Appendix: Answers to Objections to the Darwinan View of Nature
by Daryl P. Domning

To many people, the beautifully simple mechanism of Darwinian natural selection seems too simple and anything but beautiful. A long list of objections to this account of how evolution works is regularly raised by those who find the idea profoundly disturbing. Among these common objections are the following.¹⁸

(Note: you may either scroll down the page to see all objections and responses or click on an objection listed below to go immediately to its response.)

•  List of Objections

1. Chance alone could not possibly account for the complexity of life.



2. Natural selection is tautological: those who survive are said to be "the fit," but "the fit" are defined as precisely those who survive!



3. Natural selection is purely a negative force: it only removes less-fit individuals and gene combinations from the population, so it cannot create anything genuinely new.



4. Favorable mutations are too rare to provide sufficient raw material for the evolution we observe.



5. Mere change of gene frequencies within species ("microevolution") is not sufficient to account for evolution of new species or higher categories "macroevolution."



6. Has macroevolution ever actually been observed, in the fossil record or elsewhere?



7. Regardless of what sorts of evolution we may observe happening today, we are still not entitled to state as fact what happened in the distant past, when no one (or no one but God) was around to witness it.



8. Stressing the "selfish" qualities of living things ignores the abundant evidence of cooperative, even altruistic behavior in nature.



9. How could a process as wasteful and cruel as Darwinian evolution be part of a "good" plan of creation?



10. The Darwinian idea of "survival of the fittest" provides too ready a justification for the elimination of human individuals or groups who are deemed inferior, due to physical or mental handicaps, ethnic prejudice, or other reasons, and it is incompatible with Christians' belief in the dignity and unconditional worth of each person.



11. The claim that humans descend from mere animals is an affront to human dignity.



12. Why couldn't the human race have descended from a single couple? Doesn't genetic evidence support this?



13. If our brains are merely the evolutionary products of blind natural processes, how can we trust our own thinking, in science, morality, or anything else? In particular, what if our religions themselves are no more than useful adaptations to our environments, and have no objective truth value?

•  Objections with Responses

1. Chance alone could not possibly account for the complexity of life. (return to top)

Correct: it doesn't. As explained above, chance is only one component of the process. The dominant component, and the one that generates adaptive complexity, is natural selection, which, though it is unconscious and impersonal, is the very opposite of random or chance. It is therefore completely mistaken to characterize Darwinian evolution as essentially random, or to describe its products as simply the results of chance.

One version of this objection is couched in terms of information theory. In order to explain where the (genetic) information embodied in living things could have come from, contemporary "intelligent design" theorists envision an intelligent Designer who micromanages creation on the level of individual organisms and molecules. But for an accurate understanding of where genetic information comes from, we must specify what this information is about. The information any organism needs for survival (including the genetic information that generates the organism itself) is, at bottom, information about what works in the immediate environment in which the organism has to survive, and the most authoritative source of information on this subject is the environment itself.

Mutations occur at random (not under the micromanagement of an intelligent designer), and are then tested against the demands of the actual environment, which then reveals which ones are useful and which are not. The ones that survive the test, and that come to characterize the (now-altered) population, therefore reflect, and embody information about, the environment that selected them for survival.

The environment thus acts as a template against which natural selection "presses" the genetic makeup of the populations that inhabit it. Their gene pools thereby automatically have "impressed" on them the very information most relevant to their continued survival—not by chance, nor by an "intelligent Designer," but simply because in the natural order of things this could not be avoided. Together with the occasional favorable mutations, this simple, direct, reliable, nonrandom process of natural selection, continued over countless generations, has gradually raised the complexity of living things to the levels we now observe.

Thus random mutations by themselves do not "create information," any more than a monkey with a typewriter creates a Shakespearean sonnet. Information cannot usefully be said to exist in the genetic code until after selection has acted. It is only the exposure of mutational "raw material" to the test of survival in the environment that carves this random input into new "information" (which, remember, is about nothing other than survival in that very environment, and is thus a "report" from the field to future generations about what actually worked).

The point is that random factors in the evolutionary process do not render the whole process random in a destructive sense. Chance has a role to play, but not the dominant role. Randomness is not incompatible with laws of nature; on the contrary, it is an important (maybe the only) source of novelty. Even entropy—the universal tendency to disorder manifested in genetic mutations—can thus be harnessed by selection to create opportunities for new and greater forms of order.

When people object to the supposed role of "chance" in evolution, they may really be uncomfortable with a different attribute of nature: autonomy, the world's ability to operate and evolve on "automatic pilot," governed only by its own laws. Even if this process is acknowledged not to be purely the result of chance, it is still hard for many to believe that "mere" inanimate matter and impersonal natural forces could accomplish such a thing without supernatural micromanagement. As discussed below under objection #11, the roots of this skepticism are not biblical or Christian, but pagan and Gnostic.

