tothesource: The Darwin Myth—that's a strange title for a biography of Charles Darwin, isn't it?

Benjamin Wiker: Yes, perhaps it is! But all too many of the biographical treatments of him mix facts with fancies, so that we get mythological treatments of Darwin as a kind of secular saint, rather than Darwin the man, warts and all. Since this is the Year of Darwin—the 200th anniversary of his birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species—I thought it was high time to sort things out, and present a critical biography.

tothesource: By "critical biography," do you mean an entirely negative account of Darwin?

Wiker: Not at all. Darwin himself was a charming man, very kind, a model husband and father, a man of high personal moral character, and a man who suffered with the patience of Job through a lifetime of sickness. At the same time, however, he could be rather dishonest about his own theory, even with himself insofar as he remained blind to its morally corrosive implications.

tothesource: Dishonest? In what way?

Wiker: Several ways, actually. Let's begin with the question of his originality. Part of the Darwin Myth passed down and popularized, is that Charles Darwin was wholly original, the man who "discovered" evolution while sailing around the world aboard the HMS Beagle in the early 1830s, and then set out the unambiguous facts in his Origin of Species in 1859, taking the world entirely by surprise. Then, so the myth goes, every reasonable man suddenly saw the truth of Darwinism, and thereafter, only hidebound and irrational biblical literalists opposed Darwin.

tothesource: That's not what happened?

Wiker: Not at all, although Darwin dearly wanted it to be perceived that way. The truth is that the notion of evolution had been around for quite some time. Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was an immensely famous late Enlightenment figure, and offered his own account of evolution—or transmutationism, as it was called—in his book Zoönomia, published near the end of the 18th century. That was over fifty years before Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species. Charles Darwin's own father, Robert, was also an evolutionist. So, the notion that Charles Darwin discovered evolution is absurd. It was a family tradition! He had carefully read his grandfather's evolutionary account, and that of the French evolutionist Jean Baptiste Lamarck before ever stepping foot on the Beagle. He had even done research under the evolutionist Robert Grant!

tothesource: But you say that Charles Darwin wanted to appear to be original?

Wiker: Yes, he seemed quite obsessed with it. In fact, after he published the Origin, he was immediately brought to task for failing to mention the long line of evolutionists who had published this or that aspect of his theory in the first half of the 1800s. In later editions, he humbly acknowledged them—including his own grandfather!

tothesource: Why was Darwin so bent on being original?

Wiker: That's hard to say, but it brings up another aspect of the Darwin Myth. My educated guess is that Darwin wanted to see himself as a central figure, a pivotal figure, in the great liberal Whig historical drama of secular progress, where humanity escapes from the darkness of religious superstition to the light of rational secular science. This led to what I would call his most serious act of dishonesty, insisting that evolution had to be Godless to be scientific. That is a myth, a falsehood, that unfortunately still forms the minds of all too many scientists today. But evolution does not have to be Godless to be scientific.

tothesource: What does this all have to do with Darwin's account of evolution through natural selection?

Wiker: Everything! Darwin crafted his account of natural selection specifically to eliminate any need for God as an explanation for the variety of species, and their extraordinary design. Natural selection is indeed a powerful and important concept, and other scientists had already set out aspects of natural selection decades before Darwin published his Origin of Species. But Darwin insisted on making it an all-encompassing explanation of everything in biology, an explanation that entirely eliminated God. In this, he was quite like his contemporary Karl Marx who wanted to explain everything about man through a very materialist account of economics precisely so that he could eliminate God. Darwinism is, in this, much like Marxism.

tothesource: So Darwinism and evolution are distinct.

Wiker: Yes, just as Marxism and economics are distinct. Darwinism like Marxism offers a materialist, reductionist explanation of its subject. Both explain a great deal. The problems arise when they claim to explain everything. Marxism has important things to say about the problems with capitalism and about the foundations of culture in economic life. But it puts forth a grossly distorted view of human beings in trying to reduce everything about humanity—our greatest thoughts, religion, art, music, morality, all aspects of culture—to the way we get food. Like Marx, Darwin wanted to explain everything about humanity—its greatest thoughts, religion, art, music, morality, all aspects of culture—as an aftereffect of natural selection. But what if the process of evolution is much grander than Darwin imagined, so complex, intricate, and wonderful, especially in the case of humanity, that any reasonable man would conclude that it had a Divine Cause?

tothesource: Darwin wouldn't allow that?

