Recent Column: Can you choose to help? Or are you simply spreading your selfish genes?

(Note: This column won an Award of Merit at Write Canada 2007. It was originally published in Maranatha News, June 2006.)

by Denyse O'Leary

Canadian Andrew Brash, a Calgary resident, was only a few hundred steps from his dream - the summit of Mount Everest. Then, he saw something that made him turn aside.

Australian mountaineer, Lincoln Hall, was sitting on the ridge in a thin shirt, with no hat or gloves. His guides had left him for dead and, his hands nearly frozen, he was trying to jump over a cliff. Brash prevented him from jumping and thus saved his life. But Brash did not think of himself as a hero, even though days before, a group of 40 climbers had not stopped to help a Briton dying on the mountainside.

If all this sounds a bit like the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30 37), maybe that is because life imitates not merely art but prophecy. In every age, there are those who help, at a cost to themselves and those who don't.

Helping at risk to oneself is not new. When the Air France Airbus crashed in Toronto on August 2, 2005, a number of motorists helped passengers to safety. Similarly, on November 6, 2005, Grandmother Rosalia DeSantis was travelling home on the subway and, feeling hot and dizzy, she leaned over the edge of the platform . Later, in Sunnybrook Hospital's emergency ward, she learned what had happened to her. She had fainted, hit her head, fallen into the gap, and was lying across a track bleeding. The train was coming into the station in seconds.

How had she survived? Two men who knew neither her nor each other Theo Parusis, 25, and Alvaro Meija, 26 jumped down onto the track and hoisted her up to safety, five seconds before the train rolled over the spot.

One thing I learned while writing By Design or by Chance? (2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy and while co-authoring The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007) is that materialistic philosophy has a hard time accounting for altruism. The most fashionable theory today argues that you do not act to benefit others because you think God wants you to but in order to spread your selfish genes, as a product of evolution. Thus, you might help your own relatives, because they have some identical genes with you. Therefore helping your relatives spreads at least some of your genes. But you are unlikely to help people who do not share genes with you. The famous evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane put it this way, "Would I lay down my life to save my brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins."

The main problem with the materialistic theory expressed by Haldane is not that it offends religious believers but that it ignores the evidence. The evidence is that people often help unrelated others in situations where they cannot expect any reward, may suffer a disappointment or undergo a serious risk, and have no reason to think that they will spread their genes. This is only a small part of the growing conflict between Christianity and Darwinism that I have been tracking for a number of years now. It is certainly a far cry from "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13, NIV) and "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Rom 5:7 8 ). These sayings do not even mention relatives. Jesus died both for friends and for non-friends. No wonder there are growing worldview conflicts.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

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Darwinism dissent Lists of theoretical and applied scientists who doubt Darwin

Gilder, George A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

Intelligent design academic publications.

Intelligent design-friendly students should be flunked, according to bio prof Evolutionary biologist’s opinion that all students friendly to intelligent design should be flunked.

Intelligent design controversy My U of Toronto talk on why there is an intelligent design controversy, or my talk on media coverage of the controversy at the University of Minnesota.

Intelligent design controversy timeline An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

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March of the Penguins A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

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Polls relevant to the intelligent design controversy A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

Stove, David O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment will be accepted if I think they contribute to a discussion. For best results, give your name or some idea who you are and why we should care. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudesby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.

Thinkquotes of the day: Altruism simply promotes your own genes?

A boffo evolutionary biologist accounts for altruism:

The mathematical models of population genetics suggest the following rule in the evolutionary origin of altruism If the reduction of survival and reproduction of individuals due to genes for altruism is more than offset by the increased probability of survival of the group due to the altruism, the altruism will rise in frequency throughout the entire population of competing groups. Put as concisely as possible: The individual pays, his genes and tribe gain, altruism spreads. - (E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, p. 282 (Random House: Vintage Books, 1998)

From the movie, Gandhi, Gandhi's advice to a fellow Hindu who had killed a Muslim who had killed his son, and now feared he was
going to hell:

Gandhi sees the man's unbearable grief and remorse. He gently tells him, "I know a way out of hell. Find a child, a child whose mother and father have been killed - a little boy - and raise him as your own. Only be sure that he is a Muslim..."
The man's expression changes to one of hope. He suddenly sees a way in can undo what he has done and effect a restitution. He can replace his own son and provide a Muslim orphan with a home and parents. It is a perfect solution.

The man baulks, however, when Gandhi insists he raise the boy as a Muslim, but notice we don't hear anything here about genes or even tribes in the genetic sense. It all turns on ideas.

And then of course, in the immortal words of a Jewish itinerant preacher, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell into the hands of robbers ... " Read the whole thing and ask yourself where altruism means promoting your own tribe?

The major problem with evolutionary biology accounts of altruism is that most people don't even consider the behavior that merely promotes one's own family altruism. Taken to extremes - as it must be, to work the way Wilson needs it to - it is called amoral familism and is widely regarded as a key source of underdevelopment in backward societies.

Thinkquote of the day: Darwin's influence on modern thought

According to one of the best-known Darwinists, Ernst Mayr (1905-2005), here is the difference Darwin made:

But furthermore—and this is perhaps Darwin’s greatest contribution—he developed a set of new principles that influence the thinking of every person: the living world, through evolution, can be explained without recourse to supernaturalism; essentialism or typology is invalid, and we must adopt population thinking, in which all individuals are unique (vital for education and the refutation of racism); natural selection, applied to social groups, is indeed sufficient to account for the origin and maintenance of altruistic ethical systems; cosmic teleology, an intrinsic process leading life automatically to ever greater perfection, is fallacious, with all seemingly teleological phenomena explicable by purely material processes; and determinism is thus repudiated, which places our fate squarely in our own evolved hands. To borrow Darwin’s phrase, there is grandeur in this view of life. New modes of thinking have been, and are being, evolved. Almost every component in modern man’s belief system is somehow affected by Darwinian principles. (pg. 83)

– Ernst Mayr, "Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought," Scientific American, pg. 79-83 (July 2000). ( Note: SCiAm is the original source, but this link is from a botany page.)

This is useful information if a school board PR rep tells you that Darwinism is "just another part of the science curriculum." It clearly is not, as Mayr makes clear above, and as Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones also explains. Darwinism is, among other things, a philosophy that is held in explicit contradiction to traditional philosophies and religions, as Mayr is at pains to specify.

Some of the biology teachers who promote Darwinism, incidentally, hope that it will cause people to care more about the environment (because we're all just animals who happened by chance , and they're all just animals who happened by chance, right?)

The problem is that such a view is incoherent. If we can really care about or do anything about the environment as a whole - as opposed to the points at which it impacts us - we are not them and them 'r' not us. And nothing useful follows from a refusal to make the distinction.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being denied tenure at Baylor.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment are rarely accepted. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudeby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.

The selfish gene?: Seems to have been left out of the chromosomes in the liver

Who sucker punched this guy's "selfish genes" ?

(a 28 year old Ontario power company employee - a complete stranger - is donating part of his liver to help a toddler in Toronto who needs a transplant.)

Oh, and here and here are some other everyday "genuine altruism" stories I happen to know about from Canada, one of them from the Toronto area, involving young guys, who (as a group) are supposed to be selfish, according to feminists. Toronto is not the City of Angels, by the way; readers can likely supply instances from their own communities.

As philosopher David Stove would probably have said, if Dawkins was right about the selfish gene, these cases would be much more rare and they would be socially disapproved. Yet we see the opposite; such persons are admired. (In Canada, we don't pay for organs; the only thing the guy gets is paid time off work while he recovers.)

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.