[Dialogue] A Split as Conservatives Discuss Darwin

Sat May 5 19:30:51 EDT 2007

Some interesting thinking. 
A  Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin   
By  PATRICIA COHEN 
Published:  May 5, 2007, New York Times 
Evolution has long generated bitter fights between the left and the right  
about whether God or science better explains the origins of life. But now a  
dispute has cropped up within conservative circles, not over science, but over  
political ideology: Does Darwinian theory undermine conservative notions of  
religion and morality or does it actually support conservative  philosophy? 
_Skip to next paragraph_ 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/05/us/politics/05darwin.html?ei=5087
&em=&en=7bda09fc62fbdaeb&ex=1178510400&pagewanted=all#secondParagraphsecondPar
agraph) On one  level the debate can be seen as a polite discussion of 
political theory among  the members of a small group of intellectuals. But the 
argument also exposes  tensions within the _Republicans_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_party/index.html?inline=n
yt-org) ’ “big tent,” as could be seen  Thursday night when the party’s 10 
candidates for president were asked during  their first debate whether they 
believed in evolution. Three — Senator _Sam Brownback_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/sam_brownback/index.html?inline=nyt-per)  
of Kansas; _Mike Huckabee_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/mike_huckabee/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , former governor of 
Arkansas;  and Representative _Tom Tancredo_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/tom_tancredo/index.html?inline=nyt-per)  of Colorado —
 indicated they did  not.  
For some  conservatives, accepting Darwin undercuts religious faith and 
produces  an amoral, materialistic worldview that easily embraces _abortion_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/abortion/index.html?i
nline=nyt-classifier) ,  embryonic stem cell research and other practices 
they abhor. As an alternative  to Darwin, many  advocate intelligent design, 
which holds that life is so intricately organized  that only an intelligent power 
could have created it.   
Yet it is  that very embrace of intelligent design — not to mention 
creationism, which  takes a literal view of the Bible’s Book of Genesis — that has led 
conservative  opponents to speak out for fear their ideology will be branded 
as out of touch  and anti-science.  
Some of  these thinkers have gone one step further, arguing that Darwin’s 
scientific  theories about the evolution of species can be applied to today’s 
patterns of  human behavior, and that natural selection can provide support for 
many bedrock  conservative ideas, like traditional social roles for men and 
women, free-market  capitalism and governmental checks and balances. 
“I do  indeed believe conservatives need Charles Darwin,” said Larry 
Arnhart, a  professor of political science at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, 
who has spearheaded  the cause. “The intellectual vitality of conservatism in 
the 21st century will  depend on the success of conservatives in appealing to 
advances in the biology  of human nature as confirming conservative thought.” 

The  arguments have played out in recent books, magazine articles and blogs, 
as well  as at a conference on Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute 
in  Washington.  There Mr. Arnhart was grouped with John Derbyshire, a 
contributing editor at  National Review, against John G. West and George Gilder, who 
both are associated  with the Discovery Institute, which advocates intelligent 
design.   
Mr.  Derbyshire, who has described himself as the “designated point man” 
against  creationists and intelligent-design proponents at National Review, later 
said  that many conservatives were disturbed by positions taken by the 
religious  right.  
“There are  plenty of people glad to call themselves conservatives,” he 
said, “who don’t see  any reason not to support stem cell research.”  
The  reference to stem cells suggests just how wide the split is. “The 
current debate  is not primarily about religious fundamentalism,” Mr. West, the 
author of  “Darwin’s  Conservatives: The Misguided Quest” (2006), said at Thursday
’s conference. “Nor  is it simply an irrelevant rehashing of certain 
esoteric points of biology and  philosophy. Darwinian reductionism has become 
culturally pervasive and  inextricably intertwined with contemporary conflicts over 
traditional morality,  personal responsibility, sex and family, and bioethics.” 

The  technocrats, he charged, wanted to grab control from “ordinary citizens 
and  their elected representatives” so that they alone could make decisions 
over  “controversial issues such as sex education, partial-birth abortion, 
euthanasia,  embryonic stem cell research and _global warming_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) 
.”  
Advances  in biotechnology — and pressure on elected Republicans to curb them 
— are partly  responsible for the surge of interest in linking evolutionary 
and political  theory, said those in the thick of the debate.  
The  fledgling field of evolutionary psychology also spurred some 
conservatives to  invoke Darwinism in the 1990s. In “The Moral Sense” (1993), followed 
by “The  Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families” (2002), 
_James Q. Wilson_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/james_q_wilson/index.html?inline=nyt-per)  used evolution to explain the genesis 
of morality and to support  traditional family and sex roles. Conservative 
thinkers from Francis Fukuyama to  Richard Pipes have drawn on evolutionary 
psychology to support ideas like a  natural human desire for private property and 
a biological basis for morality.   
Debates  over Darwinism became more pointed in 2005, however, as school 
districts  considered teaching intelligent design, and President Bush stated that 
it should  be taught along with evolution. The conservative commentator Charles 
Krauthammer  wrote in Time magazine that to teach intelligent design “as 
science is to  encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a  nation in 
the thrall of a religious authority.” George F. Will wrote that  Kansas school  
board officials who favored intelligent design were “the kind of conservatives 
 who make conservatism repulsive to temperate  people.” 
Mr.  Arnhart, in his 2005 book, “Darwinian Conservatism,” tackled the issue 
of  conservatism’s compatibility with evolutionary theory head on, saying 
Darwinists  and conservatives share a similar view of human beings: they are 
imperfect; they  have organized in male-dominated hierarchies; they have a natural 
instinct for  accumulation and power; and their moral thought has evolved over 
time.   
The  institutions that successfully evolved to deal with this natural order 
were  conservative ones, founded in sentiment, tradition and judgment, like 
limited  government and a system of balances to curb unchecked power, he 
explains. Unlike  leftists, who assume “a utopian vision of human nature” liberated 
from the  constraints of biology, Mr. Arnhart says, conservatives assume that 
evolved  social traditions have more wisdom than rationally planned reforms.   
While  Darwinism does not resolve specific policy debates, Mr. Arnhart said 
in an  interview on Thursday, it can provide overarching guidelines. Policies 
that are  in tune with human nature, for example, like a male military or 
traditional  social and sex roles, he said, are more likely to succeed. He added 
that “moral  sympathy for the suffering of fellow human beings” allows for aid 
to the poor,  weak and ill.  
To many  people, asking whether evolution is good for conservatism is like 
asking if  gravity is good for liberalism; nature is morally neutral. Andrew 
Ferguson in  The Weekly Standard and Carson Holloway in his 2006 book, “The Right 
Darwin?  Evolution, Religion and the Future of Democracy,” for example, have 
written that  jumping from evolutionary science to moral conclusions and 
policy proposals is  absurd.  
Skeptics  of Darwinism like _William F. Buckley_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/william_f_jr_buckley/index.html?inline=nyt-pe
r) , Mr. West and Mr. Gilder also object. The notion that “the whole  
universe contains no intelligence,” Mr. Gilder said at Thursday’s conference, is  
perpetuated by “Darwinian storm troopers.”  
“Both  Nazism and communism were inspired by Darwinism,” he continued. “Why  
conservatives should toady to these storm troopers is beyond me.”   
Of Mr.  Arnhart, he said, “Larry has a beautiful Darwinism, a James Dobson 
Darwinism” —  referring to the chairman of the Christian organization Focus on 
the Family — “a  supply-side Darwinism.” But in capitalism, he added, “the 
winners don’t eat the  losers.” Mr. West made a similar point, saying you 
could find justification in  Darwin for both  maternal instinct and for 
infanticide.  
It is true  that political interpretations of Darwinism have turned out to be 
quite pliable.  Victorian-era social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer adopted 
evolutionary theory  to justify colonialism and imperialism, opposition to 
labor unions and the  withdrawal of aid to the sick and needy. Francis Galton 
based his “science” of  eugenics on it. Arguing that cooperation was actually 
what enabled the species  to survive, Pyotr Kropotkin used it to justify 
anarchism.   
Karl Marx  wrote that “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me  as a 
basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.” Woodrow Wilson  
declared, “Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in  
practice.”  
More  recently the bioethicist and animal rights activist _Peter Singer_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/peter_singer/index.ht
ml?inline=nyt-per) ’s “Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation” 
(1999) urged  people to reject the notion that there is a “fundamental 
difference in kind  between human beings and nonhuman animals.”  
At the  American Enterprise Institute’s conference, the tension between the 
proponents  of intelligent design and of evolution was occasionally on display. 
When Mr.  Derbyshire described himself as a “lapsed Anglican,” which he 
compared to  “falling out of a first-floor window,” Mr. Gilder piped up, “Did you 
fall on  your head?”  
What both  sides do agree on is that conservatives who have shied away from 
these debates  should speak up. Mr. Arnhart said that having been so badly 
burned by social  Darwinism, many conservatives today did not want “to get 
involved in these moral  and political debates, and I think that’s evasive.”   
Yet  getting involved is more important than ever, after “the disaster” of “
President  Bush’s compassionate conservatism,” he said, because the only hope 
for  Republicans is a “fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism, and 
Darwinian  nature supports that conservative fusion.”  
Mr. West  agreed that “conservatives who are discomfited by the continuing 
debate over  Darwin’s theory  need to understand that it is not about to go away”
; that it “fundamentally  challenges the traditional Western understanding of 
human nature and the  universe.”  
“If  conservatives want to address root causes rather than just symptoms,” 
he said,  “they need to join the debate over Darwinism, not scorn it or ignore 
it.”   
As for Mr.  Derbyshire, he would not say whether he thought evolutionary 
theory was good or  bad for conservatism; the only thing that mattered was whether 
it was true. And,  he said, if that turns out to be “bad for conservatives, 
then so much the worse  for conservatism.”  
Cynthia N. Vance
Strategics International  Inc.
8245 SW 116 Terrace
Miami, Florida, 33156
305-378-1327; fax  305-378-9178
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