Bioethics

You can tell when the Christmas season is approaching — by the nip in the air, and by the jump in the level of crankiness exhibited by Darwinists in the blogosphere. This year Christmas apparently has come early for internet Darwinists, who have been raising a kerfluffle on their blogs about Discovery Institute Senior Fellow William Dembski’s usage of a clip of some Harvard-commissioned animation of the cell in a few of his lectures. In typical high dudgeon, Darwinists have accused Dr. Dembski of all sorts of nefarious violations of intellectual property law. Some have even claimed (as usual, without an iota of evidence) that Discovery Institute supports the disregard of copyright laws or even had something to do with Dr. Dembski’s usage of the animation in question. (Wrong on both counts.)

“John West’s book is a deep and comprehensive study of scientific materialism’s morally corrupting effects on American public policy. Although some readers (like me) will not find his attack on Darwinian science persuasive, anyone who wants to think about the moral and political implications of modern science will have to ponder his arguments.” — Larry Arnhart, Professor of Political Science at Northern Illinois University and author of Darwinian Conservatism

Larry Arnhart is the most articulate defender of the idea that Darwinism supports conservatism, and I have enjoyed interacting with him over the past couple of years (we debated again tonight at Seattle Pacific University). Unfortunately, Arnhart has a habit of mischaracterizing my actual positions, and so he often ends up attacking a straw man. (He’s done the same thing to historian Richard Weikart.) Arnhart is at it again, criticizing my book Darwin Day in America on his blog for a position it doesn’t even uphold. This is the same book Arnhart earlier praised (see above). Since we disagree about Darwin’s theory, I fully anticipated that Arnhart would criticize parts of my book. But I had hoped that he would critique something that was actually in the book, which would allow for a much more interesting discussion. Alas, that was not to be.

Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here.

Perhaps the most celebrated defense attorney in the first half of the twentieth century, Clarence Darrow is best known for his role at the Scopes “monkey trial” in the 1920s. But he also was an early champion of the idea that criminals should not be held responsible for their crimes. Darrow’s debunking of criminal responsibility was based squarely on his worldview of deterministic materialism.

Darrow once told prisoners in a county jail that there was no difference whatever in the moral condition between themselves and those still in society. “I do not believe people are in jail because they deserve to be,” he declared. “They are in jail simply because they cannot avoid it, on account of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control, and for which they are in no way responsible.” According to Darrow, “there ought to be no jails, and if it were not for the fact that the people on the outside are so grasping and heartless in their dealing with the people on the inside, there would be no such institutions as jails.” He added that he knew why “every one” of the prisoners committed their crimes, even if they did not know the reason themselves: “You did these things because you were bound to do them.” Those prisoners who thought they made a choice to commit a crime were simply deluded. “It looked to you at the time as if you had a chance to do them or not, as you saw fit; but still, after all, you had no choice.”

Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here.

By the end of the nineteenth century, American scholars were already talking with excitement about the “new school of criminal anthropology” that sought to use modern science to identify the causes of crime. Leading the way was Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), whose book Criminal Man (1876) remains a landmark work in the field of criminology. Lombroso and his disciples contended that criminal behavior could be explained largely as a throwback to earlier stages of Darwinian evolution.

According to Lombroso, infanticide, parricide, theft, cannibalism, kidnapping, theft and anti-social actions can all be found throughout the animal kingdom, as well as among human savages. In earlier stages of development such behaviors aided survival and were therefore bred into animals by natural selection. As William Noyes, one of Lombroso’s American disciples, explained, “in the process of evolution, crime has been one of the necessary accompaniments of the struggle for existence.” While crime no longer served a necessary survival function in civilized societies, many modern criminals could be considered atavists—reappearances of characteristics from earlier stages of evolutionary development. According to Lombroso, such atavists were “born criminals,” exhibiting from birth the physical as well as behavioral characteristics of savages. Physical markers of such individuals included “abundant hair,” “sparse beard[s],” “enormous frontal sinuses and jaws,” “broad cheekbones,” a “retreating forehead,” and “volumnious ears.”

Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here.

This week’s installment of “Meet the Materialists” is particularly fitting for the week of Halloween.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Italian scientist Giovanni Aldini was performing macabre experiments on decapitated oxes, horses, lambs… and humans. “The unenlightened part of mankind are apt to entertain a prejudice against those… who attempt to perform experiments on dead subjects,” Aldini later acknowledged, but he maintained that such experiments were justified because the object was to improve human welfare. “It is… an incontrovertible fact, that such researches in modern times have proved a source of the most valuable information.”

Determined to understand the workings of what he called “the human animal machine,” Aldini knew that he needed to procure bodies while they were still fresh and “retained… the vital powers in the highest degree of preservation.” His solution? “I was obliged, if I may be allowed the expression, to place myself under the scaffold, near the axe of justice, to receive the yet bleeding bodies of unfortunate criminals, the only subjects proper for my experiments.”

Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here.

A key point of my book Darwin Day in America is that materialism did not begin (or end) with Charles Darwin.

One of the pre-Darwin champions of materialism I cover in my book is physician Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751), author of the provocative tract Man a Machine (L’Homme Machine), published in 1748. According to La Mettrie, “the human body is a machine which winds its own springs” and the “the diverse states” of the human mind “are always correlative with those of the body.” In other words, human beings are mechanisms whose rational life is completely dependent on physical causes. Those causes include everything from raw meat to heredity.

In what has to be one of the more interesting passages in culinary analysis, La Mettrie opined:

Raw meat makes animals fierce, and it would have the same effect on man. This is so true that the English who eat meat red and bloody, and not as well done as ours, seem to share more or less in the savagery due to this kind of good.

Eminent evolutionist James Watson, winner of the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA, is sparking controversy in Great Britain for suggesting that blacks are inferior to whites due to evolution. But there is nothing particularly extraordinary about Watson’s views. As I document in chapter 7 of my forthcoming book Darwin Day in America, there is a long history of evolutionists using Darwinism to justify racism — including Darwin himself.

Watson is past director and current Chancellor of the prestigious biological research lab at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Ironically, that lab has deep connections to Darwinian racism of years gone by. Early in the twentieth century it was the headquarters for one of the most virulent American eugenics groups, the Eugenics Record Office, which promoted forced sterilization and opposed immigration to America by ethnic groups considered lower on the evolutionary scale than Anglo-Saxon whites. Back then the lab was directed by Harvard-trained geneticist Charles Davenport. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Davenport held views about blacks and evolution hauntingly similar to Watson’s.

Modern Darwinists like Richard Dawkins notwithstanding, there is nothing new in the effort to offer completely materialistic explanations of human beings and human culture. For more than two millennia various thinkers have been trying to reduce human beings to mere meat in motion. Many of these thinkers figure prominently in my new book Darwin Day in America, and over the next several weeks, I will be describing some of them here.

I start today with Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, and self-proclaimed “evolution evangelist.”

Bill Dembski has posted an excellent riposte to John Derbyshire’s recent comments at the AEI conference on Darwinism and conservatism in which George Gilder and I participated. Eventually I plan to write my own reflections about some of Derbyshire’s comments, but in the meantime Dembski hits the nail on the head.