Take the BS by the Horns

Today while I was on my break at work, I sat in the wrong place, surrounded by conversations that distracted and annoyed me, but there wasn't another suitable place for me to sit.  It didn't help that I'm currently reading a novel that I'm very ambivalent about, which I may write about some other time.  That ambivalence made it even harder to concentrate.

Just a couple of feet away from me, two undergraduates were having an animated conversation about artificial intelligence and its implications.  "If you really believe in evolution," said one, "you have to believe that computers are going to get smarter and smarter until they're smarter than humans."  And so on, in that vein.  I gave up trying to concentrate on my book and spoke to them.  Computers, I told them, like culture, don't "evolve" according to Darwinian theory: they "evolve" according to Lamarckism, the transmission of acquired traits.  They acknowledged me, I shut up and went back to trying to read, though I continued to be distracted by their conversation.  The kid who'd talked about computers evolving said he knew about evolutionary psychology, and then chuckled, saying that he'd read a textbook.  His friend asked what his major was, and he replied Informatics, Philosophy, and something else.

I went back to work a few minutes early since I couldn't concentrate on my reading and couldn't give the kid the dope slap he so clearly needed.  It suddenly dawned me that Lamarckianism wasn't the proper way to think about computers.  The proper way was Creationism.  I'd remembered a science fiction story by James Morrow, "Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks," that I read about twenty years ago:*  Two science missionaries travel to a planet inhabited by androids, the product of an experiment many years earlier by some sociobiologists at Harvard.  The androids use Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man as sacred scripture, and accordingly believe that they evolved, like every other living thing.  The missionaries, scandalized, tell the androids that they didn't evolve, they were created.  Unwilling to tolerate heresy, the androids execute the missionaries.

The story is a satire, with numerous targets.  But how odd that I encountered a real-life devotee of the same cult, who believes that computers evolve like organisms, rather than being created like artifacts.  From other things I've read, I know he's not alone. Indeed, my university has harbored one of the cult's prophets.

*"Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks" can be found in Morrow's collection Bible Stories for Adults, Harvest Books, 1996.

The Darwinian Apostles' Creed

I've mentioned before, and agreed with, the argument that you shouldn't judge a religion by its worst adherents, but by its best.  I still agree with it, up to a point, though as always the first question is how to decide who the best adherents are.

But, as I say, only up to a point.  Dismissing the "worst" adherents of a religion is often an evasion.  If a religion makes supernatural claims, as Christianity does, then it's fair to ask why the Holy Spirit fails to cleanse and purify and set straight the hearts of so many Christians.  But even without the supernatural baggage, it seems to me fair to notice that a religion doesn't manage to transmit its high ideals to most of its adherents.  Along the same lines, atheists who talk as though the absence of belief in God clears away irrationality, superstition, and magical thinking all by itself, are setting themselves up for a fall.  Atheists, of course, have no central authority, no organization to set doctrine and practice and inculcate them into the laity.

On the other hand, I think it's useful to look at the middling adherents of a religion, just I think it's useful to look not only at the best works of art but at the mediocre and even bad ones.  You can't see the virtues of an outstanding work if you can't see the background against which it stands out.

This is why I was interested as well as entertained by the discussion under this meme, posted by the liberal-Democrat site Daily Kos on their Facebook page on the 155th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species.

Something seemed off to me in that quotation, partly because it's not an accurate description of how natural selection works, so I looked around and sure enough, the quotation is not from Darwin.  It's a paraphrase of Darwin by a teacher in management studies, which explains to me why it sounds like it was said by a twenty-first century motivational speaker instead of a nineteenth-century naturalist.  Leon Megginson, the likely author, probably didn't claim to be quoting Darwin, but somewhere between 1964 and 1982 the paraphrase came to be treated as a direct quotation.  It was even inscribed in letters a foot high on the floor of the California Academy of Sciences.  This writer says that the Academy removed Darwin's name from it but evidently kept the text, which is too bad because the text will still convey an inaccurate picture of natural selection to students who see it.

So, what do the Facebook followers of Kos have to say about this meme?  They loved it.  Some samples:

Well, so much for the GOP!!!

