Darwinian Liberal Education Larry a Rnhart

THEORIES OF LIBERAL EDUCATION

From time to time Academic Questions intends to present essays exploring the foundations of liberal education from a variety of differing philosophic perspectives. This is the first essay in the series.

Darwinian Liberal Education Larry A rnhart

e all know what's wrong with higher education today. Teaching and research W have become so specialized, fragmented, and incoherent that we cannot see that unity of knowledge necessary for sustaining general or liberal education. To renew the tradition of the liberal arts, we need a new unifying framework of thought. As far as I can tell, there is today only one plausible source for such a common ground of knowledge, and that is Darwinian evolutionary biology. I began to move towards this conclusion as an undergraduate student at the Uni- versity of Dallas in the late 1960s. My youthful excitement about philosophy was stirred by Aristotle's declaration in his Metaphysics that all human beings by nature desire to understand, a desire that leads natural philosophers to search for the ultimate causes or reasons for all things. Fascinated by Aristotle's comprehensive investigation of nature and human nature, I noticed that much of his writing was in biology, and that even his moral and political works assumed a biological understanding of human nature. So I wondered whether Aristotle's biological naturalism could be compatible somehow with modern Darwinian biology, and whether this might support a general study of human life within the natural causal order of the whole. But as a political scientist studying political philosophy, I found that almost no one in my academic world was open to such thinking. Aristotelian scholars had little interest in Aristotle's biology, and they were sure that Aristotle's moral and political philosophy had no connection to his biology. They were also sure that modern biology had no relevance to the study of political philosophy. On the other side of this gulf between political science and biology, I discovered that most biologists could not even comprehend the thought that biology might explain human morality and politics. Everyone assumed that biology belonged to the natural sciences, which had to be separated from the social sciences and the humanities. But if that is so, I wondered, then how can we pursue liberal education as a common activity embracing all fields of knowledge that have anything to say about the great questions of human existence in the cosmos? What has happened to Aristotle's vision of philosophy as the comprehensive search for the causes or reasons of all things?

Larry Amhart is professor of political science, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115; larnhart @niu.edu. Arnhart 7

In trying to answer this question, I was helped by reading Leo Strauss. In the In- troduction to Natural Right and History, he claimed that the most serious problem for the ancient Greek idea of natural right is that it seems to have been refuted by modern natural science. 1 Natural right in its classic form requires a teleological view of nature, because reason can discern what is by nature good for human beings only if they have a natural end. Strauss thought Aristotle had the clearest view of this dependence of natural right on natural teleology. Modern natural science, however, seems to deny natural teleology by explaining natural phenomena as determined by mechanical causes that act without ends or purposes. This creates a dilemma. If the science of man is to be part of a nonteleological science of nature, then human action must be explained by reduction to physical causes, which seems inadequate to explain human ends. The only alternative appears to be "a fundamental, typically modern, dualism of a nonteleological natural science and a teleological science of man," but this rejects the comprehensive naturalism of the premodern exponents of natural right such as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Neither reductionism nor dualism is fully satisfactory. Strauss concluded: "The fundamental dilemma, in whose grip we are, is caused by the victory of modern natural science. An adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basic problem has been solved." To my mind, this "fundamental dilemma" of modernity explained the loss of liberal education as a comprehensive study of the whole. The natural sciences assume a mate- rialist reductionism that cannot account for the human mind or spirit. The humanities assume a radical dualism that treats human conscious experience as autonomous in its separation from the causal order of the natural sciences. And the social sciences are torn between these two contradictory positions. We might overcome this dilemma, I thought, if we could see Darwinian biology as a comprehensive science that would unify all the intellectual disciplines by studying human experience as part of the natural whole. This would seem to continue the Aristotelian tradition of biology because, as Strauss observed, Aristotle believed that biology could provide "a mediation between knowledge of the inanimate and knowledge of man. ''2 But I found that many of those influenced by Strauss assumed that Darwinian biology must deny the fundamental premises of Aristotelian natural right in denying the uniqueness of human beings as set apart from the rest of animal nature and in denying the cosmic teleology that sustains human purposefulness. Reading Leon Kass's Towards a More Natural Science helped me to see how I might answer these Straussian objections. Kass suggested that Darwinian biology could recognize human uniqueness as a product of emergent evolution, and it could recognize the internal teleology of living beings as goal-directed. Darwin failed to see how his own biology allowed "that certain differences of degree--produced naturally, accumulated gradually (even incrementally), and inherited in an unbroken line of descent--might lead to a difference in kind (or at least its equivalent), say, in mental capacity or inner life." So it seemed that Darwinian biology could support an emergent naturalism in which novel traits arise in evolutionary development at each higher level of organization in an "unbroken line of descent" leading to differences 8 Academic Questions / Fall 2006

