Sunday, December 2, 2012

The Challenge of Darwinism, updated for Lent (and further updated for Advent)


In the post below, originally published during the Lenten season of this year, we locked horns with the Darwinist défi, from a mathematical/philosophical/theological point of view.  Herewith, by way of preface, a brief companion-piece, which abjures all those disciplines, and sticks to biology and sociology.

Characterizing Freud’s stance in 1908, in an article published in Mutterschutz  (“Defense of Motherhood”), his admiring biographer Jones writes:

The glorifying of monogamy  paralyzes the process of selection, which is the only hope of improving the human constitution, a hope which humanitarianism and hygiene  has already reduced to a minumum.
-- Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of Maturity (1955), p. 293

This passage may be difficult for today’s young people to understand.  By selection he means Darwinian Natural Selection, nowadays mostly known as “Evolution” -- Nature’s ruthless culling of the unfit.  Constitution here means ‘genome’.   Humanitarianism refers to welfare payments and the like, which provide survival -- and opportunities for further procreation -- to individuals who would, in an earlier age, have gone by the board without issue.   Hygiene refers to state-sponsored measures of Public Health,  which, reducing mortality across the population, again nurtures the frail along with the rugged.
Such thoughts are no longer publically expressed these days, let alone in such old-fashioned words.  In earlier decades, such qualms were mainstream:  though seldom was monogamy singled out  as a factor in devolution.  Yet the thrust is meet, and must be met.

Jones’ preceding paragraph  reports, from the same article, Freud’s view that “the prevailing sexual morality of civilation is characteried by the transference of feminine demands  on to the sexual life of the man” (though on the next page he avers that “women suffer more than men from the prevailing morality” -- the apparent contradiction  is never addressed), which “leads to a double moral life, with evil consequences”.  In that context,  I at first assumed  that Freud was referring to garden-variety marital fidelity.  And that, surely, is immune from Darwinian attack:  the appalling consequences of agamy in our barrios and ghettoes  are apparent to all.  Now, I have not actually read Freud’s article -- unaccountably, that issue of Mutterschutz is missing from my shelves (probably one of the pesky neighborhood boys  has made off with it) -- but I venture to suggest that he may have had in mind an idea that grew to prominence in his later years, the years of Totem und Tabu:  the scenario of the alpha male, lording it over his harem, infusing their wombs with his übermensch übergenes, while his less-fit cousins and brothers circle, snarling, just outside of the firelight.
Now, if the highest pitch of your ambition  is to hunt the mastodon,  such a scheme might well work;  certainly, it works for walruses.  But if you set your sights higher -- on the Gospels, on Paradise Lost, on the Riemann Hypothesis -- you need a system maximally protective and nurturing of each individual offspring, since the monogamous couple’s offspring are so few;  a goal favored in that now each child has both a dedicated-mommy and dedicated-daddy, schooling him daily in Scripture and in analytic number theory.   This happy scenario  does not refute the truths of Darwinism, but simply sublates them, or transcends them:  for we, cognitively alert and free-willed beings, have other goals, not shared by the newts and toads, for whom Darwin is surely good enough.


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~ Commercial break ~
We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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[And now to the original essay.]

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It would ill become me, as if I were afraid of truth of any kind, to blame those who pursue secular facts, by means of the reason which God has given them, to their logical conclusions;  or to be angry with science  because religion is bound to take cognizance of its teaching.
-- John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864)


In Philosophy: a Very Short Introduction (2002), Edward Craig writes (p. 92):

 For Descartes, human reason was a faculty  given to us  and guaranteed by God … and that was why he could rely on it to tell us about the essential nature of mind and matter ... What if, instead , he had thought of it as a natural instrument which had developed because, and to the extent that [emphasis in original], it gave its possessors a competitive advantage over those without it?  Would he then have supposed that what it appeared to tell us on such matters could, with complete confidence, be taken as the truth?

