Our Knowledge of Reality

ACTUALLY RATHER MORE HANGS on agnosticism at this point than Darwin’s personal mood, as Darwin himself recognised. If natural selection is all that there is, and if the human mind can be explained in purely evolutionary terms, as deriving from that of the lower animals, why should we accept that what we think about ultimate reality has any objective validity? ‘A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton’, Darwin wrote in 1881. He went on to express a ‘horrid doubt’ as to whether ‘the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?’ (Letter to William Graham, 3 July 1881, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, edited by Francis Darwin, John Murray, London, 1888, Vol I, p 285.)

Part of the point here is that just like a bee, a monkey might have a very different perspective on the world from us; and, in the case of scientific and philosophical speculation, compared to us, a very limited one. But equally, ours might seem even more limited to our distant descendents or to creatures with higher intellectual powers. Darwin hopes that natural selection will eventually produce people who would look on him and Lyell and Newton as ‘mere barbarians’; but while that does seem to follow from the point about natural selection’s programme of relentless scutinising and improving, what confidence would that leave us in the theories of Darwin, Lyell and Newton? Will their theories, in the future, seem no more reliable than those of the primitive and barbaric Tierra del Fuegans Darwin encountered on his epic voyage did to him, and who caused him to remark in his journal for 17 December 1832 on how wide was the difference between savage and civilised man, greater than that between wild and domesticated animals, ‘inasmuch as in man there is a greater power of improvement’? So what would an improved Darwin or Lyell of 500 years hence think of what will no doubt seem to be the primitive ramblings and superstitions of their predecessors from the Nineteenth century?

If these were not sufficient grounds for scepticism on our existential and metaphysical convictions, we also have to consider the nature of Darwinian explanations. As we have already pointed out, the theory of natural selection tells us that a creature’s physical and mental development is conditioned by what will aid survival and reproduction – and that is all. Why are we to suppose that speculating on our own nature has anything to do with that, or, even more, that the faculties we have developed to help us get round the savannah and find mates in earlier times are going to help us in coming to the truth in advanced scientific and philosophical investigations? Or indeed in the looking long into the past and into the future, which Darwin himself saw as part of our capacities? How did these come about through natural selection alone? And apart from the scope of our enquiries, surviving and getting mates are different aims from a disinterested pursuit of truth, and techniques and perceptual media which work well at the level of basic survival and reproduction may be pretty sketchy, if not actually misleading, when it comes to investigating areas remote from everyday experience.

Darwin’s point is put with telling directness by Thomas Nagel: ‘If, per impossibile, we came to believe that our capacity for objective theory were the product of natural selection, that would warrant serious scepticism about its results beyond a very limited and familiar range’. (The View from Nowhere, Oxford University Press, New York, 1986, p 79.) Nagel concludes that the development of the human intellect – which can go beyond the limited and the familiar – probably provides a counter-example to the view that natural selection explains everything. I would concur, adding two further points. The first is that even if we add the role of the intellect in sexual selection, saying that our minds have developed partly in order to attract mates through storytelling and other mental performances neither validates those performances or explains why it is that potential mates value those who pursue objective theory (if they do). The theory of natural selection needs supplementing at both these points to give a satisfactory account of our pursuance of objective theory.

Then secondly, as Darwin himself acknowledged, the theory of natural selection is in danger of self-destructing. If that theory explains what we think and do in terms of the value things have for us in promoting survival and reproduction, saying in effect that we accept them because they promote survival and reproduction, the same must be true of the theory of natural selection itself. We accept it, if we do, because it helps us in the struggle for existence, not because it is true, which would of course provide no rational argument against the creationist or the Islamist who might, not unconvincingly, find great support for survival in the following of his creed. So Darwinism undermines its own claims to be true (just as in analogous ways do the theories of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud if we take them at face value).

Faced with these problems, one could, of course, take a completely different tack at this point. Maybe, as Nagel suggests, the mind and our searching for truth shows that natural selection is not the whole story. Along with other human capacities (for co-operation, for the appreciation of beauty, to name but two), our acquiring of knowledge for its own sake might be something rooted in nature, something to which evolution in the broad sense has been tending, and even something anticipated in earlier forms of life. After all, it might seem to the dispassionate observer, not already convinced of the truth of strict Darwinism, that much in the behaviour of the ‘lower’ animals is done for its own sake, for amusement, play and curiosity, and hard to bring within the procrustean bed of the promotion of survival and reproduction. To the dispassionate observer, not already committed to selfish genery and the like, the human mind might come to seem not an anomaly whose self-centered classificatory schemes unjustifiably over-estimate mind in general and the human mind in particular, but as something indeed cued into reality itself in a way which transcends the demands of survival and reproduction. If we do follow this tack – which we are surely not barred from doing by anything in biology in the strict sense, as opposed to the dogmas of neo-Darwinism – then we would not have to worry about our theories of nature self-destructing. But we would, of course, have to pay the price of admitting that at least one of them, that is the Darwinism which would see everything as either anomalous or conducive only to survival and reproduction, is false.