http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/aug/15/einstein-darwin-mary-midgley

We all have myths through which we explain the world. The very word “myth”, however, is a little awkward, because it is sometimes used simply to mean “false”, but its other meaning can be very useful. I also talk about dreams and dramas and visions and so forth. Whichever way one talks about it, it’s about an imaginative background, a way of seeing a problem in the world which determines what questions you ask and how you select your questions.

The idea that all you need to do is simply and honestly find the answers to questions does not work. You’ve got to have the right questions. As the history of science has built up and developed, at every stage this has been a very important factor.

In the 17th century the imagery of clockwork was terribly strong, so when Newton was trying to understand the universe he was seeing it as a clock heading in a single direction. It’s not surprising that people were terribly impressed with clockwork because at the time it was magic, a miracle, a mystery. Once you have established a way like that of thinking about how things work, you stick with it, it is gratifying and satisfying – you find you can apply it to lots and lots of things, so you don’t feel a need to look for another one.

It remains, of course, with us. We still talk about a mechanism. And the idea that all the bits of our bodies are machines is a thought often used today. For one thing it makes our bodies less frightening – a machine is something that people make, something that people can control, can take out and alter. It provides a sense of control.

So people very much liked to look at things this way. After a time, however, physics began to find the machine image not very satisfactory; so from Michael Faraday’s time, instead of little particles you started having fields and waves and so on. Different imagery was required. Then from Albert Einstein on, the imagery questions became very difficult indeed – there is no comprehensive model or pattern which you can imaginatively see.

By the 19th century, the age of Charles Darwin, the market had already begun to be an image that fascinated people. The way in which Herbert Spencer developed Darwin’s ideas to create this terrible idea of “social Darwinism” was an attempt to make a direct equation between the processes of the market and the processes of nature. On the one hand you see the idea of the market deployed to understand nature, illustrating “the survival of the fittest” with reference to the stock exchange; on the other you see the idea flipped so that it can be said: “the stock exchange is actually just a jungle.” On both sides of the coin, things are simplified.

Why have the crude, brutalist images of social Darwinism have been so persistent? Because they have that enormous flexibility. They can be used both ways. If people are morally worried about what’s happening on the stock exchange, they can shift that worry by saying, “It’s just nature, isn’t it?” On the other hand, if they are worried about what’s going on in the jungle, they can say, “It’s all a great machine.” You are getting away from agency all the time.

These images, both of which have been very powerful in science, as well as everywhere else, have an appeal because they simplify things. But they simplify them in a way which gets rid of certain awkward frictions. And it is hard to debunk this pattern because it’s doing so much for people; soothing their anxieties – making them think it’s all quite simple.

Marxism was a big feature of the time when I was growing up, so it’s the political philosophy I’m most familiar with. It is another striking example of an imaginative system – a fable, a dream, a drama, a vision – within which a lot can go forward. Of course there was a good deal of fairly dodgy stuff on the fringe of science which was Marxist, but I don’t think it was any dodgier than the monetarist things that have been going on since then. The mythology of how markets work, of how money can do things on its own, is as remote from solid physical reality as these other things. And of course whatever the mythology of the time is, those inside it don’t recognise it as such; they think they are just noticing facts.

Mary Midgley is a moral philosopher and author of Beast And Man: The Roots of Human Nature. The article above is excerpted from a Theos pamphlet, Discussing Darwin theosthinktank.co.uk

As befits the anniversary, the popular media today is filled with material on evolution. It has even permeated art and literature. In general, the issues of evolution vs. creationism (or intelligent design) are, despite the noise and smoke, peripheral battles–in that the forces of evolution have the ultimate power, not withstanding some of the strident media-hyped fears. Any resistance from marginal segments and isolated regions are not of real significance, for the hegemonic assent of “evolution” is clear and its establishment secure. I will argue, however, that it is not secure because of better argument or superior logic. Quite the contrary, this short essay might be subtitled: “Adaptation, survival of the fittest, sexual selection, selfish genes, selection for, and other truly awful ideas.”