Wiker: No, and neither will Darwinists today. The alternative to Darwinism, that evolution is so magnificent that it implies God, is not something I just made up, but was known to Darwin himself. It was an alternative he explicitly rejected. It was the position of Darwin's acknowledged co-discoverer of evolution through natural selection, Alfred Wallace, as well as the position of Darwin's most potent critic, the evolutionist St. George Mivart. It was also the position of Darwin's main allies, the eminent scientists Asa Gray and Charles Lyell. They all pointed out that mere natural selection could not explain the development of the moral and intellectual nature of man.

tothesource: You mentioned that Darwin was blind to the moral implications of his own theory. Did that, in part, form the criticisms of Mivart, Gray, and Lyell?

Wiker: In part, yes. All of them warned of the danger of reducing our moral nature to a mere aftereffect of natural selection. The result would seem to be obvious: if we believe that morality is an unintended effect of natural selection, then we will tend to reduce morality to survival of the fittest (and the elimination of the unfit). That is, in fact, what Darwin did, even though he refused to believe that it would lead to a kind of moral barbarism. The 20th century bears witness to the horrifying effects of collapsing morality into Darwinism.

Cutlture of Life Foundation explains why Catholic intellectuals challenged Notre Dame's decision to honor Obama at last week's graduation ceremony

"During his time in the Illinois legislature, Barack Obama acted personally to ensure that that legislature would not pass a law banning the killing of disabled newborn children, born alive following botched abortions. In connection with his tenure as a U.S. Senator, he distributed fundraising circulars to raise money on the grounds of his support for continuing the practice of partial-birth abortions (a technique involving partially delivering live infants outside the bodies of their mothers, save for their heads, which are then stabbed and suctioned, before being fully delivered, now dead). As a candidate for president, he promised that one of his first legislative acts would be the passage of a law (the Freedom of Choice Act) to remove all existing regulations from the practice of abortion in the United States. On the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and as against the tens of thousands of pro-life marchers gathered in the January cold of Washington, D.C., he issued a public statement supporting the decision that overturned every state's decision to shield the unborn from being killed. He later issued several executive orders releasing hundreds of millions of federal dollars for abortion groups operating overseas, and for researchers killing human embryos. In the context of the latter order, he both excoriated defenders of embryonic life as ideological and political versus 'scientific,' and claimed the mantle of morality, and scientific purity for himself. He also claimed support for his decision based upon a national 'consensus' and his 'faith,' but failed to give evidence of the former claim, or to confront the facial irrationality of the latter claim. Despite excoriating his opponents as anti-scientific, he himself refused to acknowledge the scientific data confirming the humanity of the embryo, or the emerging scientific consensus that adult stem cells offer a superior therapeutic and moral alternative to embryonic stem cells. President Obama furthermore is readying the federal government to strip conscience protections from doctors and hospitals morally opposed to performing abortions. And he has literally filled the White House and powerful federal agencies with lawyers from the nation's foremost extremist abortion-advocacy groups, the groups that have bitterly opposed every effort of the Catholic Church, both here and overseas, to protect the lives of the unborn and their mothers from abortion.

Believe it or not, the list actually goes on. But enough has been said to help even those who might initially defend Obama's appearance at Notre Dame to understand its significance."

Helen M. Alvaré
Culture of Life Foundation

http://www.zenit.org/article-25616?l=english

An excerpt from The Darwin Myth

A particular thorn in Darwin’s side was a former pupil of Thomas Huxley himself, the English anatomist and biologist St. George Jackson Mivart. He had begun, under Huxley’s tutelage, as an ardent evolutionist. He remained an ardent evolutionist, and indeed put forth a form of theistic evolution not too different from Darwin’s co-discoverer of evolution, Alfred Wallace.

St. George Mivart was a convert to Catholicism who offered a reconciliation of evolution with Christian orthodoxy, and did so by hammering away at the weak points in Darwin’s theory. The weakest of all, in Mivart’s opinion, was that it was undergirded by naturalistic philosophical presuppositions that were unexamined. Darwin had rejected outright the idea of a divine hand guiding evolution, and then set about explaining religion away as one more unintended effect of natural selection. To do so, Mivart argued, Darwin had to treat theology in a most superficial and unsophisticated way.

According to Mivart, Darwin’s theory did not prove that there was no Creator God; it began from the assumption that God did not exist, and so his theory was constructed and expressed in such a way as to dismiss the possibility without seriously engaging it. Moreover, in order to ensure that a divine foot could not enter the door, Darwin had skirted over the profound moral and intellectual differences between man and animals by pretending that an enormous gap didn’t exist when in fact it most obviously did.

