Posts Tagged ‘Stephen Jay Gould’
the evolution of complexity
Gould’s view of the movement to complexity
I’m not sure if this is a controversial topic – perhaps it depends on whether you think complexity is in some sense superior to simplicity regarding organic life, and I suspect that we humans are a bit biased on the issue.
Bacteria and archaea are still thriving in our biosphere, in vast numbers. These two classes or domains of prokaryote differ in various ways. The eukaryotes, the third domain into which organisms have been divided, are believed to have evolved from an ancestor of modern archaea.
A question. With such forms of life thriving from billions of years ago, why become more complex? In what way would it have been more advantageous? But in thinking of advantage, aren’t we thinking outside of the prokaryotic box? Shouldn’t scientists (I’ve seen this written) confine themselves to ‘how’ questions rather than ‘why’ questions? But since I’m neither a scientist nor a philosopher, I don’t know what to think.
In any case, ‘how’ questions seem quite a bit easier to answer. One way to think about it, I suppose, is to think of ‘accidents’, or simply differences, that confer an advantage. What might be called imprecise (or just varied) replications mostly wouldn’t survive, but some would turn out to be beneficial to survival, and so, over eons – complexity.
Problem solved.
Stephen Jay Gould provides an explanation for complexity in his book Life’s Grandeur, which I find overly verbose, but I think I can simplify it, in my simple way. These early prokaryotes would’ve replicated themselves almost perfectly, but not quite. Sometimes, very rarely, they would’ve missed something, or messed something up, during replication, called binary fission in prokaryotes. This would mostly have made the next generation non-viable, because generally prokaryotes are so tiny and simple that if they were any simpler they’d come up against a ‘wall’ of non-viability. The only way a different but viable next gen could be created would be if something was added rather than subtracted.
But how could this happen? Well, the ‘addition’ might be something genetic, but let’s not go there for now – Darwin didn’t need genetics to develop his theory of natural selection, nor did he need a concept of progress, though, unsurprisingly, he fell into that trap now and again. I’ve not looked deeply into binary fission but maybe the fission might occasionally lead to something not quite the same as its predecessor, in the way that archaea are not quite the same as bacteria, or that the first eukaryotes weren’t quite the same as those ancestral archaea. That’s the funny thing about the term ‘evolved from’ – it’s so easy to say, but a lot harder to pin down precisely. Anyway, maybe some kind of genetic ‘doubling up’ made some difference, a hardiness, a more diverse diet – if prokaryotes can be said to have diets. In any case, it was all about ‘more’ – a very all-encapsulating four-letter word. For example, think of stromatolites, those colonies of cyanobacteria. Was it colonisation from the start, or did some genetic change create this kind of super-organic effect?
All of this is as hard to pin down precisely as life from non-life, but we know it happened. And we also know that once life got itself well started, it thrived pretty much everywhere, not just over our planet, but quite deeply under the surface, in the most unlikely places. And considering the vast numbers, all of them replicating, the possibility of something more complicated surviving and battening on to others in an advantageous way becomes plausible, surely.
So, prokaryotes to eukaryotes. Were there intermediate stages? Let’s look at the differences. Eukaryotes are all the life we see. Prokaryotes are invisible to us without microscopes, etc. We’ve divided them into archaea and bacteria, based on a number of differences, notably the structure of their cell walls, but these structures also differ between species of bacteria. Gould has explored the issue of ‘progress’ and complexity from a bacterial perspective in the lengthy penultimate chapter of Life’s grandeur, entitled ‘The Power of the Modal Bacter, or Why the Tail can’t Wag the Dog’. I looked up Modal Bacter online and came up empty, which is why Gould irritates me so, as a writer for ‘the general public’. I’m guessing it means the bacterial mode of life. I’m going to use Gould’s chapter for the rest of this post, which looks like being a long one. So, at the beginning of the chapter, he writes this:
… simple forms still predominate in most environments, as they always have. Faced with this undeniable fact, supporters of progress (that is, nearly all of us throughout the history of evolutionary thought) have shifted criteria and ended up grasping at straws. (The altered criterion may not have struck the graspers as such a thin reed, for one must first internalise the argument of this book – trends as changes in variation rather than things moving somewhere – to recognise the weakness).
I’m not quite sure what this means, but ‘progress’ sticks out. We can make progress in learning a language/trade/sport, but has life made progress? I would tend to agree that this term isn’t useful from an evolutionary perspective. The criterial shift is surely toward complexity, and this is surely happening in the human line of development. Unfortunately we can’t measure neural complexity in our most recent ancestors – the closest living connections we have are chimps/bonobos, and here’s something from the Cambridge University Press website:
while chimpanzee brains are markedly smaller than those of humans, their brain anatomy is so similar that a discourse comparing the two might be little different from this declaration: The chimpanzee brain is a human brain with one-third of the neurons (Herculano-Houzel & Kaas, 2011).
