Thor's Day: Natural selection

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

A scientific myth

By Kyle Garza

The qualities of a good mythological tale are easily recognizable to anyone. Personified powers or forces like gods of war or love vie for power or control in a great cosmic hierarchy. Some rise and some fall, but progress is always being made. Today, we assume that in the sophisticated, intellectual culture of the 21st century, with our scientific advancement and progress, we have left these archaic beliefs in the superstitious dust where they belong.
    But we haven’t entirely. The mythological “power” or “force” that has somehow survived in our era under the masquerade of scientific explanation is that of natural selection. Natural selection, properly understood, is the unguided process by which the best adapted organisms survive and reproduce: “survival of the fittest” in layman’s terms. Charles Darwin posited the idea of natural selection as an explanatory “mechanism” that brings about evolution in biological systems. In the late 19th century, Darwin’s “mechanism” was considered (and still is by many) to be the “inference to the best explanation” for the complexity and diversity of life that we see around us today.
    The method of “inference to the best explanation” can best be explained through the work of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Peirce (1839-1914): if C is observed, and a hypothetical A is the best explanation for why C would be true, then there is sufficient reason to suspect that A is true. Today, the diversity and complexity of life is our C and natural selection is our A in the majority of academia.
    The trouble with this idea is that natural selection is touted by the loudest, most avant-garde biologists to be the only explanation of the biological data that we have. All that lies between A (natural selection) and C (what we observe today) is purported by Neo-Darwinists to be just a matter of interpreting how the glory of natural selection’s power works; all that is B will inevitably yield its arms to an explanation owing to natural selection, according to this branch of scientists. This appeal to positivism (the idea that there is a single unambiguous interpretation of the evidence, which any right-minded observer would discover) is a conundrum that denies a priori any and all criticism of the philosophical underpinnings of natural selection.

It is then prudent to begin here that very criticism. There are two fundamental flaws inherent in the “mechanism” of natural selection. The first and foremost is a matter of teleology, or “goal” to most laymen. Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) says it best in his The Blind Watchmaker when noting that, “Natural selection, the blind unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind.” Dawkins thus sees natural selection as a “blind watchmaker,” the best response to the argument from design of William Paley (1743–1805). Essentially, natural selection drives in a specific direction, but no agent is driving it. Contrary to this notion, biologist and philosopher Francisco Ayala (b. 1934) has argued that this explanation is insufficient and flawed, for teleological explanations in biology cannot be so easily divorced from natural selection for two fundamental reasons: First, because it is directed to the goal of increasing reproductive efficiency; and second, because it produces the goal directed organs and processes required for this.
    Scientists have thus found themselves concluding exactly what Cambridge evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris (b. 1941) has: “Life has a peculiar propensity to ‘navigate’ to rather precise solutions in response to adaptive challenges.” Morris’s use of the word “navigate” is particularly helpful for analyzing the second best criticism of natural selection: our language which describes its goalless, unguided mechanical work is unavoidably anthropomorphic and teleological. Still, some scientists and philosophers see no problem with this linguistic struggle. Widely credited with inventing the modern philosophy of evolutionary biology, Ernst Mayr (1904-2005) noted that “the use of so-called ‘teleological’ language by biologists is legitimate…” because it supposedly does not contradict the “noncausal explanation” which is always supposedly at the heart of natural selection. To express Mayr’s opinion simply, we merely face a language barrier when describing the mechanism of natural selection. He believes natural selection’s “guiding power” supplants our inability to describe its mysterious ways in the very terminology in which it operates: blindly and purposelessly. The primary fault in this line of reasoning is that it exalts the agent in question above the human mind that attempts to understand it, an action which most atheists pin on scientists of any theistic persuasion as an “unscientific” copout.

