Coyne’s last two chapters might best be treated together. This is because the closer we get to the end, the faster the evolution of this review wants to accelerate.
In these chapters, Coyne addresses the evolution of man. Chapter 8, “What About Us?” tackles the evolution of man, and his last chapter, “Evolution Redux,” also about us, tries to whistle up meaning from the void.
To his credit, Coyne at least tries to tackle the thorny topic of race as it relates to evolution.
“In The Descent of Man, Darwin had conjectured that our species had originated in Africa because our closest relatives, gorillas and chimpanzees, are both found there” (p. 191).
Darwin also thought this because early evolutionists believed that blacks, also found there, were the closest human relatives of those primates. Coyne keeps Darwin and other worthies out of it, but he does acknowledge the problem. “From the beginning of modern biology, racial classification has gone hand in hand with racial prejudice” (p. 212).
What he doesn’t adequately reckon with is the fact that such “prejudice” ought not, on evolution’s terms, be kept off the table. There have been creationists who have been racially bigoted, but when they were, it was contrary to their foundational beliefs about a common descent from Adam and from Noah. But if evolutionists came across a lost valley somewhere that had a tribe of “people” that walked upright, had a language with 500 words in it, and were four feet tall, what would they do with them? If we are related to the primates, is it automatically prejudice to try to figure out if some of us are closer relations than others?
Without entering the debates himself, Coyne reveals how particular the debates about human speciation can get.
“Whether a humanlike fossil is named as one species or another can turn on matters as small as half a millimeter in the diameter of a tooth, or slight differences in the shape of a thighbone” (p. 197).
As though differences between individuals didn’t display much greater variations than that! Their fossil history of the human race is like the vocabulary exercise I mentioned before, where a child is given ten words and told to work them into a story. The fact that all the words can be made to fit does not mean the story actually happened. And we are not talking a short little elementary school story. We are talking about ten thousand Russian novels, and we still have just ten vocabulary words. We are talking about millions of years and a relative handful of bones.
There are three basic considerations that need to be taken into account, and which Coyne does not do. The first is that evolution doesn’t have a notion of progress built into the science of it. Evolution is all about surviving, and not about listening to the symphony. That means that “up” is a metaphor, and it is not necessary for the “advanced” species to be the descendant. If we all devolve to cockroaches, that would be fine, provided there are a bunch of us carrying our genes into the glory of that wonderful future.
Second, Coyne has consistently refused to acknowledge that creationists believe in variation within kinds, and they believe in variations significant enough that were a evolutionary paleontologist to find a couple sets of bones from two variants, he would call them distinct species. Creationists believe that Goliath was a blood cousin to the pygmies.
And third, related to the second, it would be the work of a ten minute thought experiment to take an animal kind — the dog, let us say — pretend we had never seen one, and then to dig up the bones of a little lap dog, a spaniel, a Rottweiler, and an Irish wolfhound, and then construct a story about how the big ones came from the little ones. We could get from a circus pony to a Percheron the same way. But weaving the story doesn’t make the threads come into existence.
As he rounds into the straight, Coyne wants to gallop to a glorious finish. Evolution is a “scientific fact” (p. 222). “All the evidence” shows “without a scintilla of doubt” that “organisms have evolved” (p. 222). Evolution “always comes up right” (p. 223). “No serious biologist doubts these propositions” (p. 223).
Fortunately, it is very easy to tell who the serious biologists are, because they are the ones who never doubt these propositions. It is like survival of the fittest, only for biologists. The fittest survive, and we know who the fittest are because they survived. Isn’t science wonderful?
Controversies within the evolutionary community are a sign of a “vibrant, thriving field” (p. 223). Disagreements among creationists, on the other hand, indicate a group of cornpones in disarray (p. 208). This is simply a variation on the previous point.
I said earlier that Coyne wanted to whistle up meaning from the void. God has placed eternity in our hearts (Eccl. 3:11), and that cannot be adequately replaced by eons of evolution, however many adjectives you use. “We make symphonies, poems, and books to fulfill our aesthetic passions and emotional needs” (p. 233). We also build churches, and evolutionists want to deconstruct and explain away that need. When they are done, the symphonies and poems will be next. Any left over emotional needs can be fixed with sex, soma, and the feelies.
But if you lose meaning, and you have a desperate need for it, the only alternative is to make your own out of the surrounding meaninglessness. This has happened within living memory, a fact of history concerning which Coyne appears to be serenely unaware.
“The biggest of these misconceptions is that accepting evolution will somehow sunder our society, wreck our morality, impel us to behave like beasts, and spawn a new generation of Hitlers and Stalins. That just won’t happen, as we know from the many European countries whose residents wholly embrace evolution yet manage to remain civilized” (p. 233).
Excuse me for a minute while I make merry with some questions. What was it that produced the last generation of Hitlers and Stalins? How long ago was that? Did my father-in-law fight in that war? Did my father join the Navy to fight in that war? Did I serve in the Navy to help take down the evil empire that Stalin had consolidated? Why does it seem not all that long ago? And may I be pardoned for wondering what continent those bad guys were on? Did they remain civilized throughout the course of that conflict? Or did civilization vanish sometime (when? how? in the grip of what kinds of scientific theories?) and then reboot in 1945? And what was it that happened in 1945? Well, I will tell you. The American creationists (p. 192) kicked some evolutionary butt.
“There have been creationists who have been racially bigoted, but when they were, it was contrary to their foundational beliefs about a common descent from Adam and from Noah.” Yes, such as Robert Lewis Dabney, a virulent racist who justified Southern slavery by claiming that African-Americans had inherited a peculiar moral depravity, versus their wholesome and wonderful Anglo-Saxon masters who had inherited no such disposition. What kind of hypocrisy does it take to blame the evolutionists for their contributions to racism, which indeed were many, while minimizing and excusing this vicious man’s efforts to keep black folk down? If you… Read more »
Fredericka, from that lecture . . . “It would be easy to give some quotations from Dabney which would illustrate this view of race, a view that none of us here would want to be associated with. I refrain from doing so only because our opponents in this controversy are being led by liars, cheats, incompetents, and scoundrels. It would be very easy for them to say that ‘Douglas Wilson honored Dabney in his lecture, quoted Dabney to the following effect, and don’t you all see that Dabney is his hero?’ So I will simply acknowledge this unfortunate and sinful… Read more »
When did racism become the unforgivable sin?
“It would be easy to give some quotations from Dabney which would illustrate this view of race. . .” Will do. “. . .the great bulk of the slaves were either the pariahs of that barbarous society, or the kidnapped members of the feeble fragments of bush tribes, who had nearly perished before the comparative civilization of the Mandingoes and Greboes, living but one remove above the apes around them.” (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3351.) Why not laud and extol Adolf Hitler, while regretting he had a little tiny problem with anti-semitism? You… Read more »
When I needed to detract attention from the sins I’m committing to the ones you might be committing.
Fredericka:
I’m not sure which “side” philosophically you’re on. If you’re Christian, I’ll take a different tack. But I’ll suppose you’re an atheist.
Yes racism is bad. But all there is is matter in motion. Abstract concepts literally don’t exist. Therefore moral indignation is nonexistent and useless. And we’re all going to die anyway, and the universe will perish in a heat death. So who the hell cares anyway?
Fredericka: And if you’re a Christian, shouldn’t it bother you that you’re behaving in such a way that someone would confuse you with an atheist?
Seth B. wrote, “But I’ll suppose you’re an atheist.”
Hi Seth B. Kindly note, you’d be wrong. Would it surprise you to know that many Christians in pre-Civil war America thought exactly as I do about slavery? For a small library of their texts, and a fuller list of my objections to Mr. Wilson’s revisionist, pro-slavery views, please see: thriceholy.net/wilson.html
Valerie wrote, “And if you’re a Christian, shouldn’t it bother you that you’re behaving in such a way that someone would confuse you with an atheist?” Hi Valerie, how are you? It doesn’t bother me because they do this all the time. They invent various ‘world-views’ and make up names for them, and then ascribe them to their interlocutors, based usually on little or no evidence, and so nobody they are talking to really knows what they are talking about, yielding perplexity. This results in more complacency and self-satisfaction on their part than conviction or conversion on the other party’s… Read more »
Frederika, Do you have any moral blind spots? Where are they? That’s what I thought. Pastor Wilson stated clearly that Dabney’s views on race were ones that none of us would want to associate with. He also said, “There have been creationists who have been racially bigoted, but when they were, it was contrary to their foundational beliefs about a common descent from Adam and from Noah.” In other words, they were thinking in an inconsistent way. Racism is not inconsistent with and evolutionary view of man. Dabney’s views were not uncommon at the time, and were often based on… Read more »
I think you missed my point, which was not about your opinions, but about your quarrelsomeness.
Randy wrote, quoting Abraham Lincoln, “. . .and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” Hi Randy, herein lies the problem. When people complain that the Southern racists Mr. Wilson champions were, well, racist, his rejoinder is to claim that the Northern abolitionists were every bit as racist. This is how, he imagines, he is taking racism off the table. But the claim is absurd. Programmatic racism was the South’s entire defense of its position, but the same was never true of abolitionism, which consciously and intentionally… Read more »
Valerie wrote, “I think you missed my point, which was not about your opinions, but about your quarrelsomeness.”
Seriously… respected omni-darwinist publications now propose the possibility that humans are – in part – descended from some sort of ape/PIG hybridization.
Again, this is serious. If we read the reasons why, we would find a whole lot of grudging acceptance of the problems with the neo-Darwinian theory itself.
Having said that, it seems to me that, if we are evolved, it is telling that white folks look more like pigs than apes in many cases.
Maybe there’s something to that.
http://phys.org/news/2013-07-human-hybrids-closer-theory-evidence.html
Valerie, sorry about the html mis-fire bomb.
When people complain that Southern racists were racists, my response is, “Yeah, and that’s bad. But what Dabney said about American conservatism was spot-on.” It’s also perfectly fine to try to understand why those people easily fell into that sin (didja see I called it sin?). Doesn’t excuse it at all.
Hi Johnny. Are we to understand that all the atheist evolutionists need do is issue a pro forma disclaimer, like “So I will simply acknowledge this unfortunate and sinful element in nineteenth century evolutionist thinking. . .” and they’re golden?
Fredericka, please notice that I commended Coyne for facing this issue head on, and I fully accept his disclaimers with regard to his views on race.
It’s unfortunate as well as pathetic that Fredericka continues to spread disinformation about Wilson’s view of Dabney, and racism in general. Doubly so, because Wilson anticipated this very tactic and behavior when he covered Dabney. Apparently Fredericka has sealed in her mind the notion that the entire South was utterly inseparable from kidnapping and racial animosity. This demonstrates a profound and stubborn ignorance of history and race relations at that time. It is the modern lie against the South. It’s like a reverse racism that refuses to heal. The way to bring healing and reconciliation is to do what Wilson… Read more »
katecho wrote,
Oh, my! How many?
Fredericka, Point well-missed. I actually think Mr. Wilson’s rejoinder was to renounce their racism as sin. He was not championing their racism. Do you champion Lincoln? What about his racism? Have you ever favorably cited someone on a subject with whom you had serious disagreements on other important issues? Do we really have to approve of every view of a person before finding some of what they have to say to be helpful? Can we not renounce the parts we disagree with and discuss the parts we do? Do you really propose that we label everyone and if that label… Read more »
Woah, wait a minute. By what right? By what standard? Who says? Who cares? Who says racism is wrong? If God is Lord over all, he can say racism is right. He can say whites are better than blacks. Or do you deny the sovereignty of God? Who says? Who cares? See, your presuppositionalist tricks aren’t very impressive.
Frederick, racism sell well. It is all a matter of who are you racially biased against. If it is Whites, it is free game. Ask George Zimmerman. If his name had ben Jorge Zamorra, we would never have heard of him.
Jeff: No, God could not declare that racism is right arbitrarily, because the would contradict his Word, and His Word is the standard of right and wrong. God can’t lie.
Hi Randy. I think even a stopped clock is right twice a day. However I would not take the trouble to sing the praises of the stopped clock.
“We had a Civil War, and the good guys won. Glory, Hallelujah! What kind of people want to cheer for the bad guys?”
So the good guys are the ones who wanted hundreds of thousands slaughtered for their cause? Glory, Hallelujah? I’m pretty sure Planned Parenthood has an executive position for people who hold that view.
So, to summarize: Wilson said some guy was right when he said “x”, and wrong when he said “y”. Fredericka comes along and says but saying “y” is wrong. But saying “y” is wrong. But saying “y” is wrong.
You are beaten, Wilson.
Fredericka wrote:
Fredericka, is there something that Wilson could say that would satisfy your objection to him?
If so, what would that be? Would you really be satisfied that he had undone the offenses you believe him to have done?
If not, would you mind if we got back to the topic of each post at hand, instead of your constant tangential reversion to your perceptions of his racism and sexism, because your hobbyhorse doesn’t have any destination anyway?
Haha! Love the childish response to rebuke, Fredericka: “I’m not the one being quarrelsome, he is.” Where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah, every bratty kid responding to a parent’s correction: “He started it!” Your pettiness proves my point.
Don’t. Feed. The. Trolls.
Ditto to what Rob said. ^
Prov. 26:4
Valerie wrote,
Hi Valerie. You think? Have you ever heard the one about, ‘I’m not the one who is racist, Abraham Lincoln is’?
Jane Dunsworth wrote,
Hi Jane. That slavery is unbiblical, as indeed it is.
Jeff Dovalovsky wrote, Good thing God never took the trouble to praise David… oh, wait. Hi Jeff. God never follows David in saying that adultery is good. Wilson, however, does follow Dabney, to perdition and beyond. For example, do you ever wonder where this cultic, unbalanced interpretation comes from, that the slave trade is bad, but slavery is good? It comes from Dabney, a man with whom Wilson ‘strongly identifies’ (Black and Tan, Kindle location 1362). See, for example: “The slave trade was an abomination. The Bible condemns it. . .but apart from the slave trade, in a slave-holding society… Read more »
Fredricka,
Could you kindly describe what you mean by “unbiblical”?
Thanks in advance,
Matthias
Rob wrote, “Don’t. Feed. The. Trolls.” Rob, please give me a reason why people shouldn’t call your little bit of heaven out there in Idaho a ‘cult.’ This man routinely responds to well-deserved criticism by pretending people are quoting him out of context, when there is nothing exculpatory in the context, by starting up the smoke machine and enveloping everyone and everything in a purple haze of over-heated and inscrutable rhetoric, and if that doesn’t work, flinging trash in people’s faces. In your view, evidently, he shouldn’t bother to do even that much. You people seem to view him as… Read more »
Tim wrote, “But saying “y” is wrong.” Hi Tim. If I can attach any meaning to your criticism, you claim I am arguing by bare assertion. Kindly note I have no desire to do so. Do you seriously want to defend Mr. Wilson’s defense of Southern slavery? He claims there are “biblical standards for slavery,” and criticizes only the South’s departures from that standard: “These differences between the biblical standard and Southern slavery make it impossible to offer an unqualified defense of the institution as it existed and operated in the South.” (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 730).… Read more »
Fredericka, Disregarding the fact that you don’t seem to respect anyone else’s opinion but your own, I would like to point out that you seem to be misunderstanding Pastor Wilson’s position on slavery, which seems to be the root of the issue here. Nowhere does he say that slavery is ideal or ultimately the perfect state of society for Christians. He merely says that the Bible never declares Roman, or pagan, slavery in the hands of Christian slaves and masters either good or evil. Paul, in the book of Philemon, mostly appears to regard slavery as simply ‘there.’ He never… Read more »
Matthias wrote, Fredricka, Could you kindly describe what you mean by “unbiblical”? Hi Matthias. Sure. Wilson claims, quoting with approval, that R. L. Dabney’s “exegesis on slavery” was “solid and compelling.” (Black and Tan, Kindle location 1278). I cannot reconcile this with my Bible, which requires liberty from servitude at the Sabbatical: “If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.” (Exodus 21:2). At the time of the Civil War, the vast majority of Southern slaves were native-born Americans and confessing Christians. Do you agree with ‘Pastor’… Read more »
Thanks, Fredericka, for this straightforward expression of the crux of your difficulty. I realize you probably explained things this way in the meta of some other blog post, but it is nice for the occasional reader like me, who has seen you commandeer several of the metas on this site, to see what your real issue is, and what you need to hear (read?) to change your opinion (note that I refrained from saying, shut you up). Per Churchill, “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” On this issue, I’m afraid you qualify.… Read more »
Hey Freddy baby, is it OK if we mildly criticize Pastor Wilson when he needs it yet not throw his babies out with his bathwater? (By the way, he and a black pastor named Thabiti Anybwhile blogged back and forth respectfully–respectfully–over Black and Tan not too long ago.) Doug is not a racist, and repudiates racism as sin. Hallelujah! He’s right that some blacks fought for the south (an old issue of his Credenda Agenda magazine said, as I recall, at one point 5% of Lee’s army was black, and in the 1920s over 200 black CSA veterans applied for… Read more »
I am impressed by Fredericka’s logic,articulateness, and persistence on this point. What people seem unable to grasp is that any time Mr Wilson raises topics regarding race, regardless of context, he also reminds every reader of his seeming defense of slavery in the American South. If he wants people to stop accusing him of portraying plantation life as consisting of happy, childlike blacks and benevolent Christian whites, he has to be willing to distance himself from these views each time he raises the subject of race. If I had Mr. Wilson’s past issues with race, I might prefer to avoid… Read more »
So the good guys are the ones who wanted hundreds of thousands slaughtered for their cause? Glory, Hallelujah? I’m pretty sure Planned Parenthood has an executive position for people who hold that view. I do not get the modern Reformed obsession with supporting the Southern Rebellion. I’m sorry, but if you just read the documents that the Secessionists themselves put out, you will see that they rebelled against their legitimate governing authority for no other reason than the protection (even if only for a time) of the institution of slavery. Higher magistrates always get the benefit of the doubt against… Read more »
Of course, as soon as I wrote that I could see one way out: There can be a disconnection between the fact that the Bible does not forbid slavery outright, but permits it and regulates it under certain conditions, and the reasons for a specific instance of slavery. Dabney may well have made a scriptural case for slavery (in the abstract) that was unassailable by honest exegetical foes. But even in the scripture there are many reasons that a people might be enslaved: debt, love, loss in war, man-stealing. In some of these cases, it might be that the ones… Read more »
Thanks for the reply, Fredricka. I was hoping you didn’t mean “unprecedented in terms of anything less than inflammatory disapproval and condemnation” by your use of “unbiblical.” But I had to look back at the article, and then to your first reply, to try to find what exactly you were objecting to. It seems you’re objecting to Wilson’s use of Dabney at all for some other issue somewhere other than on this immediate article. I’m confident you’re mature enough to absorb that complaint, but by continuing, you clearly feel justified in frying this fish. With respect, don’t take my replying… Read more »
Fredericka wrote: “Do you agree with ‘Pastor’ Wilson and R. L. Dabney that perpetual and life-long servitude was the “Biblical” prescription for these people, and if so, why?” Before we can answer, we must first know: has Fredericka agreed to stop beating her husband? [Note how the form of the complex question implies guilt either way. It’s an old rhetorical device, and a loaded-question fallacy.] Fredericka has shown herself incapable of representing Wilson accurately on this subject, and this is easily demonstrated by simply asking her to quote Wilson saying or agreeing “that perpetual and life-long servitude was the “Biblical”… Read more »
I don’t accuse Mr. Wilson of personally being racist. I think that the persistence of people like Fredericka and me (which I do understand is tiresome to those who have no problem with this) is because we truly cannot understand his position and keep thinking we must be missing something. Is Mr. Wilson saying: “Slavery in the south was bad and racist, but I can’t condemn it because the Bible suggests that God was on board with people enslaving other people”? If so, why does he need to gild the lily by suggesting that slavery wasn’t so bad? It would… Read more »
Jill Smith wrote: I don’t accuse Mr. Wilson of personally being racist. I think that the persistence of people like Fredericka and me (which I do understand is tiresome to those who have no problem with this) is because we truly cannot understand his position and keep thinking we must be missing something. Jill’s concerns are thoughtfully stated, and it genuinely appears that she is not trying to accuse Wilson of racism. But this is in contrast to what Fredericka has done. To accuse Wilson of endorsing and defending Southern slavery is not an innocent misunderstanding of Wilson. It’s a… Read more »
You know how everybody has a list of questions they want to ask God when they get to heaven? High on my list is, “Who was katecho?”