Abstract
The year 2009 sees two important and interlinked anniversaries for biological science: the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin (born 12th February 1809) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of 'On the Origin of Species – By Means of Natural Selection' (published 24th November 1859). 'The Origin', although now more often cited out of historical rather than scientific interest, is, nonetheless, the corner stone of all modern biology. While physics is sometimes seen as the doyen of the sciences, the theory of evolution outlined by Darwin has provided biology with something physics still seeks: a Grand Unifying Theory. Despite the fact that some sections of society still reject, for largely non-scientific reasons, any theory of evolution, Darwin's ideas form the basis of all deep understandings of modern biology. Indeed, without it, biology, it has been suggested, would be merely an exercise akin to stamp collecting; merely a way of detailing, ordering and cataloguing what can be observed in the animate world while offering little or nothing by way of explanation.
If the theory of evolution is indeed the Grand Unifying Theory of life, it must also have some explanatory power with regard to a range of medically-related phenomena. What then does this entail for biomedicine and for bioethics which both deal, in their various ways, with the bodies that natural selection has produced and their concomitant problems? The impression usually given of Darwin's ideas is more often derived from Herbert Spencer's starkly unsympathetic aphorism 'survival of the fittest' coined as a metaphor for natural selection rather than from Darwin's own work. In contrast to much of modern biology, which is essentially population-based, 'The Origin' repeatedly considers the life of the individual organism – a life which is also seen as a struggle for existence. Indeed, Darwinism is able to link the origin and present physical nature of sentient organisms with their various experiential needs and behavioural manifestations. However, although the perspectives offered by the theory of evolution are unlikely to offer instruction as to how best to live, understanding something of that struggle for existence from a philosophical and biological perspective may inform biomedical and ethical debates more generally. Thus, one specific area that will be addressed is that of attempting detachment from any tendency towards empathetic involvement in ethical issues in order to add perspectives of a more objective nature. Humane and humanistic approaches to biomedical issues frequently, if not typically, take their origin from the standpoint of the participant or other involved or interested parties. The approach typically adopted by the evolutionary scientist, however, is akin to that of the anthropologist who ideally seeks to explain other cultures without recourse to his or her own value system. As such, some part of the bases of bioethics, it will be suggested, lies in a philosophical understanding of the objects of biology as they exist in the world and should be given due consideration.
Of the three basic sciences – physics, chemistry and biology – it is physics which is often seen as the doyen of the group and of science in general. Indeed, in the philosophy of science, it is frequently physics which is singled out for attention when considering how science is or ought to be done. Given the way physics developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and given the fundamental nature of many of the questions it has come to address, it is perhaps not entirely surprising that it has been given such pride of place. However, the lionising of physics is perhaps more a cultural phenomenon that a logical one. The reductionism inherent in thinking that everything can be boiled down to physical fundamentals misses the fact that there are unique levels of organisation that cannot be explained when one focuses exclusively on infrastructures or components. The qualities that define a house are not inherent in a brick or those of a town in a house and while there are indeed fundamental questions about the nature of the universe that only physics can address there are, at the same time, fundamental questions about being human that only biology can address.
Interestingly, for all the emphasis placed upon physics, it is still incomplete in that it still craves a Grand Unifying Theory. The same cannot be said of biology. Unique among the sciences, it is biology that can reasonably boast of being in possession of something that holds the whole enterprise together. 'Nothing in biology makes sense', Theodosius Dobzhansky famously wrote, 'except in the light of evolution'. It is the theory of evolution which provides the Grand Unifying Theory of biology and without it biology would be little more than a process akin to stamp collecting – a process of cataloguing different kinds of biological data rather than understanding the nature and interconnectedness of the whole; it would be merely a way of describing and ordering what can be observed of the animate world while offering little or nothing by way of explanation.
It is the emergence of this Grand Unifying Theory that biologists celebrate this year. This year, there are two important and interlinked anniversaries for biological science: the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin (born on 12th February 1809) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species – By Means of Natural Selection (published on 24th November 1859). Famously, however, Darwin's ideas about evolution were formulated many years before they were actually published and when eventually they did appear, they entered a world which, although primed, was not entirely ready for them.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) (also currently enjoying a bicentenary) had described nature – in canto 56 of his poem In Memoriam A.H.H. published a decade before The Origin of Species – as 'red in tooth and claw'. All was not as it had once seemed in the created world. Ostensibly to the memory of Tennyson's friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who had died suddenly at just 22 years of age, In Memoriam, in fact, addresses a number of issues that were beginning to vex the Victorian mind – issues which have not entirely gone away. Not least among these questions was that of the place of humankind in the natural scheme of things. If human beings are entirely the product of natural processes, then where do 'good' and 'bad' come from? Indeed, what are 'good' and 'bad'?
Tennyson was writing in an era that had seen the need for the publication of (the book) Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, in 1844, to be anonymous. This book caused much controversy not least because of the theological implications that ensued from the description of an impersonal nature operating without direct divine intervention. Implications not unlike those that ensue from The Origin of Species.
Into this mix, Herbert Spencer's (1820-1903) phrase 'survival of the fittest' has come to be added as a way of describing natural selection – one of the key processes by which, Darwin proposed, evolution operates. The meaning of the phrase is perhaps more accurately (although less elegantly) rendered by 'survival of the suited'. It is those most suited to their environmental context which survive. Importantly, who or what survives is as much a matter of the environment concerned as the individuals themselves. Unfortunately, use of Spencer's phrase has too frequently over-emphasised the quality of the individual alone in determining survival. What is sometimes overlooked or missed completely is that – to use a quote often misattributed to Darwin – "it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives, but rather the one most responsive to change". Neither physical nor intellectual prowess matter – in evolutionary terms – in the same way that they do socially; biological values – if one can use that expression – and human values are not equivalent.
It is important to remember this. The logical corollary of Spencer's 'survival of the fittest' is that there must also be a 'non-survival of the un-fit' – those not suited. From here, it was a short step to the abuses that were perpetrated under the label of 'Social Darwinism' in actively seeking to 'eradicate the un-fit' – as well as the 'misfit'. Although arguably an excuse to legitimise other agendas, the stigmata with which these excesses have marked Darwinism in general still tend to linger on in some minds – and are sometimes even actively promulgated by certain enemies of evolutionary biology. There is still much against which a twenty-first century Darwinian contribution to biomedicine and bioethics must contend – not least from amongst the medical profession.
As noted above, in a purely natural world, where do human values come from? Are they the remnants of a more religious, or superstitious, past; the product of indoctrinations that we find difficult, if not impossible, to shake off or are they innate or built-in in some way? If, as noted, the theory of evolution is, indeed, the Grand Unifying Theory of biology, as well as explaining how plants, animals and humans came to be and why they take the forms they do, it must also have some explanatory power as to why minds are as they are and why certain behaviours and attitudes have emerged to be as they are. Propensities to certain behaviours and attitudes – the Darwinian suggests – are not all a product of nurture; they are, at least in part, a product of nature as well.
While I cannot pretend to be able to give a full account of what this entails for biomedicine and for bioethics – which both deal, in their various ways, with the minds and bodies that natural selection has produced – I will try to give some pointers towards the style of thinking involved when producing a Darwinian perspective as this, I suspect, is likely to prove more useful.
One of the fundamental features of understanding ourselves from a Darwinian perspective is to recognise that explanations for different biological phenomena need to be approached with caution; things should not be taken at face value – and certainly not using the standard reductionist explanations.
This is perhaps best illustrated through something the evolutionary thinker, Helena Cronin, pointed out in her book, The Ant and the Peacock. If we ask the question, 'Why do we eat fruit?', the scientifically accurate answer, 'To obtain nutrients etc', while correct is not complete and is not the same as the Darwinian answer. 'Fruit', Cronin noted, 'tastes sweet not nutritious'. We eat fruit not because it is good for us or because it provides nutrients – this is something we have only come to know about very recently, now that we have evolved a certain intellectual capacity. Instead, we eat fruit because there is something about fruit that appeals to our more fundamental – dare I say 'animal' – nature. Our fundamental nature is one that finds fruit palatable because of its flavour, its sweetness and its other experiential qualities, not because of what goes on digestively. Metabolic benefits are to be had only secondary to the sensory pleasures which preceded them.
The example I have briefly sketched helps us understand why there can be a vast industry built upon supplying sweet foods and sugary drinks. We are constituted, because of our evolutionary history, to enjoy sweet foods not for what they provide us with biochemically but because of what they offer us pleasurably. Similar, Darwinian arguments can also be made for why we have a penchant for salty and fatty foods and also for why we tend to consume food in the volumes that we do.
It is not that we have simply been indoctrinated to consume food in the way we do; there is something more fundamental going on. Although I am not, of course, suggesting that advertising or other influences have no effect on food choice, I am suggesting that we can better understand eating disorders, for example, by taking a different biological perspective. Here, I mean, a perspective that is not based upon the biology of digestion; not one concerned with the biochemistry involved but rather one which offers that conceptual biology available through Darwinism.
We can approach many other aspects of being human in the same sort of way. In so doing, this can help us understand things with which we are very familiar in new, more objective, ways. The physiologist Jared Diamond wrote a book entitled Why is Sex Fun? Interestingly, while countless generations of people have been busy having fun in that particular way, none seem to have stopped to ask why sex was, or should be, such fun. The simple answer to the question is that if sex was not fun, then people would be less inclined – if inclined at all – to do it and soon there would be none of us left. Or, to put it another way: in the past, those who enjoyed sex and who, therefore, engaged in the process were those who produced more offspring who were, in turn, like their parents: enjoyers of sex – and so they produced offspring of their own and so on down to us. In fundamental animal terms, there is a real sense in which offspring are merely born as the by-products of a quite separate pleasurable process enjoyed nine months earlier. Here, it is not so much the 'survival of the fittest' as the 'survival of the hedonist' that is in operation. This, in its widest sense, can provide us with alternative perspectives on a whole range of body-centred issues.
However, it is not all about pleasure, of course. Disgust, or 'the yuck factor' as it has been called, also plays a part. We seem to have innate aversions to such things as faeces, vomit, rank smelling food, blood and certain other bodily fluids. Even to have heard them mentioned and brought to mind, you may have found unpleasant. These aversions include avoidance or even revulsion at certain behaviours. Incest, for example, often elicits strong feelings of disgust and, accordingly, it is a relatively rare phenomenon. Biologically, incest avoidance has meant that the incidence of birth defects is much lower than it would otherwise have been. Here, holding a particular moral attitude has had a direct physical bearing on the characteristics (and survival) of populations of individuals.
Where a Darwinian perspective is likely to prove particularly useful is in the emerging area of experimental philosophy. Here, instead of musing to themselves, some philosophers have been actively collecting data: mainly data about people's attitudes and responses to various problems and scenarios posed. For those unfamiliar with it, 'experimental philosophy' is perhaps an awkward term as these philosophers often cross over into – and sometimes work with colleagues from – other disciplines. Hence, this is more an interdisciplinary than strictly philosophical enterprise. But be that as it may, an early finding from such work is that the moral positions people adopt are often very much a product of some innate emotion (a product of what the British call a 'gut reaction'); our attitudes are not simply reached by a process of reasoning. Indeed, frequently reasoning appears to be somewhat retrospective, coming afterwards in an attempt to provide a case for holding an otherwise unsubstantiated position.
Something a Darwinian perspective always has somewhere in mind is the question of benefits. Typically, the question 'What survival, or reproductive, benefit does exhibiting a certain emotion or attitude have?' is asked – albeit sometimes tacitly. Human beings evolved in relatively small social groups where natural selection operated in a particular way such that behaviours ensuing from holding certain moral attitudes had beneficial effects in terms of survival and/or reproduction. Attitudes which contribute to what we now call 'ethics' were originally shaped under such conditions. None of this was - or could be – built initially on reason or logic since our intellectual capacities are really only recent acquisitions. However, although we now have the capacity to reason, this capacity has been added to a creature that still bears many of the hallmarks of its animal ancestry. A Darwinian perspective also helps us to remember this by helping us to understand what we are a little better.
I am not, of course, suggesting that a Darwinian perspective is the only perspective one should adopt or necessarily that it is the most important perspective. And I am certainly not suggesting that it provides all the answers. However, it does offer a way of looking at ourselves differently – even in ways which allow us to take a more disinterested position when it comes to highly emotive issues. It offers different explanations for many things which are otherwise taken for granted or taken at face value or given a too reductionist ('scientific') explanation. As such, it helps us form a more complete picture of how we are and how we have come to hold the views that we do.