Angels, apes, and men.

THE IMPERIALISTIC tendency to exalt a partial truth or insight into an exhaustive, exclusive explanatory principle is a permanent intellectual temptation, surrender to which always does violence to truth. In the past the chief culprit was often religion; today it is usually science. Apparently unencumbered by any respect for elementary principles, procedures, and implications of rationality, popularizers of reductive scientific naturalism such as Jacob Bronowski and Carl Sagan are nevertheless given wide and potent publicity in their evangelical endeavors, serving as the St. Pauls and John Wesleys of the scientistic gospel--with far more dubious consequences, to be sure.

Thus in a considered work of his maturity, The Identity of Man, Bronowski blandly assures his readers that "man is a part of nature, in the same sense that a stone is, or a cactus, or a camel." Any rational mind must boggle at this assertion. After all, do cactuses or camels or stones dress up and troop down to the Museum of Natural History to hear eminent scientists lecture? Do they buy and read books by same? Do they dispose themselves to weigh and consider reason, truth, evidence, and validity in argument, and on that basis grant or deny assent to propositions so urged? If so eminent a popularizer as Bronowski evangelizes us with such feckless and obvious self-contradiction, is it any wonder that the common man often mistrusts the local biology teacher's views on evolution? For surely the great A. N. Whitehead was saying nothing very original or abstruse when he noted that "scientific reasoning" itself is and must be "completely dominated by the pre-supposition that mental functionings are not properly part of mature." That is, if scientific reasoning, or any reasoning, lays any claim to validity, it cannot without contradiction also claim that mind and reasoning are "part of nature, in the same sense that a stone is, or a cactus, or a camel." The mind cannot be coherently understood (or used) as an "epiphenomenon." It doesn't take an Aristotle to recognize that the proponents of scientific naturalism are always busily sawing off the branch of rationality on which they are sitting and from which they confidently pontificate. But then, as Whitehead said, "scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study."

These thoughts are aroused by two books on the evolution/Creation Science controversy, in which Biblical literalists and scientistic Darwinists often dramatically hold the stage. The first is by Professor Stanley L. Jaki, an enormously distinguished historian of science (and the subject of a luminous article in these pages by Russell Kirk, May 27, 1983). Only a hundred pages long, Jaki's Angels, Apes, and Men is the distillation of a lifetime of profound learning; it is a magisterial book that by its sure and eloquent command of scientific history and philosophical rationality joins what errant and transgressive minds too often put asunder, the worlds of matter and mind, of physics and metaphysics, of science and religion.

It is a tonic work for all extremists and idiosyncrats: for the literalists, with their fearful fideistic Biblicism and their mistrust of reason and scientific method; and even more for scientistic Darwinists, with their materialistic arrogance, their mutilated conception of reason, and their willful reductionism. Of these two parties of extremists, Jaki is more worried by the Darwinians than by the Creationists. "Whatever the discredit," he writes, brought by the Creationists "on Biblical revelation no less than on science, they deserve credit" for not having surrendered like most mainstream Christians, to "sugar-coated versions of Darwinism, as if Darwin would countenance an evolutionary theory in which natural selection is not the ultimate explanatory device for everything, including mental reality." Creationists, he writes, "are still willing to make a stand on behalf of creation as the ultimate ground of man's existence," and this stand "has in it something of the posture of a Socrates ready to pay the highest price in defense of his conscience and its abiding purpose in the belief that individual conscience will live for eternity."

In addition, the willful, ostentatious contempt for elementary standards of rational consistency on the part of Darwinian fundamentalists justifies the suspicions that were voiced 25 years ago in the introduction to a centennial edition of The Origin of Species by the eminent biologist W. R. Thompson. Thompson wrote that "the success of Darwinism was accomplished by a decline in scientific integrity."

In his own time this lack of rational consistency and integrity in Darwin's work was demonstrated by Sedgwick and Martineau, and it has been documented in our time by what Jaki calls a "respectable minority of life scientists," including Pierre Grasse, eminent zoologist and former president of the French Academy of Sciences. It has also been documented by two outstanding scholars who can hardly be accused of being in the Biblicist camp: Jacques Barzun's Darwin, Marx, and Wagner and Gertrude Himmelfarb's Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution are devastating critiques and exposes of the internal inconsistencies and willful obfuscations that have characterized Darwinism from the beginning. Upon first publication both of these books earned the highest praise. The London Times Literary Supplement, for instance, said of Miss Himmelfarb's "thorough and masterly book" that "no one should presume henceforth to speak on Darwin and Darwinism" who had not read and studied "this authoritative volume." Yet Philip Appleman's Norton Critical Edition of Darwin, which reprints numerous modern essays and selections from books on Darwin (including two of Appleman's own), contains no selection from either Barzun or Miss Himmelfarb, and it does not even mention Miss Himmelfarb's book in the extensive bibliography. Is it any wonder, then, that plenty of people other than Biblicists are suspicious of the integrity of Darwinism and of its proponents?