of manhood. 

Darwinian Stories 

Darwinism was used to bolster the philosophy of naturalism, the claim that nature is all that exists. Among writers, it inspired a new genre called literary naturalism. Novelists portrayed humans as evolved organisms, governed by the laws of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Émile Zola, a leading theorist of literary naturalism, said he wanted to portray characters as “human animals, nothing more.”

For example, Frank Norris wrote a short story (1893) about a bookish student named Lauth living in medieval France who gets caught up in a riot and ends up killing a man with a crossbow:

In an instant, a mighty flame of blood-lust thrilled up through Lauth’s body and mind. At the sight of blood shed by his own hands all the animal savagery latent in every human being woke within him — no more merciful scruples now. He could kill. In the twinkling of an eye the pale, highly cultivated scholar . . . sank back to the level of his savage Celtic ancestors. His eyes glittered . . . and his whole frame quivered with the eagerness and craving of a panther in sight of his prey.

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), often assigned in high school classes, is set during the Civil War. Early in the novel, the main character, Henry, flees from the field of battle. But later he “felt the daring spirit of a savage.” He redeems himself by fighting like a “barbarian, a beast,” a “war devil.” 

Jack London is best known for books like The Call of the Wild (1903). But what most people do not know is that, as a young man, London underwent what one historian calls “a conversion experience” to radical naturalism by reading books about evolution. He even memorized passages from Darwin’s books and could quote them by heart, the way Christians memorize Scripture. 

Though London wrote about dogs, he intended them as metaphors for humans. In The Call of the Wild, the main character is a dog named Buck, a house pet captured and sold to an Alaskan expedition where he is thrown into a Darwinian struggle for survival. In the Nordic cold, he quickly learns that men and dogs “were savages all of them, who knew no law but the law of the club and fang.” 

Eventually, the last tie to civilization is broken and Buck returns to a pre-civilized existence. A literary critic writes, “Ideal manliness thrives in Buck only because he becomes less and less human, more and more wild.”

Theodore Dreiser, author of American classics such as Sister Carrie, likewise underwent a naturalistic rite of passage by reading books about evolution. He wrote that Darwinism blew him “intellectually to bits,” destroying the last vestiges of his Catholic upbringing. He intended his novels to show that all human “ideals, struggles, deprivations, sorrows, and joys” were nothing but products of chemical reactions in the brain. He called them “chemic compulsions.” The literary naturalists used fiction to promote a Darwinian worldview that reduced humans to products of evolutionary forces. 

The Thin Veneer of Civilization 

The literary naturalists treated the wilderness as an arena where men could reaffirm their masculinity. As one historian explains, the wilderness was seen “as a source of virility, toughness, and savagery — qualities that defined fitness in Darwinian terms.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs set his immensely popular Tarzan series (1912) in the African jungle. Because of Tarzan’s wild upbringing, he avoids the debilitating forces of civilization, possessing the power and strength of primitive manhood. Even after mastering European customs and languages, he prefers to “strip off the thin veneer of civilization” (as Burroughs puts it) and dress in a loincloth of animal hide, eating raw meat that he has killed himself. In Tarzan of the Apes, he tells Jane, “I am still a wild beast at heart.” 

The message of the Tarzan books, says sociologist Michael Kimmel, is that “descending the evolutionary ladder is the only mechanism to retrieve manhood.”

This is a severely stunted, shrunken, truncated view of human nature. From the time of the classical Greeks and Romans, virtue had been defined as the restraint of the “lower” passions by the “higher” faculties of reason, spirit, and moral will. But Darwinism was taken to mean that humans had triumphed over the other species not by reason and moral restraint but by the fierce, fighting urges. In a stunning reversal, the animal passions and instincts were held up as the authentic self. 

The secular script for manhood was redefined as crude and combative, governed by the biological instincts for lust and power. 

Many of the literary naturalists created rollicking adventure stories that are great fun to read. One of our sons devoured the Tarzan books. But Christians should always read with their worldview antennae poised to pick up the story’s underlying message. A Darwinian worldview furthered secular ideas of what it means to be a man. 

