Mistakes regarding natural selection

Charles Darwin

Since Charles Darwin coined this term, and included it in the title of his famous book, published in 1859, the term natural selection has been poorly understood, especially by non-specialists. Let’s review a few of the most frequent mistakes:

• Natural selection is a force that acts on living beings to cause evolution. This is not true. Natural selection is not a force, nor an object, nor an interaction, nor a phenomenon. It is simply a statistical observation. What is observed is the fact that, in general, individuals better adapted to their environment tend to leave more descendants than those less adapted. Nothing else. It is, therefore, a matter of common sense, not the result of the external action of a mysterious force.

The sin of the scientist

Isaac Asimov

In an article published in 1969 with the same title as this one, Isaac Asimov argued that science should be subject to ethical constraints, and analyzed several cases in which a scientific discovery could be considered morally unacceptable. I consider here a few cases, not necessarily the same as those chosen by Asimov, and later will comment on his conclusion.

• The medical experiments with the Jews in concentration camps by Dr. Mengele and other Nazi doctors, or by the Japanese with their American prisoners. Even in such a blatant case, the perpetrators could find an ethical justification on their deeds, arguing that, as their victims were inferior beings who had no right to life, it was right to use them for experiments that could be beneficial to other human beings that enjoyed that right. It is an unacceptable justification, but they probably used it to silence their conscience.
• The two atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. This act of war killed over 200,000 non-combatant civilians. During most of Western history, including the first World War, this would have been considered unacceptable. The justification was that dropping the bombs saved the lives of thousands of soldiers, who would have died if the fighting had been prolonged. Is this enough, or are we again comparing the lives of two groups of human beings, some of which are considered more valuable than others? Anyway, Sergeant Leroy Lehman, who recognized Hiroshima before the release of the bomb, ended his days in a monastery.
• The same argument (that the lives of some human beings are more valuable than those of others) has been used in other circumstances. Sometimes, to increase the strength of the argument, even the human quality of the victims is denied. Some cases are obvious, both in history (slavery) and now (abortion).

First atomic bomb explosion in Alamogordo

In his article, Asimov concluded that there are cases where science has led to morally unjustifiable progress, and pointed at the use of poison gases as a war weapon whose sole purpose was killing human beings. It is noteworthy that the author of this discovery (Fritz Haber) was later awarded the Nobel Prize, not for poison gas, of course, but for other important findings in the field of chemistry (a process for synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen).

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Science in General: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

Science is a tool

Francis Bacon

The utopia The New Atlantis, written by Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Galileo and pioneer of modern philosophy of science, describes a perfect society that would automatically arise from the practice of science, which the inhabitants of the island of Bensalem have made the basis of their society and its government. Like many of his encyclopedic followers, who a century later created the myth of indefinite progress, Bacon believed that science in the future will save man and solve all human problems, opening the way to a paradise on Earth.

This mistake is common. Tools are often confused with their good uses, forgetting that the same tools can also be misused. Let’s look at a few examples, among the thousands that could be cited:

Science, ethics and democracy

John Boyne’s novel, The boy in the striped pajamas (2007) is about the slaughter in the gas chamber in the Nazi concentration camps. The book ends thus:

Of course all this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again.

Not in this day and age.

Is this true? Those things can never happen again?

I think this ending is not right. First, it’s not true that it all happened a long time ago. Seventy years is not a long time for historic events. Second, it’s not true that those things could never happen again. Have we forgotten the Ruanda massacres in the nineties?

But perhaps the author meant that those things can never happen again in Europe. Have we forgotten the Srebrenica massacre and the Sarajevo tragedy, also in the nineties?

Or perhaps he means that these things cannot happen in a democratic country. Has he forgotten that Hitler reached power after a democratic election? Has he forgotten that the Athenian democracy was discredited for millennia by their death sentence against Socrates, the result of a secret vote that took place just after the restoration of democracy, which followed the oligarchy imposed by Sparta after the Peloponnesian war?

Consequences of scientific fraud, a lesson for politicians

Scientific fraud is an important issue that can give rise to complex ethical problems. The mystery novel Gaudy night (1936), by Dorothy L. Sayers, offers a concrete example. When he is about to defend his doctoral thesis, a scientist discovers a little-known document that demolishes his work. Temptation is too strong, he steals the document and proceeds with his thesis. Unfortunately (for him) one of the university committee was aware of the existence of the document, tries to look it up and discovers that it is missing, and who was the last person who consulted it. The fraud is thus discovered, the thesis is rejected, the case is made public and the researcher is dismissed with unfavorable comments that put an end to his scientific career. As he must support a family, he has to accept a job below his level and finally commits suicide.

The characters in the novel formulate the following ethical problem: Must a person give up his vocation because of having yielded just once to a temptation of fraud? What comes first, the integrity of science or the fate and perhaps even the life of an individual human being? In the words of one of the characters: [That old piece of paper] made no difference to anybody. It wouldn’t have helped a single man or woman or child in the world - it wouldn’t have kept a cat alive; but you killed him for it.