What Is Man . . .
To the Editor:
David Berlinski gets everything right in “The God of the Gaps” [April], and is even touching and poetic in his affirmation of the miracle of our existence. His view is akin to that of Einstein and other great scientists who have seen their quest for truth as the search for traces of God in the physical universe.
Mr. Berlinski’s treatment of Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founder with Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection, is sensitive and accurate. It is indeed a mystery why our species, which spent most of its existence hunting game and gathering fruit and nuts, was pre-adapted for higher mathematics, fine art, and modern physics. Evolutionary theory has no explanation for this. Of course, it could be simply a fortuitous exaption (that is, adaptation for one purpose deployed for a different purpose), but many will find this to be too convenient a non-explanation.
Mr. Berlinski’s treatment of modern science as the locus of modern-day miracles is brilliant and insightful. It is simply a shame that those untrained in the natural sciences, especially physics, cannot see the stunning, improbable, and yet necessary structure of physical reality. It is difficult indeed not to see the hand of God in quantum mechanics and the exogenously given parameters of particle physics.
Insightful, too, is Mr. Berlinski’s interpretation of the evolution of vision. The fact that vision has evolved many times in many species shows clearly that vision is the product of a wholly natural process. But actually seeing and being conscious of the world is the true miracle of vision, and cannot be reduced to the interaction of neuronal signals.
One of the most egregious arguments of the atheistic crowd is that when you “boil things down” to basics, we humans are just apes with clothes. Thus, for instance, Homer’s Iliad is, at base, just an elaborate primate mating game. “What is essential about the boiling process,” Berlinski wisely notes, “is not what has been distilled, but what has evaporated—namely, everything that is of interest in the Iliad.”
I look forward to reading Mr. Berlinski’s new book, The Devil’s Delusion, on the pretensions of “scientific atheists.” But while they deserve to be criticized roundly for suggesting that modern science can exhaustively explain the universe and our place in it, they are far less dangerous than the “intelligent-design” crowd, which denies modern evolutionary biology altogether and holds that our ruminations about the metaphysics of the universe are “alternative scientific hypotheses” deserving of scientific legitimacy. This is just drivel, and deserves our unmitigated contempt.
Not one word that the “designers” say—indeed, not one word in Mr. Berlinski’s essay or in my letter—is of any scientific value whatsoever. This does not delegitimize such discourse, but rather places it in a value sphere outside of science. As Gilbert Ryle once said, “Physicists may one day have found the answers to all physical questions, but not all questions are physical questions.” This, I believe, is the correct stance of believers.
Herbert Gintis
Santa Fe Institute
Northampton, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
It is a sour reader who is not charmed by David Berlinski’s wit, but he is wrong to state that latent physical abilities (or “unopened gifts,” as he calls them) “make no sense in Darwinian terms.” He writes of an Ecuadorian primitive who could be educated at Oxford to the same polish as a native Briton. But this is in fact a function of the intertwining of nature and nurture. Some inherited traits must be nurtured in order to come to fruition. Others require no gestation period: they confer immediate advantage on the inheritor.
Statistically, both traits follow Darwin. In the drive toward survival/dominance, there is no statistical distinction between the effect varying the degree of “fit” for nature/nurture traits and the frequency with which simple advantaging traits occur during reproduction.
Mr. Berlinski is also wrong in stating that “useless genes are subject to negative selection pressure, and therefore must drain away into the sands of time.” Genomes contain many segments that may be dormant at a given time but can be reactivated in a new or altered environment.
Louis Harovitz
Staten Island, New York
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To the Editor:
I appreciated and concurred with David Berlinski’s reflections in “The God of the Gaps.” Primitive man clearly had capabilities that were not needed in his environment; the treatment of “gaps” by Darwinians often seems an expression less of scientific method than of articles of faith; genetic endowment does not explain human qualities; the physical sciences cannot capture the spiritual dimension of life.
In this connection, it is useful to differentiate between that which occurs within a given “level” of evolution and that which pertains to a “new” or more advanced level. For example, the level of dead matter differs from the advanced level of living matter; non-mammalian animal life differs from mammalian life, which in turn differs from the new level of man.
Reductionists seek to explain a higher level by reducing it to a lower level. Thus, they attempt to explain reasoning in terms of brain functions, and thence biology, chemistry, and physics. Yet experience shows that each new level has its own laws, which better explain its behavior than do the laws of the level that preceded or gave rise to it. Thus, no matter how perfect our study of the cells and impulses of the brain were to be, it could never “tell” what a person is thinking, let alone whether his thoughts are true or false. Even in disciplines developed by man, arithmetic does not explain algebra, which does not explain calculus. Nor does the Newtonian physics of motion explain modern physics (be it relativity or uncertainty). On the contrary, a higher level permits a better understanding of the qualities of preceding levels.
Thus, as Mr. Berlinski notes, reducing the Iliad to bestial fighting eliminates “everything that is of interest” in it. Analogously, reducing the choices made by individuals to deterministic formulas eliminates everything that is of interest in them. As we move to each higher level of evolution, there is greater freedom, and therefore newness.
From this perspective, “evolution” is not antithetical to intelligent design but a partner; the former focuses within a given level, while the latter focuses on the formation of a newer level. A higher level certainly requires its predecessor, but the explanation for its formation requires a perspective that is absent from the lower level. The lower level is studied bottom-up, or causally, while the transition to the higher level is better understood top-down, or teleologically, as though there were a purpose to be fulfilled. Moreover, a higher level influences lower levels, as when thought moves a body, or when biology harnesses chemistry. (As Mr. Berlinski well points out, man’s anatomical structure differentiates him from the chimpanzee.)
The materialist (or reducible) view of the world emphasizes what is base in man’s makeup, while the design view emphasizes the elevated role of ideas and spirit. At issue, in the end, is not just whether there is a God but upon which element our eyes are trained.
Allen Weingarten
Monroe Township, New Jersey
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To the Editor:
David Berlinski’s witty skewering of atheist pretensions reminded me of a review by John R. Searle of Daniel C. Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained that appeared in the New York Review of Books several years ago and that is now available in an anthology of Searle’s writings. Searle charged that Dennett’s book “makes no contribution to the problem of consciousness but rather denies that there is any such problem in the first place.” Further: “I regard Dennett’s denial of the existence of consciousness,” says Searle, “not as a new discovery or even as a serious possibility but rather as a form of intellectual pathology.”
Understandably, Dennett wrote back offended, insisting that “the persistent problem of consciousness is going to remain a mystery until we find some such dead obvious intuition [like the feeling of pain when someone pinches his forearm] and show that, in spite of first appearances, it is false!” To adopt anything but a third-person perspective when studying first-person phenomena would represent, for Dennett, the abandonment of scientific methodology.
To which Searle offered the obvious riposte:
Here is the paradox of this exchange: I am a conscious reviewer consciously answering the objections of an author who gives every indication of being consciously and puzzlingly angry. I do this for a readership that I assume is conscious. How then can I take seriously his claim that consciousness does not really exist?
Outsiders to this debate who find their faith in God grounded on firmer soil than the latest lucubrations of noisy and self-congratulatory materialists can at least take occasional pleasure in seeing these pretensions so masterfully punctured by thinkers who know a fallacy in reasoning when they see one. Atheism may have damaging consequences for society, but I’ll at least say this for the new atheists: they sure are good for a laugh.
Rev. Edward T. Oakes, S.J.
University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary
Mundelein, Illinois
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David Berlinski writes:
I am grateful for these letters and the generous sentiments they convey. After publishing a number of articles in COMMENTARY in which, I have been assured, I got everything wrong, it is gratifying to discover that in “The God of the Gaps,” I got something right. Correspondents troubled that I might be embarrassed by their praise may set aside their concerns.
My views, Herbert Gintis writes, “are akin to that of Einstein and other great scientists.” I am certain this is so, even though, with respect to Einstein, no one is quite sure what his views really were. In a letter sold recently at auction, Einstein affirmed that “the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.”