The earlier ideal of the Christian gentleman had urged men to live up to the image of God implanted in them. By contrast, the Darwinian worldview urged men to live down to their presumed animal nature — to compete in the ruthless struggle for dominance and power. The “Real” Man was being defined in increasingly toxic term

s. 

Philosophy: the Yin to science's Yang?

Human not ape-man?

 Scientists Are Skeptical that Intelligence in Homo naledi “Erases Human Exceptionalism”

Casey Lusken

major science news story is making the rounds right now about how the hominid species Homo naledi may have had high intelligence, buried its dead, used fire, and even carved markings into a cave wall. All this is unexpected since Homo naledi’s brain size is not much different from that of a chimp. 

Given the extensive media attention (e.g., Wall Street Journal, Newspeak, ABC News, Associated Press , New York Times , to name a few), you might think this is some completely new proposal that just got published in a major scientific journal. That inference would be wrong. At least when it comes to burial of the dead and use of fire, these are old claims about Homo naledi that have been controversial for years but are now being reinvigorated based upon new evidence presented in a series of three preprint papers (Here, Here, and Here). The papers were uploaded at bioRxiv, which, of course, is a preprint server, not a scientific journal. Newsweek thus observes, “The papers are still in preprint, however, so they are yet to be published officially in a peer-reviewed journal.” The Associated Press Notes, “The research has not been peer-reviewed yet and some outside scientists think more evidence is needed to challenge what we know about how humans evolved their complex thinking.” 

             Someone must have a good PR team at work to generate such a large batch of news stories about mostly old claims based entirely upon preprints! Phys.org is even running a story about the project’s lead scientist, Lee Berger, heralding “South Africa’s Lee Berger, Palaeontology action hero”!

Scientists Are Skeptical

Peer-reviewed or not, and hyped or not, the data exists and it’s worth discussing. And apparently quite a few scientists are skeptical. The New York Times notes:

But a number of experts on ancient engravings and burials said that the evidence did not yet support these extraordinary conclusions about Homo naledi. The cave evidence found so far could have a range of other explanations, they said. The skeletons might have been merely left on the cave floor, for example. And the charcoal and engravings found in the cave might have been left by modern humans who entered long after Homo naledi became extinct.

“It seems that the narrative is more important than the facts,” said Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia.

An article at The Conversation authored by a quartet of four archaeologists, based in Australia, Kenya, Spain, and Germany, shows that some prominent scientists aren’t convinced. The article, titled “Major new research claims smaller-brained Homo naledi made rock art and buried the dead. But the evidence is lacking,” covers the three main claims: use of fire, burial of the dead, and the presence of cave art.

Let’s take a look at each of these.

Torching Fire Use by Homo naledi?

The skeptical quartet note that the investigators have not published any evidence that demonstrates Homo naledi used fire in the cave:

In public lectures and on social media they clarify they have found new evidence for hearths, including charcoal, ash, discoloured clay and burned animal bones. Yet none of the scientific research needed to confirm the use of fire has been carried out. Or if it has, it hasn’t been published.

Previously acquired radiocarbon dates obtained by the site investigators on the apparent hearth material provided very late dates that distanced the hearths from the remains of Homo naledi by several hundred thousand years.

These are pretty strong criticisms. The quartet says the investigators are making assertions that have simply not been backed up by evidence presented to the public. In that case, claims of Homo naledi’s fire use seem totally unestablished. 

Burying Claims of Burial of the Dead

As for burial of the dead, the skeptical quartet note that there are “rigorous criteria agreed upon by the scientific community for identifying intentional human burial.” But, they argue, the Homo naledi evidence does not meet this standard:

[I]s there actually evidence for funerary behaviour at Rising Star Cave? According to standards set by the palaeoanthropology community, the evidence presented so far indicates no.

They continue:

[N]ot one of the burials provides compelling evidence of a deliberately excavated pit. Indeed, the shallow cavities may not be dug pits at all, but natural depressions where the bodies accumulated and were later disturbed by trampling, or partial cave collapse.

