Tag Archives: Jerry Coyne

Does the Euthyphro Dilemma Apply to Evolutionary Ethics?

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

One of the most popular, but misguided, challenges that atheists fling at theists is Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma. I have written about why this is no dilemma at all for theists in other blog posts, so I won’t cover that ground again now.

Philosopher Matt Flannagan, though, has introduced a new wrinkle in this debate. Flannagan argues persuasively that the Euthyphro Dilemma is actually a serious problem for those who argue that morality is the product of evolution.

In an article in the Christian Research Journal (vol. 36, number 01), Flannagan specifically challenges the position of Jerry Coyne, a biologist and outspoken atheist. Flannagan claims that “Coyne’s own secular account of morality falls prey to the Euthyphro dilemma.” Here is Flannagan:

After claiming that moral obligations cannot be constituted by God’s commands, Coyne offers an alternative: morality comes from evolution—humans evolved a capacity to instinctively feel that certain actions are wrong.

This position is pretty standard among many atheists that I speak to, so Coyne serves as a useful proxy for the wider atheist crowd. How is Coyne’s account susceptible to the Dilemma?

Plato’s question [in his dialogue Euthyphro] is equally applicable here. One can ask, “Are actions wrong because we have evolved a disposition to condemn them, or do we condemn them because they are wrong?” If the latter is the case, then actions are wrong prior to, and hence independently of, evolution, and so ethics is independent of evolution.

So how does Coyne avoid this problem?

To avoid this implication, Coyne must adopt the first option: actions are wrong because we have evolved an instinctive disposition to condemn these actions. The problem is this option makes morality arbitrary. Couldn’t evolution have produced rational beings that felt that infanticide and theft were obligatory or that rape was, in certain circumstances, OK?

As Darwin himself noted, “If men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering.”

So option 1, for Coyne, is also very troubling because now morality is arbitrary, based on the randomness of the evolutionary lottery.

Coyne is left with either affirming that 1) morality existed prior to and independent of evolution, or he must affirm 2) that morality is really just arbitrary because moral values could have turned out very differently. Now that’s a real dilemma.

Is There Any Scientific Controversy Over Darwinian Evolution? Part 1

Post Author: Bill Pratt

I am told again and again by blog commenters that there is absolutely no controversy over any aspects of Darwinian evolution among those who study biology in the scientific community.  Here is a typical quote from a recent commenter, who was speaking about the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute’s advocacy of teaching the controversy over certain aspects of evolution:

There is no scientific controversy. None. Not one bit. At all. This is purely a religiously motivated, and intentionally manufactured one, to appear as a scientific controversy. But appearances can be deceiving, especially when it is done intentionally to try to create controversy where none exists in scientific terms, one that does not match up to the evidence science has revealed from the reality we share.

But this is simply not true.  There is plenty of controversy in the world of evolutionary biology.  You just have to read.

I thought it would be helpful to point out just one prominent biologist’s disagreement with the standard evolutionary account.  His name is James Shapiro and he is a molecular biologist at the University of Chicago.  A pro-ID scholar, William Dembski, wrote a review of Shapiro’s latest book, Evolution: A View from the 21st Century, where he carefully describes Shapiro’s disagreement with the standard account.

Dembski starts by quoting evolutionary geneticist Jerry Coyne, who gives a succinct definition of evolution:

There is only one going theory of evolution, and it is this: organisms evolved gradually over time and split into different species, and the main engine of evolutionary change was natural selection.  Sure, some details of these processes are unsettled, but there is no argument among biologists about the main claims . . .  While mutations occur by chance, natural selection, which builds complex bodies by saving the most adaptive mutations, emphatically does not.  Like all species, man is a product of both chance and lawfulness.

Dembski continues:

Coyne here depicts the form of Darwinism that currently reigns, what is called the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which combines classical Darwinism (which holds to universal common ancestry, evolutionary gradualism, and natural selection) with modern genetic theory (which locates the source of heritable variation in genetic mutations, i.e., writing errors in DNA).

So, if this is the standard view of evolution, and there is no controversy over it, then we should expect Shapiro to agree with his colleague, right?  Wrong.  According to Dembski,

Of all these elements, Shapiro only subscribes to one, namely, universal common ancestry, or common descent, the claim that all organisms trace their lineage to a common ancestor (thus making all organisms alive today cousins). On every other point, Shapiro demurs.

Read that again.  Shapiro only agrees with common descent and disagrees with the rest of Coyne’s description of evolution.

Thus, when it comes to the claim that evolution proceeds gradually, Shapiro writes (p. 89): “Do the sequences of contemporary genomes fit the predictions of change by ‘numerous, successive slight variations,’ as Darwin stated, or do they contain evidence of other, more abrupt processes…? The data are overwhelmingly in favor of the saltationist school that postulated major genomic changes at key moments in evolution.”

If Shapiro simply left matters there, however, he might align himself with proponents of punctuated equilibrium who, keeping faith as much as possible with neo-Darwinism, see the principal source of biological variation in genetic copying errors, otherwise known as “mutations.”  But Shapiro rejects  this view as well.  For him, variation, which is always the creative potential of any evolutionary theory (no variation, no evolution), is not a random affair at all.  Rather, organisms intelligently control their variation and thereby facilitate the evolutionary process.

Shapiro writes (143): “Living cells and organisms are cognitive (sentient) entities that act and interact purposefully to ensure survival, growth, and proliferation. They possess corresponding sensory, communication, information-processing, and decision-making capabilities.  Cells are built to evolve; they have the ability to alter their hereditary characteristics rapidly through well-described natural genetic engineering and epigenetic processes as well as cell mergers.”

Dembski then concisely summarizes Shapiro’s view of evolution:

Organisms behave purposefully.  They evolve themselves.  They do this by intentionally modifying their own DNA.  Within neo-Darwinism, DNA is a read-only memory subject to occasional copying errors.  For Shapiro, DNA is a read-write memory, with the organism itself deciding when and where to modify its DNA.

Enough said, I think.  Shapiro differs dramatically from evolutionary orthodoxy.  He is representative of the active debate that is occurring among scientists who study evolution.  Why should these differing views not be openly discussed?  Why am I told that there is no controversy when there clearly is?  Let’s just admit that there are scientific debates within the evolutionary community, instead of pretending they don’t exist.