Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Evolution -- with a small e

Like us, Peter Wood, provost of the King’s College in New York City, rejects the notion of any contradiction between evolution and intelligent design.

In his National Review essay, he writes:

This battle (between Outraged Scientists and Unrelenting Creationists) is unnecessary and intellectually irresponsible ... in fact, evolution and intelligent design can coexist without the universe cracking asunder. All we need here is a little theoretical modesty and restraint.

A good place to start is to distinguish between the theory of evolution (without the capital E) and Evolution as a grand and, apart from a few rough edges, supposedly comprehensive account of speciation and genetic change. Small-e evolution is an intellectually robust theory that gives coherent order to a huge range of disparate facts. In contrast, capital E Evolution, is a bit illusory. Like a lot of scientific theories, on close inspection it is really a stitched-together fabric of hypotheses.


Evolutionary theory hits a wall in trying to explain what happened with the emergence of fully modern humans about 150,000 years ago.

We can give a name to what happened: with the biological emergence of modern humans came both the capacity for and the realization of "culture."

But to speak of the beginning of culture and the emergence of our species by way of some genetic mutations from anatomically similar ancestors does little to explain the profound mystery of the event. Of course, if we are convinced in advance that genetic mutation is a random, material event, the results of which are sorted out by the struggle for survival, the immense mystery dissolves into happenstance blips in strands of East African DNA, c. 150,000-200,000 years ago.

But at that point, we have moved beyond scientific evolution to doctrinaire Evolution. The randomness of the mutation cannot be demonstrated or proved; it is simply an article of belief, no different in character from a belief that an intelligent Creator nudged the adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine bases of that DNA strand into the right order.


At bottom the dispute between Evolutionists and Creationists always comes down to the question, "What is random?"

Actually, a line of argument that depends on seeing events as random is in a rather worse position than one that postulates, even if it can't prove, underlying order. In science, what's random today is frequently modeled tomorrow. To base a theory of life on ever-more-emphatic repetition of the idea that, "No, it's random," is a bit like stamping your foot and saying, "It's so because I say it's so."

5 comments:

Queasy Rider said...

I guess it's okay to convey the idea (in schools) of the possibility that creation is 'intelligent', as long as it does not get intertwined with particular ideological moorings, i.e., that of the Christian right. I think that is what most people are concerned about. WIth good reason. I don't see how they can teach 'intelligent' design in a secular way (in the Indian sense of the word ;)).
- Nanda Kishore

doubtinggaurav said...

PR,

The acceptance of pseudo theory of intelligent design is just the beginning of the slippery road, which if taken can only lead to obstructionism and obfuscation.
The debate about existence of God and divine purpose not suited for school curriculum

Primary Red said...

Kumar:

An excellent & very well-written counter-point! It was fun to read it.

All we've said (see, http://secular-right.blogspot.com/2005/07/mindless-design-it-surely-aint.html) is that the assuredness with which evolutionary theorists dismiss theism is in itself a rather fundamentalist position.

Let's take the discussion to another context to illustrate this.

This is like people arguing that, since there is no empirical evidence of life elsewhere in the Universe, there is no life elsewhere in the Universe. Clearly, such an assertion is quite likely to be proven false over time as human capacity to probe our Universe continues its onward evolution (pun unintended!).

It would be entirely reasonable for students of science to be told that, notwithstanding such absence of evidence, they should nurture their curiosity, they should train their telescopes to the sky, they should still look for life elsewhere -- because if there was no life elsewhere, as Jodie Foster says in the beautiful film Contact, it'd be an awful waste of space.

In epistemology, evidence leads to hypothesis -- which remains true until, as Karl Popper would point out, it is falsified. The path of scince is not validation via experiment but falsification via new experiment. "Truth" -- as history tells us -- is rather an unstable concept; all we can ever be sure of is what's been proven false.

Now, you are absolutely right that evolutionary biology yields little direct evidence of theism -- so, it's OK to postulate the Darwinian process as the working hypothesis. But, why dismiss human curiosity and puzzlement that such enormous beauty has emerged out of a stochastic accident? It's quite likely that we have a great deal more to learn about how the biological Universe works -- why snuff out people's legitimate scepticism in the name of Science?

All people are asking for is for kids to be taught that evolution is indeed the working theory -- but it's somewhat unsatisfying; and that people are still searching for other answers (one of them is linked to the parallel human belief in god). That's all.

The problem here is that Science is on the defensive -- and therefore, has become very fundamentalist in being unable to concede its falliability. Isn't this a thoroughly anti-Science attitude -- the kind that theists once used to bash great ideas of Gallileo & Copernicus?

Best reagrds.

sanjay said...

I tend to agree broadly with primary red except that it is not science per se but some scientists that have become fundamentalist.

Question is why have some scientists turned defensive? Well, in 1970 Thomas Kuhn pointed out that scientific practice is shaped by deep assumptions of the worldview of which the scientist may be unaware but one which is unquestioningly (unscientifically?) shared by all scientists.

Example: reductionism states that the world can be understood by breaking it into smaller units until we arrive at a set of fundamental units. This is a basic assumption of science that is not going to be subjected to any kind of an empirical (falsifiable) tes. In fact, there is no known experiment that science has ever conducted to demonstrate that reductionism will indeed lead to some fundamental units. Thus, reductionism, by itself, constitutes an a priori belief system of the scientific community.

A proponent of Intelligent Design could very easily argue that reductionism itself is an artifact of intelligent design. how? because it is neither applied randomly to scientific experiments, nor is it scientifically proven to be valid.
Therefore, reductionism is the "intelligent design" built into all scientific endeavour.


Sanjay

Primary Red said...

RM,

You're right -- the ID folks are plenty fundamentalists themselves. And, at the end of the day, evolution is indeed the framework we all agree with.

All we are saying is that evolution by natural selection does not contradict people's faith; natural selection fanatics (e.g., Salman Rushdie -- who we've supported in other contexts), in contrast, absurdly believe that evolution disproves God's existence.

See http://secular-right.blogspot.com/2005/07/mindless-design-it-surely-aint.html

We are OK with staying with evolution as is -- as long as atheists quit attacking faith using evolution as a weapon. That's the battle line.

Secular is not the same as Godless.

Best regards.

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