Science Literature

Here's some gripping reading for your summer vacation!

The Darwin Conspiracy by Roy Davies (2008)

This publication marks the 150th anniversary of the joint presentation of Darwin and Wallace of their thinking about evolution by natural selection to the Linnean Society. The book is a blockbuster because it claims that "Darwin perpetuated one of the greatest crimes in the history of science". It concludes that Darwin plagiarised Alfred Russel Wallace, deceived the world about the maturity of his own ideas before 1858, and, to satisfy his personal need for glory, failed to give credit to scholars who influenced his thinking.

It needs someone with remarkable abilities to put together such a radical revision of history. The author's experience is in writing, producing and directing documentaries that challenge popular historical narratives. During the 1980s, he was responsible for a TV programme about Darwin that presented a story that was and is widely accepted:

"Darwin [was] a nervous man who concealed the secret of how species originate for more than twenty years, until he was forced to publish when he realised someone else might get there before him. The programme was called The Devil's Chaplain."

Since that time, Davies has come to reject this account as iconic.

"Today, having researched the Darwin record for myself and having been utterly convinced by what I have learned, I believe [. . .] that the original programme (which went out under my name) left a great deal of new information about Darwin unmentioned. If I had known then what I know now, The Devil's Chaplain would never have been made. What you are about to read is the story leading up to the discovery of the origin of species, which I would eagerly have transmitted in its place."

Being a natural sceptic of conspiracy theories, I read this book cautiously - 'convince me if you can!' By the end, I was persuaded. What impressed me was the way Davies drew on the research of numerous Darwin scholars, showing that although they discovered important aspects of Darwin's life and work, they were unable to package their findings into a coherent whole. The person who came closest was Arnold Brackman, who concluded in 1980 that Darwin did plagiarise Wallace. It is the 'big picture' that Davies provides for the first time, and my title makes reference to the earlier eye-opening research papers.

The first researcher to be discussed in the book is Professor Darlington of Oxford University. He sought an answer to the question "by what thought process had Charles Darwin actually arrived at his ideas about evolution?".

"Darlington pointed out that he could not find, in all the accounts of Darwin's work published up to that time, any suggestion that some original germ in Darwin's mind had led inexorably to the full development and enunciation of this big idea."

Darlington recognised that Darwin's writings bore the marks of rhetoric. For example, "Darwin's unawareness of what his contemporaries were thinking matched his unawareness of what his predecessors had written". This comment is highly significant for what comes later, because Darwin was very concerned about gaining precedence for his own ideas and he consistently referred to "my theory".

The second scholar is the anthropologist Loren Eiseley. He identified a mismatch between the time (October 1838) when Darwin read Thomas Malthus's Essay on Population (which Darwin claimed "Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work. . .") and yet 18 months earlier he was already making notes on the very same ideas? After noting many similarities between the way Edward Blyth reported data in his published articles and the wording in Darwin's notebook about these same phenomena, Eiseley came to the conclusion that Darwin had lifted Blyth's thinking about natural selection - without acknowledgement.

"Eiseley believed, even making some allowance for the accidental use of the same sources, that the effect of his research was cumulative. He argued that these many similarities could not be explained by chance and that Darwin had plundered Blyth's articles for the ideas which underpinned the thinking that led to On the Origin of Species."

Barbara Beddall set out to refute Eiseley's suggestion that Darwin had plagiarised Blyth. She particularly wanted to find the letters between Wallace and Darwin - but found that some were missing. She also found, in the period 1853-8, that other letters to Lyell, to Hooker and to Asa Gray were lost. This, in her opinion, was "very odd". She came to the conclusion that they had been deliberately destroyed to obscure the record of how Darwin formulated his theory. She commented: "Without these letters, a clear idea of the extent of Wallace's influence on Darwin is beyond academic assessment and the full story impossible to gauge". But the jigsaw that Davies has assembled does have a clearer picture so that the significance of the missing letters is not "odd" but part of a pattern.

"The idea that it might have been Darwin himself [who destroyed the letters] seems not to have occurred to her."

Altogether, Davies features the work of nine researchers, with each contributing one or more pieces to the jigsaw. This review cannot do justice to the way the arguments develop. Here is just one more nugget. It concerns another letter of Wallace dated 2 March 1858. We know it was posted at the same time as his momentous letter to Darwin that contained the short paper that was presented at the Linnaean meeting in on 1st July that same year. Darwin claimed the letter reached him on 18 June, the same day that he wrote to Lyell to say that Wallace could not have written a better abstract for Darwin's own work. However, as Davies shows, we now have a complete timeline for the transport of this letter from the Dutch East Indies to its arrival in the UK, and the date-stamped envelope of the other letter posted along with the letter to Darwin. These date stamps show that the letter arrived in the UK on 2 June - on course for delivery to the addressee on the following day. Davies writes: "

The arrival of Wallace's letter on 3 June would have given Darwin more than enough time to digest its contents and make the two lengthy changes to the "natural selection" chapter of his manuscript. It would also have allowed him to claim that Wallace's ideas were replicas of his own."

