The Evolution Debate

Introductory note: challenges and criticisms are welcome. Rude, vulgar or hostile responses will be thrown out with the garbage.

I recently came across previews for Ben Stein’s documentary, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” The premise of the documentary is that there is a systematic effort on the part of the scientific community to suppress any dissent to the prevailing theory of evolution, or “neo-Darwinism” as it is referred to. Its aim, or at least its primary stated aim, is to promote academic and intellectual freedom.

To me, the project initially looked promising – more academic freedom is always a good thing in my view. As a Catholic and a supporter of the theory of evolution – moreover, as one who was able to reconcile these views after years of struggle – I welcomed the prospect of the door being opened to the possibility of scientifically discussing the role of “intelligence” in the development of life.

As I investigated the blog site that promotes the release of the move in April, however, it became clear that, while Ben Stein can sound reasonable in an interview, this project is ultimately rooted in what thus far looks to be “soft” right-wing ideology. Of course this unfortunate discovery in no way invalidates the demand for greater academic freedom, for the ability to express ideas in an academic setting without fear of ridicule, censorship, a ruined career or in some cases, physical violence. For those who see double-standards implied in every position, I would defend Ward Churchill’s right to speak as much as I would Stein’s or anyone else’s.

Now is not the time to track the development of fundamentalism or the “Religious Right”; but it must be said that Biblical fundamentalism alone is not necessarily the motivation behind the “attacks on science”. There are deeper ideological problems which largely go unaddressed by the atheist crusaders, and by defenders of the theory of evolution in general. In a knee-jerk way that parrots the behavior of their foes, they have not sought to patiently explain, but rather to become just as aggressive, and now field their own highly visible and obnoxious contingent on the battlefields of the Culture War.

It may be argued that one good turn deserves another, and in the battle for Truth and Right and Good, no punches can afford to be pulled. Partisans on each side consider that they have a duty to their doctrines. In such a struggle the ends naturally justify the means, and no lie is too bold or audacious to repeat over and again until it gains an air of truth, and finally becomes truth to all who hear it. Those who aren’t conscious liars are at any rate doing all they can to avoid the displeasures of cognitive dissonance; they know that the further they stray outside of a carefully-defined paradigm of facts and methods, the closer they come to having their subjective, ideological pretensions undermined and possibly debunked.

Because they lack the critical thinking skills, or the necessary intellectual optimism, to attempt to synthesize apparently conflicting views (or at least build bridges between them), they say that the gap is unbridgeable without having ever taken a serious look at the possibilities afforded by the terrain.

At the end of the day it appears to me as if the EXPELLED project, even in spite of what I think are its flaws, errors, and downright silly pretensions, still has a valid point to make. If the Catholic Church 500 years ago was the status quo and the Galileos were the rebels, today the situation, in the minds of a significant section of the public, has been reversed. The modern scientific establishment, dubbed “Big Science” by the EXPELLED group, occupies an analogous position to the Church, and today’s creationists, in spirit if not in method, the position of the dissenting Galileo. Again I reiterate that this is how a large chunk the public sees it; I don’t buy into the popular Galileo narrative, most of which is based on some ridiculous play written long after the affair.

What is at the heart of the fear of the average fundamentalist or “evangelical” Christian with respect to evolution? Part of it is that inability to synthesize, out of intellectual limitations or rigid pessimism, which I might add is more shamefully shared by a growing number of atheists and horribly misnamed “free thinkers”.

Much of the objection in my experience to the theory of evolution is that it threatens to render life meaningless. Not just personal lives, not just personal relationships with Christ, but life in general, in the larger, existential sense. Ironically it does not seem to me that evolutionary biologists have ever accounted for the development, in humanity, of a need to search for meaning and embrace it when we believe we have found it. What role “meaning” could play in the survival of the species at a physical, material level is beyond me. Is it that any being capable of self-awareness and abstract thought will necessarily consider meaning? It seems rather that meaning was all around primitive and ancient man, practically taken for granted, and it was only with the advent of modern atheism (itself a product of man’s unexpected separation from nature) that it began to dawn on humanity how important meaning is.

