Darwin Devolves : The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution by Michael J. Behe
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Sell Me A Bridge!

Although it pretends to be something else, this is a book about metaphysics - our fundamental presumptions about the way the world is. Unfortunately it isn’t a very good one. The Ancient Greek philosophers started the genre when they made the distinction between cause and purpose. Everything has a prior cause but for some things that cause is an intention, which is, they thought, it’s own cause.

Eventually the opposing ideas cause/effect and purpose ripened into what we now call mechanism and teleology. And we’re still trying to work out the relationship between them. Behe’s book continues the battle between cause and purpose as the way the world ‘really’ is and how the process of evolution takes place as a consequence.

Behe has chosen to opt for a teleological view of the world. This hasn’t been popular among philosophers (or evolutionary scientists) for the last century or so. Arguably, the last well-known thinkers to adopt a teleological approach to evolution include two Frenchmen, Henri Bergson (who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1927) and Teilhard de Chardin (a Jesuit palaeontologist).

Both these men thought that the universe was pursuing a goal rather than following the strictly random progression of cause and effect. Bergson identified this purposefulness with the élan vital or creative impulse of human beings as the source of spontaneous innovation. Teilhard suggested that the entire cosmos was headed toward not a grim heat death but what he called the Omega Point, essentially a reuniting of all things, or, less euphemistically: God.

The teleological pot never quite stopped simmering for the remainder of the 20th century - it was kept barely going by, of all things, American Pragmatism, a philosophy which is implicitly teleological. But the world at large became dominated by the physical mechanics of evolution sparked by the discovery of DNA.

DNA, it was presumed, was the missing mechanical link in Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was the molecular locus at which things happened and through which all life from bacteria to human beings was generated. And DNA was the substance whose random mutations could account for the mechanical progression from one form of life to another, and from species to species within those forms.

But, according to Behe, scientific results aren’t turning out as expected. While he recognises that DNA is “an elaborate molecular code expressed through the intricate actions of hugely complicated molecular machines,” he doesn’t buy the implication that the process of evolution is ultimately without some more general purpose. His evidence for this conclusion is precisely that provided by other theoreticians as evidence for the opposition, essentially junk DNA.

In Behe’s view, evolved life forms, during the process of progressively adapting to their environment actually devolve. That is to say, their genes are degraded from those of their ancestors as they sacrifice long term development for short term gain. Human beings in fact have mostly bits and pieces of now inoperative DNA in their chromosomes, suggesting some really massive ‘fall’ from a previous superior state. Darwinian evolution is wasteful and its destructive!

For someone committed to purposeful cosmic development this waste and destruction is intolerable. Darwin must be wrong. His theory, because it is about destruction, cannot account, Behe says, for that first positive productive spark of life, that first molecular occurrence of DNA. We must look at the bigger picture to understand what’s happening here. And that bigger picture means recognising that there is a design that we haven’t yet grasped, a quite literal Deus ex machina.

Forget the origins of the Big Bang, it’s that first molecule which must have been inserted into the soup of creation which is the core of the problem. And, of course, if there is such an insertion, there must be a design; and if there is a design, there must be a designer. And the traditional name for this designer is God. And thanks to theologians like Thomas Aquinas, it is clear that the designer-God that best fits the needs of the universe and its orderly development is that described by Christianity.

As usual, a metaphysical choice apparently has found its own confirmation. If purpose is presumed then purpose will be found. But the flaw in Behe’s argument is not in his metaphysics but in what might be called his post-metaphysical analysis. This analysis is largely cultural and has much more to do with Behe’s Roman Catholic background than either his metaphysics or science.

I don’t begrudge Behe’s metaphysical stance. On the contrary, to the extent that his metaphysics conforms to that of Bergson, Teilhard, and many of the American Pragmatists, I am right there with him. And for the sake of argument, I’m even willing to accept his claims about intelligent design. Who am I after all to contradict Aquinas. But at that point we part company.

Christian thinking did not spawn the idea of intelligent design. Before Christianity, the Gnostics of Persia and their forebears had already thought through the issue of reconciling a God of creation with the apparent waste and destruction that is apparent, not just in molecular DNA but in a dog eat dog world of aggression, violence, injustice and death.