in kind. Differences in degree passing over a critical threshold of evolution could produce differences in kind? On the question of teleology, I was impressed by Kass's distinction between "external teleology" and "immanent teleology." External teleology is the conception of all of nature as an organic whole in which all beings serve a cosmic purpose set by an intelligent designer or creator. By contrast to such cosmic teleology, Kass suggested that "the primary home of teleological thought is the internal and immanent purposive- ness of individual organisms, in their generation, their structure, their activities." This immanent teleology of living things was what Aristotle had in mind, Kass observed, when he spoke of natural teleology. And while Kass recognized that Darwinism was generally regarded as rejecting cosmic teleology, he noted that Darwinian biology implicitly assumed the immanent teleological nature of organisms. Even if evolution by natural selection is not purposeful, it produces organic beings that are purposeful. Plants and animals grow to maturity, and once grown, they act for ends set by the functional nature of the species. 4 I was inspired by Kass's striving for "a more natural science" that would require the kind of biological understanding of nature that could account for the ethical and intellectual purposefulness of human life as an expression of nature. Like Kass, I sought a biological science that recognizes "the tacit ethical dimension of animal life," and thus the "natural, animal bases for the content of an ethical life." Like Kass, I believed that a science of living nature would reject both reductionist monism, which reduces life to homogeneous matter, and transcendentalist dualism, which sees human mental and moral experience as simply separated from the rest of nature. 5 Like Kass, I decided that such a science could bring together Aristotle and Darwin. 6 In looking for such a science, I have been encouraged by the growing number of scholars who have begun to take seriously the idea of a unified liberal learning grounded in Darwinian science. In the 1970s, books by Lionel Tiger, Robin Fox, and Edward O. Wilson suggested that a Darwinian account of human nature could provide a common framework for all the intellectual disciplines studying human behavior within the order of nature as a whole, v Later, political scientists such as Roger Masters and James Q. Wilson showed how a Darwinian science of human nature could revive the Aristotelian tradition of naturalism in moral and political philosophy? Now, many scholars in biology, the social sciences, philosophy, literary theory, and the aesthetic arts are looking to Darwinian theory as a unifying conceptual framework.9 In 1998, Edward O. Wilson argued that the natural human desire to understand the world as an orderly whole was a quest for the fundamental unity of all knowledge, which he called "consilience"'~~ This longing for a comprehensive knowledge of the whole began with ancient philosophers such as Thales and Aristotle. It was renewed by the Enlighten- ment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But now, Wilson claimed, the progress in modem science has created the realistic prospect for satisfying this ancient longing by developing a web of causal explanations that would combine all of the intellectual disciplines. Crucial to this unification of knowledge would be evolutionary biology as explaining the nature of human beings and their place in the natural whole. Arnhart 9

