We can’t let superstition trump science
Attempts to denigrate Darwin and doubt manmade climate change are part of a worrying trend to ignore the evidence, says David Aaronovitch.
PRRRIIINNGG! It’s the doorbell. There’s a woman with a clipboard and a series of questions. The first one is: ‘‘People have different views about gravity. Which of the following statements comes closest to your view about what governs gravity?’’ and then you’re given a number of options to express whether or not you think it exists. ‘‘Thanks,’’ you might say, picking up her pen which has fallen to the ground, ‘‘but I think that one was settled some time ago.’’
During May and June, 2129 representative British adults were asked this question by YouGov, except that the issue was about evolution, not gravity. Which statement came closest to their opinion ‘‘about the origin of species and development of life on Earth’’?
Fern Elsdon-Baker, director of the science and religion project at Birmingham Newman University who commissioned the poll, said the preliminary results showed that a ‘‘large majority’’ accepted evolutionary science.
However she noted that a significant minority ‘‘express doubts about evolutionary science-based explanations for human origins’’. This wasn’t confined to religious types: 12 per cent of atheists agreed or strongly agreed that evolution couldn’t explain the origin of humans. In all, nearly 30 per cent of respondents either didn’t know or even rejected the theory of evolution when applied to humans. Dr ElsdonBaker says her survey highlights ‘‘concerns about evolutionary science’’ which go beyond religious identity and ‘‘fundamentally challenges the way we tend to think about evolution and creationism’’. It’s hard to know how infuriated to be by her description of such anti-scientific thought as ‘‘concerns’’. Evolution is, after all, the foundation stone of modern biology.
I can see why some people accept natural selection when it comes to the evolution of animals but cavil at it when it comes to humans. Natural selection establishes, among other things, that humans have no unique importance as a species other than what we imagine for ourselves. Bacteria, for example, don’t respect us more than they respect nematodes.
There is, among many of us, a need to feel special. In that sense antievolution thinking is a shriek of egoism, a sublime philistinism. It is the cry of the person who looks at the vast and infinitely minute grandeur of the universe and thinks, ‘‘Can this be all that there is?’’ And demands something else.
Such a need crashes into the hard fact of evolution and, by extension, its proponents. As John Carey wrote in The Sunday Times this weekend, Darwin’s The Descent of Man ‘‘finished off [the Adam and Eve myth] as a credible explanation of how we got here’’.
Enter the author AN Wilson and his new book Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker, which he wrote about in The Times last month. It is Wilson’s contention that Darwin was a rubbish scientist who stole his best work from other people, whose theory of evolution was wrong and has been superseded, whose legacy has been distorted by Darwinist zealots and whose writings inevitably gave rise to racial classification, eugenics and Hitlerian pseudoscience. Wilson now advocates that Darwin’s statue in the National History Museum be given the Robert E Lee treatment and replaced by one of the naturalist Richard Owen.
I like religious people on the whole. But, with an almost impossible case to make for the existence of a particular deity, some of the cleverest of them become intellectually sly. Wilson has an eye for character and a portraitist’s skill and these are on display in the book, yet he is Jesuitical in his handling of ideas.
If Hitler had only been a Darwinist, instead of a steadfast believer in stuff like world ice theory (the collision of ancient ice moons caused a cataclysm that led to humanity dividing into supermen and evil humanoids) then we might have been spared some trouble. But he wasn’t and we weren’t.
In his other writings, Wilson has been keen to shield the likes of Hilaire Belloc and Richard Wagner from the accusation that their undisguised antisemitism was somehow an important part of their character and legacy. But poor old Darwin gets saddled with the responsibility for ideas he never had and for people he never met.
Related to this selective blaming is the born-again Wilson’s waywardness with science. And perhaps our credulity in dealing with it. In almost no paper or magazine was the Darwin book reviewed by a scientist. Readers might have been surprised had they read the review in the New Scientist and discovered that Darwin had not been wrong, or replaced (as opposed to supplemented) by subsequent scientific discoveries. Evolution and natural selection remains intact, as I discovered in recent conversations with microbiologists about the development of antimicrobial resistance - a classic example, as it happens, of evolutionary adaptation and selection.
I regret that we need to restate the facts about evolution. Scientists might have been relaxed about the notion of ‘‘concerns’’ trumping evidence if it weren’t for the bad experiences of recent years. The desire to let go of the science in favour of the better story (most notoriously in the case of the causes of autism) was grimly illustrated by the MMR debacle. This showed what can happen when even a minority of the population, unhindered by a scientifically illiterate political class, go off on one. It takes relatively few parents to pull their kids out of vaccination programmes for us to lose ‘‘herd immunity’’.
And then there’s the question of the human contribution to global warming and thus to climate change. Once again the desire for the better story and the difficulties in counteracting CO2 emissions have created a powerful counter-scientific impulse.
In one sense I agree with AN Wilson. Perhaps the Darwin statues are getting in the way of our thinking, just as Wilson’s need to feel all mystic is getting in the way of his.
When I was a boy we taught science abominably, without a sense of excitement and narrative, and then at 14 or 15 most of us just stopped studying it. Maybe we shouldn’t let anyone into a university unless they have at least one science A level or into parliament unless they can explain natural selection to their voters. - The Times