I read a troubling article in the Wednesday, March 3 1999 edition of The Ottawa Citizen which made me extremely, and rather uncharacteristically, angry. It presented the case that Godless philosophies such as the (shudder) theory of evolution are directly responsible for the decline in morality and hope in human life. Additionally, the theory of evolution will be the cause of a nightmarish future where eugenics programs weed out the weak, elderly or infirm in the name of "improving the species." Not only was this one of the most poorly reasoned articles I have ever read, but it presented a shockingly anemic understanding of both philosophy and science. While the author holds a PhD, his credibility is strained by his extensive reliance upon out-of-context quotes to promote his line of reasoning ("quote mining"), his grand conclusions, broad generalisations and religious agenda. I wrote a response as a letter to the editor, but understood it had little chance of being published -- being a three page document over a succinct and juicy letter (doublespaced it would have been a six page essay). Still, at least I can publish it here. Following, in white text, is the original article. Below it, in blue, is my letter.

The 'Final' Death of God

Neo-Darwinism is Leading us Into Moral Bankruptcy

One of the biggest stories of the century has been the defeat of Genesis by genetics. Science, in the doctrine of neo-Darwinism now seeks to deliver the coup de grace to God. This dangerous, rehashed theory has hurried to fill the vacuum of ideas created by the implosion of Marxism and the overt decline of Freudian psychoanalysis. Like these discarded creeds before it, neo-Darwinism is mounting a full-scale assault on freedom of the will, on immortality, on moral grandeur, on the human soul itself. Like them, too, it has in a remarkable way captured the minds of young intellectuals and opinion-makers.

This theory has a champion in the shape of Richard Dawkins, as professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. This passionate propagandist sees it as his role relentlessly to publicize the virtues of this "new" theory. The Americans elected him Humanist of the Year. So what does this tip-top humanist think humans are? "Survival machines -- robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." The polemical professor's equivalent to a Bible is Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection. The soundbite that best describes this Herbert Spencer's phrase "the survival of the fittest."

Darwin did not know about DNA. We do, and each day brings discoveries about what can be done with genes and what genes can do. Thus has Darwinism become "neo." It was that it is the fittest and most selfish genes which are selected to survive. If you hear the rattle of eugenic ghosts, consider this. Darwin had an alternative title for his book. The title page of John Murray's 1859 edition bears the words "or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life."

Darwin's American Doppelganger is E.O. Wilson of Harvard. This insect zoologist has given us the brand new science of "sociobiology." His acolytes call themselves "evolutionary psychologists. These people believe that our brains are already genetically programmed -- hardwired -- by the time we born. The brain at birth, says Wilson, is an "unexposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid." The photograph has already been taken. Mental life has, effectively, been lived before we take our first breath. From such genetic fatalism, genetic slavery must follow. As an example, such neo-Darwinists conclude that morality "has no other demonstrable function but to keep human genetic material intact." If they are correct, then all that we do, think and feel, all that we believe, imagine, dream, all that we hope for, love and wonder at are preprogrammed by sections of DNA into the "super-computer" of our "robot" brains.

So, to these intellectual trendsurfers, talk of God or religion is offensive rubbish. Today the enemies of God wear neo-Darwinian helmets. "Faith," says Dawkins, "is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus, but harder to eradicate. The whole subject of God is a bore." The Oxford professor also makes the astounding, and possibly class-actionable, statement that those who teach religion to small children are guilty of "child abuses."

The Queen is by Dawkins' definition the supreme governor of an organization that specializes in the mistreatment of our sons and daughters. Parliament, by allowing the partnership of state and religious schools, is colluding with child abusers.

But how, we might ask the professor, can a "blindly programmed robot" be guilty of anything? And why would a "genetic survival machine" want to abuse its progeny? But Dawkins is relentless. He explains the survival of the time-honoured belief in God by its "great psychological appeal," failing to explain the survival of that. "Everything fits. Everything points in the same direction," enthuses Dawkins, unwittingly revealing himself as a pseudoscientist.

Yet neo-Darwinism has no explanation of how life itself originated in the primordial soup. Despite Dawkins' confident explanation that "it all makes sense," neo-Darwinism has no answer to the greatest mystery -- what was the origin of the life from which the species eventually evolved?

Neo-Darwinism is scientifically, as well as philosophically, unproven. No neo-Darwinist has ever described from start to finish the formation of a new species by random mutation. The fossil evidence is woefully lacking on the gross anatomical level, and irrelevant on the molecular one. Also, evolutionary theory relies on gradualism. Random genetic mutation and the production of genes "superior" in the survival business is a desperately slow process. But the fossil evidence that does exist suggests that species evolve suddenly in "big bangs" rather than bit by bit. Neo-Darwinists have difficulty explaining this.

In short, a consensus is building that the relatively recent revelations of life's molecular complexity (the new part of neo-Darwinism), far from being an argument in favour of evolution, actually cast doubt on it. This does not require a return to Creationism, although certainly new life has been breathed into the formerly moribund argument from design for the existence of God (the universe is so complex it must have a designer, i.e. God) It does require, though, that the strident and certain trumpets of the neo-Darwinists give forth a more properly scientific and tentative sound.

A suspect and philosophically dubious theory as inflammatory as neo-Darwinism could have great repercussions. Ideas shape poetics, events and human affairs. Ideas beget action and validate behaviour. These facts are doubly true in a society in which there is a vacuum of ideas, a materialistic culture largely devoid of purpose and meaning such as the one in which we live today. Who can deny that Nazism and the Holocaust were made possible in part by the popularity of Nietzschean doctrines of the supremacy of the "will," and the concept of the "superman," by prevailing attitudes towards euthenasia and eugenics which led to the inauguration of a chair of "racial hygiene" at Munich university in 1936? When a society comes to believe fully that the true purpose of life is the spreading around of our DNA like muck simply so that it can survive, there will be hideous consequences.

Of course, men such as Wilson and Dawkins are politically sensitive. They have jobs to protect, research grants to preserve, public, publishers and colleagues to appease. Dawkins claims that when he is talking of a genetic purpose it is but a "fruitful metaphor." Can he be aware of the potential effect of such metaphors in the minds of the less intellectually sophisticated? For every figurehead with a career to maintain, there will be many young turks with little to lose. These action men will have no interest in the polite disclaimers, the antacids that serve to make the meal more palatable to the politically queasy.

Indeed, in the sorry and surly dawn of the far-from-brave new world that the neo-Darwinists will have helped create, there will be no room for finer feelings and altruism. There will be nothing left but the marching genes, stamping on value, grinding hope into the ground, pounding freedom into a pulp of pointless nothingness. What then will be society's attitude to rapists; to those who discard older wives for the brand-new reproductively efficient models; to those who would take by force, steal and murder? Would they not be doing what they were programmed to do? Surely they would be without blame? In a nightmare neo-Darwinist world, accountability would be dead.

In fact, in such a Godless, morally meaningless culture, might it not make sick sense to discriminate with extreme prejudice against those deemed to lack fitness in the survival business -- the unintelligent, the old, the infirm, the celibate? In that place, what value would there be but survival? What occupation more understandable than "improving the species?"

Dawkins is already on record as saying that he would "love to be cloned." So, it seems, the madness is still with us. The best and brightest of the educators of the public in academe's most ancient groves have not forgotten how to talk the language that can so easily lead to destruction. Have we forgotten so soon what such a world was like?

Dr. Garth Wood is the author of The Myth of Neurosis. This article ran in The Spectator of London.

My Letter to the editor...

Precisely what "neo-Darwinism" stands for is never explained in the article, except that the study of genetics is somehow involved. Nor does Wood explain what is so "dangerous" or "rehashed" about neo-Darwinism, save that these words are highly evocative and elicit a strong emotional response.

Although he provides examples suggesting the poisonously anti-religious attitudes reinforced by neo-Darwinism, Wood wants the reader to believe this is actually the binding doctrine of the evolutionist. While many scientists, such as Richard Dawkins, are hostile towards religion, many scientists are not. Many scientists are religious. There is no overt dogma inherent to science, leastwise not as it pertains to the overthrow of religion. While little can be said to excuse Dawkins' overt hostility towards religion, he is a brilliant and dedicated researcher who has often been maligned and misrepresented by fundamentalist opponents represented by the Institute for Creation Research in North America, and Answers in Genesis in the UK. His hostility must be presented in context. For example, a recent video produced by both groups, "From a Frog to a Prince," features an interview with Dawkins, deliberately manipulated in post-production to discredit both Dawkins and evolutionary science as a whole.

Despite the emotional appeals made in the article, the scientific facts of evolution cannot, and do not, touch upon philosophy, morality or religion. That some scientists say they do is not sufficient to make it so. Wood conjures phrases like "selfish genes," "survival of the fittest," and "improving the species." Evolution is scientifically defined, quite simply, as "a change in allele frequencies in a population over time." The connection between the fact of evolution and its implications for morality is grossly overstated. However startling, the implications of evolution cannot be the grounds by which to dismiss the truth. This truth is firmly demonstrated by geology, paleontology, astronomy, biology, and chemistry -- indeed by every discipline. Many theologians and faithful believers have no difficulty at all in reconciling the obvious differences between religious orthodoxy and scientific fact. The Vatican itself has recognized Darwin's account of natural history. To suggest that the study of evolution is a godless pursuit to destroy religion, in the guise of neo-Darwinism or not, is either naive or dishonest.

Dr. Wood selectively harvests many quotes in order to suggest that evolution is seen by its advocates as contrary to morality. Whether this is true or not, how does understanding evolution decrease our potential morality in any way? If his careful suggestions are true, would this not mean that only ignorance can foster morality? Or, worse still, that humans should fundamentally be incapable of moral behaviour at all? The fact that humans now have a better understanding of their origins can hardly be the root of any decay of morality if the lack of morality exists in the first place. The reasoning is so circular as to be dizzying. Dr. Wood also ignores such philosophies as ethical humanism, a belief system which, while patently non-religious, promotes the same altruism, honesty, peace and equality as any religion.

One of the few scientific discussions in the article presents the lack of evidence provided by evolutionists to explain the appearance of life on earth at all. In response it must be said that this study of abiogenesis is distinct from the study of the mechanisms of evolution, and while many biochemical origins of life have been proposed, evolutionary theory itself is not equipped, and does not attempt, to affirm or deny the role of God -- or any god -- in this process.

Dr. Wood also addresses the fossil record. Without conceding the obvious fact that fossilization is an exceedingly rare process, he asserts that "No neo-Darwinist has ever described from start to finish the formation of a new species of random mutation." First, any species at any point in time should be considered a transition between an earlier form an and a later one. Secondly, evolution has been observed many, many times; both in present day and throughout the earth's history, and through compelling fossil evidence. Consider, for example, the role fossils have played in illustrating emergence of modern birds from reptilian ancestors -- a process scrupulously documented in peer-reviewed journals. A celebrated example of speciation taking place is the formation of five new species of cichlid fish when they were separated from a parent stock only 4000 years ago -- a wink in the great age of the earth. This has been well documented. One has only to acknowledge the existence of bacteria which are now resistant to previously effective antibiotics in order to acknowledge the fact of evolution.

Finally, Dr. Wood presents the "repercussions" of neo-Darwinism. These moral consequences are a grim warning, but are these truly valid criticisms? If his science is poor, his philosophy is worse. We are not simply discussing the importance of morality versus the push of progress. Dr. Wood uses emotional arguments rooted in a morality as seeming justification to turn away from the truth. A weak connection is made between Darwinism and the Holocaust. Much pain should be taken to separate eugenics from evolution -- two distinct ideas, with the former predating the latter. Hitler himself required the destruction of books supporting evolution, and mandated prayer in schools. Anti-Semitism has enjoyed a tragically strong expression throughout the entire history of Christianity. Would Dr. Wood have us believe that such hatred, while fueled by religious intolerance, required the apparently atheistic philosophy of neo-Darwinism to actually catch fire?

An excellent book discussing the propaganda tactic of presenting evolutionary theory as a powerful motivation for racism is "Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism" by Dr. Philip Kitcher.

Dr. Wood's article suggests that rape, adultery, anarchy, theft and murder are the only logical fruit neo-Darwinism shall reap. Is it not true that these acts have always been intimately connected to human societies? Can not a single murder possibly have occurred before Charles Darwin penned his observations on the emergence of Galapagos finches? The tendency to commit selfish acts either exists within us, or it does not. In either case, it seems premature to suggest that a "Godless, morally meaningless culture" filled as it is with rape, adultery, murder, and so on, can owe its existence to scientific enlightenment. Saying such things implies the existence of a paradise on earth in times when societies were not so secular; an assertion our bloody, shameful, "moral" history can hardly support.

To think that the selfish propagation of one's genes can ever be used to justify any kind of immoral behaviour is absurd. Wood takes the allegorical "selfish gene" far too literally. Altruism is a well-documented, biologically reinforced behaviour. It can be easily observed in social insects such as ants and bees -- where individuals sacrifice their own genetic legacies -- that is, their lives -- to benefit a queen and a hive. Human societies, far more complicated, clearly benefit from acts of altruism too. Dr. Wood needs to browse the anthropology section of his library. Cooperation and interaction are the essential factors in our success as a species. Otherwise; solitary, selfish, brutish, we would lack even a language to debate our godless amorality. In every human society, the elderly play an invaluable role in the rearing of children. Far from being a selfish, genetically motivated consequence of neo-Darwinism, the extermination of the old to better allocate resources for the benefit of "the strong" would be tantamount to suicide as a species.

People will do as they will with their interpretations of the truth; this is to be certain. However, is not the pursuit of the truth -- of knowledge -- a far more morally satisfying act than supressing, ignoring, or misrepresenting it?

I'll have a respectable update tonight.

Brought to you by Jolt Cola, with
the buzzing and mild irritation of
caffeine induced paranoia.

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