THE DARWIN WARS:
how stupid genes became selfish gods
By Andrew Brown. Simon and Schuster. xiv + 241 pages. £12.99
ISBN 0 684 85144 X
'Just as Darwinism now provides the main explanatory framework of our times, so disputes about Darwinism are really disputes about our very nature and place in the world,' (from the dust-jacket). Andrew Brown, a Templeton Prize-winning freelance journalist, surveys these deep-seated and often polemical and acrimonious disputes, 'conducted like musketry battles' (p.30), which are 'struggling for the soul of every reader' (p. xi).
'The Darwin wars are not between believers and disbelievers in evolution, or in Darwinism. They are about the scope and proper limits of Darwinian explanations. All sides in these arguments take for granted that where there is design in nature, it has been produced by Darwinian processes operating for a long time in reasonably stable environments,' (p.18). 'Darwinian explanations' include 'selfish gene' theory, adaptation, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, with variable but significant doses of behaviourism or reductionism.
Brown identifies two main parties in the 'Darwin wars' (p.56-57): 'Dawkinsians' (Richard Dawkins, Edward O. Wilson, John Maynard Smith, Daniel Dennett, Helena Cronin), who believe that natural selection acting on genes can explain everything - and who are mostly 'passionately anti-religious'; and 'Gouldians' (Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose), who argue that natural selection is vastly over-rated and fundamentally deficient, and who raise questions about the social construction, and consequences, of scientific knowledge (p.70).
'Almost all the participants in these disputes take it for granted that the factual claims of creation and resurrection at the root of Christianity are untrue': one acknowledged exception is 'Sam Berry . . . who has written several books to wean evangelicals off creationism' (p.154). Evangelicals fight their own 'Darwin wars', of course, over biology, ideology and theology. Although Brown doesn't believe that 'science and religion need be two deadly enemies, or even that they deal with the same subject matter' (p. xi), he states that 'Darwinism does make real difficulties for Christianity' (p.187, 191, 213), and explores religious issues in chapter 9. Brown himself is a professed atheist (p.180), and he makes many sweeping and provocative comments. For example: 'It is tempting to argue that although Christianity appears to derive from a succession of lies . . . it may have produced more useful truths than Darwinism even though Darwinism's story is true' (p.194); 'We could describe as omnipotent a God who gives cancer to children and knowledge of the truth to Ian Paisley, but we should not call him loving or just' (p.192-193); and apparently one Margaret Spufford is 'one of the few theologians both willing and able to be intellectually honest' (p.192).
Confronted with the 'sheer gut-wrenching wrongness of the world', Brown asserts that both Darwinism and Christianity can explain how the 'mismatch between our longings and the world around us came about', but neither can abolish this mismatch, or provide a 'benevolent ethic' (p.193-195, 201, 220). Tragically, such a conclusion drove the mathematical biologist George Price to suicide (p.1-7, 9, 13, 193, 220). Brown quotes Jesus' cry of dereliction from the cross (p.193), which is deeply ironic, since Brown's own cry is ultimately for a redemption which only the gospel of the risen Jesus can offer.
