Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
abiogenesis, but the first two propositions show that this is at most a slight
modification of that claim. If all living things are governed by natural laws
and if experiments have shown that “life could have begun as a chemical
reaction,” then any remaining puzzles about “how or where” will seem fairly
insignificant. Rather than introducing caution, the curators in fact push
out the boundaries of science even further. So definitive is the scope of the
naturalism established by this famous experiment that it now even encom-
passes “rules to live by.” Scientific naturalism is made to seem a normative
premise. Since “physical and chemical laws” govern all living things, they
govern every human judgment, the realm of “ought” just as much as the
realm of “is.”
Rather than clarifying where science leaves off and broader specula-
tions begin, the museum seems intent on sustaining just enough ambiguity
and misdirection to maintain the appearance of professional reserve even
as it invites visitors into the realm of evolutionism. Its scientific pretensions
provide a cover for its scientism. Much as Huxley had done in
Man's Place
in Nature
, the curators of the Field Museum have created a message that
has scientific markings, but this is precisely what enables it to pursue such
mythopoeic themes.
A different language surrounds public discussions of evolutionary sci-
ence, a language disposed to pass outside the bounds of material causality
that are usually regarded as the defining limits of scientific explanation.
The scientific credibility of evolutionary ideas may be jeopardized when
they pass into this outer frontier, but the identity needs of scientists tempt
them to lose sight of this fact. A strictly mechanical conception of evolution
would make the scientists who teach it mere technicians of nature, whereas
evolutionary ideas about “place,” “order,” and “rules to live by” make sci-
entists into authorities capable of pointing the way to historical progress.
Only a science that dealt with the subject of natural history could so easily
transition into the language of history as it is more traditionally rendered.
I do not have space here to examine a representative body of such public
treatments, but I would like to discuss one more that seems to fairly repre-
sent this pattern of narration: Joseph Levine and Kenneth Miller's textbook,
Biology: Discovering Life
. Their chapter introducing evolutionary science,
entitled “Darwin's Dilemma: The Birth of Evolutionary Theory,” actually
contains two birth narratives. It chronicles the process of discovery that cul-
minated in the publication of Darwin's
Origin of Species
, but it is also about
the birth of a new epoch. In fact, Levine and Miller open with this second
claim when they declare that Darwin's topic “shook the world” because of
