The reason for this public show of certainty and the unwillingness to admit that there are gaps in current knowledge are understandable – at least to some extent. Evolutionary biologists would probably be more candid about the weak spots in their discipline if it was not for the fact that vested religious interests are ready to pounce at any sign of wavering.
One consequence of this approach is that evolutionary theory has become the bedrock of scientism – science as an ideology as opposed to a method of investigating the world. As Simon Conway Morris observes, ‘More than one commentator has noted that ultra-Darwinism has pretensions to a secular religion.’51 Backsliding and expressing honest doubts about the completeness of the theory is simply not tolerated in biology in the same way it is, for example, in physics.
There is no question, however, that the biblical model should be rejected. God did not make all species complete as they are today in a week. Evolution, in its widest sense, is an established fact, even though many of the details about the precise mechanisms and forces that drive it remain highly debatable. The evidence for natural selection alone deals a deathblow to creationism, although mutation does potentially allow God to slip back in to decide what changes will (or might) work so that tweaks can then be made to DNA. But it is surely something of a demotion, and rather demeaning to an allegedly all-powerful deity. Why should the God of Judeo-Christian tradition be restricted to working in this way?
Rejecting the God of Genesis does not preclude some form of ‘soft’ design, an active but limited creative force at work. In fact, certain aspects of evolutionary history would be easier to explain if such a force existed. Everything considered, neo-Darwinism is neither the coup de grâce to all design theories, nor the atheist epiphany it is supposed to be.
According to Dawkins, once you properly understand neo-Darwinian theory, you know there is neither God nor any kind of supernatural force at work in the universe. However, the man who originally formulated the neo-Darwinian synthesis – of which Dawkins is the eager acolyte – saw it very differently. In fact, this largely unacknowledged genius would have had no problem with the thrust of this part of the book …
THE GOD GIVER
It comes as something of a shock to discover that Darwin’s ideas were far from the overnight success most people believe them to be. As science is no exception to the rule that history is written by the victors, today we have the impression that the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species changed everything at a stroke. In fact it took almost a century for his ideas to become the scientific givens that they are now. Until as late as the mid-1930s most biologists and palaeontologists considered that Darwin was, at best, half right, and factors other than natural selection played a part in evolution. Although a number of influential biologists quickly embraced natural selection, many either rejected it or regarded it as an interesting but unproven hypothesis. Palaeontologists in particular refused to accept Darwin’s theory because it failed to fit the fossil record.52
A great irony is that the rise of genetics in the first decades of the twentieth century was originally thought to demolish Darwinism. The whole basis of genetics was that genes are fixed and unchangeable units of heredity – the biological equivalent of atoms – while Darwinism required them to vary. The neo-Darwinian synthesis was the result of reconciling genetics with Darwinism, laying the foundation for everything that has come after. It was the recognition that genetic mutation was the cause of the small, individual variations that natural selection seized on and honed.
Ernst Mayr and science historian William B. Provine sum up the rapidity of the change in attitude in their introduction to The Evolutionary Synthesis (1980):
In the early 1930s, despite all that had been learned in the preceding seventy years, the level of disagreement among the different camps of biology seemed almost as great as in Darwin’s day. And yet, within the short span of twelve years (1936–47), the disagreements were almost suddenly cleared away and a seemingly new theory of evolution was synthesized from the valid components of the previously feuding theories.53
The momentum has carried on ever since. But just what happened over those dozen years, and why did Darwinism come out on top after nearly a century in the wilderness?
The surprising difficulty in answering this question is shown by the number of conferences called to discuss the events of those years. The Evolutionary Synthesis was a collection of the papers delivered at one such event organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974. A similar gathering was held in 1981 at Bad Homburg in Germany to discuss the rather syntactically tortured question: ‘How complete and how stable is, and has been, the evolutionary synthesis, or “neo-Darwinism”?’