They cannot die off soon enough. If ever a species should have gone extinct before its time...

The Pope got your message loud and clear , Mr. Darwin !

I guess if you look at politics from a Darwinian point of view, and seeing as the rich and powerful are the ones with the most to lose from change, you can understand why they fear change so much. Thus the term conservative and its ideology.

Well thank you, President Obama for hanging in there!

... In other words, thanks to President Obama for resisting change?

A few commenters pointed out that the quotation is bogus.  No one so far of the people who like the quotation have acknowledged that.  Predictably, since it's Daily Kos, many of them have interpreted it as a prophecy of the downfall of the American Republican Party.  (Just as conventional religious believers see current events reflected in Holy Scripture.)  Some commenters have pointed out that the GOP is currently managing change pretty well, having won control of Congress and many state-level governments besides.  This also rolls off the backs of the true believers.

While culture, such as our ability to create artificial environments so that we can live in regions that would otherwise kill us, certainly has played a role in human survival, that's not "managing change."  ("Manage change" is one of those empty phrases beloved of motivational speakers and gurus.  Does it mean to respond creatively or passively to change, or does it mean to make change happen?  What kind of "change" are we talking about here?)  Nor does functioning in an organization have much to do with natural selection.   Success in Darwinian terms means reproductive success, not climbing the corporate ladder.  A CEO with a multimillion-dollar paycheck who doesn't have offspring who in turn have offspring, is "unfit" for evolutionary purposes.

Even more, Darwin's theory is not about individuals or political parties, it's about species.  (Note the commenter above who referred to the Republicans as a species.)  It is species that adapt, or fail to adapt, and species that persist or die out.  All individuals die; it's the species -- a statistical abstraction that evolutionary theorists still have trouble defining -- that Darwin was concerned with.

It's not a big deal that so few people recognized that the Darwin quotation in this meme isn't genuine, though it's still significant since liberal secularist Democrats like to see their opposite numbers as gullible fools who'll believe anything they're told.  What matters is that so many pledge their allegiance to Darwin and Evolution, but have no idea what Darwin's theory actually says. Whether human beings and dinosaurs coexisted, for example, is not part of Darwin's theory; it has more to do with geology in any case, but it's an empirical question, not a theoretical one. (For that matter, I suspect that contrary to what orthodox Darwinians like to say, it's possible to do valid biological research on the details of evolution without understanding -- or even believing -- the theory as a whole.)

I don't have any real numbers, of course, but this meme and the reactions it inspired support my suspicions of poll numbers about belief in Evolution versus belief in Creationism.  (Just in passing, the percentage of Americans who subscribe to Creationism, according to Gallup, dropped from 46 to 42 percent since 2012.  That number has held fairly steady for "the past three decades.")  That a certain number of Americans say they believe that human beings evolved doesn't tell me anything about their grasp of evolutionary theory, and I have heard from enough people who clearly misunderstand the theory to wonder.  (Gallup asked its respondents to declare how "familiar" they are with the theory of evolution, but that's no help.  Thirty percent of those who said they were very familiar with the theory also believed that God guided the process, while thirty-four percent left God out of it.)  "I believe that Man Evolved, without help from God" is a declaration of faith, not evidence of scientific literacy.

When He Was Good He Was a Very, Very Good God, But When He Was Bad ...

I'm nearing the end of Mary Midgley's The Solitary Self, and I'm bothered by her handling of religion.  For example, I mentioned yesterday her invocation of something called the "traditional theological idea of an immanent God."  Later in the book she quotes Charles Kingsley, a contemporary and friend of Darwin: "It is just as noble a conception of Deity to believe that he created primal forms capable of self-development ... as to believe that he required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which he himself had made" (95).  She then comments,

Thus, as Kingsley and many other Christians have looked at it, if God is present, he pervades the whole process of evolution as its creator and is immanent in all of it.  He is not an outside operative, a retired clockmaker or visiting in to adjust the nuts and bolts.

