People like evolutionary psychologists and paleologists love to explain features of nature in terms of their evolutionary adaptability. Sometimes the relationship between the features and their evolution is clear: light moths live near light-barked trees, where they can hide while resting. Dark moths live near dark-barked trees. Blacken the light-barked trees with soot, and in a few generation the moths have adapted by “turning” black. Actually the genes for white moth wings were disproportionately devoured by marauding bird flocks…
This story makes sense, and you can actually use it to make some simple predictions.
Today I was writing about the constituents of cannabis resin, and imagined a highly religious audience (don’t ask). How would I explain the natural function of cannabis resin?
I have a lot of ideas about this topic. First of all it is sticky and grows on tiny little hairs, each ending in a “glob” or “goober.” (In informal stoner lingo, this is known as a “trichome”). The sticky little hairs and globs must really annoy the tiniest categories of mites and aphids and whatnot, just by tripping them up.
Then, the resin is smelly. That might repel some herbivores, or maybe attract creatures who eat and poop out seeds. Pollinators don’t seem to be a concern with cannabis flowers, though.
The weirdest part of the resin is the cannabinoids. Many creatures, though not insects, will be affected by cannabinoids because they have an “endocannabinoid” system in their bodies. The plant’s “phytocannabinoids” are presumably imitation endocannabinoids, meant to change the way animals act. Maybe birds don’t like cannabinoids and wait until mature seed has dropped from the flowering top, in order to avoid getting unpleasantly stoned? Maybe herbivores get loaded and forget where those delicious plants were located? Or maybe some creatures like what phytocannabinoids do to them, and so they hang around the cannabis patch controlling pestilential spider mites.
Unfortunately, I can make any and all of these explanations into an evolutionary story. I can look into what cannabis does in nature, declare that it must be adaptive because it occurs in nature, and soon enough my explanation is backed by the weight of Darwin’s theory.
As I was doing my resinous write-up, it occurred to me that evolutionary arguments might offend some of my hypothetical religious audience. I could wimp out and add a disclaimer: “these views represent an opinion based only on a theory… apply intelligent design if you like, at my level of knowledge it explains the function of cannabis resin just as well as natural selection!”
In other words, in this case, intelligent design and natural selection bring us to the same place. Why are the cannabinoids so weird? Because they are the only plant compounds whose function is to mess with the endocannabinoid system of an animal. Either they evolved that way as cannabis competed in the natural world, or God made it that way. Since neither explanation added any substance to my essay, I left them both out!
Seeing the two theories side-by-side in this way made Deism understandable, the so-called rationalist belief that the world was designed by God, wound up, and left to run on its own. To Benjamin Franklin and his ilk, the world was understandable because they could count on things in it being designed, and thus carrying out functions. Look in any biology book today and see how every molecule and ion of life is described in terms of its function, just as if it were designed for the purpose. Further, the Deists must have conceived of geology and weather as purposeful events… an idea now supported by the Gaia theory of our planet as a self-regulating system.
I don’t believe in Deism or Intelligent Design, nor do I believe Gaia is an intelligence regulating geology and climate in a truly “purposeful” way — no intelligence, no mind in which to hold a purpose. The accumulating adjustments of evolution are more satisfactory to my overall worldview.
Why not teach Intelligent Design as what it really is — Deism? God is not miraculously creating right now — but he designed everything on Earth and in the Heavens. We can expect to find his/her purposes throughout the natural world. We’ll look in everything for a working design — hearts to pump, gills to breathe and volcanoes to mix up the elements of Earth’s crust.
This Deism was supplanted by a view that systems with a continual energy flux can become self-organizing, most dramatically through the evolution of life. Nowadays, scientists continue to refer to the functions of body parts and ecological actors as if they worked by design. But, this is like us referring to the sun rising in the East and setting in the West — true enough, but don’t we really orbit the sun?
If we can teach pre-Copernican theories of the universe, why not teach Intelligent Design? The trick is, to teach it truthfully so that students can get an idea of where each theories’ value starts and ends. There is a terrible tendency in our culture to say, “in any controversial issue, we must make both positions appear to be equally well supported. This is called being fair and objective.” How about dipping a toe in reality and reporting truthfully on the waters? A deeper look, into issues better understood than cannabis resin, will clearly support evolution every time. Just look at the development of life up the layers of sediment!
On the same note, when someone tells you “boys are naturally loud because evolution has programmed them to be aggressive,” or “you can’t be a healthy vegetarian because you evolved to eat meat,” assume they are blowing smoke up your ass. As little as we know about the origins of our species, anyone can make up any story and make it appear to make sense. These stories should be no more valid to the skeptical mind than someone saying, “a woman’s place is in the home because God made her as man’s helpmate.”
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