Evolution in Media and Beyond

Brigitte found a fascinating article yesterday centered on the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany—a place where she once worked before she and I ever met. The context today was Ramstein’s role in making drone warfare possible; the article is titled “Game of Drones” and appeared on April 17 in The Intercept (link).

The background on the publisher for starters. The Intercept is the first publication of a corporate entity called First Look Media. That corporation dates to October 2013—hence we might call it young. It was founded by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of e-Bay. He is just 47 himself and hence, in a context like this one, also quite young. He built the company around three editors famed for groundbreaking and generally liberal orientations: Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill.

Omidyar’s entry into the media by founding his own company is less visible than Jeff Bezos’ (Amazon) purchase of the Washington Post or Chris Hughes’ (co-founder of Face Book) majority investment in The New Republic. No doubt, now the pattern has been set, yet other Big Names in the e-World will also enter the media. The evolution here, in a way, follows the source of New Money; to get into the media has long been the crowning act of reaching that stage in success where becoming a Lord of Mass Communications is the last peak left to climb.

The story of Ramstein today, by contrast, illustrates societal/technological evolution on a grand scale: How to annihilate distance (and therefore time) by permitting drones to destroy targets from terminals at Creech Air Force Base in Clark County, NV using drones flying over Arabia, let us call it. The intermediate point of focus is Ramstein’s satellite relay station, itself served by a Galaxy-26 satellite that oversees most of the eastern hemisphere of the globe. The satellite serving as Ramstein’s eye-in-the-sky was first moved from a location above the U.S. to the one it now occupies in 2009.

Evolution keeps working in its mysterious ways. And just to imagine the money and effort to move a satellite halfway across the world boggles the mind—and never mind the vast labors and expenditures necessary to implement a military system the public is only vaguely aware of. Brigitte sighs, remembering her humble labors at Ramstein which, even in her days, was a center of the Cold War. How it has evolved….and how rapidly.

Back in 1948, when the occupying French forces began to build the first airbase at Ramstein, the town had a population of around eight thousand—and the place to see was the Catholic St. Nicholas Church, the tallest structure anywhere. Back then the feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated with a procession—and is still celebrated today. 

The evolution, therefore, is just 67 years old—even as the old still hangs in there. How long will all this last? I found the image of Ramstein’s St. Nikolaus church on a Wikipedia page showing another hundred or more airplanes taking off, landing, or making patterns in the sky. Progress is still going on and up, higher and higher. Someday, of course, this curve will peak and start going down again. I won’t be here then, but it will happen.

I Am Behind Because I Am Ahead

Occasionally we hear people say that an institution is behind or ahead of the times (see last two posts). The word “times” here signals either culture or a functional vector; when this concept (if not the phrase) is applied to children, they’re either retarded or precocious; when to a business it is “behind” when it stops growing or fails to go public and then, in turn, fails to engage in diversification or acquisitions.

This dynamic vector has no terminus. I’m evolving, I’m evolving—and forever more. Progress is always to the better, evolution to the higher. Regression and devolution therefore are negatively flavored words. And arrival’s always mythical: the classless society or the end of times rapture. The imagination just refuses the infinite progress as well. Time must have a stop.

Deep engagement with “the times” is listening to one hand clapping. Reality is better pictured as the cycle of the seasons. Autumn is summer’s devolution and the progress toward winter time. And someone behind the times in Winter, dreaming of warmth and colored flowers, may be ahead of time because Spring is just around the corner.

News from the Vendian

Headline-writing is an art most resembling free verse. Free verse is a flattering sort of writing genre, much like modern art. Anyone can do it. The two headlines I want to talk about today come, respectively, from The State Column (link) and Science News (link):

