Teaching Darwin: A Hypothetical Program

In his book Forty Days and Forty Nights, Matthew Chapman (a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, as fate would have it), after emigrating from England to America in the 1980s, wrote that he was surprised to discover that “many Americans not only rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution but they reviled it.”¹ In his adopted land, of course, such distaste comes as no surprise since acrimonious disputes frequently flare up in American school systems regarding that eternal binary of evolution versus creation, the accompanying legal tussles sometimes attaining something of a legendary status. Chapman in his capacity as journalist was assigned to cover one of the more prominent of such recent legal battles, the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial which took place in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, two decades ago (of which his Forty Days and Forty Nights offers an often witty chronicle).

Intelligent Design in the Dock

The trial itself is probably too well-known to require anything but a brief account here, but for younger as well as for non-American readers let me attempt a brief summation. The plaintiffs, a group of parents, objected that the Dover School Board should not allow intelligent design to be noted alongside Darwinism, arguing that students were being deprived of their rights under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the American Constitution which prohibits the teaching or presentation of religious ideas in government school classrooms.² The defense attorneys for the Dover board, on the other hand, argued that the nub of the matter was simply about encouraging free enquiry in education. Students should be given the chance to learn about contending ways of making sense of the world if they were to be properly educated. 

Expert witness Professor Michael Behe of Lehigh University argued that in any case there was a clear demarcation line between on the one hand intelligent design, which is based on biological study and research and, on the other, theism, which is more typically based on faith and revelation.³ Judge John E. Jones, however, ignoring Behe’s distinction, ruled that the Dover school board’s history and actions (which, he noted, included the recommendation to students to consult the ID-friendly book Of Pandas and People)⁴ revealed its members’ religious inspiration. Hence those members’ aims were interpreted in strictly legal terms as being unconstitutional since they were deemed to harbor an undisclosed religious agenda prohibited on constitutional grounds. For more on the trial in relationship to intelligent design, see this video presentation by Casey Luskin:

After Dover

The trial itself is perhaps a convenient point of departure to initiate a conversation about how Darwinism might best be taught in schools — or even if it should be taught in schools. For just before the Kitzmiller v. Dover controversy arose, it was precisely the “if” question which was posed by Alvin Plantinga in debate with the late Daniel Dennett. The point at issue was: Should Darwinism be taught in schools?⁵ The atheist philosopher denounced Plantinga’s question for being downright silly, Dennett’s view being that to even pose the question was nonsensical: if arithmetic and history were being taught, so should Darwinian evolution. Plantinga’s spirited riposte was that it was not ethical to teach evolution as “settled truth” in the way arithmetic, history, and other school subjects were being taught, adding,

We all know of scientific theories that once enjoyed consensus but are now discarded: caloric theories of heat, effluvial theories of electricity and magnetism, theories based on the existence of phlogiston, vital forces in physiology; theories of sponataneous generation of life, the lumeniferous ether, and so on.⁶

Plantinga made the further point that both creationism and Darwinism are bound to be problematic for statistically significant groups of people, so that both Darwinism and creationism will inevitably be opposed by some groups of children and their parents. His solution was that neither the one nor the other should be taught dogmatically but presented conditionally. His quasi-Solomonic verdict was as follows,

Should creationism be taught in public schools? Should evolution? The answer is in both cases the same. No, neither should be taught unconditionally; but yes, each should be taught conditionally.⁷

Plantinga’s point seems a valid one since the rarely confronted question which must surely hang over the heads of any open-minded educator and professor must be: How do we teach as purportedly “scientific” something that has no provable basis in empirically demonstratable science? To be sure, Darwinism has managed to achieve the status of an entrenched idée reçue, yet the reality is that most of us have been more acculturated into accepting Darwinism than educated about it in a properly critical and historically contextualized way. Warren Nord once made the point that, if not properly contextualized, 

Students typically come to accept the claims of science as a matter of faith in the scientific tradition, rather than of critical reason(…) There is a kind of scientific fundamentalism in which methodological naturalism functions much as does Scripture for religious fundamentalists.⁸

Notoriously, it is not just students who are tempted to accept Darwinian postulates as matters of fact and faith but also many members of the scientific community and, most crucially, political legislators. This is why Discovery Institute warned the Dover Board that they would be fighting an ill-advised battle if the matter were to go to court, in part because important constitutional statutes would make their victory all but impossible.⁹ Hence for me the greatest problem with the verdict ultimately handed down is the very large matter of whether the case was, to use the technical legal term, justiciable at all, that is, whether the issue was (or is) properly amenable to a fair and disinterested adjudication in a court of law. 

A Legal Counterclaim

Although I am no jurist, I can conceive of a historical hypothetical, reflecting my own personal perspective alone, where the Dover Board might have advanced a counterclaim so as to put not intelligent design but Darwinism itself in the dock. Such a procedure had in fact already been put in place in a virtual sense on numerous occasions (albeit not in an official judicial setting). The late law professor Phillip Johnson devoted a whole 1991 volume to what he titled Darwin on Trial.¹⁰ Remarkably, Darwin himself had in his Origin of Species been the first to lay himself open to a counterclaim when he wrote,

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would obviously break down.

