Ever since Darwin, the Christian West has been at war with itself. At the extreme edges of this conflict are militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, the hot gospeller of neo-Darwinism who believes evolution has solved the mystery of our existence, and American Christian fundamentalists who insist that not only was Darwin wrong, but also that the whole story told in the Bible is literally true.
Somewhere in between these two extremes are, I hope, the rest of us.
This usually cold war has now entered a very hot phase. The militant atheists have been enraged by the fact that President George W Bush has said “intelligent design” is as likely an explanation as evolution. Meanwhile, intelligent design (ID) is being studied and developed in some respected universities.
The truth of what is going on here is complex yet vital. The average newspaper reader and television viewer in Britain has, thus far, had no chance of understanding why. The BBC, for instance, presents anything but the strictest neo-Darwinian orthodoxy as clear evidence of insanity.
Knots need to be unpicked. First, the world is purposefully designed. Sharks have teeth to capture their prey and trees have leaves to capture sunlight. In the absence of any competing hypothesis, it is rational to assume that an intelligence, God perhaps, is at work.
Enter Darwin. He said that, once a stable replicative process is established in nature, then errors will occur. A few beneficial errors will render replicators — organisms — better adapted and, therefore, better able to reproduce. Over billions of years, this simple process will lead to the variety of life we see around us today. Note that Darwin did not say how this system works nor how it began. He had no idea.
Since then, we have begun to understand how evolution works. DNA is the replicator at the heart of the system and errors in the transcription of this molecule result in mutations, most of which are harmful but some of which are beneficial. The combination of Darwinism and molecular biology has created the orthodoxy known as neo-Darwinism.
None of which has — or should have — the slightest consequence for religious belief. Indeed, to a Taoist, Hindu or Buddhist, Darwinism must appear irrelevant, trivial or obvious. Even a Christian shouldn’t really be bothered. Of course, Darwinism shows the Bible is not literally accurate if only because it requires the earth to be billions rather than thousands of years old — but treating biblical stories as metaphors, not literal truths, is a commonplace of Christian theology.
Darwinism did not, as we are sometimes told, “explain life”. What the theory explains is what happens once life, or at least replication, gets going. Darwin did not know how replication began and, contrary to what you may think, neither do we.
At the back of your mind is the idea that a lightning flash triggered a replicative system in the primordial soup, and suddenly the show was on the road. You may also be dimly aware of the Miller-Urey experiment in 1953 in which soup was created in the lab and bombarded with lightning. Amino acids appeared. Bingo! Nope. Amino acids, the chemicals that make proteins, are thermodynamically speaking easy.
In fact, we now know that the odds against a stable replicative system establishing itself in the soup by chance are overwhelming. We absolutely do not know what started life and it remains the most staggeringly weird and improbable development.
Neo-Darwinians must, reluctantly, accept this. But the slightest suggestion that the orthodoxy is, in any way, incomplete is treated with contempt. In fact, the orthodoxy is incomplete, and even among the ranks of strict Darwinians there are profound disputes about the mechanism of evolution. The late Stephen Jay Gould, for example, regarded the gene-centred orthodoxy as wrong-headed.
It is in this context that ID should be understood. Mainstream ID contradicts the fundamentalists’ faith in the chronology of the Bible since it accepts the billions of years necessary for the development of life at its present levels of complexity.
My problem with ID is its name. “Intelligent” design? Nothing in the many questions that have been asked of neo-Darwinism necessarily points to an intelligence behind the development of life. Rather, the argument is simply that natural selection may not be the only force at work. Life may, for example, have started and be sustained by an innate drive towards complexity within the laws of physics. This would explain why life began so soon, a few hundred million years, after the formation of earth.
Of course, some adherents to ID are driven by a need to establish religious rather than scientific truth. But neo-Darwinism has also in many cases abandoned proper scientific inquiry. Instead of testing the theory against the world, its most passionate advocates test the world against the theory. And neo-Darwinians are constantly, and often wrongly, trying to elevate their insights into a dogmatic system.
The co-decipherer of DNA, Francis Crick, for example, once defined the “central dogma” of molecular biology as the one-way flow of information from gene to organism. This central “dogma” would stop evolution in its tracks — information has to flow back to the DNA from the organism, most obviously by its death, to tell the DNA it got something wrong.
Furthermore, the claims of neo-Darwinism have been expanding. In the form of evolutionary psychology it now claims to be able to explain human behaviour in spite of the fact that a key aspect of human behaviour is that it has stopped the processes of evolution, by, for example, using contraception and keeping handicapped people alive.
Darwinism is a potent and, within certain limitations, unarguable theory. But the one truth that we can take from the work of that greatest of all naturalists is that humans are dependent on a system bigger than themselves and which, in all probability, they can never hope fully to understand.