Fossilized cells found in China may challenge theory of evolution

Early animals dethroned

The actual stories beneath these leads deal with the same subject; it’s the discovery of some fossilized blobs of once living matter 570 million years old. Such blobs were once thought to be algae; then, in 1998, they were reclassified as the embryos of animals; now X-ray methods have revealed that they are neither. They appear to be some precursor creatures that divide by a process called palintomy. New cells form inside the blobs until they are compressed so much that the blob explodes and lets them out. Cell-formation by palintomy resembles cell production in an embryo, hence the 1998 reclassification. And since no animals, as such, in embryo or otherwise, have been found as far back as 570 million years ago, the current discovery is best described by the headline from Science News: Early animals dethroned. Sorry, folks. Animals came later. The State Column, however, is a political publication; its pages are as thick with news of Gingrich, Trump, Perry, Romney, and Ron Paul as those blobs are thick with would-be spores. Therefore this minor re-dating of a recent back-dating of animal origins suddenly becomes a “challenge” to the very “theory of evolution.” Goodness gracious.

The real formation of animals took place in the Cambrian period 543-490 YA (that’s years ago). Therefore the blobs date to the Vendian (650-543 YA). Darwin hoped that life could be extended back and said that “the difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian system is very great” (Origin of the Species, Chapter X), hence the effort by some means to extend the records backwards, and the Vendian is the new frontier of that. Two steps backward, one step forward. Ain’t that a shame? For the sensitives it shakes the very foundations of reality.

Pierre Lecompte du Noüy

Pierre Lecompte du Noüy, a prominent French doctor, wrote a book intended for a general readership titled Human Destiny, and evidently it was popular even in translation else I might never have seen it. It came out in 1947. I stumbled across it in our local library. Our library is small, despite the wealth around here—and no theme visible—unless it is to buy what seem to be advanced books of the popular kind. So here was Human Destiny, its subject, broadly-speaking, evolution. And I took it home to read.

Du Noüy was a distinguished scientist although he came from an artistic family. His mother was a well-known novelist, his father an architect. Little of that spirit clung to the doctor, however. In a somewhat minor key he belongs to the transitional generation in which I place figures like de Chardin and Jung—people who were emerging from the forest of science into the dim outer edges of light—and people who had real difficulty shaking the residues of materialism even though inwardly drawn to the higher ranges.

The book is one of those bottom-up theories in which spirituality is born of matter. In du Noüy’s case evolution ultimately produces what he labels “conscience”; he pictures morality as the future path of evolution. Conscience will somehow lead to another leap in some remote time. The doctor offers very meager hopes for individuals in that he seems to doubt that “souls” exist and thus continue beyond the grave. His focus of admiration is “human dignity.” He also embraces the piety that seems to have come down to us from the nineteenth century—held by scientifically inclined but well-meaning people (like my Mother)—that we “live on” through our deeds and contributions. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, etc. The man must have been a moral paragon to think that such a view could possibly inspire mankind to heroic self-denial; at bottom his vision offers no hope for the individual. But du Noüy was clearly not an intuitive, poetic type and therefore missed a whole dimension of his theme. He thought that the miracle—at least the last miracle—was the human brain—which tells me that he never pondered the paradoxes of consciousness or the mysteries of inner life. The book has a distinctly nineteenth century flavor. The New Age had been born (Mary Baker Eddy had died in 1910) but was still just a child…

Nonetheless Human Destiny is valuable. The scientific presentation—contra positivism—is very well, expertly argued. True, the book fizzles out as it advances and we discover that overcoming the body and embracing a purified form of Christianity is our destiny—and that thereby we shall create Spirit, as it were. But what struck me as most telling was that du Noüy ultimately gets stuck on the brain. He is satisfied with his solution because he finds “conscience” on the one hand and “free will” on the other—the two pillars of morality, which is his aim. He is moved by love of his ancient tradition, which I assume from context is Catholicism; the book is structured to preserve this tradition up to a point. But while the Catholic project is to save souls, the goal for du Noüy is in the world itself: ultimate salvation lies somewhere in the future when vast majorities shall have at last embraced the evolutionary project. In effect, while referring to this future, he doesn’t actually “go there,” as we say today. And his knowledge of the “other tradition” is quite minimal and deficient.

