Sternberg's talk, titled "The Theology of the Body and Evolution," is very anti-concordist. I think he overstates the case against Darwinian evolution a bit. Part of the difficulty is that Darwinism is incredibly bound up with village atheism and libertine culture. Sternberg seems uninterested in trying to purify the theory of these elements, though he has no problem with change over time. He does seem a bit more favorable to Intelligent Design than his impartial statements on his website let on, but because he never explains the intriguing school of "process structuralism" in his talk I still don't know exactly where he's coming from.
Sternberg isn't a sophomoric anti-Darwinist. He makes a good list of objections that any people with more concordant views of Darwinism must address. It's a good source for the "videtur quod" section in a Thomistic article.
My notes are a bit sloppy, for which I apologize.
According to Sternberg:
Darwinism is a rejection of created essence, the rebirth of epicurean philosophy.
Claims evolutionism believes in self-contained cosmos. Nature is a self-sufficient explanation...
Notes neo-Darwinian "anti-speciesism," but he claims we can't just dismiss this as metaphysical overreach. Rather, it is based on the axioms of Darwinism itself.
[Not mentioned: Darwin's rejection of any qualitative difference between mankind and his fellow animals]
He describes these axioms as follows:
-Genetic determinism. The organism is epiphenomenal. This concentration on the organism is, perhaps, a hint of what Sternberg's "process structuralism" focuses upon, but he doesn't expand on his eccentric philosophy of biology. [Sed Contra: if genetic determinism is inherent to the theory, and not just an assumption made for the sake of easy research, shouldn't old Newtonian physics, with its clockwork view of the universe, also pose some problems? I would also note Thomas Hobbes' committment to epicureanism, as well as Epicurean influence on classical physics and classical liberalism.]
-Likewise agency, consciousness, free will are illusions. Personality itself is epiphenominal. [Sed Contra: "By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic loser, not one iota less than if I were a card-carrying member of Queer Nation. But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in a lake." -Steven Pinker
-random mutation, natural selection only. There is no room for designer in this picture. Sternberg voices a low opinion of those who try to graft telos onto Darwinian theory.
He quotes Daniel Dennett, Peter Singer: species are "frozen accidents," the human race didn't "have to be..." speciesism... darwinism is universal acid... I do wish he had dealt with more cordial concilators rather than the village atheist brigade.
Gregor Mendel: Anti-Darwinist?
Sternberg claims an actual historical bias against Mendel, and that early evolutionists rejected genetics. He notes Mendel was testing Darwinian theory because he disagreed with it. Mendel's experiments led to his interpretation which is in favor of fixity of species. This is counter to strict Darwinism.
[Catholic Encyclopedia article on Mendel backs this up: Mendel was an anti-darwinian! My science textbooks seemed to have glossed over this fact. I know neo-Darwinism is an attempt to reconcile Darwinism with new genetic discoveries, but I didn't know it had to reinterpret Mendel to do so!]
He expands in q&a:
Darwin was in favor of blended inheiritance, that is, continuous gradual change over time. For Darwin, there are no jumps in nature. This, Sternberg claims, was for anti-theological reasons.
For Mendel, genetics is discrete quantum changes, jumps, and thus counter to evolution simpliciter. I suspect this might be a red herring, but I can't justify my suspicions at the moment.
It is known that Darwin was aware of Mendel, and had a copy of his genetic studies, but Darwin never opened this work. Sternberg claims Darwin had made note of Mendel's theory when it was described in another book, but alludes to some sort of bias and deliberate neglect of Mendel.
Prurient Darwinians' Interests
Evolutionary biology holds that reproduction is the highest good. Evolutionary psychology has recast everything about lust, polygamy, promiscuity, in very significant ways. Lust is a selected-for trait of biological fitness. Sternberg, I think, too readily accepts certain libertine Darwinists' confusion of lust with sexual desire. I suspect this can be recovered in some ways, as Edward T. Oakes did in his essay on Steven Pinker:
This is why in despotic societies, where one male enjoys all the power, women may genuinely prefer to share one wealthy husband than to have the undivided attention of a pauper. But far from being the defense of polygyny that it sounds like, Pinker’s observation leads to the corollary: that egalitarianism and monogamy go together as naturally as despotism does with polygyny. Although he doesn’t quite say so explicitly, Pinker certainly lends credence to the claim of conservatives that democracy and the monogamous nuclear family go together and cannot be sheared off from each other without damage to both.
Sternberg recalls discovering an evolutionary psychology essay on Bill Clinton, claiming he was compelled by genes, very exculpatory attitude. This leads to Sternberg's hilarious story:
"I had a colleague, and I think it was in '92 or '93, who one night knocked on my door around one or two in the morning, he had been thrown out of his house and I wanted to know what he had done, and his wife had thrown him out because he had had relations with a student. And she had found out about this. And so I of course was shocked and amazed and told him "What in the world was going through your mind?"
You can of course be fired for this.
So I sat him down, offered him a beer and said, you know, let's talk this over. And I said "Don't you have any self-control?"
And he argued, made the perfectly good argument: "Look, you're an evolutionary biologist, I'm an evolutionary biologist, and you know this is an evolutionary drive, we're hard wired to copulate. Cut me some slack!"
So my next question was, "Did you use any form of contraception?"
And he said "Are you stupid? Of course I did!"
So here was this guy telling me that his actions were completely out of his control, that he just went through this act like a blind robot programmed by his genes, but yet this blind robot had the forethought to make sure there would be no consequences for his actions."
Future radically open-ended for evolutionary biology, some have spoken of creating different sexes, three, four of them. Sternberg correctly notes that Darwinism holds that "we are still evolving."
He claims that Catholics enamored of Darwinism are unknowingly suffering from cognitive dissonance. That few have addressed the advent of transhumanism certainly lends support to this thesis. However, Sternberg doesn't seem to have read Etienne Gilson's From Darwin to Aristotle and Back Again, which Edward Oakes tells me addresses some of the ontological problems provoked by Darwinian questions.
Sternberg didn't like the set-up of Dover ID design debate. He thinks it was outright young-earth creationism, and too explicitly theological.
He also alludes to dissenting evolutionary biologists being shut up for fear of professional retaliation and media attention in the eighties.
Sternberg notes the "ontological gap" between humans and other animals in Christian theology. Whether he thinks this can be proved "scientifically," he doesn't say.
He also bashes the habitual exaltation of the Bonobos' sex habits. Anybody who takes an anthro class will have come across bonobo hagiography.
He justly bashes the utilitarianism of human relationships in Darwinian thought. This is a very notable criticism. How many "how to catch a guy/gal" articles rely upon the latest sociobiological speculations for filler?
Concluding thoughts: I'm more annoyed at what Sternberg left out than at what he put in. I hold this to be a sign of quality.
Addendum 12/18/2006
Sternberg is in the news again. I will state here that the producer of this CD was receiving investigative calls from the National Center for Science Education in Fall, 2005 about this lecture. I presume this was done in order to dig up dirt on Sternberg.
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