Darwin & the 150-Year-Old Debt

This being the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, in celebration thereof I offer three links (and no missing links) to items of Darwinian interest: Real Physics: Origin of Non-Species, Paul Johnson on the origin of Darwinism, and my personal favorite, Australian philosopher David Stove's Darwinian Fairy Tales. (Origins was published 150 years ago in 1859.)

The last is my favorite--perhaps only because it's what I just finished reading in preparation for today. Stove is (was--died in 1994) not a Christian nor a religious believer. Nevertheless, I would pleased to read serious rebuttals to the critiques he makes. Darwin found in Malthus's population theory both the engine he needed to drive sufficient numbers of adaptations to create new species and the sort of cutthroat competition needed to make "survival of the fittest" into a creed. The problem is, asks Stove, how many populations can you think of where the number grows up to the point of available food and where the driving dynamic is competition with and against each other to survive? This is supposed tobe the basic feature of life from species to species: competition for resources with each other. That's supposed to be true of Man, too, which is why Richard Dawkins and the whole lot of sociobiologists--whom Stove has read closely--have gone out of their way (and out of their minds) to show that altruism is really just a smokescreen deliberated created by selfish genes (those darn creationist genes!) to survive and replicate. Stove see's a new religion here, that of the gene, that uses men like robots or puppets and are a lot smarter than men--worse than any Calvinst god Stove can imagine.

Now if Dawkins and the whole lot of them were forced to abandon any language that implies purpose, design, teleology--which you really can't have if their views were true--their books wouldn't sell and probably wouldn't make much sense. (Design is there, folks, right in the pages of just about everyone who writes about these things.)

Darwinians have always owed their readers a translation manual that would "cash" the teleological language which Darwinians avail themselves of without restraint in explaining particular adaptations, into the non-teleological language which their own theory of adaptation requires. But they have never paid, or even tried to pay, this debt....

Darwinians cannot reasonably expect, any more than anyone else can, to be allowed to have things both ways. They cannot, on the one hand, describe adaptations as contrivances for this or as designed for that while denying that they mean that these adaptations were ever intended; and on the other hand, decline to explain what they do mean by expression like "designed for" and "contrivance for."

...Intellectual debts (whatever may be the case with economic ones) are not extinguished merely by being ignored or forgotten, for however long a time. There is no Statute of Limitations which says that Darwinians may--as long as they go on doing it long enough--imply that adaptations are intended, and say that they are not.

 (Comments welcome on Stove's book and his arguments only.)

Comments

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

Darwin & the 150-Year-Old Debt

Have the Christian neo-Darwinists or the theistic evolutionists paid off Darwin's debt for Darwin?

[David Gray]

Thanks for bringing Stove's book to my attention, the excerpt is an interesting metaphor...

[GL]

Two men whose lives had great impact on the lives of millions, even billions, were born 200 years ago today. The one preserved the Union while defending the principle that all men are created equal. The other destroyed faith while giving a basis for the principle that men were not created at all. The one left us with a legacy worth dying for. The other left us a philosophy which gives us nothing worth living for.

[Benighted Savage]

James M. Kushiner writes:

>>> Now if Dawkins and the whole lot of them were forced to abandon any language that implies purpose, design, teleology--which you really can't have if their views were true--their books wouldn't sell and probably wouldn't make much sense. <<<

I remember taking an university course on the philosophy of sociobiology in the early '80s. It was team-taught by two Marxists who despised sociobiology but thought of themselves as staunch (neo)Darwinians. The question of final causes in evolutionary biology came up in the context of Gould and Lewontin's essay on the "spandrels of San Marco."

I seem to remember the following being offered as a "last ditch" defense of the language of teleology in biology: it's OK for evolutionary biologists to use the language of function, purpose and design because Kant, in his "Critique of the teleological judgement," has conclusively shown that it is impossible for us to conceptualize and describe nature without using such language. However. this was given as a "throwaway" line without any supporting argument, and I never got around to delving into the depths of good ol' Kant to see what the prof was talking about.