It was there that Stephen Jay Gould delivered his paper on ‘The Hardening of the Modern Synthesis’, which covered the crucial 1936–47 period. After surveying the process of theory-hardening, he came to the more important, but problematic, question of why it had happened in the first place, admitting: ‘I now arrive at the point where I should give a conclusive and erudite explanation of why the synthesis hardened. Yet truly, I do not know.’54
He offered two possible explanations. The first he called the ‘heroic’ version, which is that evolutionary biologists came up with the right answers through an objective evaluation of the evidence. The second, the ‘cynical’ version, is that the advocates of natural selection were themselves guilty of selection, by picking only the evidence that fitted the emerging consensus and dismissing the rest:
Since the world is so full of a number of things, cases of both adaptation and nonadaptation abound, and enough examples exist for an impressive catalogue of partisans of either viewpoint. In this light, historical trends in a science might reflect little more than mutual reinforcement based on flimsy foundations.55
If the cynical version is right, Gould pointed out, it might be preventing a proper understanding of evolution by ignoring factors other than natural selection. But which is right? Gould concluded once again: ‘The only honest answer at the moment is that we do not know.’56 That was 1981, but the situation is still pretty much the same. Neo-Darwinism still dominates, but perhaps that’s because it refuses to look too closely at potentially hostile data.
The ‘hardening’ of the theory was almost entirely due to one man. Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–75) was a Russian-born, naturalized American biologist and it was his 1937 landmark book Genetics and the Origin of Species that showed the way to reconcile natural selection and genetics.
Flick through the pages of any academic book on neo-Darwinian theory and Dobzhansky is a star, acknowledged for his revolutionary insight that laid the foundation for everything that came after. But look in any more popular account and you’ll be lucky to find him so much as mentioned. He doesn’t rate a single reference in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker or The Greatest Show on Earth (although he is mentioned in passing in The Ancestor’s Tale, as ‘the great evolutionary geneticist’.)57 There may be a good reason for the difference between the way specialists talk about him among themselves and the relative silence in their public pronouncements. It’s quite simple. Dobzhansky is something of an embarrassment because he was unashamedly a devout Christian. (Neatly, Theodosius means ‘God-giver’.)
Not only was he an active member of the Eastern Orthodox Church, but he saw no incompatibility between his faith and his belief in evolution. He even saw evolution as God’s way of expressing and achieving his purpose, writing in 1970 that, ‘man was and is being created in God’s image by means of evolutionary developments’.58
Dobzhansky regarded evolution as a ‘creative process’.59 To him this did not compromise the essential blindness of natural selection: chance was an important part of the process. He thought that the putative universal designer – to him the Christian God – had set in motion a system that enabled life to develop and find its own way. He preferred to talk of natural selection as groping its way forward, having ‘tried out an immense
number of possibilities and … discovered many wonderful ones. Among which, to date, the most wonderful is man’.60
Even this was part of his much wider vision. In the words of Greek geneticist Costas R. Krimbas, one of Dobzhansky’s research students in the late 1950s, he:
… recognized that organic evolution was part of a cosmic process that comprised the birth and evolution of matter and stellar bodies, the appearance and evolution of life, and finally the genesis of humankind. Every time the process passes from one stage of complexity to the next, it transcended itself, first in the transition from matter to life, and then in the genesis of humans, the transition from material life to cultural life.61
Dobzhansky took the image of groping forward from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit palaeontologist who we mentioned briefly earlier, writing: ‘This is a splendid, though somewhat impressionistic, characterization of evolution moulded by natural selection.’62
Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was a paradoxical combination of Jesuit priest and evolutionary theorist. His eagerness to combine evolution with Catholicism was not shared by his fellow Jesuits, who wasted no time in posting him to China to prevent him lecturing on the subject. There he was part of the team that discovered Peking Man, fossil remains of Homo erectus over half a million years old. Teilhard was forbidden to publish any philosophical works or, on his return to Europe twenty years later, to apply for academic posts. As a result, he went into self-imposed exile in New York. His classic work, The Phenomenon of Man (Le phénomène humain) was published shortly after his death in 1955, when the ban expired with him.
