Even bright, well educated people misunderstand evolution

February 2, 2010 • 11:09 am

by Greg Mayer

A few days ago The New Republic posted a review of books on miscegenation laws and eugenics by Richard Posner. Posner is a judge of the US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Unusually for a sitting judge, he is a prolific author who writes on a wide range of subjects. Although usually considered a conservative, he has taken some rather non-conservative positions, and is not an “originalist” (the favored judicial theory of full-blown conservatives such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia). In his review (from which I learned a lot about miscegenation laws), he writes:

The novelty of Darwinism, so far as its social and political impact was concerned, was its depiction of a struggle for survival between different species, with the ones well adapted to their environment surviving and the others becoming extinct.

Well, no, actually, that’s not the novelty of Darwinism at all. The struggle between different species (e.g., between predators and prey) was long and well known before Darwin. Natural extinction had been a more recently controversial matter, but was resolved early in the 19th century (see the excellent account in David Young’s The Discovery of Evolution). So although negative interactions between species, and natural extinction, formed important parts of Darwin’s account in the Origin, they were not novel. And even evolution as such (i.e. that organisms changed over time) was not novel with Darwin (although he was the one that convinced the world at large of its truth).  Darwin’s greatest novelty was the variational mechanism of change within species, natural selection.

Posner does go on to say some fairly sensible things about what a species is, and does in fact dwell on within species matters (since there is only one extant species of Homo), and I don’t want to pick on him, but he’s a bright, well educated, and thoughtful guy, a member of the nation’s educational and political elite who writes about Darwinism, and he has at best an incomplete notion of  the most important and novel aspects of evolutionary theory. This may seem like inside baseball (“Among species, within species– who cares?”), but it really is crucial: Darwin did more than elaborate a theory of historical community ecology (others had done that as well), but also a theory for the transformation of lineages by mechanisms which account for both adaptation and unity of type. I’m reminded of H.J. Muller’s famous statement at the time of the Darwin centennial in 1959, “One hundred years without Darwin are enough”, bemoaning that while evolution as such was known and accepted, few understood evolution by natural selection, Darwin’s most original contribution. It’s the same today: one hundred fiftyone years without Darwin are enough! (Francisco Ayala took care of one hundred fifty years.)

25 thoughts on “Even bright, well educated people misunderstand evolution”

  1. But isn’t Posner making his point in terms of the social and political context, rather than the scientific?

    I’m easy to persuade that many people- including educated ones- having an imperfect understanding of evolution. I’m just not sure, given Posner’s interest in eugenics here, that the scientific aspect is his prime concern.

    1. You’re right that Posner’s main concern wasn’t scientific, which is part of the reason I didn’t want to pick on him. But it would have made his social/political impact point much more forcefully to note that Darwin’s novelty was that there was a struggle within species that led to adaptation, since it was with within-species issues that Posner was concerned.
      GCM

  2. I was thinking, too, that the “so far as its social and political impact was concerned” changes things.

    Unfortunately, I think it’s probably even more wrong that way, though. The novelty in social and political impact appears to have been the intra-species conflicts, and the way that turned into Social Darwinism. While one does not gather that Social Darwinism had much to do with the science, serving as a channel for pre-existing prejudices, its impact appears rather larger than any realization of inter-species conflicts.

    Glen Davidson
    http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p

    1. duhh…at the time this discussion happens, “negroes” were an inferior “race-species”, and, social darwinism is not dead at all, it is re-incarnated in the evopsycho trends of mushy thinking

  3. I think Dawkins brought up the subject in his latest book. If a cheetah chases an impala it’s a struggle between cheetah and impala; if a cheetah chases two impalas it’s a struggle between the two impalas.

  4. Since this blog post is pedantic in a good way, I thought I’d add to the mix.

    Greg Mayer stated, “[Posner] is not an “originalist” (the favored judicial theory of full-blown conservatives such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia).”

    Actually, Justice Scalia employs a form of originalism he denotes as “textualism”; mostly when it’s convenient to arriving at an outcome consistent with either plutocratic and/or conservative political positions. J. Scalia freely and often discards that interpretative approach in order to avoid outcomes not favored by conservatives or plutocrats. There are exceptions, he supported flag burning as speech contra to the conservative movement’s position, however it’s important to note his approach is not applied consistently but instead when it’s convenient.

    Is this hypocrisy on J. Scalia’s part? I’d argue most of the time it is though he has acknowledged is willing to wander off the reservation in a written defense in a book he wrote several years ago titled, A Matter of Interpretation. However that book was a rare admittance on his account, most of the time he rides a moral high horse he of all the justices has least earned. However Chief Justice Roberts is fast approaching J. Scalia in hypocrisy as he supports astonishingly immodest rulings that overturns precedents and laws, some of which weren’t even facially challenged by the plaintiffs like Citizens United.

  5. Judge Posner represents a long and imposing tradition in economics which holds that Darwin made his name simply by applying in the biological field the ideas that the Smithians had already established in social science. Here, for example, is the Nobel-awarded economist Friedrich Hayek:

    “Since the emphasis we shall have to place on the role that selection plays in this process of social evolution today is likely to create the impression that we are borrowing the idea from biology, it is worth stressing that it was, in fact, the other way round: there can be little doubt that it was from the theories of social evolution that Darwin and his contemporaries derived the suggestion for their theories.” (The Constitution of Liberty)

    In another work (New Studies in Philosophy) Hayek describes Mandeville, Hume, Ferguson and Adam Smith as “Darwinian before Darwin.”

