Why does it matter?

The guide continues with smear campaign against evolution, by accusing it of fostering “relativism, religious skepticism and a dehumanized view of men and women.”

All this from a scientific theory! But wait there’s more!

In particular, it says evolution provides “Darwinists” justification for abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, racism, and Nazism. Therefore, evolution must be wrong. Try our new faith-based “theory,” satisfaction guaranteed. Operators are standing by.

Guide:

After establishing that most evolutionary biologists are atheists and agnostics, the guide repeats the allegation that evolution is a kind of religion. “Darwinism has become the substitute ‘creation story’ for those who embrace materialism. Materialism is a philosophy which says that the physical realm is the only reality that exists.” This “worldview” leads to moral relativism, religious skepticism and dehumanization.

Hmm, sounds like Satanism to me. Whaddaya you think, Davey?

Comments:

This one paragraph contains multiple falsehoods. First, the Guide preaches a lie, that evolution, a scientific theory, is directly responsible for Social Darwinism, a completely different animal. Anthropologists, sociologists, politicians, demogogues, have applied a bastardized interpretation of evolutionary theory — the fit survive — to social and political structures. Social Darwinism has existed in one form or another since humans’ early history: the strong can subject the weak, because they’re “better.” After Darwin published his theory, the strong now had a “scientific” justification for their behavior.

A creation story by definition is one that is fictional or perhaps allegorical. Every culture has its own creation story. Genesis is one example, though creationists would no doubt debate that issue. Evolution, by contrast, depends on centuries of concrete evidence supporting it, plus corroborating evidence from geology, astronomy, genetics and physics. It’s not a “just so” story based on oral traditions going back millenia, but a scientific explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.

Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education (which opposes the teaching of ID in science classes), identifies two kinds of materialism, only one of which applies to the theory of evolution. Science depends on material — that is, tangible or observable — evidence. Four hundred years ago, Galileo started science on a materialist path by testing his hypotheses about motion against reality, rejecting a purely philosophical interpretation of reality. Throughout the history of science, its practitioners have relied on material evidence to test hypotheses and verify theories. Immaterial evidence, such as assertions, authoritative statements, traditions, space aliens, God, angels or gremlins, is rejected as invalid.

There is a philosophical school of thought called materialism, however. This philosophy holds that the only trustworthy “reality” is what we (or our instruments) can sense. The supernatural does not exist, which mean materialists do not accept there is a God, Heaven, Hell or anything transcendental.

Whether philosophical materialism fosters wrong behavior is a debatable point, well beyond the scope of this critique or the Leader’s Guide. I will observe, however, that believers of philosophies and religions that accept the transcendental have committed as many crimes against humanity as so-called materialists, despite their belief in the afterlife.

Guide:

Relativism is the idea that there is no absolute moral “truth” that applies to every time and culture. Darwinism encourages relativism by portraying morality as simply another evolving product of natural selection. According to Darwinism, morality evolves into whatever best promotes physical survival in a certain time and place.

To support this bold argument, the Guide then quotes Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson:

Morality … is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends … In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate.”

And then another quote from bioethicist Michael Denton:

Thesocial and political currents which have swept the world in the past 80years would have been impossible without [Darwin's] intellectual sanction.

Comments:

If I remember correctly, Christians once had the same complaint about the theory of relativity, which held the only absolute for all observers was the speed of light. Relativism assumes that so-called absolute rules do not always apply to all situations. Science has nothing to say about relativism, but a lot to say about relativity. (Relativity is correct, by the way.)

Darwin and evolutionary biology say nothing about morals or morality, which are immaterial. Perhaps Social Darwinism does, but that’s not a science and (hopefully) not something that is taught in a science class. Sociobiology, on the other hand, assumes that perhaps ethics and morality derive from some biological or genetic source. Altruism, for example, might have evolved as a means to guarantee a sufficient gene pool for a species to survive.

Ruse and Wilson, both sociobiologists, wrote Evolution and Ethics, published in 1985, from which this quote is pulled. It pops up all over the ‘net, most frequently on creationist and ID sites preaching the evils of evolution. Daniel Dennett, a critic of the ID movement, also quotes it.

Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will … or any other part of the framework of the Universe. In an important sense, ethics …is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate … Ethics is seen to have a solid foundation, not in divine guidance, but in the shared qualities of human nature and the desperate need for reciprocity (Ruse and Wilson, 1985, 208:51-52)

For someone grounded in the Christian tradition, one can see why this quote, with its implication that our ethics and morals derive from material, not transcendental, sources might be disturbing. It implies, furthermore, that conditions might change, so that formerly forbidden behaviors (homosexuality, premarital sex, abortion) are now judged to be permissible. Relativism and sociobiology seemingly undermine the authority of a religion. Neither is Darwinian evolution, however.

Denton’s quote also appears on anti-evolution sites pretty much in the abbreviated version printed in the Guide. Not surprisingly, Denton’s point was not that Darwin was responsible for the last 80 years of history, but that interpretations of his conclusions influenced society and politics.

The twentieth century would be incomprehensible without the Darwinian revolution. The social and political currents which have swept the world in the past eighty years would have been
impossible without its intellectual sanction. … The influence of the evolutionary theory on fields far removed from biology is one of the most spectacular examples in history of how a highly speculative idea for which there is no really hard scientific evidence can come to fashion the thinking of a whole society and dominate the outlook of an age. Considering its historic significance and the social and moral transformation it caused in western thought, one might have hoped that Darwinian theory … a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth. (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Adler and Adler, 1985, p. 358)

As I noted earlier, Denton is a sharp critic of evolutionary theory, while rejecting ID and creationism. Given his stinging comments in this extract, one wonders why the Expelled Guide writers did not use a longer passage. Unless of course they didn’t bother to actually read Denton’s essay …

Guide:
The Dehumanization of Life

In a Darwinian framework, human beings are no better than any other animal and ultimately may be treated as animals by those who consider themselves to be greater, more human, enlightened or evolved.

Comments:

Here’s a very bold statement, with little supporting evidence. It plays on the confusion already created in the Guide between evolution, a scientific theory, and Social Darwinism or materialism, socio-political philosophies. Evolution does identify humans as animals, albeit very intelligent ones, specifically, primates, an order of mammals. In contrast to the story of Genesis, science shows humans were not created separately from the other animals, but are part of the evolutionary tree of life. Genetic and paleontological evidence supports this conclusion, but creationists/IDists prefer to ignore the evidence.

Before Darwin was ever born, some groups of humans have treated other groups as animals. Whites enslaved blacks, invaders slaughtered entire villages, Christians killed Jews, Catholics tortured Protestants, the list goes on. To blame Darwin and evolution for “pre-existing conditions” is ludicrous.

Besides, the abuse of a scientific theory does not invalidate the theory. Contrary evidence disproves a theory. The Guide has yet to offer that.

Guide:

To support its smearing of “Darwinists,” the Guide introduces Peter Singer, a provocative bioethicist at Princeton University,

who
advocates infanticide for handicapped infants and euthanasia for the elderly,[and] defends his view by stating:

All we are doing is catching up with Darwin. He showed … that we are simply animals. Humans had imagined we were a separate part of Creation, that there was some magical line between Us and Them. Darwin’s theory undermined the foundations of that entire Western way of thinking about the place of our species in the universe.

Comments:

For once, the Guide does not butcher a quote, though the context is probably different from originally intended. Singer is making an observation about evolution’s demotion of human from a special place in Creation, to a more humble position. Copernicus did the same in the 16th century, when he suggested the Earth was not at the center of the universe. Civilisation survived the trauma.

Guide:

Expelled’s propagandists now libel “Darwinists” by saying the theory justifies abortion, quoting an extreme statement regarding the development of the fetus.

Similar arguments have been used by Darwinists to justify abortion. In fact, some Darwinists have argued that babies in the womb can be eliminated because for most of the pregnancy they represent lower stages of man’s evolutionary history. According to biophysicist Elie A. Shneour,

Abortion is justified because the unborn baby progresses over 38 weeks through what is, in fact, a rapid passage through evolutionary history: From a single primordial cell, the conceptus progresses through being something of a protozoan, a fish, a reptile, a bird, a primate and ultimately a human being. There is a difference of opinion among scientists about the time during a pregnancy when a human being can be said to emerge.”

Comments:

Shneour’s statement repeats the biological observation, “Ontology recapitulates phylogeny,” that is, mammalian fetuses resemble in their early stages the fetuses of creatures further down the evolutionary ladder. Tellingly, the Guide does not extract this quote from one of Shneour’s scholarly journal articles, but from a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times about abortion laws in California. Shneour does condone abortion, but not random termination of fetuses. The quote omits this sentence at the end: “But there is a general agreement that this does not happen until after the end of the first trimester.” (LA Times, Jan 29, 1989, letters page, p. V-5).

Anti-evolution sites parrot this quote, apparently without regard to its original intent or its scientifically benign meaning. Taken at face value, it would appear to characterize Shneour, and by association all evolutionary biologists, as baby-killers. But it is a logical fallacy to say his opinions represent what “some Darwinists” or “Darwinists” in general believe. Similarly, we can quote Adolf Hitler, who was supposedly a Christian, but we cannot truthfully say his statements or actions represent all Christians.

That early fetuses resemble the fetuses of lower forms of life is a scientific observation. That some would use this biological fact to condone abortion does not invalidate evolution, which incidentally, does not address fetal development.

Guide:

What can be worse than abortion? Eliminating the child with birth defects, or an “extra” child. Because children, after all, are just animals. To support this argument, the Guide quotes Watson and Sanger.

Dr. James Watson (Nobel Laureate) suggested that, “If a child [with birth defects] was not declared alive until three days after birth … the doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering.”

Dr. Margaret Sanger (Founder of Planned Parenthood) said,

The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.
[from Chapter V of Woman and the New Race]

Next to both these quotes is an adorable, roughly six-month-old baby.

The Guide than offers another quote from Singer, supposedly encouraging parents to kill disabled babies and families to euthanize “incompetent persons of any age.”

Comments:

Classifying humans as animals scientifically does not automatically devalue them. As I already have noted, certain groups have treated others as animals long before Darwin. In addition, abortion and euthanasia involve medical, legal, social and political issues; they are not automatically consequences or even subjects of evolutionary theory.

Watson’s quote is from a 1973 article he wrote for Prism, a publication of the American Medical Assoication. He was talking specifically about the ethics of creating test-tube babies, and what to do about a deformed infant with little chance of survival. Thus its appearance here is completely out of context.

Sanger, as the Guide correctly states, was a eugenicist, but not an evolutionary biologist. Darwin never suggested that parents should eliminate offspring for pragmatic reasons, though animals in the wild of course do. Sanger believed that large families were unacceptable even immoral, since before AFDC, WIC, school lunch programs and health insurance the poor frequently could not adequately support large families. She was contrasting (dramatically) the early death of an infant to the misery and slow death it would endure as it ages. Undoubtedly Sanger’s opinions on the matter were influenced by her eugenic beliefs; her alarms are limited to poor families, not the well-to-do.

Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the health rate of the surviving members. Moreover, the overcrowded homes of large families reared in poverty further contribute to this condition. Lack of medical attention is still another factor, so that the child who must struggle for health in competition with other members of a closely packed family has still great difficulties to meet after its poor constitution and malnutrition have been accounted for.”

Full text

Guide:

Where can Darwinism lead?
Returning to eugenics and Nazi Germany, the Guide quotes Darwin’s Descent of Man again:

The weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this has been highly injurious to the race of man … Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to eed.

