Customer Reviews

Apes or Angels?: Darwin, Dover, Human Nature, and Race

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The pioneering German sociologist Max Weber coined a useful term: "status symbol".

This refers not just to the distinctions in clothes and furniture lovingly catalogued by novelists such as Tom Wolfe. There are also status symbols in the realm of ideas.

Perhaps the two doctrines currently most de rigueur for entry into intellectual polite society:

1. That humanity evolved from lower animals according to the process of natural selection outlined by Charles Darwin.

2. That humanity has not evolved any patterns of genetic variation corresponding to geographic ancestry ... well, none other than the obvious ones that we can all see.

These two concepts are directly contradictory, as former UCLA professor of science education Cornelius J. Troost points out in his new book Apes or Angels? Darwin, Dover, Human Nature, and Race. Troost's title refers to how the British politician Benjamin Disraeli wittily rejected the first proposition in his day: "Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels".

Yet, the two doctrines, self-annihilating as they may be, are tests of sanctity among the self-righteous of our day. For example, Christopher Hitchens asserted in the Wall Street Journal on January 18, 2008 in "The Perils of Identity Politics" :

"The number of subjective definitions of 'racist' is almost infinite but the only objective definition of the word is 'one who believes that there are human races.'"

Hitchens' statement works as pure comedy gold on so many levels. Here we have America's most famous atheist making a quasi-religious creed out of a scientific controversy--and he's taking the empirically incorrect side of the debate, at that. And then he defines as a sinner anybody who doubts his dopey dogma!

As a G.K. Chesterton scholar aptly summarized: when a man stops believing in God, he doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything.

Chesterton himself wrote in 1922 in Eugenics and Other Evils:

"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal."

As Troost notes, the second of these two status shibboleths asserts that Darwinian evolution suddenly--magically!--stopped at the exact the moment when Darwinian logic says it should have sped up: when the ancestors of modern humans first left Africa for new climates. (Indeed, a major paper last month by Gregory Cochran and four other leading scientists demonstrated that the latest genome data suggests that humans have been diversifying genetically at ever faster rates over the last 50,000 years).

The second statement would be logical if you rejected the first, which Creationists do. Nevertheless, fashionable opinion today is all on the side of the apes.

Or you could accept the first and reject the second statement--that is, 1) evolution occurred, but also 2) it's still occurring--as most honest scientists who have thought hard about the subject have done.

The personal costs of dissent, though, are high. Confessing a disbelief in the second status symbol can lead to immediate expulsion from respectability, as we saw last October with the instant degradation of James Watson from being America's most prestigious senior scientist to being a pariah for uttering a few heretical remarks. (Interestingly, although hardly surprisingly, Watson's senior partner in discovering the structure of DNA, Francis Crick, held exactly the same dissident views, which he expressed in numerous private letters to other famous scientists.)

Troost follows Occam's Razor in assuming both that humans evolved and are continuing to evolve. So he avoids the self-hobbling of more popular authors on evolution, who must avoid violating contemporary taboos. Troost's book provides a compact (only 214 pages) but well-integrated tour de force of the current state of the human sciences. (In reading this, please be aware that he includes some extremely generous praise of my writing.)

Troost takes aim at the two varieties of Creationism--Fundamentalist Protestant and Secular Liberal a.k.a. Race Denial--and shows how they both undermine science education in America.

Fundamentalist Protestant Creationism seems to be evolving in a more strident direction. The Catholic Church has always warned against fundamentalist interpretations of scripture. For example, St. Augustine wrote in late Roman times:

"We must be on guard against giving interpretations of Scripture that are far-fetched or opposed to science, and so exposing the Word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers."

The book is fascinating. It tells the truth about a massive cover up of essential facts about the scientific study of evolution and human intelligence, or "g". The PC, Diversity, and Multicultural movement, mostly university inspired, has organized to deny and muddle the reality of scientific truth about this vital subject. This is a vanity publication and the author needs some help from a good editor. However, this is a minor criticism. Also, this is definitely not a racist book, even though it will rile the PC folks to a fairly well. It is understandable that it had to be published as vanity publication ... what publishing house would risk the condemnation of printing it.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution has been calling a dangerous idea by many philosophers. Dangerous, but essential to our understanding of what we are. In the words of science Professor Cornelius Troost evolution means that "man had no soul and mankind consisted of races that varied both trivially and significantly." How Darwin and his successors came upon the theory of evolution and how it is still being attacked is the theme of this book. According to Troost, evolution faces threats from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. The right refuses to accept that man is descended from apes and not created by God himself, (thus Apes or Angels). The left, obsessed with equality of all mankind defined as being the exact same, refuses to accept that evolution created any significant differences between the races. Troost believes that latter poses the larger threat to evolutionary theory.

After reviewing Darwin's theory and the improvements made to it by his successors, Troost dives straight into what will surely be most controversial part of this book. Troost describes humans as the "variable species," meaning that humans, like all species, vary to a certain degree, including between races. Troost points to many scientific studies that bear this out. Differences do not mean inequality, however, since equality refers to "fair treatment and not human biology." But "for a society based upon freedom and equality biological inequality is an almost indigestible truth. Somehow we must learn to accept unequal outcomes." Troost is right, but at this point in time we seem very far from that goal. I only hope that Troost is not pilloried for taking such a stance.

Although the sections on race will receive the most attention, there is far more to this book. Troost takes us through the intelligent design debate and shows that intelligent design is simply another creationist attack on evolution, albeit a more sophisticated one, using scientific arguments to argue that an intelligent being must have been involved in evolution and biology. So far, all ID efforts to change curricula have failed. ID may the last stand of the creationists. There is also a section on religion and reason.

Yet while evolutionists continue to fight these battles against Darwin's enemies, the field itself is far from finished refining the theory. The issue of the interaction of culture and biological interaction is complex and has not been resolved, because some genes express themselves through interaction with the environment, while others do not. We don't know which do and which do not, or why. It is clear that Troost hopes that we can continue to examine this interaction while settling on the fact of evolution, both as our descent from apes and the differences that exist in humans.

It is unlikely that any reader will agree with everything in this book, even if the reader is one of the few people who are willing to accept that we are both apes and a varied species. For example, I disagree with the author's assertions that high birth rates from lower socio-economic Hispanic immigrants will degrade our culture, since birth rates tend to drop with increased economic stature. However, my disagreement is a respectful one. I will not condemn the author for taking such a position, although based on the normal response to works like this, many others probably will. What a shame.

Have you ever had one of those college professors whose lectures are so full of interesting asides, stories, anecdotes and other marginalia that, by the time you leave the class, you're not quite sure exactly what it was you were supposed to take away with you?

Troost's book is a lot like that. Each chapter is so crammed with tables, stories, asides and exposition that it's hard to a sense of the narrative as one reads from page to page. He has an awful lot to say, and he writes as if he's afraid he's going to forget an important point- so he just tosses in every possible piece of information, just in case. According to the jacket bio, Troost is a retired professor of science education; there's a sense in this book that he's taken all the notes he's assembled on evolution over the years and squeezed them into one volume.

The overall thesis is about evolution, but it's hard to tell what the central thesis is- if there is one. At first I thought the main focus of the book was in support of evolution over creation. Then I thought it was about the importance of genetics in determining human behavior. Then it was a history of teaching evolution. One minute you're talking about human genetic variability, and then there's a discussion of genetic variation in dogs that doesn't really illuminate the question. There's a lot on genetically determined qualities of different races, using what I would contend is an outmoded, 19th Century, notion of race.

What's lacking is a solid narrative structure that takes you from one assertion to another, and build a coherent argument in favor of the author's thesis- which, as I note, isn't really conveyed very well. And even with all the facts, tables, citations and quotes, there are a lot of questionable assertions- Troost believes very strongly in genetic determination in a lot of areas where I think the evidence supports social factors. He describes Ayn Rand's Individualism as being devoted to the idea of "strong Machiavellian leadership" which is rather the opposite of what Rand preached. He thinks Soviet-era atheism was a consequence of "Stalin's Lysenkoism"- I think it's pretty clear that it had its roots in Marx's critique of religion. He states that Gerald Edelman's (no relation) model "will greatly enhance our understanding of brain operation as it is verified by further research" but gives no evidence of why we would expect it to be verified. (n.b., I don't think Edelman has a testable model).

But the fatal flaw of this book is simply that it is so poorly organized. I think Troost should go back and come up with a list of questions he wants to argue, and with the help of a good editor (and some critical reviewers), develop a narrative structure, and rewrite all this data into a series of solid arguments. Then he might have something really worth reading.

This little book is interesting although it could have used better editing. The theme is the evolution of man, which is continuing and which results in racial differences in intelligence. That fact caused the author great difficulty in finding a publisher and he was finally forced to use a vanity publisher, probably explaining the editing weaknesses. That said, it is worthwhile.