Teilhard saw the universe as absolutely purposeful, the aim of matter being to engender life and the goal of life being to attain consciousness. He argued that human consciousness would eventually create a planetary spiritual entity that he called the noosphere, which would eventually link with extraterrestrial intelligences; life and mind would then permeate and take control of the universe. The goal of the entire process was the ‘Omega point’, at which creation reunites with its creator. To Teilhard this meant reunification with the Christian God. He declared that ‘evolution is an ascent towards consciousness – therefore it should culminate forwards in some sort of supreme consciousness’.63
Although most of his concepts had already been around for thousands of years, Teilhard’s contribution was to link them with twentieth-century ideas, particularly those from the biological sciences. The idea that the divine is present in everything and that creation is unfolding and moving determinedly towards a specific end underpins many ancient mystical systems – ironically for Catholic Teilhard, most of them Gnostic. It also very much underpins Hermeticism – especially the prime role of mind in the evolution of the cosmos – and the all-important arcane school of Heliopolis from which it developed.
Tantalizingly, there is even a specific connection, albeit an indirect one, between Teilhard’s ideas and the great Egyptian school. The same underground stream sweeps certain luminaries along throughout the millennia. Teilhard’s formative influence was the philosophy of Henri Bergson, particularly his Creative Evolution (L’Évolution Créatrice), which Teilhard read just before his ordination in 1912. Bergson (1859–1941), in turn, was heavily influenced by the works of Plotinus,64 the ‘Neoplatonic’ philosopher who we argue was more accurately neo-Egyptian given that he ultimately drew his inspiration from the religion of Heliopolis. Bergson also gave a series of lectures on the ‘numerous and impressive’ parallels between Plotinus’ system and Leibniz’ theory of monads.65
Teilhard’s ideas on purposeful evolution were surprisingly influential, particularly in the French-speaking world, and remain cautiously debated by scientists such as Christian de Duve, John Barrow and Frank Tipler. The latter two wrote in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle that ‘the basic framework of his theory is really the only framework wherein the evolving cosmos of modern science can be combined with an ultimate meaningfulness to reality.’66
Teilhard de Chardin obviously represents the polar opposite to Richard Dawkins, which is deeply ironic given that Dobzhansky, founder of Dawkins’ discipline, embraced Teilhard’s creative evolution. Not only did Dobzhansky greatly respect Teilhard’s philosophy, in the 1960s he even became President of the American Teilhard de Chardin Society. Significantly, however, he did not begin as a ‘Teilhardist’ and tailor his work in evolutionary biology to fit. Quite the reverse. It was his work on the neo-Darwinian synthesis – especially the implications of a creative element in evolution – which led him to Teilhard. To Dobzhansky the genetic system was fully compatible both with the idea of a creative, intelligent universal power and a universe evolving towards an ultimate goal.
However, the mysteries discussed in this chapter suggest that even this fails to present the complete picture. As Dobzhansky saw it, God made DNA and left it to get on by itself, confident it would eventually reach its destination. But perhaps Dobzhansky stopped short of a full answer. It does appear that other events, elements of ‘luck’ with no connection to the genetic system, were contrived to get life past particular blocks on the evolutionary road … perhaps with GUD’s helping hand.
The belief that a purely mechanistic explanation must lie behind the processes that shape evolution might hold up if the sciences generally had found no evidence of design in the rest of creation. But they have. Physics, in particular, has moved on since the mechanistic Victorian science in which Darwin advanced his theory. Biology hasn’t.
To us, towering above all the other tantalizing hints about true intelligent design is the uncanny suitability of DNA and its mysterious origins. There does seem to be something scarily made to order about it. It is not just that a molecule with all the right, miraculous properties for life should have come into being. Whatever process produced DNA did not necessarily have to make something that was also able to adapt to changing conditions. LUCA might have turned out to be an organism that could happily survive and thrive in the conditions of a four-billion-year old Earth, but would die off as soon as those conditions changed.