I'm not well acquainted with Kingsley's writings and ideas, so I can only go by what Midgley quotes from him.  But I can't see that Kingsley was referring in that sentence to an "immanent" God, as she claimed.  He seemed rather to have in mind an "outside operative" who wound up the "primal forms" and let them chug along without further intervention.  An immanent deity who "pervades the whole process of evolution as its creator" would be more like another theological concept of god, as the creator and sustainer of the world.  That would perhaps be compatible with Darwinian theory, just as it's possible in principle to think of natural disasters both as "acts of God" and as events describable and explainable by the physical sciences, but Midgley seems to have things exactly wrong.  The notion of god as "wholly other", an outside operative as it were, is also part of the "traditional theological idea" Midgley referred to -- which isn't really a single idea but numerous ones.

Midgley continues:

There should not, then, really have been a serious clash here.  The only difficulty -- and of course it has proved a serious one -- is that it means the biblical account of creation cannot be taken literally.

That news ought not really to have shocked Christendom.  As it happened, the Church Fathers, notably Augustine, had very early seen the need to treat some biblical stories as metaphors or allegories, and had often advised this.  Origen pointed out that the sun and moon could not literally have been created "on the third day," because there could have been no days before they were present.  This, he said, did not matter because the symbolic meaning was always the real message.  Thus the Genesis story simply describes the total dependence of all creatures on a ruling benevolent spirit and does this through a myth: an imaginative vision that is the most appropriate way of bringing such vast and mystifying facts within human comprehension.  The details of the story are merely shaped to make this central point clear. 

Since, however, the truth of the symbolic story was so important, people naturally often did assume that biblical stories were factually true as well ...

I can't tell where Augustine leaves off and Midgley begins in this passage, but it isn't philosophy, it's apologetics -- and fundamentalist apologetics at that.  (Bear in mind that fundamentalists do not 'take the Bible literally' -- they take it very figuratively in order to preserve its inerrancy.)

Where to begin?  Well, allegorical readings of scripture began earlier than the Church Fathers.  Apocalyptic books often involved allegorical visions which were decoded for the seers by heavenly guides.  Jesus gives his inner circle of disciples an allegorical interpretation of one of his own parables in the fourth chapter of Mark's gospel; I doubt it's authentic, but it's at least as old as the gospel itself (around 70 AD).  In chapter 4 of Paul's letter to the Galatians, centuries before Augustine, he wrote:

²² For it is written that Abraham had two sons: the one by a bondwoman, the other by a freewoman. ²³ But he who was of the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and he of the freewoman through promise, ²⁴ which things are symbolic. For these are the^[d] two covenants: the one from Mount Sinai which gives birth to bondage, which is Hagar— ²⁵ for this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and corresponds to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children— ²⁶ but the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all.

This is some rather fancy footwork: Paul equates Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, with Judaism ("Jerusalem, which now is, and is in bondage with her children"), and Sara, the mother of Isaac, with the followers of Jesus, dwellers in "the Jerusalem above [which] is free".  This is doubly ironic since in Galatians Paul was not addressing Jewish Christians, but Gentile converts who were, he insisted, free from the law of Moses.  I bring this up as a reminder that allegorical or metaphorical interpretations don't always reveal "the truth of the symbolic story" -- they can be thoroughly dishonest.  Bear in mind that this allegorical reading is not marginal but canonical, in a New Testament document of crucial importance for Christian theology.  (It's also typical of New Testament use of the Hebrew Bible, in yanking passages out of their original context and giving them wildly inapt readings.)

Further, allegorical, typological and other non-literal forms of interpretation weren't applied only to certain biblical passages: they could be applied to everything in the Bible, and to non-Biblical writings besides. After all, a book breathed by God himself must have many layers of meaning.  Jewish and Christian interpreters borrowed the approach from philosophical interpreters of Homer.  Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish contemporary of Paul, also applied it to the Hebrew Bible, with very different results of course.  Allegorical and other non-literal readings don't uncover the "true" meaning encoded in a text: they allow the interpreter to impose his own agenda on the text -- as Walter Kaufmann put it, to read their ideas into a text and get them back endowed with authority.

As for "myth," that's a word with many different meanings too, even on the literal level.  No one knows what the writer (or writers) of Genesis 1 and 2 thought their work meant, but the interpretation Midgley gives -- "the total dependence of all creatures on a ruling benevolent spirit" -- isn't even reductive, it's platitudinous.  She also forgets (surely she must know) that there are two different creation stories in Genesis, with different sequences of creative acts and, therefore, presumably different meanings.  She also knows that myths, though powerful, aren't necessarily true or valid, as when she refers to "social atomism" as "the prevailing myth of the time" (116).  Genesis 1 and 2 might have been the prevailing myths of their time, but we don't know what they were meant to convey except in very broad outline.

Nor can the god of Genesis 1 and 2 (or the rest of the Bible) be categorized as an "immanent" deity who created the world, set evolution in motion, and then sat back to watch it play out. Yahweh is, as many modern theologians have said, a god who "acts in history."  He isn't immanent, he sits on a throne in the heavens, watching his creations go through our paces; but sometimes he comes down to walk in a garden, or to hang out in the mountains and flash his behind at his prophets. Whatever the meaning of such mythology, it can't be reduced to Midgley's account without severe violence to the texts. Midgley's reading requires her to take the first chapters of Genesis out of their literary context and ignore the larger narratives.  That's not a matter of not taking the Bible literally, it's using it as a foil for her own agenda.  Midgley is entitled, of course, to hold whatever cockamamie conception of god she wishes; but to read it into the Bible and get it back endowed with authority is intellectually dishonest.  (There are some intriguing similarities between Midgley's position and that of Terry Eagleton, who says that Yahweh is "not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design ... but an artist, and an aesthete to boot," and "[u]nlike George Bush, not an interventionist kind of ruler.")

Midgley refers again to Darwin's rejection of "the rather simple Christian faith in which he had been brought up, but he never embraced simple, confident atheism either" (93).  She quotes a passage from his autobiography in which he wrote of "the extreme difficulty, or rather impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man, ... as the result of blind chance or necessity" and concluded that "I deserve to be called a theist" (93, italics added by Midgley).  It may be that it's impossible to conceive of the universe as uncreated, but that's not evidence that it was created; it may be evidence of the limitations of human thought.  The revivalist New Atheists whom Midgley is attacking presumably accept the Big Bang theory, which many scientists have interpreted as a creation myth to replace Genesis.  (It should be remembered, just in passing, that Genesis wasn't the only creation myth even in antiquity.  There were lots of them, even in the Near East.)  Again, this may be evidence for the human mind's inability to imagine or think about a universe without a beginning, or that came into existence without some kind of impelling force, but it's not evidence for or against any theory.

That condescending bit about "the rather simple Christian faith" in which Darwin was raised is a sore point for me; I'm not sure what symbolic meaning Midgley intends by it.  I don't know about Darwin's upbringing -- it's time to read some biographies! -- but was nineteenth-century Anglican Christianity really that simple?  What really annoys me is the apparent implication that a more complex or sophisticated Christian faith would have been superior.  Midgley's own contortions to produce a more sophisticated reading of Genesis don't inspire any confidence in me, at least.  And the labyrinthine complications of academic theology are not obviously better than the simplicities of a little church in the glen.  The former Pope Benedict's version of Christianity, for example, is surely sophisticated enough to satisfy even Mary Midgley, but it's not a religion that I feel obliged to respect on that account, or any other.  It allowed him to participate in the cover-up of sexually predatory clergy, while attacking gay people and feminists, and (as Grand Inquisitor under John Paul II) siding with military dictatorships against their "simple" people.  No, sophistication is not desirable in itself.

My own atheism is "simple", in that it starts by not believing in gods: not by denying their existence, but by requiring theists to explain what they mean by gods in the first place, and to give good reasons for believing in their existence in the second.  This starting point makes no assertions about the origins of the universe, or the nature of morality, or the uniqueness (or not) of human beings in relation to other animals.  The world is, I agree, mysterious, and I'm very aware of my ignorance about most important questions.  Midgley dismisses at one point those people who use "agnostic" as a euphemism for atheists, but what I mostly see are self-identified agnostics who use agnosticism as an excuse to buy into "spiritual" movements and teachings that they'd sneer at if they were associated with Christianity, but can accept in the exotic guise of "Eastern" or "indigenous" philosophies.  I don't see much humility in such people, or for that matter in many mainstream religious believers.  The function, if not the intention, of their "faiths" is to eliminate mystery: they always seem to have answers for every difficult question -- the inspirational memes that clog the Internet are full of cheap, easy platitudes.  Whatever floats their boat, but it doesn't work for me, and I wonder how well it really works for them.

