One of Three

I started listening to the most recent episode of EconTalk, in which Professor Roberts interviews one Hanno Sauer about the latter's new book: The Invention of Good and Evil. I have to admit that I gave up not too long into it, in part because of this statement from Mr. Sauer:

 And, now you get the opposite problem when you move to a naturalistic Darwinian framework. All of a sudden, the default assumption seems to be that it's 'nature, red in tooth and claw.' It's dog-eat-dog, it's elbows out. Everyone is selfish. Everyone is essentially sociopathic. Right?

And, now you get the problem: Okay, evidently there is friendship and heroism and love and altruism and sacrifice. But, where do those come from? It seems to not make any sense.

It irked me, because the basic idea that, under "a naturalistic Darwinian framework" that "everyone is essentially sociopathic," doesn't actually come out of any of Mr. Darwin's work. As I noted in my (unfinished) blogging of my way through On the Origin of Species:

There are three distinct facets to the Struggle for Existence, as Darwin explains it - competition within a species, competition between species, and mitigating the hostile effects of one's environment.

Mr. Sauer's book, rather than seeking to correct the misconception that the "default assumption" should be that competition within species is the norm, leans into it. And I found myself asking why. Or, on the larger scale, why does the misconception persist so? I can't possibly be the only person who has read Charles Darwin, or recalled that person-to-person competition is only part of one of three primary conflicts that Mr. Darwin identifies. So why don't more people push back against it? Why accept the hostile framing that the idea that "the Darwinian view of Evolution requires one to be murderously pseudo-Machiavellian" and then try to argue that unselfishness can grow within it, when it strikes me as much easier to point out that "friendship and heroism and love and altruism and sacrifice" make the other two conflicts much easier, and start from there?

Speculation on other people's motives is often a one-way ticket to creating a strawman argument, so I won't indulge in it, other than to say that there must be incentives at play that I am either unaware of, or not fully crediting. Because while it may seem unreasonable to me, there are assuredly reasons for it that people feel are worthwhile.

Of course, it may simply be that the misconception is widely held enough that people don't always realize that it is, in fact, a misconception. It's like Fyodor Dostoevsky's bit of dialog in The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan notes: "If God does not exist, anything is permissible." This is commonly taken to be absolutely true in much of the Western world, especially by Christians, despite the fact that there is nothing in the viewpoint of Moral/Ethical Realism that requires some sort of divinity to create the rules, just as there in nothing in Mathematics that demands some sort of divine order for 2 + 2 to equal 4. Perhaps it's just easier to set out to prove the argument incorrect than to point out that it doesn't actually seem to make any sense, given the world as we understand it.

Escalations

Charles Darwin identifies three basic conflicts that made up the Struggle for Survival. They can be summed up as interspecies conflicts, intraspecies conflicts and conflicts versus the environment. I think one of the things that makes the concept of "evil" so compelling is that it elevates conflicts between people, either individuals or populations, from the personal to matters of the life and death of the species as a whole. And when the stakes are suddenly that high, it's easy to conclude that there's no such thing as extremism.

Aside:

For those of you who weren't here when I started The Short Form, it's mainly an antidote to my tendency to be wordy. Sometimes, thinking about what would otherwise be a long post helps me distill it down into a sentence or two, that says what I want to say, perhaps with a bit of context thrown in for added clarity.

Rally

I am an amateur Evolutionist. Not having cared about how this or that species came to be since I was a sophomore in high school, I have allowed my understanding of the current Theory of Evolution to grow old and dusty, and all sorts of layman's misperceptions and odd outlooks on things have crept in over the years, resulting in an odd hodgepodge of science, personal understanding and outright inanity. (Having read Darwin is of little help here; On the Origin of Species is quite dated at this point.) And, not being a scientist, I don't maintain any sort of rigor in my approach to such things - if it makes sense, I go with it, and let someone else sort it out for me later. And I am careful to make way when presented with evidence, one way or the other, and keep and open mind.

I am also an amateur Atheist. Being your average random American, I was raised Christian; Roman Catholic, to be precise. I was told that there is a God, and that he sent his only son down to Earth to die for our sins, and that there is a Devil, who makes people do bad things because he wants them to go to Hell; apparently, he gets off on torturing souls and God doesn't mind him having a hobby to keep him off the streets. Somewhere in there was always the faintly disturbing idea that Communion at Sunday mass was this magical form of cannibalism, with what you thought was red wine and cardboard-tasting wafers actually being the body and blood of Jesus. Anyway, I also quit caring about religion when I was in high-school; having come to the realization that my classmates weren't mean-spirited because "the Devil made them do it," but because they were simply bastards. There might be a God - there might not. I don't know, and frankly, I don't find the truth of it to important to my daily life. Being a bastard is being a bastard, come Heaven, Hell or basketball court; and therefore to be avoided.

But if there's one thing about a Roman Catholic education, it's that the church, having repented of hounding Galileo, doesn't bother to take issue with science, per se. Sure, they might not like this discovery, or that procedure, but they're cool with science overall. Father Phillip, my biology teacher, firmly believed in Evolution. He had a chart on his classroom door; at the top of the chart was God. Below that, were quarks. And it kept going until you arrived at mankind. For him, there was no conflict between Evolution and God. Sometimes, though, I'm convinced that he's in the minority.

