Taking a different look at Darwin's Theories of Natural Selection

Fire of Liberty

Now while I generally ponder about the importance of enforcing our borders against illegal immigration, finishing our mission in Iraq, the dangerous nature of Iran, gas prices, increasing our energy supplies and resources(Alternative and petroleum via other sources), The War on Terror, and conservatism(social, economic), I also find time to look at subjects like natural selection and evolution. Though I tend to cast a dark shadow on Darwin's concept of the "survival of the fittest"(Not to mention the large number of scientists and true-believers who take the theory as gospel)and believe that human nature comes from a higher being(G-d), I'm still interested in what folks have to write about the examination and re-examination of Darwin's ideas that were expounded in his The Origin of Species . To keep you from falling asleep at your computer and to keep my sanity with all things science, I thought I'd share with you what I've been reading and intend on reading with regards to Darwin's theory of Natural Selection.

Two pieces on Darwin's theory that seemed to be blinking lights in the sea of other news is "Natural Selection," by James Seaton over at the Weekly Standard as well as Tom Wolfe's "Darwin Meets His Match" over at the New York Sun. Seaton's piece was basically a review of Larry Arnhart's new book Darwinian Conservatism, which posits the idea that the theory put forth by Darwin almost 150 years ago helps to define and defend conservatism and its "realist" approach towards life and a rejection of any kind of utopia that seems to arise out of the minds of leftists and their progressive brethren.(Just think about solutions to poverty and war.) I'm not so sure that I'd embrace such thinking but I have to give Arnhart his due in presenting such a thought. So give Seaton's piece a look and if you like it, take a leap of faith and check out Arnhart's Darwinian Conservatism. As for the wonderful and lengthy piece Darwin Meets His Match, the New York Sun has presented Tom Wolfe's speech that he delivered before the 35th Jefferson Lecture of Humanities that took on Darwin and his friends in the intellectual community(This includes Freud, Marx and others of yesteryear and today). Instead of trying to explain Wolfe's ideas, I thought I'd give you a look at his work. Here's a sample:

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, this evening it is my modest intention to tell you in the short time we have together . . . everything you will ever need to know about the human beast.

I take that term, the human beast, from my idol, Emile Zola, who published a novel entitled The Human Beast in 1888, just 29 years after Darwin's The Origin of Species broke the stunning news that Homo sapiens—or Homo loquax, as I call him——was not created by God in his own image but was precisely that, a beast, not different in any essential way from snakes with fangs or orangutangs . . . or kangaroos. . . or the fang-proof mongoose. Darwin's doctrine, Evolution, leapt from the pages of a scientific monograph into every level of society in Europe and America with sensational suddenness. It created a sheerly dividing line between the God-fearing bourgeoisie who were appalled, and those people of sweetness and light whose business it was to look down at the bourgeosie from a great height. Today, of course, we call these superior people intellectuals, but intellectual didn't exist as a noun until Clemenceau applied it to Zola and Anatole France in 1896 during the Dreyfus Case. Zola's intellect was as sweetly enlightened as they made them. He was in with the in-crowd. Evenings he spent where the in-crowd went, namely, the Café Guerbois, along with Manet, Cezanne, Whistler, Nadar, and le tout Paris boheme. He took his cues from the in-crowd's views, namely, Academic art was bad, Impressionism was good, and Homo sapiens had descended from the monkeys in the trees. Human beasts? I'll give you human beasts! Zola's aforementioned novel of that name, La Bete Humaine in French, is a story of four murderers, a woman and three men, who work down at track level on the Paris-Le Havre railroad line, each closing in on a different victim, each with a different motive, including the case of a handsome young passenger train engineer with a compulsion . . . to make love to women and then kill them. With that, Zola crowned himself as the first scientific novelist, a "naturalist," to use his term, studying the human fauna.