This odd observation – very similar anatomy with one third of neurons – is a head-scratcher. I would have thought that neural organisation, perhaps especially in the prefrontal cortex, would be key here. After all, isn’t this the point of such comparisons? We’re looking at neurology to help us understand the differences we see in the culture and behaviour of Pan troglodytes and Homo sapiens, are we not? And it’s surely fair enough to say our human behaviour is more complex, what with our language, our science, our culture, our cities and whatnot? To point this out is not to be hubristic. In pointing this out we need to be aware, and many of us are, of the downsides – our altering of the atmosphere, our responsibility for species loss, and so on. I should also point out, since I’ve mentioned hubris, that free will is a myth, as I’ve argued in more than one previous post. I didn’t choose to be human, it just happened to me. Not my achievement. Nothing to be proud or ashamed of. Just something to make sense of, as best I can.
So, bearing this in mind, human complexity is worth studying, and it’s not about patting ourselves on the back. This particular complexity of humans – and it may be that, in the vastness of the universe, different living complexities have evolved – is clearly a product of evolution. We wouldn’t be here without the ‘Modal Bacter’, as Gould calls it, or without the chain of connection that goes back to the earliest life forms.
So, it seems to me, that Gould, in trying to question, or demolish, the pedestal he believes we have placed ourselves on, and to give himself credit for so doing, is missing the point by raising up the ‘Modal Bacter’, as if it should somehow be given obeisance for being the great survivor and the great progenitor, while we are the mere accidental offshoots. Take this quote (along with my insertion):
Wind back the tape of life to the origin of modern multicellular animals in the Cambrian explosion [or indeed to the ‘Modal Bacter’ millions of years before], let the tape play again from this identical starting point, and the replay will populate the earth (and generate a right tail of life) with a radically different set of creatures. The chance that this alternative set will contain anything remotely like a human being must be effectively nil, while the probability of any kind of creature endowed with self-consciousness must also be vanishingly small.
S J Gould, Life’s grandeur, p 214
There’s an obvious flaw in the logic here. If you take the tape back to the Cambrian explosion or any other point in time and replay it, you’ll get the same result, because it’s the same tape! What he presumably means, is that if some condition was changed back in the Cambrian, or earlier, then a very different result would ensue for later generations. Or, that we humans are just ‘accidents’ resulting from particular initial, or previous, conditions. And so with all life, including his much-vaunted bacteria. Not to mention all planets, stars, etc. This should hardly be seen as a revelation. Which makes me wonder just what Gould is on about.
So let’s explore further. Here’s another of his ‘critiques’:
Under the traditional model of evolutionary history as a ‘cone of increasing diversity’, life moves ever upward to greater progress, and outward to a larger number of species – from simple Cambrian beginnings for multicellular animals to our modern levels of progress and range of diversity. Under this iconography, pathways actually followed run along predictable courses that would be at least roughly repeated in any replay.
Again I find this sort of writing overly tendentious. Either life has become more diverse in expression or it has not, and this has nothing to do with progress. And researchers are exploring this question, hopefully without recourse to ‘iconography’. It may be, as Gould argues, that vertebrates were in a ‘tenuous position’ before the Cambrian explosion and that, with some tweaking of prehistory, they wouldn’t have survived and we wouldn’t be here. So presumably this means we should be more humble and less overlordly. But is this something to be humble about, or proud of? Maybe it’s worth being aware of, just as I wouldn’t exist if my parents hadn’t met. But the fact is, they did, and vertebrates didn’t go extinct. So, if we stick with the facts, life would be a little more tractable. And no need to worry about progress or perhaps even complexity. We find complexity everywhere, from bacteria to the biosphere, and on to black holes and big bangs. It’s such a fun world to explore! And that’s the thing that easily makes me remain ‘umble. The world’s complexity isn’t my doing, obviously, and I hardly comprehend even the tiniest part of it….
References
Archaea vs. Bacteria
Stephen Jay Gould, Life’s grandeur, 1996
stuff on punctuated equilibrium and organic complexity
isolation, strong selection, rapid change – an example of peripatric speciation
I’ve read a few books by Steven Jay Gould, and have found them sometimes a bit heavy-handed and clever-clever, though I’m sure I’ve learned a lot from them. I’ve also strongly disagreed with his notion of NOMA or non-overlapping magisteria, and have written about it in the long ago. The notion didn’t last long, it seems. So I’m wondering about how the concept of punctuated equilibrium, developed by Gould and others back in the day, is faring.
The idea was first proposed by Gould and Niles Eldredge in 1972. The PBS evolution library puts it this way:
… species are generally stable, changing little for millions of years. This leisurely pace is “punctuated” by a rapid burst of change that results in a new species and that leaves few fossils behind. According to this idea, the changes leading to a new species don’t usually occur in the mainstream population of an organism, where changes wouldn’t endure because of so much interbreeding among like creatures. Rather, speciation is more likely at the edge of a population, where a small group can easily become separated geographically from the main body and undergo changes that can create a survival advantage and thus produce a new, non-interbreeding species.
This is strange and interesting. I had thought that the ‘rapid burst of change’ was considered to be due to a sudden change in external conditions, brought about by, say, a burst of volcanic activity, or a massive meteorite, or whatever caused the Cambrian explosion (of new life forms) over 500 million years ago. I might return to that shortly. The type of speciation mentioned above, in which there is separation and isolation, creating unique circumstances for diversification in small populations, is called peripatric speciation. It’s one of the four modes of speciation generally recognised, the others being allopatric, parapatric and sympatric. Peripatric speciation is described as ‘a special version of the allopatric speciation mode’. A good example of this allopatric speciation mode, it seems to me, is the separation of the ancestors of bonobos and chimps into these two species about two million years ago. To back me up here’s a quote from UC Berkeley’s Understanding Evolution website:
Allopatric speciation is just a fancy name for speciation by geographic isolation… In this mode of speciation, something extrinsic to the organisms prevents two or more groups from mating with each other regularly, eventually causing that lineage to speciate. Isolation might occur because of great distance or a physical barrier, such as a desert or river…
So to round this out, I must inform myself about parapatric and sympatric speciation, which means trying to put other people’s explanations into my own words. Parapatric speciation occurs when there’s no outside barrier to gene flow (the movement of genetic material, often in the form of individual carriers of genetic material, from one population to another). Think of human migration, where the mixing of genes might not be random, due to culture barriers, but of course the chances of mixing would be much greater than if there was no migration. Sympatric speciation involves a reduction of gene flow without distancing or physical barriers. In humans it could happen when a particular set of humans breeds only with others of that set. This would take a very long time, and for humans it would involve a very artificial situation, but it has been known to occur, though rarely, in some species of insects and fish.
So, back to punctuated equilibrium. That this concept has been explored, with some evidence found but also disputed, is perhaps an indication of how novel and complex the whole topic of evolution still is. We look for traces of evolution in the fossil record, but that record is piecemeal and easily subject to ‘contamination’ over time. To be honest, much of what I’ve read from the proponents of punctuated equilibria goes over my head, requiring, it seems, an understanding of macroevolution, cladogenesis, phyletic gradualism and much much more. So I’m at a crossroads, sort of. Should I just give up, or plough on, with my not very efficient plough? How important is the topic? I really don’t know.
Here’s an example of the problem, as I see it, from ScienceDirect.com:
Cladogenesis is a phenomenon of evolution that occurs by the divergence of taxa due to positive selection for the adaptation of sister populations from a common ancestor to different environments due to their anatomical, morphological, geographic, temporal, ecological, and/or ethological (behavioural) isolation.
Ah, so that’s what cladogenesis is! But really, what’s a clado (a clade?) and what are taxa? Who’s this being written for? Obviously not dilettantes like me. I’ve turned instead to videos, and found one by someone I know well – sort of. Robert Sapolsky, whose big books Behave and Determined I’ve read with great interest in recent years. Sapolsky gives the story of gradualism versus punctuated equilibrium a humorous twist, with the proponents of gradualism calling the punctuators ‘jerks’, while they in turn were called ‘creeps’. Maybe, but is this really a big issue? Isn’t it quite reasonable to assume that just as the Earth’s biosphere itself has changed gradually but with the odd convulsion along the way, both forms of speciation, or many forms, have occurred?
So I’ve finally found a more enlightening (for me) video, obviously made some time ago, because it featured both Gould, who died in 2002, and Eldridge talking about their work, in good old layperson terms.
Anyway, for me the controversy or non-controversy over punctuated equilibrium is nowhere near as interesting as the one highlighted by Gould in his 1996 book Life’s Grandeur:
The basic theory of natural selection offers no statement about general progress, and supplies no mechanism whereby overall advance might be expected. Yet both Western culture and the undeniable facts of a fossil record that started with bacteria alone, and has now produced exalted us, cry out in unison for a rationale that will place progress into the centre of evolutionary theory.
This is particularly fascinating/amusing for me, as it plays into the ‘directed evolution’ concept which seems to me to be the god-botherers’ last hope for their world-view, though it seems to rule out ‘young Earth creationism’, though you never know with these people. I recall the late Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s most controversial Catholic, trying to argue for God-directed evolution shortly before sex-based controversies caught up with him and he disappeared from public view. Unfortunately, you need to make scientific sense of what this God-thing is, given that our planet is only one of probably billions out there, each of which has its story to tell, as part of a 13.8 billion-year universe.
Gould tries to deal with this conundrum – the undirected nature of evolution, from the point of view of ‘progress’, and how this process has produced ‘exalted us’ – in the last 60 pages or so of Life’s Grandeur, but I find that his tendency to use verbose language really gets in the way of comprehension (the key seems to be a fixed boundary condition) – so much so that I prefer to look to other sources. A research article from 2000, ‘Evolution of biological complexity’, points out, fairly obviously, that the key is to effectively define and perhaps quantify complexity – a difficult task, it seems. After all, complexity is complex.
Definitions may vary and not everyone is likely to agree, but what this article focuses on is genomic complexity, and information – ‘the amount of information a sequence stores about its environment’. I’m not sure what’s meant by a sequence here – perhaps a sequence in an evolutionary chain. The article is long and, for me, forbiddingly mathematical, but as it concludes in the abstract..
We show that, because natural selection forces genomes to behave as a natural “Maxwell Demon,” within a fixed environment, genomic complexity is forced [my emphasis] to increase.
So what is a ‘Maxwell Demon’ (I do know that it comes from James Clerk Maxwell, and that it has to do with the second law of thermodynamics), and how has this ‘proof’ fared in the 14 years since it was published?
