Darwinian Fundamentalism: reductionism, pluralism, play
Good scientific theories usually have the following things:
predictive accuracy - the ability to forecast what we have not yet observed
internal coherence - the various parts of the theory should not contradict each other
external consistency - the theory should not contradict other accepted theories, or 'laws of nature'
unifying power - the theory should bring together and explain previously disparate areas of knowledge
fertility - the theory should generate novel hypotheses
falsifiability - it should be possible to construct hypotheses that could lead to the rejection of the theory - this is an especially important scientific value
simplicity and elegance - this is a value judgment i.e. it is a subjective judgment made by scientists. Consequently simplicity is a desired characteristic rather than a defining characteristic of a scientific theory (www.flyfishingdevon.co.uk/salmon/year1/audioscientificmethod/scimeth.htm)
For the purposes of this paper however, although not suggesting that his is an entirely fail safe system, I will use Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion as a standard for verifying truth claims. Popper put forward this criterion as a critique and replacement for the “verifiability criterion” of logical-positivism. It will be used as a method to separate what we suppose to be “good science” from “bad science” or mere ideology. To the extent that an evolutionary narrative can be considered scientific is to the extent it can be falsified or “the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment a.k.a through common experience of it”
The ideology of intelligent design
as well as some of the theories associated with Neo-Darwinian biology can not
be falsified so it is hard to make the claim that they are
scientific in the strict sense. While intelligent design can not be falsified because we
have no instruments to detect a designer who stands outside the
material world he/she designed, one of the central tenets of Darwinian
fundamentalism that only natural selection and genetic variation can
explain all evolutionary descent can not be falsified in the same
way.
For instance, it can not
be demonstrated that all life descended from a single primordial
cell solely by the process of natural selection and genetic variation. One can dispute the
falsifiability of the proposition, by asking, "What experiment
can be conducted to show this did not happen?" The problem is
similar to the problem of "last night I dreamed of electric
sheep." There are no other witnesses to my dream but me, just as
there are no witnesses left from the Precambrian era to account for
everything that might have gone on then. If there are no witnesses,
one can argue that there is no way to test the claim and the
assertion is therefore not falsifiable.
Worse are the falsifiability claims
of Neo-Darwinian evolutionary psychologist who claim to explain the
origins of consciousness. The tales told by them of our
psychological origins can never be falsified and so are similar to
the just-so stories of Rudyard Kipling that, as Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin reminds us, maybe useful as
a quick way to solve a child's curiosity can not be verified.
For Kipling, the elephant got its trunk because a crocodile pulled on it. Does this mean that elephant trunks occurred as an adaptation due to hungry crocodiles? Maybe, maybe not because it is a hypothesis that cant be proven. It is “just so”.
Evolutionary psychology seizes on a
given trait in members of contemporary society and make up a just so
story using analogs to Darwinian mechanisms -that inevitably concern
survival - . So language evolves as follows:‘ We talk by making
noises and not by waving our hands because hunter-gatherers living in
the Savannah would have had trouble seeing one another in the tall
grass.’ There is no way to falsify the above statement.
While
these just so stories discredit the attempt to explain everything by
natural selection, these tales do not entirely discredit the role
that natural selection legitimately plays in evolution. For example,
the proposition that life changes through generations, and this
change is influenced by variation and natural selection could be
tested. One could test this proposition by taking a life form,
exposing it to the pressures of natural selection, observing the
effects over time. This can be done quite easily and in fact is
observed all the time. One can gather evidence for the applicability
of natural selection and adaptation by observing bacteria evolve and
adapt resistance to anti-biotics. Closer to our own skins adaptation
by natural selection give us our shades of color.
The mechanism of natural selection to explain environmental adaptation has held up remarkably well over the past 150 years. Even the claim by creationist that one can not falsify the fossil record on which Neo-Darwinism depends is not wholly true. The fossil record is constantly under interrogation and paradigm shifts do occur. The Cambrian explosion in which the most complex forms of animal life seem to have appeared 530 million years ago has caused much scientific debate and was thought by Darwin as the single biggest objection to his gradualist theory of evolutionary descent. Since then there have been many theories that have been proposed to account for the rapid explosion of life. Recently the theory of punctuated equilibrium developed in the early 1970s proposed a view that evolution over long intervals is nearly static and "punctuated" by short periods of rapid change.
This theory has forced many scientist to adopt more complex ways of conceiving evolution than simple reductive narratives would allow. Its must not follow that all scientist will agree on a single paradigm and in this instance the debate between reductionist and constructionist perspectives of evolution has been one of the most lively in science. Most notably, Daniel Dennet representing the former and Stephen Jay Gould the latter. However most scientist no longer view evolutionary descent as reduceable to the simple selection at the genetic level.
