Richard Dawkins and the Law of Unintended Consequences
Post-1945 evolutionary studies were, as far as the public could discern at any rate, a relatively sedate affair right up to the later 1970s. Then, a new, brasher breed of biologists and philosophers began to declaim an unambiguously atheistic interpretation of Darwin’s legacy. This new trend can be dated to the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene in 1976, a volume which enjoyed the then unusual novelty for science writing of not just presenting dispassionate reporting, but of inaugurating a new era of scientific proselytization. Without a trace of irony, it appeared, Dawkins in Selfish Gene and his numerous later publications was setting up his stall as a would-be messianic preacher with a distinctly secular/nihilist gospel to spread.
Educator or False Messiah?
The polarized responses elicited by Dawkins’s sermonizing are well enough known. Those who witnessed post-1976 discursive developments in real time will likely remember a narrative in two parts. On the one hand there were Dawkins and his followers attempting to give theologians a jolly good drubbing by pointing out to them the futility of endorsing any belief system which disregarded the exclusively material reality undergirding human life. Against that line of argument came a strong counterblast resulting in what seemed a veritable renaissance of Christian apologetics where one theological writer would follow another to point out the callowness of Dawkins’s understanding of religion,1 widely recognized as consisting in little but a rerun of the old conflict model of science and religion which first arose in formal terms in the later Victorian period in America.2 However, to nobody’s surprise the theological volumes which the dispute produced cut little ice with the persons to whom their critiques were directed (even assuming they were read by those persons at all). It is for that reason that I wish in what follows to turn to a less well reported aspect of the controversy but one which exerted a far greater public impact.
The New Atheists had indeed, just as they intended, stirred up a hornets’ nest, but it was their misfortune that so many of the more aggressive hornets have since turned round to sting them. This trend stems in good part from the fact that those expounding the Dawkinsite gospel had vastly underestimated those large ambivalences in many persons’ minds which for many decades had been concealed under a forbearing mask of civilized tolerance. The New Atheists’ failure to understand the nuanced way that “ordinary people” think was a strategic error so profound in its repercussions that, for reasons to be considered below, those after-effects could yet consign Darwin and his works to the dustbin of history.
Darwin Fatigue
In order to understand how and why Dawkins and his followers came to commit such a grave error it would be as well to reprise something of the reception of Darwin’s Origin in the more than a hundred years following 1860. The theories Darwin originally expounded were resoundingly rejected by the first cohort of scientific critics.3 Over the English Channel, too, skepticism about the ways and methods of pure speculation appears to have lain behind the decision of the French Academy of Sciences when it declined to elect Darwin to its zoological section on the grounds that both Origin and its pendant volume, The Descent of Man (1871), were “not science, but a mass of assertions and absolutely gratuitous hypotheses, often evidently fallacious.”4
Despite this clear scientific disapprobation, however, there emerged as the 19th century wore on an increasing acceptance of or at least acquiescence in Darwinian ideas on the part of increasing numbers among the educated classes (although many, like Thomas Huxley, whilst assenting to evolution, dissented from Darwin’s distinctive notion/misnomer of “natural selection,” recte natural preservation). By the century’s end a form of “Darwin fatigue” appears to have settled upon many people’s thinking, and with it a drift towards letting the case go by default. Where for instance writers and opinion-formers of the high Victorian era were once vitally engaged with Darwinism and its implications, many of their literary successors at the approach of the 20th century (excepting Thomas Hardy) reacted with some indifference, often quietly relegating Darwinism to the status of a superannuated controversy. As Professor John Holmes noted with regard to these later writers, “It was their parents’ and grandparents’ controversy, not their own.”5 And although pockets of questioning continued to exist to the extent that there could even be talk of an eclipse of Darwinism in the early decades of the 20th century6, the so-called New Synthesis of the early 1940s (which claimed to harmonize Darwinism with more up-to-date findings in genetics) ostensibly succeeded in steadying the ship, persuading large numbers to accept the Darwinian legacy positively. But how steady was the passage of the ship really?