Recently, I encountered an Evangelical critic of both evolution and atheism who offered me an "obvious reason" for "Darwin's lack of appeal," as he stated it. It's that, to their mind: "no one lives as if Darwinism is true." He went on to say, effectively, "If you really believe in evolution, you can do whatever you want to any living thing." The implicit sub-text here is clear: The only sources of an ethical/moral sense in humans are a divine power and/or a sincere belief in same. And that a belief in the Theory of Evolution directly precludes a belief in such a power, or even the acceptance of the possibility of its existence. Humans otherwise lack an intrinsic ability to internalize values and mores that are beneficial to anyone other than themselves as individuals, and possibly those they care about. Our conversation eventually reached this admonition: "Leave compassion and moral judgment only to those who believe human life is more than an accidental collection of amino acids." Explicit in this statement is that those who believe that humanity arose from the vastness of the Universe unbidden by the divine have no right to act in a manner that believers find compassionate or moral - they are commanded to abandon such behaviors. The critic denounces such actions by those who believe in Evolution as "irrational and contradictory," even though he still appears to appreciate the acts themselves. This is a common enough stance that I encounter it every two to three years in general conversation, and so it's unsurprising to hear it

For many Evangelicals, and those who hold similar beliefs, to be religious, and therefore, to be moral, good and/or just, is to subscribe to the idea that the Bible is a literal history of the events that it purports to chronicle. In the Christian Broadcasting Network's "Operation Supreme Court Freedom," one of the Prayer Points is to: "Pray that those who oppose biblical truth would retire from the Supreme Court and be replaced by those who honor God's law." It's pretty clear from this statement that as far as the CBN is concerned, you cannot honor God's law without accepting "biblical truth." And if you cannot honor God's law, you lose any claim to virtue.

The confluence of ideas that states that one must chose between God and Evolution, and that to chose Evolution is to reject the concepts of Good and Evil, is a faith-based one. As such, it can continue even in the face of a lack of proof. Which it does; its basis in reality is tenuous at best. While many people honestly believe that those who believe in Evolution leave themselves an "out" when it comes to ethics and morality, and may deliberately make such a choice precisely to obtain that "out," how many people can point, off the tops of their heads, to people who cite "survival of the fittest," "natural selection" or "evolutionary pressures" as a motive for the crimes they commit? Yes, there are a few high-profile mass murderers and hate-mongers, spouting corrupted Nietzsche as moral cover. But when was the last time you heard a mugger fall back on Darwin? Or a corporate executive, fresh off the "perp walk," quoting from On the Origin of Species for justification?

The religious left, even though they are, by all accounts, a clear majority of the Liberal movement, seems to sit and fret in silence. They are, evidently, hoping to avoid being thought of as "backwards religionists," unfit to wear the label of "rational human being." This should end. Anyone who can manage to hold in their heads the idea that humanity, could have evolved from less-advanced animals, and still manage to be ethical, caring, just and devout should feel free to speak up; long, loudly and often, and request their opponents prove them hostile to religion, to the divine, to kindness and/or to the well-being of their fellows. And the secular left errs when it attempts to demonstrate, however correctly, that the God-fearing are capable of the same hienous acts as those who acknowledge no divinities. More productive would be working to show that the Agnostic, Atheist and even the Anti-Theistic among them can be just as upstanding and forthright as the most pious clergyman. As the saying goes, "hope is not a strategy," and hoping that people will come around to the "right way" of looking at the world is a lost cause. If we accept the idea that hostility to Evolution is (at least in part) a reaction to the idea that Darwinism (directly or indirectly) equals Moral Anarchy, then everyone who understands that notion to be false would do well to marshal their evidence, stand up for the truth as they see it and place their opposition in the position of needing to discredit them.

I was taught that the process of Evolution was the hand of God shaping mankind; not out of clay, but from organic materials. And not in the first days of Creation, but billions of years after God sparked a tiny mote into the infinite vastness that stretches away from me in all directions, expanding ever farther with each passing moment. This was presented as a matter of faith. The hand of God faded with the final demise of my religious beliefs, but contrary to the charges of Evangelicals, a desire to keep others down didn't become Evolution's new bedfellow in its absence. When I donate money for disaster relief, or give twenty dollars to the single mother sitting by the expressway entrance, it's because I genuinely feel that what I'm doing is right, not because I'm insane, or taken leave of my senses. It is my job to demonstrate that, and when required defend it, and force others to prove me wrong, or to acknowledge the falseness of denying my ethics.

Presto, Change-o

How do we really know that one species evolved into another?
"How do we know that evolution is really happening?"

One of the factors that drives skepticism about the process of evolution (outside of a religious conviction of humanity holding a special, divinely-ordained place in the Universe and/or that only a creator deity can be a source of ethics) is the idea that it entails one lifeform "turning into" another lifeform. This can conjure up an image of change that takes an entire population, and over time, transmogrifies them, in a coordinated fashion, into a population of entirely different lifeforms. And one of the things that can help drive that misconception is the way laypeople talk about evolution.

Now, I say this as a layperson myself - after all*, I'm a project manager, not an evolutionary biologist. And, as a layperson, I likely often make mistakes when talking or writing about Darwinian evolution. So I'm not making the case that everyone always has to get everything right. But I do think that it's somewhat important to avoid certain specific phrasings that provide fodder for critics and motivated skeptics. Sure, the process of evolution can, and inevitably will, given enough time, alter an entire species to a point where, if you could re-create an archaic example of that same species, interbreeding with the modern population would no longer be possible. (This process is termed "anagenesis.") This isn't say that the particular word choice should never be used - only that it's worth being careful with, so as not to engender confusion or needless controversy.

People taking the statements of the uninitiated as gospel, however, is something that I encounter all the time. Especially when those statements can be construed to fit in with preconceptions about the topic at hand.

* (Feel free to insert "Damnit, Jim!" here.)