Du Noüy’s half-way stop, half-way in matter, not quite all the way out of it and thus in the pure light of spirit, arises because he saw evolution as a relentless but unconscious filling of every ecological niche, seeking and experimenting until it finally achieved us. He is stuck on the brain because spirit and brain seem absolutely fused, but the brain evolved, hence had to have priority. But everything depends on where you start. I find it much easier to see spirit as prior and matter facilitating its action in a material dimension. But never mind that. What du Noüy thought that he saw is the emergence of spirit; deep down he was a progressive. What I see when I look around is more of the same, with or without spirit. With humanity’s emergence—if emergence it was, rather than arrival—evolution certainly expands, but where it trends is the same old place. It continues to build even bigger structures: institutions, nations, and empires this time. These, in turn, develop ever better nervous systems, economies, and modes of controlling their cellular components, namely us, while retaining the same sorts of reactive but ultimately stupid behaviors that the dinosaurs already had. A lack of mind, of real awareness, is strongly evident despite the lively chatter. The collective does not seem to hear the little wisdom that it occasionally produces.

My own walk-about tells me that du Noüy was wrong in thinking that evolution will be collective. The natural tendency of aggregation into ever greater wholes continues, but the outcomes one envisions are rather ominous: devastating wars or ecological disasters. Like Teilhard de Chardin, who came well after him, du Noüy evidently anticipated some kind of new miraculous event suddenly arising from massed Christian morality. For de Chardin this was the noosphere; and that scientific priest even envisioned the hand of evolution hard at work in concentrating people along the coastlines and the waterways of the continents. He should see these cities now. Whatever else they are—and clearly they are an evolution, along with satellites, computers, and the Internet—they are not spirit in any genuine sense of the word.

Indeed, I get apocalyptic images as I look at the shape of the future. It seems as if, after man came on the scene, the locus of evolution shifted to mankind and new creatures are now arising from within the human mass as various semi-conscious collectives. They both exist as independent institutions and simultaneously form organs and functionalities of yet other larger entities. They exist quite independently of little cells that temporarily make them up. Lincoln’s War Department is the Pentagon today. It is the same entity but filled with all new people. People form all of these collectives but people don’t really control them. Collectives have a “life of their own.” Individuals in temporary charge of these new dinosaurs enjoy the illusion of enormous power; they become puffed up, inflated, by being suddenly so large. Yet they can almost never act entirely on their own so that, in collective decision-making, that radical, new, original something, the unity of spirit, of individual consciousness (or conscience, as du Noüy would have it) is compromised away into mere nature.

Sometimes these new, collective beasts eat one another—as Disney is now eating Marvel Entertainment. The digestive juices of the aggressor eventually deform, change, and absorb what had a distinctive character of its own.

As collectives have gained ever more in power—not just physically, as in employing everyone, but also as images, as entities, as presences, as actors—we have developed a dualistic view of morals, of rights and wrongs, and justice. We simply accept that these enormous actors (with a life of their own, remember) have freedoms and rights superior to our own. When one eats another and layoffs are announced, we simply accept this. We simply transfer cells from Enron to the State Unemployment Office. When the Pentagon violates employment contracts by “stop loss” decrees and thus holds people in involuntary servitude, we accept this because the Pentagon is one of those minor godlets, one of evolution’s new little leviathans, destined to live, a mortal godlet, to be sure, until its parent, the American Empire, someday dies in a great chaos of dissolution.

Evolution has continued, to be sure. The way we are proceeding, the far future seems to hold no animals or plants except those grown in vast mono-cultures by man for his nutrition. Man will have swallowed Nature whole, will have become nature; all individuals will just be cells of ever more complicated structures, all with a life of their own, and these lives shall have the precedence always. Distopia. Well, actually, it won’t really be like that. The age of the dinosaurs eventually ended. At current rates of so-called progress, we shall destroy ourselves as we now are. It’s almost certain. Something new will come eventually. The show might actually start over. It wouldn’t be the first time. Oil will run out…

The spirit is a radical phenomenon and cannot be set equal to the brain. For me the problem is to see how brain and spirit interact and what that means. The spirit is radical, but in its most meaningful forms quite weak and inconsequential. Du Noüy thought that freedom was a key—but I look around and see mankind in chains, the pawn of its own institutions.

