April 27, 2005
Darwinism versus Creationism: 19th Century Battles in the 21st Century
At OneGoodMove.org, "Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why God is a delusion, religion is a virus, and America has slipped back into the Dark Ages." This is an interesting piece, but like so many arguments in which people dig themselves into a trench in order to protect and defend and ideological position, it misses the point.Unfortunately in a society that seems to be moving ever farther backward, it's hard to suggest that Darwin's theory is discredited and obsolete without people immediately casting you into the mold of the Creationists, who believe that the English translation of the Book of Genesis is to be taken literally, and interpreted to mean that the supreme being actually created the earth in six days (as per the human calendar) about 5,000 years ago, said "Let their be light, and there was light," and so on. (Who was he placing his order with, by the way?) For those who are so intent on forcing this text, translated from an ancient Greek dialect, into a narrow literal mode, any deeper significance is lost.
Dawkins is not only an evolutionary biologist, he is an atheist of such passion, he might be called devout, ironically, when it comes to that doctrine. He is so busy fighting the medieval minds of the creationists, that he has allowed them to drag him back into the scientific battles of the 19th century and to remain enmired there.
There are some who will never be open to revise their ideas no matter what evidence is given them and it's questionable how much value there is in beating that dead horse with them. It is now the 21st century and both the Creationists and the Neo Darwinists are fighting a battle that no longer matters any more. The fact that Darwinism is discredited, however, is significant because it carries a huge amount of social baggage with it that needs to be examined and reframed.
Though Darwinism is considered science, with people like Dawkins who are absorbed with fighting a rear guard action against the creationist, it is more of a religion than science. The distinction is in the attitude taken toward it. Neo Darwinism is defended fervently as doctrine, not seen as a theory, which must continually be held up to scrutiny as new information comes in, which would be the scientific attitude.
Though in the popular mind, the battle over Darwinism is over evolution, it's not. Darwin didn't originate the idea of evolution. Evolution was already in discussion at the time of Darwin's grandfather. What Darwin introduced was a theory about the mechanism of evolution and that was through random mutation and natural selection.
The theory, just to be clear, was that mutations happen randomly in a population, and when one confers a survival value, it gives an advantage to those in the population with that trait. They survive to reproduce at a higher rate than the others and so the species evolves in that direction.
Darwin established convincingly, and further studies have solidified the validity of the principle within relatively narrow limits within species. Moths have turned black when their environment turned black, and so forth. What Darwin was not able to establish was that his natural selection was the mechanism by which one species evolves into another. Darwin knew that the fossil record did not validate his theory, but he hoped that more fossils would eventually show the transitional species that were missing at his time.
That hasn't happened, and in fact some fossil discoveries have cast even greater doubt on natural selection as the sole means of evolution. The discovery of the Burgess Shale in Western Canada showed that while there were no complex animal life forms 600 million years ago, by 450 million years ago, all the phyla of animal life that exist today had already sprung forth. That "Cambrian explosion" has been narrowed now to about 10 million years, which is a blink of an eye in geological time.
There were plenty of strong arguments against Darwin's theory in his time based on the contention that there has not been enough time time for evolution to play out as it has based solely on random mutations, and those arguments have grown stronger in the century since. Other arguments were strongly argued based on complex biological systems like the eye that would have required a number of unrelated courses of evolution in different systems to have gone forth without conferring any survival before they could have converged to create the system that did confer an advantage. But what has finally broken the back of the theory is microbiology as it has developed since the 1950s.
This story is beautifully explained in the book Darwin's Black Box, by Michael J. Behe. Try to imagine that in the 19th Century very little was known about the molecular level of life. What was small was thought to be simple. Scientists thought insects had no internal organs. Cells were seen to be simple lumps, instead of the immensely complex systems we now know they are. What was not known was described and interpreted in very superficial ways. That has all changed now that scientist have modeled the DNA molecule. You can no longer slur over all the tiny changes that would have had to take place for the more visible changes to result.
In arguing that the eye could indeed have evolved by a long series of random mutations, Dawkins, following Darwin, says the changes from a light sensitive spot of a more simple eye to the more complex higher animals could have been made in a series of infinitessimal steps. According to Behe, "Dawkins' explanation in only addressed to the level of what is called gross anatomy ... [he] merely adds complex systems to complex systems and calls that an explanation. This can be compared to answering the question 'How is a stereo system made?' with the words 'By plugging a set of speakers into an amplifier and adding a CD player, radio receiver and tape deck.'"
Though the majority of scientists, like the majority of lay persons, still accepts Darwinism as fact, many now see that the time has come to find a theory that better represents what has been observed in the 21st Century. According to Lynn Margulis, Distinguished University Professor of Biology and the University of Massachusetts, who came up with the widely accepted theory that mitochondria were once independent bacterial cells, said that Neo-Darwinism will be seen by history as "a minor 20th century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology." Leaping back to Creationism is not even worthy of serious consideration by anyone who is vaguely awake. But more thinking is needed because Darwinism is an essential component of the modern conception of life and humanity.
Among the common misconceptions surrounding Darwin is the attribution of the phrase "survival of the fittest" to him. That phrase was coined by Herbert Spencer. But the idea is believed to be confirmed by Darwin's theory, and it is used to justify many cruel policies, as if nature requires us to exterminate the weak to strengthen the species.
Even after the advances of microbiology that finally destroy Darwinism have trickled down to the popular mind, it will take a long time to sort out the cultural legacy of them. But now is a good time to at least begin to consider the questions.