Darwin’s Laws
Terrified of the primacy of “hard” science and the
imperialism of physics, biologists sought the equivalent of Newton’s paradigm
of mechanistic and deterministic physics in Darwin’s theory. Newton’s laws of
motion and thermodynamics explain movement of objects through time and space.
Darwin’s theory describes the movement or “evolution” of genetic life forms
through time and space. Where Newton gives us action and reaction, friction,
inertia, and entropy as physical laws, Darwin has given the the principles of
variation in the species, natural selection, survival of the fittest, and
chance as the laws for the origin and development of species.
Newton vs. Darwin
The idea that biology should follow natural laws, similar to
those of physics is dear to biologists. Once their science is based on incontrovertible
laws they will have achieved parity with the “hard” science of physics and
break the imperialism of physics. As long as the laws of physics are applied to
biology through Darwinist theory, biology would appear to be a hard science,
not merely a conglomeration of observations and classifications. Once the theory
is enshrined as doctrine, biologists have a framework to explain everything:
everything except the life which is under study.
The Study of Life
If “Bio-ology” means “the study of life” the biologists fail
when they try to explain “life” as an epiphenomenon of matter. There is no
evidence for this explanation.
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| William Blake's Newton |
Nonetheless, biologists want laws and Darwin’s are useful,
since they exclude any link between life and consciousness, between
consciousness and higher consciousness, between higher consciousness and the divine.
Unfortunately, the parallels between Darwin and Newton aren’t really hard
science at all. Newton’s laws may apply to the the movement of inert objects, but
those objects will not transform over time. “Matter can neither be created nor
destroyed,” says Newton. Burn a carbon-based form and you get carbon. Boil
water and you get water vapor. The water molecules do not disappear. The
elements may change states from solid to liquid to gas, they may combine in
novel ways chemically, but Newton tells us that they are not fundamentally
transformed. In biology the transformations even within the species are
astonishing. Look around. No two human noses are exactly the same. Everyone has
a different face. Face recognition technology and biometrics are based on the
idea that no two individuals are alike.
The transformation to childhood to youth to old age also leaves us
unrecognizable. Take a meeting with a friend from primary school. You won’t
recognize him. The astonishing transformations of biology defy the laws of
Newton. A caterpillar has teeth. The same caterpillar transforms into a
butterfly. The butterfly not only has not teeth and is incapable of eating
leaves, it has wings and can fly. How can such a monster exist. And yet biology
demonstrates the existence of incredible monsters. What child is not impressed
by a trip to the museum and the dinosaurs he sees. As a boy I visited the La
Brea tar pits where giant wooly mammoths were trapped in tar and fossilized for
thousands of years. How is such dynamic transformation possible?
Entropy and Order
If the universe follows the Newtonian law of entropy, we
should see a gradual deterioration of everything, a decay.
When a pitcher
releases the ball the escape velocity of the ball from his hand is at its
greatest point. As the ball travels to the plate the velocity decays. This is
because of friction and gravity. Entropy is the idea that systems over time
become disorganized. This means the entire universe is locked in a downward
spiral of decay. But life takes the opposite path. If we are to believe the
Darwinists, over time life becomes more and more organized, defying the law of entropy, but without any purpose.
Mollusks evolve into sharks, sharks into amphibians,
dinosaurs, and birds. Dinosaurs and birds into reptiles and mammals, mammals
into primates and apes. Higher order apes into humans. Natural selection has an
upward path; species do not remain in homeostasis. Rather than a downward
spiral governed by the law of entropy which says that systems tend toward disorganization
over time, evolution demonstrates quite the opposite: over time life-systems
become ever more complex. What drives the cycle? How does life overcome the
principle of entropy?
Mechanistic Determinism
There are many such philosophical problems that divide the similarities
between the physical laws of Newton and the natural laws of Darwin.
Since the Darwinists want to mimic the physical laws of
Newton, evolution is described as a gradual, continuous process. Change in
Newtonian physics is local, and so also in biology. Then again, since Newton’s view
of physics tends towards determinism, Darwin’s biology is also deterministic. The
beauty of extending Newton’s determinism towards life systems is that Darwin’s
theory can apply the same mechanistic determinism to living systems. Following
the positivist paradigm of the 19th century philosophers, everything
becomes deterministic: the physical world is governed by the laws of Newton;
the living world by the laws of Darwin; the economic world by the laws of
supply and demand, by Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the mental and psychic world by
the laws of Freud. In our practical, useful world, there is a law for
everything. According to the materialist philosophers that have ruled the world
of Western thought for more than a century, human beings are no more than units,
objective things whose lives and choices are governed by the same inexorable
laws that govern material nature and the atom.
Humans as Objects: Auschwitz and Amerika
The “laws of nature” are not exclusive to material
phenomenon; today they are applied in the human sphere. In Auschwitz USA, Jon
Huer writes of the objectification of humanity and its manipulation by
psychology:
“In the last hundred years of industrial advancement, a great
deal of scientific progress has been made in the field of Efficiency Studies.
