Creationism

But unlike most of these attacks, “What Darwin Got Wrong,” a new book by Jerry Fodor, a professor of philosophy and cognitive sciences at Rutgers University, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona, comes not from the religious right, but from two atheist academics with — surprise — a nuanced argument about the shortcomings of Darwin’s theories. Their book details (in very technical language) how recent discoveries in genetics have thrown into question many of our perceived truths about natural selection, and why these have the potential to undermine much of what we know about evolution and biology.

Salon spoke to Fodor over the phone from his home, about the problems with Darwin’s ideas, bloggers’ “obscene” comments on his work, and why Darwinism might be as unreliable as creationism.

In 2007, you wrote an article attacking Darwinism in the London Review of Books, and experienced a lot of backlash from both inside and outside of the scientific community. Why do you think people get so worked up about Darwinism?

It’s a theory that’s played all sort of roles in the foundations of biology. There’s a lot of people who think wrongly that if you didn’t have Darwinism the whole foundations of modern biology would collapse. I doubt that’s true. I’m sure it’s not. But if you tell people, “There’s this fundamental theoretical commitment you’ve made and there’s holes in it,” they’ll want very much to defend that theory.

Most of the backlash to the book so far has been on blogs, which have been pretty obscene and debased. What’s upsetting is that they tell you that they think you’re an idiot, but they don’t tell you why — people who aren’t part of the field or who may not, in many cases, know much about Darwin. I’m not sure that all people who have been blogging about it are very sophisticated. It’s frustrating because you don’t know who you’re talking to.

At some point you just have to stop worrying about the reaction and worry if the argument is any good. I don’t take the arguments that say, “This that can’t be true because of what I learned in Biology 101″ very seriously.

 What is your beef with natural selection?

The main thing Darwin had in mind with natural selection was to come up with a theory that answers the question, “Why are certain traits there?” Why do people have hair on their heads? Why do both eyes have the same color? Why does dark hair go with dark eyes? You can make up a story that explains why it was good to have those properties in the original environment of selection. Do we have any reason to think that story is true? No.

According to Darwin, traits of creatures are selected for their contribution to fitness [likelihood to survive]. But how do you distinguish a trait that is selected for from one that comes along with it? There are a lot of interesting structures in creatures that have nothing to do with fitness.

Some variants in selection are clearly environmental. If you can’t store water you’ll do worse in a dry environment than if you can. But suppose that having a high ability to carry a lot of water is correlated for genetic reasons with skin color. How do you decide which trait is selected for by environmental factors and which one is just attached to it? There isn’t anything in the Darwinist picture that allows you to answer that question.

So we have no way of knowing whether a trait serves an evolutionary purpose?

Some traits are presumably selected for by the environment, and some of them are not. If somebody says Trait A affects fitness and Trait B does not, but Trait B comes with Trait A so you’ve got both traits in the organism, it’s very natural for somebody in the Darwinian tradition to think that Trait B has been selected for by the environment. But the answer is, it’s not there for anything.

Look, everybody has toenails, so you might ask yourself, why is it such a good thing we have toenails? It may be a case that in the environment there was some factor that favored toenails but there also may not.

As you explain in the book, it turns out many genes are far more tied together — and gene expression is much more complicated — than many people originally thought.

What the genetics has come to show is that traits are not independent, but complexly interconnected, and a lot of the effect that the environment has on an organism’s evolution depends on what organism it is.

There’s a famous fox-into-dog experiment, in which many generations of foxes were selected for being domestically trainable. As you would expect, when you select for domesticability, you get animals that behave less and less like their feral counterparts — but you also get curly ears and kinked tails and changes in their reproductive system. Nobody had that in mind, but the structure of the organism groups all of these traits together. Why do these animals have kinky tails? They just happen to be structural correlates. Now the question is, how much of the evolutionary variance is determined by factors of the environment and how much is controlled by the organization of the organism, and the answer is nobody knows.

Most children learn about natural selection by learning the example of the giraffe’s long neck, which supposedly evolved because it allowed animals to graze higher branches. Does this mean that we’re giving schoolchildren the wrong information?

The inference runs that there’s this creature that has a long neck, so this creature was selected for having a long neck. That inference is clearly invalid. A creature that has a long neck may have that neck because a different trait was selected, and the long neck came along with it.

And in a sense, there are no such things as traits. The environment selects creatures. Animals can have long necks and toenails, but if you try to break such creatures apart into traits and you say, OK, “What selected this trait?” and, “What selected that trait?” you’ve made a mistake right from the beginning. The disintegration of the organism into traits is itself a spurious undertaking. Biologists have said for a long time that organisms aren’t like Swiss apples, you can’t tap them on a table and have them fall apart into distinct wedges. Selection is operating on whole organisms.

There’s been increasing evidence in recent years that homosexuality has a genetic cause, which doesn’t exactly mesh with natural selection, given that gay people aren’t likely to have lots of children. Does your theory help explain the gay gene?