For this reason it’s good to recall Jesus’ words when he said: My kingdom is not of this world. That must be true. The evolutionary vector opened by the dawn of mind points in a radical direction: out of this dimension. In our dimension the very force that ultimately brought forth brains—and perhaps thereby freed the spirit captured here by some cosmic calamity or placed here by some design—is still at work doing what it has evidently always done, by some half-conscious necessity: build more and more complex structures in very much the same old way. The spirit is radical and may simply be catching a ride, passing through, a stranger in a strange land, bound for somewhere else.

This Conquest May Be Hazardous to Your Culture

Flet victus, victor interiit. The conquered mourns, the conqueror’s undone.
[Roman proverb]

When this old saw is carefully unpacked, a task historians routinely accomplish long after each major upheaval, it turns out that conquerors are transformed by their victories and the culture of the conquered ultimately triumphs. We speak of a Graeco-Roman culture because Rome conquered Greece in a contest that extended over fifty-five years and ended in 146 BC. In the wake of that conquest wave after wave of Hellenistic culture transformed Rome permanently. And we, mostly descendants of the barbarians who, in the late and morbid stages of the Roman Imperium, invaded and conquered Italy, absorbed its superior culture and became its inheritors by a kind of osmosis.

Remembering this sort of thing is unavoidable for folks like me who grew up head down over big thick books—and our minds filled with the nightmare from which James Joyce tried to awaken—when we note the preparations for withdrawal from Shiite Iraq just as we step up our efforts to crush the Taliban in Afghanistan.

A while back now I read a book entitled What Is Life? written by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan in which the authors present the fascinating hypothesis that evolution proceeded in part by creature eating creature, thus by conquest, as it were. To be sure, this was not the only mechanism of change, but it is thought to be one. Ingested creatures, if small enough, may find a new home inside their eater and sink anchor into the alien soil and turn into symbionts. My own earlier excursions into the nightmare of biology (echoing Joyce) had prepared me to accept this. The presence in the cell of mitochondria, little structures with their own DNA and reproductive cycles, little oxygen-generating power plants that supply the cell’s energy, seemed to say that cells have immigrants who came from elsewhere.

Other examples from a larger scale aren’t hard to find. In the New York Times the other day (June 30, 2009) is a brief story headlined When a Hybrid Takes Hold, The Outcome Can be Bad. Hybridization. The story deals with a new hybrid salamander produced in Salinas Valley in California when barred tiger salamanders, brought to the region from Texas by bait dealers, escaped and began to mate with the native California tiger salamanders. The resulting larvae, which are the food of the California newt and the Pacific chorus frog, were radically different and nearly did in all the frogs. New hybrids are sometimes indigestible, and not just in this case.

This, in turn, reminds me of “as above, so below”—which might be extended to say, “and in the middle too.” If we don’t want our culture to change, therefore, we must avoid both conquest and absorption—and we mustn’t mate with folks our parents don’t approve of. Good luck…

See Spot Run

[This is a science-fiction fantasy. Or is it a science-science fantasy?]

Life is like the big red spot on Jupiter. No; I am not kidding. Back forty, fifty years ago, in the seventies and sixties, the scientific consensus was stolidly mechanical. Life was chemical in character. The organic chemicals were being synthesized in labs. It was held then that in due time science would combine them in a tube and life would come wiggling out. That ambition hasn’t been jettisoned exactly; biochemists haven’t simply thrown up their hands and decided that life is some kind of hologrammatical whatsit that cannot be explained; chemistry is still very much in the saddle; but the mood has changed. An excellent, widely-used textbook, its second edition published in 1972, Biology Today, begins with the question, “What is life?” David Kirk, the author, does not provide an answer in so many words. The whole text is the answer. Today’s science would say that life is a dissipative structure like—well, like the big red spot on Jupiter.

Battle of Clerics

I came across some notes of mine from May 2005 titled “A Battle of Clerics.” My new look then at the subject of intelligent design (ID) must have been occasioned by some uproar. Indeed, checking back, it appears that around that time began a case later known as Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. in which the U.S. District Court held that teaching intelligent design in public school biology classes violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Intelligent design was held not to be science; the court also saw it as hopelessly entangled in a creationist belief.

