Darwinism: it ain’t what it used to be

Among the books I had shipped home from Blackwell’s this summer was Virolution, the most recently published book by Frank Ryan, a British physician who has become both an evolutionary theorist and a populariser of biological science. Its blurb claims that it is the most important popularisation of biological science since Dawkins’ Selfish Gene; that could well prove correct.

The gist of Ryan’s readable but apparently respectable book for laymen is that Darwinism ain’t what it used to be. Random-mutation-and-selection is increasingly viewed as only one of four modes of evolution, and by no means the most important of them. The others are epigenetics, polyploidy through inter-species mating (hybridisation), and viral symbiosis. Most of his book focuses on the last of these, specifically on the Human Endogenous Retroviruses (HERV’s) that have depsosited the so-called “junk” DNA that occupies the vast preponderance of the human genome, and which vastly accelerate the rate of evolution. The book lacks a conclusion — how these four different modes of evolution interrelate, e.g., to what extent HERVs may play a role in epigenetics, is still not understood at all. But then, the story Ryan tells is very new: only a few decades ago, scientists were being denied publication and some simply ceased submitting their research results because the Darwinian Consensus was about as kind to them as the Papacy reputedly was to Galileo.

However, Ryan’s book makes clear that evolutionary biology is moving in a direction that increasingly emphasises cooperation as well as competition among species, toward a view of life as a co-evolving community. Among the things that seems to be evolving is the ability, through greater genetic diversity and complexity, to evolve ever more rapidly. The difference between this and evolution merely by random-mutation-and-selection for the interface of religion faith and science may be, for many believers, significant enough to merit attention.

Ryan’s book reminded me of Jared Diamond’s famous Guns, Germs and Steel. Before Diamond, the question: “Why did civilisation arise where it did, and not elsewhere?”, was answered by reference to access to dead things, to resources like flint and tin and copper and iron. Diamond revolutionised his field by answering it by reference to access to living things, to domesticable species of plants and animals. He portrayed the prehistoric development of civilisation as the evolution of a multi-species symbiosis led by humans, a trans-species community that strikingly seems to foreshadow Isaiah’s “Peaceable Kingdom.”

Now evolutionary biology seems to be taking the same turn that prehistoric studies recently took — toward a focus on multi-species community and cooperative symbiosis. Speciation seems so rapid, and to proceed by such diverse means, that “species” becomes a far more tentative and fluid notion. The role of competition among and within species in evolution diminishes, whilst the role of cooperation and community grows. Randomness gives way to creativity. This will not satisfy those who insist upon a literal reading of Genesis 1 and 2 in terms that a second-millennium BCE Hebrew could have understood. And it remains full of death and suffering, “red in tooth and claw.” However, it may appeal rather more than did 19th-century Darwinism to believers in a God who infuses purpose into life and history, and to whom Isaiah’s vision of the eschaton is prophetic.

At the very least, we may confidently infer that “social Darwinism” is unlikely to derive much support from evolutionary biology in the future. As biology increasingly stresses inter-species community and symbiosis, the idolators of competition among races and tribes seem likely to be divested of pseudo-scientific respectability.