He begins with the story of Charles Darwin, whose voyage on the Beagle, from 1832 to 1836, exposed him to the great variety of life on earth. His visit to the Galapagos Islands in 1835 provided the opportunity to see evolution of species as a result of the alteration of anatomy in birds, the Galapagos finches, filling ecological niches. He could see that, in an isolated setting, the islands separated from the mainland by great distance over water, a bird population could evolve from a single type of finch to a variety of types altered to utilize different food types. The finches, while otherwise similar, had developed beaks similar to other species of birds he had seen in Europe.

From these observations, Darwin concluded that all forms of life had evolved from lower forms to more complex forms that could adapt to changes in the environment. This was unwelcome news in a Europe still convinced of the Biblical version of creation in six days. In the hundred years since Darwin's publication of Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, a war raged between the believers in a literal six day creation and those who adopted Darwin's theory of evolution. Modern biology has provided overwhelming evidence that Darwin was correct, even though Darwin himself knew no genetics. Molecular biology has provided the mechanisms and the result has been rapid progress in biology and medicine.

The author also devotes quite a bit of the book to the cultural changes arising from the loss of religious scruples and the triumph of secular humanism. He deplores the modern hedonistic culture but his atheism makes it impossible to see the benefits of Jewish and Christian tradition in taming the natural aggressiveness of man and the nurturing of the family structure of society. Rodney Stark's "For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery" has pointed out that Christian doctrine, which proposed a rational God whose rules could be deciphered by man, encouraged the quest for knowledge and led ultimately to the Enlightenment. Another review has mentioned Chesterton's statement that "when a man stops believing in God, he doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything. " What we see today is the result of an atheism that has left humans, hard wired, I believe, for religion, believing in secular religions like anthropogenic global warming and environmentalism. Neither of those beliefs is harmful in itself; I believe that the planet has been warming since the end of the "Little Ice Age" about 1850, and that the environment must be protected from unnecessary destruction. What is harmful is the radical adoption of those belief systems resulting in a sort of unilateral disarmament in energy policy and an antipathy to the capitalist system that generates carbon dioxide. Children finish school uneducated in history or science but convinced of the evils of carbon dioxide and of the benefits of recycling, which often contributes little to the environment.

In Chapter 5, he goes into the battles over creationism in schools in great detail. I was educated in Catholic schools in the 1940s and 50s and don't recall the subject of evolution being discussed. My high school did not offer a biology course so perhaps that avoided the topic most effectively! In college, I majored in engineering but later switched to pre-med and studied embryology without ever hearing any debate about evolution. It was assumed to be correct. One of my courses was in Comparative Anatomy, the very essence of evolution. It may well be that, in reaction to the post-1960s hedonism, fundamentalist Christianity began to push back and, unfortunately, adopted creationism as one aspect of that quest for moral certainty. I don't doubt his description of the recent struggles over Intelligent Design. I do, however, believe that the Catholic Church has avoided most of these battles and has accepted evolution as not conflicting with Christian doctrine. In later chapters the author seems to be longing for a return to a Judeo-Christian society, perhaps without the need for God, a concept that seems to be necessary for him to reject.

In several sections of the book, sometimes jumping around a bit, he discusses his concept of racial genetic differences. This is what got him into trouble with publishers and he deplores the political left's obsession with egalitarianism and "diversity." I agree to some extent with his comments on Charles Murray's THE BELL CURVE INTELLIGENCE AND CLASS STRUCTURE IN AMERICAN LIFE , which has stimulated an entire literature of furious refutations by the same Left that this author criticizes. Murray and Troost are both writing about statistical means, not individuals, but the controversy was furious when The Bell Curve came out and continues. I was at Dartmouth at the time and recall people, knowing I had bought the book, asking to borrow it. They were afraid someone would see them buying it in the Dartmouth Bookstore, a mortal sin in the modern religion of secular humanism.

Some of the material is quite technical and Troost is well equipped to discuss genetics, although he omits mention of Craig Venter A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life, who deciphered the human genome as a private entrepreneur, not part of the government funded project. Venter is going on to great discoveries that will probably solve the energy problem and, incidentally, providing irrefutable evidence of the power of evolution. The book is a bit uneven but provides a good discussion of the evolution wars and of the research in neurobiology.

I enjoyed this book -- it was bedside reading for several days as I dipped in and out of it. The two-star review by David Edelman is on target as far as the book needing more editing and a clearer structure, but I think two stars is too harsh.