Darwin could ignore many of his critics, but Mivart’s arguments and credentials were formidable. A professor of biology; Fellow and Vice-President of the Zoological Society; Fellow, Secretary, and Vice President of the Linnean Society; Fellow of the Royal Society; he would later get his doctorate in medicine from the University of Louvain. Almost simultaneously with the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man, Mivart came out with On the Genesis of Species in which Darwin’s Origin of Species (including its implications for man) was subjected to the most thorough and serious criticism in Darwin’s lifetime. Mivart’s attack was so devastating that Darwin felt as though he had to begin again.

Again, the problem wasn’t evolution. Mivart believed that the current understanding of evolution was still largely hypothetical, but that the facts would, more and more, support it, and
further, that evolution would prove itself to be “perfectly consistent with the strictest and most orthodox Christian theology.” But Darwin’s version was another thing: “The special Darwinian hypothesis, however, is beset with certain scientific difficulties, which must by no means be ignored, and some of which, I venture to think, are absolutely insuperable.”

Two related problems pointed out by Mivart must be mentioned. First, natural selection itself is insufficient to explain the evolution of species and so must “be supplemented by the action of some other natural law or laws as yet undiscovered,” and second, illegitimate consequences have been drawn from evolution against religion.

Notice the relationship between the two. Darwin had carefully crafted natural selection to displace the need for God, but natural selection itself was inadequate on scientific grounds. It was hamstrung by its own reductionist, anti-theistic bias, the very bias which led to its illegitimate attack on religion as a mere epiphenomenon of natural selection.

http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Myth-Life-Lies-Charles/dp/1596980974

Evolutionists against Darwinism: Simon Conway Morris

Simon Conway Morris is a professor of evolutionary paleobiology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St. John's College. Elected to the Royal Society in 1990, he is the author, most recently, of Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. With other eminent evolutionists, he was asked the question, “Does Evolution Explain Human Nature?” His answer, “Except where it matters.” The following is an excerpt.

“So why quibble with the standard Darwinian formulation? Is it not obvious that the roots of human behavior and cultural sophistication lie in the rich loam of our evolutionary past? We are but a hair's breadth from our animal cousins. Such is evident in terms of their cognitive world (which many believe encompasses, at least in apes and some birds, a theory of mind), their capacity for self-recognition in mirrors, and the glimmerings among them not just of culture and its transmission but of crafted tools and even traits of personality. So what is the problem?”

“At one level, there is none. It would be strange if my fingers and eyes were to have an evolutionary origin but not my capacity to speak, to empathize, and even to deal with simple abstractions like numbers. And yet, though we may be just a hair’s breadth away from a chimp - not to mention a crow, a dolphin, an elephant, and even an octopus - we humans are still utterly and stupendously different. A seamless extrapolation from one species to another? That is what Darwin proposed, but pinning down how the glaring gaps - most obviously, language - were actually bridged remains almost entirely obscure.”

“Should we look, then, to human exceptionalism, to a freak mutation that suddenly propelled us into new worlds? It is possible, of course, but there is not a shred of evidence for it. Could it just be an illusion? Perhaps we think we are different, but the animals themselves know better. Is that credible? Not really. So profound is the gulf between us and the chimps that they might as well live in the Andromeda galaxy. Have you seen a chimp make a fire, let alone go to the library?”

“The late David Stove, an Australian philosopher, wrote a wonderful book entitled Darwinian Fairytales. How dare anybody use a word like ‘fairytale’ in the same breath as the venerated Darwin? (See how the cage housing the ultra-Darwinists rocks and shudders, the occupants hurling themselves against the bars with cries of outrage.) But Stove was emphatically not a creationist or even a theist, let alone a Christian. And he had no quarrel with evolution. For him, the question was not where we came from but who we are now. In a piercing critique, he dismantled the Darwinian pieties purporting to show why we are so extraordinarily altruistic (not to mention our love of animals), demolished the absurdities of genetic determinism, exploded the naiveties of sociobiology, and laid waste the myth that we are ‘just another species.’”

http://www.templeton.org/evolution

"A poll conducted May 7-10 as part of the annual Gallup Values and Beliefs survey found that a majority of Americans (51 percent) described themselves as 'pro-life' with respect to the abortion issue, while only 42 percent said they were "pro-choice." The results were made public May 15." Catholic News Service

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0902292.htm

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