This Evolution Thing, Seriously Now. [View All]

[Plaid Adder]

I started a joke thread about this last night introducing the theory of Spiteful Design:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=3962087&mesg_id=3962087

This actually opened up some real questions about why this planet works the way it does and what could really be responsible, which got me thinking about my own difficulties with evolutionary science, or more broadly speaking scientific materialism in general. I'm gonna warn you right now this will probably get long.

I've spent some time working on the history of medicine, and anyone who has will tell you that the scientific method does not necessarily produce truth. There are theories and practices that become accepted by the medical community not because they actually cure patients but because they support some piece of the ideological, social, or theoretical framework that perpetuates the dominance of orthodox medicine. Reproductive medicine is one area in which this becomes fairly visible because for so long medicine was so male-dominated, and the scientists and clinicians alike were so, well, downright messed up when it came to reading and treating bodies that were built differently from their own. Even now, modern orthodox medicine still has a strong tendency toward interventionist, technological, pharmaceutical solutions that sometimes create trouble for patients. America still leads the world in C-sections, for instance, even though there has lately been a reaction against ordering up a C-section every time a delivery encounters an obstacle.

My point is that although science is supposed to be objective and 'factual,' in practice scientific materialism is a belief system like anything else, and creates its own blindnesses, biases, and distortions. There are things that were accepted as undisputed truth 50 years ago which are now considered complete bullshit. There are also, undoubtedly, things that are now accepted as undisputed truth which will be judged 50 years hence to be complete bullshit. We just don't know what they are, because these soon-to-be-debunked scientific theories support and reflect beliefs about human nature and human society that we are not ready to abandon.

I am not a scientist, and therefore when I talk about 'evolution' I'm really only talking about the popular understanding of it. And one of the things that has long bothered me about popular applications of evolutionary theory is that it provides support for what I consider to be completely outlandish justifications of human behavior on the grounds that it has its root in some principle of natural or sexual selection. I was, for instance, greatly annoyed by Jared Diamond's book _The Third Chimpanzee_, in which he uses evolutionary theory to explain, for instance, binge drinking among college students. (It's a compensatory behavior engaged in by males who wish to prove to the available females that they are SO physically and sexually fit that they can deliberately handicap themselves by getting falling-down drunk and STILL be studly. No, I'm not making that up, it's in the book.) What pissed me off about TTC, and about many popular applications of evolutionary science, is that they cannot explain homosexuality except as some kind of freak aberration. We don't fit into the narrative of natural selection very well, as we are a dead end from the point of view of species survival, and so evolution becomes just another way to make us all mutants.

Now, there have been studies done that actually show that homosexual behavior is more common among animals than was originally thought, and have come up with ways of explaining how this fits in with the principles of natural and sexual selection. But even that reveals one of my issues with evolution, which is that in the wrong hands, the principle of natural selection becomes as all-powerful and, in a sense, all-knowing as the God that the Creationists are afraid it will replace. It becomes the Inexorable Law that explains everything and makes sense of a chaotic universe; things that would otherwise seem bizarre and implausible make sense because they are all part of the process of natural selection. And being an equal-opportunity skeptic, I am always suspicious of any system that tries to make one principle the Prime Mover. And being an infertile lesbian, I am ESPECIALLY suspicious of any system that tries to justify modern gender-based behaviors and formations of modern society on the grounds that they are all rooted in the female's mission to produce as many offspring as possible and the man's drive to spread his seed hither and yon.

Now, this does not mean that I don't think evolution should be taught in a high school science class. The point of a high school science class is to enable students to understand, and eventually 'do,' if they are so inclined, science. As long as evolution is the accepted explanation of how life got to be this way, then that's what they should be teaching. The concerns I'm talking about would be more appropriate for a class in philosophy, literature, anthropology, or even theology.

At the same time, I do think there is some value in challenging the dominance of scientific materialism as the one and only belief system that shapes the modern understanding of the world. There are things that science still cannot and probably will not ever explain satisfactorily--and yet, science feels like it has to try. This is, IMHO, one reason for the problems we are now running into with malpractice lawsuits: there is this presumption that medicine should always be able to save us from anything, when in fact it can't. This is most obvious among those OB-GYNs who are sadly unable to share their love with American women because the medical profession still pretends that death is not and should never be an outcome of delivery. In fact, as a friend of mine whose partner's first baby was stillborn for no apparent reason found out, stillbirth is much more common than most people would imagine, and in many cases there is no satisfactory explanation. Death is part of birth as it is part of life in general; but one of the ways scientific materialism maintains its dominance is by promising to save us from it.

You could, of course, say all of these things and more besides about fundamentalist Christianity, whose appeal derives largely from the desire to be 'saved' (not just from hell, but from death itself) and which is even more wedded to 'natural' conceptions of reproductive and sexual behavior than scientific materialism.

Again, I'm not trying to put religion on an equal footing with science, or suggest that hospitals treat patients through prayer. When I'm sick I go to the doctor like everyone else, and though I often find myself unwilling to fill prescriptions, especially after seeing all the little logo-bearing gifts from pharmaceutical companies that litter my internist's office, I would rather trust her than trust someone who's going to realign my chakras and hope for the best. My point is just that I operate under the assumption that the world is always going to be too complicated and too chaotic to be truly explained by any one belief system. Everyone's got to pick one that works for them, because like the computers we've created we all seem to need some kind of OS in order to run our software. But it's worth it to remember that your OS has limitations, and to be open to considering others.

Which, of course, is exactly the principle that the fundamentalist Christians who are pushing "intelligent design" consider dangerous blasphemy, as the whole point of being a fundamentalist is that there is One True Way which is yours and any other belief system is a snare of the Devil. But I wonder sometimes if the rabidness of all this religious backlash isn't some kind of revolt against the apparently unbreakable dominance of scientific materialism--that because scientific materialism isn't particularly flexible when it comes to allowing room for non-materialist belief systems, the Christian right has decided to just break it once and for all.

I certainly don't want to see fundamentalist Christianity unseat scientific materialism as the dominant belief system in this country. Apart from everything else, it would soon consign me to the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth; and the other thing is that most of the time, scientific materialism does appear to get the job done, whereas I have no faith that Pat Roberston would be any use when faced with an influenza epidemic. But my point is that one way out of the religion wars is to try to make scientific materialism more flexible and more able to coexist peacefully with non-materialist understandings of the universe.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder