Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hello, this is Tom Gilson and today we're pleased to bring the first half of a talk given at the 2020 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. The speaker was John west, senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture and author of Darwin Day in America. The title of his lecture, Darwin's Corrosive idea.
[00:00:37] Speaker C: It was 10pm at night and I was standing with my teenage daughter and son outside the historic lodge at Mount Rainier in Washington State. The sky was so clear that we could actually see along the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy. And for someone like myself who lives in a suburban area where artificial lights really makes it very hard to see lots of the night sky, the experience was awe inspiring. And it gave me a feeling that we as human beings are part of something greater than we can usually conceive.
Maybe you've had an experience like that. I think many people have.
Nearly two centuries ago, a young Charles Darwin had a similar experience.
The year was 1831. Darwin was 22 years old, recently graduated from college. He wanted to explore the ecosystems of the world, so he joined the expedition of the HMS Beagle in its voyage to South America and beyond. Two months later, he was walking in the midst of a Brazilian rainforest.
Confronted by the beauty, Darwin experienced an overwhelming sense of awe.
Surely he thought man was more than just an animal and there was some greater purpose behind nature than mere physical survival.
Unfortunately, Darwin's sense of awe about nature and about human beings did not last.
Fast forward to the ending chapter of his life as he wrote his autobiography. Reflecting on his earlier sense of awe in that rainforest, Darwin wrote that now not even the grandest scenes in nature would inspire such a view.
Why?
Well, he explained that the evidence of exquisite design and purpose that he once saw in nature failed now that he had discovered his law of natural selection.
Now, there are many different influences that shape our culture's view of human beings. But I've become convinced that one of the most significant has happened to be modern science in the form of Darwinian biology. Darwin's theory isn't just an academic exercise. It has real world implications for how we understand our world and each other. And there's sort of a logic to our conference today. In my talk and in Steve Meyer's talk and sort of in our morning sessions, we're going to be focusing on why does it matter and what does science really point to? Are science and faith really contrary or not? And then after lunch, we're going to be still dealing with those topics, but drilling down more on specific areas of science that actually point to a reconciliation between faith and science. But the purpose of my talk in particular is to convince you that it's not just an ivory tower thing, that ideas have consequences, and Darwin's ideas have had significant consequences for our culture and for your life, even if you don't know it.
But to fully grasp the impact of Darwin's ideas, I think we need to understand the two main prongs of his theory.
First, Darwin proposed that all creatures, including humans, had descended with modifications from an original simple primordial organism.
Second, Darwin proposed that human beings and the rest of nature were produced by a process of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, acting on random variations in nature.
This process of natural selection was supposed to be blind and unguided. Now, you can believe in a guided form of evolution, and many people have throughout the past hundred years, but that was not Darwin's theory. It's really important to understand that. And that's not the mainstream theory of evolution accepted today by most evolutionary biologists. To Darwin and many others, the first prong of his theory, common descent, suggested that there was no fundamental difference between human beings and the rest of nature. In the words of Darwinian philosopher Peter Singer at Princeton University, Darwin showed we are simply animals.
Singer is not alone in that view. According to a 2016 survey, 45% of American adults, nearly half, 45%, believe that evolution shows that human beings are not fundamentally different from other animals. Unquote.
Now, the second prong of Darwin's theory suggested that we are not the intentional creatures, creation of a loving creator, but the unintentional product of a blind and purposeless process. In the words of the late Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.
And not only was the Darwinian process blind, it was also ruthless.
Human beings, according to Darwin, gained their highest capacities not because those capacities were planned by a beneficent creator, but because natural selection ruthlessly killed off those who didn't measure up.
It can't be emphasized enough that Darwin enshrined death and the struggle for existence as the great engines of progress, as he wrote in his book on the Origin of Species.
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows.
Think of it.
War, death, starvation, struggle. That's where all the good things that we experience come from in the Darwinian worldview. This worldview has impacted our culture's understanding of the human person in at least three key ways.
First, in the erosion of the sanctity and value of human life.
