What price truth, goodness and beauty?
David S. Oderberg
BEYOND EVOLUTION by Anthony O'Hear Clarendon Press, £19.99, pp. 220 Recent years have seen a spate of books critical of the theory of evolution. One thinks immediately of Phillip John- son's Darwin on Trial, Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Richard Mil- ton's The Facts of Life, and Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box. A notable fact about these books is that none is by a philoso- pher. Johnson is an academic lawyer, Mil- ton a science journalist, Denton a biologist, Behe a biochemist. Few in professional philosophy, where Darwin rules OK, have dared raise their heads above the parapet by openly questioning evolution, let alone writing a book critical of it. Anyone who finds the theory questionable runs the risk, as do thinkers in other disciplines, of being branded a crank, a fundamentalist, and, even worse, a scientific illiterate. Professor Anthony O'Hear of the University of Bradford has, in this challenging new book, taken the plunge. To be sure, it is no part of his thesis that evolution is false — only that it cannot explain all aspects of human behaviour, and is therefore radically incomplete as a total theory of life, contrary to the dogmat- ic view of its partisans. As he claims at the beginning, there are certain aspects of human life which certainly derive in important ways from our biological nature, but ... once having emerged they cannot usefully be analysed in biological or evolutionary terms.
What are these aspects of human life which cannot be given an evolutionary explanation? They are, he argues, no less than the three most important features of human activity: our pursuit of truth, our desire to be moral, and our love of beauty. Philosophers from the Greeks on have identified Truth, Goodness and Beauty as the three fundamental ideas underlying all others, and while their capitalised forms do not figure much in the vocabulary of the thoroughly modern philosopher — rather metaphysical, a bit mysterious, aren't they? — few would, when pressed, disagree with common sense in holding that our posses- sion of these three concepts marks us out in some way as distinct creatures in the world of animal life.
Professor O'Hear is certainly not one to downplay their significance, and his book is neatly divided into a tripartite study, in which each idea is analysed in turn, its meaning and manifold connotations teased out, its role in human activity clarified. It is through such an analysis that the shortcomings of evolutionary explanation become apparent. For the dogmatic evolu- tionist, all aspects of human activity, even at the intellectual and psychological levels, must be explained in terms of the contribu- tion each aspect makes, directly or indirect- ly, to survival and reproduction.
Survival and reproduction of what? Here we get a glimpse of one of the skeletons in the evolutionist's cupboard, one well noticed by O'Hear but not elaborated upon since it is not his central concern. Some evolutionists hold that the so-called 'unit of selection' is the individual organism; others that it is the species; others say both; Dar- win himself sometimes says both, some- times one, sometimes the other; yet others, such as Darwin's latter-day attack dog Richard Dawkins, the gene. Now these answers cannot all be right, and the emer- gence of a consensus among evolutionists is eagerly awaited. But what all views of the unit of selection have in common is that features of organisms are selected for their usefulness in promoting the survival and reproduction of something or other.
But when it comes to the pursuit of truth, there is a problem. Humans are self- conscious beings, the only ones we know of in the animal kingdom. A sexy project in current evolutionary theory is that of explaining self-consciousness in terms of natural selection, and yet self-conscious- ness, argues O'Hear, resists such an analy- sis. As self-conscious beings, we see ourselves as agents in the world, with beliefs about that world, with the desire to know and understand the world. We for- mulate theories and hypotheses about any- thing from tomorrow's weather to the ultimate structure of matter. Now, know- ledge of the weather is certainly a useful thing to have, but what about the structure of matter, or the solution to Fermat's The- orem, or the existence of black holes?
Certainly we can think of many uses to which abstract, or arcane, or highly spe- cialised knowledge can be put. As physi- cists are fond of reminding us, if it weren't for quantum theory we would not — or so they say — have personal computers. (Is this another reason for wishing quantum theory to be false, apart from its inherent paradoxicality?) Surely, however, we do not pursue knowledge at the highest reaches merely because we want to enhance our control over the planet, or our survival as a species or as individuals. We do not plumb the depths of reality simply because we might get a new version of the Stealth Bomber out of it. We do it because we want to know. We are, by nature, just plain curious. We have beliefs, and we want to test them against the world, whether they be useful or not. The theme of this part of O'Hear's study is that truth is not the same as usefulness: The very fact of being self-conscious about our beliefs, of being in a full sense believers, then initiates a process in which we search for what is true because it is true, rather than because it serves some interest of ours.
And that includes our abiding interest in survival and reproduction.
Evolutionists, of course, have various proposals for trying to solve this problem, but O'Hear argues forcefully that they do not work. For example, the appeal to so- called 'sexual selection' is inadequate. The idea here is that we are attracted to intelli- gent people as potential mates, since intel- ligence, like strength and physical beauty, bodes well for the production of clever, problem-solving offspring who will have a survival advantage. But is that why people become physicists (or philosophers, for that matter) — so that they can find a mate? Heaven help them if it is. And isn't nature, on this proposal, being extravagantly waste- ful? Why couldn't she have produced a species of skilled bluffers, adept like no others at deceiving their conspecifics into thinking they are good at quantum theory and pure mathematics? Just think of the millions of pounds that could be saved on funding for scientific research!
The line of argument pursued by O'Hear should be apparent, and it is applied with equal deftness to morality and aesthetics. How can evolutionism explain our desire to be moral beings, indeed our recognition that we are required by reason to do good and avoid evil? Naturally enough, this question is at the heart of another hot research project, but the early returns are disappointing. Much ingenuity has been put by Dawkins and friends into explaining morality in terms of strategies for co-operation which enhance survival prospects: we all fare better out of the state of nature. But this and similar proposals do not begin to touch the heart of the quest to be moral. They have nothing to say about Socrates' famous statement that it is better to suffer evil than to do it, even to the point of death. They have nothing to say about the concentration camp inmate who asks if he can replace the sick old man in front of the firing squad; or about the self-sacrifice of the saint who gives up all worldly plea- sures to live in muck and mire among prim- itive tribes, or with lepers, working himself to death in the process. There is not much promise of gene reproduction among the millions who throughout history have embraced the celibate life in pursuit of a transcendent spiritual good.
One can easily multiply examples. No amount of game theory, or of toying around with lit-for-tat' or mutual reward strategies, can explain the recognition of mankind that there is such a thing as being good, pure and simple, out of love, out of charity. And as for goodness, so for beauty, where, in a fascinating discussion of the aesthetic impulse, O'Hear shows that our creation and appreciation of works of art cannot be reduced to a biological drive towards survival, whatever the utilitarian purposes art can, and at its best should, serve.
I have only scratched the surface of Beyond Evolution. The details must be left to the reader to examine. In following the twists and turns of O'Hear's argument, he will pass fascinating side roads in which brief but brilliant sketches are given of Hegel, Sartre, Hayek, and others whose thought is relevant to this topic. In particu- lar I recommend the discussion of tradition and culture, in which the author offers a profound and convincing account of why conservatism, properly understood, is the natural heartland of the human intellect.
One of my few concerns is that by the end of the book the inevitable nagging question is left unanswered. If evolution cannot explain fundamental aspects of human life, including their origin, to what extent does this count against the theory? Should we, as O'Hear believes, go beyond it? Or should we give it up altogether? It is to be hoped the author will address this question in another place. For the time being, we must make do with what is on its own terms a profound, subtle and brilliant- ly argued book.
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