It’s not obvious what, when the environment was selecting for fecundity, would have selected for people who are gay. You could have gotten them innately as a result of something that has nothing to do with sexual performance.

Do you think people are defending Darwinism because they think any attack on Darwinism gives power to creationists, and they don’t want creationists to get the upper hand?

I think there’s the sense that if you think that there’s something wrong with the theory you’re giving aid and comfort to intelligent design people. And people do feel very strongly about whether you want to do that.

When you do science, you try to find the truth. The problem with creationism, even if you’re not a hardcore atheist, as I am, is that anything is compatible with creationism. If God created the world, he could have created it any way he liked. So creationists, when faced with evidence of evolution, are happy to say that that’s the way God created the world. If it turns out that there is no process of evolution, they’d say OK, that’s fine too. Whatever turns out to be the case it’s compatible with God having created the world, so you can’t argue with their position or you throw your shoulders out.

As you explain in the book, one of the problems with Darwinism is that Darwin is inventing explanations for something that happened long ago, over a long period of time. Isn’t that similar to creationism?

Creationism isn’t the only doctrine that’s heavily into post-hoc explanation. Darwinism is too. If a creature develops the capacity to spin a web, you could tell a story of why spinning a web was good in the context of evolution. That is why you should be as suspicious of Darwinism as of creationism. They have spurious consequence in common. And that should be enough to make you worry about either account.

If you’re right, what do you think your argument means for the study of evolution?

If this is true, then we need to rethink the implications of Darwinism. Maybe the right question to ask is not what environmental variables are doing selection, but what kinds of complexes are they selecting on. One sees, even without God, how this Darwinian story could turn out to be radically wrong. You could see a massive failure of the evolutionary project, because wrong assumptions were made. 

In “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Dawkins has written what is essentially a layperson’s primer for the theory of evolution. Dawkins aims to explain to the everyday reader why evolution isn’t a “theory” but a fact and that we need only look around us to find evidence of its existence — from continental drift to the reproductive habits of wasps. Dawkins uses simple language, elaborate metaphors and color photographs to make his point, and the result is a convincing, if occasionally dry, overview of evolutionary biology. It’s also clear, from the book’s first pages, that Dawkins isn’t very tolerant of his creationist opponents (the book includes a memorably confrontational encounter with Wendy Wright, the creationist president of Concerned Women for America).

Salon spoke with Dawkins via Skype about creationism’s popularity in America, its connection with religion, and how he feels about his own notoriety. A video excerpt of the conversation is posted below.

As you point out in the book, over 40 percent of Americans believe in creationism, which is a higher number than in many other Western countries. Why do you think that creationism has such a strong foothold in the United States?

First of all we have to believe the Gallup polls, and I suppose we do. I mean we believe Gallup polls about other things. You’re asking me a question about sociology and comparative religion in different countries. I’m not an expert in that, it’s not really up to me to say why the United States and Turkey should be way out ahead or behind in this particular case. It does seem to be the case that of all advanced Western nations the United States is more religious than any other.

Do you also think there’s a greater degree of anti-intellectualism in America compared to a lot of other countries?

There does seem to be evidence of a divide in the United States between two cultures. It does seem to be a deeper divide, and maybe even a widening one, perhaps we don’t see in European countries. There seems to be a divide between what shall we say — the Sarah Palin voters and the Barack Obama voters — who seem to be more bitterly split than the corresponding divides in other countries.

You say in the beginning of the book that you would like to convince people that creationism is not a feasible or a viable belief system, but you also make it clear that you’re not a big fan of creationists.

That’s putting it mildly, yes.

Doesn’t that make it difficult for a creationist to read this book without feeling insulted? Won’t that hurt your goal?

No, I’m not really aiming it at creationists. I don’t think they read books anyway, except for one book. It’s aimed at the intelligent layperson who does read books and who vaguely knows a little bit about evolution and who vaguely knows that there are creationists and maybe even vaguely thinks that he’s a creationist himself, but who is curious and wants to know the evidence.

It’s just that the evidence is so enthralling, it’s so exciting. It is so wonderful that here we are on this planet and we understand why we’re here. And it’s just a sort of ecstatic feeling to understand why you exist, and I want to share that feeling with other people.

Well, one of the things that you do very well in the book is take this very complicated scientific jargon and scientific reasoning and use metaphors to explain it in a way that a lot of people can understand. Do you think there’s a lack of that kind of writing — explaining science for a broader audience?

There’s not exactly a shortage. My book is not the only one that does that. I’ve always done this. I mean, way back to my first book in 1976, I’ve used that technique and I’ve always worked hard to try to make it easy to understand, to try to put myself in the position of the reader, which is a pretty obvious thing to do, really.

Do you think there’s a shortage of that being done in education?

I think it would be a good idea if other scientists did more of it, and I think there are plenty of scientists who could do it very well. Really I think it amounts to a kind of responsibility almost, to go out there and explain what it is that they do in entertaining and interesting ways.

