Evolution: Part I

When I began my blog back in 2009, I had this blog post (and a few others) in mind. It's more than a bit ironic, then, that it's only now (four years later) that I get around to posting it.

So what finally got me moving? It was The Economist on the first pass, so fittingly it is The Economist on the 2nd pass too.

But let us not let bygones be bygones. Let us begin with the first pass.

So the first pass is what follows. A reflection I wrote after reading one too many articles from The Economist that danced around the topic of evolution. This will surely turn out to be my longest posting to date. I hope it reads OK in blog format.


Confusion

“Half all Americans either don’t know or don’t believe that living creatures evolved.” So begins an article on page 38 of the October 8th, 2005 issue of The Economist, a widely respected British news magazine read by movers and shakers around the world. The article continues with its trajectory of scorn in the sentences which follow. “And now a Pennsylvania school board is trying to keep its pupils ignorant. It is the kind of story about America that makes secular Europeans chortle smugly… Yet it is more complex than it appears.”

Indeed it is! For if we but flip a few pages forward, we discover on page 92 an Economist review of a book titled “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.” In this book the author relates his personal story – how he successfully transformed himself from a “wretchedly chaste” college student into a remarkably successful practitioner of one-night stands. But the victory was hollow, as the book reviewer soberly notes.

The game giveth, but it also taketh away, as the author is all too aware. As reality blurs, Mr Strauss finds it increasingly hard to view women as anything other than targets on which to hone his technique. “We may have been supermen in the club”, he muses, “but on the inside we were rotting.” Redemption comes in the form of Lisa, who cares not a fig for Mr Strauss’ patter. Lisa loves him, it turns out, for himself.

These two articles from the same edition of one magazine ought to give us pause. On page 38 not only is evolution presented to readers as true, but the acceptance of its truth is presented as a sign of great learnedness and wisdom. On the flip side, failure to accept the claims of evolution as true is cause for derisory laughter from around the globe.

Yet on page 92 the story line has somehow reversed course. One of Darwin’s finest has dropped out of the race, our Economist book reviewer warmly reports. Having finally mastered the art of passing his genes to different women every night, this man abandoned the game in order to focus his affections on only one woman. The Economist reviewer clearly approves! We are invited to celebrate the redemption, no less, of Mr. Strauss from what appears on the face of it to be a superbly perfected pattern of Darwinian behavior. Redemption? Isn’t that a religious word? What indeed is going on here?

The simple conclusion, if we take the time to review these two articles closely, is that the writers of The Economist are of two minds – and it’s not clear at all that they are aware of it. In areas of science, the editors of the Economist are careful to present evolution as a fact – a fundamental truth. Evolution, we are assured, is indisputably what is. However when forced to address matters a bit closer to the heart, as it were, the editors of this same magazine are equally careful to assert that evolution is not at all it’s cracked up to be. Whatever evolution is, it is not what ought to be. I don’t think any other conclusion makes sense.

Just to clarify my meaning here, let me suggest how the review should have gone if the book reviewer believed not only that evolution is but also that it ought to be. In this hypothetical world, I believe the book reviewer would have found fault with Mr Strauss for thinking of women as anything more than vehicles for the propagation of his genes. According to basic evolutionary theory, members of the opposite sex are targets. The reviewer would furthermore have been deeply puzzled by Mr Strauss’ bizarre decision to cease the endless bagging of anonymous women. Males are supposed to do that. Finally, the reviewer would have been in a state of utter confusion as to why Mr Strauss felt like he was rotting inside. Words like that are unscientific and, worse still, they make no sense at all in the context of a wildly successful reproductive lifestyle.

So the writers of the Economist are clearly of two minds, and it seems to me that they are not at all sure what to do about it. The example provided above, by the way, is not at all unique or unusual. Conflicting perspectives of this sort are to be found on a regular basis in the pages of the Economist. A year later, for example, The Economist closed a different article on sexual selection with these words:

Evolution has thus arranged things so that if a woman does cuckold her man, she is likely to gain the maximum advantage in terms of children with good immune systems, and sons who will have similarly rakish good looks and behavior. Just don’t tell your husband that. (Page 75, March 4th 2006 issue.)

Once again, we see in close proximity two conflicting threads of thought. On the one hand, we see a rather bold proclamation of an evolutionary fact. On the other hand, we see a tacit, if weakly humorous, acknowledgement of the moral need to keep this fact a secret. Let us put the joking aside and ask a serious question: If this is evolutionary factoid really is in some sense true, why on earth would it be best, for ethical reasons, to keep it a secret? The Economist offers no answers. Indeed, I suspect they were afraid to ask the question.

But before we move on, there is one more thing worthy of note. In this text we find Evolution personified. It is treated as a rational force or being. Leaving aside the fact that this will be defended as a literary invention, it is still worth asking one more question in this regard. If Evolution were indeed a living and active being, should we call it a good one? It’s a rather important question. Whether or not we wish to be redeemed from it, needless to say, hinges crucially on this point. Here too, however, The Economist is silent.

This series is continued in Evolution: Part II