We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
In
The Blind Watchmaker, one of his
works of materialist propaganda, Richard Dawkins records an experiment he
performed which he believes confirms his world view. He had a simple graphic
design installed in a computer, and then had the computer programmed to modify
the design randomly, one small line at a time. In no time, the simple graphic design
began to look, in Dawkins’ eyes, like an insect or a bird or a Spitfire or any
number of other things. Perceiving some of the shapes to be like living things,
Dawkins invented the term “biomorphs” and – voila! – he was at once explaining
to his readers that this little experiment showed how random and unplanned and
undesigned the emergence of life on Earth must have been. No need to think
anything transcendent or immaterial was involved in the process. Life simply
appeared by random chemical and physical changes in molecules, just like the
random shape changes in his “biomorphs”. Of course it required lots of time to
do this (millions of years), but each “generation” of the computer model was
achieved in a matter of seconds.
Unfortunately,
as Neil Broom patiently explains in Life’s
X Factor, there are a number of things radically wrong with the conclusions
Dawkins reaches. First, one-dimensional graphic designs, which look vaguely
like living things, are nowhere near the complexity of real living things.
Second, Dawkins’ “biomorphs” randomly mixed nonsense shapes (looking like
nothing in particular) with shapes of non-living things (note the Spitfire) as
much as they produced shapes that looked vaguely like living things. Certainly
the undirected forces of nature can produce an infinite variety of shapes –
like the wind sculpting sand dunes, or dripping chemical-charged water
producing statue-like stalagmites
- but this has nothing to
do with explaining how living organisms appeared. Third, the whole experiment
took place in the sophisticated, organized and definitely designed context of a
computer. Fourth, the experiment proceeded according to a purposeful computer
programme – that is, it was designed.
If
Dawkins wished to draw conclusions about the origins and development of life
from his observation (and in fact he had little ground to), then they should
have been the very ones he wished to deny – that life is purposeful and
designed, within a designed context, just like his “biomorphs”.
Professor
Neil Broom, head of the Chemical and Materials Engineering Department at the
University of Auckland, and Fellow of the Royal Society, is running a great
risk in arguing like this. Such is the dominance of biological-materialist
propaganda now, that anyone who suggests there is something transcendent,
designed and purposeful in life will be classified as a religious nutter
lacking the sophistication of a true scientist. On the level of insult, talk of
“design” is automatically countered with images of American Protestant
fundamentalist advocates of nonsensical “Creation Science”.
Broom
(pgs.83-84) specifically dissociates himself from such pseudo-science, noting
that “Creationists” (who would have us believe the Earth is only a few thousand
years old) are as ignorant of modern scholarship concerning the Bible as they
are of how to do science. Broom is careful to note that he accepts fully the
story of evolution as the best hypothesis we currently have for the development
of life. But this is not the focus of his argument. As he states :
“It should be stressed here that I am not
attacking the reality of biological evolution. I am not even attacking the key
mechanism that underpins neo-Darwinism, namely natural selection. Rather, I am
asking a much deeper question – is natural selection as material as its
proponents proclaim it to be?” (Pg.34)
Later
he adds: “As a descriptive account of
life’s probable pattern of unfolding, the evolutionary narrative seems alive
and well. There is quite simply too much carefully catalogued evidence
unearthed by a multitude of scientific disciplines to deny that life began
‘simple’ and ascended the ‘Everest’ of increasing complexity and sophistication
over an immeasurably vast period of time.” (Pg.163)
In
one chapter, he lays out his six “approximate facts” of life, viz. life is very
ancient (we are talking many millions of years); life has structural unity
(different species replicate the same or similar functions); life is plastic
(it mutates and changes); life is “pro-life” (living organisms cling to life);
life is upwardly mobile (in the development of life forms, there is a
progression towards greater complexity and ultimately consciousness); and the
process of evolution leaves some redundancies in animals (such as, apparently,
the human appendix).
With
the possible exception of the fourth (“life is pro-life”) none of these
“approximate facts” would be disputed by any evolutionary biologist, regardless
of his/her extra-scientific ideology.
In
Life’s X Factor, then, we have a
sophisticated and well-informed modern scientist taking issue not with the best
modern science, but with the ideology
of biological materialism which now dominates ‘pop science’ items and articles
in newspapers and magazines and TV shows.
“It is important to emphasise”, says
Broom, “that biological materialism is a
philosophy that draws an all-embracing explanatory circle. In principle, if not
in detail, it claims to provide the answer to life’s mystery. Given only the
material laws of physics and chemistry, life had to happen – or so we are told.”
(Pg.15)
In
reply to biological materialism, Broom observes that there is absolutely no
demonstrable chemical or physical reason why less complex chemicals and
organisms should ever develop into more complex ones. Further, he notes (with many examples) that
having asserted the blind purposelessness of the development of life,
biological materialists nevertheless deploy language that suggests ordering and
purpose, and then attempt to evade the obvious conclusion that there really is
ordering and purpose.
