Dominique Guillo
Abstract
Many studies in the social sciences regard the rejection of evolution, creation-ism, and religious faith as closely related attitudes. The purpose of this chapter is to show that this explanatory schema is wrong and that representations of living species do not necessarily obey a binary logic based on the opposition between faith and reason, or religion and science. This chapter looks at and compares attitudes to evolution in two different countries, France, which is a laic country, and Morocco, where Islam is a state religion. In France, people claim to strongly adhere to “evolution” and reject “creationism.” However, the representations of nature they associate with the word “evolution” come actually very close to that of Intelligent Design, the belief that the natural world displays clear signs of intelligent interventions. In Morocco, adherence to creationism seems motivated largely by rational as well as religious argu-ments. Most importantly, however, this inquiry underlines a major feature of these beliefs: they are often inherently blurred, because many individuals feel indifferent vis-à-vis the topic — the origin of species. Therefore, represen-tations of living species are not universally and necessarily considered to be sacred, even though in many circumstances this is undoubtedly the case.
The reception of Darwinism is commonly analyzed within a framework that uses — or is similar to — the Weberian thesis of secularization through the
advancement of science. According to this thesis, Darwinism has contributed to the “disenchantment of the world” by extending modern rationalism to the biological field. In doing so, the theory met with resistance from various reli-gious movements. In the same breath it spread to nonbelievers — or less fervent believers — a conception of nature that was rid of creationist elements (I use the term “Darwinism” to designate all the propositions that are widely accepted in evolutionary biology; see Mayr).
The secularization thesis underlies much of current research on this topic in philosophy, cognitive sciences, and social sciences. These studies often rely on or develop the hypothesis that creationist representations of the origin of species are based on fallacious reasoning inspired by cognitive schemata that are deemed to be typical of faith (see, e.g., Dennett; Dawkins, The God; Coyne; Coleman).
Conversely, adherence to a Darwinian representation of living species is consid-ered to be the result of logically correct reasoning, supported with facts and free of references to occult entities, divine or metaphysical.
This general thesis predicts that the more religious people are, the more likely they will hold creationist views regarding the origin of species, oppose sci-ence and evolution, and, finally, reject the genealogical link between human and ape. Conversely, the less religious people are, the more likely they will develop scientifically sound, evolutionary representations of living species, will rely upon facts, science, and reason to support their beliefs about the origin of species, and reject creationism.
However, researchers who draw such a conclusion focus more often on actors actively involved in public debates concerning creationism: religious leaders, sci-entists, teachers, or biology students. The objective of this article is to show that a very different picture emerges when one studies the beliefs of ordinary actors less directly involved in these debates. I chose to compare two very different countries: France, a secular country in which creationism is almost totally absent from the public sphere; and Morocco, a country where religion plays a central role — Islam is the state religion.
I aim to demonstrate the following points. First, in order to understand the basis of creationism, it is imperative to distinguish between the content of the representation of the origin of species that individuals have, on the one hand, and their attitudes towards evolution, on the other. In my field studies, I observed that individuals who claim to accept evolution hold representations of the ori-gin of species that, unknowingly, are not scientifically accurate, but that are, in fact, quite similar to creationist beliefs. Second, in Morocco, the majority of the participants did not straightforwardly reject evolution. Moreover, the arguments
that people invoked against evolution were both rational — or, at least, perceived by the participants as such — and religious. Third, many individuals show a lack of interest in the issue of the origin of species, exhibiting a form of indifference that results in intrinsically blurred or vague beliefs. Finally, people do not always consider the origin of humans to be deeply sacred. For these reasons, beliefs about origins of species do not follow a simple and binary logic based on the opposi-tion between faith and reason or religion and science, as the secularizaopposi-tion thesis implies. In sum, the aim of this research is to bring about new insights concern-ing the actual cognitive basis of creationism, complementary to some avenues explored in this area of research (for example, in discussions about “cognition in context” proposed in Evans, “Cognitive,” and her chapter in this volume; in Geraedts, “Reinventing”; and more broadly in Rosengren et al., Evolution).