Recently the finding of the fossil remains of the hobbit man on an island east of Bali has forced anthropologist and paleontologist to rethink human history from the relatively short span of time from ten to fifteen thousand years ago. Although there is no doubt that the paradigms that establish what Thomas Kuhn called “Normal Science” are so ideologically and professionally entrenched on the Universities as to make them hard to displace most paradigms and scientific theories do eventual fade away. This is in fact is considered the strength of science, its singular ability to demonstrate over time ever increasing understanding of phenomena.
To summarize to believe in natural
selection when falsifiable is not to foreclose the horizon of other
causes of evolution but merely to believe that: “organismic
forms have had a history there have been significant genetic changes
in species and that present life forms arose from others quite unlike
them”. (Lewontin 2006)
The problem most religious
people have with natural selection is with its idea of random
mutation that suggest that a series of accidents has led to our
current condition. To many the ideas that we are simply the result of
random process contains a certain nihilistic underpinning. But the
randomness of random mutation begins to take on different meaning
when we understand that it is not solely the organism that is under
study in biology but, rather the organism in context of the
environment; the part in relationship to the whole. Those who merely
see evolution as an extended phenotype or explainable solely through
phyletic speciation as Richard Dawkins attempt to reduce all life to
processes of natural selection and random mutation. This is the
reductionist paradigm but, from a pluralistic point of view, that
here means, that life must be seen from the context of both
organism and environment, randomness is better understood as
contingency. Here is Stephen Jay Gould:
I am not
speaking of randomness/, but of the central principle of all
history—/contingency/. A historical explanation does not rest on
direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an /unpredictable
sequence of antecedent states/, where any major change in any step of
the sequence would have altered the final result. This final result
is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon everything that came
before—the unerasable and determining signature of history.
...Contingency is an /unpredictable sequence of antecedent states/,
not randomness, chanciness, or accident. (Gould)
In fact
contingency is just one part of the equation, a law like quality is
equally applicable to natural selection:
My argument
in /Wonderful Life/ is that there is a domain of law and a domain of
contingency, and our struggle is to find the line between them. The
reason why the domain of contingency is so vast,
and much
vaster than most people thought, is not because there isn't a law
like domain. It is because we are primarily interested in ourselves
and we have posited various universal laws of nature. It
is
because…we want to see ourselves as results of law
like predictability and sensible products of the universe in
that sense. (Gould in Shermer 1999)
Now, to admit
contingency itself as a feature of physical evolution seems to square
well with Sri Aurobindo's view of evolution as Lila (play) In any
activity play or game there is always contingency or an element of
chance, if there were not that game would be extremely boring. So to
introduce contingency into evolution is certainly not at odds with
evolution as play, nor does the idea of Lila or contingency
necessarily discount the falsifiable of natural selection. So as we
shall later see, it is interesting indeed that Sri Aurobindo perhaps
also anticipates one of Gould's most well known thesis concerning the
non-linearity of evolution through catastrophic bifurcation.
Although there is a huge philosophical chasm that separates Gould as a scientist who denies teleology from Sri Aurobindo's spiritual teleology, just the fact that he constructs a theory that integrates consideration of both organism with environment into it, would seem a vision of evolution closer to an integral view than the reductionist strategies of what Gould calls Darwinian fundamentalism.
To understand the difference between the pluralist approach of Stephen Gould and his colleague Richard Lewontin and the reductionist accounts of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins is important if one wishes to know some of the stark differences between scientist who study evolution. What follows is a short but important history of the feud between Gould and Dennet in which Gould responded to Dennett in an article written for the New York Review of Books called the Pleasures of Pluralism (aka non-reductionism) and accused both Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins of being Darwinian Fundamentalist.
“Dennett had earlier written a feisty attack on theories of Gould, Lewontin, Noam Chomsky, and Stuart Kauffman, who reject a strict selectionist account of evolution and the origin of mind and language. Dennett, in his NYR, letter speaks of Gould's "non-revolutions," claiming that Gould's alternatives to genic selectionism are empty. Gould claims that speciation (the rise of new species) differs in its mechanism from the sort of gradualistic changes observed in the genetics laboratory. Gould also claims that macroevolution, the major main trends evolution, depends in large part of species selection rather than individual or genic selection, thus operating at a different level from the microevolution or the sort observed with breeding fruit-flies. Furthermore, Gould denies selectionism, claiming that many traits have not been selected for and are not particularly adaptive, and coins the term "exaptation" to characterize the functioning of a trait which was not previously selected for or adaptive. He claims this is different from the previous, orthodox neo-Darwinist claim of "preadaptation" where a trait previously selected for one function or adapted to one environment is later selected for another function in a different environment. Dennett denies exaptation differs from preadaptation and accuses Gould of tooting his own horn by inventing a new term for a well-known idea. Gould claims that exaptive traits were not previously selected for, and that preadapted traits were so selected for some other function. (http://tomweston.net/dusek.htm)
These are the four main points that Stephen Jay Gould makes to dispute the reductionist arguments for natural selection.
contingency (see above)
structural constraints, such as basic body plans, which may become far from optimally adaptive, but which are too difficult to change by piecemeal natural selection without making many other features of the organism maladaptive
"spandrels" in evolutionary biology to mean a feature of an organism that arises as a necessary side consequence of other features, but which is not built directly, piece by piece, as a result of being favored by natural selection. Examples include the "masculinized genitalia in female hyenas, exaptive use of an umbilicus as a brooding chamber by snails, the shoulder hump of the giant Irish deer, and several key features of human mentality.
Punctuated equilibrium that instead of proceeding evenly or gradually evolution tends to happen in fits and starts, sometimes moving very fast, sometimes moving very slowly or not at all.
Here is part of a response made by Stephen Jay Gould to Daniel Dennett in a well publicized letter that followed the article that was well publicized in The New York Review of Books:
So if natural selection builds all of evolution, without the interposition of auxiliary processes or intermediary complexities, then I suppose that evolution is algorithmic too. But—and here we encounter Dennett's disabling error once again—evolution includes so much more than natural selection that it cannot be algorithmic in Dennett's simple calculational sense. Yet Dennett yearns to subsume all the phenomenology of nature under the limited aegis of adaptation as an algorithmic result of natural selection. He writes: "Here, then, is Darwin's dangerous idea: the algorithmic level is the level that best accounts for the speed of the antelope, the wing of the eagle, the shape of the orchid, the diversity of species, and all the other occasions for wonder in the world of nature" (Dennett's italics). I will grant the antelope's run, the eagle's wing, and much of the orchid's shape—for these are adaptations, produced by natural selection, and therefore legitimately in the algorithmic domain. But can Dennett really believe his own imperialistic extensions? Is the diversity of species no more than a calculational consequence of natural selection? Can anyone really believe, beyond the hype of rhetoric, that "all the other occasions for wonder in the world of nature" flow from adaptation? (Gould 1997)
Gould and Dennett's battle notwithstanding on how much of evolution can be solely attributed to natural selection, the state of the art in contemporary molecular biology that concerns the actual mechanisms that cause mutations in genetic evolution is called evo-devo and combines studies of species evolution -evo– with studies of individual development -devo-.
An excellent overview of Evo-Devo is to be found in an article written by Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff. entitled Evolving Evolution which is a review of two recent books on the subject by Sean Carroll, Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart. What follows are a few excerpts from this article:
.
In 1894, the English biologist William Bateson challenged Darwin's view that evolution was gradual. He published Materials for the Study of Variation, a catalog of abnormalities he had observed in insects and animals in which one body part was replaced with another. He described, for example, a mutant fly with a leg instead of an antenna on its head, and mutant frogs and humans with extra vertebrae. The abnormalities Bateson discovered resisted explanation for much of the twentieth century. But in the late 1970s, studies by Edward Lewis at the California Institute of Technology, Christiana Nüsslein-Vollhard and Eric Wieschaus in Germany, and others began to reveal that the abnormalities were caused by mutations of a special set of genes in fruit fly embryos that controlled development of the fly's body and the distribution of its attached appendages. Very similar genes, exercising similar controls, were subsequently found in nematodes, flies, fish, mice, and human beings.
What they and others discovered were genes that regulate the development of the embryo and exert control over other genes by mechanisms analogous to that of the repressor molecule studied by Monod and Jacob. Eight of these controlling genes, called Hox genes, are found in virtually all animals—worms, mice, and human beings—and they have existed for more than half a billion years. Fruit flies and worms have only one set of eight Hox genes; fish and mammals (including mice, elephants, and humans) have four sets. Each set of Hox genes in fish and mammals is remarkably similar to the eight Hox genes found in fruit flies and worms. This discovery showed that very similar genes control both embryological and later development in virtually all insects and animals...............
According to this theory, the mutations, or variations, needed to drive evolutionary change can occur with little disruption either to the basic organization of an organism or to the core processes that make its cells function.” (Rosenfield Ziff 2006)
A common set of genes that is shared by all life forms that would seem responsible for all mutations and embryological morphology would in itself not be inconsistent with a perspective favoring an integral view of life.
The next section of this paper demonstrates that, in his own way, Sri Aurobindo anticipated some of today's predominate scientific theories on biological evolution as well as presented a view about the meaning of human evolution that in its secular aspects is consistent with contemporary social theory.