Authors: John C. Lennox
The contemporary attitude to evolutionary moral progress is much more complicated and mixed. We find some, like E. O. Wilson, still championing such progress; and others, like John Gray, saying that it is Wilson’s very Darwinism that proves that such progress is a fantasy. One of the reasons for this divided picture is that there are certain dark aspects of the ways in which social Darwinism is perceived to have been applied; and another is the effect of the revolution in molecular biology.
The idea of taking what happens in nature and applying it to human societies has had a far from happy history. Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of the principle of natural selection, was one of the first to discuss the social implications of that principle. In 1864 he wrote that selection would cause rationality and altruism to spread — a process that would lead to utopia but in the course of which “savage man” would “inevitably disappear in encounters with Europeans whose superior intellectual, moral and physical qualities make them prevail ‘in the struggle for existence and to increase at his expense’”.
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Darwin did not address the social implications of his theory in
The Origin of Species
, leaving that to his later book,
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
. There he drew social and ethical implications from the twin principles of “the struggle for survival” and Spencer’s notion of “the survival of the fittest” as applied to the development of the moral side of human nature. He and some of his contemporaries thought that these twin principles not only could satisfactorily explain the origin of species; they could also safely predict the future development of the various races of mankind. Echoing Galton he wrote: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by the centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.”
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Again: “The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”
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From a contemporary perspective the inaccuracy of this view, to say nothing of its political incorrectness, is striking, to say the least. Indeed one cannot help reflecting that, even in Darwin’s day, it might not have been easy to convince the “Turkish”, the “lower”, and “the savage” races — as he called them, that his evolutionary principles formed a sound basis for moral values. It goes without saying that the application of this kind of “scientific” thinking to Jews, Gypsies, the handicapped, and other unwanted minorities proved no hindrance to the Nazi “Final Solution”.
The net result of this and other developments (for example, attempts at eugenics) was to discredit the Social Darwinist approach, so that by 1944 Richard Hofstadter could write: “Such biological ideas as ‘the survival of the fittest’… are utterly useless in attempting to understand society… The life of man in society… [is] not reducible to biology and must be explained in the distinctive terms of cultural analysis.”
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In this connection, it is worth quoting John Horgan’s
Globe and Mail
review of Sam Harris’s attempt to derive ethics from science in
The Moral Landscape
. Horgan, it should be noted, regards Harris as one of his “favourite religion-bashers”:
My second, more serious objection to Harris’s thesis
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stems from my knowledge of past attempts to create what he calls a “science of human flourishing”. Just 100 years ago, Marxism and eugenics struck many reasonable people as brilliant, fact-based schemes for improving human well-being. These pseudo-scientific ideologies culminated in two of the most lethal regimes in history, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Harris repeatedly insists that we shouldn’t rule out the scientific revelation of an objectively true, universal morality, just because it isn’t possible yet. As long as this achievement is possible in principle, he says, we shouldn’t worry that it still isn’t possible in practice. But we live in the world of practice, where even the smartest, best-informed, best-intentioned people make terrible mistakes. I therefore fear the practical consequences of a scientific movement to derive a universal morality.
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After all, scientists’ concern for humanity’s well-being has not always been benign.
SOCIOBIOLOGY
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The discovery of the structure of DNA by Crick and Watson in Cambridge in 1953 ushered us into a new world; and it was not long before some of the leading scientists, in particular Nobel Prizewinners Crick and Monod, were indicating publicly what were for them the moral and ethical implications of this revolutionary new understanding of the genetic basis of life.
In particular, Jacques Monod claims that contemporary evolutionary theory leaves us with a universe free of ultimate purpose and moral obligation, so that there is no route from biology to ethics. Monod was convinced that Hume was right — that “ought” could not be deduced from “is”: “Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution with the result that man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe… Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down.” His view is based on his perception of the relationship between the “is to ought” problem and evolutionary theory:
One of the great problems of philosophy is the relationship between the realm of knowledge and the realm of values. Knowledge is what “is” and values are what “ought” to be. I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including communism have tried to derive the “ought” from the “is”. This is impossible. If it is true that there is no purpose in the universe, that man is a pure accident, you cannot derive any ought from is.
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Note the assumption, “if there is no purpose in the universe”. It is evident that if there is no personal Creator responsible for the universe, then the universe and human life are accidental products of impersonal, mindless, and therefore aimless, natural processes — what other possibility is there? Gray is stark: “In monotheistic faiths God is the final guarantee of meaning in human life. For Gaia,
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human life has no more meaning than the life of slime mould.”
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The very concept of meaning itself is therefore an inevitable casualty of Monod’s view. Singer expresses it: “Life as a whole had no meaning. Life began, as the best available theories tell us, in a chance combination of molecules; it then evolved through random mutations and natural selection. All this just happened; it did not happen for any purpose.”
