OK, so I am reading "The Metaphysical Club" by Louis Menand, which follows the development of modern American thought from the time of the American Civil War to the first couple decades of the twentieth century through the prism of four of the great thinkers of that era, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Sanders Pierce and John Dewey. I found this book when Therese and I were in Boston for the Early Music Festival a few weeks ago, in a 2nd-hand bookstore called Brattle Book Store (a cool spot - if you're in Boston, check it out).
Anyway, the section on William James talked a good deal about the rise of Darwinian thought and the theories that evolution and natural selection replaced. It is fascinating to me, that monogenism and polygenism, those very theories, were both used as justifications for slavery and the place of negro people in America. Natural selection, it seems to me, does not comment one way or the other on the question of whether white people and non-white people are equal or superior or inferior to each other. However, it does make the whole question moot, as it threatens to remove European human beings from the lofty position he had enjoyed, poised on the top of the heap of creation.
In the mid-19th century, when Darwin and others were developing their theories, there was already a good deal of friction between religious leaders, who were happy to have theories in place that agreed with the man-at-the-center-of-the-universe construct they saw in their bibles, and those who would supplant those theories. As we well know, that still goes on to this day. I have spent time myself engaged in that battle. When I was ten years old, I was confronted in school by Cathy Baker, a classmate who attended the same Lutheran church I did.
After she tersely demanded I explain how I could believe in evolution, when the bible says we all come from Adam and Eve, I calmly and simply told her, "it's not the same thing." I did not see Christianity and Science as working in the same realms, and therefore, one could not be a threat to the other. Religion is about believing in something, while science is about accepting theories.
The two realms have one connecting phenomena, in my estimation. That is, they both involve being comfortable with things that cannot be conclusively proven. Evolution, relativity, even spaghettification (another theory and the spark of inspiration for this blog) can never be proven beyond a shadow of doubt. God may show all kinds of signs in the opinion of believers, but she has never appeared in a courtroom in the guise of George Burns or Morgan Freeman. All conclusions about what God wants us to do with ourselves and our world will remain strictly speculative for the forseeable future.
But that doesn't stop us from trying to figure out all this mess, and trying to use religion and science as we are inclined to do it. I personally use both to some degree or other, but I don't place absolute value of one over the other. If there's one thing that natural selection helps me with, it is humility, and seeing everything as relative, with no predetermined hierarchy. An avowed brainiac, I am constantly reminded that, as much as I would like to put myself on another plain from fellow human beings who I judge to not enjoy my level of intelligence, there are many reasons why doing this does not work. One is that intelligence can be measured in any number of ways, and as much as I would like to think I am MORE intelligent than others, when I do, I am apt to put myself in position where I can be knocked off my high horse.
It's like teenagers, right? When I was a teenager, I looked at my parents and thought I had figured everything out, and didn't need their help any more. When they told me I couldn't do something or other, I was outraged - how dare they place restrictions on me! But now that I am older, I grudgingly admit that they frequently knew what they were talking about. I thought I held all the cards, when in fact M & D had the aces and quite a few other face cards.
I continue to believe that the problem people have with evolution is not really a matter of religion. To me, it is the same problem people had with Copernicus. We would like to feel as if we are the last word, the top bananas, deliberately created as unique and perfect, not to be improved upon. Evolution knocks humankind off THAT high horse. Humans are subject to the same pressures, the same frailties, as the rest of the creatures with whom we share planet earth. No matter how much we use science and other systems to remove ourselves from the game - curing diseases and combating natural disasters and so forth - in the end we may suffer a fate that is beyond our human powers to avoid, a fate controlled by the forces put in place by chance, or God, or however you would like to categorize those forces.
I like to consider what forms intelligence takes on besides the ones we think of when we say "intelligence." We all know that there are people who will never score high on the SATs, for example, who nevertheless possess faculties for carrying out sophisticated activities and creating mind-blowing stuff. And I also like the fact that, once white European ancestors are not the be-all and end-all, it becomes possible to not only consider what the other guy can do that we can't - but also to take a closer look at what is happening in the rest of creation that demonstrates intelligence that approaches our own.
Animal lovers, for example, know for sure that Descartes was wrong about animals just being machines that carry out simple instinctual properties. Animal intelligence is something that is fascinating to me. The tricky thing is how to distinguish between anthropomorphising - seeing human properties, in this case, intellectual processes, in animals - and actually observing instances of animals carrying out intellectual processes of their own design. I had a cat for 14 years named Hobbs who I considered to be a cat scientist, because I got the uncanny feeling that he studied me and changed his own behavior to accommodate my shortcomings so that we could live together amicably. That was my version of the story - I have no idea what he thought about it. I do know that we both adjusted to the circumstances life presented to us, like good roommates always do, to be good companions for each other. Granted, the relationship was skewed, since he was much more dependent on me than I on him. So it behooved him to make some adjustment.
What I'm saying is there were moments, when I was alone with Hobbs, when I definitely felt like the relationship dynamic shifted, and I was the dumb animal carrying out rote behavior, incapable of creative thinking or whatever. In those moments, I felt like he was holding the cards. That would make me laugh, to think that, like some cartoon or children's movie, I was the idiot and my cat was the genius pitying my inferior ability.
Of course, we do measure animal intelligence, whether by our terms and by some barometer we ascribe to the animal in question. For example, people will talk about what dog breeds are smarter than others. Again, I am skeptical of this, because a dog who doesn't learn to fetch a stick in 5 minutes, as far as we know, could be making the judgment that the activity is beneath his dignity!
I suppose the process of trying to imagine what intelligence may exist beyond the realm of human intelligence is a very challenging field (what is that field called? I can't think of it...). Science fiction has considered that topic in many fascinating ways. Star Trek has had many episodes that centered around the confrontation between humankind and human intelligence with creatures from other planets and galaxies whose forms and intelligence are completely alien to our own. Of course, many of the alien species encountered on the show were conventionally humanoid, played by actors with a minimum of make-up. But even within those restrictions, it was possible for the show to consider how different from us other species might be.
It boggles the mind to imagine that beyond the limits of our perception, there might be all sorts of things going on equal if not superior in sophistication and intellectual ferment to our own. To deny that the possibility exists that there might be things going on that show us to be on the bottom of heap as a species instead of on the top, is a great mistake. For me, the true measure of intelligence is curiousity and tolerance. When I am ready to "put myself in another man's mocassins", as an old adage used to say, I can double the size of my world in an afternoon. Or maybe in a moment.
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