Most people coming across this for the first time will be incredulous, thinking that Darwin's ideas on evolution by natural selection before this time were well documented. Davies shows that this is erroneous. This is why his 'big picture' is so important: Darwin was like a man groping in the dark. He gathered data, hoping to find a synthesis, but theoretical ideas were elusive. When he came across other people's ideas that helped to make sense of the data, he gathered them as well, treating them as his own. The plagiarism of Wallace was not an isolated incident, but part of a pattern of behaviour.

There are really two conspiracies in this book. Lyell and Hooker played a significant role (not in plagiarising, but in engineering circumstances to favour their gentleman friend).

"The members [of the Linnean Society] agreed that Darwin and Wallace should be acknowledged as co-discoverers of the theory of how species evolve, which would henceforth be known as the Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution. The crucial question of priority was settled by placing Darwin's name before Wallace's. Lyell and Hooker had successfully conspired to hand Charles Darwin the proze he had coveted for more than twenty years."

Alfred Russel Wallace in Singapore in 1862 (Source here)

Wallace emerges as the real hero. He could easily be made a role model for young scientists. Davies refers to him as a "brilliant yet unassuming naturalist who was never to comprehend the full extent of the conspiracy enacted against him".

Clearly, if Davies' argument is correct, the iconic Darwin needs to be dethroned. When this is accomplished, we will be in a better position to reappraise his significance as a scientist. In the meantime, here is a summary paragraph from Davies:
"Charles Darwin was a very secretive man with a driving ambition. He neither praised nor tipped his hat in the direction of Jean-Baptiste Lamark or of his grandfather Erasmus. He never openly acknowledged his debt to Edward Blyth, nor to Patrick Matthew (who had been one of the first to write about the 'natural means of selection', a phrase that Darwin modified and used without attribution). He never acknowledged his debt to Wallace. By the time Eiseley, Gruber, Beddall, McKinney, Brackman and Brooks began reassembling the long-lost pieces of the jigsaw, the myth-making surrounding Darwin's achievement, which had so worried Darlington in 1959, was complete."

Book Reviewed:
The Darwin Conspiracy - Origins of a Scientific Crime, by Roy Davies, Golden Square Books. May 2008.

Links:

The Darwin Conspiracy Home page

Tyler, D, Charles Darwin - Icon of Evolution, ARN Literature Blog, 30 June 2008

Tyler, D., Why Alfred Russel Wallace deserves to be remembered,ARN Literature Blog, 11 March 2008

Flannery, M. Science or Monkey Business?: A Review of Roy Davies' The Darwin Conspiracy, Uncommon Descent, 1 August 2008

Update:

Wright, T. Alfred Russel Wallace's Fans Gear Up for a Darwinian Struggle, Wall Street Journal, 20 December 2008)

Scientists are generally committed to realism: the conviction that we are studying a world that is objective rather than subjective and that the external world exists independently of human perception. Whilst this provides a coherent framework for the domains of physics and chemistry, there are major ideological issues to address when we come to scientific analysis of humanity. The phenomenon of consciousness has long been controversial: do we exist as persons or is our sense of consciousness a function of brain cell activity? Similar comments can be made about love, hate, our sense of beauty, and spirituality: are these just chemical reactions? (for more on this, go here)

Is consciousness "a learned repertoire of verbal behaviour"? (source here). What can be said about spirituality?

The realist conviction becomes elusive when we study ourselves! Modern science seems committed to deconstructing humanity so that we are, in essence, physics and chemistry, and our cultural behaviours are either adaptive or socially constructed. This applies to much thinking about spirituality. Evolutionary presuppositions are everywhere to be found. The option that man is a spiritual being is not even on the table for consideration.

"Two schools of thought have dominated the debate. The first views religion as a "by-product" of other evolutionary adaptations such as larger brains. The second sees religion itself as adaptive, arguing that its role in social cohesiveness and other traits may have helped humans survive."