Of course there are those who will state that those who “need” meaning are weak, in need of a crutch, incapable of dealing with harsh reality. They should strive to be satisfied with what science allegedly reveals – that there is no meaning but what we make. Life is, or can be, a party, so why not embrace what it has to offer? Have promiscuous sex. We have condoms and birth control pills for you, abortion if those don’t work. Eat fatty foods, we have by-pass surgery. Submit to a degrading, unfulfilling job or career – we have many drugs, from entertainment to consumer goods to actual pills and shots that can get you through it. The list could go on for some time.

Under these conditions, for those who absolutely reject this empty hedonistic perspective, religion is more appealing than it ever was in medieval times. And in our American society, it is highly individualistic; it takes its cues from American libertarianism and the legacy of English Puritanism. Unlike in Latin America, where the Catholic perspective has created a strong cohesion between social justice and Christianity, I think it is arguable that the Protestant/libertarian perspective in America has been a cause of social atomization and the resulting alienation and despair.

It is no surprise then that a highly personal religion would be vigorously defended against perceived threats to it. And at this juncture the greatest threat is perceived not to come from the degenerate “culture industry” or even the rival religions such as Islam, but from the march of “Big Science” and the regime of secularism it seeks to impose upon society.

The revolt against “Big Science”, I believe, is not necessarily some sort of revolt against the scientific method, empirical investigation, logical analysis, or rational thought. It is a revolt against arrogance and prejudice, against established orthodoxy and dogma. It is a revolt against “secularism”, against the materialism and hedonism which are rightly perceived to be at the root of personal and social malaise. Above all it is an expression of what seems to be a timeless human characteristic to question authority, no matter what that authority claims to base itself upon.

The creators of EXPELLED sense this and have marketed accordingly, portraying themselves as the heralds of a new rebel counter-culture. Along with other Christian youth movements such as "Battle Cry" they believe they have turned the tables on yesterday's radicals who are now today's academic establishment. "Every generation needs a rebel" says the EXPELLED website.

Wrapping up.

Ben Stein made an important point that I agree with; a theory that rests solidly upon fact and logic need not fear questions and challenges. As a supporter of the theory of evolution, I believe it can successfully withstand the criticisms of Creation Scientists and others who insist that the actual mechanics are somehow flawed or contradicted by other appearances of the facts. Evolutionary theory has nothing to fear. The real fear comes from ideological quarters, who believe that those who question evolution do so as part of a bolder and broader strategy to a) discredit science in general and b) impose a theocracy, setting back the “progress” of history and launching us back into a new Dark Age.

These claims are only partially grounded in an accurate understanding of reality. There will always be ideologues who want exactly those things, although it must be said that when even the most extreme positions on this side of the divide label themselves “scientific”, clearly it isn’t some sort of abstract hatred of science that motivates them. Their conception of science is incorrect, but that doesn’t mean they hate it. They instinctively realize that no theory today can have any credibility if it is not scientific, or thought to be scientific.

I will end on this note: successful challenges to materialism and hedonism, as well as successful defenses of the Christian faith, do not need to undermine science. The developments in physics and neuroscience are far more compelling and relevant to our cause than the controversy over Darwinian evolution, which has absolutely no account for the origins of life, the origins of the universe, the substance of the universe, or the existence of consciousness. “Darwinism” properly understood as a theory which explains the diversity we see in nature and how it has changed over time poses no threat to a spiritual worldview.

Likewise, atheists and secularists do not need to trample religion underfoot to build a rational and humane society. They will, however, need to recognize that some of their ideals and values will never be shared by the vast majority of the human race, not because of some mythical lack of intelligence, but because most of us are, I believe, hard-wired to seek out and embrace meaning where we can find it.

The Labor Theory of Value: A Scientific and Moral Proposition

II. The Marxian Laboratory

The nature and function of the Marxian LTV is often mistaken by its critics, and even some of its proponents. Whenever you read that the LTV is supposed to account for the price or value of "an object", you know you've strayed onto the wrong path. There is a reason Marx does not immediately begin Capital with a discussion of labor, even though labor will become central to his analysis of the commodity later on. The reason is that before we can determine what gives a commodity value, we must know what a commodity actually is.

What the LTV analyzes is a very specific, historical thing: a commodity, defined by Marx as a thing produced by laborers working for a capitalist, solely for exchange. It presumes that these things are the result of definitely aimed economic activity. Above all, a commodity has a social existence. If an "object" does not meet this criteria, the LTV has little if anything to say about it. Oddities, exceptions, and the like may all exist – they may meet some of the criteria or none of it. The LTV does not need to account for everything to be applicable to the things it actually claims to be applicable to, such as practically everything you will find on a store shelf with a price tag on it or in a catalogue.

It is the commodity, and nothing else, that is the basic "cell" of the capitalist economy. As we know with modern physics, everything may be made up of atoms, but atoms themselves are made up of smaller components; protons and electrons, quarks, etc. One knows very little about matter if one only knows that it is a particular arrangement of atoms. The same applies to commodities; we know they are bought and sold every day, but what are they, actually? One knows very little about commodities if one only knows that they are bought and sold in a market place.

Since we cannot use a microscope to "see" a concept, we must use, as Marx says, "the lens of abstraction". The Marxian microscope is thus first applied to the commodity, the basic unit, atom, or cell of capitalist society. A word on "capitalist society" – some libertarians claim that "capitalism" is a phrase invented by Marx (though it was actually used earlier by Trugot). For Marx capitalism is simply the epoch of generalized commodity production. For instance, in earlier epochs, production was first aimed towards securing necessities, while surpluses may have been sold at the town market or to a traveling merchant. Thus most things were not commodities. They were immediately consumed or stored away. Capitalism is signified by production almost exclusively for exchange, or production for the sake of further production.

Returning to the Marxian microscope, when applied to the commodity, it is seen that they contain both use-value and exchange-value (or utility and value). The LTV accounts for value only, the proportions at which two commodities are exchangeable. Furthermore, "value" and "price" are not identical terms. How and why prices diverge from values is an interesting discussion that I will return to later. The central point is that, in Marx's words, "[T]he exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value. Then one use value is just as good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity."

As some critics point out, this seems to "defy common sense" and every day experience. That is why we must step back from the Marxian microscope and understand that we are really in the Marxian laboratory. In the laboratory we control the conditions of the experiment, not so we can obscure the fundamental operations of a process but so we can better understand them in their pure and untainted form. Unpredictability and chaos are replaced with some degree of predictability and control. The central findings of experiments under these controlled conditions can be extrapolated to the wild environment outside the laboratory when all of the variables are accounted and adjusted for, though I will admit that with economics this is theoretically possible but often practically impossible. Even most mainstream economists who have no love of Marxism take this basic scientific approach to economic phenomena; the phrase ceteris paribus was first introduced to me not in a "hard sciences" classroom but in a microeconomics class (see below for a definition and explanation of this phrase). It may be understood that the role of labor in the creation of value is much like the role of dark matter in the universe – we will never really "see" values become prices, but we know theoretically that it must take place.

In the Marxian lab, for instance, supply and demand are almost always assumed to be at equilibrium – that is, at the point at which they cease to account for the value of a commodity. No labor theoretician either before or after Marx has ever denied that the fluctuation of supply and demand ultimately determine price. The theoretical assumption rather is that – and this should be rather obvious - when supply and demand are in perfect balance, price cannot be explained by fluctuations in supply or demand, i.e. in terms of something that is no longer happening. The likelihood or unlikelihood of this cessation is totally irrelevant. It isn't impossible in the same way a square circle is impossible, that is a logical contradiction. It is theoretically possible. In fact it may happen regularly, if only for a second here and there. This is when price = value. It is this value we draw out of the darkness and chaos and put under the light in the Marxian laboratory.