The alleged burials also fail to meet another fundamental criteria for deliberate burials: anatomical alignment of the body and articulation of skeletal remains.

In a deliberate burial, the body is generally intact and any minimal displacement can be explained by decomposition. That’s because burial involves immediately covering the body with soil, which protects the anatomical integrity of the skeleton.

Rising Star Cave so far hasn’t produced evidence for anything other than the general spatial association of some skeletal elements. At most, it provides evidence for the in-situ decomposition of particular body parts, such as an ankle, and partial hand and foot articulations.

Moreover, confirming intentional burial in the past has required the presentation of human remains in an arrangement that can’t have been achieved by chance. However, the scattered distribution of the remains at Rising Star prevents reconstruction of their original positions.

Other claimed evidence for funerary behaviour is equally uncompelling. A stone artefact supposedly included in the burial as a “grave good” is said to have scratches and edge serrations from use. But this so-called artefact’s shape suggests it may be natural. It’s still encased in sediment and has only been studied through synchrotron X-ray.

But perhaps the biggest barrier to confirming the status of the findings is that so far none of the alleged burials have been fully excavated. It’s therefore impossible to assess the completeness of the bodies, their original position, and the limits of the purported pits.

The New York Times elaborates:

But María Martinón-Torres, the director of Spain’s National Research Center on Human Evolution, said that such speculations were premature based on the evidence presented so far. “Hypotheses need to be built on what we have, not what we guess,” she said.

Dr. Martinón-Torres considered funerary caching more likely than burials, pointing out that the oval depressions did not contain full skeletons in complete alignment. If Homo naledi brought the bodies into the cave and left them on the cave floor, the bones could have become separated as the bodies decomposed. “Still, I think the possibility of having funerary caching with this antiquity is already stunning,” she said.

“I’m highly optimistic that they have burials, but the jury is still out,” said Michael Petraglia, the director of the Australian Research Center for Human Evolution. Dr. Petraglia wanted to see more detailed analysis of the sediment and other kinds of evidence before judging whether the ovals were burials. “The problem is that they’re ahead of the science,” he said.

And Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University in England, said it was possible that Homo naledi did not bring the bodies in, either for caching or burying. The bodies might have washed in. “I’m not convinced that the team have demonstrated that this was deliberate burial,” he said.

Likewise the UK’s Natural History Museum quotes a scientist who is not buying it:

Dr Silvia Bello is an expert on the evolution of human behaviour at the Museum, and was not involved in the study.

‘It sounds ridiculous because we’re used to burials, but they are not the easiest of things to define or recognise,’ explains Silvia. ‘If you have a body that is completely buried, when it decomposes the bone collapses in a certain way and in a certain order. So, this could give an indication that the body was buried whole, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you that it was a burial. The researchers call what they have found a “feature”, which I thought was very generic.’

‘There are two things at play. One is the burial, and one is the funerary behaviour: you can have a funerary behaviour without a burial.’

Science News also has a story quoting critics of claims that this new evidence establishes burial of the dead:

Some researchers consider the new evidence inadequate to confirm that H. naledi interred its own in cave graves. …

“I think that deliberate burial of the dead by Homo naledi is clear, although it is unlikely that the evidence so far presented will satisfy all scholars,” says archaeologist Michael Petraglia of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, who is not part of Berger’s team.

One objection comes from paleoanthropologist María Martinón-Torres, director of the Spanish National Research Center on Human Evolution in Burgos. She suspects that disconnected skeletal parts described in the new papers accumulated either after bodies of the dead that had been placed in cave shafts later fell through or had been left at the back of underground caves. Trampling or other H. naledi activities in caves could eventually have produced fragmentary sets of fossils uncovered by Berger’s group, says Martinón-Torres, who along with Petraglia studied the oldest known H. sapiens burial in Africa.

It’s possible that periodic water seepage into the underground caves helped to move partial or complete H. naledi corpses down sloping cave floors until they came to rest in natural depressions that Berger’s team suggests are intentional burial sites, says archaeologist Paul Pettitt of Durham University in England.