Every Zygote is Sacred

Doonesbury has been in the news again, as various newspapers around the country refused to run a sequence on abortion -- specifically on legal requirements that a woman seeking an abortion must submit to a transvaginal ultrasound procedure.

This morning I looked at some of the entries in the "Blowback" department, where readers comment. This one, from a guy in El Dorado, Arkansas, caught my eye:

A woman who aborts is going against the evolutionary imperative of millions of years. But she is improving the human gene pool, in a Darwinian sense. It is not the government's business one way or another, unless you believe that life begins at some arbitrary point, after which it would be manslaughter. I suspect there will be no end to this controversy.

Ah, pop Darwinism; he might as well have said that abortion goes against the will of God. The closest this comes to reality is that Darwin himself opposed birth control (as well as the English poor-relief laws), but since Darwin wasn't God or the Voice of Nature, that's unimportant. Not that it would matter if he were.

The notion that abortion (or anything else) is in conflict with an "evolutionary imperative of millions of years" (which has an intriguing formal resemblance to claims about "the five thousand year old definition of marriage") is ridiculous, however often people say such things. Natural selection has no more moral authority than, say, the Bible.

It's especially curious that people should talk as though preserving every individual life is an evolutionary necessity, given the popularity of self-congratulatory memes like The Darwin Awards, which eke comedy from the notion that some people are too dumb to reproduce, or even to live. Half of the theory of natural selection is that some individuals are removed from the playing field. (Notice too the commenter's claim that a woman who gets an abortion is "improving the human gene pool, in the Darwinian sense", presumably forgetting that women who get abortions are usually mothers and already have done their Darwinian duty. Those who aren't already mothers will have children in the future.)

In "Nature," infanticide is far from unknown. And this may be a good time to quote again an excerpt from Marlene Zuk's Sexual Selections (California, 2002) about the results of forced copulation among zebra finches:

These matings never resulted in any offspring, which is interesting by itself. Even more interesting, though, was that 28 percent of chicks in the aviaries were from the remaining 20 percent of EPCs that were not forced, an astounding success rate. What were the females doing to influence the fate of sperm from different males? No one knows. The cloaca of female birds is clearly capable of some sophisticated maneuvering; in several species, females have been observed ejecting sperm after a copulation. The organ’s structure and function has, however, been relatively little studied by scientists [84-5]

Females in any species are not obligated by evolution or nature to accept insemination, carry offspring to term, or allow their offspring to survive infancy. Their refusal to do any of these things is part of the "evolutionary imperative," not defiance of it.

Smite the Amalekites

Intriguing little article here about former child star Kirk Cameron (later of the Left Behind movies) joining the campaign against Darwin and evolution. I liked this bit:

The 50-page intro [to the selections from Darwin's Origin of Species], written by evangelist author Ray Comfort, will present a "balanced view of Creationism with information from scientists who actually believe God created the universe." Those scientists include Albert Einstein and a host of thinkers whose lives predated 'The Origin of Species,' such as Isaac Newton and Nicolaus Copernicus.

It's open to question whether Einstein actually believed that "God created the universe" -- Einstein's concept of God was that of Baruch Spinoza, who was excommunicated from the Amsterdam synagogue for his heretical views. "In [his later philosophical] works, Spinoza denies the immortality of the soul; strongly rejects the notion of a providential God—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and claims that the Law was neither literally given by God nor any longer binding on Jews. Can there be any mystery as to why one of history's boldest and most radical thinkers was sanctioned by an orthodox Jewish community?" I think Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort would side with the synagogue rather than with Spinoza or Einstein.

