Darwin’s “Designative Virtue”

Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein was on Joe Rogan’s show, commenting on the fact that Tucker Carlson has expressed his scepticism about Darwinian evolution. He says that Tucker is happy to meet to be instructed on why he’s misunderstood the problem, which for a generally decent bloke is a disappointing recycling of the commonest Darwinian response to criticism from anyone who can be shoe-horned into the “layman” category – even if they are also evolutionary biologists. I came to the conclusion years ago that no-one understands Darwinism.

But Bret attributes Tucker’s doubts largely to the professional evolutionists’ own fault, because when addressing the public they pretend to be far more certain than they really are of the adequacy of random variation and natural selection to produce all the new species in history. A little thought will tell you that this means Tucker Carlson has doubts about the Darwinian explanation because Darwinians themselves have doubts about it, which as a seasoned journalist he can see behind their expressed certainties. Less charitably, he can recognise bullshitters when he sees them.

Weinstein, by contrast, freely admits his own doubts about the Modern Synthesis and its variants, and says that evolutionary biologists need to come up with something better if they are to win over those like Carlson to the Darwinian side. Spoiler alert: his rescue plan for Darwin actually abandons Darwin for something more Lamarckian.

In outlining his proposal – or perhaps more accurately a new research paradigm – he starts by saying that although classic Darwinism says that evolution proceeds without foresight, human beings were produced by evolution and have foresight, so perhaps that view is wrong. At this point let’s pause and consider how circular that is: since evolutionary theory is in doubt, arguing from some human trait that supposedly evolved carries no weight at all, except as a basis for unsupported speculation.

Still, Weinstein admits that mutations observed now show no sign of purpose or direction. But that does not mean, he says, that during the long history of life some such faculty of planning, carried not on protein-coding genes but in some deeper level of genomic organisation, might not have evolved. By “evolved” here, he means by means of the same old random mutation and selection that sets up Haldane’s dilemma (the waiting time problem) in our own day.

In effect, he seems to be rehashing Darwin’s own appeal to intractable lengths of time being capable of achieving absolutely anything by chance, in this case some kind of ability to plan evolution ahead. What he actually proposes is some unspecified mechanism that enables mutations to search “evolutionary landscapes” more effectively than chance alone. “Life” somehow knows the kind of not-yet-existant possibilities that might well increase fitness, over and above natural selection’s ability to spot them when they arrive. This, I suppose, would somehow account for the co-ordination of changes necessary to transform a quadruped into a whale, or the Ediacarian life-forms into all the Cambrian phyla, in a few million years.

Now, the first problem I see with this is that the very definition of “design” is the ability to reduce decision possibilities in advance. So Weinstein is proposing not a design-analogue, but an actual designer, one produced originally by Darwin’s blind and purposeless process.

The second problem is that William Dembski has pretty much proven that, without the addition of specific information, no search algorithm is ultimately superior to random search. In other words, Bret’s cunning genome needs to know what it wants in advance, not just a better way to search for it. That is Lamarck’s inbuilt teleology.

The third problem is the black box within a black box nature of the hypothesis. The process is extremely vague, and its origins are so deep in deep time that they are beyond examination. That is even more devious than the claim that because the genetic code exists, it must have evolved: at least in that case the code is a fact, not a wish. For naturally, no evidence whatsoever exists that such a mechanism exists. It is not science but a hunch (but I suppose Weinstein might propose we start looking for it as a possibility).

Let me return to the easy assumption that because evolution is science (and Intelligent Design isn’t), proposing a foresighted genome leaves Darwinian evolutionary theory intact, and the doubters like Tucker Carlson can be dragged back from the Creationist brink. But before 1859 the default position on life, even by those favouring evolution, was a divine Creator. Darwin’s theory made atheism respectable only because, superficially, it was simple and plausible, and at least to the casual observer, it seemed to be backed up by the facts of artificial and natural varieties, and the overall trajectory of the fossil record. It seemed, and still seems before the devil-details are studied, to be self-evidently true.

However, it is far from self-evidently true that a process of random variation and natural selection could have produced a genetic mechanism capable of designing hitherto unrealised life-forms from those that exist, without employing anything as its tools other than random variations and natural selection. To me, it sounds as though Bret Weinstein, used to basing his whole worldview on the Evolutionary Lens, has acquired the habit of expecting people to believe Just-So Stories, without evidence, rather than the default position of most of the human race’s thinkers from time immemorial.

Once your ideology is unshakeable, the Aristotelian’s belief that “dormative virtue” (or in this case “designative virtue”) is an explanation for anything appears incontrovertible.