Settled Science or Polite Fiction?
By the middle of the 20th century Darwinism had seemed by default to have slipped into that niche commonly termed settled science, and Darwin’s legacy was far less often confronted critically, at least in the public arena. All that new students supposedly had to do now was “learn about” Darwin in the same way they learned about such irrefutable historical information as the dates of Magna Carta or the American Revolution. Most 20th-century attitudes to Darwinism before the advent of the later 1970s might then perhaps most politely be labelled “accommodationist.” That mindset involved a tolerant acceptance of Darwinism — even whilst some might have suspected they were assenting to a polite fiction — accepting Darwinism “under erasure,” so to speak.
For did not Darwinism possess the commendable virtue of providing at least a colorable explanation for the underlying reality of biological existence, an explanation which remained consistent with the zeitgeist of a secularizing age? By which I mean that, if you bring to evolution an anything-but-God mindset, then you will cling tenaciously to the one purely materialist theory you believe has any chance — however improbable it may appear to you — of explaining life’s diversity. At the very least, Darwinism had, with all its glaring empirical deficits, become a convenient place-holder position in the absence of any genuinely demonstrable explanations for that which the classical poet Lucretius had once termed the Nature of Things. This attitude of somewhat disengaged half-belief linked to a courteous disinclination to rock the boat remained the norm until the later 1970s. It was a diplomatic (but behind the scenes heavily caveated) acceptance of Darwinism, but the New Atheists displayed little sensitivity or perhaps even bare comprehension of the subtleties of such nuanced thinking.
Renaissance of Dissent
In the event it has turned out not to be so much wounded religious sensibilities as a dispassionate re-analysis of the evidence carried out by independent, non-aligned thinkers that is bidding fair to topple the speculative edifice of Darwinism. A more fatal counterattack than that mounted by theologians has come not only from dissenting scientists but from ordinary, educated persons goaded into reconsidering the questionable data on the basis of which they have heard unsubstantiated truth-claims being proclaimed. The salient point here is that many such persons might never have felt impelled to review the evidence had they not been rather roughly importuned to attend to what was, without evidence, purported to be The Truth. This was all the more the case because of a suspicion that the official Darwinian line might not represent the truth since, as W. Daniel Hillis commented in the context of a symposium on the dialogue between scientific culture and the intelligentsia in a broader sense:
There’s a feeling in biology that scientists should keep their dirty laundry hidden, because the religious right are always looking for any argument between evolutionists as support for their creationist theories. There’s a strong school of thought in biology that one should never question Darwin in public.7
Be that as it may, it was primarily due to the “Thou shalt believe what I say regardless or else be scorned as a nitwit” tone that many in the 1980s and ’90s felt stung to review the evidence afresh or, in many cases, for the first time in their lives. Such was certainly the case for the present author who a bare half decade ago was driven to research the evidence put forward by Darwin — whereupon he found that such evidence as exists was not merely flimsy but almost entirely nugatory and even illusory. In legal terminology I came to see the case as being without merit.
Intellectual Revolt
My negative conclusion concerning the life’s work of an icon of British science at first alarmed me since it seemed so presumptuous, but I soon found that others of my own age cohort and comparable educational background shared similar misgivings. In fact, the irreverent views of novelist A. N. Wilson and of veteran journalist Melanie Phillips reached a pitch of mocking satire which even I would hesitate to emulate. Wilson for instance discusses Swedish biologists’ computing of the time-scale on which “natural selection” would have to operate to produce a properly functioning eye in a number of fish-types, suggesting the figure of half a million years — a timeframe which Dawkins pronounced to be well-nigh instantaneous by the standards of geological time. Wilson’s sardonic response: “Having been fair to the Swedish biologists, it is also necessary to be fair to the haddock or the bream who might, if capable of speech, have wanted to say to Professor Dawkins, ‘Half a million years might seem ‘instantaneous’ in Oxford, but down here on the ocean bed, when we needed an eye to protect us from predators such as sharks, it seems rather a long time.’”8 Phillips is no less withering. To Dawkins’s contention that a molecule arose that just happened to have the property of self-copying (a “replicator”) she adds, “As the late, great comedian/magician Tommy Cooper would have said, ‘Just like that!’ There is no evidence whatever for this just-so story. It belongs not to science but to Dawkins’s imagination.”9 The fact that distinguished members of an educated intelligentsia have come forward to oppose Darwinism should surely be an indication that the whole Darwinian belief system requires to be analyzed afresh since the present theories of biological science clearly do not command the support of educated opinion.
Unknowable Unknowns
It seems inherently unlikely that just one of the many sempiternal imponderables of human existence would have revealed its secrets to what has been so much conjecture and hope-driven guesswork. Many informed minds clearly still view evolution in the same way that they do those other imponderables with which the question of the origin of species may most appropriately be compared, such as, What is the ultimate origin of the genetic code and who/what directed it to produce plant and animal species? Why are we safely cocooned in a cosmic Goldilocks zone in contrast to the truly Hadean state of the rest of the universe? Where do the laws of physics come from? What was before the Big Bang? Why is there something rather than nothing? These are the well-known existential imponderables with which the question of the origin of species is best compared. In fact, the “origin” of species (by which Darwin meant the “origination” or diversification of species) has traditionally been seen as a matter beyond all sensible conjecture, on a par with those other sources of human puzzlement referenced.
Evolution’s closest comparator is arguably that of the absolute origin of life on earth. That is, how did a once barren terrestrial environment give rise to life forms in the first place and how did the resources deemed necessary to this process — self-replicating molecules bearing well-nigh incalculable amounts of genetic information — come about? Darwin and Dawkins, in company with sundry media scientists, have made various guesses by invoking concepts like fluke chemical reactions in warm ponds or oceans and “spontaneous generation” (for which read “chance development”). However, the “abiogenetic” nostrum of water + chemicals = organic life has so far turned out to be a false hope, on earth as in outer space. There is no proof that life is just an “emergent” property of chemistry, and so the answer as to how life first arrived to reap the benefits of Earth’s bio-friendly conditions must necessarily remain a mystery.
The same skepticism could, mutatis mutandis and with equal justice, be applied to the subject of natural selection. Erasmus Darwin’s postulation of a transmutation of species was hardly a new hypothesis: it goes back to Greek antiquity and the thought experiments of Anaximander and Anaximenes in the 6th century before Christ,10 an era in which the idea of scientific proof as we understand it did not exist. Even Charles thought his grandfather’s hypotheses speculative; and in the 18th century such ideas as those of Erasmus and his French transmutationist colleagues were commonly regarded as the eccentric musings of a small, self-referential coterie.
Hence the prime desideratum in the 19th century was seen as the identification of a causal mechanism that might render plausible the counterintuitive claim of boundless metamorphic evolution alleged by Erasmus and his French confrères. Hoping to justify his grandfather’s intuitions on this point, Charles applied himself to finding a wholly material mechanism underlying the evolution of all things and so cut out the cosmic middleman, so to speak, which he found (via Thomas Malthus) in his conception of natural selection. Charles had essentially been hunting around for any idea that would make the incredible appear credible.
Randomness vs. Teleology
Although Charles had some qualified success with his Malthusian turn, many scientists, while readily conceding the possibility of incidental modifications on a minor scale as ad hoc adaptations to changing environments, have objected that the spawning of new species (speciation) is by definition a teleological project in pursuit of a new physiological goaland therefore dependent on a prior plan or conception. Purpose can after all hardly be achieved purposelessly. When Darwin bowed to peer pressure to change the term natural selection to natural preservation (on the entirely reasonable grounds that there was no goal-driven selection involved), this rather annulled the idea of innovation (i.e., development of new body plans and new species). The retitled “natural preservation” was by definition only a conservative force, not a productive one. This limitation, so fatal to Darwin’s original conception, should surely be revisited as a matter of prime importance. For to suggest that natural preservation could advance species or produce new ones seems to be an outrageous cooking of the books in order to produce a conclusion contradicted by evidence.