Similarly, the single-celled life forms that developed from LUCA and populated the planet for the first two or three billion years had limited potential for evolution. Something else had to enter the equation in order to create the revolutionary new type of nucleated cell that enabled more complex organisms to evolve. The standard theory can only ascribe this to sheer fluke. Another fluke started sexual reproduction, speeding up evolution and allowing even more complex forms of life to develop. But sex, too, faced an obstacle that would have limited the genetic diversity that it otherwise allowed had that obstacle not been removed by the appearance of the genes for ageing and, ultimately, death. Is it just us, or does that seem rather contrived?
Such ‘luck’ suggests that a proper understanding of evolution does require some ongoing creative factor, something somehow capable of comprehending the bigger picture. This, of course, fits elegantly into the designer universe scenario, and supports the evidence from cosmology that the universe was fine-tuned for intelligent life. It also implies, however, that evolution is working towards a specific end, and that the development of ever-more complex life forms is at the core of that process. This in turn implies that humanity represents its cutting edge.
But is there any evidence that human faculties such as intelligence and consciousness are more than just freak products of a blind universe? And could they be in some way actually fundamental to the cosmos?
Chapter Eleven
1 E.g. Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 173.
2 Crick, p. 58.
3 Monod, p. 167.
4 Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space, p. 119.
5 Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint, p. 109.
6 Smith, Did Darwin Get It Right?, p. 167.
7 Crick, p. 113.
8 Narby, The Cosmic Serpent, p. 92.
9 De Duve, Life Evolving, p. 51.
10 See Leipe, Aravina and Koonin.
11 Hamilt
on, p. 29.
12 Ibid.
13 In his Gifford Lecture ‘Life’s Solution: The Predictability of Evolution Across the Galaxy (and Beyond)’, given at the University of Edinburgh on 19 Feb 2007. Audio file available at the University of Edinburgh’s Humanities and Social Science’s website: www.hss.ed.ac.uk/giffordexemp/2000/details/ProfessorSimonConwayMorris.html.
14 Dawkins, The God Delusion, pp. 164–5.
15 Cavalier-Smith, p. 998.
16 Prokaryotes have, since Carl Woese’s discovery in 1977, been divided between bacteria and archaea, as described above, but neither this nor the evolution of the apparent independent DNA of bacteria, affects our point here.
17 Cavalier-Smith, p. 978.
18 Ibid.
19 Margulis and Sagan, pp. 115–6.
20 Ibid., p. 118.
21 Quoted in Ridley, p. 315.
22 Williams, p. v.
23 Ibid., p. 11.
24 Smith, The Evolution of Sex, p. 10.
25 Smith, Did Darwin Get It Right?, p. 165.
26 Ridley, p. xxii.
27 Smith, Did Darwin Get It Right?, p. 165.
28 Williams, p. 8.
29 Margulis and Sagan, p. 157.
30 Smith, Did Darwin Get It Right?, pp. 166–7.
31 Williams, p. 11.
32 See Guarente and Kenyon.
33 A. M. Leroi, A. K. Chippindale and M. R. Rose, ‘Long-Term Laboratory Evolution of a Genetic Life-History Trade-Off in Drosophila Melanogaster’, in Rose, Passananti and Matos (eds.). (This is a reproduction of a paper that first appeared in the journal Evolution in 1994.)
34 Stephen Jay Gould, ‘G. G. Simpson, Paleontology, and the Modern Synthesis’, in Mayr and Provine, pp. 153–4.
35 Mayr, pp. 529–30. A genus is the next step up from a species in biological classification, a group of distinct species that are closely related genetically, sharing a close common ancestor. Examples are the genera Canis, to which dogs, wolves, jackals, coyotes and dingoes belong, and Equus, which includes horses, donkeys and zebras.
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