2. Natural selection is tautological: those who survive are said to be "the fit," but "the fit" are defined as precisely those who survive! (return to top)

This misconception arose from the methodology of experimental geneticists early in the twentieth century. They were not seeking to test the logical basis of Darwinism, but rather assuming the reality of natural selection and merely seeking to measure its power in the laboratory. They assumed that survival reflected fitness, and used observed survival as an empirical measure of, or proxy for, fitness. They introduced terms like "Darwinian fitness" (representation of one's genes in the next generation). In reality, true fitness (competitive ability) is the result of "good engineering" of the organism (however difficult this may be to measure in practice). Those who survive are the competitively able, and the competitively able are the well-engineered: there is no logical circularity.

3. Natural selection is purely a negative force: it only removes less-fit individuals and gene combinations from the population, so it cannot create anything genuinely new. (return to top)

But even a negative process can still be creative. Michelangelo carved his "Pietà" by merely removing pieces from a block of marble, yet his creativity is not questioned. Precisely because evolution is change in a population (an interbreeding group), rather than change in an individual, it can result in novel populations with different genetic character. What changes under the influence of selection is the overall genetic makeup of the population—the relative frequencies of different gene combinations in the population.

Together with the constant input of wholly new variations from mutation, the selective removal of variations from the gene pool over long periods of time can bring about almost unlimited change. The Darwinian process is therefore less like marble sculpture than like clay sculpture: that which is being "carved" or shaped (the gene pool) is not static or fixed in stone, but endlessly changeable, malleable, and constantly being added to and subtracted from.

4. Favorable mutations are too rare to provide sufficient raw material for the evolution we observe. (return to top)

Although mutations are the ultimate source of the variation on which selection acts, the immediate source is usually recombination, which can at any moment newly (and repeatedly) expose to selection a mutation that actually occurred many generations before. Indeed, it should normally be the case that a favorable mutation becomes available not just in the nick of time, when an organism's need for it is acute, but during a period when the organism is quite adequately adapted to its surroundings, and the novelty merely improves its functioning in some way, over and above the minimal demands of survival.

Moreover, when a mutation is first exposed to selection, it may be selectively neutral (hence not eliminated), and only become favorable when circumstances change—due to environmental change, or to recombination placing the mutation in a different genetic context. Therefore the "window" of time within which an ultimately favorable mutation has to occur before it is needed may actually be quite generous.

5. Mere change of gene frequencies within species ("microevolution") is not sufficient to account for evolution of new species or higher categories ("macroevolution"). (return to top)

Darwin himself based his explanation of macroevolution on an admittedly conjectural extrapolation from microevolution. However, no evidence discovered since gives serious reason to doubt the validity of this extrapolation. And although the fossil record at first gave him little direct support, fossil documentation of macroevolution is now so routinely reported in the scientific literature (and so little remarked upon even there) that it seldom attracts any attention from the popular press.

This distinction between micro- and macroevolution, however, is problematical: it has actually been observed only in the writings of evolutionists and their critics, and never "out there" in nature. It is a distinction hypothesized by people with an axe to grind, either theoreticians postulating different mechanisms for these two supposed modes of evolution, or creationists denying the existence of macroevolution altogether. Not all biologists agree that the distinction is worthwhile.

Revealingly, the distinction is often made according to a sliding taxonomic scale—particularly by creationists, when they speak of the supposed "created kinds" within (but not between) which they are willing to concede some amount of (micro)evolution. When creationists talk about humans and what evolutionists view as their closest relatives, the "created kind" is always a species or (at most) a genus. But on branches of life's family tree more distant from us, the "created kind" is typically a group that taxonomists rank as a family, order, class, phylum, or even kingdom.

This semantic dodge (which exploits the average layman's fuzzy notions of biological classification) conveniently allows the creationist to claim, when confronted by evidence of macroevolution within such a major group (i.e., between slightly less major subgroups), that "the bacterium is still a bacterium," "the worm is still a worm," "the fish is still a fish," "the horse is still a horse," etc. They thereby gloss over the tremendous differences among different kinds of bacteria, worms, fish, or horses. But heaven forbid the conclusion (which the same reasoning would require) that we are still apes!

A more sophisticated version of this objection, based on the metaphysics of Aristotle and the Scholastics, holds that different "kinds" of creatures have different, unchanging "essences." Hence, evolutionary transitions between these "kinds," if they occur at all, are by definition beyond the power of merely natural forces, and require divine intervention in order to cross the otherwise-insuperable thresholds separating the "kinds." As a result, God is periodically obliged to act in nature (as a "secondary cause," not just as a "prime mover" or ground of being) to keep evolution moving and on the desired course—above all at the origin of life, and at human emergence from non-human ancestors.

