Cultural Darwinism

Abstract

The recent debate over Intelligent Design (ID) provides an opportunity to examine the pervasiveness and the meaning of Darwinian thinking in modern culture. The latest incarnation of a century-old critique of evolution, ID infuriated critics as a disease of scientific illiteracy. However, examining the debate as cultural history of science suggests that the IDers were not ignorant or stupid, but rather shrewd and disingenuous. They wielded scientific data as a rhetorical weapon, not as truth but as text, to be bent to one's moral purpose—which in their case was an attack on science itself. In contrast to the scientific critics, I view ID as a symptom, a boil on the neck of a social body infected with anxiety over cultural Darwinism. Though the courts seem to have effectively lanced ID, the infection remains. In an age of Darwinian psychiatry, Darwinian business, Darwinian literature criticism, and even Darwinian anti-Darwinism, some boundary checks on cultural Darwinism would be salutary—not for advancing a conservative political agenda as the ID folks seek to do, but simply for reconciling a faith in reason with a rejection of biological determinism.

Notes

Notes

1. For an introduction to this literature, see Mario Biagioli, Science Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999); Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Sheila Jasanoff et al., eds., Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995).

2. For two responses from the scientific community, one sanctimonious, the other sarcastic, see Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); The Editors of Lingua Franca, The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

3. Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, expanded ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). On the Scopes trial, see Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

4. Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968); Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987). For a history of creationism legislation, see Edward J. Larson, Trial and Error: The American Controversy over Creation and Evolution, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

5. The various drafts of the book that became Of Pandas and People were admitted as evidence in the 2005 “Panda trial” in Dover, PA. Scanned images of the pages cited can be found at http://www2.ncseweb.org/wp/?p=80. Last viewed 1 February 2008.

6. Daniel Clement Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon  & Schuster, 1995), 514.

7. Michael Ruse, “Through a Glass, Darkly,” review of The Devil's Chaplain, by Richard Dawkins, American Scientist 91.6 (2003): 554-56.

8. Joseph P. Kahn, “The Evolution of George Gilder: The Author and Tech-Sector Guru Has a New Cause to Create Controversy With: Intelligent Design,” Boston Globe (2005): C1.

9. Both quotes from Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991), 14.

10. Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1996), 95, see also 137.

11. Ibid., 185.

12. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 152.

13. Richard John Neuhaus, “Stifling Intellectual Inquiry,” First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life 152 (April 2005): 52-72.

14. David Limbaugh, “The Intelligent Design Bogeyman,” Human Events Online (2005). Last viewed 1 February 2008.

15. William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 263.

16. Stuart Pullen, Intelligent Design or Evolution: Why the Origin of Life and the Evolution of Molecular Knowledge Imply Design (Raleigh, NC: Intelligent Design Books, 2005).

17. http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2640&program=CSC%20-%20Scientific%20Research%20and%20Scholarship%20-%20Science

18. Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 13.

19. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 18.

20. See the NCSE Steve-o-meter at http://www.natcenscied.org/resources/articles/meter.html

21. Bobby Henderson, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (New York: Villard Books, 2006).

22. Richard Dawkins, A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003), 219-20.

23. Richard Dawkins, review of Blueprints: Solving the Mystery of Evolution, by Maitland A. Edey and Donald C. Johanson, New York Times, 9 April 1989, 34, Section 7.

24. Daniel Dennett, “Show Me the Science,” The Edge (2005).

25. Limbaugh, “The Intelligent Design Bogeyman.”

26. The wedge document is widely available on the internet, in various forms. The Discovery Institute's version, interestingly, is not definitive—they provide a reformatted version of the complete text along with commentary on much-quoted passages, at http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2101. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, provides a link to a PDF of the original document, which is worth seeing for the mystical Christian graphics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy). Both pages last viewed 1 February 2008.

27. Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution (New York: Cliff Street Books, 1999), 164.

28. P. William Davis, Dean H. Kenyon, and Charles B. Thaxton, Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins (Dallas, TX: Haughton Pub. Co., 1993), 19-20.

29. Kahn, “The Evolution of George Gilder.”

30. Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross, Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

31. Michael Specter, “Political Science,” The New Yorker, 13 March 2006, 58-69.

32. Charles Krauthammer, “Phony Theory, False Conflict: ‘Intelligent Design’ Foolishly Pits Evolution against Faith,” Washington Post, 18 November 2005, A23; George F. Will, “Grand Old Spenders,” Washington Post, 17 November 2005, A31. See also Kahn, “The Evolution of George Gilder.”

33. For an introduction to social Darwinism, see Peter J. Bowler, “The Role of the History of Science in the Understanding of Social Darwinism and Eugenics,” Impact of Science on Society 40 (1990): 273-78; Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944); Robert Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979). For the history of American eugenics, begin with Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963); Kenneth Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, 2d ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995); Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001).

34. Evan I. Schwartz, Digital Darwinism: 7 Breakthrough Business Strategies for Surviving in the Cutthroat Web Economy (New York: Broadway Books, 1999), 3.

35. Paul H. Rubin, Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origins of Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 30.

36. Michael Bond, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” New Scientist 180, no. 2415 (2003): 40-43.

37. Brian Boyd, “Evolution and Literature: A Bio-Cultural Approach,” Philosophy and Literature 29.1 (2005): 1-23; Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004), chap. 6.

38. Bradley A. Thayer, Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 99.

39. Michael McGuire and Alfonso Troisi, Darwinian Psychiatry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 230-31.

40. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998).

41. Leah Ceccarelli, Shaping Science with Rhetoric: The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schroedinger, and Wilson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 129.

42. Wilson, Consilience, 244.

43. Michael Shermer, How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2000); Pascal Boyer, And Man Creates God: Religion Explained (New York: Basic Books, 2001); David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Daniel Clement Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006); Victor J. Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows that God Does not Exist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007). L. B. Koenig et al., “Genetic and Environmental Influences on Religiousness: Findings for Retrospective and Current Religiousness Ratings,“ Journal of Personality 73.2 (2005): 471-88.

44. Thanks to Oren Harman for this insight.