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COMMENTARY
January 5, 2005
More evolution
Besieged on every side for my unpopular opinions on political social and cultural events flailed by outraged readers for my support of Bush and the war in Iraq; for my opposition to gay marriage and to "multiculturalism"; for my effronteries against political correctness -- why would I want to open another front? But this I did with last Wednesday's column wishing my readers a Happy New Year on behalf of myself and the recently discovered "Homo floresiensis" while taking a wild mischievous kick at people I called "evolutionists". My inbox has loaded with some of the most entertaining and intelligent correspondence I have received in a long time. Oddly enough the more patient and even sympathetic letters were from qualified science types sincerely wondering what I meant by several of my assertions. Whereas the vituperation was (not for the first time) largely from people anxious to demonstrate that they know even less about the subject than I do. Though some of it was witty and I laughed out loud. It is a subject I hope to return to now and then for I think "evolution" is not a science but an ideology a quasi-religion a colossal scientistic put-on; that "evolutionary science" is a cant expression a pretence unworthy of a scientific researcher. His job is to inquire not to advance a worldview. The people who study the development of living organisms through the fossil record should be called unpretentiously palaeobiologists . What I'm saying comes down to this. Science cannot now explain and probably will never be able to explain the origin of any species in nature -- least of all man. It can assemble the succession of species in the fossil record; it can catalogue resemblances between species in space and time; it can begin to show the fine adaptations of each to its environment; and the workings of "natural selection" when the environment changes; it can even look into the mechanism by which heritable traits are passed along from individual to individual within a species (thanks incidentally to a line of intellectual descent not from Charles Darwin but from an Augustinian monk named Gregor Mendel). But science cannot even tell you how a species is defined let alone how life emerged from the lifeless sterility of the "primordial swamp". "Evolutionism" is the prevailing speculation that by minute alterations in traits in continuing response to environmental pressures an isolated group within a species "evolves" to the point where its members can breed with each other but no longer with others and -- presto! -- you have a new species. But the "presto" has never been observed in nature and there is a universal paucity of transitional forms. The speculation may even seem plausible but remains an act of faith. It isn't science because it isn't falsifiable: there is no way to test if it might be wrong. It flourishes because it gives comfort to its believers. It assures them that nature is random. In the words of the late Czeslaw Milosz which I quoted a few months ago: "A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death -- the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals greed cowardice murders we are not going to be judged." Evolution is the guarantee that nothing really matters. My more intemperate readers accused me of buying into "Biblical creationism" . It does not follow from the fact I am intensely sceptical about "evolutionary science" however that I would be credulous about "creation science". Both require a kind of po-faced cleverness to talk a little faster than the phenomena can be presented but the latter is based on premises that are even sillier than the former. The Bible is not a textbook in cosmology or biology it is not about nature but about God. To my mind evolutionism and "creationism" are competing "isms". But they reduce finally to the same thing: an attempt to explain how something comes from nothing. Now this is a very large subject and I write a very short column. Let me append a note of autobiography to puzzle my expert readers further before my next emergence from the cosmic void. It is true I am now a "religious nutjob": which is to say a believing Catholic Christian. But this was not always so: I was an atheist into my twenties. And curiously enough it was before I ever became a Christian that I became convinced from out of my youthful fascination with biology and natural history that Darwinian evolution is smoke and mirrors. And this even though I had and retain the highest regard for Charles Darwin up there with Aristotle and Linnaeus among the greatest natural historians. I likewise retain huge respect for all toilers in the biological field. Their observations do not depend upon their theories. It is the same nature that is studied regardless of one's superstructure of belief and every falsifiable observation about it is indeed true science. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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