A cardinal Darwinian notion of the mechanism of evolution is natural selection. That is, nature acts against non-human individuals (plants or animals) or groups of individuals of the same species (not genes) by way of elimination—they are, in terms of natural selections, selected against. This does not mean the survivors are selected for or favored, it simply means that survivors are not, at least for the time being, selected against. Nature is not specifically purposeful—it is not seeking out individuals or groups to eliminate. Indeed, it is benign to outcome, and individuals or groups, in a manner of speaking, make themselves available to elimination–by being too slow on the highway when a car speeds by, or by not being fast enough when a predator is chasing, or by being confined to an environment with insufficient food resource, or by not being able to breed, etc.–or (most important for non-humans), by being made available to natural selection by their social organization. Specifically, we can only hope to know how units (individuals or groups) are selected against by speculation or examination of the deceased after the fact of their elimination. Even then, it is seldom clear. That’s why the fossil record is often so inadequate. It is clear that some didn’t survive—but not always why, at least in an evolutionarily significant way. This all seems straightforward enough and relatively undebatable.

The problem, however, becomes apparent when people begin to talk with another logic (known as affirming the consequent—modus ponens—a frightful logical error) and speak of selection for one or another characteristic that can be seen on survivors, characteristically regarded by the analyst as essential to the creature’s success in not being selected against.

Survivors in natural selection—those not selected against–are only survivors. Of course they are minimally “fit” or they would not survive, but they do not have to be the “fittest,” nor can we easily attribute their survival to some supposedly advantageous characteristic. To say they are well adapted simply is to say they have not yet been selected against. Natural selection does not care, and any notion that survivors are “fittest” is logically indefensible–it is simply wrong. Survivors are simply those minimally fit individuals (or groups) that are able to propagate successfully, and– especially amongst non-humans—live successfully for the time being, according to the group dynamics and social organization that arranges individuals in time and space. That is, the social organization of non-human animals (and some plants) arranges individuals across the landscape and through generations, commonly by way of territorial management, gender and hierarchical arrangements, making some available to natural selection, some to possible elimination. These arrangements are also their means of population control (so they do not exhaust their food resources with excess numbers since they—unlike humans—have no way of expanding such food resources), and since in successful species, births always outnumber deaths.

No animals or humans–who are alive (minimally “fit”)– can be thought of as selected for, only as not yet selected against. The only kind of selection for occurs in breeding experiments where deliberate characteristics are chosen to be artificially passed on to future generations—i.e., in the domestic crop field, barnyard, and research laboratories. And this is where a lot of contemporary bad ideas about evolution had their origins. The choice of ostensibly advantageous characteristics (that is, those most appealing to the person supervising the artificial breeding) is regarded as an example of how some natural process must operate. Unfortunately, many of our evolutionary ideas (and some of Darwin’s) come from the barnyard and the forced breeding of the crop field or competition in Victorian England. and in human society rather than from deductions made from observing nature.

Moreover, as many experiments and countless observations indicate, any individual of any species (sometimes, but not always), including humans, has a vast store of unused genetic potential, and great capacities commonly unneeded and unexpressed. Individuals of every species are brighter and more capable than the requirements made upon them by the species’ social organization or societal demands. If this were not the case (particularly in the case of humans), there would be no significant change at all. Consequently, the variation within species is the key to change. Natural selection could not operate otherwise. Natural selection is not the only mechanism at work (there is mutation, genetic drift, epigenetic and development potentials and change), but we’ll here confine our discussion to natural selection.

This leads to another bad idea associated with the notion of selection for is the notion of adaptation. Humans (and all other living things) are commonly noted as being adapted if they are surviving. But we can only say this if survivors are not as yet selected against, as argued above. Adaptation is a lousy notion that most likely came about because it is difficult for Westerners to see evolution as anything but purposeful– a mechanism that is forever ‘improving’ species, individuals, etc. After all, goes the logic involved, if natural selection is at work, surely the survivors are somehow ‘better’ adapted. But in fact we can only say they have not been selected against. Nature, in the grand scheme of things, simply doesn’t care. Thus, the idea of “selfish genes,” espoused by some biologists, makes no good sense. There are some amazingly bizarre examples of species that no longer exist. And there are some amazingly bizarre species that do exist. But we cannot examine existing species or individuals in the environments in which they are found and say anything about adaptation and survival that is not trivial. Measure the total of all species that have ever existed against those species that still exist, it can be seen that nature is ruthless. Only a very miniscule percentage of all species of all time still exist today–so much for the alleged constant pressure toward greater or more successfully adapted species.