Then the Guide, after conceding that Darwin was “compassionate,” ties Darwin, through his cousin Galton, to the eugenics movement and to Hitler’s Draconian abuse of eugenics. After quoting Darwin, the Guide quotes Hitler, thereby associating the two in the reader’s mind,

In his own work, “Mein Kampf,” Hitler said, “If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.”

Then to seal the connection, we read this quote from the book From Darwin to Hitler, by historian Richard Weikart.

Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism, especially in its social Darwinist and eugenics permutations, neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the world’s greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy.

Comments:

Darwin was merely noting a practice of sound animal husbandry, allowing only the best to breed. He also observed that humans, regardless of their culture, typically do not treat other humans similarly. In fact, human culture actually shields the weaker members of society from environmental pressures.

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed (p. 502).

The bastardized version of Darwin’s quote is the one that repeatedly shows up on anti-evo sites, as it does in the Guide.

The eugenics movement misappropriated evolutionary theory, believing that its proponents could by controlled breeding create more “evolved” humans, &umlaut;bermensch in German. Eugenicists likewise justified controlling immigration and miscegenation as means to keep hereditary lines “pure.” In the US, immigration authorities favored northern Europeans over their darker skinned southern and eastern European cousins, believing that northerners were superior examples of humanity. Nazi Germany took the practice to a more severe level.

Hitler was a eugenicist, not a biologist. He believed Germans were the pinnacle of the so-called Aryan race, and were therefore justified in enslaving or killing everyone else. He was also a megalomaniacal dictator who was probably mentally deranged. To blame Darwin for Hitler’s atrocities is so idiotic as to defy description, yet Weikart manages to make the connection.

Weikart is a fellow of the pro-ID Discovery Institute, so he is hardly unbaised. The DI funded the publication of From Darwin to Hitler, Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany. Source. Weikart’s conclusions are not original, but without Darwin’s theory, though, I would suggest Hitler would have sanctioned the same atrocities. He would have found other rationales, such as Christians have historically used to kill Jews, “witches,” and heretics.

Guide:

The guide closes this section with a quote extracted from a widely used biology textbook, Evolutionary Biology.

By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.

Comments:

Taken in the context of a biology text, this statement is merely an observation. Evolutionary theory does eliminate the need to rely on supernatural forces to explain the development of life on Earth. Science has always pushed aside the supernatural in favor of material explanations. A more complete version of the quote makes this clear.

Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx’s materialistic theory of history and society and Freud’s attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism — of much of science, in short — that has since been the stage of most Western thought … (Douglas J. Futuyma (3rd ed., Sinauer Associates Inc., 1986), p. 2)

The shorter quote, as with the others in this section, pops up repeatedly on anti-evo sites. While the fuller version pretty much sums up the importance of evolution as a scientific breakthrough, the truncated version, used as a closer to this diatribe against evolution’s so-called evils, would to a Christian reader solidify the association of evolution as an enemy of Christianity. It’s another tactic of the ID and creationist movements. By repeating the same statement over and over again, science is anti-religion, science is unChristian, science is atheistic, they hope to make readers accept the lie as truth.

Guide:

One last quote in this section deserves mention, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next,” which the Guide attributes to Abraham Lincoln.

Comments:

Apparently Lincoln never said it. It’s an anonymous proverb, at least according to the Duke Law Review.
Regardless of the source, the Guide’s authors are clearly trying to insinuate that the teaching of “evilution” will lead to the moral decrepitude of the nation.

So, do you see any scientific research or evidence that evolution is an invalid theory? I don’t either. It’s just a list of assertions without proof, insinuations, quotations without citations and logical fallacies that only preach to the converted, who would not recognize scholarship or intellectual honesty if it hit them in the head.

April 10th, 2008 | Category: Commentary, Media, Science, Skepticism, evolution | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL