Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your guest host, Mike Keys. Today we have the privilege of talking with Dr. Robert Schedinger. Dr. Schedinger occupies an endowed chair in Biblical Studies at Luther College. He began teaching there in 2000 after earning his PhD in religious studies from Temple University in Philadelphia. He also earned an earlier BS in Civil Engineering Technology from Temple. Dr. Schettinger's primary research interests revolve around the question, what is religion? He has recently published a book about the relation between evolutionary biology and religion entitled the Mystery of Evolutionary Darwinian Biology's Grand Narrative of Triumph and the Subversion of Religion. Thanks for Joining us today, Dr. Schedinger.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: Thank you. It's wonderful to be here.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: So in your book the Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms, you talk about a grand narrative of Darwinian triumph that subverts religion. Spilled right into the title. What did you mean by this?
[00:01:22] Speaker A: So I, back in 2014, had a semester sabbatical break and I had begun teaching a course in the relationship between science and religion. And I knew I needed to brush up on the science side of that. And so I began reading sort of the history, the literature, the history of the development of evolutionary theory, starting of course with Darwin, but on through all the major works of the so called neo Darwinian synthesis and up to the present day. And I decided as somebody trained in the humanities, that I would read it as a humanities scholar, would read it with a certain skepticism and see if is it really telling the story that it proposes to be telling. And I discovered very quickly as I read some of these texts that I found some of these scientists making very explicit statements that their support for natural selection as the primary mechanism of evolution was not really based on evidence, but on other reasons. So just to give you some examples of things that I noticed, in 1909, August Weissman wrote an article called the Selection Theory for a volume celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species. And in that article he says that his support for natural selection is not based on evidence, but on quite other grounds. And so if you then continue reading, you find out later in the essay that the other grounds that he's referring to is he makes the explicit statement that evolution has to be driven by naturalistic mechanisms, that there's no other possibility. And so his support for natural selection clearly was not based on some kind of scientific evidence, empirical evidence, but simply his ideological bias towards everything having to have a physical or naturalistic cause. And so then I just Continued reading. And I found other things that I didn't know. And that is often not talked about in histories of biology or certainly in textbooks. That early population geneticists like Sewell Wright was a panpsychist himself and believed that matter had both an external and an internal aspect to it. And the external aspect is all that science could deal with. But therefore science was not dealing with the totality of what matter is, because it has this internal aspect, much like the philosophy of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who talked about the within of things. And he almost sounds like Teilhard when he talks about that. And nobody ever talks about Wright's panpsychism. That's just been sort of obliterated from the narrative. And Ronald Fisher too, in terms of population geneticists in his book the Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, where he comes right out and he says that natural selection is the only possible understanding of evolution. It wins by default because any other possibility opens itself to non physical or material understandings of evolution. And in his mind that's not possible. And it just continued to go on from there. George Gaylord Simpson, who's often viewed as a strong materialist himself in his book the Tempo and Mode of Evolution, does say in one place that he believes that there's much in the universe that will not yield to a purely material or physical explanation. Now he does say that science has to assume material, so he assumes material explanations. That's all science can do. But he is implying there then, that science can be the total explanation of things if there's much that can't, that won't yield to physical or material explanations. And Theodosius Dobzhansky, of course, was a very committed Russian Orthodox Christian and was himself very interested in the work of Teilhard. In fact, he was president of the North American Teilhard association for a year. And in his often cited article Nothing in Biology Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution, he does call humans the apex of evolution. And an undirected process by definition would have no apex. So humans are the apex of evolution. That he's not supporting an undirected evolutionary process, even though he's like one of the poster children for the synthesis and sort of Darwinian evolution. And even Francis Crick when he pronounced the central dogma of molecular biology, that information can only flow in one direction, from DNA out to proteins, but never backwards. In the paper in which he coined that phrase central dogma, of course it was his term, to use the kind of loaded term dogma for this and he did so because he noted outright that the evidence for it, the direct evidence for it, he says, is negligible. It just seemed to him to be the way things operated. So I just began to see all through this history of reading all these texts that they were in a sense, almost deconstructing themselves in terms of viewing evolution as a purely naturalistic process. And so I became more and more interested in what was really going on there and how this sort of Darwinian, this narrative of Darwinian triumph had been pulled through in ways that was not based in good scientific evidence.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: This is fascinating material, Robert, and two of my other colleagues who've written on this, but in a more specific way or more narrow way, you do it more generally. But two of those colleagues are Paul Nelson and Steve Dilley. They've written about this theme of the use of religious and philosophical assumptions that drive much of evolutionary theory. Cornelius Hunter is another one who's written on this. But I'm fascinated to see how you have really hone down on some of these major players in evolutionary biology and have given further detail to this thesis. This is really interesting material. So thank you for explaining what you've been up to. But you also are working on another book, aren't you?
