Debating Darwin: Adventures of a Scholar (ISBN 0941690857)

Can Values Be Derived from Evolutionary Biology:
In "Debating Darwin", John C. Greene displays an impressive knowledge of intellectual history in regards to science and evolution's relationship and non-relationship to Western tradition. The format of the book is also impressive for someone who dares to "debate" Darwin. He publishes letters of correspondence with two eminent scientists (Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr). The debates between Green and the two scientists are assertive and friendly. Some of the people who submit reviews to Amazon could learn about civilized debate from these three great men. By their example, we can learn to disagree without becoming disagreeable. Greene's main thesis is: "One would like to feel optimistic about the scientistic mythology that has grown up around the theory of evolution, but it is hard to do so. The myth is intellectually dishonest, employing teleological and vitalistic figures of speech to describe processes that are advertised as "mechanistic" and pretending to derive from evolutionary biology values that stem from classical, Judaeo-Christian, and Enlightenment sources." p. 43. In his book, Mr. Greene defends this viewpoint consistently and brilliantly. Dobzhansky and Mayr give as good as they get, but as Greene is the author, he of course takes the last word. Greene makes some interesting quotes from various scholars such as Balfour and pan-psychist Sewall Wright. One gets the feeling that Greene agrees with Wright that our consciousness is the most knowable of all our experiences and science is a secondary sort of knowledge. It is interesting to speculate as to what Greene would have to say about Daniel C. Dennet. Mr. Greene seems unmoved by Max Ernst's theory of emergence. I assume Mr. Greene would have been equally unimpressed by Dennet's ideas about "cranes". Greene seems to be impressed by the writings of theologian Paul Tillich, which Dennet dismisses as being full of "bombastic recapitulation", and I could only imagine Greene, unconcerned by "sky-hooks", would wonder on what "Ground of Being" the "cranes" rested. At any rate, I can only speculate that Mr. Greene would be unimpressed by "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" Chapters 16 and 17 where Dennet deals with Morality. Greene would probably persist in the idea that no value system could be derived from or accounted by evolutionary theory. More ever, it seems that Greene would be unconvinced that consciousness could be explained from any scientific materialistic and/or mechanistic theory. One could be concerned that Greene seems to ignore the pre-Darwin social contract philosophers (Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke) who seem to anticipate some very materialistic basis for ethics that could be construed as consistent with Darwinism. This is my first book by John C. Greene. I have to give this book 5 stars because it is so educational, clear and decent. By giving this book such a high rating, I am not saying Mr. Greene won the debate. I am saying he has conveyed a great deal of valuable information. He also brought up important issues in evolutionary thought that should lead to a greater clarity as to what evolutionary science is and is not and as to whether evolutionary scientists are illegitimately going beyond science, in the name of science, into realms which belong to philosophy and religion. If you are at all interested in evolution, at least get this book to read Chapter 2, the letters, and the conclusion. John C. Greene is a gentleman,a scholar, and a plausible debater.

Splendid Look at the Modern Synthesis from a Historian:
John C. Greene's "Debating Darwin" is a fitting coda to his work on exploring the history of Darwinian evolution and its philosophical, sociological and religious implications. The bulk of this volume is devoted to his splendid correspondence between geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and ornithologist Ernst Mayr, two of the primary architects of the "Modern Synthesis". Philosophically, Greene's attitudes toward Darwin come closest to Brown University Professor of Biology Kenneth Miller's, especially in the latter's "Finding Darwin's God". This is an important volume for those interested in the history and philosophy of science. I suspect it will be an invaluable resource to those scholars interested in studying the creation of the "Modern Synthesis" and its subsequent history from sociological, philosophical, and, if appropriate, religious contexts.

Philosophist, Biologer...:
A fscinating semi-biographical account by the author of The Death of Adam, and Science, Ideology and World View. Many theoretical biologists take umbrage at the suggestion they might actually be philosophers with a hidden metaphysical agenda. John Greene has always attempted eloquently to disabuse the Darwinist of his presumptions in this regard. The history of Darwinism is important to study in order to understand the disguised ideological context in which its fallacies of evolutionary mechanism (amidst its triumphs of evolutionary fact)became fixed rigidly in place. Like a prophecy of the philosopher Kant Darwinism promptly ran afoul of the 'Big Three', divinity, soul, and free will, taking positions that are legitimate as dialectical explorations, if they are hypotheses, but illegitimate if they are taken as rigid axioms, or established foundations.