This challenge is absolutely valid.  On this basis, we should, indeed, do as Descartes did, and call everything -- all our beliefs, absolutely everything -- into question.  Yet alas, now without the Cartesian certainty that our Idea of the Perfect must come from The Perfect, Himself.  Epistemologically, we are much humbled. We are sweaty, dust-caked survival machines -- that has been shown -- much like the cockroach and the rat.  Are we anything else as well ?

At this point, some despair, and take to drunkenness or drugs or Postmodernism (I cite these in descending order of worthlessness).

And yet, when we look about the landscape, we find something unexpected, unexplained, and entirely surprising:

  =>  ~ ~ ~  the Urysohn Metrization Theorem ~ ~ ~ <=

along with all the other truths of abstract mathematics: truths that are seen to be true, by anyone with wit enough to see them; truths not relativized to space or to time, to culture or to … species.  If the Humble Woodchuck should ever make it as far as point-set topology, he too will discover , and celebrate,  this truth.

Its survival value:   Zero.
What gives?

Well, we don’t know what gives, but something does.   We have a stark staring ideational miracle in our midst, something no-wise selected for, something simply True.
Now, it is no contradiction to Darwinism to posit that, quite independently of the brute world ever evolving and evolving, to no purpose and upon no plan, there might be a world apart, of Platonic forms, or celestial calliopes, or whatever you will.   What does contradict Darwinism -- fly in the face of it, knock its socks off -- is our repeated and reliable ability to discover this World of Forms, again and again struggling through jungles of calculation and conception to arrive at the same ice-crowned mountain.  A World of Forms of no use at all  in escaping the sabre-tooth, whose bite is so fierce, or in hunting the mighty mastodon.
Though, let us hasten to add, among the facts that attest to the reality of these abstract truths, is that, in recent times, these have manifested themselves, not only in the clear understanding of minds suitably prepared, but in sheer physical engineering :  our spacecraft land where we want them to, and our nuclear power plants generate useful energy, owing to applications of our understanding of these Forms.

And if this be true, might it likewise be, that our insights and intuitions about our Maker, at first dimly conceived, but gradually taking form across the millennia, and finally developed to a state of great excellence by the finest minds in Christendom -- might it be that  these too  contain their share of truth?

~

Notice that, despite what we repeatedly read about the advance of science undermining the foundations of faith, we are now intellectually in a much better position to appreciate what it might mean for there to be a God who is the maker of

     visibilium omnium et invisibilium

-- all things visible and invisible -- than was Aquinas. 


[Update:  I had the sense, writing this, of committing a certain hardihood;  yet just now  happened upon the following passage, by a Jesuit of impeccable credentials:

Intellectual virtues may be an essential aspect of our existence, and prepare us for what is revealed.
-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p. 198 ]

~

Note:  Despite possible appearances to the contrary, nothing on this blog should be taken as an attack upon Darwinism, or even a critique.  Charles Darwin himself is  for me  an intellectual and even a moral hero, who just gets better  the more you learn about him.  The whole field of evolutionary biology has been characterized by remarkably brilliant practitioners, who in addition are often philosophically alert.  The appearances-to-the-contrary stem from the accidental facts that,
            (a) You don’t need me to expound the findings of this fine science, since there are easily available volumes from writers far more professionally qualified, and who, by happy circumstance, are in many cases quite gifted writers, simply as writers:  Darwin himself, Steven Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, H. Allen Orr, in writings too numerous to mention, along with excellent though lesser-known figures like D’Arcy Thompson, George Gaylord Simpson, J.B.S. Haldane, Ernst Mayr, Matt Ridley, Paul Colinvaux, Richard Fortey, George Williams, and John Maynard Smith.
            (b) With Darwinism, just as with any scientific idea in fashion, starting with atomism, magnetism, radiation, vortices, relativity, quantum mechanics, and even some mathematical ones like point-set topology and nonlinear dynamics, there have been some fanciful overreaching and stupid abuses  in attempts to apply these ideas to things to which they do not apply, mostly in the popular media.   With these I feel the need to break a lance, particularly when their agenda is to reduce those created in the image of God, to the level of cockroaches.  But the tick that feeds upon the rump of Pegasus, in no wise lessens the majesty of that noble steed.

~

A word on the … evolution (not by natural selection) of our ideas about science and about theology.
In both cases, if, naïvely, we thumb through some books and behold what our distant ancestors used to believe, we gape and gasp.   And in the perspective -- long regnant, but by now adequately criticized -- of the Whig Theory of History, those poor old dotards were simply clueless.
If, however, we examine the matter with more study and attention, we learn that the best minds of Antiquity and of the Middle Ages  were a lot smarter than our shallow understanding of their doctrines  would imply. 
For science, this post-Whig re-evaluation has been ably and painstakingly carried out by a distinguished body of historians and philosophers.  For theology -- I really don’t know;  but I do recall  that C.S. Lewis says somewhere that the old folk-images  tended to be held until some historical juncture causes them to be actually examined:  in which cases the Historical Church proved generally capable of refining its conceptions and language. Yet -- a subtle point, but crucial -- this replacement of the traditional image  is a dialectical sublation, and no mere negation.  Even from the standpoint of our modern and more nuanced understanding, the original idea, while dethroned, is yet in a sense  preserved -- aufgehoben.  Thus, the image of Jehovah as a tribal patriarch with a long white beard, sending down laws on stone tablets  and speaking, should occasion demand it, from a burning bush, remains yet a more faithful and more fruitful symbol, a more adequate gateway to eventual fuller comprehension, than would the alternative representation, as, say, a black-face minstrel, or a used-car salesman in a bow tie.  True, He is ultimately none of these three; but he participates of one of them  more than he does the others (proportionate to our understanding).

In science, it is the same.  You’ll hear it said that the Copernican heliocentric theory was resisted because
            (a) it “demoted the earth from its privileged position at the center”;
            (b) the Bible declares that Earth is stationary.

The efforts of the debunkers have decisively refuted (a) -- Craig himself has a good short summary of their findings -- but just a word about (b), since for some reason, philosophers of science are less eager to come to the rescue of the Bible.  True, it takes the Earth as stationary.  And so, by the bye, does any modern scientist in his right mind, when solving any practical problem such as the trajectory of a shell or a baseball:  the pitcher lobs it due south at x miles per hour;  the bat strikes it, traveling due north with such&such momentum; the wind is from the northeast at eighteen miles per hour, and the Earth… is stationary.  You do not factor in the sweep of this green planet round the Sun, nor Sol’s more stately wheeling along the rim of our spinning galaxy, nor that nebula’s proper motion through the celestial void, a vagrant among the observing unspeaking witness of the Fixed Stars -- which, as we now know, are not fixed in the least;  it’s just a manner of speaking.

~

A note on that last proviso, “proportionate to our understanding”.  This is actually a key idea.

By chance, I just now happened to re-read a most amusing poem from 1913, by Rupert Brooke, entitled “Heaven”.  Here he depicts fish, contemplating the afterlife:

somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
is wetter water, slimier slime!

and they imagine their unimaginable Maker,

immense, of fishy form and mind,
squamous, omnipotent, and kind

-- along with much more in this vein.
Now, this is satire, possibly even intended to be offensive;  yet let us take no offense.  Rather, the poem expresses a truth, from whatever base motivations.  For we are each, each species, but a small and finite part of the visible Creation;  which in turn is only an infinitessimal part, of the Creator.   We each receive, and cherish, such tatters and fragments of truth as we may.  And let Saint Francis be my witness: I doubt not, indeed, I do not doubt, that whither those fishes are destined, they shall find water  wetter than wet; that the celestial penguins shall throne upon ice-floes frozen to perfection, immutable; and that the sweet small vole, that dwelleth in the fields, shall … dwell there forever:  World without end.

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