Our nation just marked another anniversary of Roe v. Wade. There were I think over 100,000 people in Washington D.C. yesterday marching on that there are a lot of connections between Darwinian theory and the devaluation of life. But I want to mention one historical example and then discuss the way Darwinian thinking still is impacting us today. The historical example is scientific racism. Now Charles Darwin was not the world's first racist and he was better than some racist in that he opposed slavery. Slavery.
But Darwin nevertheless helped fuel a virulent form of racism by proposing that natural selection was a scientific explanation for why we should expect significant differences between what he called men of distinct races. Moreover, Darwin contended that the break in evolutionary history between apes and humans came, in his words, between the Negro or Australian Aborigine and the gorilla. Thus, in his view, blacks were the closest human beings to apes.
Now Darwin's view inspired a whole generation of scientists like one of his correspondents who was named Ernst Haeckel, who became preoccupied with trying to use evolution to classify races according to their presumed evolutionary history. And if you actually look up here you will see a diagram that appeared in countless biology textbooks in the early part of the 20th century that derived from Ernst Haeckel. And if you see it on the very top you have the Nordic male who's the top of the evolutionary ladder. And then at the very bottom you see these ape like creatures. Note in the middle, and this was actually Haeckel's point for this diagram, that the gap between the lowest human being and the highest human was a lot larger than the gap between the highest ape and the lowest human.
Think about that.
The gap between the highest human and the lowest human is much larger than the gap between the highest ape and the lowest human in Haeckel's view. In Darwinian biological view, this is not true by the way. But think of the impact that would have on generations of school children who grow up being taught that this kind of Darwinian racism had a horrific real world impact on Western colonialism in Africa, especially on German policy in southwest Africa in the early 1900s. As I showed in my film the Biology of the second Reich.
[00:09:47] Speaker D: Between 1904 and 1908, the German military attempted to eradicate the Herero people in southwest Africa in what some scholars consider the first genocide of the 20th century.
On October 2, 1904, General Lotha von Trotha issued what became known as his extermination order, declaring that the Hereros either had to leave German southwest Africa or face extinction.
Herero men would be executed, and Herero women and children would be driven into the desert, where they would die of starvation or dehydration.
Von Trotha justified his extermination campaign by an explicit appeal to social Darwinism, telling one newspaper that human feelings of philanthropy could not override the law of Darwin's the struggle of the fittest.
When von Trotha's extermination campaign provoked a backlash in Germany, a new plan was developed to move the remaining Hereros to concentration camps, where many more would ultimately die from malnutrition, disease and exhaustion.
In these death camps, the Hereros were subjected to medical experiments by German doctors, and their skulls were collected for shipment back to Germany to be studied by experts in racial science.
By 1908, it's estimated that more than 80% of the Herero people had been eliminated from German southwest Africa.
Back in Europe, meanwhile, German military leaders prepared for the next conflict on their continent.
[00:11:25] Speaker C: That was decades before the rise of Hitler.
What happened in German southwest Africa was horrific, but there were also impacts of Darwinian racism here in the United States.
In America, our immigration restrictions in the 1920s were largely devised in cooperation with Darwinian biologists who decided that certain races were lower on the evolutionary scale and so should be kept out.
The Bronx Zoo in New York City put an African man on display in a cage with a monkey as an evolutionary missing link between humans and apes. In the early 1900s, we sterilized 60,000 women against their will in the name of eugenics, an effort to remake humanity by applying the principles of Darwinian biology to human breeding.
Eugenics was promoted by leading evolutionary biologists at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, the University of Texas, Columbia, Stanford, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Now, today, Darwinian biology is still employed to devalue life in the area of abortion. Both scientists and activists over the past several decades have appealed to Darwinian theory to justify the claim that babies in the womb aren't fully human. Invoking an idea known as embryonic recapitulation, these proponents of abortion argue that human infants replay the history of evolution as they develop in the womb, they go through a fish stage, a lower mammal stage, and more, before finally reaching the state of a human being. Thus, if you abort an infant while she's still in the fish stage, it's no more immoral than Killing a fish.
Embryonic recapitulation is junk science and has been discredited even among evolutionary biologists for decades. That hasn't stopped some of them, including National Academy of Sciences members, as I talk about in my book Darwin Day in America, from promoting this junk science as a defense of abortion. It also hasn't stopped the argument from being invoked repeatedly in the more popular sphere by people like, say, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens in his best selling book a few years ago, why God is Not Great.
Darwinism feeds into the culture of death in more subtle ways as well. Prominent Darwinians believe that humans aren't inherently more valuable than any other animal. So how we treat animals, we should treat humans.
Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago is one of America's most prominent evolutionary biologists. He has argued on his blog for legalizing infanticide for babies with birth defects or handicaps. He wrote this in explanation, quote, after all, we euthanize our dogs and cats when to prolong their lives would be torture. So why not extend that to humans, Unquote.
Coyne recognizes that the reason we don't do that is because of our view of human beings is really different than the one propounded by Darwinism, and that Darwinism has yet to overcome this challenge of this different view of human beings. So he wrote this. The reason we don't allow euthanasia of new borns is because humans are seen as special.
And I think this comes from religion. In particular the view that humans, unlike animals, are endowed with a soul. When religion vanishes, as it will, so will much of the opposition to both adult and newborn euthanasia, unquote.
This same Darwinian devaluation of human life can be found among a growing number of activists in our society who can simply be called anti human.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: Today, Darwinian ideas influence the views of many of the most strident anti human activists.
In September 2010, longtime environmental activist James Lee took hostages at the headquarters of the Discovery Channel cable network.
Lee demanded that the Discovery Channel change its programming to highlight what he regarded as the planet's biggest enemy, humans.
In his list of demands, Lee called on the Discovery Channel to talk about evolution, talk about Malthus and Darwin, until it sinks into the stupid people's brains.
Sir David Attenborough is one of the world's most respected wildlife filmmakers. In a 2013 interview, he denounced humans as a plague on the earth.
According to Attenborough, in the past, natural selection kept humans in check by killing them off. But modern society undermines natural selection by saving the sick and finding ways to feed more and more people.
Other activists today invoke Darwinian ideas in order to deny that humans have special value.
Christopher Manes was an early leader in the influential environmental group Earth First. In his book Green Rage, he argues that evolution means there is no basis for seeing humans as more advanced or developed than any other species. According to Manes, human beings are not the goal of evolution because evolution has no goal. In his words, evolution simply unfolds life form after life form. And Darwin invited humanity to face the fact that the observation of nature has revealed not one scrap of evidence that humankind is superior or special or even particularly more interesting than, say, lichen.
The use of Darwin's theory to debunk human dignity spans the ideological spectrum.
Princeton University bioethicist Peter Singer is author of the book A Darwinian Left.
Singer claims that the life of a newborn baby is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.
[00:17:47] Speaker C: And where does Peter Singer get this from? He's told us in an interview. Peter Singer made very clear that his view was going back to Darwin. He said Darwin really showed us that human beings aren't special. We're not sort of separate from the rest of nature. We're not unique, and so that we shouldn't be treated that way. And so this idea that there's something special or unique about human beings and that human beings deserve special treatment really is undermined by Darwin. In Peter Singer's view.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: The same dismissal of human uniqueness can be found amongst some on the right.
John Derbyshire was a longtime writer for the conservative journal National Review.
In 2012, he was dismissed after writing an article for another publication arguing that blacks are more antisocial and less intelligent than whites.
Derbyshire believes that racial differences are the products of evolution. He also believes that Darwinian theory refutes the claim of traditional Western monotheism that human beings are exceptional.
In his words, the broad outlook on human nature implied by Darwinian ideas contradicts the notion of human exceptionalism. To modern biologists informed by Darwin, we are merely another branch on nature's tree.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: That was political scientist John west, author of Darwin Day, in How Our Politics and Culture have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science. You can find it at Amazon and with other online booksellers. Stay tuned to ID the Future for the second half of West's Dallas lecture on Darwin's corrosive idea. For ID the Future, this is Tom Gilson. Stay well.
[00:19:37] Speaker C: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Center for Science and culture.
[00:19:42] Speaker C: ID the Future is Copyright Discovery Institute.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: For more information, visit IntelligentDesign.org and IDTheFuture.com it.