As we know, Darwin’s temerarious challenge was later taken up by many scientists of great repute, most notably by Michael Behe in his Darwin’s Black Box where Behe gives precise physiological evidence that animals and humans exhibit such “irreducible complexity” and form such physiologically integrated units that it is inconceivable that they should have come about by an ad hoc assemblage of parts in a more or less random process. Furthermore, even two decades before the publication of Darwin’s Black Box, and a half decade before Richard Dawkins’s attempt to cudgel readers into atheism and the (claimed) miraculous power of blind chance,¹¹ another distinguished jurist, Norman Macbeth, had penned a volume titled Darwin Retried.¹² Of particular note in Macbeth’s volume is the disobliging comparison he makes between what can legitimately be counted as evidence in academic biology and what would stand up in a court of law:

I have been rather surprised to discover that many biologists dispute the propriety of a purely sceptical position. They assert that the skeptic is obligated to provide a better theory than the one he attacks. Thus Professor Ernst Mayr of Harvard rules out admittedly valid objections on the ground that the objections have not advanced a better suggestion. I thought at first that this was a personal foible of Mayr’s, but it has recurred in so many places that it must be a widespread opinion. I cannot take this view seriously. If a theory conflicts with the facts or with reason, it is entitled to no respect.¹³

I support Macbeth’s position because the reductio ad absurdum of Mayr’s approach would be (bearing in mind the inexhaustibility of the human imagination) that one might confabulate any kind of weird and unprovable theory about the world which, by Mayr’s criterion, would be entitled to stand uncontested until someone came up with a less patently absurd idea (the only proviso being that it were perceptibly less absurd than the idea it sought to supplant). It may be noted in this context that it was precisely in order to rid the world of such unbridled fantasies that the 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper came up with his falsification principle — the idea that any given postulation must be amenable to being shown to be either right or wrong. If not, it could not legitimately form any part of scientific discourse. Darwinism manifestly falls foul of Popper’s principle. But transferring the Popperian term “falsifiable” to legal terminology only strengthens the conclusion that the matter is non-justiciable, if only because legal wrangling often has an unfortunate tendency to produce more heat than light.

Plantinga’s “Modest Proposal”

A more promising route towards understanding the subject would in my opinion be to follow Alvin Plantinga’s suggestion to study Darwinism “conditionally” — by which I take it Plantinga meant against a wider historical backdrop so as to provide a fuller intellectual contextualization of Darwin’s pros and cons. This is what such a teaching program might look like (which could of course be enlarged upon or amended by professional instructors at their discretion).

First of all, after explaining the idea of Darwin and Wallace of “natural selection,” it would be prudent for an instructor to note that there is an undeniable tone of exaggeration in the term: what Darwin meant was merely natural preservation, as Wallace and Sir Charles Lyell tried to explain to him (since to select anything would require a discriminating intelligence which Nature lacks). In using the term he chose (by analogy with the deliberately “eugenic” practices used by human breeders of livestock), Darwin, ironically, was unwittingly showing a penchant for natural theology, possibly even for the doctrine of pantheism. 

It would be important to make the distinction between natural selection and natural preservation so that students might make up their own minds when it came to broaching the all-important subject of micromutation versus macromutation. As is well known, some present-day scientists, while readily conceding the possibility of incidental modifications on a minor scale as ad hoc adaptations to changing environments, object that the spawning of new species (speciation) is necessarily a teleological project in pursuit of a new physiological goal and therefore depends on a prior conception. To suppose otherwise, they contend, is a supposition requiring a truly heroic suspension of disbelief because it essentially proposes that purpose can be achieved purposelessly.

A Long Pedigree

At some time in the teaching sequence it would be advisable to explain that ideas of evolution have had a long European pedigree. One might explain how the Greek Epicurus and his Roman follower, Lucretius, taught that the answer to the world’s awe-inducing complexity was to be sought not in a once-and-for-all divine creation but in different shapes and objects generated at random by the chance interaction of atoms (such in brief being the ancient philosophy of Atomism which reduced everything to the whims of chance). Plants and animals had simply “evolved” via an extended process of trial-and-error reminiscent of what Darwin would later term natural selection. In some cases that evolutionary journey had been unsuccessful, went the ancient contention, resulting in creatures not properly equipped to compete for resources or to produce offspring. Such creatures were destined to extinction, in contradistinction to vigorous and perfectly formed specimens able to adapt and reproduce. The historical flashback might seem arcane and off-putting to some students but judicious handouts excerpted from Epicurus and Lucretius culled from the very accessible Penguin Classics series might make the subject more “real” to them despite its “dated” provenance. There might even be some scope at this point to discuss the matter of what anthropologists term “polygenesis” — the phenomenon of the same idea occurring to people in widely different cultures and at numerous points throughout recorded history.

