[Marxism] Evolution wars

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Review, Volume 52, Number 16 · October 20, 2005

Review
The Wars Over Evolution
By Richard C. Lewontin
The Evolution?Creation Struggle
by Michael Ruse

Harvard University Press, 327 pp., $25.95
Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution
by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd

University of Chicago Press, 332 pp. $30.00

1.The development of evolutionary biology has induced two opposite 
reactions, both of which threaten its legitimacy as a natural scientific 
explanation. One, based on religious convictions, rejects the science of 
evolution in a fit of hostility, attempting to destroy it by challenging 
its sufficiency as the mechanism that explains the history of life in 
general and of the material nature of human beings in particular. One 
demand of those who hold such views is that their competing theories be 
taught in the schools.

The other reaction, from academics in search of a universal theory of human 
society and history, embraces Darwinism in a fit of enthusiasm, threatening 
its status as a natural science by forcing its explanatory scheme to 
account not simply for the shape of brains but for the shape of ideas. The 
Evolution?Creation Struggle is concerned with the first challenge, Not By 
Genes Alone with the second.

It is no surprise that Cardinal Christoph Schönborn has recently chosen the 
Op-Ed page of The New York Times to enunciate the doctrine on evolution of 
the new Benedictine papacy.[1] Political and cultural struggle over the 
origin of life and of the human species in particular has been a 
characteristically American phenomenon for a century, providing Europeans 
(the French in particular) with yet another example of la folie des 
Anglo-Saxons. In his essay, Cardinal Schönborn accepts that human and other 
organisms have a common ancestry and, by implication, that the species on 
earth today have evolved over a long period from other species no longer 
extant. That is, he accepts the historical fact that life has evolved. He 
distinguishes this acceptable fact of evolution from what he characterizes 
as the unacceptable "neo-Darwinian" theory that, in the words of the 
official 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church of which he was an editor, 
evolution is "reducible to pure chance and necessity." He rejects, as he 
must, the Newtonian notion of first cause, that at the beginning God only 
created a material mechanism with a few basic molecular laws and that the 
rest of history has simply been the consequence of this mechanism.

In the evolutionary process, he writes, there must have been "an internal 
finality," the Divine plan. He calls attention to the fact that John Paul 
II, who endorsed the science of evolution in his 1996 address to the 
Pontifical Academy of Sciences, nevertheless insisted in his other writings 
that there must also be such a principle of finality and direction built 
into the material process. Such internal finality and direction cannot be 
omitted from the minimal Christian position. For if evolution is only the 
consequence of random mutations, none of which needs to have occurred, and 
if the subsequent fate of those mutations is subject only to the relative 
ability of their carriers to reproduce and to survive catastrophes of the 
environment that eliminate species and make room for new ones, then 
rational beings capable of moral choices might never have come into 
existence. But without such beings the concept of Redemption is 
unintelligible. Christianity demands, at the very least, the inevitable 
emergence of creatures capable of sin. Without a history of human sin, 
there is no Christ.

Everything else is up for grabs. Neither the Vatican nor much of quite 
conventional Protestant theology demands that one take the story in Genesis 
1 literally. Even William Jennings Bryan, famous as the prosecutor in the 
Scopes trial in 1925, when called as a witness for the defense, confessed 
that he did not much care whether God took six days or six hundred million 
years to create the world. Moreover, even the minimalist Christian position 
does not require the abandonment of the neo-Darwinian view of the mechanism 
of evolution. It is quite possible to argue, as some of my believing 
religious colleagues do, that God set the stage for evolution by natural 
selection of undirected mutations, but that He reserved the ancestral line 
destined to become human for special preservation and guidance.

full: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18363

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