History is more important, in subtler ways, than biology. In neither case am I referring to an accumulation of facts—historical or biological—but rather to the significance of that domain of thought for human life. I’m referring to questions like “How did I get here?” and “What on earth happened?” and not to questions like “Who won the Franco-Prussian War?”
“How did I get here?” is a question that is answerable biologically or historically, although the biological answer would focus on the syngamy of their egg and sperm pronuclei but omit Mom and Dad’s passion that led to it, and would also leave out your life experiences that brought you to this point, aside from the constant mitosis and physiological functions.
“What on earth happened?” is a historical question that can also be answered biologically. The bones at the end of your reptilian jaw migrated to the middle ear to join the stirrup as the hammer and anvil of your mammalian jaw. That’s what happened, over the course of a few tens of millions of years.
Yet, as any creationist will gladly tell you, it didn’t happen at all. The experts are either mistaken or lying. If the experts are mistaken, that implies a radical relativism of knowledge; there is no longer any such thing as expertise, and everybody’s ideas are as true as everybody else’s. And if experts are lying, then why are they doing it?—and try not to sound like a paranoiac.
Obviously it’s important. How important? In the 1920s, the creationists tried to make evolution illegal; later, they tried the relativist route, as “scientific creationism” in the 1970s and “intelligent design” in the 1990s.1 Obviously this is important; the right to speak with authority about the history of our species is simultaneously religious and political and scientific. In fact, perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the 2011 Miss USA Pageant was the question put to the contestants—“Should evolution be taught in schools?” Several of them stammered through answers to try and look both pious and open-minded, but none observed that the question was reversed, for it ought to have been “Should creationism be taught in schools?” To the pageant organizers, the norm was that creationism would indeed be taught in schools, and the question was framed about the option for Darwinism.
The history of life is not the only contested political arena; the history of America is one, too. In 1994, as the Smithsonian prepared an exhibit on the atomic bomb, a furious political war broke out.2 The intent was to get visitors to think about the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the immediate aftermath for the Japanese victims, and the beginning of the Cold War. What would casualty levels have been if the Allies had invaded Japan? Was Nagasaki really necessary? Was Truman trying to intimidate our Soviet allies as well as beat the Axis? To outraged militarists, like Charlton Heston and the American Legion, the decision to drop the bombs was such an obviously good one that any attempt to revisit it was equivalent to treason. They successfully derailed the Smithsonian from its mission of public education to one of nationalism for a time, and most importantly, they got the exhibit canceled.
In March 2010, the Texas Board of Education began to downplay the deist Thomas Jefferson in favor of more acceptably Christian founding fathers.3 History sure is political.
One of the less well-appreciated aspects of the “science wars” of the 1990s was the battlefield of historiography. Since “who gets to write history” and “how it gets written” are invariably about social power, the history of science as written by scientists tends to be quite different from the history of science as written by historians. The history of science by historians tends to privilege discoveries; the history of science by scientists tends to privilege discoverers. It is certainly understandable that scientists would privilege the discoverers in their histories: they are ancestor figures. They can be constructed as heroes, the academic Achilles and Paul Bunyan; and as role models, because—who knows?—a generation from now, you too may be the historical subject, for your own great discoveries. Indeed, history itself can be rendered as a series of leaps from discoverer to discoverer, a time line of how we got to where we are today, by standing on the shoulders of giants, as the greatest of them all, Isaac Newton, said so long ago.
But time lines are for a junior high schooler. That’s chronology, not history.
Glorifying the first at something new is very much a cultural value. At the very least it mystifies “firstness.” After all, the first was sometimes the first to make it to the patent office. James Watson and Francis Crick were the first to deduce the structure of DNA, but they knew they were in a race, and were only a few weeks ahead of Linus Pauling; in other words, if Watson and Crick had never been born, we would still have the structure of DNA. If Charles Darwin had never lived, would someone else have discovered natural selection? Of course; we know that because someone else did. Several people, in fact—Alfred Russel Wallace and Herbert Spencer, to name just a couple.4
What this suggests is that the discoverer may be less significant than the discovery, and consequently that the first to do/think/build it may be a misplaced emphasis. If several people did/thought/built it independently and simultaneously, that suggests that the conditions under which they did, thought, and built things may have been more important than who they were. Why tell me about the monk Gregor Mendel, whose work on plant hybridization wasn’t taken seriously until thirty-five years later (by which time, the same things he discovered had been discovered again)? The historical importance lies with the intellectual separation of intergenerational transmission (genetics) from development (ontogeny) in the late 1800s, which rendered Mendel’s work newly meaningful. If Mendel had never lived, we would still know what we do about transmission genetics. So why bother telling me about him? Rather, tell me what it meant to intertwine genetics and development in the 1860s, and what it means to separate them—the intellectual achievement that made Mendel’s work from 1865 newly recognizable in 1900.5
In other words, the history of science is a history of ideas, things, and relationships. The history of discoverers is just a long-running soap opera.