The trouble with all this is that Darwinism has done away with unchanging biological "essences," and instead sees the species as a segment of a continuum. It is a population of potentially interbreeding individuals, varying among themselves in many traits, and grading backwards and forwards in time into more or less different ancestral and descendant populations, while remaining delimited from contemporary species. Species that are related as ancestor and descendant are thus not like discrete beads on a string, but like successive sections of a twig on a branching bush: the "boundary" between one section of a twig and the next section of the same twig is arbitrarily drawn by humans, like political boundaries on the Earth.

With this background, we can better tackle the (obviously loaded) question of micro- versus macroevolution. Can "microevolutionary" processes alone (mutation and selection) really produce major changes like those seen in the fossil record? Yes; they are known to be more than fast enough to do so (by up to seven orders of magnitude!), because the "macro" changes are actually slow compared to the evolutionary "action" on the ecological time scale. Microevolution tracks short-term ecological changes, which are often reversed within a few years or centuries. In contrast, the fossil record usually filters out such rapid zigzags and only displays patterns of net change averaged over tens of thousands to millions of years. In sum, the rate of observed macroevolution reflects the (generally slow) rate of long-term net change in the environment, not some inherent limit to the power of selection itself.

Natural selection only aims at, and can only produce, short-term adaptation to immediate needs. If those needs never changed, selection would quickly achieve the best adaptations readily attainable, and evolution would largely cease. (This is the case with so-called "living fossils," organisms lucky enough to have found ecological niches that have remained relatively stable for millions of years.) But the target is often a moving one: many environments change over the long haul. As a result, there is no end to the task of adapting, and no limit (at the imaginary "species boundary" or any other boundary) to the change that selection can eventually bring about.

Biologists continue to debate whether ordinary natural selection among individuals suffices to explain all of macroevolution, or whether any special mechanisms, such as selection among different species, are involved in evolution above the species level. However, the latter view bears the burden of proof. And given the evidence that ordinary selection can produce change far faster than needed to explain macroevolution, additional mechanisms seem superfluous. A conservative view of the issue would be that, just as inches add up to miles, so-called micro- and macroevolution form a continuum, and it is artificial and misleading to draw a sharp distinction between them.

Sometimes particular differences between taxonomic groups have seemed to require qualitative "leaps" in genetic organization beyond the scope of ordinary mutations (and therefore beyond the scope of selection). However, it is not proven that such "leaps" are ever really necessary, and the examples that have been proposed (such as the evolution of the eye) have typically been shown to be explainable by small intermediate steps well within the power of mutation and selection.

In many cases, the crucial steps are not "forward" but "sideways," when something adapted to one function takes on an additional, quite different role (and then perhaps loses the original function)—as when reptilian jaw bones became additionally involved in sound transmission and then turned into mammalian ear bones. There are probably few if any truly complex adaptations in which this basic pattern of innovation via change of function has not played a part.

Some have argued for intangible vitalistic or finalistic forces in evolution; or some direct divine intervention or "intelligent design" guiding evolution on desired paths or creating adaptations of allegedly "irreducible complexity"; or inheritance of adaptive characteristics acquired during an organism's lifetime. But advocates for all these ideas still bear the burden of proof.

Since our understanding of the genetic code is still in its infancy, it may turn out that there are more efficient though still purely natural ways of bringing about complex adaptations in addition to classical Darwinian selection. New mechanisms of heredity and gene function continue to be discovered, and some of these do involve ways for the genetic code to be heritably modified apart from classical mutations. But none of these mechanisms has so far been demonstrated to reliably and consistently produce adaptive changes to the code, and that has always been the critical point. At this writing, natural selection still remains the only proven sculptor of organic adaptation. All other known mechanisms of genetic change appear to be at least partly random with respect to the organism's needs, and therefore function as "mutations" in the broadest sense.

6. Has macroevolution ever actually been observed, in the fossil record or elsewhere?(return to top)

Here again there are biases built into the question. The premise attributed to evolutionists is that if (a) a species living at time 1 is ancestral to one living at time 2, and if (b) we were to watch carefully during the entire period from time 1 to time 2, then at some point we would see something dramatic happen: macroevolution!

But failure to see something dramatic ("to see a new species evolve today") is in fact not a valid test of Darwinian theory, which has quite different, non-essentialist premises. We no more expect to see something "happen" when one species "turns into" another than we expect to find a waterfall at every point where a river crosses a state line. We humans draw these artificial lines separating ancestral and descendant species, and we do it only in hindsight, after we notice that enough change has accumulated to warrant recognition of a new species.

