Why darwinian evolution is flatly impossible

Of course, animal life is not all merriment, even Paley must admit: eating may be pleasurable, but being eaten is less so. All the same, Paley contends, God did a pretty good job of lubricating even the passage into death. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture. Here is Darwin:. Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.

It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage. But what if Malthus holds true not just for men but for all earthly life, as Darwin declares? Beings that have no souls to perfect are simply subject to purposeless misery: a round of perpetual need, and in many cases pervasive fear. Darwin does not come right out and say so, but he appears to place beasts and men here on pretty much an equal footing.

All that we can do, is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase at a geometrical ratio; that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life, and to suffer great destruction.

When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply. B ut Darwin also plainly knew that animals can be gratuitous in their cruelty, that death can be terrifying and excruciating, and that beautiful and happy beings can die tragically young and without issue. In a letter of May 22, , to the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, who saw the Origin as the subtlest vehicle of design, Darwin tries to explain why he cannot agree with his supporter: it is the problem of evil, in the sub-human world as well as in the human, that puts him off design and leaves him grasping for an answer; and that answer he believes is unavailable to human beings.

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me. There seems to me too much misery in the world. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect.

A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Michael Ruse quotes the passage cited above, and the letter is also available in Evolution: Selected Letters of Charles Darwin 0 , one of the invaluable volumes of his correspondence published by the Cambridge University Press. These sinuous reflections, in which a forceful argument is bent by scruple and reversal and humble resignation, display the ambivalence toward his signature idea that Darwin never managed entirely to shake.

Much that he sees in the world repulses him. The pervasiveness of misery is enough to convince him that the most astonishing and beneficial works of nature, such as the eye, are flatly not the result of design. Paley singles out the human eye as a particular instance of benevolent divine genius, and in Origin Darwin says that if the human eye is in fact the product of design then his whole argument falls; of course he makes quite a powerful case that even such a marvel is the work of natural selection.

As with many unbelievers, his intellectual skepticism dovetails with his emotional refractoriness. There is potential danger in this combination.

What he expresses is more like sorrow. And he does admit to tentative belief in a divinely appointed order that leaves room for so-called chance. He goes on in the letter to say that when a person is struck by lightning, the bolt does not come directly from a God bent on disposing of this particular victim at this particular time in this particular way. Nature is His blind agent, which operates without intention. Natural selection produces advantageous variations without an end in mind — indeed, without anything in mind, for it is not the work of mind.

Gray found natural selection itself a majestic, if not infallible, mode of design. It explained the utilitarian purpose of biological mechanisms that scientists had previously found unintelligible. Take a burr, he suggested. Classical botanists, examining form and structure without regard to function, defined a burr variously as a seed, a fruit, a part of a fruit, the outermost whorl of a flower, or something else. But one saw clearly in light of Darwin, and final causes, that it was an exquisite adaptation that enabled a plant to disseminate seeds far and wide by hitching rides on cattle and other animals.

What a living form did in the struggle for survival determined its structure. Purpose implied intelligence. Like Darwin, Gray acknowledged that the causes of variation seemed inscrutable, but unlike Darwin he held that because nature clearly operated according to law and order, design was the only reasonable explanation for natural selection. A world of aimlessness and accident was unthinkable to Gray.

His words to an audience of Yale theological students in have the hortatory ring of a perfervid sermon in the name of divine order. Gray draws the fundamental distinction that serious people make to this day. But after Origin Darwin would only ever go so far toward recognizing a Designer — One Who sketches the master plan but does not concern Himself with details. The Christian God, of course, is out of the question. A lthough Darwin conducted a voluminous correspondence, to say the least — he wrote or received some 14, letters during his lifetime — he avoided the cut and thrust of public disputation.

He preferred to let his books speak for themselves insofar as possible, and when they were not enough, to let his more demonstrative friends speak for him. Their efforts, Darwin himself acknowledged, were more effective than his own would ever have been.

