Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Welcome. I'm your host, Mike Keyes. Today I'm going to be having a conversation with another Mike, Mike Flannery, who is professor emeritus at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He's written quite a bit about the co discoverer of natural selection, along with Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace. And besides a series of great books about Wallace and his relationship to Darwin, Mike has come out with a new edited volume that makes available, with editorial oversight and insight, a book that Alfred Russell Wallace wrote that is still of great relevance. And as I read through Mike's introduction to the book, I could see how his book is very relevant to the current debate about evolution and intelligent design. So welcome Michael Flannery.
[00:01:06] Speaker C: Hi, Mike.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: All right, so your book is entitled intelligent how Alfred Russel Wallace's world of Life challenged Darwinism. And of course, World of Life is the title of Wallace's original book and it's integrated into your title. And we have a foreword by William Dembsky as well. So we've got lots to look forward to here. So our listeners, I know, will be especially interested in how you relate the world of Wallace to the world of Darwin. In fact, in the introduction to your book, you talk about how Charles Darwin's experience in med school at Edinburgh is actually important to understand, to get a sense of the development of Darwin's theory of evolution. Talk to us about that to get us started.
[00:01:53] Speaker C: Yeah, sure, Mike. It's one of the key points I try to make in my introduction, and I'll give you a little backstory on this, is that Darwin attended Edinburgh University from October 1825 to April of 1828. He was only 16, so, I mean, he's really kid wet behind the ears, first time he's ever really been away from home. And so while he's there, he petitions for entry into an organization called the Plinian Society.
[00:02:24] Speaker D: P l I N I a n. Plinian society.
[00:02:29] Speaker C: And what this really was was a loose knit group of so called freethinkers. Well, freethinkers is usually code for rank materialists, and this was no exception. We know it happened because they kept good notes on the organization's activities. He petitioned for admission on, on November 21, 1826, and it's during that time.
[00:02:54] Speaker D: That he was exposed to some of.
[00:02:55] Speaker C: The most heretical views of the day.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: So, Mike, you're talking about this plinian society, freethinkers, materialists. Sounds almost like a fraternity. You know, he had to join it, but it was sort of an intellectual fraternity of sorts was it?
[00:03:09] Speaker D: Yes, it was primarily, although not exclusively, an organization of students. But what would happen is members of the society would give papers each evening, then there would be like a Q and a session and so forth. And so it's during this period that Darwin belongs to the society that he's really being exposed to some pretty radical ideas. William Brown, for example, insisted that Charles Bell was wrong, that human expression was not a product of a creator who endowed the human face with a form and structure uniquely suited to expression and human emotion. He said this was nothing but anatomical chauvinism to assume any special difference between animal and human facial anatomy. So then Darwin also heard William Greig, another student, give a presentation setting out that, in his words, the lower animals possess every faculty and propensity of the human mind. And then again, Brown returned to give an inflammatory lecture on mind and matter. And Brown told the students that mind and consciousness was merely the result of brain activity. And this was seen as so potentially dangerous that it was actually struck from the society's minutes. Now, if that wasn't enough, it's during his time as a plinian that Darwin develops a close relationship with Edmund Grant, who was a fellow Plinian. He was an avowed materialist. He was 16 years older than Darwin. And Darwin always claimed evolution had little impact on him at the time, even from his association with Grant. And he became a walking companion. They would take long walks together and discuss various things, even Darwin. Darwin's biographer, Janet Brown, doubts that the conversations that he had with Edmund Grant had little impact on him. But then she sort of dismisses this relationship by saying, well, she says there's no reason to think that he became an evolutionist at this time. But I think this addresses the wrong issue. And as I point out in my introduction, the question should not be when did Darwin become an evolutionist? But really instead, when was he introduced to radical materialism?
[00:05:41] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a much deeper issue.
[00:05:42] Speaker D: It's a much deeper question. And it suggests to me that his association with these fellow Plinians really set his worldview framework.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: Yeah, we have a teenager here who's impressed by all these people that seem to be his intellectual superiors and he's just soaking this stuff in.
[00:06:06] Speaker D: Right. And so I think long before he ever got on the beagle, you know, and took his round the world voyage and did all his so called objective studies of animal behavior and animal morphology and so forth, he already had a template by which he would more or less fashion these, these things that he was seeing in nature. And so he was coming to this with the ghost of the plinian society behind him. And actually, there's a smoking gun to this because, well, what's your evidence for this? You know, you're merely speculating. Well, no, I'm not. Edmund Grant published the tabular view of primary divisions of the animal kingdom in 1861. And in a dedicatory letter, he reminded his protege, Charles Darwin. And of course, by now Darwin's quite famous with the publication Origin of Species and so forth. At any rate, he publishes this sort of introductory letter, and he talks about their common labors nearly 40 years earlier. In his words, the same rich field of philosophic inquiry.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Mm hmm. Philosophical materialism.