As a history of ideas, the history of science has its political aspects as well. What to include? Who to include? With or without warts? Does physicist Isaac Newton’s asexuality or geneticist Calvin Bridges’s hypersexuality or anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s bisexuality tell us anything important?6 Are we writing a peculiarly Freudian history of science? Moreover, there are commonly overt political interests in patronage. Patrons need to be buttered up, as even Galileo recognized at the dawn of science. And one way to accomplish that is to use history to glorify the patron, or to demonize the patron’s enemies.
Andrew Dickson White, a distinguished historian and educator, wrote a very erudite and influential two-volume work over a hundred years ago called A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. On the face of it, there would seem to be a gross self-contradiction in the title alone, given that most science has been done not in opposition to theology, but in a theological context. After all, Galileo may have been put under house arrest by the Inquisition, but he considered himself a Catholic. In fact, he was friends with the pope—which is why he felt as though he could make fun of the pope in his Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which is actually what got him into trouble. Isaac Newton may have had his doubts about the Trinity, but he wrote more about theology than about physics; he just didn’t publish it. Gregor Mendel was as much a theological insider as anybody could be.
White’s book, however, was a very influential polemic—the history of science as seen through the tunnel vision of the struggles that modern science (circa 1900) was having with Christian theology. Science represents reality, the future, wisdom, technology (all of which are actually often poorly correlated variables); religion represents backward tradition, false authority, and ignorance—and what’s more, it has always been that way!
It was an erudite and interesting approach to the history of science, but hardly fair and balanced.
Seeing history through the lens of modern issues and concerns is hard to avoid, but it is properly regarded as merely a predecessor to modern scholarship. That is to say, we now understand the past through the issues of the past, not through the issues of the present. The particular issues of today are irrelevant to what the people long ago were doing and thinking (because those issues didn’t exist yet), and would be to a large extent untranslatable to people of another age.
And yet there might be some common themes that stretch through times, and across places. The eighteenth-century French naturalist Count de Buffon was indeed forced by the theology faculty of the Sorbonne to recant, in the 1753 fourth volume of his Natural History, several things he had said in the first three volumes in 1749. He published ten paragraphs of such backpedaling, but went on to publish thirty-one more volumes, with varying degrees of impiety. But one bit of his 1753 apology was quoted by the influential English geologist Charles Lyell over seventy years later:
I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact; and I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the narration of Moses.7
And of course, Darwin devoured Lyell’s book while in the Galapagos. So isn’t it fair to draw a line connecting Buffon, Lyell, and Darwin? And The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (1925) and intelligent design (2010)?
Well, yes, but only if you can justify why the concerns of eighteenth-century Catholics, nineteenth-century Anglicans, and twentieth-century Baptists would necessarily be identical. And of course, the age of the earth (Buffon and Lyell’s primary issue) is not the same as the transformation and genealogy of species (which neither Buffon nor Lyell in the 1830s believed). So, might the issue be not necessarily religion per se, but rather social authority? After all, how do scientists react when their authority is challenged?8 How do policemen react? How do nightclub bouncers react?
Obviously nobody likes to have their authority challenged, and they will exercise the social power at their disposal to try and prevent it. To frame the conflicts as religion versus science is to miss what really binds the historical episodes. Further, to frame them as regressive religion versus progressive science is to miss a significant chunk of history—the times when science was actually wrong.
When is science wrong? To follow Popper’s famous falsification criterion, that science proceeds by proving things wrong, the answer would have to be “usually.” So that’s not a very good argument against religion. Copernicus was right in placing the earth at the center of the solar system, but wrong about the sun being at the center of the universe, the paths of planets being perfect circles, and the stars being equidistant and attached to a solid sphere. Galileo was impiously right when he said in the early 1600s that the earth goes around the sun, but Charles Bonnet was piously incredibly wrong when he said in the late 1700s that women contain their babies miniaturized in their own ovaries, and those babies contain their own miniature babies in their ovaries, until the final generation. That is not to say that Galileo should not have been persecuted for his radical ideas, and Bonnet should have been, but rather that the significant issue concerns institutions with the authority and power to persecute, not rightness and wrongness as judged in hindsight.
Hindsight, after all, is an optical illusion. Even in ancient times they knew that histories differed according to the viewpoint and interests of the writer. To the victors, a wartime triumph tends to seem inevitable, the result of superior forces, superior cunning, or superior natures. To the vanquished, it tends to seem more precarious, a bit of an unlucky break somewhere turning the tide against them.
The history of science, as written by scientists, is the history of the victors. It is the time line of inventors and discoverers, selected because they were right, or at least because they said something meaningfully similar to what we say today. With the same condescension that accompanies the label “ethnocentric,” the time-line approach to history is regarded as “presentist,” or somewhat more obscurely, “Whig history.”9 The point is that, in parallel to the ethnocentrists, who can understand another culture only as an imperfect replica of their own, the presentists aren’t trying to explain or understand the past—they are simply exploiting the past to the advantage of their modern rhetorical interests.
In this sense, the time-line approach is looking backward from the present, and picking ancestral precursors for their discoveries; but that is a history of science, not the history of science. After all, what were the other alternatives for each nodal precursor, and what was at stake? Were they the only ones working on the problem? If so, then why wasn’t the problem considered more interesting? If not, then what makes this figure the ancestor? How did they manage to discover what had eluded others, and then convince the others of it? Raw brainpower? Gift of gab? A faculty position in the Ivy League? A big grant? And why are so few of the people we talk about women or non-Europeans? Are they just not smart enough to be intellectual heroes, or is our scientific history biased in various ways that we should confront?
Genius is no better an explanation for the history of science than it is for the more general processes of cultural change, as we saw in the previous chapter. In science, everybody is smart; that’s why there is so much new discovery. Sure, there are the Stephen Hawkings and the Richard Feynmans, but without them we would still know all the math and physics they would have produced, except a bit later, and from someone else.
In other words, the history of science is about the social production of knowledge, not the neuronal production of knowledge.
Armed with the tools of naturalism, empiricism, and rationalism, European scholars of the seventeenth century began to look for, and to find, mathematical regularity—that is to say, order—in the natural world, particularly in the realms of physics and astronomy. The knowledge that the earth could best be understood as a planet orbiting a star suggested that the history of the solar system would naturally somehow incorporate the history of the earth, and moreover, that the history of the earth would somehow incorporate the history of life upon it.10
Darwinism—that all species come into existence from previously existing species, and become adapted to their local surroundings by the process of natural selection—is actually a relatively trivial proposition, in the great scheme of things. That is why it is important to see Darwinism as one of several naturalizing scientific discourses of the nineteenth century, the combination of which was so threatening; not as the product of a heroic genius.
The history of evolution, then, doesn’t begin with Charles Darwin or his grandfather Erasmus or Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. It begins, rather, with the gradual recognition that life on earth is intimately connected to the history of the world itself, and thus needs to be understood historically. But it also requires fundamentally rethinking the previously heretical idea that knowledge, especially non-biblical knowledge, is good. The compromise effected (principally in England) by theorizing geology and biology, while simultaneously maintaining that this was not a threat to the established social and moral order, came to be known as natural theology. Here, following the lead of the early astrophysicists, the biological realm was seen to be characterized by order, not by chaos. That order was the imprint of God upon the world, and to study it was to testify to God’s power and handiwork—in essence, an act of ultimate piety.11
The attributes of that order became exposed throughout the eighteenth century. First, extinction (the end of species) was a real phenomenon, with a theologically troubling prospect that God’s creations were impermanent. While a naturalist in 1720 could prophesy that a dodo might turn up somewhere other than the island of Mauritius, which is where all the other dodos were from (although one hadn’t been seen there since the 1680s), by 1820 the vast reality of extinction (as shown by paleontology) was accepted as a fact of life that required an explanation. Second, the history of life was a succession of life, with the skeletal remains of different kinds of animals superimposed upon one another, tightly fitting with characteristics of the geological features in which they were embedded. And once you have theorized the durations and ends of species, it simply makes sense to theorize their beginnings. Third, living species could be naturally arranged in clusters of increasingly exclusive similarity to one another—for example, identifying monkeys as being simultaneously animals, mammals, and primates. Physically, humans would have to occupy an adjacent spot, as Linnaeus noted in the mid-eighteenth century. What having that spot meant, however, was not immediately clear. And finally, extinct animals, known only from their skeletal remains, might often fall into the known categories but be found in the wrong places (such as elephants in the Arctic), or might crosscut the known categories (such as giant flying or swimming reptiles, like pterosaurs and ichthyosaurs).