Known as Human Resources Management among those who study these things, the
main quest has always been: How to control human thoughts and actions so that
everything works to the maximum benefit of those who control these human
resources. The maximum benefit means getting things done in the cheapest way
possible. And to get things done as cheaply as possible, the experts and
managers must control the human resources as thoroughly as possible.
Accordingly, the most “efficient” system is one that controls the human
resources by eliminating the human part and turning them into pure resources.
In other words, their ultimate organizational goal is to transform people into
things. This is the quest of all efficiency experts and human resources
managers and what is commonly called organizational behavior…. “The technique
of choice for the Nazi Masters was a skilled combination of brute force and
psychological terror; the technique of choice for the American Masters is their
“free enterprise,” which creates dependency in its consumers by giving them
what they want; this dependency leads to addiction, in which the consumers
cannot think of their daily lives without consuming what they want; once this
state of addiction is created in the consumer, it leads to control of the
consumers by the master-supplier of their addiction. Once this
dependency-addiction-control process takes place, the American consumer
resembles a helpless child who must depend on the adults for everything,
thinking, acting and feeling like a human
being included. Just now, the most dependency-certain product in the U.S.
is entertainment, inclusively
speaking, but most dominantly manifest in TV. It is the Opium-like power of
entertainment that hangs over every corner of life in America that is
profoundly altering all that is human and real.
Brute force and psychology were not invented by the Nazis;
but they used them to perfection in the Holocaust. Nor was entertainment an
American invention. But it is in American society today that entertainment “our
national creed and has made us its most dependent consumers. Only in America
now do we observe what was hitherto a peripheral human activity—largely limited
to the “useless” classes, both upper and lower—as our life-defining and
society-transforming force. But target populations, both at Auschwitz and in
America, display such complete submission to their managers that their
similarity creates an eerie historical double-take.”
It is bizarre and uncomfortable for us to consider the
parallels of psychological manipulation and propaganda in Nazi Germany and in
modern human resource management. But Huer’s book raises some important
questions. Where everything can be reduced to “laws” and “machinery,” where
humans are no more than animals and animals are “machines” there is little room
for genuine human life. Darwin laid the groundwork for the mechanistic paradigm that
holds us in our grip. How did the ideas
of Darwinism evolve into the dogmatic religion of atheists?
Science in the 19th century was in a death
struggle to free itself from the shackles of religious dogma. For Descartes, animals
were machines; but humans had free will and were beyond mechanism. Darwin, by
proposing animal ancestry to humans, took the next step and proposed to
demolish the Cartesian idea of human free will, instead pronouncing human
beings as much a part of the mechanistic paradigm as animals. Having disposed of free will, there was no
further need of God.
For the Neo-Darwinists, it is essential that organisms, are
defined as machines. Positivism and the philosophy of usefulness made humans
into machines, justifying slavery and many other iniquities.
The argument against organisms as independent life with free
will was first countered by attacking the idea of purposiveness. Determinism means determined by
“material and initial causes.” Purpose involves ultimate causes or teleology; a remote cause is incompatible
with materialist determinism.
The crusade to define humans as machines begins with an
attack on purposiveness in biology. The idea of “acquired characteristics” was
next to go, since it gave some credit to the individual organisms. The attack against
Lamarckism was really an attack against vitalism and the idea of organisms
having free will and purposiveness. Any ideas giving credence to autonomy and
free will at the level of the organism must be destroyed for the mechanistic
paradigm to prevail. Autonomy and purpose at the organismic level cannot be
reduced to mechanistic determinism and must be discarded a priori. Finally, the nature of life itself, of consciousness,
must be neatly disposed of. For the materialistic philosophy consciousness can
only be an epiphenomenon of matter. Life itself must be mechanistic, a product
of inert chemicals that somehow organized, never mind how. Materialistic
positivism must reject anything non-physical, any energy not quantified by
Newton’s laws, anything vital.
The attacks on teleology, or purposiveness and design, “Lamarckism”
and organism-based theories and “vitalism” or any appeal to consciousness have
continued and intensified since the 19th century, forming a kind of ideologically
motivated “crusade.” The hatred against
religion spewed by such publicists as Dawkins is the end-product of a tone of
debate that really began with Thomas Huxley, the first great popularizer of
Darwin. The crusade against vitalism was
especially important for the 19th century materialists since the
idea of the subjective evolution of consciousness is a threat to the most
fundamental tenet of materialist philosophy—the primacy of matter.
Dr Amit Goswami in his book, “Creative Evolution Physicist’s Resolution between Darwinism and Intelligent Design” underscores
this point:
If life requires a vital substance to
operate, then where is the supremacy of the material? For Darwinists and
evolutionary biologists, vitalism poses an additional threat because it can
justify an evolutionary thrust toward more and more complex manifestations of
purposiveness. Darwinists are all too aware the progression of evolution toward
more and more complex life, must be reckoned with. If data exist, along with a
theory for explaining the data, the situation could prove too embarrassing and
too difficult to rationalize away. Hence, mainstream biologists have always
opposed vitalism.