This does not mean we can never catch macroevolution in the act. Even apart from phenomena such as polyploidy in plants (which allows new species to arise in a single generation), we can identify cases where large numbers of new species have evolved in the (relatively) recent past, and most likely are still evolving today (though without any dramatic discontinuities being visible to us). These include hundreds of species of cichlid fishes found only in certain East African lakes. These "species swarms" have demonstrably evolved within the last few thousand years, because the lakes in question did not exist earlier. The kind of reproductive isolation that separates these species can be produced by natural selection within as little as a dozen or so generations.

As pointed out by paleontologists who favor the "punctuated equilibrium" hypothesis, rates of evolution vary widely. Long periods during which little or no net change in a species occurs (presumably because there is little or no net environmental change to disturb its adaptive "equilibrium") may be "punctuated" by much shorter periods of relatively "rapid" change. But this change is "rapid" only to a paleontologist—i.e., it is too quick to be observed in the coarse-grained fossil record. If viewed on an ecological time scale (such as the scale of a human lifetime) rather than a geological time scale, the rate of change during one of these "punctuations" would still seem very slow (and probably well within the capability of natural selection), with no dramatic, "macroevolutionary" breaks that would catch our attention. For this reason, the idea of "punctuated equilibrium" is in no way inconsistent with neo-Darwinism.

Most conclusively, countless instances of macro-evolution are clearly documented in the fossil record, despite the creationists' impassioned denials. The remaining "gaps" between genera, families, orders, classes, and other higher groups of living things are steadily being filled in by fossil finds every day. Former gaps between entire vertebrate classes, such as bony fish and amphibians, reptiles and birds, and (especially) reptiles and mammals have become so crowded with diverse intermediate fossils that the difficulty now often lies in picking out the true ancestors of the modern groups among all the collateral fossil lineages that are candidates for the honor. In particular, the evolution of humans is increasingly well documented (Tattersall 1993, 1995; Tattersall and Schwartz 2000; Campbell and Loy 1996; Klein 1999; Lewin 1998; also the Institute of Human Origins Web site at http://www.becominghuman.org).

Many connections among animal groups may never be demonstrable by fossils, because the connecting "links" were never fossilized (though the connections may be traceable by analysis of their modern relatives' DNA.) But more than enough fossil examples of macroevolution have already been found to dispose of the canard that evolution beyond the supposed "boundaries of the species" never occurs. Of course creationists cannot afford to concede this, but refusal to acknowledge the obvious continuity between species has no more sense to it than arguing that the footprints forming a single trail through the snow were each made by a different creature, because there are gaps between the footprints!

7. Regardless of what sorts of evolution we may observe happening today, we are still not entitled to state as fact what happened in the distant past, when no one (or no one but God) was around to witness it. (return to top)

If this argument were logically valid, we would have to make some pretty radical changes in our legal system, which routinely sends convicts to prison, or even death, in the absence of eyewitness evidence. Physical evidence, in the form of fingerprints, DNA, autopsies, ballistics, and many other kinds of scientific data, is rightly considered sufficient in principle to meet the legal standard of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt," even regarding events for which no human witnesses are available. Similarly, skilled hunters, like Indian scouts in the old West, can often tell from animal tracks and other signs what sort of creature passed a spot and how long ago—and then prove it by tracking down the creature itself. And any of us can walk into our own homes and in a single glance, with all the certainty we need, tell something from the changes since our last visit about what our family members or pets have been doing there. It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes, let alone divine revelation, to see into the past. A mere understanding of the ordinary processes and behavior of nature and society is sufficient.

Natural science is no different. Although the "historical" sciences like geology and paleontology rely much less on human manipulations of nature (hence much less on eyewitnessing events) than the so-called "experimental" sciences like physics, chemistry, and much of biology, their conclusions are no less certain. The reason is that there was a witness to the distant past, as far back as the Big Bang itself, other than God. And unlike God, that witness can be hauled into court to testify. That witness is the physical universe itself, which has from the first moments of its existence been recording its own history in its own ever-changing form and substance. Countless "experiments" have already been done, by nature itself, and scientists have only to observe the results.

The record is not complete, of course. But it is more than complete enough for us to figure out the essentials, including not only the fact of evolution in general but many of its details as well, and to establish them as proven beyond reasonable doubt.

Fundamentalists also assert that as a result of Adam's Fall, human intellects have become so "darkened" that we can't trust them to figure out much of anything, so we have to rely on divine revelation even about natural things (certainly including the possibility of evolution). But this objection is never raised except in regard to the study of our origins. How odd that geologists seek oil and gas miles underground, and reliably find enough of it to keep their companies in business—but they can't calculate the age of Earth and not be off by a factor of a million. How odd that biologists profitably breed plants and animals and even create a whole industry of genetic engineering—yet when it comes to how evolution might work, they don't know what they are talking about. How odd that every day, humans manage all sorts of complex tasks like repairing cars, programming computers, launching moon rockets, doing brain surgery, winning lawsuits, and even preparing their own income tax returns—and somehow the "darkening" of their intellects precludes none of this. Only when we turn to the study of evolution, it seems, do the shades come down on our brainpower.

The sciences that reveal our evolutionary origins are no more beyond the average person's understanding than any of these other achievements. They all require study and effort to master, but the methods are open to public inspection, and the methods work.

8. Stressing the "selfish" qualities of living things ignores the abundant evidence of cooperative, even altruistic behavior in nature. (return to top)

This is a crucial point, as understood clearly by Darwin himself, who stated in The Origin of Species (1859): "If it could be proved that any part of the structure [or, by implication, the behavior] of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection." So far, no such case has been found. Destructive exploitation of one species by another, via predation or parasitism, is ubiquitous, and almost equally so are cases where the interaction benefits one species while leaving the other unaffected (commensalism) and cases where both species benefit (symbiosis or mutualism). But wherever a trait of an organism benefits another species, it is found also to be somehow of use to its possessor.

Many instances of cooperation among members of the same species are explained by kin selection: they involve close relatives, and, as noted above, one's close relatives carry many genes identical to one's own. Therefore, promoting the reproduction of close kin perpetuates copies of some of one's own genes as well.

Other cases of cooperation can be explained by reciprocal altruism: I'll scratch your back because you scratched mine yesterday and may do so again tomorrow, even if we are unrelated. This too is obviously motivated by self-interest.

Computer simulations and experiments in game theory show that cooperation can be a highly adaptive strategy even in a strictly Darwinian environment. In other words, natural selection can promote cooperativeness as well as competitiveness, and the latter can even take the form of the former. As evolution has advanced, cooperation has in some cases increased in importance relative to the cruder forms of competition. A special and highly refined form of cooperation that occurs in the higher primates (monkeys, apes, and humans) is reconciliation behavior: limiting the escalation of arguments, and making up afterward. Frans de Waal, who pioneered the study of peacemaking in our primate relatives, emphasizes that individual self-interest ultimately motivates even this: "The goal of conflict settlement is not peace per se; it is the maintenance of relationships of proven value" (de Waal 1989, 231).

In short, the origins of cooperation and apparent altruism seem explainable in terms of selfishness, but no one has managed (or, so far as I know, even tried) to explain the origins of selfishness in terms of altruism or cooperation. Evolution most likely followed the same course as our individual development: we each started out in life totally self-centered, and only later learned to work and play well with others. Selfishness would thus appear to be the more primitive and fundamental condition, with altruism (if it arises at all) as its later-appearing derivative.

9. How could a process as wasteful and cruel as Darwinian evolution be part of a "good" plan of creation? (return to top)

I think the answer hinges on what we mean by "wasteful." Central to our idea of waste is the notion of purpose: something is wasted only when it fails to fulfill its reason for being. Spilled milk is regretted because it was supposed to have been drunk. But central in turn to this notion of purpose is our own egocentricity: we humans see the spilled milk as wasted, but the cat that laps it up sees it differently. Purpose and its accomplishment are very much in the eye of the beholder.

In the largest view—the view of the planet's biosphere as a whole—there is no such thing as waste. Everything is somehow recycled. If a biological process has a "waste" product, some organism is likely to evolve the ability to use it as a resource. Even residues that go unused by life return to the supporting Earth itself, as fossils (or even fossil fuels!).

Even the supposedly inescapable Second Law of Thermodynamics gives back something to the cycle of life—and something indispensable. The universal energetic inefficiency called entropy, which constantly tends to drag ordered systems toward disorder, shows up in the inevitable errors that occur in the copying of DNA. But without these mutations to serve as grist for selection, life could not evolve. The circle is complete: the law responsible for the ultimate "wasting" of the universe, the entropic loss of heat that on the grandest scale destines the physical cosmos to a cold, dark future, at the same time stokes the fires of life with ever-new variety and promise.

Each individual and species, no matter how it participates in the cycles of life, helps to keep those very cycles, and hence the creative process of evolution, going. If we believe in a unitary act of creation, or even in a single Creator, then the purpose that really counts, in the eyes of the Creator, is the overall purpose of the biosphere as a whole and of its ongoing cycles—whatever that purpose may be. What we see as "waste"—because it does not seem to advance our own agendas—the Creator may even regard as exuberance and fecundity, and as a worthy end in itself.