The Big Meaning of Evolution Examined:
This book is a semi-autobiographical retrospective of the historian's pondering the implications of Darwinism for philosophy, theology, and ethics. The title refers to Greene's correspondence with Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr, who were major contributors to the creation of the Modern Synthesis. Their exchanges with Greene accept that he is a Christian philosopher who wants to test the philosophical coherence of their Darwinism as a basis for values. Greene's study, The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought, described the transition from world views and values based on classical and Biblical thought to naturalism that substitutes thorough-going dynamic material causality for a providential world order. Greene's deep thesis is that naturalism empties nature of value and destroys world order ("cosmos"). An evolutionary ethics, on that assumption, is necessarily incoherent. Yet Darwinians are undeterred. They propose numerous world views and evolutionary ethics, usually with high confidence in the ethical and rational validity of their offerings. Darwin, according to Greene, transposed into evolutionary vocabulary the theistic perfectionism of Paley's Natural Theology. Notwithstanding the disordering tendency of chance and the debilitating doctrine of brute struggle for existence, nature remained for him a cosmos, ordered by perfection of design, harmony of the parts, beauty and grandeur of the whole, and contemplation of Homo sapiens as the culmination. The key insertion point of retention of theological premises was adaptation as incremental improvement of survivability. His study of a sample of Darwinian naturalists concludes that the original hybrid formula-ostensible rejection of cosmos principles but selective retention of them-is the defining trait of the philosophical subspecies, Darwinian naturalism. Greene is precise about the source of the antagonism between science and religion, and indeed any world view. He endorses Alexander Koyré's statement that the mechanical universe displaced "the conception of the world as a finite, closed, and hierarchically ordered whole" and replaced it by "an indefinite and even infinite universe which is bound together by the identity of its fundamental components and laws, and in which all these components are placed on the same level of being. This, in turn, implies the discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based on value-concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally the utter devalorisation of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world of facts" (p. 102). Greene notes that Koyré is not alone in holding this view. He instances A. N. Whitehead and C. S. Peirce; one could name many more, especially Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued that the supposedly rational cosmos is nihilist at bottom: anything goes. (Greene unfortunately does not discuss Nietzsche). There's a ready response to this criticism: admission that, of course, an evolutionary ethic can't be constructed solely from scientific facts or principles. Dobzhansky and Mayr admits this. Basic concepts, such as "adaptation" and "selection", require elucidation that goes beyond verifiable science. Some values may be readable from the factual evidence (e.g., evolutionary progress from lower to higher), but others clearly are not (e.g., the aim of evolution). I was surprised to discover that Mayr admits to being personally religious; he even states that "every scientist I know has religion" (p. 235). Is Greene's deep thesis then a strawman? One test of this question is his canvass of the issue whether scientific knowledge is exhaustive of veridical experience (p. 205f). "Scientific philosophy" is premised on an affirmative answer, but not all scientists agree. Greene instances geneticist Sewall Wright, for whom consciousness, not matter, was the primary reality. Science on this showing can know nothing of the inner states of its objects, and hence cannot know value as it is experienced (p. 207). This is a significant concession, since it denies the coherence of a materialist explanation of mind. Many scientists have embraced dualism. Mayr attempts to construct a middle way with his theory of "emergence" of structure through adaptation, but he admits the emergence of consciousness from a blind adaptive process requires a "sequence of improbabilities" and that it is "a miracle that man ever happened" (p. 210). Despite concessions of this kind, which seem to grant Greene his principal thesis, both interlocutors insist that their philosophies are rational systems. They also devise plausible stories about the adaptive causes of human traits, such as the "ethical animal", even though the explanations must attribute ethical intentionality to animal behavior. Children do this naturally. Is the ethologist doing the same thing in sophisticated language? The antagonism between science and world view assumes that science must be mechanistic. A good deal has been made of the purported falsification of this assumption by quantum physics, and more recently by complexity theory, aka, nonlinear dynamics. Greene mentions the former only en passant and the latter not at all. Rightly or wrongly, the quantum question has not been considered relevant in most discussions of philosophical biology. Nonlinear dynamics, by contrast, has set the fox among the chickens. Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy (Maynard Smith, Dawkins, Dennett) views it with alarm and attempts to discredit both complexity theory and empirical studies that use it. This stir merits attention as a test area. Prima facie it provides additional evidence of the antagonism of mechanistic theory to cosmos. This is something missed. Greene insists (with Mary Midgley) that naturalism is a kind of religion and one inherently hostile to conventional religion. Its creed is belief in progress in the everyday sense and the larger sense that humankind putatively has a cosmic moral destiny (despite the prediction of eventual species extinction). It is hostile to conventional religion because on the evolutionary scenario (one of them anyhow), human destiny is a bootstrapping operation in which self-consciousness, having emerged in our species, creates its own destiny ("man makes himself"). Otherwise expressed, man creates cosmos from chaos. This view is indeed widespread among ethical naturalists and possibly is diagnostic of the type. Certainly it requires remarkable psychological reversals. On the one hand the evolutionary tableau is proposed as an unanswerable demonstration of human finitude: we are one among millions of randomly assembled species, all destined for extinction. In another idiom, it is said that we are "slaves" to our genes. The practical conclusion to this premise set would seem to be Stoic resignation. Yet naturalists exhort rebellion against our fate and even taking charge of the cosmic process (both Huxleys, Dawkins, and many more). Eugenics, the SETI project for communication with extra-terrestrials, and the colonisation of space are extolled as the means. Improbable as these projects may be, they do infuse meaning into a purportedly blind universe. One might call it Star Wars for nerds. So one is right to say that ethical naturalism is a kind of religion. It has fervor, a cult of genius presided over by the ghost of Charles Darwin, a demonology, a flexible practical agenda, numerous organs for the propagation of faith, and a muscular hit squad ever active in smashing the erring. Over the past decade or so, the religion seems to have fissioned. The original version, which placed humankind at the pinnacle of evolution, is challenged by conservationist and animal liberationist splinters that deny human ethical pre-eminence. This fracture merits the attention of ethical naturalism's critics. Even more deserving of the attention of a Christian philosopher is the controversy over teaching evolution in the schools, but Greene says nothing about it. Despite these criticisms, I enjoyed the agreeable style, erudition, and lucidity of Debating Darwin.