Does the emergence of complexity of life on Earth need to be explained? Some, of course, want to explain it in terms of ‘purpose’, opening the door to agency and all that stuff, but I’m not going there. Others might worry about it in terms of that pesky second law (entropy always increases), but then there are ‘closed systems’, such as the Earth’s biosphere, which temporarily act against the ‘growth’ of entropy. Don’t worry, life will become extinct here eventually, and the whole planet will fall apart – the centre doesn’t hold.
Darwin himself was a bit contradictory about this issue. Often he enjoyed, it seems, to point out the directionlessness (to coin a word?) of natural selection, as it seemed to stick in the craws of some, but more often he fell in with his own culture and class and wrote of savages and the less advanced, in at least pseudo-evolutionary terms.
Anyway, complexity has arisen, or evolved, on this planet, so I’ll try to think about it further, with the help of reading and listening to others, in my next post.
References
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/5/l_035_01.html
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/modes-of-speciation/peripatric-speciation/
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Punctuated_equilibria
Stephen Jay Gould, Life’s Grandeur: the spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin, 1996
stuff on exaptation and Archaeopteryx
my photo of archaeopteryx, from London’s Natural History Museum
Through my various readings and researches, if they can be credited as such, I’ve from time to time come across the famous image of Archaeopteryx, a fossil (now the type specimen) of some sort of dinosaur-bird discovered in the early 1860s, and with some fanfare, I think, presented as proof of Darwin’s recently published thesis, On the Origin of Species (1859). Now, being an impoverished type, with an elementary scientific education, I’ve travelled little, and much of my reading has been from borrowed or scrounged titles, including the aforementioned work. However, a few years ago, due to a lucky and undeserved inheritance, I got to travel to London from my home in Australia, whereupon I paid a visit to the British museum. Wandering lonely as a cloud along the hallowed halls, I suddenly found myself face to face with the Archaeopteryx specimen so very occasionally but memorably depicted in the science texts previously perused, and I must say my heart skipped a beat. Not that I quite knew what all the fuss was about. It had something to do with missing links and flying dinosaurs and, as mentioned, confirmation of the controversial thesis.
Anyway a recent reading of the essay ‘Not necessarily a wing’, in Stephen Jay Gould’s Bully for Brontosaurus collection, has taken me back to Archaeopteryx, the first bird, as Gould calls it, though surely we can’t be certain about that. However the important point is that birds evolved from creatures that weren’t birds, and it likely wasn’t a sudden thing. As Gould describes it, arguments against Darwin’s theory, sometimes by evolutionists of a different stripe, questioned the development of features such as wings, and their usefulness before they were ‘developed’ enough to enable flight. Darwin responded with the concept of ‘functional shift’, more recently labelled ‘exaptation’, thanks to academic contributions from Gould himself, among others.
Wikipedia has it that ‘older potential avialans have [recently] been identified’. The term ‘avialan’, from Avialae (“bird wings”) ‘is a clade containing the only living dinosaurs, the birds, and their closest relatives’. In any case what’s more important is how flight developed in early dinosaurs. Archaeopteryx lived about 150 million years ago (the late Jurassic) and was about magpie-sized, but probably nothing like a modern bird in appearance. It had teeth, unlike modern birds, and a long bony tail, and various other features characteristic of dinosaurs. So it has been described as a transitional species. But what does this mean? Are we a transitional species? Isn’t every species transitioning in some way? (Add plug for transitioning to a bonoboesque humanity here).
What we can say is that Archaeopteryx was likely one of the first flying dinosaurs as well as the first bird or proto-bird, and we now have 12 separate fossils of the species. But of course discoveries continue. From Wikipedia,
… in recent years, the discovery of several small, feathered dinosaurs has created a mystery for palaeontologists, raising questions about which animals are the ancestors of modern birds and which are their relatives.
But let me return to this issue of exaptation – in this case, as regards wings and flight. Gould quotes from the 19th century dissenter vis-a-vis Darwin’s theory, St George Mivart, on the general problem:
Natural selection utterly fails to account for the conservation and development of the minute and rudimentary beginnings, the slight and infinitesimal commencements of structures, however useful those structures may afterwards become.
Mivart opted for a ‘comparatively sudden modification of a marked and important kind’, rather than incremental but still adaptive changes – that’s to say, changes naturally selected for, though not of course by any kind of design. But Darwin countered that these ‘sudden modifications’ smacked of the miraculous – ‘to admit all this is, as it seems to me, to enter into the realms of miracle, and to leave those of Science’.
Mivart worked hard to find large-scale modifications that might fit within an evolutionary framework, while at the same time Darwin had to work hard to show the adaptiveness of small-scale changes that might, over a long period, lead, for example, to flight. The organism would be gradually changed in terms of its hunting and feeding practices, for example, which would be incrementally selected for until the structural-anatomical changes led to an increasingly sustained ability to leave the ground for nutrition further afield and/or higher above ground.
Okay, this isn’t exactly what Darwin presents, which is change of function (functional shift – exaptation). I’m suggesting that the change itself would be so gradual as to be barely noticeable, functionally, except through the ‘compression’ of time afforded by our analyses of fossil records. However, unsurprisingly, analysts have been here before, as Gould’s essay tells us. In the case of insects, wing size compared to body size has been analysed carefully in recent decades, with respect to flight versus insulation or thermoregulation, and the results have favoured an exaptation model – first the advantages of thermoregulation, then as wings grew in proportion to body size, the advantages – and such advantages! – of flight.
The details here are complex almost beyond description – certainly beyond my ability to describe them – and we may perhaps never know whether Archaeopteryx is the direct descendant of modern birds or a cousin of that descendant. The Wikipedia article on the species is virtually book-length, with well over 100 references. The arguments run along similar lines regarding various human antecedents, with lumpers and splitters debating the position of Homo ergaster, Homo luzonensis et al. Gould points out, I think rightly, that evolutionary history is very bushy and human researchers are overly obsessed with finding direct, vertical lines of descent – ladders among the bushes, or transforming bushes into sets of ladders. The bushes themselves have their intrinsic interest and beauty.
References
Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Not necessarily a wing’, in Bully for Brontosaurus, 1991
gods, science and explanation
If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: ‘Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.’ Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept.
Sam Harris, Letter to a christian nation
Reading David Deutsch’s The beginning of infinity, together with a collection of Stephen Jay Gould’s essays, Dinosaur in a haystack, has reminded me of my critique of Gould’s bad NOMA argument, which I reread lately. So here’s a revisiting and a development of that critique.
Put very simply, Gould argued that religion was about moral and spiritual matters, and that science was about causes and effects in the natural world, and that these spheres of interest didn’t overlap, so co-existence was not only entirely possible but mutually beneficial.
In his argument, I noted, Gould generally avoided mentioning gods, or God. It seems to me now, that this is more of a problem than I thought at the time, because religions are all about gods. While I don’t want to be hard and fast about this, religions really don’t exist without gods. In that sense, you might call Buddhism a spiritual belief system or worldview or discipline, but it isn’t a religion. It doesn’t use gods to explain stuff. And Confucianism even less so. Certainly in earlier times, in a more god-besotted world, Buddhism and even Confucianism were associated with or could be easily assimilated with local deities in China, Korea and Japan, and the world of morality was generally associated with portents and god-induced ‘disasters’, but that was to be expected in a pre-scientific climate, which prevailed globally for most of human history.
This is the point. For century upon century, gods, their behaviour, powers and attitudes or natures, were the explanations for war, famine, disease and the everyday accidents that humans suffered from. Even as some medical and other knowledge developed, the will of the gods was always there as a background explanation for the otherwise inexplicable. And so it shouldn’t be surprising, in a world teeming with god-explanations, that the pioneers of more earthly, measurable and testable explanations for phenomena still clung to this background of god-explanations for so much of what they saw around them – the birds in the sky, the food that sprang from the ground or hung from the trees, the life-giving rain, the failed harvests, the floods, the plagues, the invasions and so on.
Nowadays, what we call science can provide better explanations in every area we can think of than do god-explanations, and this is a major blow to religion and its relevance in the modern world. I would describe it as a death-blow. Indeed gods aren’t just bad explanations, they’re not really explanations at all. Why gods, after all? What are they, and where do they come from? No coherent explanation can be offered for them. Of course the obvious answer is that they come from the human imagination, as is evidenced by the human qualities they display – the beauty of the love-goddess, the long-bearded father-god, the thunderous dyspepsia of the war-god and so forth – but such an explanation is anathema to religion, as it collapses the house of cards. So an attempt is made to divert attention from inquiring into the ineluctable mystery of the god’s existence – sometimes by making such inquiries a kind of sacrilegious abomination – and to focus more on the god’s commandments. This is a move made by many a staunch Catholic.
I’ve heard such people say that the ten commandments of the Old Testament are clearly the basis of all our laws and morality. I’d like to have a look at them, particularly in terms of explanation. As young children, we’re often given commands – do this, don’t do that – by our parents. These commands generally have an explanation supporting them, which we learn later. But the explanations are essential, and commands without effective explanations to support them are surely a form of tyranny – at least that’s how I see it.
So let’s have a look at these commandments, which are so essential to ‘western’ or ‘civilised’ morality, according to some. I’ve put them in my own words.
- 1. I’m your god, you mustn’t have other gods before me.
This has nothing whatever to do with morality as far as I can see. This god says elsewhere that he’s a jealous god, and this is further proof. Catholics gloss this commandment as a commandment against idolatry, but that’s highly problematic because it makes the enormous assumption that the god called God is not an idol. If he’s saying ‘I’m the true god, all the others are fake’, he needs to provide proof. He doesn’t – and presumably makes the arrogant claim that he doesn’t need to. - 2. You mustn’t take my name in vain.
So what is this god’s name? God, apparently. It’s like a marketing ploy, as if MacDonalds got to change their name to Hamburger and could take action against anyone else who used the name. In reality the god now called God was an amalgam of Hittite and Armenian gods, forged into a monotheistic being by elites of the region somewhere around the 7th century BCE. The idea of the commandment is that you should speak his name respectfully. Why? Because he’s God. The only way to avoid a circular argument here is to provide proof of this god’s existence, which hasn’t been done and can’t be done. There’s no morality on display here. - 3. The sabbath day should be kept holy.
- This is fairly arbitrary, the word coming from the Hebrew sabbat, meaning rest, and it’s based on God’s rest day, as he created the universe or multiverse or whatever in six days and rested on the Saturday, according to Judaic tradition, but Christians arbitrarily changed the day to Sunday. Of course no educated person today thinks the world, universe, or whatever, was created in a week, whatever you define a week as, by an ethereal being. Again, this could only have moral effect if you believe in this creation story and the god at the centre of it (and if you believe the god is egotistical enough to want to be eternally remembered and acknowledged in this way).
- 4. Honour your parents.
- As a heuristic, this makes sense, but it is not a given. Some parents kill their children, others do irreparable damage to them. The vast majority, of course, don’t. This is a matter of individual cases and analyses. The complexity of parent-child relations is dealt with most profoundly by Andrew Solomon in his great book Far from the tree. I would refer everyone to that book as a response to the fourth commandment.
- 5. You mustn’t kill.
- This again is too vague, as it doesn’t deal with self-defence and other exculpating circumstances. It’s also fairly commonplace, and common-sense. It’s easy to find supporting explanations. Nobody needed this commandment to create laws regarding murder and unlawful death.
- 6. You mustn’t commit adultery.
- A lot can be said here. At the time that these commandments first appeared, and for a long time afterwards, women and girls were treated as chattels and very often married off against their will, sometimes as children, to men twice or thrice their age. Considering such a context, and considering that contraception was essentially non-existent in those days, adultery was generally treated differently depending on wealth, social status and gender. There might have been an explanation for the law of adultery, but it probably had more to do with property and the status of offspring than morality per se.
- 7. Don’t steal
- The concept of private property would have emerged slowly, and would have been interdependent on other cultural developments in the move from horizontally to more vertically based cultural systems. Even so, it’s unlikely that a prohibition on stealing would’ve been novel when this commandment was formulated.
- 8. Don’t lie
- the telling of lies to advantage oneself and disadvantage others would have been a problem at least since effective languages developed, and we have little evidence as to how long ago that happened. We certainly know it was long before the 6th or 7th centuries BCE, so there’s nothing new here. Again, though, the commandment is too vague to be particularly effective.
- 9. Don’t covet (lust after) your neighbour’s wife
- These last two commandments are about thoughts, which makes them particularly ineffectual. They might be interpreted as advice, which would leave us with fewer commandments to criticise, but even as advice they seem like so much pissing into the wind. And of course the fact that wives and not husbands are singled out is an indication of the particularism of the patriarchal society this commandment addresses.
- 10. Don’t covet (hanker after) your neighbour’s goods.
- Again, hardly a profound or memorable commandment, and barely relevant to today’s society. If you’re impressed by your neighbour’s car, for example, you might ask her about it, check out its performance and decide to get something similar yourself. What’s the big deal?
I’ve spent too much time on this, but I simply wanted to point out that, while gods are what religion is all about, they are, or were, also used as explanations. That’s in fact what they were for. And a ‘commandment’ is simply an explanation once removed, because they represent the god’s will. The explanation, therefore, for bad tidings or bad karma or whatever, becomes failure to follow the will and the commandments of some particular god or other.
Nowadays we have better explanations, based on what we know of human psychology and neurophysiology, and of how we work together in societies, as the most socially constructed mammals on the planet. We also know much more about how the physical world works, which has resulted in technological developments of increasing reach and sophistication. The idea that knowing so much more about what we are has no relationship to what we should do – the moral sphere – has always struck me as preposterous. This old is-ought separation was key to Gould’s NOMA thesis. But it’s not only that science’s increasingly far-reaching accounts of ourselves and the universe we live in is essential to our decisions about what we should do. It’s also true that religion keeps trying to tell us what we are. And its account s just don’t stack up, from the broadest scientific perspective. It just fails comprehensively as an explanation.
Stephen Jay Gould, NOMA and a couple of popes
I’ve been making my way through my second collection of Stephen Jay Gould essays, Leonardo’s mountain of clams and the Diet of Worms, published in 1998, having read his 1993 collection, Eight little piggies, a couple of years ago, and I was surprised to come across ‘Non-overlapping magisteria’ as number 14 in the collection. I read it today. I’d heard that he promulgated his famous – or infamous, depending on your perspective – thesis on NOMA in a book called Rocks of Ages, so I wasn’t expecting such a treat, if I can put it that way, when I turned over the page to that essay.
As it turns out, Rocks of Ages, subtitled Science and religion in the fullness of life, was published in 1999, immediately after the collection I’m reading, and it presumably constitutes an elaboration and refinement of the earlier NOMA essay. So maybe one day I’ll get to that, but meanwhile I’m itching to get my teeth into this first ‘attempt’ – reminding myself of the original meaning of the term essai, in the hands of Montaigne.
Gould begins his essay with a story of a conversation he has, in the Vatican – half his luck – with a group of Jesuit priests who also happened to be professional scientists. The Jesuits are concerned with the talk of ‘Creation Science’ coming out of the US. One of them asks Gould:
‘Is evolution really in some kind of trouble, and if so what could such trouble be? I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both utterly satisfying and entirely overwhelming. Have I missed something?’
Gould assures them that this development, though big in the US due to the peculiarities of evangelical protestantism there, is quite localized and without intellectual substance. He wonders, in the essay, at the weirdness of an agnostic Jew ‘trying to reassure a group of priests that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief.’
This was the first point at which my (highly primed) sceptical sense was roused. First, the priest had been taught, or told, that no doctrinal conflict existed between Catholicism and evolution. One hardly gets the impression that he’s nutted this out for himself. What about the doctrine of the human soul? What about the absolutely central Judeo-Christian idea that humans were specially created in their god’s image? Can anybody honestly say that evolution casts no doubt upon these notions? To me, making such a claim would defy credibility. I mean, isn’t that precisely why so many Christians, of every denomination, have such difficulty with evolution? Second, Gould tells us that he was able to reassure the priests that evolution wasn’t under threat (fine, as far as it goes), and that it was ‘entirely consistent with religious belief’. Eh what? Did he show them or just tell them? Of course we get no detail on that.
Gould gives other examples of his fatherly reassurance, e.g. to Christian students, of the complete compatibility of Christian belief with evolution, which he tells us he ‘sincerely believes in’, but still without providing an argument. Finally he claims that, notwithstanding fundamentalism and biblical literalism, Christians by and large treat the Bible metaphorically. He seems to feel that this smooths away all incompatibilities. The six days of creation, ensoulment, original sin, humans in god’s image, salvation from sin through Jesus, his resurrection, his virgin birth, his miracles, etc etc, these are just stories. Is that what most Christians believe? Or just that some of them are stories, some of the time, for some believers? This question of literalism and metaphor is in fact a great can of worms that Gould doesn’t even glance into. It’s important, for isn’t literal truth also empirical truth, and doesn’t science have something to say about that?
In any case, having ‘established’, to his satisfaction, all this compatibility, Gould moves on to his central thesis:
The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise – science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains – for a great book tells us both that the truth can make us free, and that we will live in optimal harmony when we learn to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.
This is NOMA in a nutshell, together with some unobjectionable remarks about harmony, justice, mercy and humility, all vaguely associated with religion. Yet I’ve read a lot of history, and this has made me sceptical of the role of religion in promoting such values. If you examine sermons and priestly speeches through the centuries, you’ll find them very much parroting the ethics of their time – with a certain lag, given the inherent conservatism of most religious institutions. The Bible, that multifarious set of texts, is ideal for quote-mining for every Zeitgeist and Weltanschauung, but really we don’t need history to inform us that our ethical values don’t come from religion, a point made by many philosophers, anthropologists and cognitive psychologists. Religion is essentially about protection, hope and human specialness, all emanating from a non-worldly source, and all of these elements have been profoundly buffeted by the scientific developments of the last few centuries, precisely because the domains of scientific exploration and religious conviction overlap massively, if not completely. As Gould writes in another essay in this collection:
‘Sigmund Freud argued that scientific revolutions reach completion not when people accept the physical reconstruction of reality thus implied, but when they also own the consequences of this radically revised universe for a demoted view of human status. Freud claimed that all important scientific revolutions share the ironic property of deposing humans from one pedestal after another of previous self-assurance about our exalted cosmic status.’
Another, simpler way of putting this is that science – which after all is only the pursuit of reliable, verifiable knowledge – is perennially confronting us with our own contingency, while religions, and most particularly the Abrahamic monotheistic religions, seek desperately to keep us attached to a sense of our necessity, our centrality in God’s plan. It’s hard to imagine two activities on a more complete collision course.
Gould’s first essay on NOMA was apparently triggered by an announcement of Pope John Paul II to the effect that his Church endorsed evolutionary theory and found it compatible with Catholic dogma. This was much hyped in the media, and Gould considered it much ado about nothing, as it merely repeated, or so he thought, an earlier papal proclamation:
I knew that Pope Pius XII…. had made the primary statement in a 1950 encyclical entitled Humani Generis. I knew the main thrust of his message: Catholics could believe whatever science determined about the evolution of the human body, so long as they accepted that, at some time of his choosing, God had infused the soul into such a creature. I also knew that I had no problem with this argument – for, whatever my private beliefs about souls, science cannot touch such a subject and therefore cannot be threatened by any theological position on such a legitimately and intrinsically religious issue.
Now, it seems to me, and to many others, that this question of a soul, possessed only by humans, is an empirical question, unless the soul is to be treated as entirely metaphorical. If empirical, all our understanding of humans and other mammals, derived from evolution but also from zoology in general, tells against the existence of such an entity. We see clearly, and can map, through neurophysiology, genetics and other disciplines, the continuity of humans with other mammals, and with earlier hominids, and there is no trace of, or place for, a Homo sapiens soul. If metaphorical, the religious implications are enormous, for if the soul, which supposedly lives on after the body’s demise, were metaphorical, wouldn’t that make heaven, hell and the afterlife also metaphorical?
This is a real problem for the believers in such an entity, and a source of some amusement for non-believers. In a debate with Richard Dawkins a while back, George Pell, the Catholic archbishop of Sydney was apparently challenged on the exclusivity of the human soul and came up with the view that souls inhabit all living things but that the human soul was ‘infinitely more complex’ than those of other organisms. So now we know that white ants do indeed have souls, as well as blue-green algae and amoebae. This sounded like a physiological claim to me, and I wondered how well synchronised it was with official Catholic doctrine on the matter – or is that non-matter? It seemed much more likely that the good archbishop was making it up as he went along, just as Dawkins accuses such authorities of doing.
Gould, though, congratulates Pius XII, because he ‘had properly acknowledged and respected the separate domains of science and theology’. We get here a whiff of the authoritarian arrogance of Gould, which grates from time to time. He presents separate domains as virtually an established fact and ‘proper’, and so takes on the role of chiding those who don’t subscribe to it, because he himself has ‘great respect for religion’. He also claims, but without any evidence, that the majority of scientists think like him. It was a questionable claim in 1998, and is even more so in 2013.
Still, Gould recognises that there’s a problem, because, according to him, the two non-overlapping domains are not widely separated, like the USA and Australia, but share a troubled border, a la Pakistan and Afghanistan. This seems a concession, but it goes nowhere near far enough. Gould himself uncovers the problem while probing the detail of Pius’s Humani Generis, and finding that the fifties pope was rather less well-disposed towards evolution than he’d thought. What’s more, Pius seems aware of the conflict Gould is so keen to avoid, as he writes of ‘those questions which, although they pertain to the positive sciences, are nevertheless connected with the truths of the Christian faith.’ Pius elaborates on these questions by castigating claims, in particular as regards evolution, that might not be in keeping with ‘divine revelation’, which naturally he regards as some kind of truth. One of these truths is that ‘souls are immediately created by God’, which contradicts the evolutionary idea that all that is human is derived, through incremental moderation, from previously existing creatures. Gould provides a gloss on this by essentially claiming that Pius is patrolling the border between science and religion, intent on preserving the integrity of religious territory. I’m not convinced.
Gould then turns to the more recent statement on evolution by John Paul II. John Paul makes the point that in the 50 years or so since Human Generis, the strength of evolution as an explanatory theory has grown to the point that it’s pretty well unassailable. So he seems to have none of the qualms of Pius, yet still he makes empirical claims about matters ‘spiritual’ while claiming them not to be empirical, something which Gould prefers to obscure with a lot of self-congratulatory language about respect for ‘that other great magisterium’. Here is a slab of John Paul’s argument:
‘With man, then, we find ourselves in the presence of an ontological difference, an ontological leap, one could say. However, does not the posing of such ontological discontinuity run counter to that physical continuity which seems to be the main thread of research into evolution in the field of physics and chemistry? Consideration of the method used in the various branches of knowledge makes it possible to reconcile two points of view which would seem irreconcilable. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation.’
It’s a nice try, but the ontological difference described here is ‘just saying’. But the ‘just saying’ has a lot of religious energy behind it, because so much of monotheistic religion is tied up with human specialness, and even necessity. We are in the creator-god’s image, we’re the ultimate end-point of the universe, and other hubristic clap-trap. What John Paul is trying to ‘say into being’ is the spiritual realm, no less. The ‘spiritual transition’, the emergence of soul-stuff, is real but beyond scientific observation. Thus it is both empirical and non-empirical, which is impossible.
There’s a good reason why Gould’s claim about NOMA is bogus. All we have to do is look at what he claims these ‘magisteria’ cover. To quote Gould:
‘The net of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value.’
That the second sentence in this quote is false should be obvious to everyone after only a moment’s reflection. The central thesis in all monotheistic religions is surely that their one and only god exists and is real. We can’t possibly be talking in metaphorical terms here. Thus, an empirical claim lies at the very heart of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and there’s just no way of arguing yourself out of this. The fact that this empirical claim appears to be unprovable doesn’t make it any less of an empirical claim. The statement ‘Unicorns exist’ is also an empirical claim that is essentially unprovable. We can be pretty certain that unicorns don’t exist on our planet, but how can we prove that a creature fitting that description has no existence in the whole universe, or the multiverse, if there is a multiverse?
What’s more, religion is much more about empiricism than it is about ‘moral meaning and value’, because what is absolutely central to the monotheisms is that moral meaning and value derive from that real and existent being, and as such are themselves real and existent. That’s certainly the point that William Lane Craig bangs on about in all his debates – the empirical reality of his god, and of the values this male being espouses and somehow bequeaths to us.
In fact, on reflection, the statement that ‘God exists’ is not quite of the same type as ‘Unicorns exist’. It’s much closer to the statement ‘Dark matter exists’. Unicorns can only be contingent entities – they may exist in some corner of the universe, but if they suddenly went extinct on the planet Gallifrey it would make little difference. However, dark matter is necessary, as far as I’m aware, to the standard model of the universe and its mass. That’s why the search is on, big-time, to find it, to identify it, to learn more about it. To the religious, their god is also necessary, and it becomes a matter of urgency to ‘find God’, to know him, to understand him, etc. That’s why proof of their god’s existence is important, and always will be. Of course, the religious obviously believe they already have the proof, but an increasing percentage of inhabitants of our western world are unimpressed with such claims.