In this light it is hard to see how Darwinian evolution, an inevitable result of those natural cycles, can properly be called "wasteful," if nothing in fact is being wasted. It is equally hard to see what alternative could be more efficient. A similar response can be given to the charge that evolution is "cruel." If this means merely that it involves suffering, this is certainly true. But it seems impossible to imagine life governed by known physical laws yet without suffering and death. "Cruelty," however, connotes the infliction of suffering for no good reason. The relevant question then becomes: Are the results of evolution worth the suffering it necessarily entails? To which I reply: Does a mother consider her child to be worth what she suffers to bring it into the world?

But would an efficient Creator need billions of years of such suffering and death to accomplish his or her purpose? Our impulse is to answer "No." But, if we are honest, do we really know enough about the business of creating worlds to say how long it should take? If creation is the self-communication of an infinite God to a finite world, as some theologians say, how quickly could it be accomplished?

When someone objects that Darwinian evolution is cruel and wasteful we must ask: Compared to what? No one has ever suggested another practical way of making a functioning, coherent material universe. Even the short-cut of special creation would produce only a patchwork of genealogically unrelated pieces that were fundamentally alien to each other. And if God's intention was to have that universe bring forth a magnificent diversity of interrelated forms of life, including intelligent beings capable of love and able to enjoy into eternity a personal relationship with their Creator, then it is surely possible to argue that the result is worth the cost, and the wait.

10. The Darwinian idea of "survival of the fittest" provides too ready a justification for the elimination of human individuals or groups who are deemed inferior, due to physical or mental handicaps, ethnic prejudice, or other reasons, and it is incompatible with Christians' belief in the dignity and unconditional worth of each person. (return to top)

It is true that Darwinism has been used in this way, for example by the Nazis, to excuse some of the worst atrocities in history. But is this Darwin's fault, or have these criminals misapplied his ideas? There is a logical chasm between the descriptive statement that life up to now has evolved through natural selection, and the prescriptive or normative statement that humans should consciously attempt to control their own evolution according to the same principles, through artificial selection. The way selection works in nature does not require that we shed no tears if poor or marginalized people somehow fall by the evolutionary wayside.

While some have seen evolution as flatly opposed to morality—or have found in evolution no relevance to morality at all—many others have considered our morality to be itself a product of evolution, even a sign of evolutionary progress Some of these people (including "Social Darwinists"), in their zeal to harvest fruits from evolutionary science for the supposed benefit of humanity, have been too eager to make this illogical leap to deriving their morals from biology itself. Most attempts to construct systems of "evolutionary ethics," however, have been unsatisfactory, suffering from the "naturalistic fallacy" that "is" implies "ought to be." By this reasoning, if "the survival of the fittest" has governed all past and present evolution, then it is the only proper principle by which to steer our own future course.

But is this a valid extrapolation? Human evolution is now mainly cultural, and the laws of ordinary natural selection arguably no longer apply, but it is not clear from science alone what other laws we should obey. Some versions of evolutionary ethics have been made to yield humane dicta that are at least consistent with those of traditional religions, but other systems endorse ruthless elimination of the "unfit." Which ethical inferences from evolutionary biology are correct?

Of course, other data besides those of biology are arguably relevant, including the teachings of revealed religion. There is more to human existence than biology, and therefore no reason to rely on biology alone to inform our ethics. We cannot reduce our complex social and conceptual worlds to biology, and in seeking ethics to govern these worlds, we should not look for them where they are not to be found. Darwinian theory is best viewed as morally neutral, though it can shed valuable light on human behavior and provide a useful background to discussions of morality (Wright 1994b; Pope 1994). In particular, by exposing the role of selfishness in our evolution, it provides a powerful antidote to that very selfishness.

As enlightened evolutionists, therefore, we should seek our ethics elsewhere than in Darwinian selection. In particular, those of us who are also Christians are to follow the very different road revealed to us through the incarnation of Christ, and along this road it is never permissible to leave our unwanted by the wayside as "evolutionary waste."

11. The claim that humans descend from mere animals is an affront to human dignity. (return to top)

Several criticisms can be leveled against this attitude. First, it's certainly out of step with our American history and culture. The idea that we should look to our ancestry for our sense of worth was one that we Americans decisively abandoned when we turned our backs on the hereditary aristocracies of Europe. Furthermore, the assertion can be turned on its head: if the animals were capable of giving rise to us, after all, surely that enhances their dignity!