Much of my research and teaching has been driven by this search for a comprehensive natural knowledge rooted in Darwinian science. At the core of my thinking is the idea of human nature. In today's academic world, it is common for postmodernist relativists to assert that liberal education cannot be directed to the study of human nature, because the idea of human nature is an arbitrary social construction. But I believe that there really is a universal human nature that is constituted by at least 20 natural desires that manifest themselves throughout history in every human society, because these desires belong to the evolved nature of the human species. Human beings generally desire a complete life, parental care, sexual identity, sexual mating, familial bonding, friendship, social status, justice as reciprocity, political rule, war, health, beauty, property, speech, practical habituation, practical reasoning, practical arts, aesthetic pleasure, religious understanding, and intellectual understanding. ~1 Despite the great variability of human life across history and across societies, these natural desires will direct human behavior into regular patterns. Men and women will marry and form families. Mothers will care for their children. Young males will compete for mates and status. Societies will organize themselves as male dominance hierarchies. Competing societies will go to war. And human beings will use language and other symbols to try to figure out what it all means. In calling these 20 desires "natural," I do not mean to imply that they arise spon- taneously in all human beings without any cultivation by habit or learning. While we commonly separate nature and nurture or nature and art, animal nature--including human nature--must be nurtured if it is to reach its natural completion. And how that nature is nurtured will create cultural and individual diversity. As products of evolution by natural selection, human beings are genetically inclined to adapt themselves to their physical and social environments through cultural learning and rational deliberation. The aim of liberal education is to use all the intellectual disciplines to probe how the complex interaction of natural propensities, cultural traditions, and individual choices shapes the course of human experience within the order of nature. Darwinian theory provides a general conceptual framework for such liberal learning grounded in the scientific study of genetic evolution, cultural evolution, and cognitive judgment. This Darwinian view of liberal education has guided my teaching. At Northern Illinois University, ! helped to organize "Politics and the Life Sciences" as a field of study at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the Department of Political Science. Some of the courses in the program are cross-listed as biology courses. So my undergraduate courses typically enroll a large number of students majoring in biology along with others majoring in the social sciences and humanities. The students in biology are often curious to see how their biological concepts can be extended into the moral and political topics that we take up in these courses. The students who are not majors in biology find that they learn a lot about biology--and natural science in general--by seeing the connections between biology and the social sciences. In my course called "Biopolitics and Human Nature," I begin with two of Charles Darwin's books--The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. As a Ph.D. student 10 Academic Questions / Fall 2006

at the University of Chicago, I was initiated into the "Great Books" tradition of Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler by teaching in the Basic Program in the Liberal Arts, the adult continuing education program originally founded by Hutchins and Adler. Preferring to have my students read classic texts rather than regular textbooks, I want my students to read Darwin for themselves. The students are fascinated to discover that they can engage Darwin directly rather than relying on a textbook account of Darwin's ideas. After a careful reading of Darwin, we can move to examining some of the contemporary research in the biology of human nature, and then we can consider how this Darwinian science might apply to various topics related to the moral and political nature of human beings. In my graduate course on "Evolution and Politi- cal Theory," my graduate students discover that Darwinian reasoning about human nature can deepen and integrate their research into almost any area of the behavioral sciences and political theory. All of the students see how liberal learning at its best brings together ideas and methods from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities--all for the sake of illuminating the deepest questions of human life and its position in the universe. So why shouldn't this kind of Darwinian thinking provide a common ground for unifying knowledge and revivifying liberal education? From my experience, raising this question provokes at least five objections. Some of these objections have been raised in the pages of this journal. ~2 The first objection is that Darwin's theory of evolution is false. The second is that a Darwinian account of human nature is unreasonable in its reductionism. The third is that Darwinian explanations of human life are morally corrupting. The fourth is that Darwinism is atheistic. A final objection to organizing liberal education around Darwinian science is that it is administratively impractical to expect faculty members to move easily between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. I will respond to each of these objections.

Teaching the Controversy I know that Darwinian science is controversial. Some people choose Biblical creationism or intelligent design theory as alternative explanations for the origin and design of life. The argument for intelligent design was first stated by Plato. 13 And some of the Platonic Straussians have claimed that such an argument is necessary to support a cosmic teleology as the necessary ground for the Good as conforming to the noetic design of the whole. But even as they do this, they suggest that such a teleology of cosmic intelligence is "conjectural" and "shaky," if not "illusory.''~ In various writings, I have laid out my reasoning for why Darwinian evolutionary theory is superior to any of the alternatives. But this is not the place to elaborate my defense of Darwinism's truth. My purpose here is only to indicate how a Darwinian science of nature and human nature could revivify liberal education by advancing its goal of unified knowledge of the whole. Yet I should stress that studying the controversy over Darwinism would itself be part of a Darwinian liberal education. Darwin devoted over one-third of the chapters in The Origin of Species to the "dif- ficulties" for his theory. When my students read Darwin, they notice that he admitted Arnhart 11

