Susan Jacoby
Author and reporter
Susan Jacoby is the author of The Age of American Unreason."Darwin The Disturber
Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, disturber of the peace, and this year also marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On The Origin of Species. It seems only fitting to reflect on the reasons why Darwin's conclusions about the origins and evolution of human--and all--life continue to trouble and challenge members of the human species in the 21st century. This lasting "disturber effect" is, I would argue, one of the most convincing proofs of Darwin's genius. People don't get all riled up, 150 years after the fact, by bland, small, discredited ideas.
I should emphasize that I am not referring to the minority of biblical literalists who believe in the truth of every word in the creation story in Genesis. If your faith tells you that Adam and Eve were real people, specifically created by God as the culmination of a six-day process that began with "let there be light," there is nothing to talk about--and I don't know why you would want to spend one more second reading or arguing about evolution.
But for religious believers who interpret sacred writings as a metaphor for spiritual truth rather than as a literal description of how the world works, there is plenty to talk about. My fellow "On Faith" panelist Susan Brooks Thistlewaite, a feminist theologian and editor of Adam, Eve, And The Genome, is one of many religious scholars who accept Darwin's essential legacy--the evolution of man as a part of nature from the bottom up rather than as an exception to the rest of nature--but nevertheless believe that there is a spiritual part of men and women independent of their material existence.
The idea that the human brain--that marvelous product of both nature and nurture--does not exist independently of our material body is just as disturbing to many people today as Darwin's conclusions about the origin of species were to people 150 years ago.
And not only religious believers want to make an exception for the human mind. "People say natural selection is O.K. for human bodies but not for brain or [human] behavior," says Helena Cronin, a philosopher of science at the London School of Economics. "But making an exception for one species is to deny Darwin's tenet of understanding all living things." Even in a secular age, many of us prefer to think of our prized brains, which have placed us at the top of the food chain above larger, stronger predators, as organs with special qualities of spirituality, understanding and analysis that set us not only above but apart from the mice with whom, as Thistlewaite notes, we share roughly 90 percent of our genes.
Robert Green Ingersoll, who was known as the "Great Agnostic" in the last quarter of the 19th century, observed that when he first heard about Darwin's theory of evolution, his immediate response was to ponder "how terrible this will be upon the nobility of the Old World. Think of their being forced to trace their ancestry back to the duke Orang Outang, or the princess Chimpanzee." In a sense, this is the secular version of the shock that evolution administered to those who believed that man was a special act of creation, granted dominion over all living creatures and created only "a little less than the angels." The arrogant social Darwinists of the late 19th century were the first group to twist Darwin's insights about man in a state of nature and turn them into a justification for social injustice in a state of civilization.
The social Darwinists argued that natural selection operated in society as well as in nature--that the rich were rich because they deserved to be so, and the poor were poor because they were undeserving. Thus, any attempt to tamper with the "survival of the fittest" (a phrase coined not by Darwin but by the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, the father of social Darwinism) was really a battle against nature itself. Some of the social Darwinists were atheists, but others were liberal Protestants, like the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, who attempted to reconcile faith with evolution. Beecher argued that just as the survival of certain species in nature proved their fitness, the accumulation of wealth proved the greater "fitness" of the rich in society--and the greater fitness of rich societies in the world order.
Darwin never said any such thing. He stated explicitly in The Descent of Man
(published 12 years after Origin of Species) that environmental factors and moral concerns take precedence over natural selection as soon as man moves from a state of nature into a state of civilization. "The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy," he observed, "which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsquently rendered...more tender and widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature...If we were intentionally to neglect the weak and the helpless, it would only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil."
Darwin, by the way, was no believer in "progress"--either in the distorted sense promoted by social Darwinists or in nature. He did not, of course, know anything about the genetic mechanism of heredity, which would not be revealed until the turn of the century, when the suppressed (by Catholic Church authorities, who else?) work of the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel was rediscovered and revealed. But Darwin had concluded that many of the documented and observable mutations in nature were random. And that recognition, more than any other factor, challenges the liberal religious compromise maintaining that evolution is the mechanism by which God chose to set in motion the development of his creatures, ending in man.
