J.J.: I was much less impressed than you were by Gertrude

Himmelfarb’s review, though I don’t have access to the full piece.

Take, for example, her claim that: “there are … other modes of

knowledge, other scholarly disciplines–philosophy, history,

literature, theology–that have taught us a good deal, over the ages,

about human nature.”

Have they? Let us take theology, for example. Consider the past

1,000 years, from December 1005 to the present. A great deal of

theology has been done over that 1,000 years, several billion

man-hours, I should imagine, in the Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and

Buddhist worlds alone. What new understanding of human nature has all

that theology given us? What do we know now about human nature that

we didn’t know in November, 1005, as a result of theological

inquiries? Suppose that dispassionate inquiries into human nature in,

say, an Islamic theological seminary turned up a fact about human

nature that contradicted the teachings of Mohammed. How would Islamic

theologians deal with that? How would Ms. Himmelfarb prefer they deal

with it?

Same with philosophy. Is there a sense in which we can say that Hume

was “right” about perception and Kant “wrong,” as decisively as we can

say that Lavoisier was right about combustion and Becher wrong, or

Kepler right about planetary orbits and Ptolemy wrong? I don’t deny

that these disciplines can give us general insights and set us

thinking — see Paul Johnson’s BIRTH OF THE MODERN for some great

passages about how science, literature, and philosophy can prod and

nourish each other (index references to Kant, Coleridge, Faraday). If

you want to uncover actual facts about the natural world, though, with

actual predictive value, scientific method is the way to go. There

really isn’t any other. And like it or not, we human beings, at least

in this phase of our existence, dwell in the natural world.

I was similarly nonplussed by: “Today we have even more cause to be

concerned about the mechanistic and reductivist interpretation of all

of human life, including its emotional and intellectual dimensions, in

the name of Darwinism.” I think I know what she means. As we dig

deeper into the human brain and the human genome, more and more of our

human nature is revealed as being governed by the laws of chemistry.

We now know, for example, that an inclination to alcoholism is decided

in part by an individual’s genetic code (which is an arrangement of

chemicals). This is a thing we did not know 50 years ago–a fact

about the world, uncovered by scientific inquiry. (How on earth did

all those philosophers, historians, novelists, and theologians miss

it?) We shall uncover many more similar facts about human nature in

the decades to come.

I agree that this is something to be concerned about. More and more

of human life will indeed turn out to have foundations that are

“mechanistic and reductive.” That is a pretty sure bet, and when it

is part of the general understanding, people will have less reason to

cherish a sense of personal responsibility in themselves and their

children. That is indeed something to be concerned about. “More and

more” is not “all,” though, and it never will be. A lot of

people–including some scientists–seem unable to grasp this

distinction.

But what does “in the name of Darwin” mean? Does Ms. Himmelfarb

imagine that a Darwinist is something like a Christian, believing

Darwin to be possessed of supernatural insight and powers? Or like a

Marxist, determined to use the Master’s great Thoughts to construct a

new order of society? I know a number of working biologists, and none

of them is remotely like that. I wonder if Ms. Hummelfarb has ever

met a working biologist.

And where should our concern lead us? To the banning of further

inquiry into the human brain and the human genome? If impartial

scientific inquiry turns up results — reproducible results with real

predictive power (if you do this, then this will happen; if this is

the current state of affairs, then either this or this will be the

future state after time t, with probabilities p and q) — if, I say,

inquiry turns up these results, and the results are emotionally

displeasing to us, or to loud, powerful factions among us, should we

stop the research? How exactly WOULD we stop it world-wide — in

China, for instance, or India?

The more I engage in these exchanges, the more I understand that the

default mode of human thinking about large issues is religious. (And

Jonah is right that Paul Bloom’s Atlantic piece is well worth reading

in this area.) To a great many people, Darwin is a bogey-man, a sort

of anti-Christ figure. I suspect that millions of American children

are tucked up in bed at night with the warning that if they are not

good, the Darwin monster will come and eat them up.

To working scientists, this is nuts. Darwin was a great observer of

nature who established a neat theory that explains lots of stuff, and

which, in 150 years of inquiry, no new observations–zero, zip, zilch,

nada, none–have contradicted. That’s all. Possibly some

observation will be made tomorrow that contradicts it–an intact bird

skeleton in precambrian rocks, for instance. Then we’ll need a

revised theory, as we did in physics 100 years ago when Newtonism

showed cracks. The scientist who develops that revised theory will

then be world-famous, and will enjoy wealth and prestige beyond the

dreams of avarice. He will not be burned at the stake by enraged

Darwinians, any more than Einstein was by enraged Newtonians. Lots of

ambitious young biologists would l–o–v–e to be that guy. None of

them would describe himself as doing his daily research work “in the

name of Darwin.”

But scientific thinking–dispassionate observation, measurement,

experimentation, and hypothesis-forming–is deeply unnatural for human

beings, and a great many people–most, I sometimes think–will just

never get it, in fact will react violently against it, at any rate

when it is applied to living creatures. To most people, all abstract

thought is really religion, or ought to be. If it doesn’t behave like

religion, if a theory’s proponents don’t behave like evangelists and

theologians, people get mad with them. That is part of human nature,

according to Paul Bloom, and I think he’s right; but you can’t build

bridges or design drugs by thinking like that, and you can’t enlarge

your understanding of the natural world, either–no matter how many

philosophers, theologians, novelists, and historians you hire.