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I know of no more fascinating digital magazines than Aeon, which focuses on philosophical analysis of ideas and culture, and its twin, Psyche, which illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophy and the arts.
The two digital publications are an example of how disciplines, in this case philosophy, are seeking to reach a broader audience. Aeon and Psyche are a bit like Contexts, a magazine that serves as the public face of sociology and which makes cutting-edge social science research accessible to general readers.
Where else could you find out what Pompeii’s ruins say about its enslaved, prostituted women? Or an accessible and coherent explanation of entanglement in quantum mechanics? Or speculations among physicists and philosophers about the notion of multiple realities?
Among the most provocative recent articles I’ve recently read in Aeon is “Evolution Without Accidents,” which questions the argument that natural selection is driven by random mutations—and which also identifies the process by which women’s contributions to evolutionary theory have been marginalized. The essay is by James A. Shapiro, a University of Chicago microbiologist, who is a highly controversial figure in the study of evolution.
He argues that the neo-Darwinian view associated with “the Modern Synthesis”—that evolution is largely a result of random genetic mutations and natural selection that take place gradually over very long spans of time—is wrong, or, better put, incomplete. Instead, advances in molecular genetics indicate that random, gradual genetic variation is only one of many modes of evolutionary change.
Shapiro’s argument, were it correct, would call into question several ideas associated with Darwinian evolution—that:
- The evolutionary process is a product of accident and random chance and therefore lacks any teleology or direction or larger meaning.
- Competition, rather than cooperation and interdependence, undergirds the process of evolutionary change.
- Evolution is a slow, gradual process that takes place over the span of evolutionary time.
Due to his critique of the Modern Synthesis, Shapiro is sometimes considered a “friend” by the pseudoscientific advocates of intelligent design—who claim that the evolutionary process is not simply a product of chance and that the structures of biology are too complex to be explained by random genetic modifications and environmental fit.
I should note that Shapiro disavows any sympathies for intelligent design and the argument that evolution requires the existence of an intelligent higher power.
What, then, might be some alternate evolutionary mechanisms? Shapiro identifies several, and it’s noteworthy that a significant number of these pathways were uncovered by women.
There’s symbiogenesis, the acquisition of new genomes as a result of cell fusions; gene exchanges; DNA transfer from bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungi and other environmental elements; and the symbiotic relationship between various species associated with the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis (who died in 2011).
Then there is genetic transposition, the movement or transfer of DNA sequences from one location on the genome to another. This discovery, first identified by Barbara McClintock, can result in genetic mutations, chromosome rearrangements and the suppression and expression of genetic information. McClintock also found that transposition was not necessarily random. Rather, certain stress conditions could initiate genetic transposition, genetic mutations and gene expression. Shapiro cites evidence that cells can cut and splice their own DNA modules and engineer the structure of proteins in response to various stressors and environmental challenges.
Interspecies hybridization—sexual reproduction or crossing between different species —offers yet another vehicle for evolution and can contribute to rapid genome reorganization. Although the mule is the most famous example of hybrid speciation, such a process has also occurred in yeasts and among plants, including cotton, potatoes and rice.
Then, too, there’s phenotypic and developmental plasticity. The theoretical biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard of the Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute demonstrated that some species can rapidly adapt to changes in environment and that these rapid changes can contribute to speciation.
In addition, there’s epigenetics—a concept introduced by the Scottish embryologist and geneticist Conrad Waddington in 1942. This concept describes changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code, which can also be triggered by environmental stressors.
And there is also the role of instruction, passed across generation, in evolution. Teaching isn’t biological, but even among dolphins, it can exert a far-reaching multigenerational impact upon behavior.
Shapiro is certainly not the only serious scientist to ask whether we need a new theory of evolution. In 2014, Nature, the interdisciplinary science journal, published a forum addressing the question “Does evolutionary theory needs a rethink?” The contributors were divided, with some saying “Yes, urgently” while others replied, “No, all is well.” When, the next year, the Royal Society agreed to host a conference on New Trends in Evolution, 23 fellows signed a letter of protest.
In an article in The Guardian in 2022, Stephen Buranyi, a science journalist trained in molecular genetics and a researcher at Imperial College London, argued that the controversy was in part a struggle for professional recognition and status and partly a reaction to what critics saw as “post-truth” tendencies regarding science. But it was also about making sense of a host of stunning findings by molecular and developmental biologists and paleontologists: that cells mutate at a very high rate that has little to do with natural selection and that the fossil record reveals evolution occurring in short, concentrated bursts.
At stake, in the scientific controversy, was how the theory of evolution would take into account new discoveries involving “plasticity, evolutionary development, epigenetics, [and] cultural evolution.” We do now know that some cells and organisms and species “have the potential to adapt more rapidly and more radically than was once thought” in the face of altered environments and contact with viruses, cells or other organisms.
I am, of course, wholly unequipped to evaluate this scientific debate. But as a social and cultural historian, I can say with some confidence that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was never simply a scientific framework for understanding the process of change in life forms. Nor were the debates over evolutionary theory only about natural selection or genetic mutations or heredity.
There was widespread agreement as early as the 1860s that evolutionary theory carried profound implications for social thought, religion and public policy. As Richard Hofstadter argued in his 1944 dissertation, Social Darwinism in American Thought, theorists such as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner adopted the idea of the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest as justification for laissez-faire economics, while others, including William James and John Dewey, argued that human planning was needed to direct social development and improve upon the natural order.
The “monkey” trial of 1925 created the illusion that the debate over evolution was a straightforward contest between scientific authority and obscurantist religious fundamentalism and between the sophisticated urban progressives and the small-town booboisie and rural yokels. That conflict between science and religion continues, but the debate in 1925 was more complex than that implied in the stage play and movie Inherit the Wind.
As Edward Larson shows in his Pulitzer Prize–winning 2020 account of the Scopes trial, Summer of the Gods, the prosecuting attorney, William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential candidate, regarded Darwinism as a cruel doctrine that served as the intellectual justification for a variety of barbarities, from imperialism to eugenics. Nor was he entirely wrong in holding this view. Grossly distorted and oversimplified forms of Darwinian thinking did underlie theories of racial hierarchy and provided a rationale for opposition to unions, workplace regulations and even the income tax.
The Great Commoner also believed in the right of the people, through the Legislature, to decide what should or shouldn’t be taught in schools. His adversary, Clarence Darrow, was less interested in defending academic freedom or an education based on science than in discrediting religious fundamentalism. In other words, the trial had less to do with biology and the evolutionary process and teachers’ autonomy than with the 1920s’ cultural conflicts pitting modernists against traditionalists and urban ethnics against rural and small-town provincials.
In 1991, Carl Degler, also a Pulitzer Prize winner and a past president of both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association and a leading authority on race, the family and American women’s history, published a book that is largely and regrettably forgotten today. Entitled In Search of Human Nature, it traced “the rise, fall, and … resurgence of biological and hereditarian (especially racial and gender-based) explanations of the variations in behavior and intelligence.”
The book laid bare the ugly side of Darwin’s own thought, including his ideas about male superiority and his notion of lower races as intermediate creatures who lacked the full attributes of humanity and showed how Darwin himself “left a legacy of racism, exclusionary immigration policies, eugenics and discrimination against women.” To this list, one might add intelligence testing and involuntary sterilization.
After examining the culturalist critique of biological and hereditarian ideas by thinkers as diverse as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, and John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, Degler looks at “the revival of Darwinism, led first by ethologists such as Karl von Frisch, Nikolaas Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz and Jane Goodall—who revealed clear parallels between animal and human behavior—and followed in varying degrees by such figures as Melvin Konner, Alice Rossi, Jerome Kagen and Edward O. Wilson as well as others in anthropology, political science and economics.”
As the Degler book makes clear, the more recent studies of evolutionary genetics bear scant resemblance to the ideas of the 20th-century eugenicists. One reviewer put the point succinctly: “The ‘return to biology’ is not a return to Social Darwinism,” as some have alleged, “but an attempt to give biological and genetic factors their due.” That is all to the good. Cultural explanations—for example, David Landes’s cultural explanation of the wealth and poverty of nations—can possess their own biases and limitations.
Holistic understanding of human evolution, human behavior and human nature requires us to acknowledge the biological and physiological and the cultural and psychological, genetics and the mind. Unfortunately, in the contemporary university, C. P. Snow’s warning about a deep divide between the two cultures, one of science, the other of humanities and the arts, remains relevant. One symbol: Harvard’s new engineering and life sciences campus located four miles from Harvard Yard.
We need to bridge this gap, but many obstacles stand in the way, above all, academic specialization and intellectual fragmentation that make it more difficult for humanists, social scientists and engineers and scientists to speak intelligibly to one another. Overcoming the divide will require humanists and social scientists to acquire a deep understanding of science and show how their insights into history and philosophy of science and the sociology and politics of knowledge can make a genuine contribution to scientific understanding.
But what needs to be done on the undergraduate level?
Almost all colleges and universities require students to take two science courses, one with a lab. But this approach doesn’t ensure scientific literacy. To produce the scientifically literate graduates our society needs, discipline-based introductory courses aren’t enough. We need to supplement the existing discipline based introductory courses with new learning experiences that:
- Overcome the highly fractured approach to science education we have currently adopted and
- Give students hands-on experiences with scientific research and analysis that go beyond cookie-cutter labs.
Here’s how:
- STEM faculty at a campus need to spell out the scientific literacies that every graduate should acquire.
- All students should be able to take a course that will introduce them to the scientific method, key scientific concepts and theories, and methods of statistical analysis as well as the frontiers of scientific inquiry.
- The number of students who take part in various kinds of scientific research, whether quantitative, qualitative, lab-based or field-based, needs to expand significantly.
- Campuses should introduce team-taught courses that analyze a societal challenge from scientific, policy and other perspectives and view that topic through multiple lenses—cultural, historical, philosophical and sociological as well as scientific.
- Courses should do more to examine science and technology’s social impact and ethical implications.
To be well educated today requires scientific literacy. Just as college graduates should be able to read and understand a newspaper’s business section, they should also be able to read and evaluate scientific news. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