The antiquity of the earth was settled by about 1835, with the dismissal of biblical chronology and the confrontation with “deep time.”12 (For contemporary debates, this of course means that a “young earth” creationist has issues not with the science of The Origin of Species, but with the science of a few decades before that work.) But as the age of the earth and the history of life became extended backward, human history did not get concomitantly extended. You did not find human remains in geologic strata with plesiosaurs, but only very late in the game, in Roman burials and in ancient tombs, and then looking pretty much like us. It was as if the earth and life upon it did have a history, but the human species did not, aside from its cultural history.
A pious and simple reconciliation of the data would hold that the earth and its inhabitants had a long, unclear prehistory, and that history began with God’s placement of Adam and Eve in a (modern) Garden of Eden. This, however, exposed a more interesting question: If Adam and Eve were, say, European-looking, then where did African-looking people come from? Did they come (impiously) from a separate, disconnected origin—which might imply a negative response to the famous question, “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” Or did they come (piously) from the loins of the biblical couple, implying a primordial universal brotherhood, but also the possibility of significant physical change somehow taking place in the human form over a fairly short period of geological time?13
Stone tools, which implied the existence of very early people, were increasingly being found in clear association with the remains of extinct animals.14 This in turn suggested that the disconnect between the premodern world and the Adamic modern world might not be so clear. Philology, tracking the descent of languages from hypothetical reconstructed common ancestors, gained credibility in the early nineteenth century. By about 1820, one major common precursor tongue was widely known as “Indo-European” and was considered to be ancestral to the languages spoken from Ireland to India. Languages clearly had processes of descent and a remote common ancestry in seeming contradiction to the biblical narrative, according to which linguistic diversity simply began ahistorically in Babel. Perhaps it was history all the way down.15
As human history and biological prehistory became harder to separate from one another, the question of ancestry and descent naturally came into sharper focus. What, then, was the role of ancestry in creating a human being? Where scholars had previously spoken of “hereditary” factors or diseases, they now began to theorize something called “heredity,” consisting of the regularities of transmission. They needed to distinguish the heredity of things like heirlooms from the heredity of things like faces. Moreover, they came to appreciate that the regrowth of a starfish’s arm (regeneration), the slight alterations of form needed to derive a civet, a lion, a house cat, an ocelot, and a snow leopard from some hypothetical primordial type of cat-animal (degeneration), and the general processes of reproduction (generation) might all somehow be linked phenomena—especially if you looked at animals in a new way, as clusters of cells.16
And the miraculous origin of cells was under assault in biomedicine. Cells were accepted as the “building blocks of life” by the 1840s, and by 1860 it was very clear that there was only one way to get cells—from preexisting cells. If we know that cells don’t arise miraculously, and that species are also units of life but they end naturally, it simply isn’t that great a stretch to maintain as well that species begin naturally, from other species. And many kinds of illness were appearing to be cellular, from infections to cancers.
There was a transient middle ground between the naturalistic production of cells and species on the one hand, and the miraculous primordial biblical production of cells and species17—namely, the spontaneous coalescence of new cells and new species under the right circumstances. Nobody could specify those circumstances, but it had to have happened at least once, and perhaps cells continued to coalesce spontaneously on a fairly regular basis. That might imply that the boundary between the living and non-living is porous, and that life isn’t really that special, much less miraculous. In parallel, given the succession of species in the paleontological record, it was clear that species became extinct and were replaced by other species. Those new species had to come from somewhere. Perhaps new cells and species occasionally just coalesced into existence, either miraculously or not.
Okay, not. But it was worth a try.
Yet even for the pious who weren’t interested in cells, species, or languages, the nineteenth century saw the intensification of biblical scholarship—notably, the attempt to determine what in the Gospels can be reasonably considered as historical, and what is likely to be mythological—that is to say, meaningful without necessarily being accurate. By about 1840, the life of Jesus was being tackled from the perspective of naturalism, as the German biblical scholar David Friedrich Strauss introduced a field of “higher criticism” of the Bible with his suggestion that the life of Jesus might be productively examined historically. The Golden Bough, published in 1890 by the Cambridge classicist and early social anthropologist James Frazer, contextualized the understanding of Jesus in the domain of mythology.
By the turn of the twentieth century, reason and nature had invaded even the most basic elements of Christianity.18 A backlash soon arose. Darwin was the primary target of the backlash, but there were other aspects of the modern age that soon came under assault as well—notably, liquor. But the backlash against Darwin came from somewhere. In particular, it came from the political conclusions that were being drawn in Darwin’s name. The leading expositor of Darwin in Germany was Ernst Haeckel, whose version of evolution traced the struggle for existence from amoebas to the Nordic militarist state. German officers in World War I knew their Haeckel and articulated their aggressive national ambitions in fiercely Darwinian terms.19 And William Jennings Bryan, a Christian and pacifist, paid attention to them, which helped frame his vision of Darwinism as a fundamentally evil doctrine, and eventually led to his public repudiation of evolution in the New York Times in early 1922 on the dual grounds that Darwinism was “harmful as well as groundless.”20
That raises the interesting question, Suppose the theory of evolution were grounded, but still harmful? That is to say, suppose we came from apes, and therefore . . . non-Europeans are lower forms of life? Or therefore . . . we should engage in perpetual war until only the fittest survive? Or therefore . . . we should sterilize the poor, and restrict the immigration of inferior stocks? Or therefore . . . there are no truly selfless acts, and all human behavior must be understood in terms of its self-benefit? Or therefore . . . zoos should be closed, and all captive apes should be released into the wild?21
All of these have in fact been invoked in the name of evolutionary theory in the last century and a half. But not only are they not actually consequences of Darwinism, but they are also political/moral statements that need to be judged in the political/moral realm, independently of the fact that biological species stand in a historical relationship to one another, produced by the long-term effects of natural selection.
Suppose, for example, that you are a thoughtful citizen who is more concerned with the issue of social justice than with whether we came from monkeys. Then, depending on what version of evolution you were exposed to—and one can hardly expect you to be a highly critical reader, which is the job the scientific community itself is responsible for—you might see the racism, social Darwinism, eugenics, and other things apparently derived from Darwinism as appallingly closed-minded nonsense, regardless of our relationship to monkeys. And you might be excused for rejecting the whole kit and caboodle on that basis.
It may seem a distant memory now, but 2009 was a banner year for evolutionary biology—the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and (since he was clever enough to publish it when he was fifty) the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species. International symposia extolled his greatness and the correctness of evolution—both of which are valid and accurate. Darwin was indeed a great figure in the history of ideas, and evolution is true.
After a little bit of it, though, historians began to get restless. Could we please move on?
After all, a bit of counterfactual history—if Darwin had never lived—we would still know everything we do. Possibly we would emphasize different things in our comprehension of the history of life,22 but life would still be understood historically and naturally, not miraculously. Under the premises of naturalism, empiricism, and rationalism, the scholarly community eventually has to hit on the history of life. Further, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out over a century ago, as literature The Origin of Species is quite boring.23 Moreover, a goodly chunk of what gets said in Darwin’s name is rubbish anyway. So this must be about more than simply Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species.
Of course it is. It’s about creationism, and about adopting a figurehead, a heroic ancestor, to lead us into the modern intellectual age. The problem is that by glorifying Darwin and his greatness, we give the creationists an unreasonable idea of his place. But it’s not Darwin or The Origin of Species that they have issues with; it’s the entire field of naturalized knowledge—paleontology, genetics, bacteriology, and the like. We fall into a trap by extolling Darwin: we let creationism drive the scientific agenda.
Why are there creationists? Creationism is a reflection of a basic pedagogical failure on the part of science over the last century and a half: we have failed to convince a lot of people that they are descended from monkeys, and they are very threatened by us and vice versa.
Scientists have occasionally been known to say (correctly) that scientists decide what scientific truth is. More commonly, however, they fail to take the next step, and ask the opposing questions, “What does that actually mean?” and “How would a creationist hear it?” What it means is that, under the agreed-upon conventions for establishing truth in the natural realm, scientists can lay claim to authority in deciding what is likely to be true. Obviously, though, if all parties do not agree initially on the conventions for establishing truth, then science has no claim to authority. Moreover, since science deals with likelihoods and boundary conditions, and much of its day-to-day work involves falsifying ideas from earlier days, science is commonly wrong. What we mean when we say that scientists decide scientific truths is that we want you to believe us in spite of all that, because it is the best shot we have at ever being right. And what they hear when we say that scientists decide scientific truths is the arbitrary exercise of intellectual tyranny. We cannot convince the creationists of anything if we disagree fundamentally on how reliable scientific knowledge is produced.
For creationism, then, the battleground has to be epistemological, ideological, and theological. First, how do we come to know something in the modern world? Why are experiments considered more reliable than voices coming out of burning bushes? Second, if the pattern of similarities among living and extinct life-forms does not indicate their general degree of common ancestry, then what does it indicate, especially theologically? Did the almighty Creator get tired and decide to self-plagiarize from body plans He had already used? And third, what are the attributes of a God who takes shortcuts in the creative process, or who makes it look as if the world is ancient and life evolves, if it really doesn’t? Ought such a Being to command our veneration?
In other words, creationism is not a scientific issue; it is a cultural issue.
Worse yet, by treating it as if it were a scientific issue, we—the human evolution community—have sometimes allowed the creationists to dictate the agenda, and have said things to win their hearts and minds that are untrue, do not stand up well, and simply embarrass the good name of Charles Darwin.
The very first Darwinian generation faced off against the traditionalists, and immediately incurred a debt that subsequent generations of scientists have been paying off. Confronted with the task of trying to convince European readers that they were genealogically connected to apes, in the absence of a fossil record documenting that transition, the earliest Darwinians—most notably Ernst Haeckel—advanced an ingenious argument. The evidence of connection to the apes would come only partially from paleontologists of the future; for the present, that connection was established by the non-European races. Haeckel illustrated the point with a series of grotesque facial caricatures.
In other words, Haeckel was a might quick to sacrifice the full humanity of the non-white peoples of the world, in order to score rhetorical points against the creationists.24 That is the lesson to query.
The problem here was effectively the desperation of scientists to convince the creationists of their own fundamental truths, thus permitting the creationists to lead the direction of the science. Haeckel marshaled the evidence in support of general evolution, as the leading Continental spokesman for Darwin, but what he had to say about people makes us cringe today. Some contemporary scholars were indeed put off by Haeckel’s creative dehumanization of the races of the world, but the fact remained that, to them, he was an ally in the real struggle.25 Other scholars, who identified the “real struggle” somewhat differently—as a struggle for social justice, not for monkeys as ancestors—found Haeckel’s theory of evolution so distasteful that they denounced evolution itself, not having been given adequate tools to distinguish Haeckel’s Darwinism from Darwin’s Darwinism.
Darwin’s Darwinism was first and foremost a theory of kinship. Indeed, the biblical descent of all people from Adam (monogenism; see above) inspired the earliest theories of evolution, since the monogenists had to account somehow for the descent of other human races from whatever race Adam was.26 Some were attracted to its rival, polygenism, because that seemed to offer a scientific rationalization for slavery—whites and blacks having been created separately, and thereby of different stocks. Others were attracted to polygenism for its consistency with modern science (that of 1840), showing an earth and a history of life to be far older than the Bible suggested; perhaps blacks were created long before Adam and the whites. And still others found polygenism attractive precisely for its theological radicalism, recognizing that the Bible is merely the accumulated lore of the bucolic yokels who inhabited the Near East some few millennia ago.
Darwinism, then, made the science morally respectable—given the arguments about rights and freedom and equality lurking in the background—by giving all people a remote common ancestor, although not Adam. Rather, a kind of ape. Yet within a generation it had been largely superseded by the more chauvinistic, indeed militaristic, variants espoused by the likes of Haeckel and other “social Darwinists”—like paleontologist William J. Sollas, political scientist William Graham Sumner, and sociologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge.27 A generation later, they were in turn supplanted by the eugenicists, who aimed to build a better society by controlling the microevolution of the American “germ-plasm,” which in practice involved working to sterilize the poor involuntarily, and to restrict the immigration of Italians and Jews. Far from being a fringe movement or a pseudoscience, eugenics spoke for much of mainstream biology and genetics; the first significant criticisms of eugenics from within the genetics community came from Raymond Pearl in 1927 and Hermann Muller in 1932, after the Supreme Court had legalized involuntary sterilization of the poor, and Congress had passed legislation to restrict immigration of Italians and Jews—following the recommendations of the biologists.28
Decades later, the civil rights movement saw considerable discussion over the role that evolutionary biology had to play in the public debate. There were indeed scientists willing to argue that blacks had evolved to be less intelligent than whites and therefore less deserving of full equality.29 Others argued that biology is simply irrelevant to a discussion of social justice. By the 1970s it was common to try to make evolution as amoral and as anodyne as possible. Biological anthropology books routinely sidestepped the interesting topic of race in favor of the less interesting topic of population genetics. Likewise, the role of cultural diversity in human life—motivating human life ideologically and arming it technologically, for example—was obscured by debating whether chimpanzees “had” culture.
But then came sociobiology, and evolution became meaningful again. Unfortunately, the meaning wasn’t exactly benign again.30 This time the message wasn’t about the semihumanity of non-whites or the need to sterilize the poor on account of their unfitness. Now it was that goodness itself is an illusion, for altruism toward others is either “really” just selfishness toward one’s genes (if the altruism is directed at a family member) or toward oneself in the expectation of reciprocation (if the altruism is directed at a non-family member).
At least, that’s what studies of insects seemed to show, to some people. To others it suggested that apparent altruism might be the result of the selfish behavior of ideas or “memes” replicating themselves through human action. Anything except the possibility that people might actually be nice to one another because it’s the right thing to do, and that there are sets of obligations and expectations that anyone learns (that is to say, evolved to learn) as a functioning member of a human society, any society. In this case the “evolution” of altruism in humans, for the benefit and survival of the group as a superorganism, might simply not result from the same process as the “evolution” of altruism in other animals.
So from the beginning, Darwinism was never simply a transcription of the facts of nature, but was a moral discourse as well. And yet its associated morality has rarely been its outstanding admirable quality. The reason that evolution is a moral discourse is that it is about kinship, and kinship is cultural, and cultural things have a moral dimension. And the lesson of history is this: making evolution morally unacceptable creates an argument for creationism that it would not otherwise have.
In any human society, there are things you are supposed to do, things you are allowed to do, and things that you shouldn’t do. Knowing the differences among them is maturity. Children can make mistakes and not be held fully accountable, but adults need to know good from evil, and choose good, or else risk the social consequences. Of course, local mores and taboos, and ideas about politeness and respect and morality, vary from place to place, but there is a universal constant: in order to be a member of society, you must follow certain rules. If you don’t follow them, we don’t want you around.
That might afford a very broadly applicable reading of the Adam and Eve story, whose climax involves the protagonists realizing two facts that they had never cared about before—that they are naked in public, and that it is wrong to be so.31 This is the transformation from an immature and naive state to the grown-up status of knowing the difference between right and wrong. Once you know it, there is no turning back. You have three choices: never learn it, learn it and disobey, or learn it and obey. The first choice, amorality, is the mythic state you can dream about but never return to, when you could do anything and not be held accountable for it; but now it is restricted to children, animals, foreigners, and primitive ancestors, all of whom can be at least partially excused for not knowing the rules. The second choice, immorality, leads to punishment, stigma, and exile—the mark of Cain. And the last choice, morality, is the obvious expectation, normal human existence with the burden of rules and obligations. In other words, the amoral life (where good and bad don’t exist), the immoral life (Cain murdering his brother and lying about it), and the moral life experienced by growing up in a human society (after eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—Genesis 3:5—although after a medieval gloss, we call it an apple), comprise the universe of options—and amorality is no longer available. Be moral or immoral, and be prepared for the consequences if you choose the latter.
Of course it is an origin myth, but it is only trivially an origin myth about biology. After all, nobody seriously thought that they came from monkeys until the nineteenth century, and since then, the people who have cared about it the most have been scientists. The Adam and Eve story actually serves a much more fundamental purpose as an origin myth, explaining why you should be good, and what it takes to be one of us, which is the most basic element of human society—knowing what our rules are, and following them.
Sometimes you have to do the right thing even if it gets you into personal trouble, as Prometheus learned after bringing us the gift of fire, for which Zeus had his liver pecked out by an eagle on a daily basis.32
So social behavior is fundamental to human existence, and it is organized by a code of moral conduct, which is local and variable, but is crucial to defining who we are, and most especially, who you are.
No, we do not eat insects and cats, even though they are edible. They’re yucky. No, we do not have sex with someone who does not want to have sex with us. That’s yucky, too. And we do not have sex with our sister, even if they do want to have sex with us. That’s incredibly yucky. And to the incestuous bug-eater, we explain that that’s just not the way we do things around here, and you had better shape up if you want to hang out with us.