This logic does not, of course, explain why a supreme being would choose such an inefficient process as evolution to arrive at the human species--or why he would choose to bind us to evolutionary forces--such as our desire to consume large amounts of animal fat--that were once useful for the survival of the species but no longer are. Another element of the religion-science compromise, articulated not only by religious thinkers but by scientists like the late Stephen Jay Gould, argues that science and religion are merely "different ways of knowing." I don't agree with this formulation. Science is not really a way of "knowing" but a method of inquiry seeking knowledge that is never final and always modfiiable by new discoveries. Religion is not a way of knowing but, ultimately, a matter of belief that, at some point--regardless of how much material evidence a particular faith is willing to incorporate--relies on non-evidence of a non-material existence.
Social Darwinists were only the first group to use Darwin's ideas (or perversions of his ideas) to propgandize on behalf of social theories that have nothing to do with evolution. I am every bit as skeptical about the conclusions of certain evolutionary biologists (including feminists) about the status of women in the past as I am about conclusions by neoconservative social theorists about large, genetically determined differences among races (conclusions that were also endorsed, in the absence of any knowledge of genetics, by 19th century social Darwinists).
Let us be clear on one fundamental point: there is no such thing as "Darwinism." That is an ideological term, generally used by biblical literalists to imply that acceptance of evolution is some sort of secular religion, comparable to communism. But even today, some nonreligious skeptics suffer from a compulsion to minimize Darwin's achievement. It was quite shocking to read a contrarian piece in a special section on Darwin in The New York Times this week by Carl Safina, president of the Blue Ocean Institute, headlined "Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live." Safina argued that in "propounding `Darwinism,' even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one `theory.'" This sentence is a piece of undiluted codswallop. I don't know any scientist or decent science writer who uses the term "Darwinism" in this fashion.
After all, Darwin was a man who--without any of the tools of modern science and technology, without the support of the MacArthur Foundation or the National Institutes of Health, not only got the basic insight of modern science right but had the courage to face up to the philosophical and ethical implications of his own observations. Darwin's contemporary Alfred Wallace, who independently considered the possibility of natural selection, could not face what it meant about the place of human beings in nature and turned to spiritualism to explain the workings of the human mind. Mendelian genetics, the discovery of DNA, the mapping of the human genome: all tell us more about evolution than Darwin could have known, and all confirm the genius of his initial insights. Had Mendel's experiments contradicted the theory of natural selection, we would be having quite a different discussion about evolution today. That, of course, is the difference between scientific exploration and religion. We stand on the shoulders of giants. In any case, Safina--who is obviously afflicted by an acute case of "Darwin envy"--need not worry that anyone will turn his writings on the oceans into "Safinaism" 150 years from now.
I do not understand why it seems so important to theologians (and some sociologists) to find an explanation for human behavior that extends beyond the purely naturalistic. If the genetic research now being conducted in laboratories around the world tells us anything, it is that the interaction of genes is far more complicated than scientists imagined even a decade ago. Worrying about whether we ought to "play God" is somewhat premature, given that the more we learn about the human brain, the more we learn about how much more there is to learn. But if, as I believe, everything about human beings that we call "spiritual"--our ability to love, to create art, to imagine our own deaths--is inescapably housed within our material corpus, why is that so disturbing?
It has been almost a year since I watched the person I loved most in the world move inexorably toward death, his great mind shutting down as a result of the inevitable, degenerative, entirely physical process of Alzheimer's Disease. Now he lives only in the memories of those who loved him--and our memories are as dependent on the physical health of our bodies as his were on his body. It does not enhance human dignity one bit to find a "spiritual" explanation for our higher mental functioning; nor does it decrease human dignity to look upon our highest achievements as part of nature, inexorably tied to the body that is ours for a finite period. This finiteness renders life more, not less, meaningful: we are enjoined to use the brains within our bodies to leave as much as possible to those who will inhabit the material world after us. Darwin faced reality, and that is why he was a human as well as a scientific giant.
amen sister, amen. :)