In addition to these two great shortcomings of natural selection, any criticism of the mechanism is bound to awaken a hornet’s nest in academia. In today’s arena of scientific endeavors where paradigms are constantly evolving and being replaced by the latest breakthroughs and evidences of the decade, natural selection has received a new wave of criticism from scientists who, while remaining naturalists by worldview, question the veracity of natural selection’s power. Take for instance the work of biologists Jerry Fodor (b. 1935) and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (b. 1942): they currently find themselves in a storm of academic attack for their criticism of natural selection’s agency in Darwinism, calling out the “distressingly uncritical” nature of “much of the vast Neo-Darwinian literature” of today that attempts to explain natural selection’s role in biological evolution. Fodor in particular has questioned the “selective breeding” power of natural selection, noting that “breeders have minds” despite natural selection’s supposed “mindless” favoring of certain breeds. Once again, the linguistic shortcomings of scientists continues to produce a dead-end when it comes to explaining just how natural selection does anything.
    Now in Darwin’s day, and even still in our own, scientists desired to remove all notions of a “God of the gaps”: the idea that, wherever science may fail to produce a rational explanation for observed phenomena, “God did it” becomes the substituted answer. But natural selection has begun to become a “natural selection of the gaps” which has supplanted the “God of the gaps” approach. In fact, even atheist biologists like William Provine (b. 1942) of Cornell University have begun to argue thus:

Natural selection does nothing… Having natural selection select is nifty because it excuses the necessity of talking about the actual causation of natural selection. Such talk was excusable for Charles Darwin, but inexcusable for Darwinists now. Creationists have discovered our empty “natural selection” language, and the “actions” of natural selection make huge vulnerable targets.

    But biologists are not the only scientists challenging the mysterious “agency” of natural selection despite its being described as nothing more than a “mechanism.” Nobel laureate physicist Robert Laughlin (b. 1950), whose research is on the properties of matter that make life possible, has summarized the naturalist worldview which embraces natural selection as the driving “force” of all evolutionary life this way: “Your protein defies the laws of mass action – evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken – evolution! The human brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the cause!” Laughlin’s comment is sarcastic to be sure, but his words help to identify a pattern of begging the question that is inherent in natural selection’s explanation of the very human brain that describes it. The human brain is certainly the only reasoning faculty that is able to describe natural selection, but scientists are crediting natural selection with the production of the brain that theorized the very idea! Still, this kind of circular reasoning isn’t new to modern science.

Actually, C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)) identified it in 1947 in his work titled Miracles. Lewis, like many philosophers even today, had begun to question the rational basis for believing the inferential power of the human mind from a naturalist’s perspective, for, as theoretical physicist and Christian theologian John Polkinghorne (b. 1930) notes, “There is a congruence between our minds and the universe, between the rationality experienced within and the rationality observed without.” The situation is therefore clear: the rationality of the human mind has come up with an “irrational” or (perhaps better) “a-rational” explanation for life; natural selection, having no goal or agency or reason, does not “rationally” attempt to create minds that are capable of goals, agency, or reason. So the question is thus demanded: why would we trust a mind created by a mindless universe? Lewis summarized the naturalist’s answer as follows:

Well, perhaps we cannot exactly see – not yet – how natural selection would turn sub-rational mental behavior into inferences that reach truth. But we are certain that this in fact has happened. For natural selection is bound to preserve and increase useful behaviour. And we also find that our habits of inference are in fact useful. And if they are useful they must reach truth.

    In laymen’s terms, natural selection best explains rationality because rationality hypothesized the idea of natural selection, but this is circular reasoning defined. Natural selection thus offers neither an answer to the origin of life, nor any justification of why the rational human mind should be trusted with the idea that natural selection is true.

Today, as a matter of history, we ought not forget that Darwin himself was quite clear that his theory of natural selection was not the only explanation of the biological data which could be adduced. It seems evidently so, for though the notion of an agent or mind or God does not appeal to the large population of naturalists in academia, they have forsaken a so-called ancient myth for a merely modern one. Natural selection no more accounts for life than the law of gravity accounts for the existence of the universe (as Stephen Hawking would have us believe). The conflict ultimately lies in a chasm of worldview. The naturalist axiomatically rejects the notion of the supernatural, and thus attempts to explain life within the terms of his purported closed-system universe – no agency or mind or God is allowed in. Neo-Darwinists in particular have attempted to escape the clutches of God and instead created an idol in his place: natural selection. This resulting idol is nothing more than a personified “power” or “force” that masquerades as a scientifically observed “mechanism,” but in reality is nothing more than a genuine “god of the gaps.” If scientists truly desire to reach a conclusive answer, an end, an omega to the great question of the origin of life, they ought to reevaluate their a priori rejection of the God who calls Himself Alpha.

Copyright © 2014 by Kyle Garza