Theos-Talk Archives (October 2002 Message tt00062)

I thought this might interest people here. The attitude of the 
aggressive sociobiology researchers is extremely antagonistic to all 
forms of religion. Unopposed this is having an increasing influence. 
I recently had a friend labelled 'crazy' by official groups of this 
type for nothing more than affirming a belief in reincarnation. 
So I often take pot shots at these people. The reviewer here 
virtually declared that sociobiologists have the final say on 
religion. I couldn't quite belief such arrogance. These people don't 
really believe in ethics or its real evolution (whatever that means), 
it is all illusion of genetic natural selection. Though you might be 
interested. (This was sent out to a number of groups, plus 
talk.origins)
John Landon
http://eonix.8m.com
_________

Below is the review by John Tooby of Janet Browne's bio Vol II of 
Darwin from the NY Times. I take it Tooby is the sociobiologist. This 
review is both the 'usual stuff' and at the same time a remarkably 
biased bit of 'Darwin Promo' in action. I am surprised at the sheer 
brazenness of Darwinists. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/06/books/review/06TOOBYT.html
It should be said at once that this question as to why Darwin was so 
celebrated while his 'theory' ('my theory', as he put it) was 
rejected is, of course, open to rival interpretations, but surely far 
simpler than Tooby would have us believe. Convinced Darwinists seem 
to be almost dense on this point. Surely the quite simple answer is 
that Darwin's emphasis on evolution struck the public as correct, 
while the theory to explain evolution was obviously limited, still 
hypothesis unverified in the fossil record, and fraught with 
implications demanding a higher order of demonstration, rather than 
the lesser than has now come into existence after Darwinists have 
made their media comeback from the turn-of-the century 'eclipse' they 
complain of so loudly. Surely Tooby is aware of the history of that 
eclipse, based as it was on sound difficulties, difficulties that 
have and will always remain invariant to the question of evolution, 
even after the genetic revolution, or especially thereafter. 
It is simply a confused distortion of the record to consider that not 
only the public but most of Darwin's peers correctly saw problems 
with his theory. It is only comparatively recently that the heavy 
promotion of Darwinism has made this seem some obstinate error of 
wishful thinking. This current luxury of Darwinist domination, so 
heavily taken for granted by sociobiologists (and others!) would do 
well to recover an intelligent skepticism such as was there from the 
first in those who saw the issues perhaps more clearly than we do 
now. 
Let it be said, amidst this normative promo style of the current 
regime, 
THERE ARE PROBLEMS with Darwin's theory. Problems or not, 
verification of the record is still insufficient to prove the case. 
The rise of developmental genetics has shown that ongoing critics 
such as Lovtrup were correct, even as the Darwinist camp changes its 
story, without blinking. 
The endless misstatements of what Darwin proposed versus what Darwin 
actually proved is evident in the review, and we have nothing 
resembling the talisman of metaphysical omniscience claimed in such 
statements as this, from the review::
______quote
He used this new logic to span three seemingly unbridgeable 
metaphysical chasms. He showed how selection united the nonliving and 
the living, the nonhuman and the human, and the physical and the 
mental into a single fabric of intelligible material causation. If 
one could accept the price, the prize was a principled explanation 
for the history and design of all life. Unacceptably, this included 
the architecture of the human mind, all that now remained of the 
soul: our cherished mental life was a naturally selected product of 
organized matter, just one downstream consequence of the uncaring 
immensities of time and chance. The mind with its moral sense was 
taken out of the authoritative domain of clerics and philosophers. 
For Darwin, the responsibility for its investigation would be in the 
hands of evolutionary psychologists, of which he was the first.
________endquote
Darwin did NOT show how natural selection bridged life and non-life. 
That remains a great conundrum. Darwin did NOT show, via natural 
selection, how evolution bridged the human and non-human. The nature 
of man is barely known to man himself, a theory of his evolution is 
almost beyond his powers. We don't even have a theory of 
consciousness, let alone a theory of its evolution. Nor do we have a 
fossil sequence that definitively tells us what the facts are. How 
then can we be sure natural selection is the mechanism? HOW? Current 
sociobiologists simply declare these things to be true without 
demonstration. Darwin did NOT resolve the question of the soul. He 
was a nineteenth century materialist influenced by the postivism of 
Comte, and much else, and simply declared the problems of soul solved 
by being reduced out of existence. 
The question of the soul is and remains a still unanswered question, 
beside which millennia of men such as the Buddhist declare, without 
wishful thinking, the existence of an intangible 'soul' factor. The 
declaration by fiat that Darwin resolved this is a gross form of 
scientific ignorance. 
Darwin did NOT resolve the question of the architecture of the human 
mind. Even the barest glance at a standard sutra of yoga would leave 
one to suspect the reductionist account is a tissue of positivistic 
wishful thinking. It is simply baffling that Darwinists should in the 
name of science be so provincial on such questions, and so 
obsessively so, desperately so as in this review. 
Darwin did NOT take the issue of the moral sense out of the hands of 
clerics and philosophers. One might almost wish he had, but he did 
NOT. The current sociobiological attempt to model the evolution of 
ethics is one of the most puzzling pieces of unverified ad hoc 
speculation, all too obviously designed to patch the desperate 
problem natural selection has with the moral sense! Darwinism can't 
explain it, and it has not verified the actual way in which this 
sense evolved in fact. 
Even a cursory historical analysis, from a secularist viewpoint, can 
show that historical evolution all too clearly shows something else 
to be involved, as Huxley himself clearly grasped. Huxley is done a 
disservice here. He saw at once both the value and the problem with 
Darwin's theory. He deserves respect for that reason. 

