I am beholden to biology. It’s done a lot for us.
The study of living organisms has brought modern medicine, hardy plants, pharmaceuticals, ecological understanding, brain surgery, awareness of germs, food hygiene, evolutionary theory and other advances.
But along with such marvels, the biological revolution has come with a dark side. This multi-branched field of study, which covers everything from genetics to zoology, has frequently mutated into an ideology.
Biological discoveries have led to extreme social declarations — some of which been catastrophic, including Nazi eugenics, racial segregation and forms of “survival of the fittest” capitalism.
The transformation of biology into an ideology, with sweeping statements about everything from gender superiority to how it’s morally acceptable to eat one’s pet dog, went largely undetected until roughly the 1960s.
That’s when some began recognizing supposedly objective biologists and other scientists were anything but impartial, write Denis Alexander and Ronald Numbers in their book, Biology and Ideology: From Descartes to Dawkins.
Anglo-American scholar Bob Young was among the first to “argue that all facts are theory-laden and that no science is value-free,” says Biology and Ideology. Young noted biologists were making proclamations about reality that went far beyond their expertise.
A major project, coordinated by Cambridge University’s Faraday Institute, has been looking into the many ways biology, particularly evolutionary theory, has been used and abused through history.
Dozens of researchers in four countries have been uncovering how biology has been warped to justify dubious claims in economics, ethics, psychology, gender studies, education, spirituality, ethics and philosophy.
Here are some things the Faraday team has been revealing:
Racism and eugenics
In the decades after Charles Darwin wrote the Origin of Species, beliefs expanded about the evolutionary superiority of one race or type of human over others.
This over-interpretation of evolutionary and genetic science, often called “social Darwinism,” contributed to the forced sterilization of the bearers of supposedly “defective” genes. It was also used to segregate racial groups and oppress aboriginals.
Nazi Germany took eugenics to a diabolical extreme. “Both in terms of ideology and application, biology fuelled the racial war to exterminate, kill and resettle total populations,” says Biology and Ideology, which came out of the Faraday Institute.
Economic survival of the fittest
Darwin’s observation that evolution appeared to favour biological “survival of the fittest” was exploited in the 1900s to rationalize a particularly ruthless form of hyper-individualistic capitalism.
This brand of capitalism maintained it was natural to exploit the “weak.” Julian Huxley concluded social Darwinism “led to the glorification of free enterprise and laissez-faire economics.” As well as war.
Given its misapplication, biologists now rarely use the phrase, “survival of the fittest,” preferring to talk about “adaptability.”
Science of ethics
Biology has given birth to the so-called science of ethics.
“Followers of this approach conclude that you have no reason not to do things like eat your dead pet dog, engage in ‘harmless’ incest and clean the toilet with your national flag,” says University of Michigan philosophy professor Daniel Jacobsen.
Supporters of the science of ethics say they base their conclusions on “empirical” biology, and they argue social taboos are merely “magical thinking” flowing from irrational, biology-based emotions, such as disgust.
However, Jacobsen maintains these biological ethicists are too pessimistic about the role of reason in moral decision-making. People have good reasons, he says, to avoid such things as wiping their feet on their spouse’s photo.
Humans recognize the power in symbolic acts, Jacobsen says. “We realize our actions express our attitudes. We have reasons not to do things that express attitudes we don’t believe in.”
In another Faraday-Institute study linking biology and ethics, a University of California, San Diego, sociologist has explored how people’s moral choices depend on how they define human beings.
John Evans has found people who define humans as “purely biological beings” (rather than as images of the divine, or as possessors of consciousness) “are less likely to advocate intervening to stop genocide and more likely to argue in favour of committing suicide to save money.”
Biology has often been cited to explain male and female variations.
Downplaying the role of culture in gender, some evolutionary biologists a century ago suggested that males had a hardwired neurological superiority, such as with mathematics.
But many brain scientists and their cultural interpreters now often suggest women are superior to men, for instance in the way the female brain may be better at ‘multi-tasking” and therefore at parenting.
As in the past, such biology-based gender conclusions are coloured by ideology and stereotypes. Some call this process “reification” or “misplaced concreteness,” which refers to turning an ambiguous belief into a concrete reality.
Brain science has been the hottest thing in pop culture in the past decade.
Cambridge University neuroscientist Duncan Astle has found even governments are gullible to “neuro-myths,” or truisms based on misinterpretation of brain studies.
Some common neuro-myths, according to Astle, are that humans use only 10 per cent of their brain, that the left hemisphere of the brain is for logic and the right is for emotion and that people have “preferred learning styles,” such as auditory or visual.
Well-meaning governments are among those spending money on neuro-myths, says Astle. They include physical education programs such as Brain Gym, which purport to increase students’ creativity.
Companies, he said, are also selling products based on unproven biological assertions, including that tinted glasses combat dyslexia and that fish-oil supplements improve brain functioning.
Oxford professor Alister McGrath, a molecular biophysicist, has taken part in debates with noted atheists Richard Dawkins, a biologist, and Daniel Dennett, a cognitive scientist.
While McGrath admires the duo’s knowledge of biology, he takes exception to their reductionist argument that evolutionary biology “proves” existence is “random” and meaningless, without a transcendent intelligence.
Such hard-edged atheism is now more strongly linked with biology than any other science, McGrath says. Physicists, for instance, accept 20th century theories about the Big Bang, recognizing it was an act of “creation” that opens the possibility some entity in the universe brings life out of chaos.
Many biologists, McGrath maintains, suffer from a lack of understanding about spirituality and faith, which do not rely only on empirical proof, but on inductive reasoning. Spiritual world views, he said, need to “make sense” on multiple levels.
So how do we avoid turning biology into an ideology?
Echoing philosophers such as Canada’s Charles Taylor, Europe’s Isabelle Stenger and Isaiah Berlin, the Faraday Institute researchers oppose absolutist thinking in any field.
Instead they suggest “the best world views are provisional.” And they recommend following the lead of Darwin himself.
The founder of evolutionary theory was not a doctrinaire fellow. Darwin was known for his humility and speculative caution.
He rewrote The Origin of the Species six times, changing 60 per cent of its content. In regards to religion, Darwin could probably be called an agnostic or a deist.
In other words, Darwin believed his hard-researched propositions about natural selection were supported by evidence, but he also recognized they were provisional.
Indeed, at his 1882 funeral at Westminster Abbey, Darwin was remembered for his “utmost modesty” and called “a stranger to intellectual pride and arrogance.”
Which is a far cry from what could be said about the ideological over-confidence of some of his followers.