As consumers we are of course always thinking about utility. But producers are interested in defeating the competition and capturing the largest share of the market they can. In many was this competition has fueled technological innovation, and this is one of the central themes of Marx's Capital. It is technological progress, and the effects this progress has on the productivity of labor, more than any other force, subjective or objective, that determines the value of commodities. Commonly we hear that the LTV determines commodity value in terms of labor-time spent on the production of a commodity. But what determines how much labor-time is spent in production? What takes a week to do with a hoe and a scythe might take a day with modern farming equipment. This was central to Marx's expanded definition of labor. Right after his definition of socially necessary labor-time, a concept I accuse many of not wanting to understand, Marx points to the role of technological development in determining this time. An extended quote from Capital vol. 1, chapter 1 states:

"Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour's social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value."

In the Marxian laboratory, then, labor productivity is the primary variable for which we wish to control. When we think of competition, we normally think of two businesses slugging it out for market share. In a historical sense, competition also occurs between modes of production and levels of productivity. There is a reason why the shoe factory can defeat the shoe producing peasant family, or even a whole village of independent shoemakers in the open market; it can put out a much higher volume of equally useful but far less valuable shoes. In our laboratory at least, and probably at some point in the actual past, if we took the capitalist shoe and the peasant shoe and put them side by side, we may see only a few superficial differences, and in fact their subjective utility might be identical. You might get the exact same use out of the peasant shoe as you would the capitalist shoe. But which would you purchase? Chances are the capitalist can afford to sell you a pair of shoes at a much lower price than the peasant can. The peasant more than likely spent a few hours crafting the shoes he holds before you; the capitalist's workers and machines probably belched them out in under a minute. The peasant would probably have to sell his 10 pairs of shoes at 10 dollars a piece to even recoup his losses; the capitalist could sell his 1000 pairs at 1 dollar a piece and put the peasant out of business the next day.

All of this should seem rather self-evident. We know that, at least in some countries, the standard of living is far higher than anything imaginable in the past, and we know it is because of industrial mass production. We are very far removed from the struggle for daily existence, so far removed that the connection between labor and value has all but disappeared from our view. Thus it is important to remember that LTV has its roots not in Marx, for whom industrial capitalism was a reality, but in Locke and others, for whom the contrast between subsistence production and production exclusively for exchange was far more sharper and fresher, living as they did on the cusp of this development. There was no question for them that labor and value were intimately related. Where Marx diverged from the classical bourgeois economists, at least in the most important, fundamental respect, was his recognition of labor in the abstract. We have already seen it explained one way as "homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power". But in order to truly understand the significance of abstract labor, it must be contrasted with concrete labor, the labor with which Locke was concerned when formulating the original LTV, to which at least some libertarians, conservatives, and other defenders and apologists for capitalism still adhere to. The historical journey from the Lockean to the Marxian LTV is the journey from capitalism in its infancy, weak and forced to co-exist with other modes of production, to capitalism in the prime of its youth, standing victorious over the bodies of its slain opponents. It is debatable at least as to whether or not we are now living with capitalism in its old age (an old age I would say is wracked with violent spasms and malignant disease). What I hope will emerge is that the Lockean and Marxian LTV are complimentary, like a younger and older brother, and not mutually exclusive. Even conservatives and libertarians can embrace it, since on its own it does not imply or demand a command economy and massive state bureaucracy (an argument I will make later).

[From wiki: Ceteris paribus is a Latin phrase, literally translated as "with other things [being] the same," and usually rendered in English as "all other things being equal." A prediction, or a statement about causal or logical connections between two states of affairs, is qualified by ceteris paribus in order to acknowledge, and to rule out, the possibility of other factors which could override the relationship between the antecedent and the consequent.^[1] A ceteris paribus assumption is often fundamental to the predictive purpose of scientific inquiry. In order to formulate scientific laws, it is usually necessary to rule out factors which interfere with examining a specific causal relationship.]