Finally , we are told the 'responsibility for the investigation of 
this moral sense is to be in the hands of evolutionary psychologists. 

Aha, now I have got it. The sociobiologists are morally indignant at 
the klutzes who don't buy their ideological usurpation of 
the 'theory'. Tooby seems to suggest we are aberrant if we won't 
knuckle under here. 
In fact, this review is genuinely ignorant, or simply brazen. It is a 
puzzle partly explained by the mass media that make this kind of 
thinking so dominant, even in newsprint like that of the Times whose 
research resources should have long since produced something more 
helpful for the public than this kind of grandstanding. 

As to Janet Browne's book, which I have not yet read, it sounds like 
a most fascinating work in any case, but one can only regret that a 
lifetime of work will forever stand marred by the false education and 
domineering dogmatism so obviously being promoted in this review. 

The public needs to recall the moment of the appearance of Darwin's 
book and theory, recall the clear sense of the rightness of evolution 
and the problem with the theory that many had, and note the way this 
simple fact sticks in the craw of current Darwinists to this day, 
because they are beset with the reality of their weak position, in 
the context of their very strong claims. This type of browbeating is 
or should be transparent. 
The results are by no means the science that is claimed, and the 
public must at this point fend for itself. 

'Charles Darwin': The Scientist Was Celebrated, His Work Dismissed
By JOHN TOOBY
Charles Darwin's ''Origin of Species'' landed among the other new 
books of 1859 -- ''A Tale of Two Cities,'' ''Adam Bede,'' ''Idylls of 
the King'' and Samuel Smiles's ''Self-Help'' -- as an unlikely best 
seller, agreeably scandalous because its full meaning was only hinted 
at by its cautious author. Most readers were less interested in its 
science than in its air of emancipation. Although Lord Palmerston 
claimed that ''every class of society accepts with cheerfulness the 
lot which Providence has assigned to it,'' a restless, upwardly 
mobile reading public was willing to consider rival Providences that 
were less enamored of a static social hierarchy.Even scientists 
debating Darwinism appeared less driven by the scientific issues than 
by broader commitments. Thomas Henry Huxley exulted that ''The 
Origin'' was a ''veritable Whitworth gun in the armory of 
liberalism,'' and though unconvinced about natural selection, 
proceeded to position himself as ''Darwin's bulldog.'' Huxley was no 
aberration. Darwin succeeded in persuading only one of his close 
scientific allies, the botanist Joseph Hooker, that selection was the 
chief engine of evolution.Indeed, a central mystery surrounding 
Darwin is how his reputation floated free of the rejection of his 
core ideas. For many years before his death, he was seen as Britain's 
foremost scientist, and he became his era's premier example of the 
scientist as celebrity. When he died in 1882, he was buried in 
Westminster Abbey, close to Newton. He was viewed, The Pall Mall 
Gazette said, as the ''greatest Englishman since Newton,'' the Times 
adding that no one had ''wielded a power over men and their 
intelligences more complete.'' But while Darwin levitated, Darwinism 
fell into scientific disrepute, eclipsed, incredibly, by feeble 
rivals, from a resuscitated Lamarckianism to teleological doctrines 
of predetermined progress. Even Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-
discoverer of natural selection, retreated into spiritualism, 
declaring that natural selection could not account for humanity's 
intellectual and moral abilities.In the concluding volume of her 
magisterial biography, Janet Browne tells the story of these 
paradoxical decades, from 1858, when Darwin was preparing ''The 
Origin'' for publication, through the furious public debates to his 
death 24 years later. No scientist's life was more exhaustively 
documented than Darwin's: there were the family journals, research 
notebooks, account books in which Darwin compulsively entered every 
expenditure, and countless observations by his contemporaries -- the 
discharge of a belletristic age. Most of all, there were letters. 
Browne, an editor of Darwin's correspondence, estimates that he wrote 
as many as 1,500 letters a year.A noted historian of science, Browne 
fashions these materials into a consuming portrait not only of Darwin 
but of Victorian civilization. This biography is matchless in detail 
and compass, and one feels an abiding gratitude that Browne was 
willing to sacrifice so many years of her life to reconstruct 
Darwin's. A democracy of days, her book is weighted more by private 
moments and daily occupations than by rare dramatic turning points -- 
a biography nearer in structure to how we experience our lives than 
to how we tell them.Along the way, Browne provides memorable glimpses 
of scores of figures and institutions, including the postal system 
(''the pre-eminent collective enterprise of the Victorian period''), 
a publishing scene dominated by subscription-based lending libraries, 
the world of water cures and fashionable maladies, and the fad of 
cartes de visite at the dawn of celebrity photography. Eminences like 
Ruskin, Carlyle, Tennyson, Disraeli, George Eliot and Annie Besant 
make appearances. Prince Albert reveals a taste for mischief, 
appointing Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (opponents in a 
famous debate on Darwin's theory) joint vice presidents of the 
Zoological Society.But as Browne's high-resolution resurrection of 
Darwin's world proceeds, the enigmas of his life become more 
baffling, not less: why did his scientific peers and countrymen 
reject Darwinism while honoring Darwin as their greatest scientist? 
What allowed him to produce a series of scientific syntheses so far 
ahead of their time, and so at odds with the rest of his culture, 
that for almost a century the scientific community proved incapable 
of following the road map he left?To understand this response, it is 
necessary to appreciate the dislocating sweep of Darwin's 
achievement. The discovery of natural selection, the austere logic of 
reproducing systems, was only Darwin's first step. He used this new 
logic to span three seemingly unbridgeable metaphysical chasms. He 
showed how selection united the nonliving and the living, the 
nonhuman and the human, and the physical and the mental into a single 
fabric of intelligible material causation. If one could accept the 
price, the prize was a principled explanation for the history and 
design of all life. Unacceptably, this included the architecture of 
the human mind, all that now remained of the soul: our cherished 
mental life was a naturally selected product of organized matter, 
just one downstream consequence of the uncaring immensities of time 
and chance. The mind with its moral sense was taken out of the 
authoritative domain of clerics and philosophers. For Darwin, the 
responsibility for its investigation would be in the hands of 
evolutionary psychologists, of which he was the first. As readers 
could see from his books ''The Descent of Man'' and ''The Expression 
of the Emotions,'' there would be no prior guarantee that their 
findings would respect what society held sacrosanct.Although many 
Victorians welcomed the discrediting of a static Genesis creation, 
they still demanded a universe in which their values, ideologies and 
identities were ratified by some cosmic sanction. For Marxists and 
capitalists, anarchists and imperialists, Christians and freethinkers 
alike, humans were to be the summit, the goal around which the world 
is organized and toward which life and history progress. Despite many 
attempts, no compromise was possible between this need for 
ideological affirmation and the logic of Darwin's worldview. As he 
explained, in a world governed by physics and selection, humans are 
a ''chance,'' like other life forms ''a mechanical invention''; there 
is no ''necessary progression,'' so it ''is absurd to talk of one 
animal being higher than another.'' Most disturbing was his 
recognition that because natural selection gave a contingent, 
materialist explanation for the existence of the moral capacity, it 
removed any divine or cosmic endorsement of its products. In a darkly 
funny passage in ''The Descent of Man,'' Darwin wrote that if humans 
had the same reproductive biology as bees, ''there can hardly be a 
doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker bees, think 
it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to 
kill their fertile daughters.''As Browne shows, Darwin had unshakable 
moral commitments -- he was fiercely antislavery, furious that 
Lincoln's war aims did not center on abolition, enraged by cruelty to 
animals, politically liberal and radical. But virtually alone in his 
time, he did not seek to validate his commitments by appeal to 
nature, God or science. Darwinism was not a doctrine of the strong 
celebrating the rightness of their power over the weak. Chronically 
ill, anguished by the deaths of three dearly loved children, haunted 
by the possibility that he might have transmitted some hereditary 
vulnerability to his remaining children, Darwin was achingly aware 
of ''the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works 
of nature.'' ''My God,'' he wrote to his friend Hooker, ''how I long 
for my stomach's sake to wash my hands of it.''Emerging out of the 
fertile detail in Browne's book, it is this aspect of Darwin's 
character that suggests answers. Darwin went farther than his 
contemporaries because he was less bound by the compulsion to make 
the universe conform to his predilections. While others rapidly 
turned aside, his stoicism in the face of bitter imaginative vistas 
allowed him to persevere along logical paths to some of the coldest 
places human thought has ever reached. In a eulogy, Huxley identified 
the ''intense and almost passionate honesty by which all his 
thoughts . . . were irradiated.'' It was this quality that won the 
admiration, but not the agreement, of his colleagues and of his 
nation. The will to know must have been singularly unbending in a man 
for whom even God's banishment or death was incidental to finding the 
truth about finch beaks, barnacle mating and primate laughter.John 
Tooby's book ''Universal Minds'' (with Leda Cosmides) is due out this 
winter. He is co-director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology 
at the University of California, Santa Barbara.