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And biologist and historian of science William B. Provine also agrees with Monod that man’s duty is not written down: “No inherent moral or ethical laws exist, nor are there absolute guiding principles for human society. The universe cares nothing for us and we have no ultimate meaning in life.”
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At the popular level, the same message is communicated to the public. For, example, Alasdair Palmer, Scientific Correspondent of
The Sunday Telegraph
, likewise assures his readers:
It is not just the religious explanation of the world that is contradicted by the scientific explanations of our origins. So, too, are most of our ethical values, since most of them have been shaped by our religious heritage. A scientific account of mankind has no more place for free-will or the equal capacity of each individual to be good and act justly than it has for the soul.
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To Monod, the implications for ethics are plain. First he pours contempt on what he sees as the basis for morality: “The liberal societies of the West still pay lip-service to, and present as a basis for morality a disgusting farrago of Judaeo-Christian religiosity, scientistic progressivism, belief in the natural rights of man and utilitarian pragmatism.” Next he argues that man must set these errors aside and accept that his existence is entirely accidental. He “must at last awake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realise that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering and his crimes.”
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We are clearly dealing here with an extreme form of materialistic reductionism
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that views human beings as nothing but their genes. The logical implication, then, is that morality must be based on the genes; though apparently the prime, indeed the sole, purpose of the genes is not to produce further human beings, but to reproduce themselves — a strategy is written into the genetic code in every cell in our bodies and brains. Generations of human beings are merely machines or vehicles for reproducing what Dawkins calls “selfish genes”.
But in what sense, then, is it possible to base morality on human genes? Michael Ruse joins Edward O. Wilson to explain how they think it can be done: “Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will… In any important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate.”
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But, if a person is nothing but his/her genes, and these genes control his/her moral behaviour, how could s/he ever be blamed for doing wrong, or praised for doing right? In any case, what sense would that make if the concept of morality is a genetically induced illusion? One cannot resist the temptation to think that it is a very strange kind of
ethics
that is founded on such an
unethical
trick as deception by an illusion to get our cooperation! And why stop there: what reason is there then to think that this theory is not itself a genetically generated illusion?
Gray finds irony in the fact that Monod, in spite of his radical materialistic interpretation of life as written in the genes, espouses the idea that humanity is a uniquely privileged species:
Like many others, Monod runs together two irreconcilable philosophies — humanism and naturalism. Darwin’s theory shows the truth of naturalism: we are animals like any other; our fate and that of the rest of life on Earth are the same. Yet, in an irony all the more exquisite because no one has noticed it, Darwinism is now the central prop of the humanist faith that we can transcend our animal natures and rule the Earth.
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But then there is another even more delicate irony that Gray himself appears not to have noticed. His philosophy, he admits, undermines truth: “Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth — and so be free. But if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true [sic!] this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.”
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But what about Gray’s own mind, when it leads him to write of philosophy over the past 200 years: “It has not given up Christianity’s cardinal error — the belief that humans are radically different from other animals.”
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One must suppose, according to Gray, that his writing this sentence “serves evolutionary success”. Well, it certainly would appear to serve the success of evolutionary theory, if it were true. But then Gray has undermined the very concept of the truth, and so has removed all reason for us to take him seriously. Logical incoherence reigns once more.
Monod’s book is entitled
Chance and Necessity
. For Gray, it is precisely chance and necessity that prove that the idea that morality wins out in the end is a pretence. Indeed for him, morality is very largely a branch of fiction and consists simply of: “those prejudices which we inherit partly from Christianity and partly from classical Greek philosophy”. The case really is: “At bottom we know that nothing can make us proof against fate and chance.”
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EVOLUTION AND ALTRUISM
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One aspect of human social and moral behaviour that evolutionary theory has always found difficult to account for is altruism. This is a problem, since such behaviour would seem to make it harder, not easier, for the race to survive on evolutionary terms. For the sake of the argument we assume that, since evolution was always working to promote the survival of the species, it might somehow cause human beings to attach a moral significance to acts and practices that promoted the survival of the race. But then we would, for the very same reason, expect evolution to produce moral aversion to anything that made survival more difficult or less likely.
In light of this, it is very difficult to see how a mindless evolutionary process could explain the deep-seated ubiquitous moral conviction that we have a
duty
to support those very people who, in the nature of things, are most liable to inhibit, or even to threaten, evolutionary “progress” — the weak, the handicapped, the ill, the aged. And not only those of our own family, tribe, or race, but of people generally; even though supporting them will involve a serious drain on our resources and make the survival of the race more difficult. To argue that the instinctive desire to survive leads the healthy to support the weak and the ill in the hope that, when the healthy become weak and ill themselves, others will support them, is not convincing. Such mutual compassion is highly commendable; but it is definitely not necessary for the survival of the race. If that survival were the
sole
aim of evolution, as the claim runs, evolution would never produce a sense of moral duty to spend resources on the handicapped, the weak, the ill, and the aged. We have already noted the confusion into which Dawkins is led, when he tries to account for altruism by rebellion against the selfish genes.