WORLD ON THE WEB
Feb. 24, 2001
Volume 16 -- Number 7

_Phillip Johnson was right_

THE UNHAPPY EVOLUTION OF DARWINISM: Human DNA
experimentation has led geneticists full circle oddly
enough, to the conclusions of turn-of-the-century
intelligent-design theorists. The Brave New World proponents
were wrong: Scientific advances led to the discovery of a
"new" basis for human dignity and intrinsic worth. Since DNA
is merely the language of life, we have learned, an intelligent
creator the Word Himself must have written the human
story .

By Nancy R. Pearcey

The new year 2073 is well begun, and the centenary of Roe
vs. Wade is an appropriate time for Americans to think back
on our narrow escape from the Biotech Century and its threat
of remaking humanity itself.

In a century that worshipped at the shrine of science, who
would have thought that science itself would finally return
to beliefs once discarded as ancient superstition? Experiments
with the DNA code=8Bthe language of life=8Bhave led, near the
end of the 21st century, full circle=8Bnearly back to the original
Word that created life in the first place.

Our own century, the 21st, has indeed been the Biotech
Century, just as Jeremy Rifkin predicted in a book with that
title in 2000. In those early years, futurists had a field
day predicting the surrealistic scenes to be ushered in by
biotechnology. Most were predicting great benefits in
medicine and agriculture, to be sure, but also grave threats
to human dignity such as cloning, chimeras (human-animal
hybrids), cyborgs (human-machine hybrids), genetically
engineered subhuman slaves, and superhuman masters.

In his 1997 book Remaking Eden, Lee Silver of Princeton
predicted that a century of genetic engineering might even
create a new species of human, no longer able to mate with
its "gene poor" relations. Humanity seemed poised to take
control of its own evolution, a vision passionately promoted
by eugenicists from the time of Charles Darwin.

Indeed, the very definition of humanity came into question.
What happens to human dignity when test-tube babies are
conceived in order to be tissue donors for other family members
a practice already underway at the turn of the millennium?
What happens to our definition of human nature when researchers
create human-animal hybrids also underway in 2000? In one
case, the nuclei of human cells were extracted and inserted into
a pig's egg cells; the hybrids were allowed to grow to 32-cell
embryos before being destroyed. Researchers looked forward
to using such subhuman creatures for research even for use
as living meat-lockers for growing transplantable organs and
tissues.

Back then, some argued that genetic engineering posed no
moral questions=8Bthat it was merely an extension of the
natural methods used by farmers and breeders for centuries
with crops and domesticated animals.

Yet, nature always reaches a limit: Once a breeder isolates
a particular trait in the gene pool, change stops. Continued
shuffling of genes does not create new genes, any more
than shuffling a deck of cards creates new cards. The famous
20th-century breeder Luther Burbank said a tendency to stay
true to type "keeps all living things within some more or
less fixed limitations."

But in the 21st century, science provided the tools to
overcome the genetic barrier artificially and thus to create
a Darwinian world. Contrary to the ancient, universal view
that life is divided into distinct, discernible natural kinds
that cows are cows, and crows are crows Darwin had
proposed that living things form a continuous chain with
ever-shifting boundaries, each species melding into the next
on the evolutionary ladder.

Darwin's theory was never actually confirmed in nature. Even
in laboratory experiments, scientists were unable to cross
Burbank's "more or less fixed limitations." The fossil record
shows the same pattern of discontinuous groupings back to
the beginning of life. But genetic technology gave scientists
the artificial means to create a Darwinian world of fuzzy
edges and blurred boundaries.

And when the boundaries of humanity had become plastic and
malleable, who could say humans had any special moral status?
Even non-Christians saw the force of the argument: Embryologist
Brian Goodwin wrote that Darwinism eliminates the idea of
species as natural kinds, with disastrous ethical consequences:
"Human nature disappears as a concept from neo-Darwinism,
and so life becomes a set of parts, commodities that can be s
hifted around."

This assault on human dignity went hand in hand with the
spread of scientific reductionism, which downgraded humans
merely to complex mechanisms. It began with Rene Descartes,
the 17th-century French philosopher who proposed a dualistic
view of the human being as a robotic body somehow connected
to a mental soul=8Ba "ghost in the machine." This tenuous ghost
was easy to exorcise, and before long scientists were declaring
that humans were nothing but complicated mechanisms. "Let
us conclude boldly," said Julien Offrey de la Mettrie in 1749,
"that man is a machine." Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner, who
treated human behavior as reflex actions based on mechanistic
principles of stimulus and response, echoed him.

Again Darwin's theory played a role, offering crucial theoretical
support for the reductionistic view. Summed up by 20th-century
historian Jacques Barzun, Darwinism implied that "the sum total
of accidents of life acting upon the sum total of the accidents
of variation provided a completely mechanistic and material
system by which to account for the changes in living forms."

By the end of the 20th century, Darwinian reductionism was
being extended into fields such as ethics, where philosophers
like Michael Ruse were busy debunking traditional morality
as "an illusion," preserved only for its survival value. "What is
in our genes' interests is what seems 'right'=8Bmorally right,"
wrote Robert Wright in The Moral Animal in 1997.

In a reductio ad absurdum, consciousness itself was declared
an illusion. A computational model of the mind became
popular, with philosophers like Paul Churchland pronouncing
that mental states do not exist. Human beings were reduced
to mechanisms with no higher value than gadgets and gizmos
=8Bwhich cleared the decks for unbridled experimentation with
human embryos and DNA.

