The Persistent Paradox of Human Uniqueness

• Email
• Share
• Print

“Great is the power of steady misrepresentation” growled Darwin in the sixth and final edition of his Origin. As well he might. A campaign assiduously waged by T.H. Huxley had by no means silenced those who argued that Darwinism and its central motor of natural selection suffered fatal flaws. Yet Darwin completed his complaint to observe “but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.” Time for general applause?  Fancy a go at dethroning the Darwinian world-picture?  One might as well attack the pyramids with a bag of jelly. Not that there has been any shortage of usurpers, but who amongst Darwin’s opponents are now remembered?

Well, what about the naturalist and Roman Catholic St. George Jackson Mivart (1827-1900)?  He never doubted evolution but saw little merit in natural selection and became one of Darwin’s fiercest critics.  If he is remotely familiar today, it will be as likely to serve as an object lesson in culpable stupidity. Bad enough to deny the Darwinian formulation. To compound this foolhardiness by then insisting that evolution and Christianity are far from exclusive propositions is sheer lunacy.

Does Mivart, however, have some unexpected lessons for us? At first sight seemingly not. His falling out with Huxley and Darwin, having once held them in high esteem, was a giant stride towards intellectual oblivion. For Mivart an equal tragedy was to follow when he was effectively excluded from his beloved Catholic Church, and even denied a Church burial. Too often, it is assumed that the sundering was simply the result of Mivart’s dogged adherence to the realities of evolution, a position wholly unacceptable to those backswoodmen then skulking in the Vatican. So let’s appoint Mivart the patron saint of lost causes, with a special concern for those still engaged in the futile dialogue between science and religion.

Mivart’s tragedy is not only very different from the myth surrounding it, but is also tinged with a present-day irony. To begin with, Mivart’s fall from grace within the Church had nothing to do with evolution. Rather, as Mariano Artigas, Thomas Glick and Rafael Martínez remind us in their fine book Negotiating Darwin, it was because Mivart accepted the doctrine of Hell but did not deny its occupants happiness. To rejoice in the fact that Hell ought to be a place of eternal and unremitting torment arranged by a God who also cheerfully connives in endless terrestrial catastrophes is, of course, just the sort of ammunition urgently required by the secular arsenal. In the eyes of many, Darwinism and materialism became almost synonymous.  Even then, the chips were down.

Mivart failed to win the argument, but Huxley’s own polemics reveal not only unwavering support for Darwin but a philosophical agenda that was very far from neutral. Consider these words in a letter to his wife, written in 1873. “We are in the midst of a gigantic movement … nor is any reconcilement possible between free thought and traditional authority”. And there is no doubt where Huxley would have placed Mivart.  One thing Huxley would not have forgotten was that his opponent Mivart was a highly accomplished biologist. What Huxley could never have fathomed was that Mivart was also a visionary. Like G.K. Chesterton, Mivart saw in the tides of human history vast metaphysical assumptions that, once deployed, could point to disaster. In his Contemporary Evolution, Mivart notes how a society that saw “no distinction of kind between God and nature, the natural and supernatural, man and brute [must … assert] the absolute right of the state to control all and everything in the life of every individual citizen … [and] In principle, it warrants the performance of acts incomparably more atrocious than the massacre of St. Bartholomew.” Huxley remained blind. In that letter he could only see the sunny uplands of human happiness, as he burbled on “that this free thought will organise itself into a coherent system, embracing human life and the world as one harmonious whole”.

Really? While Huxley swooned over the primroses lining the path to his imagined utopian future, Mivart smelled the ovens of Auschwitz.

The fault lines that Mivart explored invite us to examine a little more carefully whether Huxley was correct in his monistic philosophy, one safely free from the supernatural, and therefore the surest route to human perfectibility. Or in fact do we stand one step from the abyss?

None of this, of course, had anything to do with the reality of evolution; here Huxley and Mivart had no disagreement. Rather it is the worldviews that remain at stake. Accepting evolution does not mean you are compelled to accept the implied consequences, materialist or otherwise.

Thus while much of Mivart’s critique of Darwinism has been superseded by subsequent work, some of his points still have real force. Consider his insistence on the importance of convergence (such as the echolocation of bats and whales), and much more importantly the mere fact of evolutionary transformation cannot be isolated from the deeper laws that make evolution – and anything else – possible.  But there’s much worse to come. Mivart and Huxley both assented to the commonplace that we are descendants of the apes, but to Mivart, the unbridgeable gulf between the two species paradoxically still remained.

“Class dismissed. Mivart, a moment please.” Mivart might step far beyond the acceptable bounds of Darwinism, but in his insistence on human uniqueness there could be no conflict with his Church. This is not to deny that the Vatican was wary of evolution, but it had learned its lesson from the Galileo debacle. Where the real issue lay, as emphasized in Negotiating Darwin, was the place of humans in the order of creation. And here lies the kernel of the science-religion debate. As the ever-growing flood of scientific data first undercuts the theological bank before the citadel itself falls to ruin, so the proposal that humans are unique was first quaint, is now absurd.  Surely the twin strands of archaeology and animal behavior have finally erased the differences? Australopithecus morphs into Homo. New Caledonian crows craft tools far more complex than anything from chimp culture. So where’s the problem?

All cut and dried. Except that the paradox of human uniqueness shows no signs of dissipating. Think of the Australian philosopher David Stove’s intelligent, acerbic and hugely entertaining Darwinian Fairytales. Here, in a loosely connected set of essays, he argues that all that makes us human falls far beyond any Darwinian explanation. Yet Stove was no closet creationist.  As an atheist, his attacks on religion, and much else besides, are bracing stuff. In his essay What is wrong with our thoughts, Stove announces that as soon as humans attempt “any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness …  But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato … or Marx.”

Nevertheless where Stove sees embodied lunacy, I see something far stranger and more creative. From whatever perspective you prefer to view the problem, it still underlines our sheer uniqueness. The paper-thin differences that separate us from such animals as apes, dolphins, crows, parrots and quite possibly octopi look tenuous to a degree — but there remains an impenetrable wall. Both briefly (Johan Bolhuis and Clive Wynne in Nature 458, 832-833; 2009) and at length (Derek Penn, Keith Holyoak and Daniel Povinelli in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31, 109-178; 2008) have queried whether the continuum that should link the human mind to the rest of creation, be it phyletically to the ape or convergently to the crow, entails a serious delusion. Like Mivart, none of these researchers doubt either the facts of evolution or the undoubted mental capacities of animals.  But do we see eye to eye? Tantalizingly close to be sure, but at each and every turn somehow the animal key never quite fits the human lock.

And this is not so surprising.  Even compared to the primates our brains show significant differences, and not just in terms of size. But — and this is the crucial point — how these neurological differences translate into the emergence of new cognitive worlds is not obscure, it is entirely opaque. And this is a point that Mivart would have saluted. Mivart’s insistence that evolution must not be denied its metaphysical context earns as much scoffing now as it did in the time of Huxley and Darwin. Yet it is no accident that when Darwin came to explain how matter became rational he lost his nerve. Writing in 1860 to Asa Gray, he remarked on how “A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton” as we might try to discern the true nature of the universe.

Mivart would have found this an astonishing capitulation. He was no more a creationist than Darwin, but for Mivart human intelligence was far from being some sort of accidental by-product of the universe. Rather, it was the key to the universe itself.

Simon Conway Morris is a professor of evolutionary paleobiology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St. John's College. Elected to the Royal Society in 1990, he is the author, most recently, of Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe.