David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

The neutral theory of molecular evolution was never destined to achieve wide favor among Darwinian biologists. Kimura’s treatise is framed as a powerful but difficult mathematical argument. But population geneticists understood its importance, even if they disagreed in some of its details. To the extent that the neutral theory is true, Darwin’s theory is not.

This has prompted at least certain population geneticists to deplore in print the sheer effrontery that is so conspicuous a feature of the popular literature devoted to Darwin’s theory. Richard Dawkins has appeared as tempting a squab within the tent of population genetics as he has long seemed without. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch observed that “Dawkins’s agenda has been to spread the word on the awesome power of natural selection.” The view that results, Lynch remarks, is incomplete and therefore “profoundly misleading.” Lest there be any question about Lynch’s critique, he makes the point explicitly: “What is in question is whether natural selection is a necessary or sufficient force to explain the emergence of the genomic and cellular features central to the building of complex organisms.”

But if it is quite possible that natural selection is neither necessary nor sufficient to account for the complexity of living systems, then it is also possible that it is of no relevance to living systems whatsoever.

The demotion of natural selection from biological superpower to ideological sad sack throws into bright relief an obvious question: How to explain on the basis of a random walk the startling coherence and complexity of living organisms? If the question is obvious, so, too, is its answer: We have no idea. “The general foundations for the evolution of ‘higher’ from ‘lower’ organisms,” Emile Zuckerkandl has written, “ seems so far to have largely eluded analysis ” (italics added).

This is surely true. But the phrase eluded analysis conveys a current of intellectual optimism at odds with the facts. Something that has so far eluded analysis can hardly be assigned to a force that has so far eluded demonstration. It is in this context that Daniel Dennett’s assertion that natural selection has been demonstrated “beyond all reasonable doubt” must be judged for what it is: It is the ecclesiastical bull of a most peculiar church, a cousin in kind to an ecclesiastical bluff. When Steven Pinker affirms that “natural selection is the only explanation we have of how complex life can evolve,” he is very much in the inadvertent position of the apostles. Much against his will, he is bearing witness.

In all this, it is the reaction among the faithful that provokes no surprise. Within minutes of the publication of Koonin’s paper, a call for censorship went up over the Internet. “Well,” one solemn donkey wrote, “since it is clear that this paper will be on every ID/creationist blog on the planet in under 12 hours, I might as well put in my 2 cents early.”

He might as well. And those two cents? What did they amount to?

One cent was devoted to a counsel of caution: “I think Koonin should give a little credit where credit is due to gradual, stepwise evolution.”

The second cent was spent on a cry of alarm: “Sometimes you’ve got to wonder how many hangovers (i.e., creationist quote-mining and general confusion over the status of evolution outside of the specialist community, and needless wrangling within the specialist community) could be avoided if scientists would exercise just a little caution during the party(i.e., spending a little time soberly comparing their revolutionary ideas with more prosaic explanations).”

The words if scientists would exercise just a little caution have a meaning all their own. They are written in code. They convey the need, apparently imperative, for biologists to keep bad news to themselves.

What is left is the “general confusion” that the public so often suffers when it comes to Darwin and Darwinism. On this matter, biologists are not at all confused. Whatever the degree to which Darwin may have “misled science into a dead end,” the biologist Shi V. Liu observed in commenting on Koonin’s paper, “we may still appreciate the role of Darwin in helping scientists [win an] upper hand in fighting against the creationists.”

It is hard to be less confused than that.

The God of the Gaps occupies a very considerable comfort zone in biology. He is right at home. We know better than we ever did that a great many aspects of biological behavior are innate. They arise in each organism. They are a part of its nature. This is certainly true of human beings. The point has been made with great force and plausibility by the linguist Noam Chomsky. Just as children are not taught to walk, they are not taught to speak. The environment serves only to trigger an innate maturational program. Human language is the very expression of human nature.

This is widely seen as offering dramatic confirmation of what Chomsky himself has called the “biological turn.” It is surely easy to see why. What is innate in an organism, so it is claimed, reflects its genetic endowment, and its genetic endowment reflects the long process in which random variations were sifted by a stern and unforgiving environment. If we are born with the ability to acquire a natural language, the gift lies within our genes and our genes lie within the shifting tides of time.

This view is so common that it is often forgotten that it is also incoherent. What is both interesting and innate in an organism cannot be explained in terms of its genetic endowment. If the concept of a gene is given any content at all—not a certainty by any means—it is entirely with the context of molecular biology and biochemistry. The gene is a chemical, a part of the molecule deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Its function is straightforward: It specifies the proteins needed by a living organism, and it species them by means of a remarkably complicated system of translation and transcription. To speak clearly of the genetic endowment of an organism is to speak only of the passage from one chemical structure to another— that and nothing more.

But to speak of the genetic endowment of an organism in terms that answer any interesting question about the organism is to go quite beyond the coordination of chemicals. It is to speak of what an organism does, how it reacts, what plans it makes, and how it executes them; it is to assign to a biological creature precisely the properties always assigned to such creatures: intention, desire, volition, need, passion, curiosity, despair, boredom, and rage.

These are not properties of a living system that can be easily seen as the consequences of any chemical reaction. It would be like suggesting that a tendency toward kleptomania follows the dissociation of water into hydrogen and oxygen. This may well be so. Research is required. But if it is so, it represents a connection that we do not understand and cannot grasp. The gap is too great. When Richard Dawkins observes that genes “ created us, body and mind” (emphasis added), he is appealing essentially to a magical connection. There is nothing in any precise concept of the gene that allows a set of biochemicals to create anything at all. If no precise concept of the gene is at issue, the idea that we are created by our genes, body and mind, represents a far less plausible thesis than the correlative doctrine that we are created by our Maker, body and mind.

“The more comprehensible the universe becomes,” Steven Weinberg has written, “the more it also seems pointless.” I suspect that Professor Weinberg is not actively called upon when victims of life’s injuries require solicitude. Beyond demanding that they deal with it, what could he say? This has struck many as an ungenerous attitude, and Weinberg has made every effort to cover his comment in confusion, chiefly by observing after the fact that he considers the universe a fine place, after all. If Weinberg’s power, prestige, and intellectual authority are not evidence in favor of the universe, then at least he can say that he has gotten from it a very good deal.