James Le Fanu: Why Us? (The limitations of science)

by John Clinch , Friday, June 19, 2009, 18:28 (5634 days ago) @ John Clinch

Part 3 - The point at which I really wanted to throw the book across the room came in his discussion of evolution by natural selection which, he seems to admit at one point, is the explanation for the extraordinary biosphere (a position he then resiles from on the grounds that we don't yet have all the answers) and, in particular, his unjustified traducing of the personality of Charles Darwin. It's an ad hominem point he makes, of course, but Darwin was like the rest of us a man of his time and this is reflected in the language he uses about "savages" and "civilisation" and so on. But LeFanu's sneering criticism really won't do: Darwin was passionately concerned about slavery and what he saw of the maltreatment of "savages" in South America. In fact, his observations concerning the fundamental similarity of "primitive" peoples to Englishmen seems to have encouraged his thinking about the similarity and unity of all life on Earth. And, what's more, the science of genetics has since shown us that homo sapiens is one of the most homogenous species on Earth ... something that Darwin would not have been in the least bit surprised about. - And then, the killer ... the argument from final consequences that doesn't even work on its own terms. How low and wrongheaded can LeFanu get than to hold the theory of evolution by natural selection to account for the evils of "social Darwinism?" He stops short of blaming Darwin for the Holocaust (as his fellow-travellers, the creationists, are fond of doing) but only after covering evolution with such a mound of sticky poo with all its supposedly evil consequences that the ignorant reader is left with a very bad smell about it all. He refers, several times, to the "debasement" of mankind wrought by evolution. In what way evolution is meant to be debasing is unclear. LeFanu may regard it as a debasement to have revealed to us our origins as a tiny shrew-like creature about 65m years ago but I don't. I'm enormously humbled and wonder-struck. Darwin's incredible insight instils in me a humility and awe by which I feel a profound connection with this fragile world, a feeling bordering on the religious. I'm sorry that Mr LeFanu doesn't. He seems to prefer to find a justification for his religion in the old God-of-the-gaps. Some people, it seems, never learn. - But, of course, even if evolution did debase humanity, even if Darwin were the most evil social Darwinist about, even if evolution was a hypothesis designed to reinforce a vicious social hierarchy, racism and exploitation, it wouldn't be any less true for that. And the evidence is overwhelming: it is as true as gravity, however LeFanu may want to misrepresent it. (He often refers to the survival of the fittest and seems to interpret "the fittest" in the way the Nazis did ... i.e. as the strongest rather than the most adapted to the environment ... another revealing error.) - The fact that Darwin explicitly recognised, as all good scientists do, the weaknesses in his theory (the fact that the fossil record is not suffused with countless "transitional" forms) emphatically does not make the underlying theory wrong. Unwittingly (I'll give him the benefit of the doubt here), LeFanu here deploys the simplistic argument of the creationists and ID pseudo-scientists that the fossil record is just to like that. Actually, contrary to what these people assert, so-called "transitional" fossils get uncovered all the time ... and all in the places geologically that one would expect to find them. The modern classic is ambulocetus and we mustn't forget the stunning Darwinius masillae recently revealed. It would take one ... just one, mark you - to be found where it should not be to put a dent in evolutionary theory. But no ... what we find is a remarkable consilience right across the board. Time after time the theory is reinforced by a complex web of good evidence from different disciplines - by zoology, anthropology, homology, genetics, geology, population studies. The fact that the processes of speciation and abiogenesis are not yet fully understood does not displace evolution as really the basic architecture of our understanding of the living world ... the rest is detail. Moreover, an evolutionary approach can assist in our understanding of many social phenomena too (c.f. Dawkins' much misunderstood but important contribution, memetics.) LeFanu would dismiss it all with a wave of the hand, because it is incomplete, without anything to put in its place. - Cont'd