New research by Fincher and Thornhill comes from the second of the schools mentioned above. The thesis is that "religion diversity appears to be tied importantly to infectious disease stress across the globe, and the global pattern is consistent with our model of religion genesis". The mechanism is explained thus:

"Religion marks group members [. . .] and can dissuade people from interacting with those outside the group. In areas with rampant infectious disease, this can be an advantage: No outsiders means no outside pathogens. Isolation can also prevent the exchange of ideas, or religions, in this case. That might lead to the rise of many independent religious systems."

The authors present "an evolutionary history of antagonistic coevolution between parasites and hosts and subsequent religion genesis". The more infectious diseases there are, the more religions spring up. The hypothesis advanced by the authors is that "the more a society disperses and mixes with other groups, the more it risks contracting new diseases - in other words, strangers are bad for your health". The reactions that have appeared so far suggest that people are viewing the hypothesis favourably. However, some concerns are worth highlighting.

The first concern is about causation. What is the cause and what is the effect? How do we know? The authors do not appear to discuss these questions. The areas of high religious diversity are in the tropics, where diseases tend to be more virulent and more numerous. Life in the tropics introduces many challenges that are not faced by those of us living in temperate zones of the Earth. Some analysis of lifestyles in the tropics would appear to be warranted, but this is not supplied by the authors. Philip Ball writes:

"It's an intriguing observation. But as with all correlation studies, cause and effect are hard to untangle. One could equally argue that avoiding contact with other social groups simply prevents the spread of some cultural traits at the expense of others, and so merely preserves an intrinsic diversity that has a tendency to arise anywhere. This, indeed, is the basis of some theoretical models for how cultural exchange and transmission occurs. Where opportunities for interaction are fewer, 'island cultures' are more likely to coexist rather than being consumed by a dominant one."

Secondly, the authors case appears to rest heavily on the thought that religions are closed groups, with social insiders and outsiders. This again is controversial. It is completely alien to the spirit of Christianity, which is to respond to the commission of Christ about reaching out to others. Rachel Zelkowitz writes:

"But Courtney Bender, a sociologist of religion at Columbia University, disagrees [with the hypothesis]. Religions around the planet range from being very open to very closed to outsiders, she says: "You can't just say religions have strong boundaries." Indeed, traditional religious societies often interact with those outside their own group for trade or military alliances, says Richard Sosis, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut."

A third concern is about the data sources. The study is undertaken at a broad-brush level with source data about religions drawn from Barrett et al's World Christian Encyclopedia. What is absent is a discussion of what constitutes a separate religion (as distinct from a local variant). For example, animism appears not to be a distinctly identifiable religion: it is subsumed by a long list of tribally-based religions. The authors do not discuss taxonomic questions, and whether they are "splitters" or "lumpers". They do not say how they handle the data about the 33,830 denominations within Christianity. They do not say how they distinguish between scattered pockets of religious followers and communities, nor how they handle the questions about the size of religious communities. The World Christian Encyclopedia is based on census data, and there are a whole host of uncertainties associated with self-assessment.

Zelkowitz observes that "the evolution of religion itself is not well-understood." This is the key to understanding studies of this kind. There is a strong presupposition in the minds of many scholars that religion must be an evolved behaviour and that it must be possible to identify the drivers for the rise of religion as a phenomenon. What few will even consider in their research is whether man is a spiritual, as well as a material, being and that the drivers for religious diversity come from mankind's spiritual nature. This position is, historically, part of the Christian worldview and, at very least, it deserves to be tested and scrutinised fairly by academics. It is the secularised mindset of scientists that prevents them considering such radical alternatives, and it is the strength of ID based science that multiple hypotheses can be considered - without making any presumptions about the outcomes of research. For a previous blog related to this topic, go here.

Assortative sociality, limited dispersal, infectious disease and the genesis of the global pattern of religion diversity
Corey L. Fincher and Randy Thornhill
Proceedings of the Royal Society B, First Cite, July 29 2008 | doi 10.1098/rspb.2008.0688

Abstract: Why are religions far more numerous in the tropics compared with the temperate areas? We propose, as an answer, that more religions have emerged and are maintained in the tropics because, through localized coevolutionary races with hosts, infectious diseases select for three anticontagion behaviours: in-group assortative sociality; out-group avoidance; and limited dispersal. These behaviours, in turn, create intergroup boundaries that effectively fractionate, isolate and diversify an original culture leading to the genesis of two or more groups from one. Religion is one aspect of a group's culture that undergoes this process. If this argument is correct then, across the globe, religion diversity should correlate positively with infectious disease diversity, reflecting an evolutionary history of antagonistic coevolution between parasites and hosts and subsequent religion genesis. We present evidence that supports this model: for a global sample of traditional societies, societal range size is reduced in areas with more pathogens compared with areas with few pathogens, and in contemporary countries religion diversity is positively related to two measures of parasite stress.

