Friday, 11 April 2025
Theistic Darwinism: attempting to keep ones feet on the ground while having ones head in the clouds?
On the 70th Anniversary of His Death, Anything to Salute in the Thought of Teilhard de Chardin?
Why should advocates of intelligent design care about a French Jesuit priest who died 70 years ago today, on April 10, 1955? Born in 1881, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin along with being a Jesuit priest was also a geologist and paleontologist who made several trips to China to participate in geological and paleontological work (he was part of the team that discovered Piltdown Man, later revealed to be a hoax). But Teilhard is best known for his book The Phenomenon of Man, published in French in the 1930s and in English in 1955. In this book Teilhard lays out a vision for the evolutionary process that is at odds with the established scientific view but is consistent with his own religious convictions.
A Truncated View
Teilhard argued that the science of his time had a truncated view of evolution. Scientists studied the evolutionary process as if it were a movie playing on a screen in front of them with the scientists themselves as mere passive observers. Teilhard thought that evolution needed to be seen from the inside, viewing humans not only as observers of evolution but also as its products. As such, Teilhard conceived evolution as occurring on four levels, only two of which were acknowledged by establishment scientists.
The first of these levels he called cosmogenesis, the evolution of the physical universe. The second level he labeled biogenesis, the evolution of life in the physical universe. According to Teilhard, this is where evolutionary biologists had traditionally stopped. But a full accounting of the evolutionary process, he believed, required two additional levels: psychogenesis, the evolution of consciousness in biological organisms, and noogenesis, the evolution of reflective thought, a characteristic unique to humans. With the evolution of humans, Teilhard believed evolution had crossed what he called a “threshold of reflection” that would fundamentally alter the very course of evolution. Rather than a billion-fold trial and error, evolution would now proceed more intentionally through the exercise of the human mind. We should remember that Teilhard formulated these ideas in the 1930s, long before anyone had conceived of the possibility of genetic engineering. Teilhard was prescient
His Most Controversial Idea
Having fully accounted for the evolutionary process, Teilhard went on to articulate his most controversial idea. He argued that over time, human minds would eventually form a web of reflective consciousness enveloping the Earth (what would he think of the Internet?!). He called this the noosphere. In time, the noosphere would reach an omega point where consciousness would completely fuse with the God who created it. Teilhard’s view of evolution was thus highly teleological. The evolutionary process existed for the purpose of creating beings with the ability of reflective thought so that they could commune with their Creator. No Darwinian contingency here!
Not surprisingly, most Darwinians howled with derision at Teilhard. In response to The Phenomenon of Man, Nobel Laureate Peter Medawar published one of the most devastating book reviews ever written. Medawar called Teilhard’s book “nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.” For Medawar, reading Phenomenon brought on feelings of “real distress, even despair.” Despite this, many philosophers and theologians found Teilhard’s book of great interest. But according to arch-Darwinian Daniel Dennett, the esteem in which non-scientists held the book is nothing more than a testimony to their “depth of loathing of Darwin’s dangerous idea, a loathing so great that it will excuse any illogicality and tolerate any opacity in what purports to be an argument.” The Darwinian reaction to Teilhard’s explicit evolutionary theology is of course to be expected. What we don’t expect is to find that this disdain was not shared universally within the Darwinian establishment.
"Nothing in Biology"
Enter Theodosius Dobzhansky, perhaps the most important figure in the history of evolutionary theory after Darwin. In his often-cited essay “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,” Dobzhansky unexpectedly calls Teilhard “one of the great thinkers of our age.” As a man of deep Christian faith himself, Dobzhansky clearly resonated with Teilhard’s attempt to create a synthesis between evolution and religious thought. In fact, Dobzhansky appears to have been so taken with Teilhard’s work that he served for a year as president of the North American Teilhard Society (1969). Of course, we will never learn from the textbooks that a figure as central to the modern evolutionary synthesis as Dobzhansky seemed to embrace an explicitly teleological and even theological understanding of evolution. I suppose Dobzhansky was deceived (according to Medawar) or prone to illogicality (according to Dennett)!
A Logical Dead End
Ofcourse, neither Teilhard nor Dobzhansky appears to have made an explicit design argument. They would be better categorized as theistic evolutionists. For Dobzhansky this is confirmed when in his previously cited essay he states, “There is, of course, nothing conscious or intentional in the action of natural selection.” Here Dobzhansky adheres to the standard Darwinian story. Yet just a few lines later he notes humans’ ability to make conscious, intentional decisions, and concludes, “This is why the species Homo sapiens is the apex of evolution.” The incompatibility between these two statements seems not to have occurred to Dobzhansky. Clearly, a process with no direction or larger purpose by definition has no apex. His attempt to hold to both an orthodox Darwinian viewpoint and an orthodox Christian viewpoint simultaneously dissolves into incoherence. Theistic evolutionary schemes seem to be a logical dead end.
While Pierre Teilhard de Chardin may not have been a forerunner of intelligent design thinking per se, the significance of his pointing out the incomplete nature of the evolutionary theory of his day should not be underestimated. As Thomas Nagel would argue today, any theory of evolution that excludes the origin of mind and consciousness from consideration is at best half a theory. Teilhard noticed this weakness of Darwinian evolutionary theory nearly a century ago, and at least one very prominent Darwinian may well have agreed, even if he never admitted it in public.
A real life Jurassic park is just as far away as it was yesterday?
Dire Wolves Are Still Extinct
The media are such suckers for hyperbolic biotech stories. Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences made headlines for supposedly having genetically engineered a return of dire wolves that disappeared about 12,500 or so years ago, which many stories claimed to now be “de-extinct” after three gene-edited pups were born
Still a Gray Wolf
Uh, no. The company actually engineered gray wolves to have white fur and (if it works) a larger stature. But despite a similar appearance, gray wolves are not actually close relatives of the extinct species. From the New Scientist story:
Grey wolves and dire wolves were thought to be very closely related based on their physical similarities but a 2021 study of ancient DNA revealed that they last shared a common ancestor around 6 million years ago. Jackals, African wild dogs and dholes are all more closely related to grey wolves (Canis lupus) than dire wolves are, despite their similar appearances.
Beth Shapiro of Colossal says her team has sequenced the complete genome of the dire wolf and will soon release it to the public. Shapiro could not tell New Scientist how many differences there are but said the two species share 99.5 per cent of their DNA. Since the grey wolf genome is around 2.4 billion base pairs long, that still leaves room for millions of base-pairs of difference
The company made just 20 gene edits, with five of those having to do with fur color. That’s still a gray wolf any way you look at it.
So, is this a deception? Let’s call it puffery. The company was careful to acknowledge that the dire wolf is not actually back but that the pups are “functional equivalents.” From the Rolling Stone story:
Shapiro says, people should understand an important detail of the project: It is impossible for the DNA of these new cells to be 100 percent identical to their prehistoric ancestors. “There’s probably millions of differences between gray wolves and dire wolves, and the DNA editing technology is not sufficiently robust that we can make all of those changes simultaneously without causing the cell to melt down,” she says. “Until we can synthesize a whole genome from scratch, we can’t make something that’s 100 percent genetically identical, but it’s also not necessary, because what we’re trying to do is create a functional equivalent of that species that used to be there.”
But “functional equivalent” is not a headline grabber, so much of the media went with the exaggerated version that would get bounteous clicks.
Colossal plans to re-create a woolly mammoth. I suspect that if that happens, it will really be an elephant with good hair.
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