For some people science is an impartial, objective exercise, unalloyed by personal passion and prejudice, there to tell us The Facts. Scientific information and discoveries are described in specialised journals with little relevance to the everyday world of politics, society and religion.
The authors of the recently published book, Biology and Ideology – From Descartes to Dawkins take a different view. The thirteen essays in the volume illustrate the many and varied ways in which biology has been utilized for a wide range of political, religious and social purposes from 1600 to the present day. The purposes may be beneficial, benign, or harmful but all are “ideological” in the broadest sense of not being intrinsic to biology itself.
With the benefit of hindsight, historians more than others are in a good position to discern such uses and abuses of biological ideas. Whereas the 20th century abuses of genetics in eugenics and in racist ideologies are obvious, less obvious are the subtle ways in which the same biological ideas have been used during the same period for quite opposite ideological purposes in different countries. Thus, the supposedly ‘materialistic’ biology that in France was utilized by the philosophes to subvert the 18th century social order was, in Britain, used as a key resource for natural theology, which supported the social order.
If ideology has always hovered near biology, it has never left the side of Darwinian evolution. The theory of evolution has been invested with ideological overtones, particularly in North America, ever since Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859. For some, evolution became a philosophy that threatened to undermine the notion that mankind was “made in the image of God”. For others, it became a political threat to the social order, subverting campaigns to achieve greater rights for the oppressed.
The theory of evolution was, in effect, transformed into a bogey-man for virtually anyone who had an axe to grind. Rather than simply explaining the origins of biological diversity, it became an icon of materialism, or militarism, or atheism, or socialism, or capitalism. In fact, since 1859 evolution has been deployed in support of almost every conceivable ‘ism’, many of them mutually exclusive. All kinds of ideological barnacles became attached to the theory to the extent that the actual biology was obscured in the process.
And so it is today. The presentation of evolution by the ‘new atheists’ is, somewhat ironically, very similar to that of the creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design. Both see in evolution the evidence for atheism that one despises and the other desires. Opposite poles are often more similar to each other than either side is prepared to admit.
The ideological uses and abuses of science are bad for science education, because so often the science gets lost in the rhetoric. They are also bad for religion, because scientific theories are always provisional, open to refutation, and simply not up to the herculean task of refereeing pro- or anti-religious arguments.
Darwinian evolution, for example, just happens to be the inference to the best explanation for the origins of all the biological diversity on planet earth. It’s a stunningly successful theory but it is best just to let scientific theories do the job that they’re good at, and not invest them with ideologies that have nothing to do with the science.
Denis Alexander is Director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Cambridge and the author of Creation or Evolution – Do We Have to Choose? (Oxford: Monarch, 2008).
Biology and Ideology – From Descartes to Dawkins (Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers, eds, Chicago University Press, 2010) is out now and can be purchased at a discounted rate on-line at www.faraday-institute.org.