The God of gnosticism is neither the rather distant Ancient of Days of Judaism nor the supposedly benign and co-suffering triune God of followers of Jesus. The Gnostic God is evil. The purpose this God had in mind is precisely what we can observe and experience around us - a world of unrelieved suffering, overwhelming desire to escape through myth, universal grasping for power, and a general disappointment with the way things have turned out.

Gnosticism invaded Christian thought at an early stage and pops its head up periodically in sectarian enthusiasms - strict Calvinism, Jansenism, and some Anabaptist cults for example. But in Roman Catholicism, gnosticism is formally a heresy. According to doctrine, creation is good, as is the God who/which established its existence.

So it is obvious that what Behe is pushing is not science, not even metaphysics, but religion - his religion against what he believes are heretics. He wants us to believe that there is not just intention behind the cosmos but good intention. He believes this as an article of Faith and wants to rest of us to accept it as a methodological principle.

As they say in New York City: “Sell me a bridge!”

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The Temptation to Exist 
by 

Emil M. Cioran, 

 

Richard Howard (Translator), 

 

Susan Sontag (Introduction)

 

ophy-theology 

The Sin of Obsessive Assurance

Susan Sontag’s introduction to these essays cites their dependence on Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. But I don’t think she is correct in her claim that Cioran merely restates their arguments. Rather he makes them even more extreme in their already radical alienation by recognising the source of the problem: language, that very tool through which the problem is formulated. This self-referentiality is spiritually, politically, and very often physically intolerable.

Being trapped within the bubble of language is a horrible fate. It obsesses us; it frustrates us; and it can often drive us insane. So Cioran laments, “The fact... that our first ancestor left us, for our entire legacy, only the horror of paradise. By giving names to things, he prepared his own Fall and ours. And if we seek a remedy, we must begin by debaptizing the universe, by removing the label which, assigned to each appearance, isolates it and lends it a simulacrum of meaning.”

There is no escape from the bubble. We increase its strength every time we attempt to denounce it. It is a universe that expands without limit faster than we can measure it. Because we casually use it, we believe we control it. But this is its hidden strength: it feigns impotence. Cioran speaks of “the stupidities inherent in the cult of truth.” Language simply never approaches reality. Truth is merely a conceit that language insinuates into defective lives.

The therapy we typically employ to break out of the bubble is action. Action is real; action seems to pierce the bubble, to neutralise it. But, of course, the motive for action, the ideal, the goal, the value and intended effects of action are already infected by the contents of the bubble. Even in action we cannot but increase its power: “The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths.”

Cioran says, “The aspiration to ‘save’ the world is a morbid phenomenon of a people’s youth.” Youth eventually finds that saving the world demands power. Power is the universal currency of the idealists who have emerged from youth strengthened in their resolve to push on. So they spend their lives collecting it. “Contaminated by the superstition of action, we believe that our ideas must come to something.” Language leads us into an abyss of delusion that we seek to impose everywhere, on everything and everyone.

Those who seek power within the bubble don’t realise that to the degree they succeed in their quest, they become oppressed under the weight of their own language. Their personal bubble collapses to the literary density of a neutron star in which substance is so uniform that there is no chemical or atomic interaction. Their expression becomes repetitive and formulaic. Cant is the ultimate reduction of language to disassociated atoms of linguistic matter. Action becomes increasingly violent to compensate for the vacuity of language. The result is predictable:

“Faithful to his appearances, the man of violence is not discouraged, he starts all over again, and persists, since he cannot exempt himself from suffering. His occasional efforts to destroy others are merely a roundabout route to his own destruction. Beneath his self-confidence, his braggadocio, lurks a fanatic of disaster. Hence it is among the violent that we meet the enemies of themselves. And we are all violent— men of anger who, having lost the key of quietude, now have access only to the secrets of laceration.”*

Most people are satisfied to remain placidly within the bubble of language because it promises happiness, contentment, advancement, and ultimate peace. Liberation, redemption, and salvation are the terms used to provide assurance that the bubble is fundamentally benign. That this is a delusion is rejected by the mass and exploited by the rest. Language provides to the ambitious an unlimited vocabulary of novel ideas that please those who need assurance:

“As for our redeemers, come among us for our greater harm, we love the noxiousness of their hopes and their remedies, their eagerness to favor and exalt our ills, the venom that infuses their “lifegiving” words. To them we owe our expertise in a suffering that has no exit.”

Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had some minimal confidence that their writing might be noted, perhaps heeded by some to improve life within the bubble. Cioran had no such hope. He knows that attacking the bubble is a task of intellectual vanity. The compulsion to carry out such attacks leads only to exhausted compliance:

“One does not abuse one’s capacity to doubt with impunity... Those who have found answers for nothing are better at enduring the effects of tyranny than those who have found an answer for everything.”

Cioran, therefore presents more than an atheist spirituality. He wants to combat the grave sin of optimism rampant in a world that considers idealism a virtue. Salvation does not come from triumph against physical or social adversity but the renunciation of ideals tout court. Seen in this light, as a mystical prophet, Cioran presents a call perhaps not heard since Isaiah to attend to oneself rather than everyone else’s defects.

*It is difficult for me to read this passage without thinking of Trump’s incitement to riot on January 6th.

The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Listening, Not Telling, Is the Issue

The idea of correlating literary criticism with physiological and psychological research is intriguing on the face of it. But I would be much happier about this book if it were directed toward the listeners rather than the tellers of stories. As it stands, it’s a sort of how-to manual for improving the script for the Kardashians and other creators of literary roadside bombs.

The world isn’t experiencing a dearth of folk who can tell stories well. There are many more good stories in print, and podcasts, and film than all of us could ever experience. And any one of us is hopelessly overwhelmed. Particularly by the semi-literate terrorists with whom we co-inhabit the planet.

There is a natural identifier for most good writers and other storytellers - they get paid; or at least they get published by people who pay for the privilege of doing so. Bad storytellers abound on blogs and webcasts and chat rooms and GR because nobody thinks they’re worth paying for, except the odd rogue government or fascist billionaire.

Why would anyone want to make these ill-educated denizens of the storytelling underworld better at their craft? In order to be more convincing about their tales of cannibalistic pedophile Democrats, poisonous contrails, or the global conspiracy of Corona virus? They already do a pretty good job of attracting an audience for this junk. Teaching them more tricks of the trade strikes me as superfluous.

The real problem is obviously the inability of vast numbers of story-listeners to discern how these modern bards of balderdash, hate and spite are being manipulated by the rhetorical technique, bad as it is, that they already employ.

I suppose that the intent of the book could easily be subverted by reading it as a listening-guide. But that’s not its stated purpose. Besides, any piece by Harold Bloom provides more insight than the whizz bang psychological factoids presented by the author.

Storr is certainly right in his contention that we tell stories in order to keep the horrors of conscious existence at bay. Storytelling is therapy for the knowledge that everything about us is temporary, transient and doomed. But far too much story-listening isn’t therapy; it’s rage and revenge on other storytellers for our fragile, incomplete, and changing grasp of what we call reality.

View all my reviews

Darwin Devolves : The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution by Michael J. Behe
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Sell Me A Bridge!

Although it pretends to be something else, this is a book about metaphysics - our fundamental presumptions about the way the world is. Unfortunately it isn’t a very good one. The Ancient Greek philosophers started the genre when they made the distinction between cause and purpose. Everything has a prior cause but for some things that cause is an intention, which is, they thought, it’s own cause.

Eventually the opposing ideas cause/effect and purpose ripened into what we now call mechanism and teleology. And we’re still trying to work out the relationship between them. Behe’s book continues the battle between cause and purpose as the way the world ‘really’ is and how the process of evolution takes place as a consequence.

Behe has chosen to opt for a teleological view of the world. This hasn’t been popular among philosophers (or evolutionary scientists) for the last century or so. Arguably, the last well-known thinkers to adopt a teleological approach to evolution include two Frenchmen, Henri Bergson (who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1927) and Teilhard de Chardin (a Jesuit palaeontologist).

