In this scientifically authoritative essay collection, Salzman, a seasoned and provocative environmentalist, demonstrates how evolutionary theory penetrates nearly all aspects of human society. She faults social justice movements for their short-sighted focus on human needs to the exclusion of nonhuman nature and stresses the potential of evolutionary thought for replacing religious and secular ideologies with an ecological paradigm for broad social change.

Salzman's special concern is the resurgence of irrationality, anti-intellectualism and anti-science attitudes.. She explodes the myth of genetic determinism promoted in popular media, discrediting the belief that natural selection involves violence. In place of the arbitrary "economism" of socialists and the free marketeers' faith in untrammeled economic growth, she envisions a human society modeled on interdependent self-regulating natural systems.

Politics as if Evolution Mattered

Darwin, Ecology and Social JusticeBy Lorna Salzman

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Lorna Salzman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-3475-8

Contents

Introduction.........................................................................................1Why Darwin Matters Today.............................................................................5The Evolutionary Debate..............................................................................13Science vs. New Age-ism..............................................................................19Ecology and Evolution................................................................................24Evolution Misunderstood..............................................................................29Evolution's Balancing Act............................................................................35Sidestepping Evolution...............................................................................38Biodiversity.........................................................................................42The Threat of Genetic Manipulation...................................................................46Counter-evolutionary Technologies....................................................................51Ecosystems as Models for Human Systems...............................................................54Progress and Purpose.................................................................................58Humanity in the Biosphere............................................................................61The Ecological Imperative............................................................................64Formulating a New Agenda for Social Change: Nature Comes First; Nature Bats Last.....................70Afterword: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible.................................................75Recommended Reading..................................................................................77

Chapter One

Why Darwin Matters Today

"... it took nature more than a billion years to develop a good worm." The Sea, Robert C. Miller

"Miracle ... is simply a synonym for the total absence of explanation." River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins

"... the framework of human life is all life ... it is life, not man, which is the main contour, and it is ecology in general where human ecology is to be found." The Subversive Science, Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley

The theories and writings of Charles Darwin, in particular his On the Origin of Species, have grown into the foundation of all modern biological thought. It is no exaggeration to say that the disciplines of biology, ecology, modern medicine and agriculture, among others, could not exist without Darwin. Without him, these would be forced to rely on random observation and anecdotal experience, mere trial and error, with all the inherent handicaps.

Biological and medical science would operate in a vacuum, accumulating clinical and experimental evidence that would lack coherence and predictability. The development of modern medicines and the refinement of food crops (conducted by traditional farmers over millennia through simple observation and experiment) would be haltingly slow. Humanity would have virtually no understanding of biological systems, their functions or their importance. The treatment of disease would be limited to treatment of symptoms alone. Management of natural resources would lack a scientific basis. In truth we would still be in a Dark Age of science, scarcely any better than the shamanism practiced in some parts of the world (which as a cultural practice has some social validity in non-industrial societies). As Theodosius Dobzhansky cogently observed, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

No original aspect of Darwin's theories on evolution and natural selection (and evolution is accepted as fact today) has been proven wrong, with the exception of Darwin's belief in inheritance of acquired characteristics, an understandable error given the total ignorance of heredity mechanisms in his time. The basic precepts of evolutionary change and natural selection remain the foundation—the working hypotheses—of scientific research and experiment. No one has yet proposed any different working hypothesis, nor has any experiment indicated that the use of these is flawed or erroneous. In every laboratory and field study, analysis and re-analysis, evolution and natural selection have proven to be unshakeable and valid. The reliance of biology on the fact of evolution and the theory of natural selection is as justified as the reliance of engineers on mathematics and physics for building bridges, skyscrapers, airplanes and machinery.

Even the claim sometimes made that natural selection cannot be demonstrated or proven is false. Chemical manufacturers constantly reformulatepesticidesandpharmaceuticalsbecauseofthespreadofresistant microbe strains or populations of insects, most notably the AIDS virus. Every year the Centers for Disease Control, as well as drug companies, must come up with new drugs as resistance to earlier ones grows. Malaria, the largest disease killer on earth, has resurfaced with a newer deadlier strain that is resistant to nearly all existing drugs and which can only be treated by a dangerously toxic drug that itself can be lethal (and which itself will eventually become useless). Influenza, which killed at least 40 million people in the 1918 global epidemic, must be confronted every year by scientists who try to predict what type will appear so that they can design the proper vaccine. Recent studies by two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, of the finches in the Galapagos Islands—the same ones observed by Darwin—have shown that evolution by natural selection is actually observable over short time periods (see The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner, Vintage Books 1995).

While no reputable biologist doubts or uses anything but Darwinian precepts for research, the philosophical and ethical implications still trouble many people, and not just those who adhere to fundamentalist religions. Some of these concerns are over the implications of evolution for religious believers in a deity; others have difficulty with the notion that the human species is not intrinsically "superior" to other animals; yet others are disturbed by what they see as violence and competition in Nature and wonder whether this is inherent in humans; there are those who refuse to accept the role of chance and stubbornly adhere to belief in purposeful design; and there are those who may believe in evolution but insist on the notion of "progress" and "purpose" in Nature.

There are many reasons for this: a general lack of familiarity with science and how it functions; an expectation that science can attain "final" answers; an inability to regard science as a process, not a religion; the prevalence of a broad spectrum of differences in interpretation of scientific data; the unavoidable ideological bents and biases of individual scientists; a reprehensible emphasis by the mass media on discrete facts and events rather than on processes or systems—all these, plus the distortions of self-interested political and religious ideologues who hope to promote their own agenda, have combined to make science in general and Charles Darwin in particular suspect.

One would have...