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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Chalk This One up to the Creationists1/17/2008 15:23:13 For the last week, in an attempt to wrap my head around the concept of speciation in biology, I've been working through Jonathan Weiner's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Beak of the Finch. Phrased as definitive evidence for the reality of Darwinian evolution, the book follows Princeton biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant in their decades-long study of Galapagos Islands finches. The careful fieldwork and beak measuring, in Weiner's eyes, amounts to a wonderful metaphysical odyssey. The finches reveal a process of evolution that is not, as Darwin imagined it, tediously slow and impossible to witness. Instead, it can happen suddenly, in the space of a mere handful of generations, given the right conditions. The capacity for speciation is not the exception but the norm, and species are always in fluctuation, any continuity maintained precariously by their circumstances. For all species, including our own, the true figure of life is a perching bird, a passerine, alert and nervous in every part, ready to dart off in an instant. Life is always posed for flight. From a distance it looks still, silhouetted against the bright sky or the dark ground; but up close it is flitting this way and that, as if displaying to the world at every moment its perpetual readiness to take off in any of a thousand directions. (p. 112) Wonderful prose, designed to transform one's whole view of existence. Near the end, Weiner insists, "We have all barely begun to glimpse the degree to which we are all involved in the action and reaction of evolution right now" (p. 275). About halfway through my reading I came across this review on the infamous creationist website Answers in Genesis (AiG). They are the ones behind Kentucky's new creationist museum.  Predictably, the review challenges that in fact Weiner does not justify his central claim at all, that no instance of true speciation is documented. Weiner's account of the Grants' research observes variation and it observes natural selection, as the birds are weeded out by patterns of climate and food availability. AiG graciously commends the Grants' painstaking decades-long research product, as well as Weiner's readable account of it. However, they insist that all the variation discussed in the book is simply variation within the God-given limits of species. The finches may have different beaks, but they are all still God's finches.Rosemary Grant describes the birds' variation this way: "They're undoubtedly species," says Rosemary. "They differ in song, size, and shape. It's easy for us to tell them apart, and they tell each other apart." (p. 209) What strikes me as strange about this passage is the extent to which this describes quite perfectly the differences among human races. Our various cultures have different traditions of song (and other expressions). Like the birds, we can learn one another's songs, but those we grew up with come most naturally. Human races have different physical attributes (average height, for instance), and these amount to different physical abilities. Like the birds also, we are able to hybridize among races, though our patterns of behavior tend to avoid it. The consequence of this is that if Weiner's claim about the birds is true, that their speciation has been observed, than he is also claiming that different human races are different species. I am not myself a creationist, for I find the Darwinian hypothesis, even if awaiting certain doubts, corrections and even possibly replacements, is far more plausible than creationist alternatives. But I do think there is something to be learned from creationists. There is a truth in every error. Here, I think they reveal the self-assurance of Weiner and other evolutionists with the power of their scattered evidence. In doing, they reveal, in Mary Midgley's words, "evolution as a religion." This should not be read as coming down harshly on myself and my fellow evolutionists. Rather, when religion too becomes phrased as part of the evolutionary mix, it is inescapable. Weiner quotes, "I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect," Darwin wrote to Asa Gray. "A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can." (p. 298) By this account, what we believe—what seems true to us—is not a matter of abstract reasoning so much as nature mixed with circumstance. Our very species, much less our minds and feelings are contingent on the conditions, the niches, that allow them to be maintained. As Hannah Arendt (no great Darwinian) writes in The Human Condition: Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. That is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings. (p. 9) In certain respects, Darwinism is at odds with itself. It is paradoxical. On the one hand, it is a triumph of science, an idea that helps us explain ourselves and the world around us definitively. On the other, it makes us into deeply indefinite creatures, desperately far from knowing our own possibilities and our own potential. Evolution is an explanation that places limits on explaining. The problem of the 19th and 20th century Social Darwinists, with all their sins of eugenics and racism, was to imagine themselves vindicated by a theory that in fact obscured them. Neither "race" nor "species" holds more water than the politics that enforce its definition. We cannot judge the course of evolution, for evolution judges us.
re: - 1/19/2008 10:57:41
re: Chalk This One up to the Creationists - 1/19/2008 21:38:34
re: - 1/19/2008 22:32:22
I use "Darwinism" here on purpose. Even if it is the basis of what has become evolutionary biology, it has ideological roots, and these are what I want to focus on, rather than a larger scientific enterprise, which encompasses a broader ideological range. But do you really think it makes a difference, in terms of speciation specifically? I thought that was just defined by whether or not two populations can still produce offspring?? Hmm... Simon Conway Morris seems really strange to me (despite his fundamental work on the Burgess Shale). I saw him at a conference in England last summer and he has some pretty out there Platonic ideas going. I really admire him for taking the science seriously but keeping the metaphysical implications as an open question (thus being against *both* reductionist materialists and the "design" camps). I know he dismisses, or is just not so interested in, vitalism (like H. Bergson) and panpsychism, but to me his focus on convergence actually strengthens aspects of those frameworks, rather than a static Platonism (whatever he himself might believe personally?).