I actually agreed with the U.S. District Court up to a point. I think that ID is a philosophical position—as is Darwinism. Neither is a “hard science.” Biology must remain, by its very nature, a soft or a “descriptive” science. The biological realm staunchly resists experimental approaches able to demonstrate how species may have been formed. The whole area is saturated with assumptions, hypotheses, theories, assertions, denials, and the rest—not one of which is capable of demonstration or falsification. A person may be persuaded of this or that, but the proofs are not compelling. We’re in the realm of natural philosophy here. Biology is no more a science than are cosmology, history, psychology, anthropology, or sociology. Science strictly construed is a term applicable, alas, only to physics and to chemistry. In the biological realm anatomy and medicine qualify up to a point, but even in medicine there are spooky areas that don’t fit the narrow gauge of experimental science (psychiatry, placebo effect, etc.).

What we see in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover is indeed a battle between clerics, thus between dogmatists. The matter cannot be resolved on merits. This is the sort of problem that E.F. Schumacher (A Guide for the Perplexed) labeled a “divergent” problem: the more you debate it, the greater the heat and the confusion. (“Convergent” problems, by contrast, produce solutions.) The matter therefore must be lifted to a higher level where another philosophical system, using its own definitions of value and its own transmission of holy writ, will decide who is right. Not in reality, to be sure, but in the social context that prevails.

The problem with ID, I think, is three-fold. First, it expends a lot of effort on showing something that is rather obvious to any open-minded observer. It is the teleological pattern that entirely soaks the biological realm. Purpose is present. You don’t need intricate researches to make it plain. I reached that conclusion very rapidly after studying biology for about three months in my adult years. I saw “technology” all over the place. I loved looking at the details of cells. It seemed to me self-evident—and if there was anything new there, it was that “As in the macrocosm, so in the microcosm.” Purpose is present.

Second, ID positions itself as science. This is in part visible in William A. Dembski’s work; Dembski relies heavily on mathematical approaches which, to me, are a clear indication of the clerical character of this battle in biology: modern science believes it offers irrefutable evidence when it offers it in the form of equations. And the public, which gets a real scare when it sees Greek letters and square-root symbols, is properly awed. Mind you, I have read Dembski—a lot of Dembski. Carefully. It’s not the work itself. It is its positioning and rhetorical uses that are the problem. The nature of biological evidence does not change just because we approach it with a transcendentalist assumption. What you see in biology is mechanism. That which is the real puzzle we can't access at all by any methodology that uses chemistry, dissection, equations, or fossils. The facts, as they appear to me, are that the life sciences must be approached by philosophical, transcendental means. They are inaccessible to science understood as a genuine explanatory methodology. Biology cannot be explained that way. Give me an equation for purpose…

Third, ID proponents take an adversarial position to conventional, neo-Darwinist approaches. This flows from the second error, the assumption that biology is a hard science where—if only the workers in the field were to use the right method—new answers would be possible. I don’t think so. At the same time, however, there is ample room for debating naturalism as an ideology. But that’s an entirely different enterprise. One doesn’t need the bacterial flagellum for that. Two thousand years worth of philosophical tooling is on hand and ready to be used in the usual way.

When clerics battle, don’t look for charm or inspiration. It’s the Pied Piper who attracts the children to follow him out of the city. The poets and the visionaries might lead us if inspiration strikes them. The clerics will just keep shouting—and nobody the wiser.

Other Transitional Figures

Emerging as I did from a Jesuit education—which I value, incidentally—one of the amusing paradoxes I encountered was that some famous authors of my youth were labeled heretics by both sides—my teachers as well as the Pundocracy of Unbelief. I use that ponderous term in order to signal a difference between science and scientism. Practitioners of science—physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology—are too busy to be ideological. They tend to be confident—but only too aware of their own and of their craft’s limitations. To have a dogmatic spirit must be a special cross to bear. It is a temptation to exercise power rather than a yearning for truth. I’d rather suffer from the latter. But the point is that any system of belief, religious or atheistic, will have those who yield to the temptation and thus morph into irritating busybodies.