The reappearance of those ancient ideas could then be tied in with a discussion of the secular program of the European Enlightenment. Whereas pre-Darwinian generations believed unselfconsciously that Nature’s laws were God-given, post-Darwinian scientists witnessed a new era of enquiry where naturalistic explanation alone was valued and metaphysical speculation shunned. One would have to explain that Charles Darwin was the intellectual heir to an atheist grandfather, Erasmus, together with sundry French natural philosophers who toyed with the idea of animal types being liable to experience change in their physical morphology over vast tracts of time. Julien Offray de la Mettrie, in his L’Homme Machine (1747), might be mentioned, together with Denis Diderot, who even played with the bizarre (not to say physiologically illiterate!) idea that those humans not required to perform manual labor might eventually become just heads.

It might then be explained that Charles Darwin conceived the ambitious goal of explaining how all these seemingly miraculous metamorphoses had been achieved in practical terms (an idea which had been widely scoffed at before 1859). His ambition was to identify what early 19th-century biologists termed a vera causa, a sufficient actuating means, for the supposed changes. In effect, Charles Darwin was quite consciously brainstorming to finding a wholly material mechanism underlying the evolution of all things so as to cut out the cosmic middleman, so to speak, thereby aspiring to vindicate what most had heretofore thought to be his grandfather’s outlandish ideas. (His chance discovery of Malthus would of course need to be introduced in this context.)

Such, one could conclude, is the Darwinian microbes-to-man narrative, the story of how humankind and animals supposedly evolved naturally without benefit of supernatural oversight from the state of unicellular beginnings to that of large, highly complex animals. To preserve intellectual integrity at this point, it might be prudent to do a bit of what is now termed “teaching the controversy.” This would entail explaining how some experts remain unpersuaded that all animal life could have evolved by the supremely chancy ministrations of Mother Nature alone since — according to the terms of neo-Darwinian theory — natural selection must necessarily wait upon genetic mutations before it can kick in and begin its winnowing operations.

The counterarguments to Darwinism should of course remain strictly factual. The cross-over from one species to another may thus be shown to be problematical in view of the practical experience of animal husbandry, where selective breeding has considerably greater success in bringing about minor changes than major ones (which in fact remain unheard of to date), the genetic code appearing to possess an inbuilt fail-safe system to ensure genetic homeostasis and the integrity of the species. While direct study of Darwin’s works would be a step too far, the instructor could make use of some memorable quotes. For example, Darwin shows a disarmingly sensitive awareness of the weaknesses of his theory in rhetorical questions such as, “Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined? … as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the Earth?” Such passages would act as a good springboard for discussion and classroom debate, and possibly be linked to a trip to the local Natural History Museum to view the fossil collection.

More Existential Questions

Darwinism also raises more existential questions where science meets philosophy in a way that senior students would respond to readily. How did the unequivocally non-material aspects of life, such as consciousness, thought, and the subjective self, come into the picture? Could sentience have evolved template-less from any purely material matrix? How could the entirely random interplay of impersonal forces have all unwittingly been instrumental in the creation of persons? This dimension could be used to discuss the limitations of scientific theories, something acknowledged by all genuine scientists (in varying degrees!). Darwin himself contemplated being mistaken, writing “I have asked myself whether I may not have devoted my life to a fantasy.” Even arch-materialist Richard Dawkins could write that life is “almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a powerful illusion of deliberate design.” And in the sixth chapter of his Blind Watchmaker, he makes this rather disarming comment: “Does it sound to you as though it would need a miracle to make randomly jostling atoms join together into a self-replicating molecule? Well at times it does to me too.” This intellectual honesty is to be commended and students taught to respect it. Such an approach would, in my experience, be a pedagogical plus. My erstwhile teaching experience taught me that many students have a critical and sometimes even cynical attitude to certain topics and wish to debate matters rather than have The Truth handed down to them on the modern equivalent of stone tablets. 

There are of course practical problems to the implementation of my hypothetical program, not least the challenge of integrating an element of history of science and philosophy into the biology curriculum. This does not mean, however, that it should not be attempted, and I have no doubt that professional science teachers would be more than up to the task. The effort would certainly be more fruitful than trying to settle ideological differences in a court of law.

Notes

1. Forty Days and Forty Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, Oxycontin and other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 5.
2. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
3. See Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
4. Of Pandas and People: The Central Questions of Biological Origins, by Percival Davis, Dean H. Kenyon and Charles B. Thaxton (Dallas: Haughton, 1993).
5. Alvin Plantinga, “Creation and Evolution: a modest proposal” in Darwin, Design and Public Education, edited by John Angus Campbell and Steven Meyer (East Lansing: Michigan UP, 2003), pp. 513—523.
6. “Creation and Evolution”, p. 519.
7. “Creation and Evolution,” p. 523.
8. Warren A. Nord, “Intelligent Design Theory, Religion and the Science Currriculum” in Darwin, Design and Public Education, p. 52, 56.
9. See Traipsing into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision, edited by David K. Dewolf, John G. West, Casey Luskin and Jonathan Witt (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2006), p. 8.
10. Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove , Illinois: Intervarsity Press, third edition, 2010).
11. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (London: Granada, 1976). Cf. also The Blind Watchmaker (London: Penguin, 1986).
12. Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried (London: Garnstone, 1971).
13. Macbeth, Darwin Retried, pp. 6-7.