Steven Dutch, Professor Emeritus, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
It is safe to say no theory in the history of science has been so thoroughly abused inthe name of ideology as evolution. It was the first far-reaching theory in biology, itseemed to have implications for human society, and ideologues of all shades saw evolutionas a powerful ally or an equally deadly threat. Some of the major ideological abuses ofevolution are shown below.
| Ideological Interpretation of Evolution | Supporting Responses | Opposition Responses |
|---|---|---|
| Evolution disproves the existence of God | Atheism | Fundamentalism |
| Evolution negates purpose | Nihilism | Fundamentalism Marxist opposition |
| Evolution implies that society should operate according to "survival of the fittest" | Social Darwinism Eugenics | Fundamentalism Marxist opposition Lysenkoism |
| Evolution implies some races are superior to others | Racist movements | Fundamentalism Marxist opposition |
Having researched this subject in quite considerable depth, I cringe whenever I hear afellow scientist ask "Why can't evolution simply be God's way of creating life? Iknow then that I'm dealing with somebody who wants to join a debate without acquiring eventhe most minimal literacy first.
The historical background page spells out a few of theproblems such an interpretation (termed theistic evolution in conservativereligious circles) raises. How could a loving God ordain a universe in which mostorganisms are fated to be killed and eaten? Yet these objections alone are notinsuperable. The objections to God ordaining predation are largely based on sentimentalityand anthropomorphism; predation might not be within the domain of morality at all. Also,believers have coexisted for centuries with the far more troubling issue of how a lovingGod could create hell.
The issue of agreement with the Bible is more serious but again by itself isn'tinsuperable. Many believers had been accommodating themselves to the geologic time scalefor a long time by interpreting "day" in Genesis to mean an indefinitely longtime. The need to reinterpret much of Genesis as allegorical or mythological was a hurdlethat many believers could not cross, however. Nevertheless, the core of the problem lieselsewhere.
Many scientists don't like to use the term "believe" when talking aboutscientific theories because they want to differentiate scientific opinion from othersubjective systems of belief. And therein lies the fundamental fallacy academics commit indealing with conservative religious believers. No major world religion claims tohold subjective beliefs. To a Hindu, it is not a matter of personal perceptionwhether or not you are reincarnated. To a Muslim, it is not a matter of opinion whether ornot Mohammed heard the word of God. To a fundamentalist Christian, whether or not youbelieve in heaven or hell is absolutely irrelevant to whether or not you will go there. Allthe major world religions claim to deal in matters of objective fact. The factsmay not be demonstrable by experiment or immediate observation, but their eventualobjective reality is considered to be beyond dispute. To militant religious believers,their doctrines are fully documented on a par with the Apollo moon landings or thestructure of DNA. If you don't accept the documentation, that's your problem, not theirs.
The failure to realize that religions hold their doctrines to be factsleads to immense frustrations on both sides of the science-religion debate. Both sidestalk past one another. Muslims, for example, find it absolutely incomprehensible that anyWesterner who becomes well-informed about Islam does not immediately convert. They regardthe truth of Islam to be so self-evident that any other response is unthinkable.
In Day the Universe Changed (p. 272), James Burke reproduces a cartooncalled The Descent of the Modernists. It shows a staircase going down, withsteps labeled:
Christianity Bible not Infallible Man not Made in God's Image No Miracles No Virgin Birth No Deity No Atonement No Resurrection Agnosticism Atheism
A young student is stepping off the second step. Halfway down is a modernist clergyman.Stepping off the bottom step is a bearded college professor holding a chemist's flask.He's become a scientist. The degeneration is complete. (Atheists, of course, imagine thesteps going up, not down.)
Confronted by the challenges of militant atheism, evolution, archeology and textualanalysis, conservative American Christians met shortly after 1900 to hammer out what theyregarded as the irreducible core of Christianity. They referred to these tenets as theFive Fundamentals. Interestingly, the staircase above contains every one of them (one stepimplies two of them):
A reporter, groping for a term to describe the growing conservative movement, coinedthe term "fundamentalist" and before long, fundamentalists themselves were usingit. The term has come to denote any believer who insists on strict adherence to a centralcore of beliefs, so that we now speak of "Muslim fundamentalists."
Thus, the answer to the question posed earlier, "Why can't evolution simply beGod's way of creating life? is that from the fundamentalist viewpoint any compromise withevolution fatally weakens the fabric of Christianity.
The idea that Christianity was a unified collection of doctrines based on a chain ofScriptural interpretations was around long before fundamentalists (they codified thedoctrine, not invented it). Break the chain, in the view of many believers, and you breakChristianity, and both sides responded accordingly. Anti-religious debaters had a powerfulnew weapon to use in undermining the historical and doctrinal basis of Christianity.
To devout believers of the 19th century, it must have seemed as if atheists werepopping out of the woodwork everywhere. One might well have asked "where are allthese atheists coming from? The answer is that they were there all along, but as long asthere was no prospect of winning a debate with believers, and as long as all the socialpressures worked against nonbelievers, they kept quiet. Moral: suppression is alwaysmore dangerous in the long run for suppressors than their victims. Suppression createsan illusion of conformity while driving the opposition into hiding where they are hard tosee. In the end, what appears to be a solid front actually turns out to be a hollow shell.To anyone who still has doubts, I have just two words: Soviet Union.
Darwin has been accused of making it impossible to believe in God. What he actually didwas make it possible not to believe in God. The nature and origin of life was thelast large area of science that looked like it might have an inescapably supernaturalcomponent, and Darwin kicked the props out from under that idea. You could still believethat God guided evolution or not, but your belief had nothing at all to do with thescience. Another thing that happened as a consequence of evolution was a shift in theburden of proof. Before Darwin, nonbelievers were in the position of having to disprovethe existence of God to a hostile audience; after Darwin, believers often had to prove theexistence of God to a skeptical audience.
Many Southern states passed laws banning the teaching of evolution. John Scopes, ahigh-school biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, argued with many of his friends that theTennessee law was unconstitutional; it violated the First Amendment. So they decided toput the matter to a test. In 1925, Scopes lectured on evolution and was charged withviolating the law. So Scopes was no Galileo (for that matter, neither was Galileo!); thiswas a test case and Scopes walked in with his eyes open. What nobody anticipated was thatthe case would attract nationwide attention.
Clarence Darrow, the noted attorney, offered to conduct the defense. The prosecutionwas handled by aging political legend William Jennings Bryan. During the trial, the smalltown of Dayton became a media circus. The noted newspaper columnist H.L. Mencken, whodespised fundamentalists, wrote such scathing columns that there was talk of running himout of town. At one point a local merchant put a caged gorilla in his store window sopeople could decide the matter for themselves. "The poor beast cowered in hiscage" wrote Mencken, "afraid that it might be true." The climax of thetrial came when Darrow called Bryan to the stand as a recognized expert on Biblicaldoctrine and grilled him mercilessly. Bryan may have been bypassed by time, but in his dayhe had been a highly respected figure and even people who were solidly behind Scopes feltthat Darrow had crossed the line. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. The case wasappealed and thrown out on a technicality, so nobody got the Constitutional ruling theyhad hoped for. Worn out by age and the stress of the trial, Bryan died a few daysafterward. Scopes became an oil geologist, spent most of his career in South America, anddied in 1966. Ironically, that was just about the time the Supreme Court finally didconsider the Constitutionality of the Tennessee law and threw it out.
It's impossible to see the Scopes Trial without images from the play and film Inheritthe Wind intruding. Inherit the Wind is compelling drama but very poorhistory. In modern terms, it is a docudrama, and only loosely based on historical realityat that. The Bryan character in the play is a bitter, judgmental, closed-minded man.William Jennings Bryan had actually been a progressive politician in his prime, mostfamous for a speech in which he attacked moneyed interests with the line "shall wecrucify mankind on a cross of gold?". He ran for President on the Democratic ticketin 1896, 1900 and 1908, pulling in respectable popular and electoral vote totals. If hewas something of a fossil himself by the time of the Scopes Trial, he was neverthelesswidely respected as a man of principle and a great figure in his prime.
Fundamentalist opponents of evolution launched a different strategy beginning about1970. They argued that the Biblical account of creation was defensible as a scientifictheory, called scientific creationism. Their principal strategies included:
The fallacies in most of the creationist arguments are immediately obvious toscientists but are superficially convincing to non-scientists, and especially peoplelooking for a way to reconcile science and religion. Although creationists specificallyavoided mentioning the Bible in their scientific writings, they usually rejectedwell-established scientific views and substituted ideas that served no other purpose thanto validate the literal interpretation of Genesis. For example, they proposed exotictheories of nuclear decay in which atoms decayed faster in the distant past. There is noexperimental or observational basis for these theories; their only function is to make itpossible to believe in a young Earth.
Scientific creationism is, in fact, pseudoscience, something deliberately and falselyclaiming to be scientific. A number of states passed laws requiring that creationism betaught in school as an alternative to evolution. A Federal court considered the Arkansaslaw in 1982, mercilessly exposed it as a pretext for teaching religious views, anddeclared it unconstitutional. Ironically, the court denied the argument put forthby Scopes, stating that it was not prepared to grant total academic freedom without anyoutside oversight.
If creationism has been defeated in the courts and failed to win credibility amongscientists, it continues to be active at the grass-roots level. Opponents of evolutionhave focused their efforts at influencing school curricula at the local level. Suchefforts can have national impact because fear of losing sales causes textbook publishersto water down the evolution content of their texts, reinforcing the misconception thatevolution is little more than an opinion held by some scientists. Another tactic widelyused by anti-evolutionists in recent years is running "stealth" candidates forschool board seats, candidates who conceal or downplay their views on evolution untilafter the election.
One of the most bizarre reactions to evolution took place in the Soviet Union. TrofimLysenko, a biologist, rejected Darwin on Marxist grounds. He reacted against Darwinbecause of the lack of direction in Darwinian evolution and because of the capitalistabuses of Social Darwinism. Instead he argued for the evolution of Lamarck. Lysenkolikened the appearance of a new environment to a political revolution, and the struggle oforganisms to adapt and pass on their improvements he compared to the workers struggling tocreate a better society and pass it along to succeeding generations.
What made Lysenko so powerful was that he wedded his ideas so tightly to Marxistideology, and particularly that he became a personal friend of Stalin. During Lysenko'sheyday from the mid 1930's until the late 1940's, Soviet biologists either toed the Partyline, got out of genetics, or disappeared into the Gulag. Lysenko crippled Soviet biologyfor a generation.
Another application of "survival of the fittest" was the interpretation thatsociety should help evolution along by encouraging the fit to reproduce and by barring theunfit, a movement termed eugenics ("good genes"). Some aspects of thisnotion are relatively noncontroversial; for example genetic screening can identifymarriage partners who carry genes for hereditary disorders.
In cruder form, this notion found expression in mandatory sterilization of the mentallyill or handicapped and laws banning mixed-race marriages (how far we've come in a shorttime is revealed by the fact that ten per cent of marriages in the U.S. are nowinterracial). A more far-reaching interpretation held that society should encourage birthsamong the "fit" and discourage them among the "unfit." These viewswere supported by numerous studies that seemed to show that traits like criminality couldbe inherited. A number of the most influential studies were later revealed to be outrightfabrications. Since it's a well known fact that fertility rates are lower in affluentsocieties than poorer ones, many eugenics advocates feared that "unfit" segmentsof society would outbreed and overwhelm the "fit."
Perhaps the most bizarre expression of the eugenics movement in the United States wasthe "fittest family" movement. For a time in the 1920's and 1930's, familiesentered themselves in county fairs just like cows and chickens, to be judged on physical,mental and moral fitness. But this movement seems sanity incarnate compared to forms takenby eugenics in Nazi Germany. Who better to father German children than Olympic athletes?During the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, German women were encouraged to date Olympic athletes,but to be sure they recorded the athlete's registration number. If they became pregnant,the state covered all their maternity costs. (Presumably, this fringe benefit of being inthe Olympics didn't extend to people like Jesse Owens!)
As everyone knows, German racial theories culminated in the Holocaust, where Jews,Gypsies, and Slavs were killed or worked to death because of their alleged racialinferiority. More sobering even than that is the German euthanasia program, because it wasinitiated and carried out not by German ideologues but by respected psychologists, andnone of the participants was compelled to join. The roots of the program can be traced tothe 1920 book The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value byjurist Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, both highly respected men. The book,which actually pre-dates Hitler's start in politics, argues that legal safeguards forhuman life should be removed in cases where patients are mentally beyond recovery andtheir care is an economic burden on society. Euthanasia of mental patients began in 1939,long before many other elements of the Holocaust. Between 1939 and 1946 the population ofGermany's mental institutions dropped from 300,000 to 40,000.
