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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

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