The public ruckus called for audacity and more audacity, and the four musketeers, as Janet Browne calls them, supplied it when their diffident hero could not. I am quite ashamed of you! Have you no reverence for fine lawn sleeves! By Jove you seem to have done it well. Together, these men would also control the scientific media of the day, especially the important journals, and channel their other writings through a series of carefully chosen publishers — Murray, Macmillan, Youmans, and Appleton.

Towards the end they were everywhere, in the Houses of Parliament, the Anglican Church, the universities, government offices, colonial service, the aristocracy, the navy, the law, and medical practice; in Britain and overseas.

As a group that worked as a group, they were impressive. Their ascendancy proved decisive, both for themselves and for Darwin. The theological claims that Gray made for Darwinism pale beside those of the Harvard graduate and popular itinerant lecturer John Fiske, as Barry Werth shows.

The doctrine of evolution asserts, as the widest and deepest truth which the study of Nature can disclose to us, that there exists a Power to which no limit in time or space is conceivable, and that all the phenomena of the universe, whether they be what we call material, or what we call spiritual phenomena, are manifestations of this infinite and eternal Power. Such talk was so much gush to Darwin. As he aged, he lost that wondrous sense of spiritual magnificence that he felt in the Brazilian rain forest.

When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist. However, Darwin also reflects otherwise than theistically, and he writes that this reverent impulse has weakened with time. His own theory of variation and natural selection, he notes, encounters no such impediments.

He reserves his particular opprobrium for Christianity, saying he can only hope its doctrine is untrue, for the unbelievers it condemns to hell include some of the finest men he has known, father, brother, friends. Yet immediately he wheels about, admits his own mental impotence before the ultimate questions, and bows his head in awe.

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic. To the end, Darwin believed above all in the Gospel of Work. The volume on worms almost instantly became the biggest seller Darwin had during his lifetime.

While Adam Gopnik acknowledges the towering mastery of Origin and Descen t , he nevertheless contends that Worms best encapsulates. He believed just the same that the way he had always done things was more than rigorous enough.

With the study of worms completed in October , Darwin began to fail. Heart pains seized him. He could see the end approaching. His scientific reputation appeared not to concern him, perhaps because he believed it assured. He had never descended into the public controversy over evolution: he had been quite content to start the questioning and then withdraw to a height well above the clamor.

See the full report for a deeper look at the ways question wording and format can affect survey results on evolution. Both Protestants and Catholics are considerably more likely to say evolution was guided or allowed by God than they are to say that humans evolved due to processes such as natural selection, or to say that humans have always existed in their present form. In spite of efforts in many American states and localities to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools — or to teach alternatives to evolution — courts in recent decades have consistently rejected public school curricula that veer away from evolutionary theory.

In Edwards v. Aguillard , for instance, the U. In Latin America , for example, roughly four-in-ten or more residents of several countries — including Ecuador, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic — say humans and other living things have always existed in their present form.

This is true even though the official teachings of Catholicism, which is the majority religion in the region, do not reject evolution. In Central and Eastern Europe, evolution is broadly accepted , but roughly half or more of adults in two countries — Armenia and Bosnia — reject it. Meanwhile, Muslims in many nations are divided on the topic, although majorities of Muslims in countries such as Afghanistan, Indonesia and Iraq reject evolution.

In times of uncertainty, good decisions demand good data. Please support our research with a financial contribution. It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values.

Adhering closely to the words of American geneticist George R. The definition encompasses two different types of selection processes. Subset selection is the selection of elements from a set and does not produce new variation. This type of selection is what Vrba and Gould called sorting , and it lies behind Sober's [] contention that natural selection itself cannot produce novelty. Successor selection includes variation and environmental interaction that can lead to a new variety.

This type is close to Neander's concept of natural selection as a cumulative, channeled process that can create novelty. An important general observation is that selection neither implies progress nor excludes cooperation. Both subset and successor selection can be applied to the social domain, as when laws are repealed without substitution subset selection or when organizations give rise to new spinoffs and imitations successor selection.

A number of biologists who embrace developmental systems theory do not use the replicator—interactor framework but focus on the entire development system. Hodgson and Knudsen's insistence on precise definitions is admirable, but the discussion gets bogged down at times. Distinctions between dialectical and overlapping phenomena can easily be pushed too far. Words and concepts that seem perfectly reasonable by general definition e.