that some of the objections to his theory "are so serious that to this day 1 can hardly reflect on them without being in some degree staggered." And yet he answered these objections and insisted that his theory would emerge as highly "probable" if one considered the "facts and arguments" in its favor.15 Proponents of intelligent design theory claim that the living world manifests an "irreducible complexity" that shows the work of an intelligent designer that cannot be explained by Darwinian mechanisms of natural evolution by random variation and natural selection. I have my students study some of the writing in the recent debates over intelligent design. ~6 They can see that even if neither side in these debates can absolutely prove their conclusions, we can still weigh the evidence and arguments and decide that one or the other is more plausible. I point out that the intelligent design proponents employ a rhetorical strategy of negative argumentation in which they challenge the Darwinians to prove exactly the step-by-step evolutionary pathways for complex organic mechanisms, which demands a standard of proof that the intelligent design proponents have not themselves met in showing exactly how a disembodied intelligent designer works in the world. If we ask for scientifically testable hypotheses about precisely when, where, and how the intelligent designer intervenes in the living world, the advocates of intelligent design theory have no answer. Many of my students have had the experience in their natural science classes of memorizing ideas and concepts from their textbooks without actually understanding what they've memorized. But in my classes, the students work through some of the argumentation in the scientific debate over Darwinian evolution so that they can make up their own minds. Consequently, they gain a deeper understanding of scientific reasoning than they would ever have from just memorizing material from textbooks. Moreover, they become excited about this science because they see how it bears upon fundamental questions about the origin and meaning of human life. The advocates of intelligent design theory have recently argued that high school biology teachers should "teach the controversy" over Darwinian evolution by allow- ing the students to study both sides in the debate. Defenders of evolution say there is no scientific controversy here because the idea of "intelligent design" is not really scientific, But while I find intelligent design theory unpersuasive, I see merit in the slogan "teach the controversy." Isn't this what liberal education is all about? Even if high school students are not properly prepared for this, why can't college and university students think through the debate for themselves? In my classes, I do not require that the students agree with me that Darwinian evolution is as solid a theory as any in science. But I do require that they understand the reasoning that supports Darwin's theory, and that they also understand how difficult it is to formulate creationist or intelligent design alternative explanations so that they are scientifically testable.

Emergence The second common objection to unifying liberal education through Darwinian biology is that this would require a crude reductionism. Edward O. Wilson seems to 12 Academic Questions / Fall 2006

show this strong reductionism when he says that "the central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics." And yet "based on" cannot mean "specifically determined by," because to say that would fall into the oversimplified determinism that Wilson rejects. He identifies human beings as "emergent animals" who have capacities that are constrained by, but not specifically determined by, the laws of physics. ~7 This is clearly the case for the ethical and cultural experience of human beings. Wilson believes that "human social existence, unlike animal sociality, is based on the genetic propensity to form long-term contracts that evolve by culture into moral precepts and law." Yet, again, his words "based on" cannot mean "specifically determined by." For as he indicates, to explain "the biology of the moral sentiments" would require research at many levels, including the social histories of ethical systems and the individual histories of people living in a variety of cultures. ~8 Moreover, the "base" here is biology rather than physics. The "genetic propensity to form long-term contracts" is surely not a predetermined effect of the causal laws of physics. ~9 Reductionism assumes that to explain some complex phenomenon, we need to break it down into its simplest parts. Physicalist reductionism assumes that we can ultimately explain everything through the physics of matter and energy. But against such strong reductionism, Darwinian evolutionary thought sustains the idea of emergence that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. Emergent phenomena are those complex wholes with properties that we could not explain or predict from our knowledge of the parts. Harold Morowitz, a biophysicist, argues that as we move through the history of the universe, we pass through many levels of emergent complexity with novel properties that cannot be completely reduced to the earlier levels. 2~ When the universe began 12 billion years ago in a giant explosion, that was emergence. When chemicals in the early universe formed the first living cells, that was emergence. When the first multicellular organisms arose, that was emergence. When the human mind arose from the primate brain, that was emergence. Although each new level of complexity is constrained by the laws governing the earlier levels, the novel properties of the higher levels cannot be explained fully or predicted exactly from the properties of the lower levels. So, although the human mind is constrained by the laws of physics and chemistry, we cannot fully explain or precisely predict the workings of that mind through the laws of physics and chemistry. Robert Maynard Hutchins noted that liberal learning as comprehensive and co- herent knowledge of the whole had to be unified by the study of first principles} 1 Ancient Greek thought was unified by metaphysics. Education in the medieval university was unified by theology. I suggest that Darwinian liberal education could be unified by the principles of emergent evolution. Arnhart 13