The notion of adaptation is rampant in the social sciences, such as anthropology, as well as in biology. It is seen as advantageous for species and social forms of humans to have. But surely the “best adapted” species or social group is the species or social group that is on the most evolutionary thin ice, for without variation, environment change (especially if dramatic) leaves these “well-adapted” species or social forms vulnerable. We read endlessly that various human groups are well adapted, and the archaeological literature if filled with examples. But are these not the social forms that would be least likely to be able to adjust to significant change? The successful form is surely the form that contains the most variation, the most alternative possibilities to adjust, accommodate, react to change—and to maintain and reward those possibilities and options.

This critique of adaptation in evolution is particularly applicable to humans. Like it or not, humans—amongst all other living things—are unique. And Social Darwinians, Evolutionary Psychologists, Socio-biologists, and today, even literary Darwinians don’t like it. Humans exist in all sizes, shapes, and environments. And we have an amazing capacity to change our environment, produce and expand our food resources, breed in ways that do not combine deleterious recessive genetic combinations, and maintain dramatic differences between us. In other words, we are characterized by amazing variation in genetic terms, and amazing variation in how we produce, transform, and live in all manner of environments. And despite this array of different characteristics, we can all successfully breed. Just how, then, do all these differences come to be? Why do we not, with sufficient variations, speciate, like all other species have done in history? And how do we persist (without speciation) in all this immense variation? Can we say anything about the differences observable between humans that are not essentially trivial? Black skin, white skin, etc., is found where it is because it was not selected against, but the functional significance of each skin color is not something that can be deduced easily from the fact that it is not selected against.

Yet physical anthropology and human evolution scientists have spun the most amazing tales about it all—assuming that these various differences between humans in various environments must have some advantage. In fact, they may only exist where they do because nothing is selecting against these specific characteristics. And if there any significant pressures selecting against any particular characteristic, humans survive because they have pushed back such pressures, rendering them no longer very significant in natural selection. The differences in phenotypes may be visibly clear, but why they exist is not so clear. Consequence cannot be read as cause, and the invisible potentials in all individuals to be something else, in genetic terms, is lost to history, and remains only potential. Indeed, we could go so far as to say that overall, natural selection in humans has been rendered insignificant today, save in trivial ways. Since humans can transform and produce so much of their environments, they not longer are significantly subject to it.

Thus, just how various skin colors came about in previous generations is largely of no significance to survival or natural selection. There are advantages to dark skin and there are advantages to light skin in the environments in which they are found. The important point, however, is that there is no longer any selective significance to dark or light skin in any environment in which humans are found today.

As another example, it can be argued that secondary gender differences amongst humans also have ceased to have any selective significance. Facial hair or beards, for example, still exist on mature males of most of the human species simply because there is nothing selecting against them. They have no selective advantage and apparently no selective detriment. Large breasts or the lack of abundant facial hair on many human females are similarly of no selective significance. Indeed, sexual dimorphism in non-human species is also frequently unrelated to mating (or attracting a mate), and specific sexual characteristic of males (say, brilliant plumage of some male birds) are often directed toward other males (as in territorial management) rather than attracting females. The concept of sexual selection probably stemmed more from Victorian social dress customs between sexes than natural law, for most dimorphism is related to territorial management, cooperation, and not to attracting a mate.

The view that any of our various individual or group differences might be fodder for natural selection is certainly true, but some of these differences are acquired by individuals during their lifetimes. While nature can perhaps act against some of these differences, it is not significant, since acquired characteristics are not passed on to offspring. While some believe (or believed) that acquired characteristics might be passed on or inherited– the view that the giraffe acquired its long neck because it needed to reach leaves on trees–they have little support. The observational facts are easy: the giraffes’ long neck enables them to eat the leaves of trees. But the deduction is wrong. While there is a burgeoning new field called epigenetics (the study of the activation/stimulation or lack of activations of particularly genetic characteristics through time—or the inheritance of characteristics that are not reflected on the genetic sequences of the nuclear DNA), this is wholly different than inheriting genuinely acquired characteristics with no genetic basis. This new field, indeed, relies heavily on a careful study of genetic potential and environmental interaction.

Getting back to the maintenance of immense human variation—just why is it that we, of all other species, are unique in having such immense variation without subsequent speciation? While our capacity to produce our environment (and make no mistake, human hunters and gatherers produce their environments quite as much as do industrial social forms (through the use of poisons, fire, traps, sophisticated organizational techniques, sharing mechanisms, exogamy, etc.), unlike other animal hunters and gatherers, it is our unique kinship system that has effectively preserved our immense variations and store of vast genetic potential. We do not marry (or breed with) our close kin. This is not sibling avoidance, as found, say, amongst Egyptian gray geese avoiding nest mates, but a social rule known as the incest prohibition. Exogamic rules exist amongst all human populations. The fact that close breeding sometimes does occur is not significant, for it is always accompanied by negative sanction. Humans have had these rules for probably well over 100,000 years, and thus have since then preserved vast sources of variation. Since we do not normally breed close, various possibly deleterious recessive genes are not expressed. We are literally genetic time bombs waiting to explode upon close mating. We breed out, however, and are thus capable of successful propagation with all other peoples in the world, save our closest kin. This means that every human is a repository of enormous genetic potential (much of it possible fatal) that is rarely expressed, and is indeed unknown, except through genetic counseling.

Racists, meritocrats, and others think otherwise. They think the most “successful” humans must be the most fit, and that the poor (for example) are unfit because of their own lack of success, usually specified in some way as inherent in their being. These folks are at work everywhere, in social sciences, biology, psychology, literature and art, and they are commonly powerfully placed. They have not been eliminated by Obama’s election, and many of them rule in various institutions such as universities and governments. It will be a constant struggle to expose them and their ideas. But so long as we live in hierarchical social forms, we must keep up that struggle.

James C. Faris is the author of Navajo and Photography. He lives in New Mexico.

dated 16 May 2009 | issue 2151
Posted: 5.19pm Tuesday 12 May 2009
Human evolution and the African Eve

A new TV series shows that all humans are descended from African ancestors who walked the earth some 200,000 years ago, writes Neil Faulkner

The origin of the human species is still a subject of fierce political debate. The question of whether modern day humans evolved together or are in fact separate races has social as well as historical significance.

Frederick Engels and Karl Marx avidly read Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species when it was first published.

They praised the work as a major rejection of religious creationism – the belief that God created the world.

This influenced their own works on how humans evolved and their relationship to nature.

The fact that humans had the intelligence and ability to work together meant that they survived famine and catastrophe.

The debate about how humans evolved millions of years ago and how they came to leave Africa is still very much alive among archeologists.

All the evidence supports the theory that humans evolved from an ape species more than three million years ago. A 3.2 million year old fossil of an archaic ape found in Ethiopia, nicknamed Lucy, is accepted as being the oldest known human predecessor.

However, how this archaic ape evolved into modern human, and during what period those people first migrated around the world, is still controversial.

Some archeologists argue that humans evolved separately in Asia and Africa over the last million years, developing different physical and mental abilities, before interbreeding.

Journey

A major five-part documentary series on BBC2, The Incredible Human Journey, which started last Sunday, examines the conclusions raised by the discovery of Peking Man.

Dr Alice Roberts, who presents the series, is an anatomist and anthropologist at Bristol University. She is in no doubt about the anti-racist implications of the science.

She said, “The really fantastic and powerful insight we’re getting out of this is that we’re a very young species and that we’re all very closely related to each other. That’s why racism is such nonsense.

“The idea of ‘race’ doesn’t make sense in biology. It’s a concept pulled together from a ragbag selection of physical characteristics, culture and religion, and attachment to place of birth.”

The new evidence shows modern humans are descended from a single African woman, usually called African Eve, who lived about 200,000 years ago.

This date – based on DNA analysis – is a perfect match with that of the earliest known fossils of Homo sapiens.

Two skulls and a partial skeleton that were found at Omo in Ethiopia in 1967 have recently been re-dated to approximately 195,000 years ago – the oldest known members of our species.

Such evidence undermines a theory of human development – known as multiregional evolution – which had become quite popular.

Homo erectus, the very first humans, did leave Africa and settle in areas which would become China.

Fossil remains of erectus excavated at Zhoukoudian near Beijing between 1921 and 1937 – dubbed at the time “Peking Man” – probably date between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago.

They are claimed to be the direct ancestors of the modern Chinese. It has even been argued that the archaic skulls have distinctive East Asian features.

The African early human is described as being stronger, taller, with a thick set skull and large jaw. His Peking cousin was in contrast said to be smaller but more agile and intelligent.

This theory, dubbed Out of Africa 2, is even taught in many of China’s schools to support a sense of national identity and superiority.

These descriptions are familiar to anyone who has studied racist caricatures of what African and Asian people are meant to be like today.

This theory assumes parallel evolution in different places, and then interbreeding to achieve a single hybrid species – modern humans.

Biological evidence also shows that “speciation” – the creation of new species – occurs through branching off and separate evolution.

Moreover, a “missing link” – intermediate fossils which prove such a development – do not exist.

The latest DNA evidence has shown once and for all this theory is wrong.

The new findings come from the Chinese professor Jin Li who has used the latest DNA technology to trace the genetics of modern humans.

He took samples from 12,000 Chinese people to see if they could have descended from Peking Man.

The conclusion is stark – he found that we are descended from the same species of early human, which developed in Africa some 200,000 years ago.

It has now been established that Peking Man became extinct and humans evolved from Homo sapiens.

So what do we now know about human evolution based on the evidence we have today?

Early human species evolved from a group of archaic ape species known as australopithecines. This included Lucy, who we can tell from her fossil walked upright.

Labour

This freed her arms and hands for labour and in turn encouraged natural selection in favour of higher brain capacity.

Hand and brain, labour and intellect, skill and thought would have begun that explosive interaction whose evolutionary culmination is modern humans.

About one million years ago Homo erectus migrated from Africa and colonised much of South and East Asia. The standard tool of erectus was the stone hand axe.

Later, a more developed early human – Homo heidelbergensis – settled much of Western Asia and Europe.

Neanderthals evolved out of heidelbergensis. Their tool-kit was dominated by sharp-edged stone flakes.

For well over 100,000 years Homo sapiens did not leave Africa – except for a brief foray into the Middle East.

When the great exodus finally began around 85,000 years ago, it was rapid. Southern Asia and Australia were colonised some 50,000 years ago, Northern Asia and Europe 40,000 years ago, and the Americas just 15,000 years ago.

They probably spread along the coast of southern Asia, only later penetrating the interior.

Almost certainly, as hunter-gatherers, they moved in search of new food supplies, responding to resource depletion, population pressure, and climate change.

They were designed for long-distance movement such as endurance walking and running.

Their manual dexterity made them excellent tool-makers while large brains made them capable of abstract thought, detailed planning, language and social organisation.

They formed small, tight-knit, co-operative groups.

Cultured

They were, in a literal sense, “cultured” – their ways of getting food, of living together, of sharing tasks, of making tools, of ornamenting themselves, of burying their dead, and much else were agreed within the group.

Their society was an early form of primitive communism, as identified by Marx and Engels.

Their species characteristics meant they could adapt to radically varied environments. In the Arctic, they hunted reindeer, in the tropics, pigs, monkeys, and lizards.

Tool-kits varied according to the challenges. Instead of simple hand axes and flakes, they manufactured a range of “blades” – sharp-edged stone tools longer than they were wide.

And they produced art, painting and sculptures of the animals they hunted believing them to be magical.

Above all, the new species experimented and innovated, and successes were shared and copied. Culture was not static, but changeable and cumulative.

Instead of humans either dying out or changing form in the face of new conditions, Homo sapiens found solutions in better shelters, warmer clothes and sharper tools.

Nature and culture interacted. Humans became progressively better at controlling, altering, and exploiting their environments.

This explains the emergence of farming around 10,000 years ago. Hunting turned into herding.

The collection of wild grasses became the cultivation of cereals. Probably some sort of ecological crisis lay behind the change.

It was the uniquely “progressive” character of Homo sapiens as a species that made this possible.

What the DNA evidence proves is that humans are a single species.

Leading geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who spearheaded the collection and study of DNA data concludes that, “Studies of human population genetics and evolution have generated the strongest proof that there is no scientific basis for racism.”

As a species – the descendents of African Eve – we have come a long way. But the greatest challenges are still ahead.

The Incredible Human Journey, BBC Two, Sundays at 9.30 pm