I love my man Zola. He's my idol. But the whole business exudes irony so rich, you can taste it. It tastes like marzipan. Here we have Darwin and his doctrine that in 1859 rocks Western man's very conception of himself . . . We have the most popular writer in the world in 1888, Zola, who can't wait to bring the doctrine alive on the page . . . We have the next five generations of educated people who have believed and believe to this day that, at bottom, evolution's primal animal urges rule our lives . . . to the point where the fourth greatest pop music hit of 2001, "You and Me, Baby" by the Bloodhound Gang, proclaims, "You and me, baby, we ain't nothing but mammals./So let's do it like they do on the Dis-cov-ery Channel"——it's rich! rich! rich beyond belief!

O. I love you, Emile, but by the time you and Darwin got hold of it, evolution had been irrelevant for 11,000 years. Why couldn't you two see it? Evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech! As soon as he became not Homo sapiens, "man reasoning," but Homo loquax, "man talking"! Speech gave the human beast far more than an ingenious tool. Speech was a veritable nuclear weapon! It gave the human beast the powers of reason, complex memory, and long-term planning, eventually in the form of print and engineering plans. Speech gave him the power to enlarge his food supply at will through an artifice called farming. Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary, but also the evolution of animals! Our animal friends——we're very sentimental about predators these days, aren't we—the lions, the tigers, the wolves, the rhinoceroses, the great apes, kangaroos, leopards, cheetahs, grizzly bears, polar bears, cougars——they're "endangered," meaning hanging on for dear life. Today the so-called animal kingdom exists only at the human beast's sufferance. The beast has dealt crippling blows even to the unseen empire of the microbes. Stunted adults from Third World countries with abysmal sanitation come to the United States and their offspring grow six or more inches taller, thanks to the wonders of hygiene. Cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, turkeys would be extinct by now had not the human beasts hit upon the idea of animal husbandry. So far the human beast enjoys the luxury of crying sentimental tears over the deer because she's so pretty. But the day the human beast discovers deer in his cellar, fawns in his bedroom closet, bucks tangling horns in the attic at night above his very bedroom . . . those filthy oversized vermin, the deer, will be added to that big long list above. We're sentimental about the dolphins, because they're so smart. What about the tuna? It's okay to kill tunas by the ton because they're dimwits? It would take an evolutionary mystic (and there are such) to believe these animals will ever evolve their way out of the hole they're in thanks to man's power of speech.

No evolutionist has come up with even an interesting guess as to when speech began, but it was at least 11,000 years ago, which is to say, 9000 B.C. It seems to be the consensus . . . in the notoriously capricious field of evolutionary chronology . . . that 9000 B.C. was about when the human beast began farming, and the beast couldn't have farmed without speech, without being able to say to his son, "Son, this here's seeds. You best be putting ‘em in the ground in rows ov'ere like I tell you if you wanna git any ears a corn this summer."

Do forgive me, Emile, but here is the tastiest of all ironies. One of Homo loquax's first creations after he learned to talk was religion. Since The Origin of Species in 1859 the doctrine of Evolution has done more than anything else to put an end to religious faith among educated people in Europe and America; for God is dead. But it was religion, more than any other weapon in Homo loquax's nuclear arsenal, that killed evolution itself 11,000 years ago. To say that evolution explains the nature of modern man is like saying that the Bessemer process of adding carbons to pig iron to make steel explains the nature of the modern skyscraper.

Let's just say that there's a lot of folks out there who take a greater thought of Darwin's ideas of Natural Selection much further than Darwin or his supporters refused to go. All in all it just shows you that even Darwin's theory and its hanger-ons are finding out that they're facing a "survival of the fittest" on their own. It just goes to show you that you have to keep up a defense of your theories and ideas and listen to other views and thoughts on the issue. Resting on your laurels isn't the best approach. So I recommend you read these two pieces.

As for a good book, I recommend you check out David Stove's book Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution, which clears up the fuzziness of Darwin for lay readers. I can't say to much about the book because it's coming via UPS but once I read it, I'll fill you in. So enjoy the reads on Darwin.