Initially
the opposition was based on a two-fold approach. First, vitalism was seen as
dualism. The question is posed; how does a dual nonmaterial vital substance
interact with a material substance? This query puts the vitalist on the
defensive. Second, anything vital that we may feel is considered part of the
interior subjective experience. The idea of epiphenomenalism was posited: All
our internal experiences are epiphenomena of matter, of the body. And, of
course, when molecular biology was solidly established and the functioning of
the life of the cell began to be elucidated in unforeseen detail, vitalism just
faded away. Eventually, it became every biologist’s prerogative to deny any
vitalistic tendencies. However, as I
mentioned earlier, vitalism made something of a comeback in the 1980s with
Rupert Sheldrake’s (1981) introduction of the idea of nonlocal and nonphysical
morphogenetic fields.
Purposiveness and Design
Since arguments that
support purposiveness and design involve reasoning from seemingly purposeful
features of the observable world to the existence of at least one designer,
design arguments are teleological (from the Greek word “telos”, meaning “goal”
or “end”).
If evolution is
purposive then Darwinism is wrong. Darwin argues that chance environmental
conditions encourage “selection” for survival. For contemporary evolutionary
biologists there is no purpose to the universe. Darwinian natural selection
accounts for everything. As Mary Midgley observes in The Solitary Self:
Neo-Darwinian theorists offer this force as the final
explanation, not just of evolution, but of all sorts of deep social, physical
and metaphysical mysteries as well. us it seems that competition lies at the
heart of the universe. And what explains our own lives is the unbridled, savage
competition between the genes that supposedly rule us. is is the vision that
Richard Dawkins offers us in answer to questions about human destiny in his
book River Out of Eden, which is boldly subtitled A Darwinian View of
Life: “ universe we observe has
precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no
purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference ... DNA
neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.” (Dawkins 1995: 155).
The mechanism of natural
selection alone is responsible for the variation of species. One of the
problems for this idea is the increasing complexity in highly evolved species.
One might even claim to demonstrate that evolution results in a hierarchy of
being. But since this hierarchy shows purpose
and design, Darwin’s views need adjustment. Of course no one really promotes
Darwin’s views today: his original thesis has been modified several times by
the great thinkers in biology. Today his revised theory is Neo-Darwinist. Some
of these scientists have even gone so far as to incorporate design and
purposiveness into Neo-Darwinism, reclaiming it from the vitalists.
Evidence of Purposiveness in the Hierarchy of Evolution
Metacognition, altruism, ethical considerations, moral
sense, are impossible to explain from the point of view of Dawkins and his
genetic determinism. And yet there have been
noble attempts. Neo-Darwinists are adept in adjusting the Darwinian hypothesis—since
it is really a supple mythology, capable of adapting to fit any doubt. In the
19th century it was argued that only the strong survive. Natural
selection favors ruthlessness. As Dawkins puts it, even the gene is “Selfish.”
But if later studies reveal that altruism is an important evolutionary factor
in humans, there is no difficulty. Biologists suddenly discover that humans
were selected for survival because of the genetic trait of altruism. Genes
suddenly shed their selfishness and become compassionate. As Amit Goswami puts
it, “Darwinism is so general that it can be reinterpreted to incorporate any data
that contradicts it. It is not falsifiable.” But of course, Neo-Darwinism is
not a true scientific thesis for it explains nothing, predicts, nothing and
cannot be falsified. As philosopher Karl
Popper famously observed, “Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory,
but a metaphysical research
program—a possible framework for testable scientific theories.”
Dawkins complains that the universe has no purpose, even
while ascribing purposiveness to his “selfish” genes. But our universe is full
of purpose, from the apple seeds that become trees to the living beings that
surround us everywhere; everywhere there is purpose, everywhere design. The
artificial logic that strives to divorce life from purpose is blind to the life
that creates logic. Everywhere is design. And Dawkins cannot avoid speaking in
teleological metaphors, even in his atheistic myth-making. He holds up DNA as a
godlike agent whose pitiless indifference forces us to dance to its tune. As if
DNA was Krishna playing his flute on the banks of the Yamuna, forcing us to
dance to his divine song. And how could DNA make us dance to his tune if there
were no purpose in the composition?
Stephen Jay Gould was the
most famous popularizer of evolutionary science before Dawkins. But even Gould
found evidence for purposiveness in the material creation. It is, he says, far
more natural and rational to read the universe we know from science as a purposive
whole than deliberately to ignore all this evidence for system. Purpose and direction is immanent and
widespread throughout the cosmos. Again Midgely:
More generally, it is an objective fact that all living
things behave purposively: that is, they all strive and struggle to live in the
way that their particular nature requires. They do not, of course, need to be
conscious to do this. An acorn that is buried under a paving stone will go to
enormous lengths to grow past or round the stone or, if necessary, to lift it
up in its struggles, because this is the action necessary for a proper oak
seed. An enquirer who did not under- stand this purposive striving would have
no chance at all of under- standing what the acorn was doing.
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