1968: Flunking Evolution

“The evolutionary backdrop and the ecological setting, rather than the flashy on-stage protagonists of the drama, are more of my concern. Yet the answers are never simple, in part because the questions cannot be clearly phrased. The shadowed globe continues to spin. We are embedded in our history, in all our personal histories, and in theirs.”
Lynn Margulis

In order to fulfill my distribution requirements so I could graduate in the spring of 1968, I took "Evolution" in the winter of the 1967-68 school year.

I don’t recall how I felt about the subject before the course started, but the course itself didn’t inspire me. It seemed too technical for a non-science majors course, which it was supposed to be. But I believe I was just barely passing. Then it was time for the final.

Two things happened at that point, which were at least partly related. The first—and possibly most fateful---happened in the library.

I was also taking a philosophy course that term. (I’d taken several, starting my first year, and had considered it as a major, before committing to English Literature and Composition.) Perhaps it was for this philosophy course, but in any case I was reading a journal in philosophy in the library.

In what I seem to recall was just a book review, I read a sentence that was almost incidental. It said that the Darwin’s theory of Evolution was shaped in part by existing political and economic ideas and ideologies. It suggested that so-called Social Darwinism predated Darwin.

It was a sudden bolt of lightning to my conceptual framework, which is what I learned to call it in my first philosophy course. Scientific theories were, I had believed, based strictly on the scientific method of hypothesis and experiment (or evidence) to test the hypothesis. The idea of pure science, or "value-free science" was a kind of postulate, an axiom, if not a dogma. It was what you assumed as a starting point. The logic of Natural Selection emerges directly from meticulously studied evidence. Darwin’s theory was based on science, and nothing else.

But in a sentence in a philosophy journal, I was told that it might not be necessarily so.   Science might also be guided, consciously or not, by other factors, including invisible ideology.

Oddly, although studying the Vietnam War had shown me the tangle of motives and ideology leading to deception and self-deception in politics and government, I still assumed the evidence-based objectivity of science itself, if not the ends to which that science was directed. Especially a science and a theory so remote from weapons development and social control.

But this comment suggested that even the theory of evolution is not utterly impartial and objective. I had just found an opening to this idea, and sensed a glimmer of the other side. I was both stunned and excited. It was like the moment that nearly every first year philosophy student faces when presented with the argument that it’s possible that the world does not exist at all except in our heads. It becomes both an obvious and more complex argument pretty quickly, but at first, it’s a mind-blower.

So was this. To some, this may now be a commonplace observation: that the formulation, acceptance and rejection of scientific theories, including Darwin’s, are shaped in part by ideas outside of science as well as ego, institutional power struggles and conventional inertia. To others it may still be unorthodox.

But to me in 1968 it was a new and electrifying notion. We hadn't learned it in Evolution class. I was very excited by the idea. It filled my head, and I wanted to learn more. I wanted to explore it.

Too late, as it turned out. Because there were no papers in the course, just this last big exam.

Which brings me to the second thing that happened.

In the days leading up to the final exam, we were supposed to view an exhibit of bones in a room on campus. There would be questions about those bones, and how they illustrate evolution, on the exam.

I went with a group of other students from the class. The exhibit made no sense to me. I didn’t see how I was going to remember the shape of skulls and tiny white bones. I went into a Groucho Marx crazy scientist routine, perhaps with the help of a white lab coat I found on a hook. Nobody thought it was funny. Everybody was worried.

The night before the exam I walked around campus. In the library, at tables outside the dining rooms in Seymour, students were frantically studying. It was clear as day to me that none of them expected to remember anything they were studying past the day of the exam. The exam was everything.

I had done the same thing before—studying for the exam, and the exam only. It was the drill. Play the game, that suddenly serious game. I knew I should suck it up and do it just one more time. But I could not bring myself to do it. It was a charade, it was a travesty, it was a tragedy. With the seriousness of what was going on around us, what might be happening to some of us next, it was insane.

It had nothing to do with education, I felt so acutely, and nothing to do with reality. It even had little to do with the study of evolution as far as I was concerned.

I was supposed to be concentrating on the patterns of bones. Instead my head was swimming with this new idea that the theory of evolution, that science itself, was not so pure, was complex, perhaps more human. What did it all mean?

Sick at heart, I expressed some of these thoughts, and my desire to research and write about this, on the back of my exam the next day. Probably not as calmly as I just have.  On the exam itself I got as far as the first question on the bones, and stopped. Just stopped.  No More.  No More.

There are various ways now to describe this second thing that happened, and its relationship to the first. I tended towards self-righteous anger, and there was some of that. But the emotions were more complex and more complete. It was definitely some kind of crisis. Perhaps in a way, of conscience, or consciousness. So much suppressed, repressed, was rising. It made me suddenly very upset and very tired.

I failed the exam. That was enough so that I failed the course entirely.

The immediate outcome, the result of that failed course I will tell in another post. But the result of that moment in the library with the philosophy journal comment about evolution, I will tell now.

Paul Shepard

The first story I relate to that moment also leads back to Knox in for me a melancholy way. Three months or so before I hauled my stuff up the stairs to the third floor of Anderson House and began my college residence, a young family packed up their belongings and left Galesburg. The father was Paul Shepard, a much beloved and revered young teacher in the biology department for about a decade. His legacy lives on at Knox in Green Oaks, some 700 acres restored to natural prairie habitat. It was Shepard’s vision, and he directed Green Oaks for its first decade as well.

At the behest of a mutual friend, Prof. Doug Wilson of the English department, I bought  Shepard’s first book, Man in the Landscape (1967)at the Knox bookstore.

I'm not sure when I read it all.  I recall being mesmerized by the writing in just the first chapter for awhile, which set me off dreaming and thinking.  But it may not have been until after I left Galesburg that I read enough of the book to understand that it is an ambitious and multi-disciplinary study in the area of what we came to call ecology. It dealt with the relationship of social and cultural beliefs to attitudes about the natural world, and how science was conducted. Shepard apparently taught a course by that title which must have been the basis for the book.

Doug Wilson and Paul Shepard. Photo by Flo Shepard.

In other words, it was just what would have intrigued and interested me. If our time at Knox had overlapped, I would have taken that course, and the course of my life might have been altered.

For one thing I would likely not not be worrying about a science course requirement in my senior year.  But that realization was to come, for this story is just beginning.

Apart from two books he co-edited I saw in the 70s, it wasn’t until the late 1980s that I chanced upon another Paul Shepard book while visiting Seattle. Nature and Madness was even more mind-blowing. In the Squirrel Hill public library in Pittsburgh I found two of his books between Man in the Landscape, and was awed by those as well. They were Thinking Animals and The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game. Both dealt profoundly in aspects of animal and human evolution--and in the co-evolution of humans and the animals humans hunted.

Eventually I mentioned my discoveries and enthusiasm in a letter to Doug Wilson. He brokered the beginning of a correspondence between Paul Shepard and me.

Unfortunately it lasted only to the extent of two letters from me and one from him. Just after I arrived in Arcata in 1996, I learned that he had died from cancer.

I learned it by a letter from his widow, Florence Shepard, who noted our brief correspondence. Very soon she asked me if I wanted to write something for an issue of the Wild Duck Review about his work. I met Casey Walker, its editor, and writer Jack Turner (The Abstract Wild) for coffee here at Los Bagels, and talked about the approach I would take. My article appeared in that special issue of August 1997, along with contributions by Stephen Kellert, Delores LaChapelle, C.L.Rawlins, Barbara Ras, Barbara Dean, Steve Chase, Joseph Meeker and Flo Shepard, and a poem by Gary Snyder. (I’ve republished a longer version of my essay here.)

By then, yes, I had realized that all the events that flowed from flunking that evolution course would likely have been quite different if Paul Shepard had still been teaching at Knox when I was a student there.

Flo and Paul Shepard

And even that isn’t the end of the story. In fairly short order, Flo Shepard asked me to create a website about Paul Shepard, featuring biographical information that she wrote and photos she provided; photos and descriptions of his books (including posthumous volumes) with quotes from reviews, plus other information and a couple of short Shepard essays not otherwise collected.  So I did.

Eventually that site became technically obsolete, but it was the basis of a subsequent site that Casey Walker assembled. Not too shabby for the guy who flunked evolution.

In that winter in early 1968 we were already awash in dreadful waves of information about air and water pollution and environmental destruction, and in predictions of ecological doom. That became my major interest brushing upon science in the 1970s—when I read two of the first academic collections on the new subject of ecology co-edited by Paul Shepard (The Subversive Science, still a classic, and Enviro/Mental.)

In grade school and high school I had been interested in astronomy and the sciences of the Space Age, so I later gravitated towards the new physics of the very large and the very small. But all along the way since college I kept my eye on the larger question of what influences a scientific theory.  I was reading Lewis Thomas, James Gleick, William Irwin Thompson and others, and watching the Nova programs and the great PBS series' by Jacob Bronowski, James Burke and Carl Sagan.

Then as earlier posts on this blog attest, I became interested in the history of the theory of evolution through an interest in H.G. Wells and the future. That’s been ongoing since the late 90s. Those posts express some of the ideologies and examples of self-interest that contributed to how Darwin and evolution were interpreted, even today.

Consider it irony, given my less than stellar academic record or experience in the sciences, but in the early 2000s I found myself becoming the go-to guy to review books on science for the general public at the San Francisco Chronicle, and wrote them also for Salon and other outlets. Perhaps their theory was that if I could make sense of it, other readers could, too. But of course the Chronicle has many scientifically literate readers in the Bay Area and down Stanford way, including eminent scientists. So I had to work at it.

Back cover of the paperback edition of Damasio's book,
with excerpts from my review at the top.

Nevertheless, for the SF Chronicle I reviewed a biography of Einstein, and a couple of books on brain science, including one by Antonio Damasio. (His agent later said that an overjoyed Demasio read the entire review to him over the phone.)

 I reviewed a half dozen or so books on psychology, and all nine books in the Mind and Life Series, derived from public discussions held by the Dalai Lama and Buddhist practitioners with scientists in a number of fields, including physics, neuroscience, psychology and biology.  One of the Mind and Life Institute cofounders was biologist Francisco Varela, who introduced the concept of autopoiesis, or self-regulating life.

For the North Coast Journal I reviewed books on the history of quantum theory, on astrophysics, paleoanthropology, two books on Darwin, one on cultural evolution, several more on psychology and another half dozen or so on climate science.

And partly because publishers kept sending me new books on science, I wrote about dozens more on my Books in Heat blog.

Along the way I learned how impure science is. A theory may be accepted because of reputation, or denied because of ego and institutional politics. I saw examples of this over and over, and some seemed pretty scandalous.

But this is apparently so widespread and so well known among scientists that they can joke about it. One of the books I reviewed for the Chronicle was The Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh. In it Singh quotes physicist Max Planck saying that new ideas seldom win over adherents of old ones—usually a generation must pass while the new idea’s “opponents gradually die out.” He also quotes English geneticist J.B.S. Haldane’s four stages of acceptance for a scientific idea: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. This is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so.

But the role of ideology in the formation of a theory has also entered into the dialogue. And its clearest example has always been evolution. In my posts on H.G. Wells and his novel The Time Machine I’ve noted the ideological influences on Darwin and the ideologies that latched onto his theories as a triumphant exemplar.

But we don’t have to go back to Darwin.

It should be unsurprising—but instructive—that much of the actual science taught at Knox in 1968, including in that evolution course, is now considered wrong. Apropos of bones, dinosaurs were believed to have all been cold-blooded and slow of foot. T.H. Huxley’s suggestion that they were ancestors to birds was derided and forgotten. None of that is considered the true view any longer.

Life was divided into two kingdoms only: plants and animals.  Now there are six (though some scientists are abandoning the entire classification.)  Protozoa in 1968 were one-celled animals. They aren’t anymore, and some scientists consider the very word to be obsolete. In other sciences, such basic concepts as plate tectonics had not yet made it into textbooks, and even the Big Bang itself was not the accepted cosmological explanation until the late 1960s.