This quotation conveys a crudeness of thought somewhat at odds with the popular impression that Einstein was the most intelligent man who ever lived; but there are, of course, many other remarks attributed to Einstein suggesting a less peremptory attitude. Even though they are in conflict, I agree with them all.
There are two respects in which I might take issue with Mr. Gintis. One of them is trivial. “The fact that vision has evolved many times in many species,” he writes, “shows clearly that vision is the product of a wholly natural process.” Is there a difference between saying this, I wonder, and saying simply that organs of sight have evolved many times? Why not leave naturalness to the naturalists?
There is no gainsaying the fact that organs of sight have appeared in evolutionary history, but whether we have understood the process by which they have appeared is another matter entirely. If we cannot say what the eye does, beyond saying that it allows organisms to see, what confidence might we repose in any evolutionary explanation of its origins? As readers of COMMENTARY may remember, I discussed this issue, which is more logical than biological, in “A Scientific Scandal” (April 2003), and before that in “The Deniable Darwin” (June 1996).
Mr. Gintis is offended by dogmatic affirmations of atheism. I am, too. But then he adds a curious remark. The scientific atheists, he says, “are far less dangerous than the ‘intelligent-design’ crowd, which denies modern evolutionary biology altogether and holds that our ruminations about the metaphysics of the universe are ‘alternative scientific hypotheses’ deserving of scientific legitimacy. This is just drivel, and deserves our unmitigated contempt.”
I am as willing as Mr. Gintis to unmitigate my contempt in the face of drivel, but while what he has to say is very stern, it is also very silly. Having rejected Darwin’s theory, I have also rejected intelligent design as an alternative—and in the pages of COMMENTARY, no less (“Has Darwin Met His Match?,” December 2002). I come to this discussion with unstained hands. Nonetheless, the attack on theorists of intelligent design (and, I might add, on the Discovery Institute, which has promoted their work) has represented a form of barely controlled hysteria.
For this reason, it seems to me important—morally as well as intellectually —to stress two things:
First: critics of Darwin’s theory of evolution like Philip Johnson, Michael Behe, Steven Meyer, Paul Nelson, William Dembski, and Jonathan Wells have pointed to problems with respect to that theory that biologists simultaneously asserted did not exist and would soon be remedied. The problems were real. The remedies have not yet been forthcoming.
Second: when it comes to denying things, no one in the intelligent-design community is prepared to deny evolution altogether. How could anyone? It is, to repeat, Darwin’s theory of evolution that has been the cynosure of their concerns —and of mine, too.
This is not the place to rehearse yet again the theories of intelligent design. Nor is it the place to rehearse once again criticisms of Darwin’s theory. In any case, a sense that Darwinian theory is inadequate to explain the complexity of living systems is now common within the community of evolutionary biologists; I offer more detailed arguments and references to this literature in The Devil’s Delusion. With that said, why, then, is intelligent design so very dangerous? If theories of intelligent design are true, they pose no danger. If they are false, who cares? And if we do not now know whether they are true or false, surely we can wait without anxiety?
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I am not sure what to make of Louis Harovitz’s response to my article because I suspect that deep down we do not disagree. “Some inherited traits must be nurtured,” he write, “in order to come to fruition. Others require no gestation period: they confer immediate advantage on the inheritor.” This is obviously so.
The question raised by Alfred Wallace is otherwise. What is the origin, Wallace asked, of certain characteristically human abilities? No schedule of selective advantages accounts for their appearance, he observed, because within primitive societies none exists.
If it is not clear how such unopened gifts arose when they were not needed, it is equally unclear why they should have persisted when they were not used. “Genomes,” Mr. Harovitz writes, “contain many segments that may be dormant at a given time, but can be reactivated in a new or altered environment.” True enough: genetic reversals of a single genetic variable do occur. But what is at issue is hardly a single genetic variable.It is typically a complicated series of morphological and psychological traits that are under the control of a very large number of genes if they are under genetic control at all. Can these be raised from the dead once they are gone?
In answering affirmatively, Mr. Harovitz may be referring to the marine benthic Ostracoda (Arthropoda: Crustacea). Writing in the 2002 issue of Revista Española de Micropaleontologia, R. V. Dingle argued that two species of Ostracoda seem to have regained their sight by the “rejuvenation of ocular structures from functionally blind ancestors through the reactivation of dormant genes.”