    Economists like Posner, Hayek and others must necessarily misinterpret Darwin in order to render respectable a theory of social evolution which leads to laissez-faire conclusions. They cannot specify a mechanism by which mutation and selection takes place because that would disarm the model of human behavior that they wish to hold up: behavior that is rooted in natural law. The objective is to identify the emergence of a spontaneous social order as something natural, something which we cannot and should not adapt to our own needs.

    1. Excellent point.
      Another Hayek quotation highlighting Michael John’s observation:
      “It was in the discussion of such social formations as language and morals, law and money, that in the eighteenth century the twin conceptions of evolution and the spontaneous formation of an order were at last clearly formulated, and provided the intellectual tools which Darwin and his eighteenth-century moral philosophers and the historical schools of law and language might well be described, as some of the theorists of language of the nineteenth century indeed described themselves, as Darwinians before Darwin.”
      (Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty; University of Chicago Press, 1973; p.23)

      As an antidote, it is most amusing to read Thorstein Veblen’s 1898 essay, Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science.
      (Mercifully available online, albeit transcribed with several typos:
      http://prof.mt.tama.hosei.ac.jp/~hhirano/academia/econom.htm )

      Seven decades before Hayek, Veblen punctured the classical economists’ conceit. Well ahead of his time, Veblen’s critique is devastating — and very funny. To extract the full flavor of his mordant wit, thinly disguised beneath a veneer of academic respectability, slow reading of this short piece is recommended.

  6. Strange that people should get this wrong. The phrase ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ was written by Tennyson in 1849, a good ten years before Darwin’s Origin.

    The other point to make (in reference to an earlier discussion, though relevant here), and it is often missed, is that the English word ‘fit’, as in ‘survival of the fittest’, does not mean suvival of the most healthy (as in a ‘fit person’), but survival of the most adaptive, the one between whom and the environment there is a better fit. Which is why, pace Forbes, ‘survival of the fittest’ is not a tautology.

    2. Eric–

      Nice point about the meaning of fit. In statistics, we use fit in the sense you indicate, as indicating the closeness of the correspondence between a model and data (as in how well a regression line ‘fits’ the data).
      GCM

      1. What Mr. Darwin meant in a later ed. of The origin was mostly verbatim of the claim-Mr H Spencer-that natural selection and survival of the fittest(SOF) are synonyms. Which they arent. SOF is not science. Lets drop it. Dont need to remind you that “Fitness’ does have a precise meaning NOW,not in the times when Mr Darwin and Mr Spencer exchanged ideas, unfortunately.

      2. Survival of the fittest may be an unlucky choice of terminology. But as I understand it, as mentioned above it can be made precise.

        Whether as differential reproduction, relative fitness or as the gradient of traits under natural selection. It’s all the same measure (modulo the observed space [chosen phase space in physics lingo]), and it’s all science.

  7. Theory of evolution true because you have to believe it, then you believe it.
    Fossils date the rocks,
    rocks date the fossils.

    1. Really, you don’t know at all what you’re talking about. The rocks are dated radiometrically; they are ordered by superposition or by the use of index fossils, which make no assumption about evolution. This is an old creationist canard, and I think you’d better try your luck over at Uncommon Descent where they love illogical statements like this.

  8. I think even some scientists don’t understand the TOE very well.

    (Not counting the creationists who have sciencey degrees)

    Science educators and those who support their efforts have a lot of work ahead of them.

  9. Darwinism

    I’m not sure if to put this as pedantry (re Michael Heath) or as a cultural clash. But the fact is that this term is ludicrous in physics, or even in consistency, terms.

    At the same time that biologists use inclusiveness in theories (i.e. evolution theory is analogous to gravitation theory but not, say, general relativity) they term it according to the then non-existent exclusiveness.

    The cultural subtext is that science theory is a mere philosophic opinionated “-ism”. Which it isn’t, seeing it is the best tested theory in science (quantitatively and qualitatively).

    I don’t know how biologists do it, but I can say for certain that I don’t envy them. Biology kicks ass, but biological terminology apparently sucks endlessly.

    1. “seeing it is the best tested theory” – seeing biology theory is the best tested theory

      1. Im sorry, but I lost your “drift’ here. Certainly Darwinism, if that is what you talking about, is a pain-term in the neck and should be avoided.Like “SOF”. Many have argued for it. It plays on the hands of people that confront creationism (the word of Mr. God) vs darwinism (the word of Mr Darwin) for example. I dont know if people is confronting “creationism” with “physics” of string theory or big bangs scenarios? which are MUCH more open to, well, inspired diatribes. If this was your intent, I am for rigourizing biological “terminology”, especially in relatuion to evolution and its underlying mechanims.

      2. forgot to mention that i suggest the above in order to avoid using “selfish genes”, “meme technologies” to name a few, which add nothing to understanding.

  10. Evolutionary adaptiveness for all or exclusive fitness for a few. That is the question!

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