What has lasted is the lesson I learned that night in the library: to question, to probe, to analyze theories and how they are made. Seeing them in the larger context of society, history and ideology eventually makes for better science, and—for citizen non-scientists (and non-science majors)—better evaluation of scientific theories and findings.

But it may be even more important than that.

In 1968 the latest interpretations of Darwinian evolution were gene-centered. Gene centeredness became both especially prominent and popularized with Richard Dawkins’ 1975 book The Selfish Gene. That book, and the  gene as the determinant of evolutionary change via survival of the fittest , took the 19th century ideology supporting the predominant interpretation of Darwin to a condition close to dogma. That ideology begins with the master 19th century metaphor of the machine--lifeforms as cogs in the machine of evolution.

That ideology further emphasized violent competition, aggression, conquest, and man against nature.  Survival of the fittest, the struggle for existence, nature red in tooth and claw, winner take all, the war of all against all--they all were idolized as drivers of natural evolution and as the essence of animal and human nature, with no exception, and no room for compassion, cooperation, or co-existence.

But in subsequent decades, both the science and the ideological basis came under attack from different directions. (And perhaps I need to say here I am not at all talking about so-called creation science, or a denial of evolution itself.)

By the 1980s eminent paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was attacking the Darwinian tenet that natural selection operating slowly over great periods of time is the main or only driver of change, despite the discrepancies in the fossil record (those little white bones presumably.)

He believed that the basis for this bias was more ideological than scientific: the insistence that natural selection is very gradual was because it came from a politically conservative class and time in England that favored gradual social change. A theory of more sudden change as well as gradual change—the “punctuated equilibrium” Gould favored—was too much like revolutionary political threats to the established order.

Today variations of punctuated equilibrium are more generally accepted, as is another more recent—and more revolutionary theory—proposed by biologist Lynn Margulis, who found in microscopic life the evidence that crucial steps in evolution were taken by means of symbiosis: separate organisms living together for mutual benefit, beginning with the evolution of microbial life.

Lynn Margulis

Perhaps it is possible that among the periodicals in the Knox library in the winter of 1967 was an issue of the Journal of Theoretic Biology which contained Margulis’ now-landmark first article setting forth the central tenets of her theory of symbiosis within the cell. It had been rejected by 16 other journals. But even when it appeared, it was derided. Though symbiosis is not the same as cooperation, it is close enough. It did not fit the prevailing ideology of selfishness.

Margulis persisted and found more evidence while the establishment had time to get used to the idea. She later joined with James Lovelock in developing the Gaia Theory, which is symbiosis on a grand scale. It is, as another biologist described it, symbiosis as seen from space.

Life, Margulis wrote, "does not 'adapt' to a passive physiochemical environment as most neo-Darwinians assume; instead, life actively produces and modifies its surroundings."  The biosphere is not "determined by a physical universe run by mechanical 'laws...the metabolizing biosphere is physiologically self-controlled."

 If science survives for another century, Lynn Margulis will be recognized as a major figure.  Far from being a war of individuals or species, or objects that operate according to 19th century machine metaphors, she has shown that life is completely interdependent.  The earth is not only our home--it is our body.

Evolutionary theory in the 21st century is moving towards multiple explanations. In their 2014 book Evolution in Four Dimensions (MIT Press), Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb examine not just the genetic (itself a vastly more complex subject than got fixed in the public mind in the 1990s), but the epigenetic (non-DNA inheritance), behavioral (animal learning passed on) and symbolic (human heritage though language and other systems.)

Science is based on evidence, but evidence can be a tricky thing. Sometimes people see the evidence they look for, and they fail to see it if they are not looking for it. That includes scientists. One of the primary reasons for not seeing the evidence is that it does not fit into the current theory, or the current ideology.

This has been shown to be true countless times in the study of animals, when evidence of intelligence, tool-making and communication have been overlooked, because of the ideology of human exceptionalism, which itself derives as much from the ideological right of capitalist humans to exploit and lay waste to the rest of existence as it does from any religious or scientific dogma.

One important illustration is the work of primatologist Frans B.M. De Waal, who documented patterns of reconciliation behavior in primates (after fights, the participants would seek each other out and engage in friendly behavior.) Previous researchers hadn’t seen this because prevailing beliefs emphasized aggression and competition, and so they missed the signs.

It does not seem a coincidence to me that many of these beliefs—the selfish gene, animals as aggression and competition machines, human exceptionalism and so on, are all major underpinnings of capitalism, and its exploitation of the planet. Nineteenth century capitalists were at least conscious of co-opting evolution, and thereby guiding any science that deals with animal or human behavior. By the modern age, these sciences were functional captives of that ideology.

Contemporary British philosopher Mary Midgely has written eloquently on this broader subject of the ideology often unconsciously assumed in scientific theories, particularly in her book Evolution As A Religion. (Margulis also refers to the orthodox neo-Darwinism as "a minor twentieth century religious sect.")  Midgely points out that scientists attack others for basing their beliefs on ideology or religion, while failing to see the cultural myths and assumptions that underlie their own scientific views.

“Social Darwinism or Spencerism is the unofficial religion of the west,” Midgely writes. “And it is widely believed that the theory of evolution proves this kind of narrowly self-assertive motivation to be... fundamental, universal and in some sense the law of life. Mystical reverence for such deities as progress, nature and the life-force is then invoked to explain and justify cut-throat competition. As we have seen, such a view of the natural motivation of our species is simply a mistake, a projection of current interests.”

Many new discoveries run counter to the 19th century ideologies of man against nature rather than humanity embedded in nature, of capitalistic selfishness as natural but cooperation for a common good as unnatural in human or animal nature, and even human intelligence as entirely separate from animals.  And, the argument goes, this is all so embedded to our nature that it is useless to believe we can resist or change it.  What could be more basic than your selfish genes?  You can't fight it because it's human nature.  These ideologies survive and try to rule science as well as the rest of us, in Ted Carpenter’s phrase, “like a watch ticking in the pocket of a dead man.”

There are those who are tempted to inappropriately use the new research to support a different ideology, but animal research for example does find support for the existence of cooperation and altruism, perhaps even the empathy and imagination that are clearly survival tools for our species.  But taken together, the implications of this research are necessary correctives to the one-sidedness and especially the destructiveness of the ruling paradigms.

What does the new science regarding the origin of species tell us? That we must be talking about origins plural, for evolution is much more complex and involves several different pathways than suggested by Darwin and mandated by Dawkins. This is even truer in regard to evolution in a larger sense.

We must see this as the ideology it is, and what it means. Insofar as it is a rigid explanation of animal and human behavior, this ideology of complete selfishness, acting only in one’s self-interest, life as a war of all against all, all the time—is wrong. For more than a century it has excused human destruction that has led us to the brink of mass extinctions and an unrecognizable Earth. And it is still leading us there.

Failure to see this ideology for what it is—an ideology—is a major failure of science in the modern age. That the ideological underpinning of predatory capitalism are the same as those of evolutionary science is no coincidence. Capitalists at least were conscious of co-opting evolution, and thereby guiding any science that deals with animal or human behavior.

This dogma of evolution fit wonderfully well with capitalist economic theory—and why not? Capitalists were paying the bills. Although some scientists tried to refute these interpretations, the scientific mainstream continued to aid and abet this view.

All of this contributed to the seeming present inevitability of predatory capitalism which rules the world, and which has proven unable to modify itself in light of the findings of science, most conspicuously climate science.

 Fredric Jameson is reputed to have observed today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. Evolutionary theory and dependent theories of human nature have contributed to this stranglehold on the imagination. Yet predatory capitalism continues to bring the end of the world closer.

All our ecological "doom and gloom" of the late 1960s led to change, but not enough, and not fast or widespread enough. With the onrushing climate crisis, with mass extinctions and multiple ecological catastrophes underway or in the offing, time is running out.

Ours remains a crisis of consciousness. If humanity doesn’t fully commit to an ideology of interdependence and the science that supports it, then humanity as well as the world that supports it are in danger of extinction. Human civilization will turn out to be a bloody but hopeful experiment that didn’t quite make it far enough to respond to this challenge, largely if not entirely of its own creation. We’ve taken this course of evolution, and we’re flunking it, and taking the planet we know with us.