I don't know of any explicit critiques of Stove, but I imagine that it would include such an argument from necessity bundled with a re-packaging of teleology as either "function" or "misunderstood and reduceable to efficient causality."

[JRM]

"The problem is, asks Stove, how many populations can you think of where the number grows up to the point of available food and where the driving dynamic is competition with and against each other to survive?"

If he really asked this question, he doesn't understand evolution, as is typical of philosophers. Perhaps he was misquoted or misunderstood?

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

"The other [Darwin] left us a philosophy which gives us nothing worth living for."

Well said, GL.

And to Mr. James Kushiner's post, it's certainly valid to ask whether the Christian neo-Darwinists or the theistic evolutionists have paid off Darwin's debt for Darwin.

[Rob G]

"The one preserved the Union while defending the principle that all men are created equal. The other destroyed faith while giving a basis for the principle that men were not created at all. The one left us with a legacy worth dying for. The other left us a philosophy which gives us nothing worth living for."

Nicely put, Greg, but I'd have to disagree on both counts. The statement assumes a malice in Darwin that I don't really think was there, and a nobility of intent in Lincoln that's more than slightly exaggerated, IMO.

[Benighted Savage]

JRM writes:

>>> "The problem is, asks Stove, how many populations can you think of where the number grows up to the point of available food and where the driving dynamic is competition with and against each other to survive?"

If he really asked this question, he doesn't understand evolution, as is typical of philosophers. Perhaps he was misquoted or misunderstood? <<<

Stove is a "bracketed" anti-Darwinian. He's most critical of the (neo)Darwinians when they discuss human populations. He's not interested in the question of origins, and seems indifferent to whether modern evolutionary theory applies to spiders or sponges.

Stove in a nutshell: historical Man has culture -- this makes homo saps so different from other organisms that (neo)Darwinian explanations of human behaviour and human history are either false or trivial. Special scorn is heaped on Dawkins and his hyper-adaptationist ilk.

[Neil Gussman]

I looked at the Real Physics link and decided to follow through with my resolution to read "The Origin . . . " during my deployment. I believe only a fool would comment on politics without knowing Machiavelli and I think I am in the same boat on biology. I have a copy in my bag, and a long flight coming up right after Easter.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>I believe only a fool would comment on politics without knowing Machiavelli and I think I am in the same boat on biology. I have a copy in my bag, and a long flight coming up right after Easter.<<<

Where you are going, I would take Clausewitz, T.E. Lawrence, and George MacDonald Fraser.

[Mairnealach]

Stove says:

"Darwinians have always owed their readers a translation manual that would "cash" the teleological language which Darwinians avail themselves of without restraint in explaining particular adaptations, into the non-teleological language which their own theory of adaptation requires."

When someone insists there is no God, it is fair to point out their folly of using teleological language to describe evolution.

However, to insist the theory of adaptation demands a forfeit of teleology is a foolish mistake. Nothing in the bald mechanics of it requires such a thing.

It's understandable that an atheist like Stove would make that mistake. It's their idol, where they derive their false comfort from.

Why any Christian would then agree with their mistaken atheist logic is a mystery to me. I have always been taught that refusing the basic assumptions of the atheist mindset was good Christian practice.

But to even ask the question "have Christian evolutionists paid off Darwin's debt?" is to presuppose atheist thinking on this issue to be correct. Not only that, it is bearing false witness, because I have never heard a Christian evolutionist attempt to do away with teleology, as "paying off the debt" requires. They are the only biologists attempting to *uphold* teleology. (By "teleology", I mean, um, actual teleology, that is, design by the revealed son of the most high God. ID teleology ascribes no credit to Jesus Christ, but says anyone could have done it.)

Sometimes it seems to me the Christian evolutionists are the only ones with Christian presuppositions.

[Neil Gussman]

Mairnealach--Amen