Science Literature

"Evolutionary biologists are - as modern scientists go - a historically minded lot" says Armand Leroi. Yet the perceptions of many are coloured by our secular culture: "The pre-1859 theoretical landscape is shrouded in a Judeo-Christian gloom that reaches without interruption to the dawn of recorded time, where it dissolves into the Stygian darkness of pagan creation myth." Happily, historians of science are generally able to challenge these revisionist cardboard images of the past. Leroi is reviewing a book by David Sedley, who is Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Regarding the coffee-table myth, Leroi observes:

"David Sedley's book will change that view. He argues that, for the philosophers of ancient Greece, the central cosmological question was this: is the world, and all that it contains, the handiwork of an intelligent designer?"

"Even when Plato and Aristotle walk side by side, as in Raphael's famous painting The School of Athens, they do not see eye to eye or point in the same direction. We can't hear what the two are saying in Raphael's scene, but it seems clear enough that they belong to different generations and aren't listening too carefully to one another." (Source: go here)

The intellectual ferment of Athens threw up all sorts of ideas. Many were cranky, some indulged in poetry and metaphor, but the central issues could be explored with reasoned arguments.

"The brilliance of this book is that Sedley lets the Greeks talk to us and, surprisingly, we can understand what they're saying. Listen to Empedocles describing a time when the world was filled with a diversity of creatures with improbable combinations of features, most of which were then winnowed out, and you hear the late Stephen Jay Gould illuminating the body plans of the Burgess Shale fossils. Listen to Aristotle heaping scorn on Democritus for supposing that living things self-assemble from accidental combinations of atoms, and you hear Fred Hoyle's gambit that "a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein". Truly it has been, as Darwin said, just "one long argument"."

As the abstract of the review says, an exploration of these ancient debates "should broaden biologists' horizons". The puzzle is why debates about this central, cosmological question should not be an integral part of the discourse of the scientific community today? When there are numerous scientists who provide reasoned arguments that "the world, and all that it contains, [is] the handiwork of an intelligent designer", why are those advancing these arguments treated as though they have betrayed science? Why are they not welcomed as helping to broaden the minds of their colleagues? Sad to say, this stimulating debate is being crushed and we have a growing list of people who have been EXPELLED!

One long argument
Armand M. Leroi
Nature, 452, 153 (13 March 2008) | doi:10.1038/452153a

Abstract: Revisiting ancient Greek debates about the natural world should broaden biologists' horizons.

BOOK REVIEWED-Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity
by David Sedley, University of California Press: 2008. 296 pp.

Evolutionary biologists are - as modern scientists go - a historically minded lot. All of us acknowledge the greatness of Charles Darwin and some have even read On the Origin of Species. A few speak of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Lamarck or Goethe. Yet our historical horizon is actually very near. The pre-1859 theoretical landscape is shrouded in a Judeo-Christian gloom that reaches without interruption to the dawn of recorded time, where it dissolves into the Stygian darkness of pagan creation myth.
David Sedley's book will change that view. He argues that, for the philosophers of ancient Greece, the central cosmological question was this: is the world, and all that it contains, the handiwork of an intelligent designer? [snip]