Book Review

The seeds of genesis and creation

Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion

Francisco Ayala is a former Dominican and one of the most distinguished evolutionary biologists of his generation, a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Both the AAAS and the American National Academy of Sciences (NAS) take as part of their responsibilities the furtherance of the public understanding of science; both organisations acknowledge the importance to that understanding of a realisation of the limits of the sciences. A recent statement from the NAS expresses one of those limits thus: "Religion and science answer different questions about the world. Whether there is a purpose to the universe or a purpose for human existence are not questions for science."

Ayala agrees. What challenged him to write this book is the widespread uneasiness with the Darwinian theory of evolution among evangelical Christians in the United States and their consequent support for the intelligent-design hypothesis. Ayala takes apart the intelligent-design theories one by one to show that they are groundless and that the ID hypothesis itself can be undermined by focusing on the many examples of imperfect design in organic structures that are directly traceable to the vagaries of evolutionary history. Since the attack on evolution is prompted in large part by religious considerations, Ayala goes on to propose in rebuttal a sharp (perhaps slightly too sharp) separation between scientific knowledge and religious belief, using terms reminiscent of Stephen Jay Gould's famous principle that "they cannot be in contradiction because [they] concern non-overlapping realms of knowledge".

Ayala's exposition is admirably clear. He fills out Darwin's own evidences for evolution from comparative anatomy, palaeontology and biogeography with new data. But he devotes his main attention to genetics - his own area of expertise. Just as the finite speed of light has allowed us to explore the distant past of the galactic universe, the string of millions of nucleotides that constitute the DNA distinctive of the individual organism allows us to look equally deeply into that organism's past ancestry, tracing a path from the complex animals of today right back to the primitive organisms of the primeval seas. It has given altogether convincing evidence of the thesis of common ancestry, allowing one to determine not only what the stages were in the evolution leading to a particular kind of organism but, roughly at least, even when the forking in the branches of the family tree occurred. All in all, Ayala can conclude, to my mind quite reasonably, that "there is probably no other notion in any field of science that has been so extensively tested and corroborated as the evolutionary origin of living organisms".

But what about evolution's "gift" to religion, according to the book's title? The only one Ayala mentions is in the area of theodicy: the cruelties of the living world that so troubled Darwin "are difficult to explain if they are the outcome of God's design", but follow naturally if they are an inevitable part of evolutionary process. (An objector might ask whether or not that process is itself the Creator's choice ... this would need further discussion.) Although he fences off religion from issues about the natural world and its history, he does allow that "scientific knowledge may provide a basis for theological insights". He does not elaborate. Still, prompted by his choice of book-title, one might well inquire whether evolutionary theory does, in fact, offer any further such gifts.

And the answer comes loud and clear. The success of the theory itself allows the recovery of an insight from the early and medieval Christian Church that was almost entirely lost from view in the unfortunate turn to biblical literalism in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, a shift that has, sadly, proved long-lasting in some quarters. Inspired by the exegetical practice of the earlier Greek fathers, St Augustine took it as obvious that the first two chapters of Genesis were not to be interpreted literally, not least because to do so would make them mutually inconsistent. Furthermore, his own soaring account of the Creation made it seem antecedently unlikely that a transcendent Creator would have to keep adding to his work day after day. Surely an all-powerful and all-wise Creator would have got it right from the beginning? Augustine proposed that the potentialities of all the living kinds that would come after were implanted in the new creation from the beginning, each to make its appearance, he says (drawing on texts from Scripture), when the conditions of earth and water are right. He admits that to know how those "seeds", as he called them, were to bring this about would call for a degree of insight into natural process that he did not possess. That would have to wait for Darwin. That Augustine would regard Darwin's validation of his own theologically inspired insight into the origin of living kinds as a welcome gift can hardly be doubted.

Further Darwinian contributions could be more far-reaching in their theological implications. Catholic theology has traditionally understood the Genesis story of the Fall as being about two historical individuals in an original state of innocence, later lost by their sinful disobedience, with terrible consequences for their descendants. But thanks to Darwin's theory and the convergence of multiple lines of evidence, it is now generally accepted (as John Paul II allowed in a 1996 address) that the human body is of evolutionary origin. It would follow that the first humans were necessarily the inheritors of animal instincts and urges that would have been morally innocent in their unreflecting predecessors but were now potentially transformed into human sin in the light of newly awakened moral sensibilities. This conflict between body and spirit would have extended to all humans, affirmed, this time on genetic grounds, to constitute a single species. And it would be transmitted by physical generation.

Furthermore, in a much-quoted address to the AAAS in 1995, Ayala himself argued from an analysis of DNA evidence that the (genetically) human population could never have been smaller than several thousand breeding individuals. It could not have gone through a bottleneck of only a single pair, which would have left an unmistakable restriction of present genomic diversity.

It would seem that, on the face of it, these further gifts from Darwinian hands call for a reinterpretation of the Genesis story of human origins at least as dramatic as the one Augustine had already given the Genesis account of the origins of the living kinds. Although theologians are unaccustomed to taking a lead from the natural sciences, some have already been sketching the outlines of what such a reinterpretation might look like. However, caution seems to be the order of the day. There is clearly quite a lot at stake.

Ayala has shown in the past that he is well aware of the theological ramifications of these Darwinian implications. But he has prudently decided to pass them over in silence.

To many of the Christian critics of evolution for whom this book is intended, these implications might well not appear as gifts!

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