Darwinian Fairytales

By James Franklin
Tuesday, 24 October 2006
An Australian philosopher ruthlessly dissects the logic of Darwin and his followers.

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In public debates over evolution, people often lose sight of the foundational principles of its most popular explanation, Darwinism. One who did not was the Australian philosopher David Stove, whose book Darwinian Fairytales is reviewed below by his literary executor, James Franklin. This gem of ruthless logic and rapier wit was originally published in 1995 and, inexplicably, went out of print. For a while it languished on the internet in an electronic version, until it was reprinted earlier this year in the United States.

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Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution By David Stove
320 pp Encounter Books ISBN 1594031401 2006

The evolution versus intelligent design controversy is a strange one, in that positions are taken on a scientific question on religious and philosophical grounds. And not just on one side. Most defenders of intelligent design would prefer it to be proved that Darwin’s theory of evolution cannot account for the complexity of living things, in order to give room for divine creation to fill the gap. On the other side of the debate, Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and other leading pro-Darwinian books, writes "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually-fulfilled atheist". He has a strong philosophical need for the science to deliver a certain answer too.

The question of the evidence for Darwinism is not easy, contrary to popular belief. The evidence that present organisms descended from primitive forms over very long periods of time ("evolution" strictly so called) is indeed very strong. It is not so easy to prove conclusively Darwin’s theory of the causes of evolution. The sole (or almost sole) cause of evolution, Darwin says, is natural selection (the "survival of the fittest") acting on random small changes in genetic material.

In the nature of the theory, it is rather distant from any observations, as long-term evolution is not directly observable – it requires subtle arguments like extrapolation from varieties to species and genera, excuses for gaps in the fossil record, argument about whether "irreducibly" complex structures could have evolved bit by bit, and calculation as to whether something as complex as humans could have evolved by a random search process in the time available. A complex theory with such a distant relation to evidence needs attention from an expert not so much in biology as in logic, and one without a philosophical axe to grind.

David Stove fits the bill. An (atheist) Australian philosopher (1927-1994), he was known for his defence of the rationality of inductive reasoning and his logic-based criticism of the philosophy of science of Popper and Kuhn. Shortly before his death he completed the manuscript of Darwinian Fairytales, an attack on modern evolutionary theory from a different direction from the proponents of intelligent design. He has two main criticisms. The first is that Darwinian theory is so logically flabby it can "explain" anything by subtly changing the terms of the debate. He writes of the standard account of altruism:

Any discussion of altruism with an inclusive fitness theorist is, in fact, exactly like dealing with a pair of balloons connected by a tube, one balloon being the belief that kin altruism is an illusion, the other being the belief that kin altruism is caused by shared genes. If a critic puts pressure on the illusion balloon -- perhaps by ridiculing the selfish theory of human nature -- air is forced into the causal balloon. There is then an increased production of earnest causal explanations of why we love our children, why hymenopteran workers look after their sisters, etc., etc. Then, if the critic puts pressure on the causal balloon -- perhaps about the weakness of sibling altruism compared with parental, or the absence of sibling altruism in bacteria -- then the illusion balloon is forced to expand. There will now be an increased production of cynical scurrilities about parents manipulating their babies for their own advantage, …

His other criticism is that the Darwinian theory requires it make statements about all species that we all know are false of the human species. For example qualities injurious to a species are supposed to be "rigidly destroyed", whereas we know abortion, celibacy, and many other traits are common in humans.

Science is an excellently rational enterprise, perhaps the best in the business. But it has never been very good at admitting its problems. It would not hurt evolutionary theory to admit that critics like Stove and the intelligent design theorists have identified serious problems. It would be better to work on answers than trying to shoot the messengers.

James Franklin is an associate professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney.

Further reading

David Stove, `So you think you are a Darwinian?’. Royal Institute of Philosophy website.
James Franklin, `Stove’s anti-Darwinism’. Royal Institute of Philosophy website.

Roger Kimball's Introduction to the new edition.

source: Mercatornet

When I use a word

George Rutler

Lewis Carroll anticipated the word games that demagogues play when he had Humpty Dumpty say, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” There are a lot of Humpty Dumptys around in our time, turning words inside out to turn the moral order upside down. They call vice “liberation” and infanticide “health care.” A few years ago, a major chain of bookshops listed a book on how to commit suicide under the category “Self-Improvement.”