Refuting
William Paley’s famous 200-year-old analogy of the watchmaker God, Richard
Dawkins (quoted pp.51-52) may write: “Natural
selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered,
and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparent
purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no
mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no reason, no foresight, no
sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is
the blind watchmaker.”
Dawkins’
reasoning here is similar to that of the materialists John Avise and Jacques
Monod, or the Oxford chemist Peter Atkins who, in his book Creation Revisited, claims that chemicals assemble themselves
randomly and the development of higher organs is purely a matter of chance.
Yet,
says Broom, having dismissed the idea of an organizing mind “Richard Dawkins’ popular exposition of
modern evolutionary theory doesn’t just contain the odd careless lapse into
mind-laden language; it is in fact ridden with the most blatantly purposeful
elements” (Pg.57). Further “the
narrative line of the materialist all too frequently lapses into a kind of
personified, anthropomorphised depiction of nature, giving minds to molecules
which they do not appear to have” (Pg.67).
Of
course Broom anticipates the obvious objection that Dawkins et al. are simply
speaking metaphorically. But, as he asks, if their purpose-and-design-laden
language is simply metaphorical colouring, then why are they never able to
expound their materialist conceptions in “neutral” language without such
metaphor? When Dawkins speaks of the “smooth
upward pathway” in the development of the eye, or even when he refers to a
gene as “selfish”, he is producing
what Broom calls “unintended
intentionality”.
Later,
Broom has great fun taking to task such tele-popularisers as Jacob Bronowski,
David Attenborough, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov and Robert Winston, in their
various programmes, for assuming that the limited (and, of course, designed)
1953 Miller-Urey laboratory experiment “proves” an entirely materialistic
conception of how life began. Says Broom: “Materialistic
science has produced not one shred of evidence demonstrating that meaningful
codes can arise by entirely material means. And yet meaningful codes lie at the
heart of all living systems.” (pg.130) Among much else, Broom also takes on
what he calls “genetic reductionism”
– that is, the modern superstition that the gene (which is essentially a system
for transmitting information) is the basis of all life.
Having
made very clear what Broom opposes, it’s also necessary to show what he is
promoting. He endorses the work and science of Michael Polanyi, who warned of
the type of reductionism that omits mind and purpose from its explanation of
life. He follows the English zoologist Alistair Hardy in seeing purposeful
changes in animal behaviour as being one of the triggers of animal evolution
(i.e. not purely mechanical mutation). Above all, he argues throughout for a “primary non-material or transcendent
dimension or guiding presence”. Call it God if you will. Or a Life Force or
élan vital (and in the process incur
the wrath of materialists, who will accuse you of the heresy of “vitalism”).
But at the very least, it is an awareness that, in a scientific description of
the processes of life, there is a middle ground between unscientific biblical
literalism and mindless materialism, no matter how much the latter has captured
the high ground of publicity in recent years. En route, Broom goes so far as to
suggest that there might be something to be said for Lamarck’s (pre-Darwinian)
concept of the role of animal intentionality in evolution. And there might even
be something to be said for a form of Paley’s watchmaker argument, no matter
how much Lamarck and Paley must now be read in the light of subsequent science.
Life’s
X Factor is a spirited, lively and sophisticated argument. Of course it
will not convince everyone, but nobody can deny both the depth and breadth of
Professor Broom’s scientific knowledge. Nor can one deny that (unlike Dawkins,
for example) he treats his ideological opponents with courtesy. I was
particularly taken by the two chapters in which Broom chronicles the “Birth of
a Big Idea” by recapitulating the development of the theory of evolution
(Lamarck; Wallace; Spencer; Darwin – and Mendel, without whose genetics there
would be no synthesis into neo-Darwinism); and then points out that there are
“establishment” neo-Darwinists who believe in steady, progressive incremental
evolution, and “revisionists” who emphasise “jumps” when there are periods of
rapid speciation, probably triggered by climatic trauma etc.
This
is very good popular science writing.
He
is also on very firm ground when he shows how the reductionist mindset of
materialism always has a hard time dealing with causality. This leads him to
consider the whole matter of cause in philosophic writing, from classic
Aristotlean teleology to Bacon’s and Descartes’ desire to look at the specific
rather than the general causes. Here he notes, correctly, that all the
foundational scientists of the early modern world (Galileo, Newton, Pascal
etc.) were profoundly religious, and when they began to see the universe as a
mechanism, they were in effect saying it was designed by God. Only later did
this concept of a mechanistic universe, coupled with the discovery of how vast the universe actually was, appear to dethrone God. But in the
process humanity was also de-throned (being no longer seen as at the centre of
things) and classic humanism ended.
An
awareness of the inadequacy of materialism is probably our best path back to a
true humanism.
Life’s X Factor is a good start.