Nonetheless, some still argue that there is a theological problem here, because we take such pride in bearing the "image and likeness" of God. But if Jesus has revealed to us a humble God, can we image that God by being prideful? The trinitarian God, as theologian John Haught (2001) points out, is distinct from the world not by being unrelated to it, but by being the most intimately related Being of all. Hence, to display the likeness of God—the capacity for intense relationship—we should embrace our relationship to the rest of life on Earth.

But if human dignity depends on the uniqueness of our rationality (or of our creation in God's image), and if Darwinism demonstrates continuity between humans and other animals, then doesn't Darwinism diminish our uniqueness, and therefore our dignity?

Even if they were not the result of evolution, the similarities between other species and our own—for example, in behavior and psychology—are incontrovertible facts. Indeed, no scientific discoveries of the last half-century have shed more light on human nature and its origins than these. Great apes (orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees) have highly individual personalities, rich emotional lives, and complex social relationships. They can learn systems of symbolic communication (such as American Sign Language). And they display empathy, conciliation, and love, as well as surprisingly sophisticated political intrigue, deceit, and aggression. Some ape species even possess distinct behavioral and material cultures in different geographic regions. We have grossly underestimated them in the past; and while their intellects and cultures are certainly inferior to our own, we do not yet know just how different or alike they and we really are.

Darwinian theory is opposed to the "essentialist" view, harking back to Plato and reflected in modern creationism, that different species have fundamentally different, eternally separate and unvarying "essences." Living species instead consist of populations of unique individuals that vary in countless ways, and this variability is the raw material of evolution. In this sense, Darwinism emphasizes the importance of individual differences in contrast to species differences, and challenges the idea that humans are in a special moral category. At the same time, of course, this stress on individual uniqueness potentially enhances the dignity of individual humans, as distinct from humanity as a whole.

Moreover, a property such as "rationality" (or "intelligence") is made up of many distinct traits and abilities, all of which vary among human individuals and are shared to various degrees with nonhuman animals. Each of these traits must have come to characterize the human population by a gradual process, making the "animal-human" boundary irreducibly fuzzy.

But a difference in degree can also become a difference in kind. We recognize so-called "emergent" properties in all sorts of processes and systems, both living and nonliving. Simple rises in temperature change ice into water into steam. A tadpole transforms itself imperceptibly into a frog. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly. The invention of computers has shown that a certain level of "mere" physical complexity can yield "intellectual" abilities (such as solving math problems or playing chess) equaling or exceeding our own.

If evolution gave rise to moral agents, a distinction between morally reflective and morally nonreflective beings would still be no more problematic than the task of distinguishing degrees of moral responsibility among defendants in our courts of law, when questions of immaturity, insanity, or mental impairment are raised. As for our extinct, "subhuman" ancestors at the evolutionary boundary between nonhuman and human, as a practical matter we are not called upon to judge their actions.

The extinction of the intermediate forms that once connected our species to others has left a clear boundary between human and nonhuman abilities today, making us unique in that sense. If one allows that our dignity as a species can be a matter of degree as well as kind, then we can still retain our moral stature and responsibilities while acknowledging the dignity of our fellow creatures and our commonality of descent with them.

Although Darwinism in one sense regards humans as a species like any other, it also emphasizes the differences among species that arise out of the variations among individuals. The differences, especially in our case, are as obvious and important as the similarities, and Darwinism helps explain how those differences came about. If Darwinism does not assert for our species a special dignity, it is because "dignity" itself is not part of the lexicon of science; but we need not look to science alone to provide our sense of dignity, any more than our sense of ethics.

The hostility to tracing our descent from other animals is fundamentally un-Christian, in fact heretical. It owes much to the often-condemned heresy of Gnosticism, which sees the material as inferior or evil and only the spiritual as good. When we disavow any genealogical relationship to "mere animals," we are implicitly denying that we (we spiritual beings!) are really part of God's material creation. This idea of the Gnostics (that the human body is alien to the human personality or soul) can be traced back to Plato and the Neoplatonics, who had great influence on early Christian thought. Like that other Platonic notion, essentialism, this one is also opposed to Darwinism—and to the orthodox, incarnational Christian faith. It is supremely ironic that such a dualistic, unbiblical stance should be taken by biblical literalists who insist on the importance to Christianity of the Genesis creation account—which unequivocally affirms that we were formed "out of the clay of the ground" (Genesis 2:7).

Ultimately, of course, whenever we allow ourselves concern over affronts to our dignity, we are flirting with the sin of pride. But this is a moral issue on which evolution is neutral. Biblical literalists feel that descent from "mere animals" diminishes our dignity; but the implications of evolution really cut both ways. For which is more flattering to my ego: to think that in making my species the Creator spent only an instant (or six days at best), or to think that God was willing to devote over thirteen billion years to the task of bringing me into existence?