George Orwell updated Lewis Carroll in his brooding book 1984. By now “Orwellian” has become a neologism for Humpty Dumpty talk. In a famous essay called “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell wrote: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Foolish thoughts can also be criminal and destructive. Recently the press reported the death of a retired Massachusetts congressman who, despite having been censured for perverse and predatory sexual offences with a youth, was re-elected to office and given major leadership offices. One senator called him “a role model.” The New York Times and the Boston Globe obituaries said that he was survived by his husband. His husband. The syntax reminded us that we are a couple of decades past 1984 and language rot is now a received style. It is not just Humpty Dumpty silliness: It is a deliberate attempt to alter reality by altering the language which describes reality.

Orwell optimistically thought that the decay is reversible, but “to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.” By definition, however, regeneration is not the desire of the degenerate. The clarity of thought urged, for instance, by Pope Benedict is considered scandalous. The historian Toynbee said that civilizations die, not by invasion, but by suicide. Under the guise of sophistication, the moral lights of culture begin to dim when wordplay is considered an amusing game and not a sinister plot.

Gazing upon the ruins of Timgad in North Africa, a city founded as Thamugas by the emperor Trajan in 100 a.d., and destroyed by the Vandals after it had lost its cultural balance, Hilaire Belloc wrote: “We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.

Calculating the benefits of friendship

By Ana Ines Trapp


Friday, 06 October 2006



What good is friendship? The answers of two recent writers miss the heart of the matter.

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Has there ever been a friendlier society than the 21st century's global village, in which total strangers phone from the other side of the world and call us by our first name, and electronic messages constantly reassure us that our familiars are thinking of us? At the same time, busy as we are, have we ever been less likely to actually see our friends or do anything for them? To paraphrase James Taylor's ever-popular song: "Just send me a text, and you know wherever I am / I'm checking my Nokia and I'll text you again." American research published early this year found that visiting friends has been declining for the past 30 years, thanks mainly to better education, longer working hours and urbanisation.

Even the concept of friendship is at risk. Modern sociologists and anthropologists have manipulated it, seeing it as a sort of imperfect state of love between people of the same sex. They have insisted on reading this reality from the perspective of gender studies, and it is difficult to speak about a deep friendship between two persons of the same sex without that friendship being interpreted as homosexual affection. It is a pity, and also a dangerous proposition.

Traditionally friendship has been understood as a different sort of love from the one between a husband and wife or a courting couple. That is the simple reason why a person who is married also likes, and needs, to develop friendships. Friends play a different role to that of the spouse. A couple has a level of acquaintance and understanding that could be similar to that between friends, but there is an essential difference. The bonds of friendship are mainly spiritual, it is a communion of souls; the bond of love between a man and a woman is spiritual but also bodily -- a married couple is called to be "one flesh".

Recently two authors have offered some useful reflections on this subject, although their views also tend to confirm the feeling that friendship in our day is being misunderstood. Friendship: An Exposé is a collection of essays by the literary critic Joseph Epstein. In Vital Friends: The People You Can't Afford to Live Without, Tom Rath fluctuates between business management advice and self-help writing.

Rath, a psychologist from the University of Michigan, writes from the perspective of his research in the field of human interaction. He claims to be especially worried about the approach of the most recent human sciences studies. As he sees it, they focus too much either on social groups or on individuals, forgetting the importance of one to one relationships, which is where friendship actually develops. He presents the cases of two homeless people and discusses how friendship, or the lack of it, influenced their lives. He also comments on some unique and famous friendships, such as the one between Roosevelt and Churchill during World War II.

In a way, the first part of this book can be seen as an extension of Rath's previous work in How Full Is Your Bucket? Positive Strategies for Work and Life. In it, Rath analysed the way in which good deeds increase one's own happiness and the other's happiness at the same time. In Vital Friends he turns his attention to the benefits of developing friendships at workplaces.