The biggest science news of the fall has been the unveiling of this new fossil of a human ancestor named Ardi. How meaningful do you think this discovery is, and how far do you think it’s going to go in changing people’s minds about evolution?

It’s not a new fossil. It’s been around for a while, but I understand what’s happened is that it’s been finally described and published. It’s not the missing link. There were many possible links, and this is one of them. It’s older than the Australopithecines that we know already, so it seems to fall in the gap that had been left between the Australopithecines and the common ancestor with chimpanzee that we know from molecular evidence lived about 6 million years ago. So Ardipithecus lived around 4 million years ago and the Australopithecines lived about 3 million to 2 million years ago. So this does plug a very nice gap.

Do you think that there’s any one particular piece of evidence that will change people’s minds about creationism, or do you think that it’s really just a question of a gradual erosion of people’s belief systems?

I wouldn’t expect their minds to be changed by fossils, really. I think the more convincing evidence is the evidence from comparison of modern animals and plants, because we have so many different species, and by comparing them with each other, particularly comparing the molecular genetics which is nowadays very easily done. All living creatures have the same genetic code, so you have an exact digital count of the similarities between every species and every other species, and if you look at that pattern of similarities it falls perfectly into a hierarchical tree. It’s a family tree. And even better than that, everything you look at — every different gene you look at — gives you the same family tree. That’s remarkably persuasive evidence to anybody who attends to it long enough to understand.

You also describe an encounter with Wendy Wright, from Concerned Women of America, in the book. She repeatedly refuses to listen to your arguments and not only that but your evidence. Do you think the debate about creationism is just a question of people not being willing to look at very obvious evidence?

I think that’s very clear in the case of the interview with Wendy Wright that she had a kind of willful refusal to listen. She absolutely knew what she believed. She’s believed it since childhood. She believes it, because it’s in the holy book. Nothing that you could say to her would ever change her mind. That kind of mind is not open to evidence. It is a complete waste of time arguing with people like her. Fortunately there are plenty of other people with whom it’s not a waste of time arguing, who simply don’t know very much about it, and why should they? There are lots of things we don’t know much about, and so I have great hopes — not of convincing people like her, who are forever close-minded — but of convincing people who just haven’t given it very much thought.

Do you think that it’s possible for people to be both religious and believe in evolution?

It’s an empirical matter that there are plenty of individuals who can manage to reconcile the two. On that level it clearly is possible, because people like Francis Collins do it. I find it hard to see quite how they do it, but that’s the topic of my earlier book, “The God Delusion,” rather than this book.

What spurred you to write the book now? Was there any kind of current event or any kind of encounter with a person that made you think that now is the time to write a book about creationism?

It is a book that I ought to have written long ago in a sense because all my books previously have assumed the truth of evolution, and this one gives the evidence. I think that if you actually know why now, it was probably that publishers are so centenary-minded. It is the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth, and the sesquicentennial — if that’s the right word — of the publication of “The Origin of Species,” and so those two things came together, and it occurred not just to my publishers but to other publishers as well. But really, the more honest answer is that there was no particular reason. It was just a very exciting subject and what could be better than to lay out the evidence for the dominant and certainly correct view of why we exist at all? What could be more enthralling than that? Why do you need an excuse to write about it?

I certainly remember a lot of what’s in the book from my high school and college biology classes. What do you think makes your book more convincing than other past books given the fact that a lot of this information has been around for quite a while?

I don’t want to make any false claims for it. I write the books the way I want to write them, and I hope people enjoy them. There are books out there which are very good, and it’s up to the readers to read as many of them as they like and decide which version they like best.

In the past few years, especially with “The God Delusion,” you’ve become sort of an evangelist for the atheist movement. How have you dealt with becoming a more polarizing figure over the past few years?

I don’t quite know why it should be polarizing. I like to think “The God Delusion” is a humorous book. I think actually it’s full of laughs. And people who describe it as a polarizing book or as an aggressive book, it’s just that very often they haven’t read it. They’ve read other people reacting to it. It is true that religious people do react to any kind of criticism as almost a personal insult, it’s almost as if you’re saying their face is ugly or something, and so that has put out the idea that “The God Delusion” is an aggressive book. You’ve heard words like strident and shrill, as well. I’d like to suggest that actually it’s quite a funny book.

Do you regret having that kind of reputation? Do you feel like it’s handicapping you in the future — that you’ll always be seen as having a certain kind of agenda in mind?

Yes, I think it’s unfortunate. I think it comes from people who haven’t actually read the book, or who haven’t actually met me personally, and so I’m described as a very aggressive, strident person, which I’m not.

What’s your next writing project?

I do have a plan to write a children’s book, which is barely started. It’s too early really to talk about that but one of my ambitions has for a while been to write a children’s book about science, not about evolution, but about science and about scientific ways of thinking.