re: Chalk This One up to the Creationists - 1/20/2008 08:37:03
re: - 1/20/2008 10:31:56
...which is why I think it is still possible to speak of "Darwinism" as the ideological content of evolutionary biology. I agree in terms of ideology, and it's up to any given writer of course, but to me "Darwinism" just feeds into the Darwin vs. x, Darwin vs. y sensationalizing. (For example, in physics there's still no accepted linking of relatively with quantum physics, but the macro world isn't known as Einsteinism and the micro world as Bohrism, etc.) The way creationists or "design" fetishists pick on Darwin, or equate all of contemporary biology with Darwin -- but without bothering to come up with another scientific theory that actually works (that accounts for existing data, predictions, etc.) -- just gets on my nerves I think (!). Re: speciation -- doesn't that very Wikipedia entry give examples of actual, observed speciation over time? I guess I just don't see what the controversy about speciation is.
re: Chalk This One up to the Creationists - 1/20/2008 21:17:43
re: - 1/21/2008 11:03:44
...If we don't speak of Einsteinism or Bohrism, perhaps we should... I guess to me what's interesting about science is that ultimately it stands or falls independent of the personal inspiration of any given discoverer or inventor (even as I appreciate that "all-too-human" factor, too, which ultimately is the motor of the whole process -- since of course the transcendent state of God doesn't need science, it's us humans who do). To me the only hope of keeping the option of revising dogmas open is precisely to expand their scope beyond just individual personalities, otherwise science just devolves into a personality contest, it seems to me? (And even though that opening could only get honored in practice by...more personalities, but of a certain type...) (Cf. the disagreements between Bohm and Bohr, Bohm trying to argue for a plurality of interpretations to fuel further experimentation, Bohr wanting to enforce his own quasi-metaphysics: Quantum Dialogue.) ...observed variations still do not amount to proof that very different species (e.g., humans and dogs) grew out of their common ancestors by nothing other than ordinary variation and natural selection. I guess I'm just not sympathetic to this criticism (the basis of this initial post?), since it's just an issue of time span that makes the difference. It just doesn't seem controversial to me, since science uses that sort of temporal extrapolation in all sorts of other fields. (For example, I personally believe that there's more behind the *directionality* of evolution than the scientifically observable mechanisms alone can attest to, in line with Bergson and Simon Conway Morris, but the mechanisms as we understand them don't contradict claims like that; directionality claims are just of a different, "meta" level of analysis -- at least in 2008, since no other viable scientific theory is on the table now. In other words, if a new knowledge claim is scientific rather than just ideological, then the burden is on the new scientific theory to actually make the advance; Newtonian physics still holds true as an approximate limit case within relativity, but relativity needed its *specific* predictions and confirmations to make the advance. No theory is airtight, by definition, but the pick-and-choose, empty challenges alone aren't really science.) ...asking why some people are drawn to pointing out the slightest doubts while others might obscure them to the point of carelessness. I agree, since good science keeps both extremes in perspective, within the scientific method...
re: - 1/26/2008 15:23:40
...the observed variations still do not amount to proof that very different species (e.g., humans and dogs) grew out of their common ancestors by nothing other than ordinary variation and natural selection. I really don't want to beat a dead horse (or dog...), but a couple other thoughts popped up last week... -- If a simple definition of species (for sake of argument) is that populations of different species can't reproduce with one another, then, at least from that technical perspective, the difference between "different" species and "very different" species is more of a human/psychological distinction than one based on the definition of the term itself (whatever the specifics of the definition used end up being). What's so elegant about evolution (above & beyond any debates about the hierarchy or interplay of the different material mechanisms, and how they might or might not relate to metaphysics) is that it accounts for the *continuity* of all life. (In other words, I don't think it's just a coincidence that it's only the creationists and "design" fetishists who start fudging the definition of evolutionary terms, claiming to be doing science without doing new science, etc. -- what they really want to "prove" is an all-controlling God, rather than one who lets things happen, or "lures" rather than forces, etc.) -- I don't think the scientific method, by definition, ever gives absolutely conclusive proof (as a field like number theory might, within it's very limited and abstract domain), just the most adequate mapping between theory and facts at any given time, based on natural principles of understanding and experiment/validation. But to me the different between absolute proof & adequacy is crucial, since at least in principle the ball is really in anyone's court to make genuine scientific advances (it just so happens that the creationists' pretenses to science, over & over again, can be disproved). |
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