Wrong on the Internet

So... the latest bit of "point-and-laugh" to make the rounds of the internet is a 30-minute video of a woman named Megan Fox (although not that Megan Fox) "auditing" the Field Museum of Natural History for "liberal bias."

One of the things that she says, and something that I've heard before from other creationists, is: "Darwin once said 'If the single cell is more complex than I think it is, then all of my theories -- I'm gonna have to start all over again'." This is a badly mangled reference to a line from Chapter Six of "The Origin of Species," in the section named: "Modes of Transition." The section opens with: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." (Note that Darwin continues with: "But I can find out no such case.") Many creationists claim that advances in our understanding of cellular biology over the past 150 years have demonstrated that cell organelles are "irreducibly complex," that is they are complex systems made up of subsystems in such a way that the absence of any given subsystem renders the whole inoperable.

A common example of "irreducible complexity" is the mousetrap. A typical mousetrap has a number of individual subsystems that work together to catch mice. Remove one, such as the holding bar, and the trap fails to catch any mice.

Now, note what this implies: an irreducibly complex system cannot come about in a gradual manner. One cannot begin with a wooden platform and catch a few mice, then add a spring, catching a few more mice than before, etc. No, all the components must be in place before it functions at all. A step-by-step approach to constructing such a system will result in a useless system until all the components have been added. The system requires all the components to be added at the same time, in the right configuration, before it works at all.
Irreducible Complexity: The Challenge to the Darwinian Evolutionary Explanations of many Biochemical Structures

Okay, fine. There's only one problem. That's not how Evolution by Natural Selection works. Organisms don't come together by the random agglomeration of fully-formed parts in the way machines do. And perhaps more importantly, even machines don't really operate in this way. It's likely possible to find an old-school version of a mousetrap that we would recognize as a cruder version of the ones we have today. Then you could trace the refinement of the system through the alterations that were made to the individual systems.

The rest of video continues on in this vein. Fox, as she moves through museum, makes a number of snide comments. She becomes especially animated when she finds "inconsistencies" the museum exhibits or items that strike her as too precise for the evidence at hand. (Interestingly, while she constantly argues that without video evidence of the distant past, scientists simply cannot know certain things, she herself exhibits certainty that, for instance "horsetails have always been horsetails.") And as you listen to her comments (some of which are screamingly incorrect), it becomes clear that not only does she not believe in natural selection, but she doesn't really understand how the process would work, were you to observe it in action. And for this, she has become something of a laughingstock in atheist and skeptic circles.

Why?

Okay, so Megan Fox is woefully uninformed about the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, and regards other people who believe it as dupes. What difference does it make? Who cares that Fox believes in an intelligent designer, and thinks that if children want to believe that dragons were real that scientists shouldn't dash their hopes? If Fox believes in cave paintings of dinosaurs, why is that of any importance to the rest of us?

Part of it, I think, goes back to the idea that the less-sophisticated must be protected from believing Wrong Things. Because despite the fact that there have been thousands of years of human technological advancement alongside superstition and accepting things that we now know to be untrue, all that will suddenly grind to a halt if not enough people believe the Right Things. Or will it? Innovation and technology don't depend on having an understanding of things outside of one's chosen field. Putting a man on the moon is rocket science to be sure, but it isn't paleontology. If you think that the skull of a pachycephalosaur is actually a dragon skull and that this proves that humans actually saw living dinosaurs as late as the middle ages, that alone isn't going to make you bad at your job, or prevent you from making new breakthroughs in it.

It's easy to believe, I think, that the Flavor-Aid that people we disagree with are serving has been poisoned and that the people who are drinking must be saved from themselves before they are irreparably harmed. But the fact that something may be false doesn't also make it harmful. For many self-described Christians, a lack of believe in the dogmas that they hold to be true marks one as amoral at best, and dangerous at worst. And it might sting to be held as an inferior intellect for holding a different understanding of the world. But there's little point in returning the favor.

Clearly

Clearly, we need faith as a component, and it's just silly to say otherwise. You know the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust.
Penny Nance. CEO, Concerned Women for America

“Moral relativism,” according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “is the view that moral judgments are true or false only relative to some particular standpoint (for instance, that of a culture or a historical period) and that no standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others.” Or, as many of us experience it today, morality is not objective. From a Judeo-Christian-Moslem standpoint, this is incorrect, as the justice that is the stated goal of moral behavior rests upon the idea of a single, neutral and consistent arbiter who holds the final judgment. The principles by which this arbiter judges are what render moral judgments true or false, and its standpoint is, by definition, privileged.

The difficulty that Nance's statement creates is that acts that we consider evil, like the Holocaust, pre-date the Age of Enlightenment and Reason. The armed religious pilgrimages-cum-massacres that were many of the Crusades were certainly not driven by the idea that humans could arrive at workable moral and ethical frameworks without a reliance on faith. And long before the Crusades is the story of the destruction of the Amalekites at the direct command of God, and the rebuke of Saul because he sought to honor God in a way other than simple obedience of the command to slaughter.

And that is the problem. At the heart of Euthyphro's dilemma is the simple fact that what religious authorities have told people were “right” and “moral” has often not squared with what people independently concluded were thus. And this has been true for thousands of years. And if you take divinities out of the equation, you are left with fundamental disagreements between people as to what actions (or inaction) constitute “right” and “moral.”

It doesn't take a student of theology to realize that just about any community, anywhere, if it is going to be stable and have any longevity, must eventually settle on a set of rules that govern the behavior of its members. And as all of these rules have similar goals, they are unlikely, in fact, to appear to be random when viewed from outside. While detractors famously point to “The Survival of the Fittest” as a principle that mandates that every person do what is required spread their own genes at the direct expense of their neighbors, the fact remains that this deals with only one of three basic facets in the Struggle for Existence put forth by Darwin. Individuals in a given species do not compete solely with one another. They compete against other species and against the very environment in which they live. To the degree that there have been societies that have persisted for long periods of time with rules that differ from the codes, inspired by Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought, that have dominated Western and Middle-eastern civilizations, their moral codes were just as relevant and successful as any other. Moral relativism is simply an acknowledgement of that, and a refutation of the idea that it was just for conquering invaders to denounce as evil and then exterminate those other moral codes, simply for being different from their own.

It has become fashionable among Christians to see intellectualism, and the denial of the need to be strictly obedient to the word of a deity or to have faith as a prerequisite for moral behavior, as a pernicious force that leads people away from divine guidance and grace, thus leaving them susceptible to acting on baser instincts that a faith-based morality would supposedly quash. It is equally fashionable to accentuate the “otherness” of the Nazis (who are popular whipping boys due to their status as morally unambiguous villains) by presenting what seems to be a highly self-serving understanding of Christianity as, instead, a form of devout Atheism, using the “Socialist” aspect of “National Socialism” to portray the Third Reich as sharing Marxism's dim view of religiosity. This supports the idea that the Holocaust was the result of a rejection of traditional morality, rather than the same sort of bending morality to the service of national and ethnic superiority that more skeptical observers see throughout history.

h/t George E. Williams IV

Stage Right

If I had some modicum of skill as a dramatist, and a working knowledge of Evangelical Christian apologetics, I think that it would be very interesting to create a play, entitled "Darwin and the Devil." In it, the Devil would pose as one of Darwin's contemporaries, and encourage him to do all that he could to publicize his theory of evolution through natural selection, and at the same time, work to convince him that he must reject any and all faith in God, if he is to be true to his scientific understanding.

This occurs to me as a result of having read parts of religious tract that seeks to debunk the Theory of Evolution in general and Charles Darwin in particular. It's a very well constructed (if entirely bogus) work, that skillfully melds a plausible sounding strawman argument with a false dilemma and tops it all of with a hint of supernatural menace. (Personally, I found the inclusion of the the idea that evolution is so out of touch with reality that only the intervention of Satan himself could allow it to have persisted to the present day to be sheer brilliance.)

I find the idea that being able to effectively demonstrate that geese, for instance, evolved from a goose-like bird ancestor rather than being the result of a specific and deliberate act of individual creation to be prima facie evidence of the non-existence of a god to be fascinating. And dead wrong. Granted, while the Holy See is the final authority on matters of religion only if one happens to be Roman Catholic, I would think the fact that Popes have managed to reconcile Darwin and God would be convincing on this account. But, clearly it isn't, so I expect that a scholarly treatment of the subject would be a complete waste of time. But maybe a play would be a more entertaining and perhaps engaging way of dealing with not only the topic of science and religion, but the idea that one must choose between two ideas that are not, to all appearances, mutually exclusive.

On the Imperfection of the Geological Record

In this chapter, Mr. Darwin hangs out with some noted geologists of his day, and explains to us why it's unreasonable to expect that every animal that ever walked the Earth should have left behind perfectly preserved fossilized remains for scientists to be able to put together an exacting family tree of the whole of Earth's lifeforms.

This is another chapter that is made more interesting because of the fact that it was written a century and a half ago. There have been a number of advances in geology and paleontology since then, and I suspect that if he suddenly found himself in the modern day, Darwin would have a hard time deciding if he wanted to be a geneticist or a geologist. Darwin's understanding of geologic processes is limited by the limited access to the world that he has, which gives one an expanded appreciation of the world as we know and understand it today. The ability to see the past of the entire world, which we take for granted now, was completely beyond the science of the time. I'd like to see what Darwin would have done with it.

Hybridism

I'm really not sure what to say about this chapter. It's long and dense, and more than a little confusing. I read it more than once, and didn't understand it any more the third time than I did the first. Darwin mainly talks about the ease or difficulty of making certain crosses. There seems to be very little about how evolutionary pressures or forces impact on this, and so overall, the chapter seems sort of out of place. This is, I suspect, another place where access to modern genetic science would have made Mister Darwin absolutely giddy. Being able to decode genomes, as we are today, I would think that we have a much better understanding of why certain crossbreeds work, and why others don't - which combinations are simply non-viable from the start, which ones result in catastrophic defects that doom the developing embryo and which ones result in viable, if not always fertile, offspring.

Instinct

One item that I had originally overlooked when thinking about Evolution is that fact that Natural Selection operates on behaviors, as well as the physical structures of an organism. (Of course, here the discussion is limited to animals - as plants to not have "behaviors" in the same fashion.) I suspect that this is due partially to the fact that I don't own any pets or working animals - and therefore have lacked the experience of watching an animal exhibit a complex behavior without having had the opportunity to learn that behavior from an older animal.

Like I said, I'm not trying to write a book report, so I'll refrain from a page-by-page retelling of the chapter. But there is some interesting stuff here, if you ever get around to reading it yourself. The basic gist is simple - certain inborn behaviors show grant a population of animals a competitive advantage of some sort, and is therefore retained. As further modifications that amplify the effect appear, they are retained, and the behavior is effectively reinforced. Again, domesticated animals are a useful model here - intentional selection has created a number of working dogs that show very specific behaviors (and, at the same time, lack others).

The trick with demonstrating the action of natural selection on behavior isn't much different that with an organism's physicality, although it is more difficult. The fossil record can show us certain physical traits of an animal - but is commonly mostly (if not completely) silent concerning behavior - witness the back-and-forth over whether or not Tyrannosaurs were predators or scavengers. In The Origin of Species, Darwin, with the help of the naturalist community is able to track down several variations on specific species (like cuckoo birds), and from their differing behaviors, put together a simple narrative on how the instincts may have evolved. It's not often a very complete picture, but it does illustrate how Natural Selection works on instinctive behavior, and broadens the scope of the Theory beyond the simply physical.

Miscellaneous Objections to the Theory of Natural Selection

In this chapter, Mr. Darwin selects and tackles a number of objections to the Theory of Natural Selection raised by others. It's interesting to note that right off the bat he declines to be bothered with people whom he feels haven't bothered to actually acquaint themselves with the theory before embarking on criticisms. (I, for my part, am reading this book from the opposite perspective - since once cannot very well defend, or otherwise intelligently speak to, a work that one hasn't actually read.) It's also a safe bet that had Darwin attempted to answer every possible critic of his, he would have needed another 670 pages, devoted just to that alone.

In structure, this chapter is somewhat dull. Darwin rattles off some critique raised by some or another noted scientist of his time (one Mr. St. George Mivart seeming to be his chief critic), and then proceeds to explain why he feels that the particular objection is off the mark. Hardly a rousing read, unless one is really into this sort of thing, which I am not. But again, there are some really wonderful insights into the period to be gleaned, and it's an interesting look into how people of the time thought of things. The evolution of organisms over time is clearly seen as a progressive force, with later editions of a species moving towards some standard of perfection. This is a notion that doesn't seem to be so prevalent today. It's also worth noting that Darwin doesn't see Natural Selection as being an agent of change - but merely the mechanism by which certain changes become fixed. Other changes may occur on their own, and as long as there is no particular reason why Natural Selection would act against them, they could very well stick around.

Darwin also deals with one of the most tiresome questions of any discussion of evolution - "Why hasn't such-and-such an animal evolved into some other sort of animal?" (In the modern world, ninety-seven times out of one hundred, it's because the person asking the question is an idiot, wanting to know something stupid like "Why haven't humans evolved wings?" or something else equally inane.) In the end, it's about competition. Someone once asked me why monkeys hadn't evolved to displace us yet. The answer is simple - with humans already on the scene, monkeys aren't going to be able to get to a place where they can beat us at our own game. The way I see it, primates would have about one generation to go from wild animals to "Planet of the Apes," because if it took any longer, we'd see the threat, and deal with it. Most primates are better off where they are, as masters of the ecological niches they inhabit, where humans (while they might be a threat to the ecosystem) are not direct competition.

Whether Darwin manages to answer all of the criticisms raised convincingly is not for me to answer. I would say yes, but I'm biased, and I also understand that I have insights into the goings-on of life that the scientific community of a century and a half ago didn't have access to. Hence it is perhaps easier for me to quit the realm of miracle for that of science than it was for some of Darwin's forgotten contemporaries.

Difficulties of the Theory

For starters - yes, I know I'm behind, as it's been a while since the last installment. There are always, it seems, more engaging things to write about. But I did like this chapter, and I'm glad that I finally got around to it.

Natural Selection is a very useful theory for explaining how many sorts of plants and animals came about, but it is not ironclad, and in Chapter VI, Mr. Darwin takes it upon himself to bring up some of the difficulties with the theory, and answer them, at least to his own satisfaction. It should be said that Darwin does not appear to be attempting to change the minds of potential critics, so much as he is making the point that he understands that there are possible rebuttals, and that he has thought about them, and reached some conclusions that prevent the objections raised from being fatal ones. Of course, in modern times we have the science of genetics to show us the potential links between different species. I, for my part, find the idea that genetic similarities between creatures to be tests of our faith, or the result of divine hoaxing, to be unconvincing. But the Creationist (and by extension, pseudo-creationist segment of the Intelligent Design crowd) are always going to have one big thing in their favor - the lack of an absolutely complete fossil record that shows each and every transitional and intermediate form that a given animal may have evolved through. But for those who say that such is needed for Natural Selection to be the least bit credible, I have a simple response - show me the clay. And I leave things at that.

Darwin does point out a number of items, that, if considered true, would put an end to the Theory of Natural Selection. One such idea is that certain plants and animals are beautiful for the enjoyment of either their Creator, or mankind. This was advanced as an explanation of why certain plants and animals have features that cannot be directly seen as contributing to the organism's survival. Darwin cheerfully admits that if you assume that plants and animals were deliberately designed to an exterior standard of beauty, then you can pretty much forget Natural Selection. But Darwin's willingness to predicate Natural Selection on certain assumptions has become somewhat twisted in the intervening century and a half; to the degree that people now claim that Darwin sowed the seeds for the destruction of Natural Selection by making assumptions that modern science has clearly disproved, such as a complete absence of non-cellular life (like bacteria and viruses). This I find particularly interesting - if antibiotic resistance in bacteria isn't a clear and convincing example of Natural Selection in action, I don't know what is.

One of the things that struck me as interesting is that Darwin attempts to answer the question of eyes, which stars in one of the common modern arguments against Natural Selection. How could any series of uncontrolled mutations, over any amount of time, the question goes, produce an eye? For Darwin, the idea that the eye evolved through several stages on its way to the modern forms we see today is perfectly plausible. Obviously, to the other side, it is less believable. And I'm not going to go into all of the details here. But I'm struck by the fact that both Darwin and his modern detractors settled upon the same example. And it does explain one problem of Natural Selection - even a complete fossil record wouldn't show us the exact construction of a dinosaur's eye, any more than it illuminates the structure of the brain.

