Troy Camplin Ph.D

Darwin at 200, The Origin of Species at 150

There have been two theories in science so important, so revolutionary that they caused social changes – for the better and the worse, though better in the long run – and were opposed by clear-thinking religious people as ungodly and unbiblical. The first was the heliocentric theory first proposed by Copernicus, improved by Kepler, and supported and proven by Galileo. Everyone is familiar with the consequences of Galileo’s support of Copernican theory. The second was Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which was in fact only one theory of evolution Darwin developed, the second one being the theory of sexual selection. Except in the Catholic church (where the first battle was fought), at least officially, we are still fighting battles over Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection was not the first theory of evolution, but it was the most logical, most able to make sense of the geological, fossil, and biological evidence together, and most adaptive to new evidence (such as Mendelian genetics) of any theory of evolution then available. Had Darwin not developed his theory, the evidence would have eventually pointed someone else in this direction, perhaps Alfred Russel Wallace, who was on a similar path, though focused on groups rather than individuals. One could speculate on how a Wallacean evolutionary theory would have developed, but the fact is that Darwin was the locus of a perfect storm of education, upbringing, intelligence, experience, and observation to give us the particular theory of natural selection he developed. And it is this theory that has dominated in science, culture, and even religion.

Too often, when people say “evolution,” they in fact mean “natural selection.” This is true of Darwinists and anti-Darwinists alike. But evolution and Darwinism – and even Darwinism and natural selection – are not the same. Natural selection is but one of many theories of evolution, including disproven ones like Lamarckian biological evolution, and more recent (and more promising) ones like Stephen J. Gould’s punctuated equilibrium. But Darwin’s two theories of evolution are themselves quite different, and each often creates opposite effects. While natural selection tends to create efficiency, sexual selection tends to create extravagance – the kind of extravagance we often associate with beauty and the arts. Everyone is familiar with the example of peafowl. The peahen is drab to keep her hidden on the nest as protection against predators – this is a result of natural selection. The peacock is brightly colored, with a long, showy train. The bright colors, Fibonacci series distribution of eyespots on the train, and size of the train are all visual indicators of good health, and the peahens use these indicators to select a mate. The females do the selecting because, once they are fertilized, they cannot be fertilized again. Peacocks, on the other hand, can breed with many females, so they do not have to be conservative. The sexual conservativeness of peahens creates the extravagant peacocks, while the sexual liberalism of peacocks creates no selective pressure at all, allowing natural selection to work on the peahens to produce a more conservative coloring.

Why then do so many people focus on natural selection when it is only one theory of evolution, one of many evolutionary processes? The enemies of evolution, whether fundamentalists or even evolutionary biologists such as Gould and Richard Lewontin, who objected to evolutionary explanations of human behavior, focus on natural selection because it is reductionist in its pressures, allowing for the creation of straw men on anti-evolution arguments. The argument of “irreducible complexity” is one such argument. Of course, natural selection by itself cannot explain the rise of complexity, especially when combined with popular notions of entropy. If entropy states that everything is becoming more random, then how can random processes create more order? This suggests that natural selection goes against the second law of thermodynamics. This ignores more recent work that shows that self-organization, complexity theory, systems, theory, emergence and catastrophe theory, information theory, chaos theory, and bios theory can in fact explain how order arises out of randomness and how complex entities can emerge from simpler collections of parts and thus appear “irreducible” in their complexity. A simple familiarity with catastrophe theory and its mechanisms would answer the question of “irreducible complexity” if the ones raising the question were intellectually honest. My own experience is that no amount of evidence can ever convince the intelligent designers; creationists are another issues, as they have not invested a great deal of intellectual dishonesty and active suppression of inconvenient facts so that they can believe what they believe. Ignorance – even willful ignorance – is easier to overcome than is active dishonesty and purposeful suppression of facts.

Which brings me to the other group of anti-evolutionary thinkers, represented by people like Gould. Gould, and others like him, have chosen to place political ideology (in this case, Marxism) above and ahead of science. Thus, no matter what the evidence, he was convinced of the Rousseauean blank slate theory of the mind – and that human evolution magically stopped 40-50,000 years ago. This resulted in the famous fight against E. O. Wilson’s sociobiology and its offspring, evolutionary psychology. Somehow only human behavior could not be explained using evolutionary biology. This strange omission can be understood only as ideological. Too often, Gould was a Marxist first, a biologist second. Admittedly, the Marxist, non-reductionist, approach fo materialism led Gould to develop the theory of punctuated equilibrium, but it also blinded him to the fact that there is such a thing as human nature, and that it had a biological basis (since he and others mistakenly thought that if humans had a nature, that meant they weren’t able to change; humans having a nature only means there are limits to how much we can change – the real objection for Marxists is that humans cannot change as much as is necessary for Marxism to be true or for a Marxist utopia to be realizable). Fortunately, science is especially good at centrifuging away the garbage and separating out what is good.

The commonality between religious fundamentalists and Marxists like Gould is the rejection of time and, thus, change. This is clear for those fundamentalists who understand God as being timeless (I would argue, rather, that he is most time-full), but it may seem an odd claim to make for the latter group, since I just stated that their argument against human nature was that it wasn’t changeable. However, Marxists only need a completely malleable human being so that they can create their politico-socio-economic utopia that is to take place at the end of history. Once utopia is achieved, though, there can be no more change (since any change would be for the worse). For this, human beings being at all constrained makes such utopias literally impossible. Marx and Hegel both considered time important, but in the end, both foresaw an unchanging endpoint, and thus brought timelessness back in. for Darwin, though, change is unending, and this is what many cannot stand.

A world of perpetual change is what Darwin showed us. It is based on random processes (mutations), but these random processes occur in complex systems (Cells), which eliminate, use, suppress, express, and/or spread those changes. New developments in epigenetics, RNA editing and splicing, evolutionary developmental biology, information theory, game theory, systems theory, complexity, emergence and catastrophe theory, chaos theory, and bios theory are helping us understand evolution in its full complexity. So fruitful is (and can be) this newest synthesis in evolution, it is being applied universally, in the work of J. T. Fraser and others, such as Frederick Turner and Stuart Kauffman (and others at the Santa Fe Institute), and in psychology in the work of Clare Graves, Don Beck, and Christopher Cowan. The fact of these theories’ lack of dominance in the scientific community, let alone the culture, speaks to the continued resistance to theories in which time is central. It also points to our continued discomfort with random processes underlying order, and with complex systems in general, whose complexity demonstrate our inability to completely understand everything. Darwin’s sins are many. Not only does Darwinism place humans squarely among all other living things, but the complexity of the world that emerges from his theory destroys the very possibility of a complete understanding of the world. Thus do all utopian dreams fall by the wayside, destroyed by inherent uncertainty and the fact of human nature. Darwin is the enemy of Left and Religious Right in equal measure.

Still, there are many exciting things going on in the field of evolution. Psychology is being opened up by it in evolutionary psychology and cognitive psychology. Sociobiology has managed to ward off sociobiology, but even it cannot withstand facts forever. Economics now has the beginnings of evolutionary economics. And the arts and humanities are even opening up to evolutionary explanations wit the work of people like Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Steven Pinker, Frederick Turner, Ellen Dissanayake, John Gottschall, David Sloan Wilson, Denis Dutton, Marc Hauser, and Joseph Carroll. Ideas like Darwin’s, spread as they do because they are so powerful at explaining the world. They powerfully, fruitfully explain the world as it is, not as we want it to be. This is why it is a successful scientific theory, and why it is so culturally controversial – even now.