Laws and Purpose

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.

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 19^th 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.”

 Excerpt from: Jon Huer. “Auschwitz, USA.” iBooks.

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?

Dogmatic Religion of Atheists 

Science in the 19^th 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.

Crusade against the Soul

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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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.

Problems with the Paradigm of Exploitation

 Mind and Cosmos: Impossible to erase subjectivity

The failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.  In his book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False Nagel writes:

“Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science. The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything. If we take this problem seriously, and follow out its implications, it threatens to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture.“

Subjective Reality Exists

Nagel’s atheism doesn’t prevent him for advocating for consciousness, mental or subjective reality. He reasons that the ocean of perceptions, ideas, and emotions in the human mind are more than the sum total of synapses and electrical brain impulses. Nagel determines that consciousness exists and is just as real as any physical thing.

According to Nagel, even if we could map out neural firings in the brain that may be responsible for the panoply of thoughts in the network of awareness, our map could only show us where thoughts take place. But thought itself is a distinct reality; it is different from the locations of electrical impulses and the movements of neurons. We don’t feel electric patterns in our brains; our thoughts are a superior reality. This mental awareness, or consciousness is a special realm of being and must be understood and studied as such. Nagel argues that the study of consciousness should be considered primordial, just as biology takes into consideration elements that cannot be found in physics.

Altered Paradigms

If mental phenomenon and consciousness are a distinct realm of existence, obviously we must alter the paradigms of science to include them. Materialistic and purely physical theories about the origins of life are inexact. The materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature, then, is almost certainly false.

If consciousness exists as an independent phenomenon, life cannot have originated in a an undefined primordial chemical reaction.  Natural selection cannot account for the evolution of consciousness, or for the development of language in human beings.

Nagel concludes that Biology, is a distinct scientific field from from physics. Where physics deals with velocity and movement, Biology studies an phenomenology that exists beyond the purely physical. If pointing out the limits of reason was the preoccupation of Kant, Nagel wants to put limits to the imperialism of physics and its determination to exclude consciousness from the life sciences.

Half-baked Theory of Everything

Stephen Hawking has the hubris to call his half-baked speculations “A Theory of Everything.” Even if his highly speculative views have some value, their exclusion of life, consciousness, language, mind, emotion, will, and the entire phenonemon of subjective reality hardly qualifies as a theory of everything.

As Nagel points out, “subjective consciousness, if it is not reducible to something physical, … would be left completely unexplained by physical evolution—even if the physical evolution of such organisms is in fact a causally necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness.” Since physics hasn’t the slightest pretense of explaining consciousness as a reality it can hardly be said to explain everything.

Deeper Understanding of Universe

So Nagel calls for a deeper understanding of our universe, one that takes up the big questions and delves into the nature of consciousness. Nagel’s views are, of course, heresy for those who have embraced Neo-Darwinistic positivism as their religious point of view, as he himself acknowledges:

“The argument from the failure of psychophysical reductionism is a philosophical one, but I believe there are independent reasons to be skeptical about the truth of reductionism in biology. Physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox view, and any resistance to it is regarded as not only scientifically but politically incorrect.”

The idea of Evolution as Religion is not new. Indeed, in the book by that name, Mary Midgley ascribes religious fervor and intensity to the devotees of Darwin and his disciple Dawkins. Here’s Dawkins comparing animals to machines while ascribing personality to inert matter:

“The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.”

Inert and inorganic matter is here compared to creative gods by the eminent evolutionary biologist.

“Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived...”

While it is certainly imaginative and charming to compare chains of ribo-nucleic acid with Al Capone, this is hardly “science.”

Dawkins continues, “...in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes.”

Note the tenuousness in his argument. Having ascribed gangster personalities to inert genetic materials Dawkins exhorts us to “expect” this gangster-like quality.

“I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness...” Genetic material, being inorganic, has no consciousness or self. Why would a scientist attribute selfishness and even ruthlessness to inorganic matter?

Of course, Dawkins is not a scientist when he adopts this language. He is using “colorful language” as a charming “popularizer” of science. Attributing personality to genes while denying the existence of the self is quite a trick. He even goes so far as to attribute immortality to the gene:

“It does not grow senile; it is no more likely to die when it is a million years old than when it is only a hundred.”

Of course, the gene is not living material, so it can neither live nor die. But never mind, this is no longer science, but a flight of fancy:

“It leaps from body to body down the generations, manipulating body after body in its own way and for its own ends, abandoning a succession of mortal bodies before they sink in senility and death. The genes are the immortals.”

(Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene Oxford University Press, 1976 p2-3)

Dawkins would deny the very existence of the self, and yet is celebrated for a book on “Selfish” genes. Since genes are inorganic material it remains to be seen how they can be “selfish.”

Philosopher Mary Midgley in her book Evolution as Religion focuses on the paradox that while modern scientific atheists want to exclude faith from science, they end by having faith in reason. Faith refuses to die, so it is applied towards materialism. Surely science will give us the answers we need--in the future. Never mind that Social Darwinism explains that the survival of the fittest has selected the white race to dominate the weaker races. Never mind that Social Darwinism, Eugenics, and Racism are only a few of the byproducts of rampant materialism.

Darwinism as Religion

Dawkins’s Darwinism itself is a form of religion argues Midgely: “Though this idea [of the Selfish Gene] has no place in science, it is extremely suggestive to the religious sensibilities. Worship, as we have already seen, is not only something carried out in Gothic buildings by people singing Hymns A&M. It has many other forms and can be entirely informal. It is certainly the mood most strongly suggested by Dawkins’s discussions of the gene. Sociobiological thinking, then, seems to conduct, side by side with its perfectly respectable attempt to account for the inheritated co-operative tendencies of plants and animals, a very different and far less respectable myth-making activity.”

Midgely points out that it is common in the literature of socio-biology to ascribe motives to inanimate material such as genes, or to the process of natural selection itself.

Thus Midgely, on the animistic tendency in sociobiological literature : “There is a constant colourful invocation of non-human, but purposeful-sounding beings--usually the genes or DNA. These are treated as real calculating agents, manipulating human beings and other animals, who may suppose that they have purposes of their own, but are deceived in this, being in fact only ineffectual pawns, puppets or vehicles of these ‘hidden masters.’” Midgely objects to this personification: “The effect is, of course, to produce bad science,” she says.