[00:07:35] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:07:36] Speaker B: Which at least now you're thinking the title something like Only An Rescuing the Origin of Species from the Grasp of Darwinian Mythology.
So you've talked about religious aspects to evolutionary theory and now here you have the idea of Darwinian mythology, sort of storytelling that has religious aspects and you're an expert on what is religion. So this is important for us to hear from you. So where do you see this new book heading?
[00:08:05] Speaker A: Well, after I got finished with the Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms, I had dealt a little bit with Darwin in that book, but not in any great detail. And so I became much more interested in trying to understand who Darwin himself was. I just felt like I couldn't trust the major biographies because they start from the perspective that Darwin was one of the greatest scientists of all time, greatest biologists, laid the foundation for evolutionary theory. And so they tell his life story kind of, you know, from that perspective. And I wanted to get behind that kind of what I call Darwinian mythology. And so what I did is I decided his correspondence would be a great place to start because that would give me kind of a real time insight into the development of his thought. So a letter he's writing. Because even Darwin's own autobiography is written from a perspective late in life when he knows how things are going to turn out. But if he's writing a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1850, he doesn't know how things are going to turn out. So it would give me kind of a real time insight into a real time development of his ideas.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: Sure, historians like those candid moments that correspondence will reveal that maybe a kind of a touched up autobiography later might not.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: Right, right. And certainly the auto or the biographies, you know, all the well known biographies do cite his correspondence. But as I started to read the correspondence, so I sat down, I said, I'm going to devote some time here, however long it takes, whenever I have a few minutes to read through the first 11 volumes of the correspondence, taking us up to about the year 1863. So it's like 5,000 pages worth. And I just became fascinated in the whole Victorian England context and just kind of reading the correspondence of this person. And so I began to realize that the biographies, while they cite the correspondence, if you start reading the biographies as I did, you start seeing a small selection of letters that get cited over and over again to the exclusion of a much more comprehensive engagement with the correspondence. And so as I read through the correspondence, one of the things that really stuck out to me that I hadn't really thought about before, even though it is mentioned in other sources, but they don't make a big deal about it. And that is the level to which Darwin went to tell all of his scientific correspondence, to implore them to view the Origin of Species as only an abstract, just an abstract of his theory. Because he was working on the big book, what he calls his big book on evolution or on natural selection in the late 1850s. And then when he got the famous letter from Alfred Russel Wallace laying out his theory, the similar theory that sort of four star when to put the big book aside and then work on what he calls his abstract, which became the origin. And even when after it was published. So when he published it, he sent out presentation copies to a whole bunch of different people. And in every one of the letters that he sent with those presentation copies, he says, I'm sending you my book, the Origin of Species as yet only an abstract as yet. He says it over and over and over. This is really important to him for people to view it as only an abstract. And part of my argument is the reason he did that is because he knew that it was deficient in terms of evidence. And so when the Origin came out and then you start seeing reviews of it in the British press, many of the reviewers were also giving him the benefit of the doubt and saying, now this is only an abstract so we shouldn't draw firm conclusions on his theory because we haven't seen all the evidence. But they expected that he would follow up the Origin with the Big Book. And even Darwin led to that expectation that he would do that, but he never did.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Well, okay, so Darwin was sticking with his plan there even past the publication of the Origin for this Big Book. And I guess eventually that waned.
So given that he didn't publish his Big Book, why didn't he?
