A.N. Wilson goes into more fascinating detail about his return to religious faith from atheism in an essay in the New Statesman. Now isn't this interesting: the literary critic, biographer and historian credits his gradual re-conversion in no small part to a counter-reaction to the "superstitious" materialism of Darwinian evolution and, yes, the dreaded Darwin-Hitler connection.
The latter in particular drives the Darwin Lobby bonkers -- not least the always charming propagandist P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula, who alludes today to the "fallacious claim that Hitler's crimes were built on a foundation of godless Darwinism." It's supposed to be only slow-witted "creationists" who swallow that claim.
I guess that makes Wilson a creationist. Excerpt:
One thing that finally put the tin hat on any aspirations to be an unbeliever was writing a book about the Wagner family and Nazi Germany, and realising how utterly incoherent were Hitler's neo-Darwinian ravings, and how potent was the opposition, much of it from Christians; paid for, not with clear intellectual victory, but in blood.
Also this:
Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist "explanations" for our mysterious human existence simply won't do -- on an intellectual level. The phenomenon of language alone should give us pause. A materialist Darwinian was having dinner with me a few years ago and we laughingly alluded to how, as years go by, one forgets names. Eager, as committed Darwinians often are, to testify on any occasion, my friend asserted: "It is because when we were simply anthropoid apes, there was no need to distinguish between one another by giving names."
This credal confession struck me as just as superstitious as believing in the historicity of Noah's Ark. More so, really.
Do materialists really think that language just "evolved", like finches' beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where's the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena -- of which love and music are the two strongest -- which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat.
The very first question that the great medieval rabbinic commentator Rashi asked about the first verse in Genesis is why the Hebrew Bible, which contain so much law, is told as a story, a narrative instead of a legal case book. I think one answer is that stories frame values and worldviews more powerfully than laws do. And ultimately, presenting a picture of how the world works, and therefore how we should work in the world, is what Biblical tradition is all about.
The Darwinian idea of unguided evolution driven by accident and chance is primarily a story about how the world works. Ideas have consequences, and all the more so when they are encapsulated in a narrative.
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Perhaps I should elaborate somewhat on what evolutionary theory might state regarding DNA and whether or not it might be "junk."
Clearly one does not simply study evolutionary theory and suppose that there must be "junk DNA" in the genome. There is little to no junk DNA in bacteria and in archaea, according to measures of "junk DNA" used a decade or so ago. Furthermore, in the history of "junk DNA," initially there was resistance against the idea, probably because DNA had so long been thought to be the most basic part of an organism to be selected.
Can evolutionary theory explain junk DNA, though? Generally, it is thought so. Transposons, the so-called "jumping genes," seem often to act as little more than "selfish DNA," merely replicating at the organism's expense. Bolstering that notion is the fact that organisms do have defenses against transposons. Nevertheless, transposons make up significant amounts of the DNA in many (most?) eukaryotes. And one should not pretend that transposons are only parasites, as they likely provide some of the basic material for evolution to act upon.
This does sound like junk DNA (at least initially) coming from transposons, however:
Large amounts of our genome are also made up of tandem repeats, and of retroviruses as well. It is possible that tandem repeats played a role in the changes that dogs have undergone, due to our selection, at least according to one paper. Retroviruses do appear to play some part in evolutionary change. Nevertheless, it is difficult to consider most of the tandem repeats and retroviral segments as anything but junk DNA. Now this is not to say that they do not play any role, say, in spacing the genes, or even conceivably in a regulatory role. The point of evolution would not be that DNA would remain useless, of course, even though it could, so if initially useless DNA became useful, that would comport with evolution quite well.
Probably it would be fair to say that eukaryotic evolution needed at least some "junk DNA." Bacterial and Archaeal evolution can do without it, at least now (many basic pathways are thought not to have evolved much for at least a billion years), likely because most of the niches are covered by some DNA or other, or can be covered with a few changes. Eukaryotes had to change a good deal to become what they are, and gene plus genome duplications appear to have played a significant role in eukaryote evolution, especially early on. Other "junk DNA" likely also played roles, of course. So did sexual reproduction.
Still, one probably cannot say that evolutionary theory predicts much "junk DNA," even during the course of eukaryote evolution. Gene duplications were almost certainly needed to produce what exists today, but the genes are a small part of DNA, and likely remain the most crucial parts, on average. Regulatory functions by so-called "junk DNA" would probably play a greater role later on, much as appears to be the case in marsupial evolution. What is more, duplicated genes which did not pick up regulatory or genetic functions were generally mutated into meaninglessness.