Back to science: the maturation of modern science involves transforming science from an amoral child into a moral adult. It proceeded over the course of the twentieth century, and is still accelerating. The year 1945 saw two revelations for science. First, the complicity of American physicists in building weapons of mass destruction, which were used as they were intended, to kill and destroy, but for a good cause. As the Manhattan Project’s leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer, said a few years later, “Physicists have known sin.” And second, the complicity of the biomedical community in judging large groups of people to be innately inferior, and discriminating against them, sterilizing them, or even killing them on that basis. We know what the Germans did in the 1930s and 1940s, but we’ve never really come to grips with the fact that they were inspired by their American counterparts in the 1920s.33 Nevertheless the infamous 1927 Supreme Court decision of Buck v. Bell, which gave states the right to sterilize citizens against their will, was based on the latest American scientific knowledge and expert testimony.34 By 1936 the Germans were acknowledging their debt to American geneticists, by awarding one of the most prominent activist geneticists, Harry Laughlin, an honorary doctorate.35 It even came up at the Nuremberg trials, in defense of the Reich commissioner for sanitation and health, Karl Brandt. It didn’t help; he was hanged anyway. Geneticists have known sin as well.
Prior to 1945, one could argue, however naively, that science stood aloof from cultural matters like politics and morality. After all, science and warfare have always had connections, long before the Manhattan Project. During World War I, for example, the German chemist Fritz Haber helped the Axis cause by developing chemical weapons, notably poison gas; in opposition to enlisting science in the cause of mass death were Haber’s wife, Clara, and his friend Albert Einstein. Clara soon committed suicide over it; Einstein eventually signed the letter to Franklin Roosevelt that got the Manhattan Project started.
The theme of the scientist without morality has been a literary apprehension since the dawn of science. Francis Bacon’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe wrote of a scholar named Doctor Faustus, who seeks the knowledge and power that science touts, but who shortcuts the methods of experiment and observation by simply selling his soul to Mephistopheles. Two centuries later, Mary Shelley wrote of Victor Frankenstein, who acquires the knowledge to reanimate life, but not the wisdom to use it well. And almost two centuries after that, Michael Crichton wrote of John Hammond, whose desire is to profit from dinosaurs, whose shortcut to knowledge is his checkbook, and who can simply enlist the science and the scientists he wants by buying them. What these characters share is the author’s suspicion that “pure knowledge” isn’t really the scientist’s sole motivation. Doctor Faustus wants sex (with Helen of Troy), Dr. Frankenstein wants life, and Mr. Hammond and his scientific staff want money—the same three base motivations that inspire everyone else, except that these guys are smarter and more ambitious than the rest of us, and actually seek the power that Francis Bacon was talking about when he said, “Scientia potestas est.”
So by the second half of the twentieth century a scientist could no longer invoke the separation of science from society. The amoral universe of the primordial Garden is now the moral/immoral universe of infecting Guatemalan prostitutes with syphilis to track its spread,36 harvesting the cells of Henrietta Lacks and not sharing the wealth they generated with her descendants,37 proposing imaginary natural inequality as a rationalization for real economic and social inequalities,38 starting direct-to-consumer genetic services that may market information and misinformation about descent, race, health, or athletic potential, with hardly any oversight or regulation,39 and producing and vending genetically modified foods and psychiatric pharmaceuticals whose actual value to the human race is less clear than their profitability for their multinational corporate manufacturers.
The issue of interest-conflict is of course an old one. Compromising with the truth in order to maximize profit is, after all, the lifeblood of capitalism. It’s salesmanship, showmanship, and marketing, the sucker born every minute, and the proverbial root of all evil. You want to mix that with science? What could possibly go wrong with that?
Actually the intersection of science and profits presents such an obvious conflict of interests that we can even find a tradition of Jesus warning us about the way a quest for profit adulterates a quest of truth. Invoking a pagan personification of money, he says, “No one can serve two masters: . . . You cannot serve God and wealth [Mammon].”40
The days of imagining a separation of the life sciences from morality are long gone. We certainly don’t want non-scientists to impose a moral code upon science; and yet we scientists are utterly untrained to fashion a scientific morality for the modern age, and we have a ridiculously bad track record when we have previously tried. The best we can do is find an ideological position within evolutionary science that is less stupid and evil than previous attempts to do so. More importantly, we have to convince the public that this isn’t the wicked Darwinism of generations past, but a more ideologically benign Darwinism.