Natural Morality In the American antebellum liberal arts colleges, it was common for seniors to take a course in moral philosophy---often taught by the college president--as the capstone of their education. After all, the final purpose of liberal education was not just to pass on abstract knowledge but to form moral character. Today the idea that the purpose of higher education is to promote morality would seem to most university professors amusing in its quaintness. To many of its critics, Darwinian science seems to contribute to this disdain for moral education by teaching that nature lacks any cosmic meaning or purpose and is therefore indifferent to morality. That's why another common objection to the teaching of Darwinian evolution is that it subverts moral life. But when my students read Darwin's Descent of Man, they see his lifelong interest in moral philosophy. From his reading of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and other works in the Scottish moral sense tradition, Darwin was persuaded that morality was rooted in natural moral sentiments. A crucial part of his theory of human evolution was explaining how these moral sentiments could have arisen as part of the evolved nature of human beings. He saw human morality as a complex product of natural selection, cultural evolution, and rational deliberation. "Ultimately," he concluded, "our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment----originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit. ''22 Recent research in anthropology, social psychology, evolutionary game theory, and neuroscience confirms and deepens Darwin's understanding of the moral sentiments as an evolved expression of human nature and human history. 23 Modern psychologi- cal research recognizes that those who lack the moral sentiments--who do not feel love, sympathy, shame, and guilt--are psychopaths, and we must treat them as moral strangers. Studying such research to explore the character of morality as a ground of social order and human happiness would be an essential activity of Darwinian liberal education. Some of the critics of Darwinism worry that its denial of cosmic teleology subverts moral life by teaching that the universe is indifferent to morality. But, as Leo Strauss suggested, we can ground morality in the "desires and inclinations" of human nature, and then judge a human life as good to the extent that it conforms to those natural desires and inclinations. So "however indifferent to moral distinctions the cosmic order may be thought to be, human nature, as distinguished from nature in general, may very well be the basis of such distinctions. "24 A Darwinian science of human nature supports such a natural morality by explaining the moral sense as rooted in those natural human desires and inclinations. Even if morality cannot be grounded in the cosmic teleology of nature, it can still be grounded in the immanent teleology of human nature. To study the Darwinian nature of morality sounds disturbing to those people who associate Darwinian morality with the social Darwinist tradition of racism and eugenics 14 Academic Questions / Fall 2006

that led to morally repugnant policies such as those of the Nazis. Recently, creationists and intelligent design proponents have been citing Richard Weikart's book From Darwin to Hitler as showing that Adolf Hitler's evil character came from his adop- tion of Darwinian ideas. 25 Weikart argues that there was a clear path "from Darwin to Hitler." His reasoning is that Darwinian materialism denied the Judeo-Christian belief in the sanctity of human life as based on the biblical teaching that all human beings were created in God's image, because Darwinism taught that human beings were nothing more than animals created by the blind, material causes of evolution. Consequently, Hitler's claim that some human beings were "unfit for life" and should be exterminated could be grounded in the scientific materialism of Darwin. And yet even Weikart repeatedly admits that there is no direct connection between Darwin and Hitler, and that the apparent connections arise from distortions or deni- als of Darwin's actual teaching. 26 For example, while Darwin was influenced by the ideas of Francis Galton, the modem proponent of eugenics, Darwin rejected Galton's scheme for improving the human race through selective breeding as both intellectually and morally mistaken. Unlike Galton, Darwin thought that it was proper for a civi- lized society to aid the weak as an expression of that moral sympathy that constitutes "the noblest part of our nature." He believed that the history of moral progress was largely the history of the ever greater extension of sympathy "to men of all races, to the imbecile, maimed, and other useless members of society.''27 When my students read Darwin's Descent of Man, they can see how Darwin's ideas could be distorted to support racist eugenics. But they can also see how far those distortions are from the original teaching of Darwin in support of the natural moral sentiments. This leads them to think about how ideas in the natural sciences are often perverted by their use in moral and political rhetoric.

Science and Religion Creationists and intelligent design theorists like to quote evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins praising Darwin's evolutionary explanation of apparent design in the living world as refuting the "argument from design" for God's existence, which therefore "made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. ''28 But there is no good reason to accept the militant atheism of people like Dawkins as a necessary implication of Darwinian science. When my students read Darwin, they see how careful he was to show the compat- ibility between his evolutionary science and Biblical religion. He began The Origin of Species with a quotation from Francis Bacon: "Let no man out of a weak conceit of sobriety, or an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God's word, or in the book of God's works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficiency in both. ''29 This metaphor of God as speaking through two books--the Bible as His word and nature as His works--was commonly used by Christians to justify the scientific study of nature as compatible with reverence for the revelation of Scripture. Arnhart 15

My students also see in the last sentence of The Origin of Species a vivid image of God as Creator. "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.''3~ There is indeed "grandeur in this view of life," and this grandeur can evoke a natural sense of piety, a reverence for nature that might lead some of us beyond nature to nature's God. It is easy to understand, therefore, why there have been so many Darwinian scientists who see no contradiction between Darwinian evolution and theistic religion. 3' Darwinian liberal education would promote the study of religion both as a source of social order and as an intellectual challenge to natural science. Although Darwinian biology cannot confirm the supernatural truth of Biblical religion in its theological doctrines, Darwinian biology can confirm the natural truth of Bibli- cal religion in its practical morality. Religious morality can help believers solve "prisoner's dilemma" situations where the mutual benefits of cooperation might be lost through the temptation to cheat, because religious morality promotes intense group solidarity and punishes those who cheat. Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has shown how a Darwinian theory of human social evolution can explain the moral utility of religion in bringing individuals into well-organized groups by coordinating behavior and preventing or punishing cheating? 2 Darwinian liberal education would also probe that vital tension between science and religion that has animated much of the intellectual history of Western civilization. The human search for ultimate causes that would explain the universe culminates in a fundamental alternative. Either we take nature as the ultimate source of order, or we look beyond nature to God as the ultimate source of nature's order. Our natural desire to understand is satisfied ultimately either by an intellectual understanding of nature or by a religious understanding of God as the Creator of nature. The naturalist says that all explanation presupposes the observable order of the world as the final ground of explanation that cannot itself be explained. To the question of why nature has the kind of order that it has, the only reasonable answer is that we must accept this as a brute fact of our experience. That's just the way it is! After all, even if we appeal to God as the ultimate cause of nature, we still cannot explain why God is the way He is. That's just the way He is! The naturalist would say that since we have never directly observed God creating everything out of nothing, but every day we observe the causal regularities of nature, we must conclude that the existence of an uncaused nature is far more probable than the existence of an uncaused God. By contrast, the creationist asserts that it is far more probable that God would exist uncaused than that nature would exist uncaused. These are difficult questions. In fact, they are the deepest questions that human beings can ask themselves about the order of the world. 16 Academic Questions / Fall 2006

Evolution for Everyone So that's how I would answer the intellectual objections to grounding liberal learning in Darwinian evolution. Those people who deny the truth of Darwinian science should be free to dispute it as best they can, while recognizing the weight of the evidence and arguments favoring it and the difficulty of developing alternative explanations that are scientifically testable. Those people who fear Darwinian reductionism should see how Darwinian biology recognizes the emergent evolution of complexity. Those people who fear Darwinism as morally subversive should see how Darwinian reasoning supports morality by rooting it in human nature. Those people who fear Darwinian atheism should see that Darwinian explanations leave open the possibility that the evolution of nature is ultimately the work of nature's God. At all of these points, a Darwinian framework for liberal education directs us to think about the fundamental questions of human existence in the world. Isn't that what a liberal education is supposed to do? But still many people will object that integrating the liberal arts curriculum through the idea of Darwinian evolution is impractical, because this would require a radical restructuring of academic procedures and institutions, which is unlikely. My response here is to suggest some small steps we can take that don't require radical change. The first step is for college and university teachers to develop courses in their departments that incorporate Darwinian ideas. Many professors are starting to do that, because they are finding that evolutionary theory offers them fruitful lines of research that they can introduce in their regular teaching. As I have indicated, my courses in biopolitical theory attract students from many departments across the university. The next step is for faculty members in different departments to cooperate in interdisciplinary teaching. Next year, I will be team-teaching a course on evolution with a philosopher and a biologist. Students will register in one of three courses in the Department of Political Science, the Department of Biological Sciences, or the Department of Philosophy. But the three classes with the three professors will meet together. We will explore the general ideas of evolutionary theory and then apply them to various topics crossing the fields of biology, philosophy, and political science. The different viewpoints of the three professors in each class will surely stimulate lively discussions. A third step would be to expand this into a general curriculum that would bring together courses in many departments. The best model for this would be David Sloan Wilson's Evolutionary Studies Program at Binghamton University. 33 This program was started by Wilson in 2002, and is already being adopted at other schools. The program is an integrated curriculum with a required introductory course "Evolution for Everyone" and a list of courses across the university from which students must earn a minimum number of credits. Wilson teaches "Evolution for Everyone" as the course in which all students in the program are introduced to the central concepts of evolutionary theory as well as some illustrative application of those concepts to various fields of study. He emphasizes the application of evolutionary ideas to human nature. Beyond this one required course, students satisfy the remaining requirements by taking courses offered in many departments. Over 50 faculty members representing Arnhart 17