In a final incredible act of ingratitude, all the more unbelievable given that Hitler'srise to power was built on German anger over their defeat in World War I, among thoseeuthanized were numerous disabled World War I veterans. The euthanasia program was given alower profile after 1941; it was affecting morale in the Army, since soldiers began tofear (with reason) they might be next if they were wounded. But the program continued tothe end of the war; indeed, so convinced were its participants that they were actingperfectly legally that euthanasia went on in places after the occupation, until theoccupation authorities found out and shut the institutions down. The fate of theparticipants reflects the same spotty fate of other German war criminals: execution andimprisonment for some key figures, lesser or no punishment for many others.
A natural question in evolution is wondering where and when the different humanpopulations appeared, and whether one group might be higher in evolutionary stature thananother. (To cut to the chase, the modern answer to the second question is no;differences among races are inconsequential compared to the range of individualvariations.)
Since primates show a steady increase in brain size from most primitive to mostadvanced, perhaps brain size is the key. On the average, white brains are larger thanblack, and male brains than female. Thus white males are superior, an obvious conclusionif you happened to be a 19th century white male. Brain size was considered so important inthe 19th century that many people stipulated that their brains should be weighed aftertheir deaths, so we have a surprising amount of data on brain sizes of famous people. Theyshow a range of a factor of two in volume; clearly differences of a few percent betweenraces can't be significant. Also, advocates of brain size as a measure of intelligencesomehow fail to note that on the average, Asian and Native American brains are largerthan white brains. Finally, Albert Einstein's brain was preserved for study; it has nevershown any physical differences from any other normal brain. Whatever influencesintelligence, it doesn't show up in any known physical characteristics of the brain.
Mental tests of various kinds were devised in the 19th century initially for thepurpose of diagnosing and treating mental handicaps, but they rapidly were turned towardplacing humans in a hierarchy. One test widely used by immigration officials in the U.S.during the 19th century was to ask an immigrant to draw a picture of a common object likea house or person. At first glance this test looks better designed than most; it avoidsthe problem of literacy and a lot of cultural biases. The only problem was that it hadnever occurred to the testers that many immigrants had never used a pencil andhad never developed the motor skills needed to draw a picture. Even believers in thetesting began to suspect something was drastically wrong when over half of some ethnicgroups were rated as mentally retarded by this test.
It's a paradox that while fundamentalists were condemning evolution, many of themsimultaneously embraced the idea that whites might be more highly evolved than blacks. Asthe British writer Chesterton observed, "men began by reluctantly enslaving othermen, and ended by just as reluctantly freeing apes." The idea of blacks being closerto apes than whites reached its climax in an 1874 book by the biologist Ernst Haeckel, whodrew a tree with four branches occupied by an orangutan, a gorilla, a chimpanzee and aNegro.
The most recent book to argue seriously that there is a real genetic difference inintelligence between blacks and whites is The Bell Curve. Intelligence testsgiven to blacks and whites do tend to show whites having a slightly higher average score.Most psychologists regard intelligence tests as crude measures at best. They consider thedifference to be statistically insignificant, and attributable to differences in educationand literacy or cultural differences in how questions are interpreted. But even if thedifference is real, the bell curve represents the distribution of individuals; if a blackscores 125 on an IQ test, of what relevance is it that blacks average a few points lowerthan whites? And finally, something that believers in genetic differences in intelligenceseem never to notice: a black with a certain score on any intelligence test is smarterthan every white with a lower score!
This history has used terms like "fit" repeatedly without addressing thecentral question that abusers of evolution never faced: what do we mean by fit?.The sports pages are full of people who are magnificent physical specimens but completelyunfit in any other sense; they commit crimes, beat their spouses, and have no skills apartfrom being able to bounce a rubber ball or hit a ball with a stick. There have been Nobellaureates who stole ideas from colleagues and students, others who served the Nazis, andinnumerable business giants who ended their careers in prison. And most of theirachievements are the result of acquired characteristics that cannot be passed ongenetically anyway. On the other hand, Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant mindsever, is almost totally paralyzed and able to communicate only with a voice synthesizer.
Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man
Frederic Wertham, 1966; A Sign for Cain, Macmillan. The German euthanasiaprogram is detailed in Chapters 8 and 9.
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Created 10 April 1998, Last Update 1 September 1998