Presumably, if other hominids entered the cave later, then they could also be responsible for the markings on the cave wall.

Is the Writing on the Wall?

As for the markings on the cave wall, these are clearly artificial — that much seems obvious. But it’s quite another task to demonstrate that they were produced by the species Homo naledi. The problem is that the markings are at this point totally undated and thus it’s difficult to say whether they were made by Homo naledi or some later species — perhaps even by humans — who entered the cave and scraped up the wall. This point is reiterated by multiple stories:

Science News notes: “[T]here is no way to determine whether H. naledi or perhaps later H. sapiens visitors to the underground caves — part of South Africa’s Rising Star Cave System, about 40 kilometers west of Johannesburg — created the undated engravings found by Berger’s group. … But the underground cave engravings remain undated. There is no way to know whether people reached the cave chambers within the past few thousand years and carved those wall patterns, Pettitt says.” 

In an Associated Press story, Rick Potts of the Smithsonian makes a similar point: “Scientists haven’t yet been able to identify how old the engravings are. So Potts said the current evidence can’t say for sure whether H. naledi was truly the one to create the symbols, or if some other creature — maybe even H. sapiens — made its way down there at some point.”

The New York Times likewise states: “As for the engravings and the fires, experts said it wasn’t clear that Homo naledi was responsible for them. It was possible they were the work of modern humans who came into the cave thousands of years later. ‘The whole thing is unconvincing, to say the least,’ said João Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona.”

The quartet of skeptical archaeologists writing at The Conversation also note: “The problem with the rock art at Rising Star Cave is that it’s undated. To imply any link with Homo naledi requires firm dates. This could be achieved through using dating techniques on associated residues or natural deposits covering the art, or by studying materials from excavated and dated archaeological layers that can be linked to the art (for instance, if they contain engraving tools or engraved rock fall fragments). …In the absence of dating, it’s simply spurious to claim the engravings were made by Homo naledi, rather than by another species (and potentially at a much later date).”

Incidentally, the cave markings look very similar to markings made by Neanderthals — whom we already know were highly intelligent. As John Hawks told the Wall Street Journal:

Similar ancient hashtags have been documented at a Neanderthal site in Gibraltar that is just tens of thousands of years old. “They are uncannily similar, and they are 8,000 kilometers apart, you know, it is just crazy,” Hawks said.

Neanderthal fossils aren’t known from southern Africa, but any similarly smart hominid (like Homo sapiens) could have made these marks.

“Erases the Idea of Human Exceptionalism”

The possibility that some later species made the cave markings is not even considered by many news outlets, including ABC News, which is completely credulous about claims that these markings were made by the precise individuals who “laid to rest” the bones that are found in the cave:

The researchers began to hypothesize that Homo naledi buried its dead during continued excavations in 2018 and in July 2022, those hunches were not only proven but amplified once Berger and his team found skeletal remains of Homo naledi and then carvings on the wall above them to mark those laid to rest there.

The symbols included triangles, squares and a sort-of “hashtag” sign, as in two cross-hatching equal signs, Berger said. However, it is unclear what these carvings meant, and researchers will be delving into whether there is a “random chance” that Homo naledi used the same symbols as humans or if they were obtained from some sort of shared ancestry.

Why do so many folks seem so eager to accept unsubstantiated claims about Homo naledi? ABC News spells out what the investigators want to accomplish with this research:

The finding was “striking” and “shocking” and erases the idea of human exceptionalism — that humans are different than animals and special due to their big brains. Homo naledi had brains about the size of a chimpanzee, and yet practiced ritual burials, a behavior previously assumed was only done by humans, Berger said.

They get points for candor, at least. The purpose of these stretched and unverified claims of high intelligence in a small-brained hominid is apparently to “erase the idea” that human beings are “special” and “exceptional.”

Keep in mind that Berger et al.’s previous claims about Homo naledi’s intelligence have been highly disputed and their initial claims that the species lived 2-3 million years ago turned out to be exaggerated by a factor of 10. Time will tell if these latest Homo naledi claims from Berger’s team stand up. I’m skeptical, to say the least.