[00:07:28] Speaker D: So exactly. I believe that rich field wasn't evolution, that rich field was materialism, and Darwin didn't want to let that on. But my whole point is Darwin came to his investigations of nature as a materialist principle.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: Yes. Now, I mentioned that Bill Demski wrote a foreword to your book, and he says that you advanced three powerful claims. What is he referring to?
[00:07:55] Speaker D: Well, I make three claims. The first I've already mentioned, namely that Darwin came to his study of nature with a preconceived worldview particularly suited to materialism, and he made his observations fit that preconceived view. But the other two, I think, are equally important, and they relate to Alfred Russel Wallace after conceiving the theory of natural selection while he was on the spice Islands in the Malay archipelago during his stay on the island of Ternate. We believe it was written early in the rainy season, probably February of 1858. Wallace increasingly distanced himself from Darwin's emphasis on randomness and chance in the life sciences and proclaimed his distinctive theory of intelligent evolution, which is a theory of common descent based upon natural selection strictly bounded by the principle of utility, which is the idea that no organ or attribute of an organism will be developed and retained unless it affords that organism a survival advantage. And then he placed this all within a larger teleological or purposeful framework. So he said, where utility cannot be found in a known organ or attribute, some other cause, an intelligent cause must be called upon. It really started with a paper he readdez to the Anthropological Society of London in March of 1864, but was formally presented in the April 1869 issue of the Quarterly Review, where he called upon an overruling intelligence to explain the special attributes of man, and he never really looked back. It was intelligent evolution all the way, culminating in his book, which really comprises the bulk of my new work. The world of life, a manifestation of creative power. Directive mind and ultimate purpose. And finally, my third claim vindicates Wallace's insistence on human exceptionalism by making reference to Mike Behe's confirmation of intelligent evolution in his most recent book, Darwin Devolved, which was published very recently. And really a close examination of that book, I think, confirms Wallaces assertions regarding human exceptionalism that he published over 100 years ago.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: Yeah, and that ties into what I was saying when I introduced you in your new edited book, and that is that much of this is of great relevance to understanding the debate today. Yes. So this is this idea of intelligent evolution. Now, some of our listeners may be wondering, well, how's that different from theistic evolution from the ideas of kindler, Francis Collins and the like? What would you say to that?
[00:10:52] Speaker D: There's a great deal of difference. As I point out in my introduction, Wallace's intelligent evolution is not just another brand of theistic evolution. Wallaces type of evolution is intrinsically guided. That's key. It is intrinsically guided, unlike the scenarios sketched out by the theistic evolutionists, like the ones you just mentioned, Francis Collins, Ken Miller, Carl Giberson come to mind. What they really are, I think theistic evolutionists is a little deceptive and not quite a clear representation of their views. I like to refer to them as darwinian theists. What they want to do is they want to take Darwin's theory of randomness and chance and just sort of plug God into the top of it like a cherry on top of a sundae, and say, well, okay, we can have all of Darwin's emphasis on chance and randomness and no guidance whatsoever. It's all blind, and then somehow just sort of insert God on the top of it. And that's a, quite frankly, a pretty irrational position to take because you're trying to combine chance with providence, and the two just really don't come together. So I like to refer to the, what's commonly referred to as theistic evolutionists, like Ken Miller and like Francis Collins and so on. I like to refer to them as darwinian theists.
[00:12:34] Speaker B: Right, right. Okay, so this book that's just come out is an edited abridgement of Wallaces book by the title the World of Life. And you actually had an earlier edition of this abridgment in 2008 that was revised in 2011. So what's new in this most recent updated edition?
[00:12:53] Speaker D: Well, there's quite a bit new, and I would say there's basically three new additions to this book, if I could condense them. First. I've completely updated the historiography related to Wallace and Darwin, with a special focus on recent books like Jane T. Costa's Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species, which is published in 2014. And a year before that, Peter Bowler came out with Darwin deleted. And then Ken Miller recently came out with human instinct, which tries to explain how we evolved to have reason, consciousness, and free will. All of those books directly try to either refute Wallace altogether or they try to sanitize them. For example, James T. Costa tries to darwinize Wallace in ways that I think are pretty inaccurate. So I'm not going to go into the great details. We don't have time to go into all my arguments. But that's one aspect that is new. I've completely updated the historiography up to present. I've also critiqued the positions of Biologos, which is a leading center for darwinian theism, especially with regard to its president, Deborah Harsma. On the more positive side, I've given some detailed analysis to Tom Wolf's kingdom of speech, which I believe came out around 2016. And Tom Wolfe's kingdom of speech actually confirms much of Wallace's argument for human exceptionalism through the power of speech.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: Yeah, well, this is really great, Mike. There's so many things that render this new edition warranted and important for the current debate. I'd like to continue this conversation in our next podcast, but thank you so much for joining us right now for this great introduction to your new book.
[00:14:52] Speaker D: Thank you, Mike.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: I am Mike Keys. Thanks for joining us at id the future.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. Id the future is copyright Discovery institute. For more information, visit intelligentdesign.org and idthefuture.com.