A similar stricture might be applied to the large role accorded to chance in the evolutionary process, which stands in logical contradiction to the idea of a predictable mechanism or vera causa. By normally accepted standards, any observation making a claim to the status of a regularity or scientific law which depended on the postulation of chance would condemn itself as being a contradiction in terms. For chance is by definition not a (causative) agency nor does it evidence the predictability and regularity of a natural law. Darwin, to give him due credit, at least had the grace to harbor doubts about the role of chance in evolution, which is more than can be said of many of his 20th- and 21st-century legatees, some of whom show themselves blithely free of such reservations. Here for instance is Daniel Dennett expounding with unruffled finality (and circularity) what he terms his “algorithmic” ideas about natural selection: “Can the biosphere really be the outcome of nothing but a cascade of algorithmic processes feeding on chance? And if so, who designed that cascade? Nobody. It is itself the product of a blind algorithmic process.”11 That proposition seems to be not only culpably unfalsifiable (in Karl Popper’s sense) but also, frankly, indiscussable (to use the term used by the logical positivist philosophers of the earlier 20th century to designate what they called non-sense).
The Mystery of Mysteries
In the quest to get to the bottom of perennial mysteries, it has been justly observed, “absolute materialism does not triumph because it cannot fully explain the nature of reality.”12 Darwinism provides no convincing answers to the problems it claims to solve because the questions it attempts to confront lie beyond the domain of empirical science and its strictly delimited methodological parameters. Humankind’s steps towards solving these mysteries have hitherto been Lilliputian at best and all too frequently wrong-headed. As astrophysicist Paul Davies once observed, we can pursue rational enquiry till the cows come home but “my instinctive belief [is] that it is probably impossible for poor old Homo sapiens to get to the bottom of it all.”13 Furthermore, he adds, when we finally come to review an extended explanatory chain, “sooner or later we will have to accept something as given, whether it is God, or logic or a set of laws or some other foundation for existence… whether we call this deeper level of explanation God or something else is essentially a semantic matter.”
The irony is that Darwin himself in private correspondence showed himself only too aware of the limitations of the scientific method:
I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.14
Quite so. Rather surprisingly, Darwin’s conclusion makes him something of a poster boy for our postmodern mentality, whereas his more doctrinaire modern disciples seem more like Victorian forebears trapped in an anachronistic, pre-quantum universe. For almost a century now the Newtonian/Enlightenment paradigm has had to cede scientific authority and status to that of quantum physics where, in the subatomic world, the predictable regularities of the Newtonian universe simply do not apply. No self-respecting scientist can now claim to deliver certainty and predictability in the wake of bewildering advances in quantum mechanics with its (only) probabilistic laws.15 It may even be necessary to revisit causality and even reality itself. Early 20th-century British scientist Sir Arthur Eddington could see that clearly when he claimed that religion became eminently possible for a reasonable scientific person in the year 1927. The significance of that very precise date was that it was the year of the promulgation of Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle which essentially announced that “all bets are off” with regard to mankind’s aspirations to be able to truly understand nature. We were, Eddington strongly hinted, dependent on powers far beyond our comprehension.
Although he could have known nothing of the quantum world, the Darwin who latterly termed himself a theist seemed to show an instinctive understanding of albeit dimly apprehended hidden dimensions of reality when he courteously but firmly refused to endorse the views of the first atheist Member of Parliament, Charles Bradlaugh. It therefore seems probable that he would have felt considerably affronted had he been able to foresee the tendentious uses to which his essentially questioning legacy has been put by certain of his modern disciples. It would be reasonable to suppose in an imaginary counterfactual scenario that Darwin would show the door to Dawkins and the New Atheists as politely but as firmly as he once did to Charles Bradlaugh.
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