Both these men thought that the universe was pursuing a goal rather than following the strictly random progression of cause and effect. Bergson identified this purposefulness with the élan vital or creative impulse of human beings as the source of spontaneous innovation. Teilhard suggested that the entire cosmos was headed toward not a grim heat death but what he called the Omega Point, essentially a reuniting of all things, or, less euphemistically: God.

The teleological pot never quite stopped simmering for the remainder of the 20th century - it was kept barely going by, of all things, American Pragmatism, a philosophy which is implicitly teleological. But the world at large became dominated by the physical mechanics of evolution sparked by the discovery of DNA.

DNA, it was presumed, was the missing mechanical link in Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was the molecular locus at which things happened and through which all life from bacteria to human beings was generated. And DNA was the substance whose random mutations could account for the mechanical progression from one form of life to another, and from species to species within those forms.

But, according to Behe, scientific results aren’t turning out as expected. While he recognises that DNA is “an elaborate molecular code expressed through the intricate actions of hugely complicated molecular machines,” he doesn’t buy the implication that the process of evolution is ultimately without some more general purpose. His evidence for this conclusion is precisely that provided by other theoreticians as evidence for the opposition, essentially junk DNA.

In Behe’s view, evolved life forms, during the process of progressively adapting to their environment actually devolve. That is to say, their genes are degraded from those of their ancestors as they sacrifice long term development for short term gain. Human beings in fact have mostly bits and pieces of now inoperative DNA in their chromosomes, suggesting some really massive ‘fall’ from a previous superior state. Darwinian evolution is wasteful and its destructive!

For someone committed to purposeful cosmic development this waste and destruction is intolerable. Darwin must be wrong. His theory, because it is about destruction, cannot account, Behe says, for that first positive productive spark of life, that first molecular occurrence of DNA. We must look at the bigger picture to understand what’s happening here. And that bigger picture means recognising that there is a design that we haven’t yet grasped, a quite literal Deus ex machina.

Forget the origins of the Big Bang, it’s that first molecule which must have been inserted into the soup of creation which is the core of the problem. And, of course, if there is such an insertion, there must be a design; and if there is a design, there must be a designer. And the traditional name for this designer is God. And thanks to theologians like Thomas Aquinas, it is clear that the designer-God that best fits the needs of the universe and its orderly development is that described by Christianity.

As usual, a metaphysical choice apparently has found its own confirmation. If purpose is presumed then purpose will be found. But the flaw in Behe’s argument is not in his metaphysics but in what might be called his post-metaphysical analysis. This analysis is largely cultural and has much more to do with Behe’s Roman Catholic background than either his metaphysics or science.

I don’t begrudge Behe’s metaphysical stance. On the contrary, to the extent that his metaphysics conforms to that of Bergson, Teilhard, and many of the American Pragmatists, I am right there with him. And for the sake of argument, I’m even willing to accept his claims about intelligent design. Who am I after all to contradict Aquinas. But at that point we part company.

Christian thinking did not spawn the idea of intelligent design. Before Christianity, the Gnostics of Persia and their forebears had already thought through the issue of reconciling a God of creation with the apparent waste and destruction that is apparent, not just in molecular DNA but in a dog eat dog world of aggression, violence, injustice and death.

The God of gnosticism is neither the rather distant Ancient of Days of Judaism nor the supposedly benign and co-suffering triune God of followers of Jesus. The Gnostic God is evil. The purpose this God had in mind is precisely what we can observe and experience around us - a world of unrelieved suffering, overwhelming desire to escape through myth, universal grasping for power, and a general disappointment with the way things have turned out.

Gnosticism invaded Christian thought at an early stage and pops its head up periodically in sectarian enthusiasms - strict Calvinism, Jansenism, and some Anabaptist cults for example. But in Roman Catholicism, gnosticism is formally a heresy. According to doctrine, creation is good, as is the God who/which established its existence.

So it is obvious that what Behe is pushing is not science, not even metaphysics, but religion - his religion against what he believes are heretics. He wants us to believe that there is not just intention behind the cosmos but good intention. He believes this as an article of Faith and wants to rest of us to accept it as a methodological principle.

As they say in New York City: “Sell me a bridge!”

View all my reviews