Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 21 October 2009

Larry Arnhart

Profesor Larry Arnhart, Professor of Political Science at Northern Illinois University, is an unusual man. He is a US political conservative who defends the theory of evolution as itself defending conservatism. Most US conservatives strongly demur, so Arnhart is quite lonely.

US ideological conservatives tend to be people of a religious bent, and think morals come from God, and that is why we have them, or should have them if we haven’t. To people on the left, US conservatives seem to have no morals at all in respect of anything important, like fairness, justice, respect of other people, abhorrence of racialism and favouring people on grounds of class. For conservatives, lefties are cultural relativists—they decide social rules like morals are arbitrary.

Many left wingers call themselves socialists by which they mean they consider society ought to secure all of its members, not just a favoured class. They do not consider social rules as arbitrary, because they depend on the fact that we are social, and that is something we have evolved as a strategy for survival. In short, sociality has Darwinian explanations. Right wing guru, Francis Fukuyama, in The Great Disruption, insists human nature actually exists, and gives rise to society, and its concomitant properties like morality—so sociality supports the conservative view! It is the line that Arnhart favours, but his fellow rightists are not convinced, typically labelling Fukuyama as “evil”, the usual conservative argument stopper.

More than a third of The Origin of Species considers potential problems with the theory, a fact that gives right wing creationists ammunition against evolution. They like to claim that Darwin was not even convinced of his own idea, honesty evidently being something beyond their comprehension. But Darwin wrote 150 years ago! He offered possible answers for the objections he had raised actually and rhetorically even then, but now there is a vast amount of additional evidence. Though many details still remain unexplained, nothing has emerged to even dent the success of evolutionary theory in any way.

All Darwin claimed at the time was that evolution was supported by the preponderance of the evidence and arguments, and that his hypothesis of natural selection explained it. Today the evidence is so overwhelming and comes from so many different aspects of life science that it cannot be reasonably contradicted, and his hypothesis, albeit modified in some ways, remains the explanation. Creationists unreasonably denigrate the immense body of evidence for Darwin’s theory, appearing to everyone except their fellow Christian fundamentalists to be latter day flat earthers.

Intelligent Design and Irreducible Complexity

The main opponents of Darwinism, the name for evolutionary theory favoured by the right, are Michael J Behe, Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University, a fellow of the Discovery Institute, and the author of Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, and William A Dembski, another fellow of Discovery Institute, and proponent of Intelligent Design, the purpose of the Seattle Discovery Institute, who wrote Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology. Both are grinding their religious axes rather than arguing from science.

William A Dembski claims his opposition to Darwinism is strictly scientific. He has a method of detecting design (The Design Inference). Arnhart says it is based on our observations of human design, but breaks down as a detector of divine design, and that is the only type of design that could have played a role in the origin and history of life. So the Dembski theory of design detection is irrelevant and misleading for biology. As Arnhart puts it:

If something appears to be intelligently designed, and we cannot plausibly explain it either as designed by human intelligence or as a product of Darwinian causes, then we are just ignorant of the causes.

Dembski argues intelligence is always inferred through well established methods, and he can indeed detect non human designers from their designs like beavers from their dam, and extraterrestrials who send a stream of particular digits in some electromagnetic signal. So his theory works for non human design as well. Human and divine design are equally inferable, but convinced Darwinists like Arnhart need to block the design inference whenever it threatens to implicate God. Once their line of defense is breached, Darwinism is dead. Arnhart’s counter claim is people don’t infer design, but rather reflect on their own intelligence and attribute design when they recognize something it takes intelligence to do. Such introspection, though, is not an empirical basis for inferring an immaterial designer.

Arnhart thinks we cannot infer a divinely intelligent designer from our common human experience, and so Dembski’s hypothesis that we can is false. We have no common experience of how a divine intelligence designs things for divine purposes, so what is required is direct observation of a divinity designing something. Without that direct experience the proponents of intelligent design theory are hiding an appeal to faith. But we have never demonstrated any sort of supernatural explanation for anything. Everything within our experience is explained naturally, or it remains unexplained until we have the additional experience needed to explain it. The whole objective of science is to extend human experience in such a way that we get evidence to find new explanations. None are ever supernatural. When we turn to the origin of life, to assume it will be natural is not a question of faith but is based on all of our previous experience. Faith is an unquestioning acceptance of explanations that are utterly beyond our experience. That is why they are called supernatural.

In Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe says all the evidence concerning evolution is evidence for descent with modification, not evidence of natural selection. Behe, concedes that all species, including human beings, descended from a common ancestor. Indeed, the evidence for evolution in the sense of descent with modification is overwhelming. Behe is right about that, but still wants to bring in God’s finger somewhere, so argues that it is needed to “build a vertebrate from an invertebrate, a mammal from a reptile, or a human from an ape”. Yet whatever the mechanism, if successive generations can be changed, then what is to stop an invertebrate from gradually becoming a vertebrate? Some worms have intermediate characteristics, as he knows!

He accepts many Darwinian explanations for similar anatomy across species, and he sometimes accepts Darwinian theory as adequate in molecular biology—the evolution of haemoglobin is from a modification of the simpler protein myoglobin. Here “the case for design is weak”. His objection to evolution is that it fails to explain certain complex molecular systems in which “several well matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function” work together, and not one can be removed without causing “the system to effectively cease functioning…. So, Behe argues, an ‘irreducibly complex’ system cannot be produced by continuously improving—by slight, successive modifications—a precursor system, working by the same mechanism, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system lacking a part cannot work at all”. Examples he gives are:

1. the mechanism of the flagellum of a bacterium
2. the mechanism of the cilia of cells
3. blood clotting
4. cellular transport systems
5. the immune system
6. the biosynthesis of proteins and nucleic acids.

As an irreducibly complex system cannot evolve, on this theory, it must have been deliberately designed and assembled. Who could have done that? Behe says it was a Creator (God, in other words), using His intelligence—ergo it is Intelligent Design or ID.

What is true is that these mechanisms are complicated enough to have so far defied scientific explanation, but some of the steps have been looked at, and Behe’s claim that lesser, so called precursor systems, cannot function is false. Behe is simply highlighting some of the places in evolutionary science where we have not yet got complete explanations. Though Behe admits evolution can explain many biochemical mechanisms, for him, whatever remains unexplained is the sign of intelligent design. Evolutionary theory has been going only for 150 years, and the molecular explanation of evolution is only 50 years old, so many of the detailed biochemical pathways have not yet been worked out. Behe’s is a “God of the Gaps” argument, but he neglects Coulson’s warning when he coined the phrase that God’s gaps always close as science makes further discoveries, and humans have only been working on evolution for this short time. God had eternity to learn how to do it, Christians tell us! As long as science has something yet to explain, there is still a gap for God, so Behe can not be refuted. ID is therefore not scientific according to Popper’s criterion. It is not falsifiable.

Behe rejects the Darwinian explanation of why and how change happens from one generation to the next. It is not by random mutation and natural selection. He does not want to talk about all the evidence available at the phylogenetic level, even though that is the level we all see, and the level where selection first was put into effect, by unnatural selection—actually observed intelligent design of animals—selective breeding. Instead he rejects animal studies as being “hasty, uninformed guesses”. First we have to turn to molecules. Well, of course, scientists can do both, and more. It is quite unscientific to reject a whole body of observations even though they can be made, and have been, just because they are out of some conjectural order. Science studies natural phenomena, and animals and plants are still natural things, capable of study, just as molecules are. Moreover, animals do reproduce, and that is the phenomenon at the root of evolution. Incidentally, molecules reproduce too. Behe is fond of making unwarranted statements, of exaggerrating some statements that are to a degree true until they virtually become their opposite, and of citing unnamed people, probably his best friends or maybe himself!

He accuses Darwinism of explaining anything it likes, but what he means is that hypotheses have to be proposed to explain some challenging observations. Some might turn out to be correct and others might have to be discarded, but that is simply how science works, as he knows. Because an explanation is hypothesised does not mean it has been shown to be true. Theology operates on the basis of authority, and consequently many religious believers think science is the same. It is not. Behe must know it, but likes to humour his fans among the religious community—Catholic in his case.

Morality and Evolution

But is Darwinism compatible with faith in God? It is the central question for “God bothering” right wingers. The opposition to natural selection among conservatives is fear that it denies religion by removing the role of God. For conservatives that removes the basis of morality, for they are evidently incapable of maintaining any moral sense without thinking God is behind it. Otherwise they would not have the least concern for the truth or otherwise of Darwin’s hypothesis. A Discovery Institute spokesman thinks Darwinism subverts traditional morality:

If human beings and their beliefs really are the mindless products of their material existence, then everything that gives meaning to human life—religion, morality, beauty—is revealed to be without objective basis.

Arnhart thinks conservatives like Fukuyama and James Q Wilson can see that Darwinian views of human nature provide scientific support for the traditional idea of natural moral law, so conservatives have no reason to fear evolutionary theory. Human beings really are naturally social and moral animals, and therefore we can judge social life by how well it conforms to the natural needs and desires of the human animal. Natural law is a rationally observable and scientifically verifiable fact.

The basic behaviour of any single organism is selfish as it strives to reproduce. Yet, humans cooperate and, in cases such as celibate clergy, even sacrifice their own “genetic good” for others (Behe). It seems Behe cannot comprehend that an organism might find cooperation to be the best way to extend its “genetic good”, that selfishness in the sense of extending a gene line might be best served by being cooperative or even altruistic.

Arnhart tells religious conservatives that Darwinism is an extension of the natural law or natural right which was inferred by Saint Thomas Aquinas from Aristotle. Aquinas declared:

Natural right is that which nature has taught all animals.

Both John Calvin and Martin Luther from Protestant perspectives said natural law was moral law written into our hearts. Natural law or natural inclinations are instincts, and what is instinctive to us generally seems right or good. Reproduction of the species is an essential instinct, and so it seems, quite naturally to we reasoning human beings, as a good thing. Most of us enjoy sex, and sacraments like marriage were invented to make us take our social responsibility to look after children seriously, if we want to have it.

John Locke, Adam Smith and Charles Darwin perpetuated ethical naturalism. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith showed how ethics stemmed from the natural inclination to sympathy, which lets us imagine the feelings of others if we were in similar circumstances to them. It is quite natural and not given to us exclusively as images of God Himself because animals feel sympathy, or something indistinguishable from it in the way they react when they see others experiencing distress. Sympathy is the basis of morality. In The Descent of Man, Darwin says our morality is rooted in human nature, and modern social scientific research confirms it. Most of us are born wanting to please others, and averse to offending them. We want praise by others. Proper conduct is socially approved conduct, conduct that earns us the praise of others when we do it. Proper conduct towards others is morality, and evolution upholds it.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin discussed group selection in the context of the evolution of human morality. Tribes containing “a greater number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members… would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection”. The problem was explaining how such virtues could evolve within a tribe:

But it may be asked, how within the limits of the same tribe did a large number of members first become endowed with these social and moral qualities, and how was the standard of excellence raised?

This is the main problem of group selection. How do altruistic traits become common within a group despite harming individual fitness? It was unlikely they could be directly favoured by natural selection within a tribe. He suggested two mechanisms. One was what we now call reciprocal altruism—tit for tat—that a favour might be offered in the expectation of a favour returned. More important was “the praise and blame of our fellow men”:

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance during rude times of the love of praise and the dread of blame.

Darwin does not explain how praise and blame are converted into individual fitness, but modern simulations confirm the importance of reputation. An individual who gains a reputation as a cheat or shirker will be excluded from the benefits of social life, with adverse effects on fitness. Conservative pundit, James Q Wilson (The Moral Sense) defines moral sense as:

An intuitively or directly felt belief about how one ought to act when one is free to act voluntarily.

James Q. Wilson

Wilson tries to understand the social, biological, and evolutionary origins of our shared moral sense. He argues against the view that morality originates in culture, because much of culture, especially primitive culture, is a rationalization of natural social inclinations—social instincts. Examples are sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty.

1. Sympathy serves as both a motivation and a standard for moral judgement. Sympathy may be a key to understanding the evolutionary basis for altruism.
2. Fairness is grounded in our sociability. Three common senses of fairness are, fairness as equity, fairness as reciprocity, and fairness as impartiality.
3. Self control is the ability to forgo immediate desires to secure future desires.
4. Duty is being faithful to one’s obligations. It is related to conscience.

Wilson thinks our human nature needs to be better investigated:

Thinking seriously about the kind of animals we are will help us understand our persistent but fragile disposition to make moral judgements and the aspects of human relations that must be cultivated, if that disposition is to be protected and nurtured.

It has to begin with the obvious truth that we are social cooperative animals, not solitary competitive ones, so he wants us to consider:

• the role of the family in children’s development of a sense of moral rules and principles
• the effect of troubled families on the moral development of children
• the importance of bonding and training.

Social Policy and Private Property

Conservatives, Arnhart says, have long assumed that conformity to human nature is a fundamental goal of good social policy. A Darwinian conservatism would respect the variability in human affairs, but the universality of human biological nature would offer a general criterion of policies in how well they nurture human capacities as social animals. Although Darwinism cannot prescribe specific public policies, it can remind us of the propensities of human nature to which any successful policy must conform.

Thus violent crime is committed mostly by young unmarried men, and preventing or controlling such crime depends on understanding the biological nature of young men and the universal need in every society to channel their male propensities into socially acceptable behavior. The stability of family life is fundamental for every society because the dependence of the young on parental care is a natural characteristic of the human animal, and thus every good society must regulate sexual mating, conjugal bonding, and parental attachment to children to secure the natural ends of family life.

The main focus of right wing beliefs is private ownership of property. James Q Wilson establishes his right wing credentials by proclaiming that, notwithstanding our natural sense of fairness, it does not extend to an equal distribution of property in society! Ludwig von Mises (Socialism) in 1922 claimed that socialism would fail because it was contrary to human nature. By attempting to abolish private property through socialist economics, and attempting to abolish marriage and the family through free love, the socialist communities, Mises predicted, would eventually collapse, because “we have no reason to assume that human nature will be any different under socialism from what it is now”.

Mises suggested that Darwinian biology rightly understood would sustain his conclusion that social cooperation through a division of labor was rooted in the biological propensities of human nature. Richard Pipes (Property and Freedom) even defends possession of property as a natural instinct for humans, so societies that try to restrict or abolish property—such as Tsarist or Marxist Russia—tend to deny freedom and promote tyranny because they must repress human nature. To support his claim that property is natural, Pipes appeals to biological studies of possessiveness and territoriality among human beings and other animals. Thus a Darwinian understanding of human nature would provide a solid intellectual basis for conservative political thought, not for socialism.

Right, Left or Indifferent

While it is interesting to hear a conservative defend evolution on the grounds that it upholds social habits and morals, it is, of course, quite ridiculous to claim evolution for one side or the other of the political divide without sufficient attendant evidence, and it is a fair bet that evolutionary strategies that can be considered left or right will succeed in some circumstances and niches and not in others. Overall, left policies tend towards sociality and social ownership, whence socialism and communism, but right policies emphasize individuality and private ownership. Taken to their ultimate, rightist policies mean the destruction of humanity through the destruction of society.

If it is true that property ownership is a basic human instinct, a most dubious suggestion, then once we realize that excessive ownership by one person or just a few is damaging to social cohesion and the human sense of fairness, then we are entitled to restrict property ownership. It is already the case, yet the right want to concentrate property ever more into the hands of a few. Ultimately Arnhart is flogging a dead horse because religion is a far more secure basis for the right, and the traditonalist know it. They do not then have to keep responding to new discoveries by science. Religion is already how the ruling class define it for the intolerant mass of half witted people eager to support the rich in exploiting them. The rich prefer this assured support, support they can manipulate through their ownership of the popular means of communication.

Finally, we must recognize that we are distinguished particularly by our advanced intelligence, which means that we do not have to be controlled and conditioned by our instincts. Social behaviour is at least partially cultural for this very reason. If it were true that humans can quite naturally kill each other, say, in a fit of frustration or temper, we can still legislate that any such behaviour is punishable, because it is antisocial and destructive of mutually assured security in any decent society. We can allow our instincts free range where they are social, and we can restrict them when they are atavistic, when they are a legacy from a presocial ancestor. What we can do now, with willing, is make society just how we like it, and antisocial features cannot be part of it.

Further Reading

• More about morality, and justice as fairness, and more, the Principle of Humanity
• A lot more on religious origins—five linked webpages
• More on the death of God and secular Christianity

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History