Attached is Phil Johnson's book review of E.O. Wilson's "Consilience", which
appeared in The Washington Times.
I found his "two-platoon" metaphor brilliant, and I know nothing of American
football!
Steve
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The Washington Times, May 24, 1998, Sunday, Part B; BOOKS; Pg. B8
HEADLINE: Is man the measure of all things? One scientist's reply
BYLINE: Phillip E. Johnson
I read Edward O. Wilson's "Consilience" in the same week that I
received "Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science," the new
guidebook for high school teachers published by the National Academy of
Sciences. Reading the two books in tandem gave me the sense that
evolutionary science is a lot like American football with its two-platoon
system.
The National Academy's guidebook was written by the defensive platoon.
It seeks to combat creationism by reassuring teachers and religious parents
that evolution is a harmless concept that mainly deals with the kind of
variations that allow bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics. The
notorious tendency of Darwinism to encourage agnosticism is blandly covered
over with the empty declaration that the theory of evolution is compatible
with unspecified "religious principles."
The Guidebook has nothing to say about social Darwinism, or materialism
as a philosophy, or the role Darwinian theory has played in justifying
various political ideologies and encouraging a naturalistic mindset even
among theologians. Evolution according to the defensive platoon is so
inoffensive an idea that it seems downright boring.
The offensive platoon for the scientific team consists of aggressive
writers like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and Edward O.
Wilson. There is nothing innocent or boring about the picture of evolution
they draw. The offensive game plan was best summed up by Mr. Dennett's
remark (in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea") that Darwinism is a "universal acid"
that eats through every competing idea, including the notion that there is
an independent, choosing self that somehow rises above the material causes
in the brain. God is dead and the mind is merely what the physical brain
does in response to material stimuli - if these Darwinists are right.
The "consilience" of Mr. Wilson's title refers to his project of
unifying the intellectual world by persuading everybody to let science set
the agenda in all fields. Religious people should give up their myths and
accept that science is religion liberated and writ large. (The defensive
platoon doesn't repudiate statements like that, but pretends they were
never made.) Moral theorists should use their philosophical or religious
rhetoric to shore up the behavior patterns that the great god Nature has
determined to be effective for human beings. Artists and literary scholars
should base their work on the patterns that neuroscience has found to be
pleasing to our brains.
Mr. Wilson has an urbane manner that is superficially polite and
modest, but his dogmatism is relentless. He writes of the "unbroken string
of successes" that reductionism has produced for three centuries, ignoring
the repeated failures of reductionist attempts to explain human behavior -
including behaviorism and his own social Darwinism.
He says that there is no non-physical mind, because no physical site
for it has been located. (The methodology is identical to that of Nikita
Khrushchev, who announced that Soviet cosmonauts had verified atheism by
reporting that they had not seen God out there in space.) He takes for
granted that natural selection is responsible for creating the human brain,
along with everything else in the living world, despite the absence of
evidence to support this claim.
Mr. Wilson must be aware of the powerful objections that have been
made to the notion that one can attribute vast creative powers to natural
selection by extrapolating from the very modest effects (e.g., peppered
moth variation) that have actually been observed. He also must know that
even the officially accepted fossil chain of human ancestors (itself more
the product of Darwinian belief than the cause of it) does not show the
gradual progressive change that would occur if evolution proceeded as
neo-Darwinism prescribes.
Mr. Wilson just doesn't care about contrary evidence. Scientism is
his religion (he describes his conversion from Christianity to Darwinism as
an "epiphany" and an "enchantment") and he preaches the faith by insisting
that scientists have unspecified "overwhelming evidence" for the
materialist worldview. They don't.
Believers in God are only a secondary target of Wilson's program,
however. The main rival to scientific rationalism in the university world
is postmodernist epistemological relativism, as embodied by cultural
luminaries like Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty. Mr.
Wilson's impossible dream is that he can persuade the deconstructionists
and multiculturalists to become camp followers of science.
One problem with this program is that a thoroughgoing materialism
actually supports relativism by undercutting the belief that our reasoning
powers are adequate to carry out the rationalist program. If all our
thoughts are the product of material processes in the brain, itself a
product of mindless evolution guided only by survival of the fittest, then
why should we expect our theories (including materialism itself) to reflect
"the way things really are"? Natural selection programmed our faculties
only that we might produce viable offspring, a specialty at which we are
significantly less proficient than bacteria and cockroaches.
The postmodernist philosopher Mr. Rorty, who debated the consilience
thesis with Mr. Wilson in the Wilson (no relation) Quarterly, accepts the
scientist's Darwinism and all its logical consequences. For Mr. Rorty the
prime consequence is that we can judge theories only by pragmatic criteria,
by how well they seem to work for various purposes. In his way, Mr. Rorty
is also pursuing a form of consilience across disciplinary boundaries.
Pragmatism fits very well with Darwinism, which says that nature put the
capacity for theorizing into our heads not so that we might know the truth,
but merely to equip us to breed more successfully.
From this standpoint we can explain the consilience thesis itself as a
kind of weapon designed to give one band of thinkers the right to rule over
all the others. Under primitive conditions the ability to use words for
such a purpose would have led to greater access to food and females, and
thus have enabled some ancestor of Mr. Wilson's to spread his genes more
effectively. The prizes are different today, although not all that
different, but the basic strategy of proclaiming authoritative theories to
attain power over other minds is as old as mankind.
Phillip E. Johnson is professor of law at the University of
California. His most recent book is "Defeating Darwinism - By Opening Minds."
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"Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented."
--- Dr. William Provine, Professor of History and Biology, Cornell University.
http://fp.bio.utk.edu/darwin/1998/slides_view/Slide_7.html
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