[A]s Charles Darwin first pointed out, our behaviour
and the attitudes that underpin it are, to a
large extent, evolved: they have been shaped by
natural selection, helping us and our ancestors to
survive and reproduce. After all, if our behaviour
were not by and large adaptive and hence
appropriate, then none of us would be here.
-Colin Tudge, Manchester
Guardian
I want to believe-and so do you-in a complete, transcendent,
and immanent set of propositions
about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively
and unambiguously direct us how to live
righteously. I also want to believe-and so do you-in
no such thing, but rather that we are wholly
free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought
to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually
and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want,
Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be
perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at
the same time to discover the right and the good and to
create it.
-Yale Law Professor Arthur
Leff, Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law
There are really three books rolled into one here and they decline in quality sequentially. The first, which is quite good, describes the achievement of Charles Darwin in observing the natural world and then formulating the compelling metaphor of Natural Selection to explain evolution. But as Darwin himself recognized, he did not propose any mechanism by which such selection might occur. This was left to Gregor Mendel, the hero of Tudge's book, whose experiments on peas, carried out in a monastery garden in Brno from 1856 to 1864, demonstrated that certain traits were inheritable by offspring and produced mathematical data on the likelihood that these traits would be inherited, establishing the initial laws of heredity. All well and good. The two 19th Century scientists are thoroughly engaging and modest men. Tudge conveys his own adoration of them, particularly Mendel, and suggests that all of biology since is merely "Footnotes to Mendel", which was the title of the book in Britain.
I've often noted my own skepticism about Natural Selection here, so I'll not rehearse it again. Instead, let me merely state that I accept that Mendel proved that breeding could alter peas. What he did not do is demonstrate that any amount of breeding would ever make a pea change into a bean, or whatever. Mendel deserves credit for being the first to generate numbers and mathematical formulas to accompany the type of breeding that humans had been engaged in for thousands of years, but he hardly proved that the evolution of species was a product of natural selection.
Tudge though seems to feel that at this point Natural Selection was amply proven as a scientific theory. Not only is he unconcerned by the remaining objections to Darwinism, he actually says the following about natural selection :
It is a circularity:
nothing succeeds like success; only success succeeds. It is meant
to be a
circularity. If you perceive the circularity
of natural selection, you begin to feel the weight of its
relentless force, which certainly shapes living
creatures and possibly shapes the whole Universe,
down to what are thought of as fundamental particles,
and even the apparently immutable laws of
physics.
We'll give him credit for honesty here, but demerits for coherence. He's actually extolling as a virtue of his theory what all philosophers and scientists understand to be a fatal flaw : circular reasoning is a logical fallacy because the conclusion of the argument is assumed as its premise. The classic statement of circular reasoning goes something like this : P, therefore P. In the case of natural selection, the fallacy goes something like this :
Nature favors certain traits because they improve
a species' chances of survival. Those traits that
have developed have done so because they have been
selected by nature.
Sadly lacking from this are any of the logical proofs that are normally required before we usually accept the validity of a proposition. Instead, as Tudge admits, the power of the theory lies in the fact that it need never be proven and can not be proven. For those who believe in natural selection, anything that has survived has simply survived because it has been selected by nature--end of story.
Typical of the dispensation that Darwinians seek, and society grants, is his claim that we've never observed evolution among human beings or been able to proove it from remains because humankind is currently in the midst of a, thus far, 100,000 year long pause in evolution. He maintains that we've stabilized as a species for the , rather extended, moment. Set aside for a moment the inherent suggestions that mutation has somehow paused and that the process of evolution might point towards eventual destinations. Instead, imagine that your 8th grade science teacher has just explained the laws of gravity and has set up a demonstration. He holds up a brick, let's it go, and, lo and behold, it hovers. But fear not, he counsels you, we just happen to be in the middle of a gravitational pause.... You would, properly, laugh him out of the classroom.
Typically, you'd expect someone who'd arrived at this precarious position to leave well enough alone, but Tudge is just getting warmed up. From here he moves on to the second book-within-the-book, a forceful defense of Evolutionary Psychology, which is a logical and necessary of natural selection but a theory of which even most Darwinians are skeptical. Tudge outlines four "notions" that :
...lie at the root of evolutionary psychology: that
genes do indeed influence behavior; that natural
selection operates primarily at the level of the
gene; that our fundamental behavior patterns have
evolved through natural selection and are likely
to have conferred an adaptive advantage at some
time in the past, even if they do not seem to do
so in the present; and that various mathematical
models can be used to predict likely behavioral
strategies.