Oddly, alongside this intellectual trend ran another that
was completely opposite: the exaltation of the individual as
an autonomous Self, free to make itself and create its own
values. In the Romantic movement, the "ghost" in Descartes's
machine was revitalized and elevated to center stage,
leading to what philosopher Robert Solomon called "the
modern philosophical obsession with self as the locus and
arbiter of knowledge."

Thus Descartes set off a dizzying seesaw motion, with
descendants of the Enlightenment (like the logical positivists)
espousing mechanistic materialism, while descendants of
Romanticism (like the existentialists) exalted the autonomous
self making ungrounded choices. This became a "dualism," a
"bifurcation," within the Western mind, according to intellectual
historian Richard Tarnas, and antithesis between the poles of
"nature" and "freedom," wrote Christian philosopher Herman
Dooyeweerd. That later paved the way to the Biotech Century:
As materialism reduced humans to useful gadgets to be tinkered
with, the autonomous self rejected all ethical limits except its
own desires.

In his 1970 book Fabricated Man, Paul Ramsey diagnosed the
way this dualism affected the life issues. Most arguments
for abortion, he noted, defined the person as a choosing
consciousness, while reducing the body to a possession or
instrument under our control, like a car that takes us where
we want to go. It was this dualism, some observed, that
allowed many Americans to sanction both abortion and
euthanasia. Unborn babies are not yet persons, for they
haven't started making choices; neither are the elderly and
the demented, for they have ceased making theirs.

This dualism also accounted for the willingness to create
human embryos purely for research, and to cut and splice
human DNA as though it were so much raw material available
for bio-industry. An extreme example was the late 20th
century's Joseph Fletcher (of situational ethics fame), who
insisted that test-tube reproduction is actually "more human"
than the ordinary method because it is then a matter of
choice and conscious control: "To be men we must be in
control." Thus Fletcher voted in favor of cyborgs, chimeras,
and the entire Brave New World scenario.

A quarter century after Roe, America was heading toward a
new era of eugenics=8Bnot the coercive, top-down, racist
eugenics of the Nazi regime but a eugenics of consumer
choice. Consumers ready to pay for any technology promising
better medicine or genetic advantages for their children
were creating a market.

But then something unexpected happened. From within genetics
itself came new insights. We found that the structure of DNA
suggests a new basis for human dignity=8Bor rather, a return
to an old one.

As every high-school student now knows, DNA functions like a
language. The DNA molecule is made up of nucleotides that
function as chemical "letters" in a code. The pattern or
sequence of "letters" spells out a "message" that builds
proteins within the cell. Where did this pattern come from?

It is not a random pattern, as we would expect from sheer
chance. Nor is it a single pattern repeated over and over,
as we would expect from a natural force (like using a macro
on your computer). "DNA is like the magnetic letters your
kid sticks on the refrigerator," a 20th-century college professor
named Steve Meyer once said. "The magnetic force explains
 how the letters stick to the fridge, but it doesn't explain how
the letters are sequenced to spell 'I love Daddy.'"

The sequence in DNA is completely arbitrary, in terms of
physical forces=8Band that's exactly why DNA is capable of
functioning as a code. In any code or language, linguistic
convention endows an arbitrary pattern with meaning by a
linguistic convention. For example, in English, the letters
"s-e-e" form a word related to sight; in German, the word
means ocean. Where did the linguistic convention come from
that creates meaning for the arbitrary sequence of "letters"
in DNA? How did rules of grammar and interpretation arise
that give the molecule its symbolic attributes?

That was the great question raised by the genetic
revolution. And the answer was unavoidable. Obviously,
linguistic conventions do not emerge from chemical
reactions; they are mental realities, products of
intelligence. "DNA is like a computer program," said that
historical figure Bill Gates, "but far, far more advanced
than any software we've ever created."

It became clear that the key to interpreting the organic
world was not natural selection but John 1:1, "In the
beginning was the Word." "This passage uses the Greek word
logos to say that in the beginning there was intelligence,
wisdom, communication," explained Phillip Johnson, Berkeley
law professor and the 20th century's great proponent of
Intelligent Design theory.

We found that genetics itself implies that life is a grand
narrative told by the divine Word=8Bthat there is an Author
for the text of life. This means that (contrary to Darwinism)
living things cannot be reduced to mere matter and energy.

Moreover, living things are divided into natural kinds (again
contrary to Darwinism), each akin to a story or poem.
Evolution from one into another by gradual steps is
impossible, just as it would be impossible to create Hamlet
from The Tempest by randomly changing one letter at a time.
(Virtually all the transitional stages would be cluttered
with nonsense and, on analogy to natural selection, would
die out.)

Consequently, humans have an intrinsic nature after all, and
an intrinsic dignity. There is no stage at the beginning or
end of life when the human being is not a full person.

Astonishingly, it was a non-Christian philosopher, the
well-known 20th-century postmodernist Richard Rorty, who
drew together these themes most strikingly. "The very idea
that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature," he wrote,
"is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation,
the work of someone who had something in mind, who
Himself spoke some language in which He described His own
project." In other words, human beings have an intrinsic
nature and dignity only if the world is an embodiment of the
Word, the Logos, the language of a personal Creator.
Amazingly, it was the genetic revolution that brought this
truth home, transforming the entire American culture.

In the modern world, science is accorded authority to tell
us what "really is." Philosophers and theologians had long
sought to provide ethical guidance for genetic research, but
the turning point came when science itself revealed that
the language of life the DNA code supports the conclusion
that the biotic world reflects the Logos of its Creator.

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Nancy R. Pearcey is a freelance writer living in Virginia
 

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