12. Why couldn't the human race have descended from a single couple? Doesn't genetic evidence support this? (return to top)

Biologically, a human population of the present size might have descended from a single couple (a concept called monogenism). Evolution, however, normally takes place in a breeding population much larger than two, and there is no reason to think that humans were an exception. Even if our ancestry could be traced to a single pair, they would certainly have belonged to a population from which they did not outwardly differ. On the whole, monogenism finds no positive support in biology or paleontology, and it has long seemed less than probable a priori.

Molecular genetics, however, now makes possible a much stronger statement: while a hypothetical human population of the present size might have descended from a single pair, the particular population that now exists could not have. It includes far more genetic variety (much of it inherited from prehuman ancestors) than could possibly have been transmitted to us by way of a single human couple. As calculated by geneticist F. J. Ayala (1995), the minimum possible number of individuals in the breeding population at any time in our history was at least 4,000, which would probably correspond to a total population of some 15,000 to 20,000 actual individuals. Hence, a bottleneck population as small as two people was clearly a mathematical impossibility.

What, then, of the studies showing that all people living today have in common a single female ancestor? In fact, this evidence does not mean that this so-called "mitochondrial Eve" was either the first human female, the only one living in her time, or the mother of all humans who lived after her. Rather, as Ayala explains, we all share such an ancestor merely because, by chance, none of her female contemporaries happened to leave descendants today in the strictly maternal line. The idea of a single pair of people as the sole parents of the whole human race is not scientifically tenable.

13. If our brains are merely the evolutionary products of blind natural processes, how can we trust our own thinking, in science, morality, or anything else? In particular, what if our religions themselves are no more than useful adaptations to our environments, and have no objective truth value? (return to top)

Truth, in the sense of how the world around us really is, is the ultimate criterion of evolutionary advantage, and not vice versa. It is illogical to think, just because some perception has evolved because it has survival value, that it is delusory. Just because we have evolved to perceive light does not mean that light itself is a delusion. Rather, in natural selection the condition of the organism is constantly referred back to and tested by the demands of the environment. The organism (via the mutation or genetic variant) proposes, the environment (via natural selection) disposes. In the long run, selective advantage lies in conforming to the demands of objective reality, not in creating subjective illusions.

Of course our nervous systems and sense organs can generate systematic errors, such as optical illusions. But the fact that we can recognize and correct such errors shows that our basic cerebral equipment, used with due care, can be trusted. The truth value of our more complex belief systems is difficult to determine for reasons intrinsic to the belief systems themselves, not because evolution has wired the circuits of our brains to give deceptive results.

Ironically, it is antievolutionists who are more vulnerable to mistrust of their own intelligence. Fundamentalists continue to hold the doctrine (noted under objection #7 above) that our minds are so clouded by the effects of Adam's sin that human reason (e.g., in the form of evolutionary science) cannot be trusted, and so we must seek aid in a literal reading of the Bible to gain correct knowledge of worldly reality. But this doctrine itself is an example of human reasoning, and consequently it undermines its own credibility, leading to a logical dead end. Evolutionists, in contrast, have a firm basis for trusting their own thought processes and (if they are so inclined) for appreciating them as part of the Creator's handiwork.

But biologists today have good evidence that natural selection has molded us to behave in certain ways—altruistically, for instance—while remaining unconscious that our "true" motives are evolutionarily-selfish ones. Sometimes it may even be advantageous for us to think our motives are exactly the opposite of the selective forces that really drive us. Therefore, the objectivity of our thoughts is highly suspect. So (says the skeptic) how can we believe any longer in so-called "free will," or the moral responsibility it implies? Indeed we often deceive ourselves, especially in imagining ourselves to be better than we really are. This tendency is doubtless a product of our evolution, and very likely it has some selective value. But beyond this point the skeptic's argument also undermines itself.

Everyone agrees that we seem to have free will. But if this is an illusion, then my innermost mental processes are untrustworthy; even when I examine my own thoughts, divorced from any sense impressions from the outside, I cannot rely on my perceptions. Even less, then, can I rely on my thought processes when they operate on sensory data. Therefore I cannot hope to know what is really going on outside my head, any more than inside it. So empirical science is impossible. But it was empirical science that discovered evolution and generated the evidence for selection-molded self-deception! Hence, whatever deceptions about myself evolution may have programmed into my brain (and they could be many and varied), science cannot, without destroying itself, go so far as to impugn mental functions on which our knowledge of the world depends.

18. For detailed responses to a wider variety of arguments and critiques raised by anti-evolutionists, see the "Resources" section at the end of this guide.

Words highlighted in green appear in the Glossary.