Darwinism should be examined

EUGENE KAELLIS

With all the publicity it has received, this year's celebration of Darwin's 200th birthday was hard to overlook. Among all the adulation, there have been few, if any, notes of criticism or qualification in the veritable plethora of pro-Darwinian praise.

North American Jews, mostly middle class and overwhelmingly secular, having more than average education, respond to Darwinism the same way as do most North Americans, especially intellectuals or purported intellectuals – they support it because the "experts" support it. But, for Jews, there are additional reasons. The fact that the major vocal opposition to Darwinism comes from Christian fundamentalists (actually, "literalists"), who, while supporting Israel, have an End of Days/Second Coming of Jesus agenda that culminates with surviving Jews converting en masse to Christianity, lends even more weight to Jewish sentiment in favor of Darwinism.

A major factor in this stance is wrongful attribution. Almost everyone equates Darwinism with evolution, whereas the concept of evolution goes as far back as the musings of Aristotle; the modern concept and even the term originated with Lamarck (1744-1829). "Survival of the fittest" was Herbert Spencer's and Tennyson's concept before it was Darwin's. Darwin's sole major contribution was the theory of natural selection, which, he admitted in his autobiography, he took directly from Malthus.

Malthus developed the notion that people tend to increase geometrically (two, four, eight, 16, 32, etc.) while their means of subsistence increases arithmetically (two, three, four, five, six, seven, etc.), the discrepancy between the two obviously growing in time. Human populations, Malthus claimed, were kept in check by famine, disease and war. Why people should reproduce geometrically while their foodstuffs, also formerly living plants and animals, reproduce at a significantly slower rate, he never explained. Malthus would also have had trouble accounting for today's highest per capita ratio of food to people in history, even with an unprecedented global population and poor farming methods in much of the world. Famine is caused by disruptive political or military actions; it is certainly not inevitable.

Darwin also read Adam Smith and provided the biological analogue of Smith's political economy: competition among members of the same species is completely analogous to the biological "struggle for survival" and natural selection is the analogue of Smith's "invisible hand" regulating the marketplace.

Especially for Jews, there are other considerations vis-a-vis Darwinism. The 19th century was one of "biologization." It saw the appearance of many important aspects of biology that did not previously exist, from immunology, the germ theory of disease, to embryology and so on. It also saw the biologization of criminality (e.g., Cesare Lombroso) and of anthropology.

It was in 1879 that there first appeared in print the biological concept of anti-Semitism (Wilhelm Marr). With the exception of Spain, and its Inquisition and 15th-century expulsion of Jews based on their "impure blood," before the advent of racial anti-Semitism, which culminated in the Holocaust, Jews could remove their "stigma" by conversion to Christianity.

Moreover, while Darwin cannot be held responsible for eugenics, Darwinism certainly created the climate for it. It was Darwin's son, Leonard, and Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, who became leaders of a eugenics movement that continued to gain strength until its, perhaps temporary, discrediting by Nazism.

Was the appearance of "scientific racism" and eugenics following the promulgation of Darwinism simply a coincidence? If racism and eugenicists were inspired by and embraced Darwinism, would that ipso facto make Darwinism wrong? Of course not, but the connection is unmistakable.

Some treatments of Darwinism have concentrated on Darwin's bold stance in the face of religious opposition. In fact, during Darwin's lifetime, The Origin of Species went through five editions and ecclesiastical opposition was never very pronounced. Indeed, the rapid acceptance of Darwinism in Britain grew out of its social-political-economic structure. In the 19th century, the rising bourgeoisie were rapidly displacing the old land-owning nobility in wealth and power but, unlike them, who relied on "blood lines," the new industrialists and entrepreneurs had no theoretical raison d'être. Darwin's natural selection gave them one: success became its own justification. Social Darwinism, it turns out, preceded biological Darwinism.

The theory's problems

Natural selection is logically weak. It is, in fact, a tautology, i.e., a repetition disguised as a relationship: organisms that have a reproductive advantage eventually replace their competitors in the same ecological niche and become a new species. How do we know that they had this advantage? Because they reproduced more successfully than their rivals, which is going back to line 1. True, tautology occurs in other sciences, physics, for example, with, say, Ohm's Law: current equals voltage over resistance. But that equation can be checked in countless ways by deliberately varying one or two of its components and measuring the other(s), which obviously cannot be done with natural selection.

Moreover, as Karl Popper, the foremost philosopher of science of the 20th century, pointed out, natural selection is not "falsifiable," meaning it is impossible to disprove it, so it must remain an hypothesis and should not have the credentials of a theory. To illustrate falsifiability: Albert Einstein's special relativity was subjected, in 1916, to a crucial test when the planet Mercury came into a rare position with the Sun. If Einstein's calculations had failed, special relativity would have to be discarded. It wasn't.

Darwin himself had doubts about his theory. He says so in Origin of Species: "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the corrections of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I truly confess, absurd in the highest degree."

I shall not burden the reader with the many exquisite and coordinated developmental, biochemical, structural, optical and neural properties of the eye and that portion of the brain concerned with vision. Or, for that matter, of the equally exquisite ear. Suffice it to say that every one of the nearly innumerable steps needed to create each of these organs and the brain into full function would have had to contribute to the reproductive advantage of its possessor. Troubled by this, but undaunted, Darwinians have come up with the "five per cent solution," meaning that even a little vision is better than no vision and would give their possessors a reproductive advantage. This is like saying that 1/20th of a hemoglobin or chlorophyll molecule is better than nothing. It isn't useful any more than 1/20th of an automobile is useful.

Darwin, troubled by his own theory, later came up with another one (Pangeneis), which is not mentioned in polite biological company because it is Lamarckian; that is, it supposes the inheritance of characteristics acquired during the lifetime of an organism, which is an object of derision and ridicule by almost all contemporary biologists.

Darwin was well aware that the fossil record did not support his theory of slow, incremental change but believed that eventually it would. Not so. What paleontology has uncovered is the apparent sudden appearance of new species, the equally sudden disappearance of other species and the persistence of the same species over very long periods of time in grossly changing environments, not the Darwinian model of slow, incremental improvement.

To deal with these contradictions, a new approach started to appear among evolutionists, one that hypothesized sudden, relatively large but internally coordinated changes giving rise to new species, an approach called "saltation," i.e., "jumping." But even such a prestigious and knowledgeable Darwinian evolutionist as Harvard's late Stephen J. Gould came under attack by the orthodox purveyors of Darwinism for proposing a modest theory of rapid change: "punctuated equilibrium."

Why, in spite of all these and many other problems with Darwinism do biologists, especially those at the top of the influence ladder, cling to it? There are at least two reasons.

One is that, for many decades, biologists have felt left out of the enormous advances in chemistry and physics. The more biological functions were investigated, the more mysterious they became. This explains why so much (over-) emphasis is being placed on molecular biology and DNA chemistry. Research on them mimics physics and chemistry. Of course, as complex as any chemical and physical system is, they are extremely simple compared to the most elementary biological system. Moreover, biology is much more influential in the way human beings see themselves; a drastic change in biological theory affects our social, personal and religious outlook and is, in turn, affected by it.

The other reason is that, as already stated, since the major opposition to Darwinism comes from Christian literalists, biologists feel they must close ranks to oppose their intractable enemies.

Eugene Kaellis, PhD, taught biology at New York University and the University of Saskatchewan. He was the leading guest speaker at the 100th anniversary celebration of the College of Medicine of the University of Mexico.

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