Essentially, evolutionary psychology tries to reduce all of human behavior to a kind of survival instinct on the part of the genes. It's hardly necessary to point out the logical problems with this extension of Darwinism, since Darwinists like Stephen Jay Gould have done it for us, suffice it to pint out a couple of examples of the types of behavior it can not explain :
(1) altruism : remember the football
player Joe Delaney who, despite not knowing how to swim,
jumped into a lake to try and help two kids who were drowning, but was
drowned himself ?
What were his genes doing all this time ?
(2) celibacy and homosexuality
: are these genes committing suicide when they choose not to
propagate themselves ?
(3) abortion and infanticide :
why would the genes reduce their own chances of surviving into
the next generation ?
(4) suicide :why would the genes
eliminate their own chances of surviving into
the next generation ?
It is such questions that lead Tudge to a fairly bizarre series of pages where he anticipates, but does not answer, several of the criticisms of evolutionary psychology--specifically that it offers oversimplified answers to complex behavioral questions and that it is premised on the "naturalistic fallacy", about which more later--then begs for credit from the skeptics because he's the one raising the objections first (see page 201). Admitting that your own theory has unanswerable hurdles that it can't clear is a novel approach, but it isn't science.
Of course, by now he's marched himself so far down the garden path that there's really no turning back, so in the third major portion of the book he has to face the moral dilemmas that his theories raise. Chief among them is how we can seek to impose human moral judgments upon behavior that scientists inform us is being driven by natural mechanisms. For example, if we assume that there is some genetic differentiation between the human races and each race's genes are selfishly trying to guarantee their own survival, then what is the basis for condemning genocide ? Aren't actions which improve the chances that my genes will survive, even actions which result in the death of others, completely understandable from an evolutionary standpoint ? And if my behavior is being dictated by nature, then how much responsibility can I realistically be expected to take for that behavior ? The answer, absent falling prey to the "naturalistic fallacy", is : nature absolves moral blame.
As defined by the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy :
The naturalistic fallacy is a metaethical theory
proposed by G.E. Moore (1873-1958) in
Principia Ethica (1903) that the notion of
moral goodness cannot be defined or identified with
any property. Moore argues that "goodness" is a
foundational and unanalyzable property,
similar to the foundational notion of "yellowness,"
and is not capable of being explained in
terms of anything more basic.
Basically, morality is always a human construct, it has no basis in nature. And if morality amounts to nothing more than what humans say it is, then who are you to say that my actions are immoral ? Why is your opinion any better than mine ? Meanwhile, if evolutionary psychology is valid, there are inexorable natural forces shaping our behavior in ways which are often diametrically opposed to traditional human ideas of moral goodness. If both my genes and my own personal whims suggest that I take food from the mouths of the starving to feed myself, then why shouldn't I do so ?
The importance of establishing a firm footing for some kind of morality is shown in his discussion of the types of technology that the science of genetics is bringing about. If there are no moral barriers, there is every reason to believe that genetic testing, genetic engineering, and abortion will soon allow people to design their own babies. we hear the continual outcry of environmentalists over the loss of biodiversity; what of the pending loss of human diversity ? Likewise, imagine the money to be made in cloning humans so that they will have a ready supply of guaranteed compatible replacement organs. That is, assuming we needn't worry about the moral issue of whether clones have rights.
Tudge seeks to assure us, or more probably himself, that our increasing technological power has always required us to take increasing responsibility for that power and that such should continue to be the case. Well, he's right, when we had responsibility for the atomic bomb we dropped it on people. Now we have taken responsibility for abortion and for the first time in human history, most advanced industrial nations have more male births than female. Who can seriously doubt that the technologies that Tudge envisions will also be utilized to their fullest, most abhorrent, extent ?
Alas, Tudge's efforts to escape the moral consequences of his theories of evolution are even less convincing than the initial theories themselves. By the end of the book you wonder why he just doesn't chuck the whole endeavor and acknowledge that, even if there's something to the idea of evolution, it simply isn't worth the costs in illogic and amorality it imposes. In the last analysis, Tudge does prove the greatness of Mendel and Darwin, but he does so by demonstrating how little progress, either scientific or moral, he and his fellow believers in evolution have made in the years since the great men died.
This initially helpful but finally quite silly book, which merely pushes
evolution to its ultimate and inevitable conclusions, is perhaps best suited
to those of you who still think that the skeptics of evolution are the
great danger to society. Unless you are willing to follow where Tudge
very uncertainly leads, you are a skeptic too, sagely waiting for that
brick to drop before you buy the theory.
(Reviewed:19-Aug-01)
Grade: (D+)