This is curious, if true. Either we must credit Dingle, who suggests that the shrimp can see again, or we must credit Darwin, who suggests that they cannot. It is Dingle or Darwin, but not both. In the July 2007 issue of The Journal of Paleontology, G. Hunt has suggested that there is less to Dingle’s story than meets the eye and so assigns the palm to Darwin. I have no idea, needless to say, who is right about the shrimp. I am content to let Dingle and Darwin fight it out.
But Mr. Harovitz has allowed himself to become distracted. Nothing like “reactivation” is at issue in the argument that Wallace made. The human powers latent in primitive societies do not need to be reactivated. There is no evidence whatsoever that they are dormant in anything, beyond the obvious sense that they are not in use.
On the other hand, were we to discover that the spotted hyena, as a species, has the unsuspected ability to insert itself into social life at Harvard, Mr. Harovitz, I expect, might be surprised. And for obvious reasons. The requisite abilities involve behavior in which the comparatively fastidious hyena never indulges, and they would have been of little use—perhaps none—when it came to eating carrion or laughing ghoulishly in the night.
Genes that undergo no positive selective pressure and that just hang around hoping later in time to be useful are, in fact, deleterious to the organism. They slow reproduction, waste energy, take up space, and clutter up the genome. In the case of the spotted hyena, there are no such genes. In the case of human beings, there are.
Why?
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Having made so many new friends, I am pleased to see in Allen Weingarten yet another. But I do have a few reservations about what he has written. (What, after all, are friends for?)
“Even in disciplines developed by man,” Mr. Weingarten writes, “arithmetic does not explain algebra, which does not explain calculus.” I am not sure why arithmetic should explain algebra, or whether anyone ever thought it did. But still less is it clear that arithmetic cannot explain calculus. It was precisely the great achievement of 19th-century mathematics to show that the entire obscure, metaphysically suspect machinery invented by Leibniz and Newton could step by step be reduced to the natural numbers and the laws governing their nature. On this matter, readers might consult my own A Tour of the Calculus.
Don’t get me wrong. The specific cases that Mr. Weingarten cites in his rejection of reductionism are fine, and I agree with most of the conclusions that he draws. There is very little evidence, as he suggests, that the principles of chemistry will in the end explain the principles of life. Still, I find myself discontented with this way of putting things. With respect to such issues as the brain and the mind, for example, what is important is our commitment to the facts. The brain is what it is; but so, too, is the mind. Let us learn what we can about what interests us; then we can talk about whether the mind is the brain, or the brain the mind. For the moment, we understand almost nothing of either.
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Father Oakes has pleasingly reminded me of the exhilarating dumb show between John Searle and Daniel Dennett. I would have greater sympathy with either man’s position on the problem of consciousness were I to understand better the problem itself.
What problem, I am inclined to ask? A close study of a number of cases—an attempt to tie consciousness as a category to facts on the ground—would at least dispel the impression that Searle and Dennett are shuffling ontological claims to no very good end.
Human beings are both objects in the world and subjects of the world. It is surely true that if dropped from a great height a stone and a philosopher will accelerate at the same rate of speed. Nonetheless, the philosopher but not the stone will anticipate his immediate future with a marked lack of enthusiasm. Surely this is something that calls for an explanation?
Yes, absolutely. But why is the problem more vexing than the correlative problem of explaining why both the stone and the philosopher are falling at all? Surely this, too, calls out for an explanation. In the case of their descent, the explanation must appeal either to a universal force or to the curvature of space and time. But if we can with equanimity tolerate universal forces or curved space and time in physics, why not minds or souls in psychology? The difference in the two cases does not rest with ontological distinctions at all.
In one respect, I think Dennett is correct. It may well be that there are certain kinds of facts about the human mind that we cannot interpret in the terms of any known scientific scheme. Dennett regards this as a grave problem—and it is, but only for those who imagine that the sciences are in a position to answer all of the questions that we might find interesting.
And they aren’t.
