David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

Following Stephen Jay Gould, whose “cool authentic voice” he finds irresistible, Christopher Hitchens endorses the Master in declaring against cosmic arrogance. I may well be its last supporter, all things considered. “If the numberless evolutions from the Cambrian period could be recorded and ‘rewound,’” Hitchens writes, “and the tape played again, he [Gould] established there was no certainty it would come out the same way.” Having no access to the tape of life, Gould established nothing of the sort, of course; I am recounting the story line purely pour le sport. And what sport it is, involving as it does only the celebration of an obvious tautology. Had an early vertebrate named Pakaia not survived, its survivors, Hitchens reports in amazement, would not have survived. No deflation of arrogance could be more rigorous. Or less interesting. I would find Hitchens’s thoughts even more gratifying than I do had he not enlarged them to encompass nonlinear dynamics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, subjects that in his ineptitude he waves like a majestic frond.

When it comes to the apes, the argument is so uncertain that it must be made with the assurance that arises from the affirmation of an absurdity. In writing about “our inner ape,” Frans de Waal is thus concerned to demonstrate “how much apes resemble us and how much we resemble them.”

How much, then, do we resemble them, or they us? No, really? The correct answer, of course, is that although we resemble apes in some ways, we are nonetheless quite different, and we are different in ways that are of great biological and moral importance. If this is the correct answer, it is not the one de Waal is proposed to endorse. “If an extraterrestrial were to visit earth,” de Waal writes, “he would have a hard time seeing most of the differences we treasure between ourselves and the apes.”

I suppose that if a fish were thoughtfully to consider the matter, she might have a hard time determining the differences we treasure between Al Gore and a sperm whale. Both of them are large and one of them is streamlined. This is, perhaps, one reason fish are not more often consulted on important matters of taxonomy. Or anything else.

Wishing a more detailed (but no more obvious) demonstration, both the fish and de Waal’s extraterrestrial would profit from reading a fundamental paper on the subject. Writing in Science in 1975, M.-C. King and A. C. Wilson provided for the first time an estimate of the degree of similarity between the human and the chimpanzee genome. Far more than was thought possible at the time, King and Wilson claimed, human beings and chimpanzees share the greater part of their respective genomes.

Whence the conclusion that if our genomes match up so nicely, we must be apes.

In the second section of their paper, King and Wilson describe honestly the deficiencies of this idea. Human beings and the apes, they observe,

differ far more than sibling species in anatomy and way of life. Although humans and chimpanzees are rather similar in the structure of thorax and arms, they differ substantially not only in brain size but also in the anatomy of the pelvis, foot, and jaws, as well as in relative lengths of limbs and digits. Humans and chimpanzees also differ significantly in many other anatomical respects, to the extent that nearly every bone in the body of a chimpanzee is readily distinguishable in shape and size from its human counterpart. Associated with these anatomical differences there are, of course, major differences in posture, mode of locomotion, methods of procuring food, and means of communication. Because of these major differences in anatomy and way of life, biologists place the two species not just in separate genera but in separate families.

There is nothing in this that was not evident to Alfred Wallace. Or to any student of comparative anatomy. King and Wilson went on to suggest that the morphological and behavioral differences between humans and the apes, if they were not due to variations between their genomes, must be due to variations in their genomic regulatory systems. These are the systems that control the activities of the genes by telling various genes when to sound off and when to shut up. They are of an astonishing and poorly understood complexity, if only because they themselves require regulation. Higher-order regulation in turn involves higher-order codes beyond the genetic code. Codes then require their own regulation. Even the simplest cell involves an intricate, never-ending cascade of control and coordination of a sort never seen in the physical world. It is entirely safe to assign the differences between human beings and the apes to their regulatory systems. Nothing is known about their evolutionary emergence and we cannot describe them with any clarity.

Whatever the source of the human distinction in nature, its existence is obvious, and when it is carelessly denied, the result is a very characteristic form of inanity.

Thus Jonathan Gottshall recounts his experiences in reading Homer’s Iliad while under the influence of the thesis, as he puts it, that “people are apes.” It is a thesis that he attributes to Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape. “But this time around,” Gottshall explains, “I also experienced the Iliad as a drama of naked apes—strutting, preening, fighting and bellowing their power in fierce competition for social dominance, beautiful women and material resources.” Social dominance and material resources are, in fact, not quite to the point. “Intense competition between great apes, as described both by Homer and by primatologists, frequently boils down to precisely the same thing: access to females.”

The governing words in this quotation are “boils down,” and as in so many such analyses, what is essential is not what has been distilled but what has evaporated.

That is, everything of interest in the Iliad.

At the height of the battle of Stalingrad, a young lieutenant with the 24th German Panzer Division wrote in his diary that Stalingrad “by day, is an enormous cloud of burning blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night comes, one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals feel this hell, the hardest stones cannot endure it; only men endure ” (italics added).

Would anyone reading these words imagine that man’s endurance is anything like the zestful competition of apes eager to copulate and vexed when they cannot?

This suggests an obvious counsel of humility. It is one that may profitably be directed toward biologists overmuch worried about cosmic arrogance. Before putting aside so carelessly “the idea that man was created in the image of God,” first consider the ideas you propose to champion in its place.

If they are no good, why champion them?

And they are no good. So why champion them?

Edward Wilson published Sociobiology and Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene during the 1970s. Since then, evolutionary psychology has become a contemporary darling. The story that it advances is one that takes place entirely within the human species. No apes need apply, for none are wanted.

The essentials are simple and they have the simple-minded structure of a fairy tale—indeed, the philosopher David Stove entitled his attack on evolutionary psychology Darwinian Fairytales. The significant features of human psychology first arose during the late Paleolithic era—the so-called Era of Evolutionary Adaptation. For reasons that no one has properly specified, it was then that human beings devised their responsive strategies to the contingencies of life—getting food, getting by, and getting laid. These strategies have persisted to the present day. They are at the core of the modern human personality. We are what we were. There followed the long Era in Which Nothing Happened, the modern human mind retaining in its structure and programs the mark of the time that human beings spent in the savannah or on the forest floor, hunting, gathering, and reproducing with Darwinian gusto.