What's So Scary About Evolution?

What's So Scary About Evolution? — For Both Right and Left, a Lot

John Derbyshire writes about evolution, and why it offends people on both the left and the right.

Strict fundamentalists in all three of the big Abrahamic religions regard his theories with loathing. The degree of loathing is different among the three faiths, being highest among Muslims, lowest among Jews, and intermediate among Christians. The loathing is real, though, and among some groups of believers it is very intense.

There are two reasons for this. In the first place, Darwin's theories contradict the holy books, if those books are read with a close and literal meaning. In the second, the broad outlook on human nature implied by Darwinian ideas contradicts the notion of human exceptionalism, without which the Abrahamic religions lose their point. To put it crudely, those big old Western faiths see humanity as a Chosen Species, uniquely gifted by God with powers of moral discrimination and (though there are sectarian differences here) with the prospect of an afterlife. To modern biologists, informed by Darwin, we are merely another branch on Nature's tree, our particular mental and social gifts in plain line of descent from homologues among the higher animals.

OK, that's the Right. (Religious fundamentalists are always Rightists, by definition.) What about the left?

The race issue in fact presents a conundrum for Darwinists of the political left, a conundrum eagerly exploited by religious anti-Darwinists keen to don the mantle of Political Correctness. Evolution is racist! Darwin was a racist! Darwinism inspired the Holocaust! In reply to these gleeful denunciations, the poor Darwinist can only mumble, with perfect truth but rhetorical feebleness, that as a scientific theory, Darwin's is as ethically neutral as Newton's or Faraday's. It prescribes no human action or attitude, neither "racism" nor "anti-racism" nor any other.

It cannot be denied, though, that Darwinism's metaphysical implications are hard to square with any view of human nature not flatly biological; and this applies as much to the "blank slate" egalitarianism of the irreligious Left as to the soul-based universalism of the religious Right. This is inevitable. As an empirical view of living matter, chasing down its truths one by one through thickets of patient observation, Darwinism is bound to offend systems derived from introspection, revelation, or social approval.

Here are the three prevalent views of human nature, in chronological order by origin. The "Abrahamic" view is the one promoted by the big old Western faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Darwinian view is the one implied (though not dispositively proved) by Darwinism. The third view I have labeled "Boasian" after anthropologist Franz Boas, who was the first to use it as basis for a comprehensive modern account of human nature.

Abrahamic: Our species homo sapiens is the special creation of God, either as a one-off miracle or by God-guided evolution. Human nature is a mix of attributes, some biological, some inserted by God. The God-given attributes are unique to our species. They are the same in all human populations, forming the foundation of our essential equality. Their existence is independent of our biological nature, even to the degree that they can continue to exist after our deaths. Being non-biological, they certainly do not evolve, even if other features of the living world do, so that our evolution, if it ever took place, ended (except perhaps for some incidental biological features) when God decreed we have these attributes. God rules!

Darwinian: Our species homo sapiens arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution, which have continued to the present day. Human nature is a collection of characteristics all susceptible to biological explanation. These characteristics show variation in any one population. A human population that breeds mostly within itself for many generations will develop distinctive profiles of variation, as a result of ordinary biological laws, causing it to diverge from other such populations. Neither individual human beings nor human populations are equal. Some human-nature characteristics can be shaped to some degree by "cultural" (i.e. social or environmental) forces; some cannot. Biology rules!

Boasian: Our species homo sapiens arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution. However, these processes ceased in the very early history of the species, leaving us with a human nature uniform across all populations and unchanging over time, forming the foundation of our essential equality. This human nature is infinitely resilient, like a water-filled balloon. Any of its characteristics can be pushed into almost any shape by "cultural" forces (see above), but will submit to radical re-shaping if different forces are applied. Observed variations in human-nature characteristics have probably (in the case of individuals) and certainly (in the case of populations) no biological foundation. Culture rules!

A thing you notice when these three views of human nature are lined up is how far the Darwinian explanation stands from the other two. I have worked my phrasing somewhat to bring this out, but it wasn't difficult to do so. A Darwinian view of human nature really is quite sensationally revolutionary. In particular, it makes a hash of intrinsic human equality. We may of course — and we should, and I hope we ever shall! — hold equal treatment under the law to be an organizing principle of our civilization; but that is a social agreement, like driving on the right, not a pre-existing fact in the world.

We might even speculate that the Abrahamic and the Boasian views are really the same, or that the second is a scientistic nineteenth-century derivative of the first, as Marxism was of traditional religious millenarianism. As the authors of math textbooks say: I leave this as an exercise for the reader.

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You see, it is wrong, wrong, wrong to think that anyone — even Moshe Kai Cavalin — is smarter than anyone else. That would be educational nihilism, a denial of human equality. We are all equally smart. Some people just take the wrong approach to learning, that's all.

You may have noticed there that little Moshe's Mom is Chinese. From his forename you may further have deduced, what is in fact the case, that his Dad is Jewish. Chinese … Jewish … super-smart … What is at work here: God, biology, or culture? CULTURE! screams back the entire world of right-thinking people, and who dares deny it? Well, a legendary geneticist might, but what does he know?

Only one view of human nature can be correct. Either we are the ensouled favorites of an omniscient deity; or we are biology and nothing else; or we are biological vehicles for a perfectly plastic uniform essence whose every trait is a consequence of the world immediately around us. The first option, in current American society, is largely the property of the political Right; the third, of the political Left. The middle option has no true political home, any more than Pythagoras' Theorem has. Like Pythagoras' Theorem, it is much the most useful of the three, and very likely true. Unlike the theorem, though, it tells us things about ourselves we cannot bear to hear. For that reason, it will probably never have wide acceptance.

The right objects to the notion that we arose by evolution, because it means we're apes with upgrades.

The left objects to the notion that we arose by evolution, if it means evolution kept happening as different groups of humans went their separate ways.

Both of these are logical implications of evolution, and both are denied by fundamentalists of one stripe or another.