A recent poll of ASA members showed some interesting results.
1. 73% of Christian professionals in the sciences affirmed the following: “Plants and animals developed through evolutionary processes” (with natural and/or non-natural causes from ancestral forms)
2. 60% affirmed “Plants and animals developed through evolutionary processes with natural causes from ancestral forms.”
3. 61% affirmed “Biologically, Homo Sapiens evolved through natural processes from ancestral forms in common with primates.”
There was one key area where the support dropped that I want to explore. Only 27% affirmed “Human behaviors, like kindness, care for children, competition, or desire for revenge, developed through evolutionary processes with natural causes.” Note that this is less than the 40% that affirmed “Living organisms on earth developed through evolutionary processes with natural causes from non-living material more than 3 billion years ago.”
The reason for this in my opinion is that while the theory of evolution has great explanatory power there are areas where to date it hasn’t. One such area is cooperation or altruism. Furthermore, the implications of “nature red in tooth and claw” goes against our Christian beliefs. This kind of ambivalence to evolutionary theory by Christians goes all the way back to Darwin’s “Origin of Species”.
Darwin added the following quote of Charles Kingsley to his second edition:
A celebrated author and divine has written to me that “he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.”
On the other hand, fellow evolutionist Alfred R. Wallace advocated to Darwin to use Spencer’s term “survival of the fittest” as a synonym for natural selection. Darwin did do this starting in his fifth edition.
From the use of this term, many Christians inferred social darwinism. (Whether social darwinism really is implied is historically dubious.) It is the social darwinism of laissez faire economics more than anything else that motivated William Jennings Bryan during the Scopes trial. He said the following on the age of the earth question: “It is better to trust in the Rock of Ages than to know the ages of rock.”
Since Darwin, evolutionary theory has struggled to explain cooperative or altruistic behavior in humans and eusocial creatures. One such attempt is known as Hamilton’s Rule.
Formally Hamilton’s Rule is genes should increase in frequency when
rB > C
where
r = the genetic relatedness of the recipient to the actor, often defined as the probability that a gene picked randomly from each at the same locus is identical by descent.
B = the additional reproductive benefit gained by the recipient of the altruistic act,
C = the reproductive cost to the individual of performing the act.
This is known more informally as kin selection. Since this only explains sacrifice for related creatures the self-sacrifice for the “unrelated” is still unexplained. That was until an apparently little-noticed paper two weeks ago in Science.
Hamilton’s rule states that cooperation will evolve if the fitness cost to actors is less than the benefit to recipients multiplied by their genetic relatedness. This rule makes many simplifying assumptions, however, and does not accurately describe social evolution in organisms such as microbes where selection is both strong and nonadditive. We derived a generalization of Hamilton’s rule and measured its parameters in Myxococcus xanthus bacteria. Nonadditivity made cooperative sporulation remarkably resistant to exploitation by cheater strains. Selection was driven by higher-order moments of population structure, not relatedness. These results provide an empirically testable cooperation principle applicable to both microbes and multicellular organisms and show how nonlinear interactions among cells insulate bacteria against cheaters. [Emphasis mine.]
Here’s how Smith et al generalized the rule:
To bridge the gap between theory and data, we derived a generalization of Hamilton’s rule that does not assume additivity or weak selection and whose parameters are empirically measurable (21). We found that cooperators increase in frequency if
r . b – c + m . d > 0 (1)
Distributions can be described by their moments: parameters that measure their shape and location. The relatedness vector r = {r1, r2, …} measures how the distributions of social environments encountered by cooperators and noncooperators differ in each of these moments (fig. S2). r1 is equivalent to r in Hamilton’s rule (5). The other terms are higher-order relatedness coefficients (22, 23). Any smooth function can be expanded into a Taylor polynomial series whose coefficients measure its linear, quadratic, and higher-order components. The benefit vector b describes noncooperator fitness as a function of social environment (red lines in Fig. 1) in terms of its Taylor coefficients. c is the cost of cooperation when all neighbors are noncooperators. m d is nonzero when benefits depend on recipient genotype (Fig. 1C). m is the moments vector for cooperators. d is the difference between the Taylor series of cooperators and noncooperators. Unlike Hamilton’s rule, Eq. (1) disentangles fitness effects from population structure and is valid for arbitrarily complex forms of social selection. When fitness effects are additive, Eq. (1) reduces to rb – c > 0.
Fig. 1. Measuring the costs and benefits of cooperation in microbes. Blue, cooperator fitness; red, noncooperator fitness. (A) In Hamilton’s rule, b is the slope of fitness against the frequency of cooperators among social neighbors; c is the fitness difference between cooperators and noncooperators for a given social environment. Fitness effects are nonadditive when benefits are (B) nonlinear or (C) depend on recipient genotype.
Putting this into English, it was the population structure rather than kinship that selected for cooperators of M. xanthus over cheaters, aka Richard Dawkin’s “selfish gene”. Furthermore, this work takes Hamilton’s rule from a heuristic to an empirically useful structure to look at other social structures. So, I suspect we will see a lot of followup on this in the coming years. It also challenges our intuitive concept of what constitutes the “fittest” which survives.