"It is admitted that the rattlesnake has a poison-fang for its own defence, and for the destruction of its prey; but some authors suppose that at the same time it is furnished with a rattle for its own injury, namely, to warn its prey. I would almost as soon believe that the cat curls the end of its tail when preparing to spring, in order to warn the doomed mouse. It is a much more probable view that the rattlesnake uses its rattle, the cobra expands its frill, and the puff-adder swells whilst hissing so loudly and harshly, in order to alarm the many birds and beasts which are known to attack even the most venomous species."
Charles Darwin

Mr. Darwin caught me off-guard with his prescience in this respect. One can only presume that he would be intensely gratified to learn that modern rattlesnakes are becoming less and less likely to rattle. Birds and beasts, it turns out are less dangerous to rattlers than humans, who are likely to kill snakes that give themselves away by making noise. One wonders if there will come a time when the term "rattlesnake" is a quaint misnomer, wondered about by people who have never heard an actual rattle?

Laws of Variation

While it may not be accurate to say that an understanding of basic genetics is universal in modern America, most people can be expected to know the very basics, at least. This is more or less the exact opposite of Darwin's time, when DNA and chromosomes were pretty much unheard-of. One wonders what would have happened if the science of genetics had somehow managed to take root prior to mainstream naturalism coming to the understanding of the theory of natural evolution. I know that I've made this point before, but at the risk of belaboring it, I'll make it again: The realization that Darwin doesn't understand the concepts behind genetics is remarkable. But I suppose that many of us would be just as surprised by the apparent ignorance of a renowned physicist who died before Einstein revolutionized the discipline. So the idea that one could perform operations on guinea pigs, and have the effects of same passed on to the next generations of guinea pigs, while it seems bizarre to us today, couldn't be ruled out a century and a half ago.

One of the more interesting facts of Evolution, and one that always gave me a little trouble, was the idea of atrophy. It's pretty easy to understand why evolution giveth - it's somewhat less intuitive why evolution taketh away. But there is a section of the chapter named: "Compensation and Economy of Growth" that makes a simple point. Building structures takes energy. Organisms do not have an infinite supply of energy, and other materials, needed to develop an indefinite number of structures that don't actively contribute to a creature's chances of survival and/or procreation. Therefore, once something becomes superfluous, it is adaptive to take the energy and material that went into building it, and apply that to something more useful, instead. Even small shifts in resources can spell the difference between success and failure in the grand scheme of things, and so one can expect that nature will, to a degree, tend to favor alterations that make even modest reductions in "wasteful" expenditures.

Natural Selection

This is a long and dense chapter - and if you are not inclined to be excited by long dissertations on the nitty-gritty of how species in the wild vary and change, I would recommend it as a strikingly effective sleep-aid. If this chapter isn't a form of Sominex applied to the printed page, I don't know what is. This isn't to say that the chapter contains nothing of interest - it does, and there are parts of it that are quite informative. But be prepared for a long slog, once Darwin gets some introductory material out of the way.

The capsule review: Variations arise within species (mutations, basically) - if a variation allows a population to become better adapted to the totality of the environment (note that this includes the other species present - and that changes in one species may make certain changes in another more advantageous) and thus survive to adulthood in greater numbers, that variation will spread - this is the process of Natural Selection. If a variation doesn't make a lifeform more robust, but increases its odd of successfully mating, or otherwise having more offspring than other forms, that variation will also spread - this is the process of Sexual Selection. Note that simply having an advantageous variation doesn't guarantee that a given specimen will survive, or out-compete its peers. A bird may have genes that make its feathers better insulators against the cold - this does it little good when a raccoon eats it in the egg. It gets a lot more complicated from there.

Now to back up to a very interesting point made early on. Semantics appears to be just as much an issue in Darwin's time as it is now, and we are told that people have many objections to the term "Natural Selection," one of them being that it implies that the altered species deliberately chose which new characteristics to adopt - and thus it cannot be applied to plants, since they have no volition. (Don't laugh too loudly - I've heard more idiotic things than that.) We are also told that some critics see Darwin's explanation of Natural Selection as describing Nature or evolution as an active force, with volition, and presumably a goal. Darwin says that personification of Nature in this way is unintentional, and to a certain degree, unavoidable. He mentions the way in which people commonly speak of gravity. Gravity is said to control the motions of objects in space, yet no one presumes that Gravity is an intelligent being, perched behind a drafting table with a protractor and a slide rule, calculating where it wants the Earth to be this time next month.

Darwin spends about a page comparing the human facility for shaping nature through various selective breeding techniques to the natural process of selection, and declares nature to be by far the better the better of the two. Given the understanding that Darwin much admired the skill and dedication that being a competent breeder requires, it's pretty clear that he stands in awe of the way that natural selection goes about its business - it's easy to see where people get the idea that he sees it as a deity from.

Struggle For Existence

I take exception to the label of Darwinism, or Darwinist (as opposed to Darwinian), when applied to the theory of evolution. There is some evidence that these commonly pejorative and somewhat loaded terms are not contemporaneous to Mr. Darwin, and have mainly come about as a result of people applying certain evolutionary principles to other aspects of life and society. Chief among these borrowed lines of reasoning is "Survival of the Fittest," which we are introduced to early in the chapter. Although now strongly linked to Darwin in the public imagination, Darwin himself tells us that he copped the phrase from one Herbert Spencer. Somehow I think that the theory of evolution would be better off, if Darwin had come upon the sense to give it back before he went to print. Although the two terms are not now commonly thought of as synonymous, Darwin adopted Survival of the Fittest as a "more accurate, and [...] sometimes equally convenient" replacement for "Natural Selection." As one might have guessed, Natural Selection can be contrasted with the concept of artificial or intentional selection, the means by which mankind deliberately picks and chooses traits that are to our liking, and enhances these through our ability to control breeding in captive and/or domesticated populations. In any event, Survival of the Fittest is the intersection of the facts that populations in the wild are not static - they are subject to variations in both individuals and groups, and that whenever there is competition between organisms or limitations in the environment, a "Struggle for Existence" as Darwin labels it, that competition favors those that show the best adaptations for the environmental niche that they inhabit.