The best I can say for evolutionary theory predicting "junk DNA" is that eukaryotic evolution probably did need some actually useless (or nearly so) DNA in order to evolve as much as they have. Yet many thought that truly useless DNA would actually disappear rather quickly, since it takes resources without contributing to survival at a time (even evolutionary functions are only fortuitous, not something for which the organism could save "junk DNA"). The reason that large amounts of "junk DNA" could remain is that DNA is also "selfish," and also that mistakes happen in order to create "junk." This is what happened to our "vitamin C" gene, so that it became "junk," whether or not it has subsequently picked up any function.
The only "prediction" regarding "junk DNA" that I've ever encountered from IDists is that there "will be relatively little junk DNA," which they never based upon any sort of design principles. They seemed to be simply trying to anticipate the disappearance of most "junk DNA" and to claim this "prediction" for "design." They could conceivably be right, even, since so much of our DNA is transcribed into RNA. But they have never based it in any principles of ID, because they have avoided any of the expected principles coming from ID.
In any case, it has been demonstrated that many organisms can live apparently quite well without large portions of their DNA. This does not prove that the portions taken out have no role at all, but if they do, it's not the sort of functionality one typically expects from design. More like, it's the functionality that evolution produces when otherwise useless junk is lying around.
Getting back to "design predictions," Paley predicted that life would be like what an architect or an artificer would produce. Darwin showed that this was not at all the case. Hence, today's IDists avoid entailed predictions like that one, and try to inveigle "ID predictions" into known, or at least anticipated, phenomena. That is not the way to do science.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
A literary essayist? That's what makes the Darwin-Hitler connection in your mind? The views of someone who is neither a historian of the period, nor a scholar of Nazism, nor a scientist, nor a historian of science?
Wilson clearly knows nothing about what counts as neo-Darwinism, nor anything much about what Hitler actually said.
Thelemite: It's "Lamarckian", from the name Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (in older English texts, "La Marck". And Hitler's views resembled that about as much as they did Darwin's, not at all.
Actually, it was reading Mein Kampf that sealed the case for me.
I am a biblical creationist but I also don't see Hitlers ideas coming sincerely from evolution.
He may of indeed believed in German racial superiority but it still was just old fashioned saying your people are best and attacking others who threaten that.
The only thing that can be blamed on evolution is that Hitlers ideas were not foolish in the higher classes because they fit with ideas from evolution of inferior evolving to superior and so intermediates.
The establishment of the day, not regular people, is who would and could not say these presumptions behind Hitler's ideas were baseless. This indeed came from evolution. However even if evolution had never been invented it would not of stopped the holocaust or more importently the warring against Americans, Canadians, and all innocent peoples. First ones own people. I am Canadian.
Darwin did insist women were biologically inferior to men because of evolution but he insisted there was no racial biology to intelligence. Not his fault.
So well-known philosopher/historian of science A. N. Wilson mentions "how utterly incoherent were Hitler's neo-Darwinian ravings", and this somehow means, what? That the science of biological evolution teaches genocide? That biological evolution is scientifically incorrect?
Oh, wait, Wilson isn't a philosopher of science. He isn't a historian of science. Notice also the words "incoherent" and "ravings", which Wilson uses and then himself misses the import.
There is no doubt that Hitler, like so many other demagogues, opportunistically wove popular ideas and beliefs of the time into the fabric of his rhetoric in promoting the horrendous agenda of the Nazi regime. Hitler ravings using Christian rhetoric were also incoherent. And so this means what exactly?
But just stop and think - at least for more than one second - about this notion: The Jewish people were slaughtered by the Nazis and other anti-Semites because Darwin's scientific ideas about biological motivated them to do it.
The whole idea is utterly absurd, and has nothing whatsoever to do with *science*. If Wilson seriously thinks it does (which I doubt), this would merely prove that the man is daft in this area, for whatever reason. The history of the matter of the Holocaust has to do with horrible cultural antipathies toward immigrants, immoral personal envy that some have against those who are more successful than they are, and a not unconsiderable dollop of Christian rhetoric thrown in regarding the whole "the Jews killed Christ" thing.
In regard to Wilson's comments about materialistic explanation, that you have quoted here, I see a whole lot of expression of personal feelings - but not even one shred of rational argument. (And when I clicked your link and read his whole essay, I observed more of exactly the same. Personal feelings. No rational argument.) Indeed, that seems to be his point: Logic and fact do not provide personal comfort, we need something more. That is absolutely correct. Who could disagree with that? Certainly not "materialists". (And therein lies a whole 'nother topic.)
But Wilson goes beyond this with unjustified insinuations about Darwin and Hitler and pointless rhetorical questions used to make unsubstantiated assertions about the alleged incompetence of professional scientists.
"Do materialists really think that language just "evolved", like finches' beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally?"
Or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally?
Huh? Seriously? This is the empty rhetoric of a man banking on sheer scientific illiteracy.
I had never heard of A. N. Wilson before reading your post and checking out his essay. Now, my observation of the shallowness of his thinking on some basic and obvious points rather destroys for me any credibility that his essay might have merited.
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