15 departments are involved in the program. Some of the courses that students take for their majors can also be counted towards the evolutionary studies requirements. Students are also required to participate in a seminar organized around lectures by outside speakers brought to campus. In addition to the undergraduate program, there is a similar program for graduate students with the same structure. As a result, both faculty and students from across Binghamton University in many different departments are brought together with Darwinian reasoning as their common language to talk about questions of human nature and the natural world. That would seem to fulfill the ideal of higher education as directed to liberal learning. Through such a Darwinian liberal education, we could renew the quest that began with Aristotle to satisfy our natural human desire to understand the causes or reasons of all things.

Notes 1. Leo Strauss, Natural Right alwI History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1953), 7-8. 2. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: Free Press, 1991), 279. 3. Leon Kass, Towards a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (New York: Free Press, 1985), 12, 14, 39, 59-63, 76-79. 4. Ibid., 253-64. 5. Ibid., 277,284, 295,347; Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (New York: Free Press, 1994), 62. 6. In recent years, however, Kass has moved away from his Aristotelian/Darwinian naturalism, because he doubts the sufficiency of human reason unaided by Biblical revelation of nature as created. See Leon Kass, Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2002), 277-97; and Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (New York: Free Press, 2003), xiv-xv, 1-4, 15, 68. 7. Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal (New York: Dell, 1971); Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 8. Roger D. Masters, "Evolutionary Biology and Natural Right," in Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Softer, eds., The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 48-67; Roger Masters, The Nature of Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: The Free Press, 1993). 9. For surveys of some of this scholarship, see David M. Buss, ed., The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2005). 10. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 11. I have elaborated the reasoning for this list of twenty natural desires in two books: Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998) and Darwinian Conservatism (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2005). 12. Joseph Carroll, "Pluralism, Poststructuralism, and Evolutionary Theory," Academic Questions 9 (summer 1996): 43-57; Christopher Dawson, Letter to the Editor, Academic Questions 11 (summer 1998): 5; Roger Shattuck, "Evolution, theArts, and Consilience,"Academic Question.s" 11 (summer 1998): 56-61; George Marsden, Letter to the Editor, Academic Questions 12 (winter 1999): 5; Richard Hassing, Letter to the Editor, Academic Questions 12 (winter 1999): 6-8; Howard Kaye, Letter to the Editor, Academic Questions 12 (winter 1999): 8-9. 13. Plato, Laws, 884a-907b; Phaedo, 96d-97c; Timaeus, 46d-e. 14. See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 110, 130-31; and Richard Hassing, "Darwinian Natural Right?" hlterpretation 27 (1999-2000): 147. 15. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th edition, in The Origin of Species, and The Descent of Man (New York: Random House, Modem Library, 1936), 124, 353. 16. A good collection with arguments on both sides of the debate is William A. Dembski and Michael 18 Academic Questions / Fall 2006

Ruse, eds., Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For some of my writing on intelligent design theory, see Darwinian Conservatism, 93- 103; "Assault on Evolution," Salon.corn, 28 February 2001, available at http://archive.salon. corn/books/feature/2001/02/28/idt/index.html; and "The Fear of Teaching Darwin," Inside Higher Ed, 13 December 2005, available at http://insidehighered.com/views/2OO5/12/13/arnhart. 17. Wilson, