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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