The authors I have in mind, those who didn’t fit the orthodoxies on offer, I call transitional figures, believing (maybe with an excess optimism) that what comes around goes around, hence no curve ever just goes up. There will be seasons. And if rationalism (however much I value it) goes too far, it will be corrected by intuition. And vice versa.

I’ve mentioned two of these figures recently—Carl Jung and Teilhard de Chardin. The first began as a Freudian and then reintroduced the West to God in the form of the Collective Unconscious. The other began in Darwin’s neighborhood and produced an evolutionary theory which gradually forms a sphere of mind straining towards Omega. Both of these terms are nicely ambiguous. Both thinkers clung to naturalism when you get right down to it, but of an antsy sort. It’s a naturalism clawing away at veils and trying to break free. Messy, too. Over against it a stolid, Stoic atheism appears downright noble—but, alas, the Stoic must eventually confess that pop culture is its lineal descendant, and it ain’t pretty, much less noble. Slimy wiggle-things: are they new birth or corruption?

Other figures I think of as transitional are William James, Pierre Lecompte du Noüy, and David Bohm. They were a psychologist, a doctor, and a physicist. James influenced me greatly with his book entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience; du Noüy wrote on evolution. David Bohm strayed from physics enough in his late years to commit cosmology.

James was one of the first of those who almost touched the transcendental in his writings—and certainly did so in his actual life. He keenly felt the constraining limits of naturalistic science but was a modern man rooted in empirical soil and resistant to the older practice of “natural philosophy.”

Du Noüy’s book, Human Destiny, lay waiting for me a-mouldering on the shelves of the Grosse Pointe Library; written in 1947, it must have been enormously popular to make it to these shelves. Grosse Pointe is an auto-baron’s sleeping quarters (although I live, so to say, in the servant’s wing of it). The Library here is the worst I’ve ever had to call my own. By the time I was fully grown, the name had disappeared, but de Chardin, who had a similar take on evolution, was all the rage. De Chardin saw evolution is cosmic terms, du Noüy under a moral sway. He saw the triumph of life as “conscience” and pictured morality as the future path of evolution. Conscience will somehow lead to another leap forward in some remote future time. He offered very meager hopes for individuals in that he seemed to doubt that “souls” exist and thus continue beyond the grave. His focus of admiration was “human dignity.” He also embraced the piety that seems to have come down to us from the nineteenth century—held by scientifically inclined but well-meaning people (like my Mother)—that we “live on” through our deeds and contributions. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, etc. The man must have been a moral paragon to think that such a view could possibly inspire humanity to heroic self-denial; at bottom his vision offers no hope for the individual. But du Noüy was clearly not an intuitive, poetic type and therefore missed a whole dimension of his theme. He thought that the miracle—at least the last miracle—was the human brain—which tells me that he never pondered the paradoxes of consciousness or the mysteries of inner life. The book has a distinctly nineteenth century flavor. The New Age was still aborning…

David Bohm wrote the definitive textbook on quantum theory, under that very title. It is still used in teaching the subject—and a copy of it is on sale at my local Barnes & Noble. His claim to fame, however, is an alternative hypothesis to quantum theory; when applied it explains the same phenomena giving the same physical results, but the underlying theory requires a new cosmological view. The theory is laid out in a book, written with B.J. Hiley, titled The Undivided Universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory. His take on intelligence—as the manifestation of what he describes as an “unconditioned order” in the cosmos—is developed in a much more accessible work (almost no equations), Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order; it is available in trade paperback from Amazon.

One is tempted to include in this listing Henri Bergson as well, but he does not fit my criteria. He was not a scientist by avocation or profession. His poetic élan vital was the product of a philosophical intuition, not a diversion from a narrow scientific path forced on him by intuition. And ultimately the famed élan is the assertion of a “it is what it is,” thus “life is life.”

There are probably other important figures I just failed to come across, notice, or remember. But these five individuals have been important in forming my conviction that we are in a transitional period. Thought always leads. What I see around me contradicts that which I feel, but then the present is always a drag on the future. And the Renaissance dreamers were also surrounded by the mediaeval inertia, and its corruptions, visible all around them.

