03.27.06

Fuller on Mooney

Posted in Evolution at 9:49 pm by nemo

Fuller has an interesting analysis of Mooney on evolution/ID

Like most liberal commentators who have studied the rise of scientific creationism and intelligent design theory, Mooney can only see the hand of the religious right at work. Yet, there is more to this organized intellectual opposition to the Neo-Darwinian paradigm in biology. Let me concede at the outset some basic facts: Yes, a line of descent can be drawn from high school science textbooks espousing Biblical literalism to ones now espousing intelligent design. Yes, there is probably a strong desire, perhaps even a conspiracy, by fundamentalists to convert the US to a proper Christian polity, one that is epitomized by the notorious ‘Wedge Document’ (more about which below) circulating at the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based think-tank that has become the spiritual home of anti-Darwinism. But just how seriously should these facts be taken? After all, every theory is born in an intellectual state of ‘original sin’, as it actively promoted by special interests long before it is generally accepted as valid. It is therefore essential to monitor the theory’s development – especially to see whether its mode of inquiry becomes dissociated from its origins. So, while intelligent design theory may appeal to those who believe in divine creation, its knowledge claims, and their evaluation, are couched in terms of laboratory experiments and probability theory that do not make any theistic references. Of course, this does not make the theory true but (so I believe) it does make it scientific.

Suppose we took the pulse of Darwinism in 1909, fifty years after the publication of Origin of the Species but still a quarter-century before Mendelian genetics was generally accepted as providing the mechanism for an otherwise elusive process of natural selection. We would say that the theory’s main backers were located outside the universities – even outside the emerging lab-based biological sciences. To be sure, the backers were not trivial players in the knowledge politics of the day. They included popular free market intellectuals like Herbert Spencer, as well as many ‘captains of industry’ whose self-understanding motivated their support of the fledgling fields of the social sciences, where ‘Social Darwinism’ provided a powerful explanatory and legitimatory resource for the march of capitalism.

It is common for Darwinists to airbrush away this bit of their history, which draws attention to the fact that while biologists struggled to identify the causal mechanism responsible for the striking pattern of common descent and differential evolution that Darwin recorded in nature, congenial ideological currents – including eugenics and scientific racism—kept the theory in the public eye. Thus, it is striking that the Darwin exhibition currently at the American Museum of Natural History in New York gives the misleading impression that any association between Darwin’s theory and Thomas Malthus’ anti-welfarist tract, Essay on Population is purely coincidental. Yet, Darwin himself acknowledged – and Darwin’s admirers assumed—the profundity of Malthus’ insight into the normal character of mass extinction, given the inevitability of resource scarcity. Contrary to the accounts usually given of Darwin’s reception, what was provocative about Origin of the Species was not the prospect that a theory of plant and animal species could also explain humans, but the exact opposite: that a theory so obviously grounded in the explanatory framework of laissez faire capitalism could be generalized across all of nature. Thus, Darwin’s toughest critics came from the physical and biological sciences, not the social sciences.

The ascent of Darwinism makes one wonder when the theory passed from being a well-evidenced ideology (say, like Marxism) to a properly testable science. Would it have passed the criteria used nowadays to disqualify creationism and intelligent design theory in, say, 1925, the time of the Scopes Trial? Probably not, since Darwinists still couldn’t quite square their claims with cutting-edge genetics. However, it was equally clear that Darwinism enjoyed enormous support among self-styled progressive elements in American society who found locally controlled school boards to be among the last bastions of intellectual backwardness. In this respect, the American Civil Liberties Union’s intervention in State of Tennessee v. John T. Scopes, which turned it into a showcase trial, employed a more successful version of the strategy now being carried out by the Discovery Institute and other organizational vehicles for realizing the ‘Wedge Document’. Just as the ACLU helped to drive a wedge between the teaching of science and theology, the Discovery Institute would now drive a wedge between the teaching of science and anti-theology, or ‘methodological naturalism’ as it is euphemistically called.

