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Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Conservatives and Darwin

Michael Shermer in his monthly Skeptic column tries to give conservative Republicans a clue as to how they can be modern enough to at least embrace the level of scientific knowledge established during the 19th century in, "Darwin on the Right: Why Christians and conservatives should accept evolution" Scientific American Oct 2006.

Title page to Charles Darwin's Descent of Man (1871)

He opens with some polling results that will leave devout secularists despairing for the future of the Republic (quite a few devout Christians, too):

According to a 2005 Pew Research Center poll, 70 percent of evangelical Christians believe that living beings have always existed in their present form, compared with 32 percent of Protestants and 31 percent of Catholics. Politically, 60 percent of Republicans are creationists, whereas only 11 percent accept evolution, compared with 29 percent of Democrats who are creationists and 44 percent who accept evolution. A 2005 Harris Poll found that 63 percent of liberals but only 37 percent of conservatives believe that humans and apes have a common ancestry. What these figures con firm for us is that there are religious and political reasons for rejecting evolution.

I haven't gone back to research the details of the 2005 Pew poll he cities. So I can't address those results more specifically. But I have found in seeing many of these polls over years' time that one should be cautious in jumping to drastic conclusions about them. (Warning: I love dissecting polls, though I don't blog about it that much.)

Some polling questions, like about abortion or gun control, are more likely than others to yield "solid" responses, i.e., ones for which the meanings are clear in some generally-understood sense. "Creationism" is a more general religious/ideological term, so to know what the results mean, you would need to know whether the question was general, e.g., "Do you support the creationist notion of how human life appeared on earth?", or whether the designation of respondents as "creationist" was derived by the pollsters based on the combined results of a number of related questions.

The results on the face of it look kind of "soft" to me. Sixty-three percent of "liberals" think "that humans and apes have a common ancestry" but only 44% of "Democrats" believe in evolution? There's a similar discrepancy between the two beliefs for "conservatives" and "Republicans". There's only two ways this really makes sense: a lot of both Democrats and Republicans in the survey are classified as neither liberal nor conservative; or, a significant chunk of both groups thinks that the notion that humans and apes have a common ancestor has nothing to do with "evolution".

Plus, from Shermer's summary, we would have to conclude that 29% of Republicans and 27% of Democrats either didn't respond or fit into some kind of "other" category, whatever that may be.

My point is not to challenge the quality of the Pew poll or Shermer's summary. The point is that we have to be careful into jumping to conclusions about poll results on something like this.

It's also important to remember that, however, strongly people may feel about it, evolution is a factual, historical process - not an "identity politics" label whose truth-value depends on poll ratings or partisan loyalties. After all, gravity is also "only a theory", as the flat-earthers like to say about evolution. I wonder how gravity would fare in such a poll.

Especially if the question were posed as, "Do you believe that gravity exists because spacetime is warped?" My guess is you would get at least a plurality and probably a majority for, "Say what?" But this is one of Einstein's key theoretical insights that is not seriously disputed among physicists.

But regardless of how these "just a theory" theories poll, spacetime is still warped. Gravity still pulls stuff down toward the ground. And evolution still functions, however uncomfortable that may be to religious ideas (should we call them "theories"?).

Shermer doesn't make the argument that conservatives should recognize evolution as a scientific theory that reflects reality because it's well-founded in empirical research. He's specifically addressing the question, "Can one be a conservative Christian and a Darwinian?" So he's particularly addressing the worries of fundamentalist Christians.

His six reasons are the following:

1. Evolution fits well with good theology.
2. Creationlsm is bad theology
3. Evolution explains original sin and the Christian model of human nature.
4. Evolution explains family values.
5. Evolution accounts for specific Christian moral precepts.
6. Evolution explains conservative free-market economics.

The first two points are essentially two sides of the same argument. For fundamentalists who have accepted "creationism" as an essential part of their faith, the argument is not likely to be immediately persuasive. But mainstream Christian theologians have made the same arguments. And they can call on St. Augustine as precedent; he said with reference to the teachings of Genesis that the Scriptures were meant to teach us how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go.

Shermer writes:

Christians (indeed, all faiths) should embrace modern science for what it has done to reveal the magnificence of the divine in a depth and detail unmatched by ancient texts.

With points 3 and 4, he references the ways in which evolutionary biology and the related field of anthropology have given us a much better understanding of the evolution and function of many human social habits. He writes:

By nature, then, we are cooperative and competitive, altruistic and selfish, greedy and generous, peaceful and bellicose; in short, good and evil. Moral codes and a society based on the rule of law are necessary to accentuate the positive and attenuate the negative sides of our evolved nature.

Since his article is a one-page statement of some broad points, I'm not inclined to quibble with that formulation.

But he's starting to get onto thinner ice when he says "the rule of law" is necessary to manage "our evolved nature". Actually, the rule of law as we know it is a relatively recent innovation, and is hardly universally observed in the world today. Hell, American Republicans can barely hold on to the notion. Some social regulation is necessary, but it has taken many different forms.

But he starts to slip through the cracks in the ice with his last two points. His argument for point 5 is okay, more-or-less:

Much of Christian morality has to do with human relationships, most notably truth telling and marital fidelity, because the violation of these principles causes a severe breakdown in trust, which is the foundation of family and community. Evolution describes how we developed into pair-bonded primates and how adultery violates trust. Likewise, truth telling is vital for trust in our society, so lying is a sin.

But that's way too neat a picture, even for a sketch. Lying was disfunctional in the process of natural selection? Neanderthals maybe died out because they cheated on their spouses while homo sapiens didn't? Please.

This is an endlessly fascinating area of knowledge and speculation. But let's just say for now that "pair-bonded primates" in the sense of permanent monogamy has not been a universal solution for family and reproductive arrangements among homo sapiens.

One of the more interesting aspects of this line of thought has to do with the fact that humans, more than any other mammal, undergo considerable brain development and growth after birth. One of the major implications of this is that human babies require parental nurture and training far longer than other animals and our brains are therefore formed more in the context of social interaction than they would otherwise be.

But Shermer's point 6 is basically a mild form of what is better known as Social Darwinism:

Charles Darwin's "natural selection" is precisely parallel to Adam mith's "invisible hand."

Uh, no, it isn't.

Darwin showed how complex design and ecological balance were unintended consequences of competition among individual organisms. Smith showed how national wealth and social harmony were unintended consequences of competition among individual people. Nature's economy mirrors society's economy. Both are designed from the bottom up, not the top down.

Now, admittedly, this is Social Darwinism Lite. But that is the basic concept of Social Darwinism, which argues that social arrangements that benefit the wealthy are ordaing by Nature, rather than directly by God. Social Darwinism's more recent forms have gone by names like "socio-biology" or "evolutionary psychology".

Herbert Spencer, author of Social Statics and originator of "Social Darwinism"

In the end, though, they come down to the same basic concept: that the way guys who spend most of their lives hanging out by the pool at the country club think the world should be is the Natural Order of things.

The bottom line, though, is that "Darwinism", i.e., the theory of evolution by natural selection, explains the evidence of human development that is found in the fossil evidence. Get used to it. Then you can better appreciate stories like this one, reporting on the discovery of a 3.3 million-year-old skull of an Austraslopithecus afarensis girl: Hallan el fósil más antiguo de una niña El Mundo 20.09.06. The Spanish edition of National Georgraphic is calling her "the oldest girl in the world".

posted at 9:33:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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