France: A Non-Darwinian “Evolutionism”
In order to shed light on this logic, I first investigated people’s attitudes towards, and understanding of, evolution in France (Guillo, Darwin). Here, I present one of the surveys on which I based my comparison with Morocco. I used a question-naire on genealogical relationships between living species. On the first page of the questionnaire, I arranged six images in random order. These images represent
“a chimpanzee,” “a human,” “an amoeba,” “an oak,” “a lizard,” and “a whale.”
I wrote the name of each species in a caption under each photo. On the sec-ond page, I posed the following question: “Trace the genealogical tree that in your opinion connects these individuals to each other” (on how people inter-pret biological genealogical trees, see also the remarks and observations made by Shtulman, this volume; and more broadly on the effects of the use of such peda-gogic tools, see also Blancke, Tanghe, and Braeckman, this volume).
With the experiment I investigated popular conceptions of the origin of species and measured to which degree these conceptions align with the scien-tific concepts in modern evolutionary biology. More specifically, I investigated whether or not the diagrams drawn by the students showed signs of the five sche-mata that characterize creationist beliefs about the origin of species (Mayr):
1. fixism, that is, the absence of genealogical connections between individuals of different species;
2. the Great Chain of Being, or Ladder of Nature, crowned by humans, that is, a linear and anthropocentric representation of the connections between species;
3. no role for chance;
4. an essentialist conception of species;
5. teleological thinking, a necessary consequence of each of the four previ-ous schemata.
These five patterns lead to beliefs in extraworldly or supernatural enti-ties — whether in the form of a personified god, metaphysical entienti-ties, or an abstract underlying order — that intervene in the formation of species. The 120 third-year students of a French scientific high school who participated in the study had been taught evolutionary theory in biology class, with an emphasis on how the theory breaks away from the five creationist schemata. This mate-rial was rehearsed two months before the experiment, in an Introduction to Social Sciences course. As we will see, in this sample, the results were highly convergent.
A Transformism Marked by the Anthropocentric Great Chain of Being
The first important result was that no student proposed a fixist representation of living species, not even partly: no species had been left unconnected to the others (table 10.1). The representation of the connection between species that emerges from these diagrams is unanimously transformist. But does the complete absence of the fixist schema in a sample of students from a country where secularism plays a central role validate the secularization thesis? Fixism, however, is only one of the possible components of creationist representations of living beings. In fact, all other creationist schemata are present in these diagrams.
First, there is the anthropocentric Great Chain of Being. Its most visible manifestations are, on the one hand, the linearization of diagrams — beings are connected in pairs by direct lines rather than branches or chevrons (or, in other words, a “V”) representing a “common ancestor” — and, on the other hand, the crowning of these diagrams by humans (figure 10.1).
Table 10.1 Student responses regarding fixism and transformism.
Non response “I don’t
know” Fixist
diagrams Transformist
diagrams Total
Raw data 15 1 0 104 120
% 12.5 0.8 0 86.7 100
oak
amobae
whale
lizard
chimpanzee
human
Figure 10.1 A Great Chain of Being crowned by humans.
These schemata are also present, despite appearances, in nonlinear, arbo-rescent diagrams, similar to those in figure 10.2. Strictly speaking, the diagram in figure 10.2 is not inconsistent with a Darwinian interpretation. It draws a tree with branches that represent “common ancestors.” Yet the Great Chain of Being profoundly regulates this diagram. Species’ names are arranged along a line that clearly reproduces a scale following an anthropocentric and hierarchic criterion, which refers to their propinquity to the human being: at one end, oak and amoeba; at the other, human being, and just before her or him, chimpanzee.
Note that it is quite possible to draw a tree without the human or the amoeba at one end, as is the case in the diagram (figure 10.3) proposed by another student.
Therefore, in diagrams such as figure 10.2, the reference to a common ances-tor is interpreted from a scalar and anthropocentric perspective on living beings:
the tree hides a ladder. Only in four diagrams does the schema of an anthropo-centric Great Chain of Being play no organizing role (table 10.2). In sum, the overwhelming majority of participants’ diagrams are organized according both a transformist and an anthropocentric schema (table 10.2). The conception of the transformation of species — of evolution — that emerges here is thus built from the idea of a linear temporal progression necessarily oriented toward the appearance of humans. A form of teleology, or progress, is clearly readable in this conception of life. It therefore leaves no room for chance.