You would be right to suspect that I treat the two ‘wedges’ as morally equivalent: Both should be allowed to flourish under the aegis of American democracy. As Darwinism slowly, fitfully but finally made its way into high school and college classrooms, the theory was developed in new directions, integrated with new bodies of knowledge, virtually – but of course never quite – distancing itself from its capitalist and racist roots, especially in cognate fields like socio-biology and evolutionary psychology. I imagine a comparable fate awaits intelligent design theory over the coming decades. This prognosis requires some justification since I would be the first to admit that proponents of intelligent design theory have not always placed themselves in the best possible light. At the same time, the near-hysterical response of the Neo-Darwinist forces is itself quite revealing. Mooney reduces the entire issue to a witch hunt about whether intelligent design theory is ‘really’ creationism in disguise, which for him is tantamount to showing it’s non-science, if not outright anti-science. Already at this point, Mooney is guilty of two errors, one for which he cannot be held entirely responsible: He follows the baleful tendency in contemporary US legal thinking that treats ‘science’ and ‘religion’ as mutually exclusive, rather than orthogonal, categories. However, the second error goes to Mooney’s journalistic acumen: Instead of constructing an independent standpoint from which to evaluate scientific merits of Neo-Darwinism and intelligent design theory, Mooney’s repeated practice is to ask Neo-Darwinists their opinion of work by intelligent design theorists (but not vice versa). The results should surprise no one. Such opinion may indeed be expert but it is unlikely to be unprejudiced.

By the end of this witch hunt, clearly exasperated by his quarry, Mooney exclaims that Darwin’s theory of evolution is ‘one of the most robust theories in the history of science’ (p. 183). I paused to wonder exactly what he might mean and how he might know it. It’s certainly true that Darwinism has had a persistent following for nearly 150 years, regardless of its evidential support. Moreover, Darwinism is philosophically ‘robust’ insofar as it has caused philosophers to alter their definitions of science to accommodate a research programme that clearly does not fit the mould of Newtonian mechanics. It’s also true that most practicing biologists profess a belief in Darwinism, though the impact of that belief on day-to-day empirical research is harder to establish. For example, Science magazine declared 2005 the Year of Evolution, but what they meant by ‘evolution’ relates rather loosely to what Darwin himself talked about. The magazine cited three developments: the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome, the mapping of the genetic variability of human diseases, and the emergence of a new species of bird. Only the last conforms to Darwin’s own methods. Whereas he regarded natural selection as a process that occurred spontaneously in the wild and operated mainly on groups of organisms, today’s breakthroughs in evolution occur mainly in the laboratory, often at the genomic or sub-genomic level, and are the product of explicit experimental interventions. That these two quite different senses of ‘natural selection’ – sometimes distinguished as ‘macroevolution’ and ‘microevolution’ – are seen by palaeontologists and geneticists alike as subsumed under the same ‘Neo-Darwinian synthesis’ is regarded by many historians as the most singular rhetorical achievement in science.

A good way to appreciate the intellectual challenge posed by intelligent design theory – regardless of what one makes of its origins – is to consider the rhetorical character of Neo-Darwinism. No doubt the word ‘rhetorical’ will seem too provocative for some readers, but it is meant quite literally. Although Darwinism starts in, say, 1860, and modern genetics is underway by, say, 1900, it is only in the period 1930-40 that the Neo-Darwinian synthesis is forged, providing the covering theory for modern biological research. The main feat, achieved most clearly by Theodosius Dobzhansky’s Genetics and the Origins of Species in 1937, was to persuade natural historians in Darwin’s research tradition and laboratory geneticists in Mendel’s research tradition of a strong analogy between their methodologically rather different pursuits. In time, macroevolution and microevolution came to be understood as ‘evolution’ in exactly the same sense. A comparable development for some aspiring covering theory of the social sciences would be to convince, say, historical anthropologists and experimental economists that the ‘markets’ unearthed in the ancient world and constructed in the laboratory are to be explained by the same mechanisms, which the latter research environment reveals in their pure form. Among the obstacles to such a synthesis being forged in the social sciences include the perceived incommensurability between ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ research methods. One consequence of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis was to break down these Aristotelian hang-ups, which had also existed in biology, permitting both methods to migrate across the micro-macro divide with fruitful research results.

Thus, by no means do I wish to dismiss the Neo-Darwinian synthesis out of hand. Its construction has much to teach the social sciences, progress in which has been retarded by the sort of ‘metaphysical’ suspicions that Neo-Darwinism gladly suspends. Nevertheless, there remain fault lines in the synthesis, which occasionally surface, especially in the popular science literature, where the underlying assumptions and projected implications of empirical knowledge claims are discussed more openly than is normally permitted in the consensus-driven world of peer review. Mooney could have uncovered these fault lines had he asked two kinds of biologist, a field scientist and a lab scientist, what the theory of ‘evolution by natural selection’ is supposed to be about. The lab scientist would probably say that it’s a model of potentially universal scope, with the actual history of life on earth as merely one – and perhaps not even the most important – confirmation of the theory. She would probably not lose too much sleep, were she to learn that natural selection proves insufficient to the task of explaining the entire history of life on earth because the model still applies in all sorts of smaller and maybe even larger domains (e.g. Lee Smolin’s theory of cosmological selection). In contrast, the field scientist would turn the tables and say quite plainly that the theory of natural selection is exactly about the actual history of life on earth, and that the fate of the theory rests precisely on the extent to which it explains the patterns that Darwin and subsequent natural historians have found. Everything else is merely a metaphorical extension of the original theory.

This is quite a serious difference of opinion in how one defines a theory’s referent. Perhaps, then, Neo-Darwinism is so ‘robust’ because it is so strategically vague – or should I say, ‘adaptive’! Nevertheless, the fault lines are periodically revealed. The late Stephen Jay Gould, whose expertise was closest to Darwin’s own (not least in his ignorance and disdain of lab-based science), fits my ‘field scientist’ to a tee. Not surprisingly, then, as the evidence from extant and extinct creatures suggested the insufficiency of natural selection as an overarching explanation for the actual history of life on earth, he became pan-Darwinism’s fiercest critic. Many Neo-Darwinists have not only decried Gould’s perceived defection from the fold but have more harshly criticized intelligent design theorists for trying to get some mileage from Gould’s apostasy. But this is to suggest that the Neo-Darwinists have proprietary rights over the entire history of biology. Yet, Neo-Darwinism’s own pivotal mechanism – what is now called ‘Mendelian genetics’ – was contributed by people who held the counter-Darwinian assumption that every member of a species, regardless of species history, is programmed with a reproductive propensity. That assumption is a legacy of special creationism, a research tradition in natural history that connects the devout Christians, Linnaeus, Cuvier and Mendel. To be sure, many of its elements have been subsumed by the Neo-Darwinian synthesis. But why can’t intelligent design theorists reclaim this subsumed tradition as their own to develop the biological sciences in a different direction? In that case, Gould is rightly invoked as an ally – if only in a backhanded way—because he stuck to Darwin’s original formulation of evolutionary theory and found it empirically wanting, whereas Neo-Darwinists have shifted the goalpost to make it seem as though the theory’s validity does not rest mainly on evidence from the field.

In short, intelligent design theorists should treat what evolutionists regard as a broadening of their theory, which corresponds to the ascendancy of lab-based research, as involving a thinning of the theory’s content. I was struck by this point as an expert witness for the defence in the recent Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the first test case for the inclusion of intelligent design theory in public schools. One expert witness called by the plaintiffs, whom Mooney also quotes as a source, was Robert Pennock, my contemporary in the doctoral programme at the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Pennock enthused under oath about an ‘artificial life’ computer programme that he and some colleagues at Michigan State University had recently written up for Nature magazine. To the unprejudiced observer, the programme simply looks like a strategy for generating computer viruses without the user’s intervention, albeit within parameters that approximate the combinatorial tendencies of DNA. Yet, Pennock claimed that this programme ‘instantiated’ evolution by natural selection. The metaphysically freighted ‘instantiated’, much favoured by artificial life researchers, renovates the old theological idea (originally used to justify God’s Trinitarian nature) that essentially the same idea can be materialised in radically different ways. Too bad, under cross examination, Pennock wasn’t asked whether he thought his programme added to Neo-Darwinism’s success at explaining the history of life on earth – or merely substituted for it. So much for falsifiability!

Evolutionists have been allowed to hedge their bets in this fashion because, prior to the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, there had been no ‘robust’ theory of the biological sciences as a whole. Biology was a scientific free zone, which is easily documented by noting the non-university locations of many of its historic practitioners. Under the circumstances, it is easy – but no less unfortunate – that a journalist like Mooney should come to make a simple equation between Neo-Darwinism and biological science as such. This leads him to suspect that intelligent design theory, which he treats alternatively as pseudoscience and antiscience, is conspiring to replace Neo-Darwinism wholesale – perhaps with some sort of Biblical fundamentalism. This really does the theory a serious injustice. At most, intelligent design theorists are guilty of opportunism, exploiting substantial differences of opinion already present in the Neo-Darwinian ranks, which the parties themselves think should be discussed in peer-reviewed publications rather than in the media, courtrooms and classrooms. Thus, intelligent design theorists typically accept exactly the sort of microevolution evidence for which led Science to declare 2005 the Year of Evolution. But that’s because ‘evolution by natural selection’ in these cases has been intelligently designed, namely, by the human researchers responsible for setting up the relevant experimental conditions. But what would allow natural selection to work so decisively in nature, without the presence of humans? That was the question that really interested Darwin – and Gould. It drove the analogy between ‘natural selection’ and ‘artificial selection’, which of course refers to the human breeding of animals. At this point, intelligent design theory dissents from the Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy and refuses to accept macroevolution as the final word.

Moreover, there is a positive programme behind intelligent design theory, though its proponents have not been as vocal about it as they might. The programme requires some imaginative thinking about ‘anti-naturalism’. We need to pick up on the idea of ‘instantiation’ mentioned above. A scientifically tractable way of thinking about ‘supernaturalism’ is in terms of the same form, end or idea being realized in radically different material containers. However, some of these containers may be better suited than others for what they contain. Converting this general point into a programme of theoretical and practical problems renders ‘intelligent design’ scientific. (Herbert Simon’s classic The Sciences of the Artificial can be thus read as a secular tract on intelligent design as a metatheory for all science.) Now, if we further suppose that humans have been created in the image and likeness of God – or less provocatively, that reality is in some deep way human-like – then it becomes easy to think about life itself from a design standpoint. Our technologies are then lesser versions of the divine technology responsible for all the world’s creatures. By the same token, we can treat these creatures as prototypes for technologies we might develop to enhance human dominion over nature. Perhaps the most obvious of numerous historical examples is the study of birds for aviation technology. (More Unitarian Christians, like Joseph Priestley and perhaps even Isaac Newton, might say we converge with God at that point, but I offer no opinion on the matter). In short, the biological sciences would become an advanced form of engineering, corresponding roughly to fields currently known as ‘biomimetics’ and ‘bionics’, which draw very heavily and fruitfully from contemporary biology but without any theoretical commitment to the Neo-Darwinian synthesis.

There is potentially quite a lot of money to be had by thinking of biology in this fashion, which I think helps explain why the Discovery Institute – founded as it was by technoscience sophisticates like George Gilder and Bruce Chapman – has supported intelligent design theory. To put the point bluntly, they want to corner the market on ‘playing God’ by both supporting the requisite technological innovations and laying down the moral ground rules for their use. Here Mooney overlooked that Gilder’s 1989 bestseller Microcosm was one of the first books to herald the advent of nanotechnology (as ‘quantum economics’). Had Mooney attended more to the continuities that have taken these young Rockefeller Republicans of late 1960s to their current support of intelligent design theory, he might have also seen the general reluctance of the Discovery Institute to be too closely aligned with genuine Biblical fundamentalists, as became clear was behind the support for intelligent design theory in the Dover school board in the Kitzmiller case. Indeed, it should not have been too much for Mooney to imagine that the Discovery Institute, whatever its intentions, is unlikely to succeed at spearheading some monolithic right-wing conspiracy, given that the fundamentalists who would be the foot soldiers simply want to read their biology off the Bible and not have to grapple with the scientifically informed speculations of William Dembski or Michael Behe.

The Discovery Institute is of course only one of many think-tanks trying to jump start the future of science for political advantage. Indeed, on matters relating to cutting-edge nano-, bio- and info- technology research, one might wish to turn to the judgement of such entities before that of the NAS. Of course, this is not because the NAS does not uphold good science, but simply because such an elite institution is unlikely to have its ear sufficiently close to the ground really to know what is and is not feasible in the foreseeable future, which is essential for framing any general political guidelines for research support. (That the NAS does not move very fast is symptomatic. Generally speaking, the peer review system has served to stagger publication, so as to allow a critical mass of researchers to become ‘pre-acquainted’ with impending research findings. But as time-to-publication shrinks in even the peer-reviewed sectors of the internet, the advantage accrued to those ‘in the know’ shrinks.) Imagine, if you can: What may turn out to be the best work is not being done by the ‘best people’ at the ‘best places’! Let me make clear that I do not wish to celebrate the diffuse and largely unmonitored – and certainly unregulated – nature of emergent technoscientific trends. But we are unlikely to win Mooney’s ‘Republican war on science’ if we cling to a nostalgic view of the authoritativeness of the self-selecting college of scientific cardinals represented by, say, the NAS.

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