"What is the real financial and emotional impact of friendship on the job?" he asks, in a tone that somehow diminishes the human scope of the concept of friendship. His answer is, basically, an analysis of quantitative research led by Rath with the support of Gallup Consulting, the firm for which he works. Five million people were interviewed and the author concludes that people who work with friends, or make friends in their workplace tend to be happier, more pro-active and more efficient -- not only in the office, but also when they are not at work. This is a common observation in the field of business administration: group encouragement tends to generate "friendly" workplaces as a means of making business more effective.

Rath, to give him his due, goes further, presenting eight categories of friends: builder, champion, collaborator, companion, connector, energiser, mind opener and navigator. He shows that each of these roles has much to do with some of the essential virtues of a friendship: cheerfulness, encouragement, support, generosity... He suggests that the reader analyse who are the people who fill these roles in his or her life. Rath's starting point is a very good one, but he has a weak anthropological background, and a direction that may be tricky. We choose our friends up to a point, but not with the intention of categorising them and calculating the benefits we can extract from them. In other words, a person does not run his life as just another business; friendship is not a profit-raising instrument.

Epstein's book is different in style and in spirit, but not for the better. The essays in Friendship: an Exposé are more insightful, but more pessimistic. The author sets out his vision of friendship and dedicates much of his time narrating the pleasures and troubles of his friendships. It is full of stories from Epstein's childhood to his adult years.

He respects Aristotle, but points out the scarcity of literature on this topic. Simultaneously he discredits the claims of the Freudian school: he does not agree that sexual inclinations lie behind all human relationships. In that he is wise.

Still, he fails to see the full breadth of friendship. He sees it as a troublesome reality -- without which, however, one couldn't afford to live. He regrets having so many friends and talks about them in an unfeeling manner: "One of the toughest rules of the art of friendship is to take friends as they are." An Epicurean at heart, he wants the pleasure of good conversations without obligations.

No treatise on friendship today would be complete without examining the influence of new technologies. Rath finds that technology has helped to unburden him of some of the needs he considers to be excessive in friendship. Thanks to voicemail, he can feel he has contacted his friends, although he did not actually get the chance to speak with them. Epstein also offers the strange insight that friendship has changed because of the different role of women in today's society. Friendship has become, he concludes, a leisure activity where generosity has to be measured.

Again, Epstein's starting point is a good one. But then it is quite easy to agree with the idea that friends are enjoyable, important and worth taking time to think about. The concept that is missing is that friendship is not a good which one pursues for oneself, but for the sake of the other, as Aristotle explains in his Nicomachean Ethics. And it is essentially a free gift. So the person who looks for friendship in order to lead a pleasant life, forgets that a true friend is one who makes sacrifices and chooses the not-so-comfortable in order to make a friend feel comfortable.

A true friend has also to be willing to make the other a better person, to get involved in their future. This may involve sometimes telling a difficult truth, correcting faults and offering time and help as often as necessary. So, why "come running" to give that friend "a helping hand"? Not only to honour James Taylor, but because it is in giving ourselves that we see lasting friendships flourish.

Ana Ines Trapp graduated in Communication from the Universidad de Montevideo, Uruguay, where she worked as a book reviewer for El Observador. She currently lives in Maryland.

Book review

Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life. By Thomas V. Morris. Eerdmans. 214 pp. $12.95 paper.

Pascal, while universally admitted to be a genius, is generally relegated to the pantheon of "minor" philosophers, since most of his life was spent either in mathematical discoveries or in his famous tangle with the lax moral theologians of the Jesuit order. He died before he could assemble the disjecta membra of his famous Pensées into an organized, consistently argued book, and so he is more often known for his aphoristic brilliance than for any coherent philosophy. But coherent it is, and we owe Thomas Morris, Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame, many thanks for this stimulating, witty, and utterly absorbing book on perhaps the greatest apologist for Christianity in modern times. Morris notes the contrast between Pascal and much of philosophy today: "Intellectual activities themselves can be powerfully diverting. Many philosophers and theologians are masters at keeping their distance from spiritual realities." Or, as Pascal says, "Pious scholars are rare." Why? Because "we run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it."

Edward T. Oakes, S.J.

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(c) 1997 FirstThings 38 (December 1993): 63-64.