[00:12:08] Speaker A: Yeah, so that was one of the main questions that I wanted try to answer. Okay. Because he led people to the expectation that he would. He said that he would. He even says in the beginning of the Origin that he will follow up with his Big book. And everybody was expecting it, anticipating it. People were writing him letters saying we can't wait to see this big book. But then he never published it. Now he eventually published the first couple chapters on variation under domestication later in 1868 in that monograph he expanded the first two chapters, but he never published the rest of it. Now the party line among many Darwinian scholars is that, well, he just sort of, you know, cribbed from different aspects of it the different works that he wrote later. And so he never really had to publish the whole thing because he just took pieces of it and published in a different context. I think that's wrong. I think in light of the reaction that he got to the Origin and some of the scientifically substantive criticisms that he got in response to the Origin, many of which we see in the correspondence, people writing to him, like the Irish botanist William Harvey and others, that Darwin realized that the Big Book, if he published it, really wouldn't be any more convincing to these critics than the Origin itself. And I think reading the Big Book since that manuscript, his unpublished Big Book manuscript was published in 1975 by Cambridge and is available and I've read it. I think that's right. That it would not have been any more convincing in terms of addressing the various criticisms.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: Yeah. And given all the high expectations for it, that could be deflationary to his program. Right. If he went ahead and published it.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: Right. And so what I think happened is he had been doing some research with orchids over some period of time, studying fertilization mechanisms in orchids and trying to, I think, document co evolutionary relationships between insects, pollinators and orchids and the various, what he calls contrivances in orchids to assure their self fertilization or their fertilization by insects. And so what appears to have happened is he hit on this orchid work, which he doesn't talk about at all in the Origin or in the Big Book, as kind of the missing evidence for natural selection, that this is how he would convince his critics of the reality of natural selection, by showing them all of the amazing, exquisite variations in the ways that orchids are fertilized.
And so he followed up the origin. The first thing he published after the Origin was his monograph on fertilization mechanisms in Orchids in 1862. And he wrote to Asa Gray. Actually, Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist, wrote to Darwin after the Orchid Book came out, and he congratulated Darwin on a great monograph and said something to the effect that you have created a flank movement on your enemies.
And Darwin wrote back to Gray, and he says, you're the first person who recognized that that's the reason I wrote the Orchid Book, that it's a flank movement on my enemies. And I think what he means by that is he's trying to outflank his critics while they're waiting for the Big Book with all of the evidence that the Origin of Species didn't have. He could outflank them by showing them this work on orchids, which would provide that evidence.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: Interesting, interesting.
[00:15:36] Speaker A: But his flank movement failed in a most ironic way, because when the Orchid Book was published, reviews started appearing in the British press. And as these reviews came out, almost everybody who reviewed the Orchid book hailed it as a great work of natural history, great contribution to botany. But they also didn't see any connection between what Darwin had provided in this book and his previous theory of natural selection. And then some of these reviewers started to go beyond that, and they began to say things like, this is actually a great work of natural theology that Darwin has proved, you know, in the exquisite nature of these fertilization mechanisms in orchids, the great designing intelligence of God or whatever.
One person even likened the Orchid book to the Bridgewater treatises. And then what's really interesting here is that Darwin wrote to his publisher, John Murray. He originally planned on writing or publishing the orchid work as an extended paper, probably in the Linnaean, but then it got too long, and so he decided maybe I should publish it as a separate monograph. So he reached out to John Murray, his publisher, just to feel him out on his interest in potentially publishing this book. And in that letter, Darwin even says to Murray, darwin likens his orchid book to a Bridgewater treatise in writing to Murray. So even Darwin seemed to, at least in this private letter, be thinking that what he had produced here was in some way reflecting some sort of intelligence or creative power in the universe and not something that could be explained simply on just undirected natural processes.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And thus two key terms in your two titles, Subversion of religion and Darwinian mythology. Right. There's a sense in which there's a religious dimension to Darwin's work and his aspirations as a whole. He's wanting to pitch it as a scientific contribution, but there is a. There is important religious, philosophical content playing a huge role in driving him forward. And that's interesting to think.
[00:17:52] Speaker A: I think he was just deeply conflicted over the whole question of design and teleology in some places, wanting to present his work as purely empirical and inductive and naturalistic, and then at other places seeming to fall back on this, you know, issues of design and teleology. So I think he was just very deeply conflicted on the, on the whole question.
But he's not presented that way in the, in the mythology that he's the one who, you know as well, a Richard Dawkins or a Daniel Dennett or somebody like that. He's the one that provided the purely naturalistic understanding of evolution. And they ignore, I think, the deeply conflicted nature of Darwin's own struggling over these issues.
[00:18:40] Speaker B: Right. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Schedinger, for sharing with us some interesting details about your published book and your book soon to come. But there's so much more we need to pick your brain about. So let's have you back for another episode. But for now, thank you for joining me for this conversation. I'm Mike Keys. Thanks for joining us at IDfuture.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: Visit us at IDtheFuture.com and IntelligentDesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