One thing that those of us who are critical of intelligent design are fond of saying is that it promotes a God of the gaps. The study above shows that we should be careful of our own gaps. Whether it’s research like this or the RNA World concerning origin of life or even multi-verses we should be careful that our apologetics doesn’t lean too heavily upon a lack of a natural explanation. History has shown that such an explanation often does come along even if it takes a long time. I’ll close re-quoting Kingsley’s warning to us about gaps — this time as he wrote Darwin in 1859:
I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that he created primal forms capable of self development into all forms needful pro tempore & pro loco, as to believe that He required a fresh act of inter-vention to supply the lacunas wh. he himself had made. I question whether the former be not the loftier thought.
As one who answered that question with the majority, I think that the issue goes a bit beyond the selective mechanisms for altruism, as they would apply to non human organisms. My own view is that the particular ”gap” referred to here has not been filled exactly by the new paradigm of the revised Hamilton’s rule. Some gaps, might actually be real, and not fillable, by the means at our scientific disposal. The true nature of man, defined by so much more than the narrow form of altruism related to advancing a genetic advantage, is quite likely one of those gaps.
What I was trying to stress is where evolutionary theory appears to go in the opposite direction of what we observe in human morality. Many Christians oppose evolution because that is what they perceive. That we are more than mere biology goes without saying, although we can get into trouble when we get into the particulars. If our apologetics leans on a particular gap that ends up having a natural explanation then we lose credibility. But where is it the case that merely having a natural explanation means God’s not there?
Richard
I agree with your comment, and I do see your point about Christians and evolution. While I am a fervent evolutionist, it is certainly true that the rules of evolution must change drastically once human consciousness is involved. For better or worse, we ARE intelligent designers, and have largely shaped our own social, cultural evolution. It is even possible, (perhaps probable) that we might intervene in our own biological evolution as well, and to some extent, (thinking of medicine for example,) we already have.
I believe that the morality of man has a natural and a God given origin. The divine gift of free will allows us to choose moral (or immoral) paths in a way that is new to life on Earth. While there will always be a biological component in our individual behavior, with the love of Christ and the power of faith, I believe we can transcend evolutionary constraints, and shape our destiny.
Recent studies in epigenetics show that we are not merely the product of our genes. My point was more limited in the hazards of trying to prove His existence through things such as morality that don’t have a complete natural explanation. We know that God calls us to moral behavior through both natural and non-natural means and that we are responsible to that calling. We just need to be careful that we don’t draw the line so brightly that when we err our credibility is lost.
Agreed.
[...] more in the developing stage where there is some evidence but more work needs to be done. See my blog post for one example. We still see a similar pattern where the domain experts see more of the evidence, [...]
[...] more in the developing stage where there is some evidence but more work needs to be done. See my blog post for one example. We still see a similar pattern where the domain experts see more of the evidence, [...]
Richard said:
“Since Darwin, evolutionary theory has struggled to explain cooperative or altruistic behavior in humans and eusocial creatures.”
I’m not so sure it is hard to explain. We have empathy. When others are hurt, we can feel their pain. By helping them, we relieve that pain that we feel. As long as you even think you are helping, it reduces your pain to see others suffer or be hurt. For example, an atheist would say that prayer accomplishes nothing. But a Christian can see dying hungry kids, offer a prayer, and think they have done something about the situation. James wrote how that is worthless thinking:
James 2
14What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? 15Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. 16If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? 17In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
I enter this conversation with sincere timidity as a doctoral student in learning sciences and not an evolutionary biologist. I have a question that has been intriguing me for quite some time regarding the assumptions of evolutionary theory.
What happens to evolutionary theory when death is removed? Put another way, how does evolutionary theory based upon survival explain life before there was death?
From what I can tell evolution assumes death. Fight, flight, food and reproduction are all mechanisms to either avoid harm and death for an individual or a species. The quest for survival explains adaptations to environmental stresses an very useful ways. It strikes me that for something do die it must first be alive. If evolutionary theory is based on death, how does it explain the first life?
The creation of life before the introduction of death is definitely a part of the Biblical record, so how does the theistic evolutionist resolve this conundrum?
“From what I can tell evolution assumes death. Fight, flight, food and reproduction are all mechanisms to either avoid harm and death for an individual or a species. The quest for survival explains adaptations to environmental stresses an very useful ways. It strikes me that for something do die it must first be alive. If evolutionary theory is based on death, how does it explain the first life?
The creation of life before the introduction of death is definitely a part of the Biblical record, so how does the theistic evolutionist resolve this conundrum?”
This post dealt with issues of the theory of evolution that involves tested hypotheses that have explanatory power. As such theories are superior to laws because laws are just a collection of scientific observations. For example, having empathy for closely related groups confers selective advantage because groups that understand each other are more survivable. What didn’t make sense was self-sacrifice for the non-related was not explained. Another thing that not as well explained is how life arrived from non-life but like the study we looked at here there are some small-scale explanations of how non-living amino acid chemistry might have created some of the starting points for living RNA chemistry.
The conundrum to which you refer is to the law of evolution. That is the observation that over a billion years ago life arose from non-life and many species arose and died off. These species changed in a gradual way where later species such as mammals did not exist at all in the Cambrian for example. Genetic evidence also shows that species are related to each other in the same fashion as the fossil record suggests. This record also marks five or six mass extinctions.
Almost all of our members accede to the law of evolution (from our recent poll it appears that < 6% are young earth creationists) while only a large majority hold to the theory. They deal with the conundrum above in many ways but the answer given almost always has the form, “The Bible doesn’t say that.”