Sociobiology

Back a while now, I think it was late in 2005, Smithsonian published brief profiles of “35 Who Made a Difference.” The magazine, celebrating its 35th anniversary, decided to honor “innovators.” One of the editors’ choices was Edward O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology. His is the scientific doctrine which gives genes predominance over their carriers; thus the egg is greater than the chick; indeed the chick is the egg’s tool. Richard Dawkins made this subject even more controversial in 1976 by publishing a book with a catchier title, The Selfish Gene. While we were still in Virginia and Brigitte still going to school, I bought Wilson’s book for her in “a cloud of unknowing” as it were. The book is monstrous, oversized, evidently aimed at the coffee-table market: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. But while its cover lives up to the coffee-table promise, the contents stray far from English; the book is boring, its message dismal. In the last section of the last chapter, Wilson concludes that in the next century, namely this one, humanity will have evolved to a form no longer recognizably human. He ends by saying: “But we still have a hundred years.” He doesn’t mean a hundred years to fix things. No. The genes will have the last word—and they will have their way. He simply means that we still have a hundred years to experience what it feels like to be human. He envisions a completely planned society, “the creation of which seems inevitable in the coming century.” “In this,” he says, “the ultimate genetic sense, social control would rob man of his humanity.” The book was published in 1975.

On gloomier days we might agree with Edward O. Wilson; we need but look around to see monuments to his predictions…

Sociobiology, curiously, illustrates what fundamentalist religion is all about. It is a kind of passionate reasoning from partially true premises; in both cases the premises are found in holy books; in both cases there is a prophet; for Wilson the prophet is Darwin, for the fundamentalists he is St. Paul. The factual basis on which the structure is erected is never really questioned, indeed may not be questioned.

Wilson starts his book by saying:

Camus said that the only serious philosophical question is suicide. That is wrong even in the strict sense intended. The biologist…realizes that self-knowledge is constrained by emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system…These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions—hate, love, guilt, fear, and others—that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They evolved by natural selection… Self-existence, or the suicide that terminates it, is not the central question of philosophy. The hypothalamic-limbic complex automatically denies such logical reduction by countering it with feelings of guilt and altruism…. In a Darwinist sense the organism does not live for itself…. Each organism…is a unique, accidental subset of all genes constituting the species…

[T]he organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA. More to the point, the hypothalamus and limbic system are engineered to perpetuate DNA.

This extract from a much longer paragraph sums up the fundamental problem of sociobiology, indeed the problem of any system which posits an unconscious and emergent causation of mind. It was Archimedes who said, concerning leverage: “Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth.” We’ve improved that by saying: “Give me a fixed point outside the earth…” A fixed point, and outside the system, is absolutely essential for any kind of genuine knowledge. If my thinking is governed by the subtle string-pulls of a vast power beyond me (whether I’m aware of it or not) my thinking is essentially worthless. So is my science: it’s simply whatever DNA wants me to think.

I cannot lift myself by my own bootstraps. I cannot see my eyes without a mirror. Reality demands a fundamental dualism—a fixed point outside. Without that, no genuine knowledge can exist—only a system of reactions. Wilson thus transfers genuine consciousness to the DNA—but in orthodox Darwinian manner he clings to all of the machinery: it all happened by accident and natural selection. As Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, California: “There is no there there.”

Sociobiology is well known primarily because it tackled one of the basic problem in Darwinian theory—altruism. It shouldn’t be there beyond, perhaps, the narrow sphere of a brief mother-child relationship. Wilson explains altruism as the transcending wisdom of DNA guiding us by the “hidden hand” of hypothalamic/limbic influence so to behave that a more diverse gene pool will survive.

If you leave a lot out, if you do not think rigorously enough, anything can be explained by natural selection.

