Humanistic Religion — The Rush to Embrace Darwinism
by James P. Hogan
In 1988, Bantam published a collection of short fiction and nonfiction of mine that included an essay ardently pressing the orthodox case for Darwinian natural selection as the driving force of evolution. Today I'm less sure.
At the time of his early observations and famous voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle, Darwin was struck most of all by the evidence he found everywhere for sudden and catastrophic change in the geological record — a view compatible with Velikovsky's. By the time he published his work, he had come around to assert a principle of slow, gradual transitions operating over immense epochs of time. What brought about the change?
Essentially, Darwin adopted for biology the doctrine of gradualism that Charles Lyell had succeeded in establishing as the accepted principle of geology (winning out over the proponents of "catastrophism", represented primarily by Cuvier). Gradualism held that processes operating in the past had been the same in nature and degree as those observed today. By measuring the rates of such processes as erosion and sedimentation, and estimating how long they would have needed to produce the results observed, the enormous timescales were arrived at that have come to be assigned to the geological record. And Darwinian evolution, likewise based on the gradual accumulation of small changes, also required long timescales to be plausible.
Lyell was originally a lawyer, and derived his persuasiveness as much through rhetoric and eloquence as through rigorous appeal to evidence. He argued his case at a time when memories of the French and American revolutions were fresh in the minds of the European aristocracies, Napoleon had carried ideas of popular uprising against traditional authority everywhere from Catholic Spain to Tsarist Russia, and virtually all the European nations were seeing violent political movements advocating socialism. A time, in other words, when the reigning power structure was terrified by the thought that sudden, cataclysmic upheavals might be shown to be the natural order of things, as opposed to slow, orderly, and controllable change. At the same time, the mechanistic, materialistic scientific forces of the day rushed to embrace the first explanation of the origin of life to be offered to them in their war against religion.
Thus, the patronage and publicity accorded the new theory derived more from its expediency in justifying approved political, economic, and philosophical ideologies than from the hard evidence available to support it. And, I would contend, the same holds largely true still today, and for very much the same reasons.
When one makes an effort to strip away acquired preconceptions and forget what we "know" about the way the answers are supposed to be, a different picture starts to emerge from the one absorbed unquestioned since school days:
Now we know what to look for, the evidence that Darwin predicted would be found in abundance simply isn't there. Species, genera, families appear in the fossil record fully differentiated and specialized. What's remarkable is their stability. The postulated transitional and ancestral forms don't exist.
Evolutionary sequences shown in textbooks assume the truth of what they are supposed to prove, with no corroboration from independent ordering criteria. Fossils of species posited to be ancestral are often found to be contemporaries.
The fossil record shows a series of sudden explosions of diversity and radiation, followed by long periods of winnowing-out with extinctions. This is precisely the opposite of diversity arising from a few ancestral forms, as predicted by current evolutionary theory.
How natural selection can have the innovative power to produce the huge leaps of diversity seen in nature has never been explained. The "evidence" of the British peppered moth cited in all the textbooks demonstrates simply a predictable variation in population statistics between types already present. Nothing new, even at the species level, was created. Yet this is one of the best proofs available after a century and a half?
Reasoning turns out to be circular, definitions tautological. The entire scheme of animal and plant classification shows the hierarchical pattern characteristic of discontinuous systems, not the overlapping pattern of continuous ones (such as bands of climate or vegetation from equator to poles).
So what's this — Hogan going Creationist? No. But this is precisely the false dichotomy that most of the world would see, and why many scientists with doubts don't air them publicly. Evolution is very likely real — life today is surely very different from life in times gone by. But it doesn't work the way we've been taught. Less and less does natural selection suffice as an adequate mechanism for driving it. "Punctuated equilibrium" models conjure the impossibilities away by confining them to timescales too small to leave traces, but come no closer to explaining them. The advances in molecular biology in the 70s and 80s that many hoped would provide the picture that the fossil record had failed to deliver revealed, instead, greater inexplicable complexity, making the situation worse, not better.
The tenacious defense (not testing) of Darwinism is at root ideological — it's the only non-supernatural explanation of life that's available so far. For those who insist that "science", by definition, deals only in the material and the mechanical, and only such can be real, there is nothing else to offer. Hence, the need for universal explaining power. Everything must have some selective advantage for being the way it is, on principle — and with ingenuity a plausible-sounding candidate can always be found. The belief structure comes first, and the evidence is molded to fit with it. Just like Creationism.
But isn't trying to define a priori what science is and is not permitted to look at being just as dogmatic and inflexible as any fundamentalist? Who's to say that the supernatural can't be real — and for what good reason other than pure faith? It's more in the spirit of free inquiry not to rule anything out purely on ideological principle. So, in an ironic kind of way, it's more "scientific" to allow that there might be a God busy at a drawing board or a CAD screen somewhere than to decree that there can't be. Let the evidence lead where it may.
My own feeling is that we don't know as much as some seem to think we do, and demanding an explanation of something like life at our current state of knowledge is as unrealistic as expecting a medieval artisan to make sense of electronics. Whatever the shorter-term inconveniences, the image of scientists would benefit in the long run by their simply coming out into the open and saying, "We don't know." For one thing, it would regain some of the respect that science has been losing in some quarters. Also, it would mean there are far more interesting and exciting discoveries to be made than we have scratched the surface of yet.
And that wouldn't be a bad thing to be aware of, either.
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