Along with the replicator—interactor distinction, the concept of group selection is central to Hodgson and Knudsen's model of evolutionary change. Both books, in fact, contain excellent discussions of its history and meaning. In Darwin's Conjecture , a distinction is made between genetic group selection and cultural group selection , and applications of multilevel selection in biology and in social evolution are discussed. Group selection is tied to the definition of interactor , whereby multilevel selection means the selection of groups as interactors; that is, groups, like phenotypes, may be the focus of selection.

To be sure, the development of the interactor concept allows for a more precise consideration of group selection—one that excludes simple duplication and implies causality. As Hodgson and Knudsen note, the group selection literature has, for the most part, ignored the detailed mechanisms and structures that make the group a coherent and competitive unit.

The field of cultural group selection is rapidly maturing, however, and Hodgson and Knudsen's definition of interactor fits nicely with D. Wilson's notion of trait group selection Wilson DS and Sober A number of researchers have used the trait group concept to examine particular instances of cultural evolution, such as the origin of warfare. One problematic statement in Darwin's Conjecture is that group selection must bestow some fitness advantage over individuals p.

Hodgson and Knudsen's discussion of six major transitions in social evolution is the most ambitious chapter in the book and also the least satisfactory. Given the caliber of discussion throughout the volume, one would expect a more nuanced selection of sample transitions—those based on quantifiable outcomes, perhaps. The emergence of the social brain and that of agriculture are two possible examples of transitions with both antecedents in the nonhuman world and empirically measureable consequences.

There is a current debate, central to the rise of behavioral economics, as to whether the individual must be the ultimate unit of analysis. In the CGE model, the self-regarding rational actor is a necessary assumption, because, without it, the mathematical proof of the efficiency of competitive markets the ideological core of the model is impossible. This criticism is not restricted to economics. Hodgson then considers the nature and evolution of morality as a way to move beyond purely hedonistic concepts of human behavior.

In standard economics, morality is reduced to differences in tastes or preferences and is therefore doubly degraded. First, moral judgments are on par with any other kind of preference; second, it is impossible to claim that one system of morality is superior to any other. The alternative is to construct a theory of morality based on evolutionary principles. The rich literature on moral evolution is discussed in this book, as is how moral evolution relates to the evolution of the human social brain.

The second half of From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities offers four case studies of morality and public policy that involve cooperation in business, economic corruption, health economics, and ecological economics. These chapters serve well as applications of the principles developed in the first half of the book.

One topic missing from both volumes is the consideration of ultrasociality, a subject directly relevant to human social evolution, the economy, and public policy. The notion that humans are an ultrasocial species—characterized by a complex division of labor, a dominance over their ecosystems, and a subjugation of the individual for the good of the group—has been raised by a number of recent authors, most notably E.

Wilson Ultrasociality does not fit neatly into the generalized Darwinian framework; selection operates at the level of the entire group, not only on trait groups. Ultrasociality also raises questions about human intentionality.

In From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities , Hodgson describes intentionality from the perspective of the individual, as a certain self-reflective control, using contemporary psychology and neuroscience. Human ultrasociality leads to the concept of cultural intentionality. Can cultures learn to change direction when it is clear that their cultural habits and routines have become an evolutionary mismatch e.

Both Darwin's Conjecture and From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities present a formidable challenge to the previous assumptions of CGE economics, which is currently under siege on a number of fronts.

These books offer a plausible, coherent alternative based on perhaps the most powerful idea of the last two centuries: evolution by natural selection. Their approach fits nicely with the current sweeping unification of the social sciences, which is proceeding in much the same way as did the unification of the natural sciences in the last century Gintis Both books are well argued, timely, and well written, but they are not breezy.

The topics are difficult and unsettled in biology e. Nevertheless, these volumes provide essential reading for anyone with an interest in the new and vibrant field of evolutionary social change. Campbell D. The two distinct routes beyond kin selection to ultrasociality: Implications for the humanities and social sciences.

Pages 11 — 41 in Bridgeman DL , ed.