On the birth­day of Charles Dar­win, I want to dis­cuss a book that I main­ly start­ed read­ing for the sub­ti­tle: Liv­ing with God and Dar­win. I have always been around a lot of peo­ple who live with God and oth­ers who live with Dar­win. But I have been a lit­tle short on peo­ple who are both believ­ing and at home in evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy. The author of this book is such a per­son. His name is Charles Fos­ter and the book is called The Self­less Gene.

Dar­win, the man from Kent who devot­ed him­self to the breed­ing of pigeons to work out his sci­en­tif­ic ideas. Evo­lu­tion was already the pre­vail­ing mod­el in biol­o­gy at that time. Darwin’s con­tri­bu­tion was the idea of nat­ur­al selec­tion. Forced to pub­lish becaus A. R. Wal­lace had inde­pen­dent­ly come to a sim­i­lar the­o­ry , he com­piled his notes in 1859 under the title On the Ori­gin of Species by Means of Nat­ur­al Selec­tion. Dar­win had no knowl­edge about genet­ics, and thus could not explain exact­ly how hered­i­ty worked. This took shape at the begin­ning of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, also in com­bi­na­tion with old pub­li­ca­tions of the geneti­cist Mendel (1866).

Nat­ur­al selec­tion occurs because there is genet­ic vari­a­tion. This vari­a­tion is part­ly due to muta­tions and sex­u­al repro­duc­tion. If it pro­vides an organ­ism with a char­ac­ter­is­tic that gives it advan­tage in the ‘strug­gle for life’, it has a high­er sur­vival rate aus a greater chance to pass on this fea­ture to its progeny.

Fos­ter gives an overview of the his­to­ry of cre­ation­ism, the most­ly Amer­i­can move­ment that prop­a­gates a cre­ation in 7 times 24 hours and a young earth. Then he men­tions Richard Dawkins, the prophet of nat­ur­al selec­tion. In his book The Self­ish Gene, he pro­vides the gen­er­al pub­lic with an impres­sion of ​​evo­lu­tion­ary that most sci­en­tist don’t sub­scribe to. He can­not be called a “Dar­win­ian fun­da­men­tal­ist”, because Dar­win has repeat­ed­ly stat­ed that nat­ur­al selec­tion is not the only means of mod­i­fi­ca­tion (as in the quote above).

Cre­ation­ists are an easy tar­get for Dawkins because they do not take sci­ence seri­ous­ly. All fos­sils, all organ­isms liv­ing today, point con­sis­tent­ly to an evo­lu­tion­ary move­ment. As in every field, there is sci­en­tif­ic debate, but the wild cre­ation­ist the­o­ries clear­ly don’t fall under that cat­e­go­ry: There is not a sin­gle case of a cre­ation­ist arti­cle pub­lished in a peer-reviewed jour­nal. To be hon­est, I find it out­ra­geous that dur­ing the ‘EH-Basis­jaar’ it was explained to us how the geo­log­i­cal stra­ta are caused by the Noahic flood. Tin­ker­ing with the truth is not a Chris­t­ian atti­tude. It harms the image of Chris­tians in general.

The author con­cludes that there is a lot of agree­ment between the cre­ation­ists and Dawkins. Both believe in one sim­ple idea that explains every­thing. Both are also con­vinced that the the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion by nat­ur­al selec­tion excludes the exis­tence of God. With their best-sell­ing pub­li­ca­tions, they keep each oth­er alive.

Fos­ter con­tin­ues with a dis­cus­sion of the sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence for and against the two posi­tions. En pas­sant, he declares the Intel­li­gent Design the­o­ry dis­guised cre­ation­ism. A chap­ter on altru­ism pro­vides the first ingre­di­ents for the argu­ment of this book: Nat­ur­al selec­tion, although the strongest, is not the only force in evo­lu­tion. There is also a force that pro­motes col­lab­o­ra­tion and com­mu­ni­ty. Increas­ing com­plex­i­ty means grow­ing co-oper­a­tion, with­in the indi­vid­ual and between individuals.

The fol­low­ing is a (for me some­what too) com­pre­hen­sive chap­ter on the inter­pre­ta­tion of Gen­e­sis 1 with ref­er­ences such as Ori­gen and Calvin. The per­ceived cen­tral­i­ty of cre­ation­ism to Chris­t­ian teach­ing is recent.

In the sec­ond part of the book, the more inter­est­ing ques­tions are addressed. What does it say about God that he made the world using nat­ur­al selec­tion? And how we look at our­selves, what makes us moral beings? This post is already too long, so that is for next week.