See also:

Zelkowitz, R., Pathogens And Prayer, ScienceNOW Daily News, 30 July 2008

Ball, P., Is religion good for your health? Nature News, 1 August 2008 | doi:10.1038/news.2008.990

O'Leary, D. Evolutionary psychology: British physicist targets theory-of-the-month on "how religion got started", Mindful Hack, 13 August 2008.

The author of the book under review, Kenneth Miller, and the reviewer, PZ Myers, have both gained something of a reputation for their different ways of defending evolutionary theory. Myers is an outspoken atheist who regularly slates Intelligent Design and Creationism in his blog Pharyngula. Miller affirms both Roman Catholicism and evolutionary theory and has made an impact in legal and educational contexts for celebrating "the power of evolutionary theory to explain our existence".

Theistic Evolution: a dream or a nightmare?

Myers adopts the strategy of conflating ID and Creationism by using the term "intelligent design creationism". However, most informed people, when they read this phrase, realise that polemics has come to the fore. The specific issues mentioned (the status of evolutionary theory, Behe's empirical argument for the inability of genetic mutations to build complexity, Dembski's rationale for making design inferences about structures exhibiting complex specified information) make it clear that Myers is giving Intelligent Design advocates the label "the enemies of science".

Rather than explore Miller's references to ID arguments, Myers merely waves a flag: Miller succeeds in "refuting the errors". But Myers does not even concede that the "errors" are worth refuting: he describes ID arguments as a "political attack on the nature of science". This is again a strategy frequently used by Myers - if ID arguments are political, a scientific response is superfluous.

A major part of the review considers the way Miller analyses the appeal of ID thinking to US minds: "The popularity of creationism in the United States is ascribed to independence and rebelliousness rather than religiosity." The implication is that skepticism about evolutionary theory has nothing to do with science! Myers and Miller are allies in seeking to interpret the ID phenomenon in sociological and religious terms. However, the bond between these two is only skin deep, as Myers finds fault with Miller's theistic view of evolution: "his own religious leanings blind him to conflict between faith and science."

There is one part of the alliance that is suggested to be "rock solid" and this concerns the philosophy of science. Here are the relevant quotes:

Miller - "To the intelligent design movement, the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment, which gave rise to science as we know it, is the true enemy - science will be first redefined, and then the 'bankrupt ideologies' of scientific rationalism can be overthrown once and for all."
Myers - [They] "aim to revise what science means, discarding rationalism, naturalism, materialism and other Enlightenment values to incorporate the supernatural and loosen the rigour of all sciences."

There is both truth and error here. Historically, both are in error, as it was not rationalism that gave rise to science, but Christian Theism (which upholds rationality but not rationalism). The validity of design inferences within science is the point at issue. ID is entirely rational about making these inferences: conclusions are based on evidence and the assessment of probabilities. Rationalism, on the other hand, blocks design inferences being made about the natural world. Consequently, rationalism can become the enemy of truth. It can be an alien influence in science because it closes up legitimate avenues of enquiry: ruling out options on ideological grounds.

Whilst the allies demonstrate agreement regarding rationalism, the underlying rock is not so solid when it comes to naturalism and materialism. It is Myers who slips in comments about these ideologies. His comments are demonstratably false as naturalism and materialism had no contribution to make during the time known as the Scientific Revolution. The ideological basis of science changed with the centuries: Theism hardened to Deism (in the Enlightenment) and then morphed into Naturalism. It appears that Myers wants to ditch the Theism and the Deism and claim that Naturalism is the essence of science. However, the move to Deism and then to Naturalism has not been in the interests of scientific enterprise. What we are seeing today is science being slowly strangled by these ideologies (for a recent comment on this, go here). In the hands of the ideologues, science has become a tool for promoting and enforcing atheism. Kenneth Miller - with allies like this, who needs enemies!

The creationist controversy
PZ Myers
Nature 454, 581-582 (31 July 2008) | doi:10.1038/454581a

BOOK REVIEWED - Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul by Kenneth R. Miller, Viking: 2008. 256 pp.

First sentence: The United States has a big problem: although we maintain a strong scientific establishment, competitive with the rest of the world in many fields, we also have some of the most backwards proponents of superstitious nonsense in both our electorate and at the highest levels of politics.

See also:

Plantinga, Alvin. Evolution vs. Naturalism. Why they are like oil and water, (Books and Culture, July/August 2008)