Evolution of Evolution

Evolution of Evolution

When Ken and I go on our annual weeklong beach vacation, we plan on a week of just about nothing. A lot of swimming, even more snorkeling, and even more just lazing around and reading. We usually do one shopping trip and maybe one (no more) edifying, educational trip. The latter, this time, was a very interesting and important tour of former slave communities in the Bahamas. As in Bonaire, where the island council insisted on making a monument of the old slave dwellings so that history would never be lost, the Bahamian government is restoring old slave huts now and they will soon be a memorial park, with explanatory text, looking out to the sea, and almost directly opposite the most exclusive, hidden gated property on the island, where Sean Connery and others live.

That’s a bit of a detour on today’s tour, but it has a point. History counts. But what we make of history is more about our present than the past. And when scientists talk about the evolutionary past, well, they reveal far more about themselves than they do about what may have happened several million years ago and why. So, now, back to my beach reading. Being a lifelong science geek (despite a career as a literature prof and journalist), for pleasure I love to read nonfiction science books. Ken happened to be reading the same bestselling kind of sciency book on this trip and as we floated out in the turquoise Caribbean we compared notes on the various books we were reading. On one of these floaty afternoons, we both expressed frustration at how often our beautifully written, well-reasoned, scientifically documented books would drift into the intellectual stratosphere with the “why” question. I’ll be filing a book review of some of my reading in other blogs (I’ve read some great ones!) but for now I’ll just generalize about the scientific theology of our moment: at this moment, it seems as if evolutionary biology is the be-all and end-all of every “why?” I read lots and lots of scientific studies, both because of my lifelong interests and because I’m writing a new book on learning, on how we learn, and on how we could be teaching for learning, not for tests. So lots on cognition, neurology, biology, psychology. In most scientific explanations, there is a tightly controlled experiment. The findings of that experiment are paired with findings from similar or parallel experiments. And then a conclusion is reached. The progression from the finding to the generalization is not always one I agree with but I can see how the scientist arrived at his or her generalization. The path of inference is clear. But then there is the old “why?” question and, in this moment, the answer is not only “in evolutionary terms . . . blah blah” but some idea of evolution based on the most ludicrous assumptions (i.e. not experimental scientific findings) about gender, or race, or human character, or what it takes to survive. How do we get from the operation of one cluster of neurons to the (for example) repurposing of millions of neurons after an infant brain injury (a brilliant extrapolation) to a theory of human evolution? It makes no sense. And when the whole human evolutionary pathway seems to lead to modern American bourgeois white heteronormativity, I really, really go haywire. This ain’t science. It is sanctimonious platitudes packaged with scientific arrogance and certitude. (Oh, Ambrose Bierce, I hear you . . . surely there is something in the Devil’s Dictionary making fun of such pomposity.). I don’t at all approve of those Fundamentalists (of any stripe) who want evolution taken out of textbooks or who say the earth is 4000 years old or who believe the only explanation for every scientific “why?” question is “God made it so.” But, if we are talking about science, my friends, we cannot substitute “evolution made it so” for “God.” That’s theology. It would be more honest, in so many cases, to say we are beginning to understand “how” questions and we even know the mechanics (extremely complex ones) of many “why” questions . . . but we don’t, in the end, have scientific evolutionary proof for every scientific question. We have lots and lots of scientific evolutionary proof for evolution. But we do not have scientific proof for the evolution of evolution into an all-purpose answer, a knee-jerk generalization, that is a plug-in for every “why?” that science has to offer. That, to me, is the role of theology. One size fits all. One answer fills all. You give me the question, I know the answer. Whether Ken’s book on food production or mine on neurology, the “why?” answer should be complex, a matter of philosophical and humanistic explanation and consideration-----not an easy-out “evolution!” Ah, who knew? I’m back to yet another kind of explanation. It is possible that the evolution of evolution into an all-purpose explanatory model evolved precisely because of that two-culture division where scientists are now called upon not only to do experiments and generalize from those experiments but to offer the larger “truth” of what those experiments mean. That is not a form of training scientists have. And that may be why the same rigor applied to empirical findings within a highly specialized subfield falls away when there are generalizations beyond that field. This is where partnerships of humanists, social scientists, and scientists would help us all. Get us beyond the theology of evolution to other explanations that don’t close off questions but, in fact, beg us to probe farther, think more deeply, and more profoundly--which is to say with more humility about what we claim to know. End of sermon!