How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (13 page)

This is not just a recent phenomenon that we can blame on the temptations of the modern world. The Portuguese nobility faced exactly this problem six hundred years ago. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, the nobility shifted from a form of partible inheritance (all children inherited equal shares of the family estate) to a system of
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primogeniture (oldest sons inherited everything). The main reason for this was that they were running out of new land to acquire. Partible inheritance leads inexorably to poverty within just a few generations if family estates are repeatedly broken up without the possibility of acquiring new land. So, rather than destroy their economic power, the landed families gradually preferred to invest everything in one son.

But within just a few generations, Portugal began to have problems from growing numbers of disgruntled younger sons of the nobility who were unable to find brides because they lacked sufficient resources to be attractive as prospective husbands (and strict social rules prevented them from marrying into the ‘lower’ classes). Roving bands of disaffected upper-class youth began to play havoc with civil order. In the end, the crown had to intervene. Their preferred solution was to encourage these young Turks to seek their fortunes abroad – in the wake of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Magellan’s first cir-cumnavigation of the world. In doing so, they precipitated the great age of European exploration. The burial records of the Portuguese nobility from this period bear stark testimony to this: oldest sons typically died on their estates in Portugal, but as the fifteenth century gave way to the sixteenth, younger sons died increasingly in Africa and further afield.

If human populations are left to their own biological devices, things will probably turn out all right in the long run. One of the fundamental laws of Darwinian evolutionary theory tells us that populations will usually value the rarer sex more – which is why, over the long term, sex ratios tend to approximate 50:50. A population sex
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ratio that gets out of kilter will, in due course, be brought back into line because parents will eventually favour the rarer sex. The problem for the Chinese, of course, is that this is something that can only happen on a timescale of many generations, even millennia. The social crisis they face requires a solution on the scale of decades at best.

The Chinese government has not been slow to appreciate this. They have been running a vigorous campaign to persuade citizens that ‘girls are good too’. They have recently also threatened severe punishments for clinics that tell parents the sex of their unborn baby when the mother comes in for scans or tests. But these are long-term solutions that will take a generation or more to balance the books. In the meantime, China may have much more serious social problems to deal with. If we think we have a problem with young males and a gang culture here in the UK, spare a thought for China a decade or two hence when that problem is exacerbated by the addition of forty million sexually disgruntled young men – and there isn’t the benefit of an empire to off-load them to... Or is economic migration to the West their answer?
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It is a century and a half since the publication of Darwin’s seminal book
On the Origin of Species
, yet the debates about evolution and Darwinism continue to be as lively as they were the day after the book was published. It is still very much head-to-head between science and religion, although it has to be said that it is largely fundamentalist forms of the Abrahamic religions which seem to be especially troubled by evolution. Nowhere has this tussle of world views been so publicly debated as in the USA. It was much to the joy of the evangelical Christians that, in the penultimate year of his reign (that sounds almost biblical, doesn’t it?), President Bush placed his weight behind a proposal to include the theory of Intelligent Design in the American school biology curriculum.

So what’s all the fuss about? Well, many would regard Intelligent Design as creationism by the back door. It looks suspiciously as though the US educational system is turning the clock back nearly a hundred years to one of the most bizarre trials in American legal history – the prose-
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cution in 1926 of schoolteacher John Scopes by the State of Tennessee for teaching the theory of evolution, in con-travention of a newly enacted state law.

Intelligent Design (or ID) argues that the natural world is so complex that it could only have come into being if some unseen intelligence had designed it that way. In contrast, the theory of evolution – which of course eschews any such suggestion – is seen as inadequate, and full of intellectual as well as factual holes. ID is not, in fact, an especially novel idea: it dates back to the English theologian William Paley, who, in his classic 1802 book
Natural
Theology
, used the perfection of nature as an argument for the existence of God (the ‘grand designer’).

In the words of one of ID’s leading lights, the biochemist Michael Behe from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (that’s almost a biblical giveaway, isn’t it...), something as complex as a living cell could not have evolved by a series of small steps in which its elements were gradually assembled one by one: a cell without its organelles, for example, would be about as functional as a mousetrap before the spring was added. The gauntlet thrown down to the evolutionists is to show that a blind process of mutations could produce the kind of complexity we see in the world around us. Failure to do so is taken as implicit support for the default position (i.e. there must have been a designer).

To the naïve, these arguments sound extremely plausible. But their plausibility rests on a deliberate sleight of hand. Take the eye, for example. Could one imagine an imperfect eye that lacked a lens? How could such an eye possibly help its owner? Well, the short answer is that there are, in fact, plenty of examples of eyes of this kind
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in nature, and they are all perfectly functional and no doubt much appreciated by their owners. Eyes have been independently ‘invented’ at least a dozen times in different groups of animals: as a result, they take myriad different forms. We need look no further than the humble mollusc to see eyes that range from simple light-sensitive clusters of cells, to lens-less eyes, to eyes with fixed lenses, to eyes with adjustable lenses hardly different from our own.

The problem is that most of the advocates of ID seem not to be particularly well versed in good old-fashioned natural history. As a result, they are not familiar with the many everyday examples that make nonsense of their arguments. Nor, it seems, are they especially well versed in what the theory of evolution actually says. A common belief among IDers is that Darwinian evolutionary theory assumes that the process of evolution is a consequence of blind chance – mutations randomly producing small changes that gradually add together. Hence, the common claim that evolution by natural selection is equivalent to asserting that a whirlwind could assemble a jumbo jet by blowing through a junkyard. Alas, evolution is not a random process in this sense. Mutations certainly occur at random, but the processes that select and gradually fit mutations together over time are far from random: natural selection, Darwin’s great contribution, is a
very
directed process and can work with astonishing speed. It has taken only ten thousand years to produce the snow-white polar bear from its common ancestor with other Eurasian brown bears.