While many people interpret the phrase Struggle for Existence to indicate a dog-eat-dog world where the alleged "Law of the Jungle" rules, and it's every man for himself, this is a such a gross oversimplification that it borders on the willfully obtuse. There are three distinct facets to the Struggle for Existence, as Darwin explains it - competition within a species, competition between species, and mitigating the hostile effects of one's environment. While murdering one's neighbors in their sleep and looting their stored resources may win you points in the first category, it can actively torpedo you (and your whole group or species) in the other two, when you find yourself in a situation where your neighbors' skills (or genetic diversity) are required. Thus I find the common anti-evolutionary argument that adopting the Darwinian view of Evolution requires one to be murderously pseudo-Machiavellian, always on the lookout for any advantage that might allow one's genes to dominate humanity to be not only unconvincing, but laughably moronic.

Thomas Malthus is sort of a "guest star" in this chapter, as Darwin postulates that completely unrestricted life and breeding of any lifeform would (reasonably) quickly result in whatever it was outstripping the resources that it required to survive, resulting in a Malthusian Catastrophe of starvation and/or overcrowding. Since it's not possible for everything to live a full and (reproductively) productive life, this sets up a competition. In an "ideal" world with unlimited resources and lacking untimely deaths, every living species can manage to reproduce far faster than is required to maintain the rate of replacement, no matter how slow their natural reproductive cycles are. This level of geometric increase (I term I understand is also borrowed from Malthus) is held in check by the three facets of the struggle, which Darwin deals with over the rest of the chapter. Darwin simply discusses what is, either from his own or others' observations, or from some simple and effective experiments. He doesn't seem to bother putting forth the idea that this is how it SHOULD be. There is no discussion of fairness or justice, or of one population being somehow better than another. As he moves from competition with the environment, to competition with other species, to competition within species, we arrive at the meat of how species evolve, in the next chapter: Natural Selection.

Variation Under Nature

When confronted with two populations of plants that look similar to one another, I do not have the foggiest idea as to whether or not these are different species, different varieties of the same species, or merely two groups of the same plant that just happen to have some immediately visible differentiation. This, I always surmised, is because I'm a layperson, and I don't know anything about biology. It turns out that my guess is nearly as good as anybody else's.

Mr. Darwin takes great pains, and a good number of pages, to make the point that when dealing with closely related forms, the definitions of "species" and "variety" are more or less arbitrary, and very much dependent on who you're speaking to. Related plants and animals lie on a continuum of variation. At one end are individual differences, like those between plants grown from different seeds. At the other end are the differences that mark the dividing line between species, chimpanzees and bonobos, for instance. Between these two extremes are varieties, groups recognized as distinct populations, but close enough that they're still the same species.

(Included, briefly, in all of this, are "monstrosities." Interestingly, Darwin presumes that a monstrosity exhibits "some considerable deviation of structure, generally injurious, or not useful to the species;" one wonders if he would find the many breeds of modern dogs that have had pretty severe defects bred into them as falling under that definition.)

In the end, where individual differences stop and varieties begin, and how far varieties go before transitioning into distinct species was, in Darwin's time (and perhaps to the present) essentially arbitrary, driven more by convention and preference than anything tangible. Where one naturalist sees several different species, another sees only a few, and some number of varieties. Some went so far as to dispense with varieties altogether - any variation more important than individual differences marked a new species, including some that weren't related to physiology at all, such as location of habitat. If Darwin is to be believed, and if I understand him correctly, these sorts would consider the Canadian Geese one finds in Seattle to be a different species than those found in London. According to Darwin, at this level, the term species loses its meaning, and "comes to be a mere useless abstraction, implying and assuming a separate act of creation." I'm curious as to the reasoning behind that conclusion, as Darwin does not explain any further.

It is in this chapter where Darwin begins to draw distinctions between evolution by natural selection, and the existence of species due to special acts of creation through hypothesizing what sorts of results one might find if some agency had directly created life on earth. Whether any idea of the immutability of species is always connected with this is unclear, although we may surmise that there were adherents in the creationist camp that held so - Darwin himself admitted to once having believed so, earlier in the book. In any event, the second part of the chapter deals with some observations about the relationships between genera, and their subordinate species. Its dry and fairly obvious stuff - a genera that has a broader range will have species that show more variation than a genera with a narrower range. (Although genera is the plural of genus, Darwin seems to use it as both the singular and the plural - it seems logical to assume that such was the common usage at the time.) But I suspect that it will come in handy in the next chapter: Struggle For Existence.

Variation Under Domestication

From having gone back and read my entry on the beginning of The Origin of Species, I appear to be writing a high-school book report. I don't know if that's the flavor that I'm looking for, so this time, I'll see if I can't come up with something a little more engaging.

In reading the first Chapter of Origin of Species, Variation Under Domestication, I found myself stopping and re-reading sections of the text over and over. This was due to several factors acting in concert. Among them is the slightly archaic language that is being used. Shakespeare it isn't, but it's certainly not the way in which modern writers communicate, and this is the only text from this particular time period that I've actually read, and Darwin is English, rather than American.

But the most interesting part of the book thus far has been Darwin's tendency to speculate. In a day and age in which DNA and genetics are commonplace, it's sometimes jarring to realize that people in Darwin's time weren't aware of this, leaving him ignorant of things that any modern high-school biology student would be able to tell you. (I expect that Mr. Darwin would be a holy terror in the present time, running around gathering DNA samples from anything that would stand still long enough.) The science of biology has advanced a lot in the approximately 150 years since the Sixth Edition of The Origin of Species was published, and I find myself having to remind myself that while Darwin was clearly a very smart and observant man, he wasn't a stand-in for Nostradamus, and couldn't see into the future. Therefore, my unconscious expectation that Darwin will always prove more knowledgeable about this subject than I am is very much misplaced. In fact, it's easy to forget that I'm reading this to understand Darwin and his book (and the contexts around them), not the theory of Evolution itself, which has progressed far beyond Darwin's original ideas.

An entire section of the chapter is devoted to pigeons, as Mr. Darwin had spent some time keeping and breeding them. An interesting tidbit that can be gleaned from this section is that the world is still crawling with Englishmen - Darwin's countrymen in India and Persia favoring him with bird pelts from those lands. Again, it's only to be expected, but I suspect that at some point in the future, people would find it strange to recall the presence of large numbers of American soldiers in Japan and Germany, regardless of whether or not their history books informed them that these places were once occupied, and then home to military bases. Darwin goes into a good amount of detail about the differences between the various breeds of domesticated pigeons, with which I was completely unacquainted. I had heard of carrier pigeons, but that was about it. Short-faced tumblers were something completely beyond my knowledge.

There is an interesting point raised in the overall discussion of pigeons - namely that many pigeon breeders would not begin to credit the idea that all of the various breeds of birds could have had a single common ancestor species, sometime in the distant past. I suppose its the same thing with modern dogs. One doesn't look at a toy breed, like a Bichon Frisé, and a massive working dog, like a Great Dane, and immediately come to the conclusion that both of these animals share a common parent. Darwin takes on a chiding tone here - if naturalists are willing to credit disparate breeds of animals as having a common parent species, animal breeders shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the idea, he says.

This caution is especially interesting in light of the fact that the next section of the chapter deals with mankind's efforts to alter the characteristics of animals through selective breeding. Good breeders have an almost magical ability to effect changes in successive generations of animals, and Darwin holds their abilities in very high regard. Darwin concludes the first chapter by discussing the ways in which people both purposefully and accidentally enhance or degrade certain characteristics of animals, and the particular circumstances that make it easier to do so. The next chapter deals with Variation Under Nature.

In the Beginning...

This is the first installment of The Origin of Species weblog. I'm using the English sixth edition, originally published in 1859. Presumably, this is the final edition, but I don't know the publication history, so there may be later ones.

The book opens with an explanation of the various English and other language editions, and a listing of the changes that were made since the fifth edition.

But The Origin of Species really starts with a Historical Sketch. At the time Darwin is writing, scientific thought is changing, and the time when "[...] the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created" is coming to an end. It's useful to remember that The Origin of Species is a refinement of ideas that already existed, and not an invention, and the Historical Sketch presents 34 different authors "[...] who believe in the modification of species, or at least disbelieve in separate acts of creation [...]." Here I came to an unanticipated problem. Mr. Darwin reads French, and clearly expects his audience to do so, as well. While German authors, such as one Dr. Schaaffhuasen, are quoted in English, French authors are quoted in their native tongue, which I do not read. (It's entirely possible to transcribe the passages into Babelfish or some other translator; and if there comes a point where a passage that is crucial to understanding the text is rendered in French, that is exactly what I will do.) In any event, Darwin spends a little over a dozen pages laying out for the reader about six decades of scholarly thought as concerns the descent and modification of species, leading right up to what was then the present time, and so there are authors on his list whose work is contemporaneous with earlier editions of The Origin of Species. By the end of this, it's pretty clear that naturalism and zoology are beginning to embrace the idea that animals and plants change over time, and that if if Darwin hadn't risen to prominence with his ideas, someone else would have.

Following the Historical Sketch is the Introduction, another short section of the volume, wherein Darwin explains some of the history behind his conclusions, and the decision to publish his work. He describes The Origin of Species as an Abstract, defined in Merriam-Webster Online as, in part: "something that summarizes or concentrates the essentials of a larger thing or several things." Darwin expresses a desire to publish all of his manuscripts, realizing that the facts that he puts forth can be used to support "[...] conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived."

"A fair result," he goes on to say, "can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question; and this is here impossible." (It may be worth noting at this point that The Origin of Species is over six hundred and fifty pages long. I doubt that I have the endurance to read the sort of exhaustive treatment of the subject that Darwin might have had in mind.)

It is not enough, Darwin tells us, to understand that species have descended from other species, rather than being independently created. It is also important to understand HOW the many species of living things were modified. It is clear to him that not all such changes in species can be explained by external factors such as climate or diet, and that factors such as habit or the volition of the lifeform itself aren't even worth considering. Understanding that the variations in domesticated animals could be of great help in understanding the variation in wild animals, Darwin tells us that the first chapter of the book is devoted to the study of Variation under Domestication. From there, he proceeds to give short descriptions of the topics and subjects of the following chapters.

The Introduction ends with an admission that human knowledge of the details surrounding many plants and animals is likely to be incomplete for some time into the future, if not perpetuity. Darwin tells us that he now rejects what he, and many other naturalists once held to be fact - that species were both independently created and immutable. Instead, species descended from other species and varieties share a single parent species. Natural Selection is simply the most important of the various means of modification that ave brought this about. With Chapter One, he will start making this case.