Do Humans Evolve?
This exchange put me in mind of James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover. This epic poem tells the story of, among other things, God and the human race as Merrill learned of it through discussions with "familiar spirits" through a Ouija board (the poem is not as ludicrous as it sounds). These spirits describe a heavenly lab trying to perfect humanity, but struggling to spread a finite quantity of recyclable soul over an explosively growing human race. As they put it in the poem:
WE HAVE IN THE PAST HALF CENTURY HAD TO RESORT TO
SOULS OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS MOST RECENTLY THE RAT.
That leads me to Marilynne Robinson's essay "Darwinism," from her superb collection, The Death of Adam. In it, she makes the point that, as science, Darwin's theory of evolution is a mere tautology: that it is the fittest that survive is proved by their very survival. More recent followers of Darwin (like Stephen Jay Gould) claim that Darwinian evolution isn't a movement from "less evolved" to "more evolved"; that is, that there is no "direction" to the process. Rather, they say, it is a neutral process that is a dynamic response to a dynamic environment. But that may not be what Darwin meant. Darwin admitted to being influenced by Thomas Malthus, a man whose ideas flirted with eugenics. Robinson wonders if Malthus's influence is reflected in this passage from Darwin's The Descent of Man:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilized society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
This would seem to suggest that Stephen Hawking should have been left to die as a sickly child. Does that sound like good science?
9:59:06 PM 
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