What makes all this so intriguing is why otherwise perfectly rational people with solid scientific credentials
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should be so enamoured of ID. It is conspicuous that most of those who do espouse ID are not organismic biologists. For the most part, they are working in disciplines whose activities are largely unaffected by whether or not the theory of evolution is true. So why are they
so
antagonistic to Darwin’s theory of evolution, given that this is in fact the second most successful theory in the history of science – after quantum mechanics in physics, which, unlike Darwin’s elegantly simple theory of evolution, is perhaps the most inscrutable theory ever invented by the human mind?

We could write all this off as a kind of idle senior-common-room chitchat among those with too much time on their hands. But failing to understand the force of natural selection and its role in evolution has had, and will continue to have, rather serious consequences for all of us. It has been failure to understand evolutionary processes that gave us DDT-resistant insect pests in the 1950s, drug-resistant malaria in the 1980s, and most recently of all the terrifying phenomenon of the MRSA superbug. We really don’t want any more of these than we can help.

In most cases, of course, the culprit is religious fundamentalism: a desire to believe that the story of creation as set out in the Bible is literally true. But why is it that some religions have such a hard time with the theory of evolution? Why should the fact that humans have an evolutionary history that stretches back to a common ancestry with the apes exercise so many of them so much? Recently, it was the bishops of Kenya (or at least some of them)
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who got hot under the clerical collar. These worthies objected to a new display of our fossil ancestors’ bones in the National Museum in Nairobi lest the sight of them contaminate the minds of visiting children. Bishop Boniface Adoyo and his evangelical friends feared that the poor naïfs might actually come away thinking that we are descended – Heaven forfend! – from apes!

Ever since the celebrated slanging match in Oxford in 1860 between ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, and Thomas ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ Huxley, evolution has had an unusually hard time. Creationism has never quite gone away. Indeed, in some parts of the New World it is still in particularly rude health. It is not, of course, a condition confined to Christianity. Islam has some difficulty with the idea of evolution too: since it doesn’t appear in the Quran, asserting its truth challenges God’s omniscience, and that’s considered blasphemous.

Knowledge may be power, but the suppression of knowledge is far more dangerous. It is something we can ill afford – unless, of course, we are willing to return to a strictly peasant economy and reduce the world’s current population a few thousand-fold more or less overnight. In my view, we do that at our peril. There are just too many examples where attempts to control science have had disastrous consequences and derailed national development.

The most famous is the sad history of Russian biology. In 1917, when the Bolsheviks came to power, Russian genetics was at least a decade ahead of anyone else’s in Europe or America. But the Russian Marxists were suspicious of genetics: Marx himself notwithstanding, they interpreted the nascent theory of (genetic) evolution as
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undermining the possibility that society could be changed by education and economics – the underpinning justification for the Marxist revolution. Professors of genetics were made to sit behind empty desks, and Russian biology was handed over to one Trofim Lysenko who believed that plants could be adapted to new environments merely by stressing them. The result was spectacular crop failures and serious starvation among the peasants. Meanwhile, western genetics did not catch up with where the Russians had been in 1917 until the 1930s, and then of course they just sped ahead.

A less familiar case is the history of Islamic science. As Europe laboured under the Dark Ages, science was alive and flourishing in the cities of the Islamic empire from Andalucia in Spain to Iran far to the east. Not only did these scholars preserve for us the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers (we would know nothing of Aristotle and Plato had it not been for them), but they built on these foundations to develop modern science.

The list of their achievements is staggering. They invented algebra. The word itself comes from the second word of the title of a book by the mathematician Abu Jafar Muhammed ibn Musa: his
Hisab al-Jebr w’al-Muqabala
(literally ‘Calculation by Restoration and Reduction’) was published in ad 825. Meanwhile, the much maligned and completely misunderstood alchemists were laying the foundations of modern chemistry, and developing the experimental method to very sophisticated levels.

In his
Kitab al-Manazir
(‘Book of Optics’), the eleventh-century scholar Hasan ibn al-Haytham developed a new mathematical and experimental approach to the study of
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vision and light. It was the most important book on the topic until Newton published his
Optics
seven hundred years later. Towards the end of the thirteenth century –and long, long before Newton ever set foot in his local primary school – Kamal al-Din al-Farisi demonstrated for the first time that a rainbow consists of two refractions and a reflection of light within a water droplet. And when Copernicus, the founding father of modern astronomy, calculated his planetary motions in 1515, he did so using a ‘Tusi couple’ invented by the thirteenth-century Persian astronomer Nasir al-Din Tusi – who just happened to be al-Farisi’s tutor.

But all this came to a grinding halt in the fourteenth century, when religious fundamentalists persuaded the political powers of the day to suppress science and philosophy throughout the Islamic empire because these new discoveries challenged God’s omniscience. Islamic science never recovered, and the baton was handed over instead to the monasteries of Europe whither many of the Islamic-trained scholars fled.

We just cannot afford to go down that road again.

One reason why creationist arguments seem so plausible is that the fossil record is very patchy. Where, assert the critics of evolution, are the intermediate fossils that link the birds and fishes, or the primates and humans? Where, in fact, is the evidence for species gradually evolving from one form to another? It’s a good question. But although palaeontologists have always had explanations for why the fossil record should be as patchy as it is (the vagaries
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of the fossilisation process and the imperfect sampling that it inevitably provides), such arguments look suspiciously like special pleading. However, in the past decade, dramatic developments in molecular genetics have circumvented this problem, often in quite dramatic ways.