Natural Selection

In anticipation of tomorrow’s anniversary, here a few reflections on that interesting concept in biology, natural selection. It is quite clear from Darwin’s own words that this concept central to his doctrine merely means that, in nature, a selection takes places analogous to that which humanity exercises in nurturing and shaping animal and plant varieties by husbandry. If variations occur naturally—and we know that they occur by human intervention—

Can it, then, be thought improbable … that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life, should occur in the course of many successive generations? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) the individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others,would have the best chance of surviving and procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favorable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. [Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Great Books of the Western World, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 49, p. 40.]

Shortened and sharpened, the gist of this is that preservation and destruction take place in nature, favoring good and eliminating bad variations that come about somehow. That he means nothing else Darwin himself emphasizes by speaking of natural selection as a metaphorical expression. He does not intend to personify nature except as a way of speaking concisely of complex matters. “I mean by Nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us.”

What strikes me here is that this so-called cornerstone of modern biology is just a common-sense observation.

Darwin offered natural selection as his general explanation for biological change. But it amounts to saying that some species survive while others go extinct—and if we look for better explanations, we shall discover that those that passed away had a worse environment (internal, external, or some combination) than those that have stayed around.

If we introduce genetic changes taking place at random—changes natural selection can work upon—we don’t improve the theory. Change is change. An internal modifications is equivalent to one outside if both take place by chance. If the creature could modify itself at will in order to adapt, then we’d have something to discuss.

To be sure—a difficult subject. To say that things are tough, bad things happen, creatures cope as best they can, and what you get is that which happens (explain it as you will)—this formulation is not a theory so much as a description of the way things are. Natural selection as a mechanism is nothing more than saying that in an unruly and chaotic world some are lucky, some are not.

Something in the nineteenth century European soul favored Darwin’s theory. Another time might have shrugged it off as naïve or self-evident. The elites of that time had wearied of the older theory. It was based on a similar projection of an agency, God, another all-purpose arranger of reality. What happened here is that Darwin substituted another concept, nature. He was careful to point out that he meant everything that happens, all the laws of nature working on species. But the public understood him to have switched one universal concept for another. Within the stream of modern history, natural selection rose to an exalted principle. Part of the change arose, I’m fairly sure, by cultural embrace of secularism. The old theory had a large, to the public costly, and well-established institutional presence with demanding teachings inconvenient to many. The new one, science, was just beginning to emerge.

It amuses me to note that Lucretius (96-55 BC) wrote as follows 1,800 years or so before the birth of Darwin. Lucretius was trying to explain the dying off of what he called monstrous breeds: “Nature set a ban on their increase and they could not reach the coveted flower of age nor find food nor be united in marriage… And many races of living things must then have died out and been unable to beget and continue their breed.” Surviving breeds, according to Lucretius, had characteristics that “protected and preserved each particular race.” [Quoted in the essay “Evolution” in The Great Ideas, written by Mortimer J. Adler, Vol. 1, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., p. 451]

Lucretius was the last notable Epicurean, the last ancient atomist, convinced atheist, who, like Darwin’s followers, needed something equivalent to God, Nature in Lucretius’ case too, to act as an agent able to set bans and such.

In the context of tomorrow’s anniversary, it is worth noting that evolution as “development from simple to complex” appears in the thought of Anaximander (611-547 BC), Empedocles (5th c. BC), Aristotle (384-322 BC), Augustine (354-430), Aquinas (1225-1274), Locke (1632-1704), Buffon (1707-1788), Kant (1724-1804), Lamarck (1744-1829), and, not least, Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus. Here’s his take in verse:

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.
Erasmus Darwin. The Temple of Nature. 1802.

Looking at the organic order we cannot escape the intuition of continuity, relatedness, and increasing complexity. No names on the list above appear from periods when cultures were deeply religious—for the simple reason that in those times the eyes of the elites were directed inward and science was dormant then.

Darwin coined a concept to describe that species that survive survive. That notion itself is not remarkable, and in that form would not have spawned a branch of science. His concept as he used it is ordinary enough. The rhetorical flourish that he gave it caught on in a time not given to rigorous philosophical analysis—and elites were suddenly entranced. Yes, perhaps tea leaves can tell the future; and, yes, perhaps clouds actually do at times show faces, horses. But such discoveries are better explained by looking at the viewer—or his times—than at the clouds or at the bottom of his cup.