It's also well-established by now, thanks to James R. Moore's The Post-Darwinian Controversies (Cambridge, 1979) and David Livingstone's Darwin's Forgotten Defenders (Eerdman, 1987), that the initial Christian response to The Origin of Species was often quite positive, and that among the Christians who embraced Darwin's theory were such exemplars of conservative evangelical thought as Benjamin Warfield of Princeton Theological Seminary. (The Theopedia article on Warfield, significantly, forgets to mention Warfield's embrace of Natural Selection.)

Comfort's introduction "paints Darwin as both racist and misogynistic and explicitly highlights 'Adolph Hitler's undeniable connection to the theory.'" This is a hot-button topic, of course: it's okay for evangelists and teabaggers to play the Hitler card, but not for anyone else, and Comfort's historical sloppiness about Einstein should warn the public to be skeptical about anything else he says. The Hitler connection is tricky, and of course contemporary Darwinists will reflexively deny it. In a new English translation of his 2001 book The Pure Society from Darwin to Hitler (Verso Books, 2009), the historian of science Andre Pichot undermines the denial, though not in a way that will give any comfort to today's Creationists or Intelligent Designers. (Thanks to Richard Seymour at Lenin's Tomb for bringing Pichot to my attention with this post.)

The eugenic laws that were enacted by Hitler and his regime didn't derive directly from Darwin, but they were endorsed by many if not most Darwinian biologists of the early 20th century, who connected them to Darwinian theory. It's important to remember that forced sterilization of the "unfit" and "inferior" began not in Hitler's Germany but in the United States -- the first such law was passed in Indiana in 1907. As Pichot writes (page 179),

It is probable, therefore, that even without the Nazis, Germany would at some point or other have adopted and put into effect legislation of this kind. Besides, it was only the Catholic Church that made any institutional protest, particularly in the person of the bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen – whom we shall meet again later on, and who condemned eugenic sterilization in a pastoral declaration of 29 January 1937.

Comfort's guilt-by-association doesn't work very well in any case. Pichot reminds us that eugenic research in the US and Germany was supported by

fairly characteristic individuals and groups: Krupp (steel and armaments), Harriman (railways), Carnegie (steel), Rockefeller (petrol), Wickliffe Draper (textiles), to list only the names already encountered. The mildest comment would be that these fairy godparents who watched over the cradle of eugenics made a mistake in their philanthropic aim, and that the Rockefeller Foundation’s funding of Nazi biology is at the very least a sign of a certain blindness – comparable to that of the Carnegie Institution, which did not put an end to the eugenic activity at Cold Spring Harbor until 1940, when the laboratory was drifting into becoming a centre of Nazi propaganda. ... [185]

And to the extent that this work involved reputable scientists rather than mere fantasists, there was no reason why Rockefeller should not fund it. After all, a journal as prestigious as Nature published in 1936 an article signed E. W. M. (perhaps E. W. MacBride), which proposed to resolve social problems by way of social sterilization, with a view to punishing people who appealed to state aid for raising their children [188].

Worse still for the Creationists, some of the same wealthy philanthropists who funded the eugenic research that Hitler used as a springboard for the Final Solution, also funded and supported "end-time prophecy" work in the US. Paul Boyer wrote in And Time Shall Be No More (Harvard, 1992, page 100):

Nor did premillennialism in the 1865-1920 years appeal solely to the poor and disaffected; it also found support among the middle classes, the well-to-do, and even the elite. The signers of an 1891 memorial to President Benjamin Harrison written by premillennialist William Blackstone and urging support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine included Cyrus McCormick, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. Two Los Angeles oilmen, Lyman and Milton Stewart, financed the publication and distribution of The Fundamentals. Chicago department-store owner John Pirie hosted Cyrus Scofield's annual Bible conferences at Sea Cliff, Pirie's estate on Long Island. The head of the Quaker Oats Company, Henry Crowell, chaired the board of trustees of the Moody Bible Institute. Large middle-class Baptist and Presbyterian churches in New York, St. Louis, Boston, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and many other cities were bastions of premillennialism in these years. As Ian Rennie has written, dispensationalism attracted some of the most outstanding evangelicals of the day – and some of the wealthiest. Whatever else may be said of, belief in an imminent Second Coming, in punishment of the wicked, and in a Millennium when the injustices of the present age will be set right, cannot be dismissed -- in the Middle Ages, in the pre- World War I, era, or in the late twentieth century -- as merely the desperate creed of the disinherited.

And why not? As Boyer also points out (page 95), "Some interpreters even saw union-made labels as the Mark of the Beast."

B. B. Warfield, the Calvinist divine who embraced Darwin's theory, was anti-racist and used evolutionary theory to argue for the unity of the human species. (See Livingstone's Darwin's Forgotten Defenders, page 120-1.) Proto-creationists like the geologist and paleontologist Louis Agassiz, on the other hand, were often explicitly racist; Agassiz defended slavery, and his writings were used by slaveowners to justify their lifestyle. (It wasn't until 1995 that the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in 1845 when the SBC seceded from the mainstream Baptists, repudiated its original defense of slavery and racism.)

Pichot doesn't mention misogyny in connection with Darwin, but though it wouldn't surprise me, it should be a point in his favor where conservative Christians are concerned. Pichot says that like his contemporary and co-inventor of the theory of natural selection, Alfred Wallace, "Darwin himself shows an astonishing (and very Victorian) mixture of religious moralism and intellectual poverty, along with a colonialist racism quite lacking in soul" (85). As for racism, Pichot quotes (63) Darwin from The Descent of Man (689 in the 2004 Penguin edition):

The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly organized form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many … For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs – as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

Again, this is not the kind of racism that most conservative Christians, either in Darwin's day or the present, would object to. Considering what Christian English and American society were like then, or now, complaints about savages torturing their enemies, offering up bloody sacrifices (read the history of European war for the bloody sacrifice of millions of human lives in the cause of Christianity and democracy), subjecting their women, knowing no decency, or haunted by gross superstitions obviously boomerang on Darwin. And on today's Christian Right: has Cameron or Comfort had anything to say about the use of torture by the Bush administration, for example?

Coming from American Christians, complaints about Darwin's racism ring especially false. The Protestants who colonized the English colonies were quite happy to equate the original inhabitants of the land they claimed with the Canaanites and Amalekites, to be exterminated without compunction or mercy, and their present-day successors haven't really repudiated that view, preferring at most to try to ignore it. Pichot also quotes Wallace from his Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (Macmillan, 1875, 318-319), which he says Darwin praised in The Descent of Man:

It is the same great law of “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life”, which leads to the inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which Europeans come into contact. The red Indian in North America, and in Brazil; the Tasmanian, Australian, and New Zealander in the southern hemisphere, die out, not from any one special cause, but from the inevitable effects of an unequal mental and physical struggle. The intellectual and moral, as well as the physical, qualities of the European are superior; the same powers and capacities which have made him rise in a few centuries from the condition of the wandering savage with a scanty and stationary population, to his present state of culture and advancement, with a greater average longevity, a greater average strength, and a capacity of more rapid increase, -- enable him when in contact with the savage man, to conquer him in the struggle for existence, and to increase at his expense, just as the better adapted, increase at the expense of the less adapted varieties in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, -- just as the weeds of Europe overrun North America and Australia, extinguishing native productions by the inherent vigour of their organization, and by their greater capacity for existence and multiplication.

Pichot comments acidly, "We might of course remind Wallace that many American and African plants were introduced to Europe and prospered (which is more than people from these lands ever did), but the suspicion is that the purpose of the botanical comparison is simply to naturalize the extermination of indigenous Americans and Australians, reducing this to as natural a phenomenon as the disappearance of a plant in a habitat colonized by another" (56). The trouble with Wallace and Darwin, then, is not that they broke with Christianity, but they didn't break with it decisively enough. But given the divisions on race among both Darwinians and anti-Darwinians, it's clear that Pichot is right to say (page 266) that "As we have already seen in the case of eugenics, Darwinian genetic theories were an inexhaustible sophistry, on the basis of which anything and everything could be justified." You could say the same thing about Christianity.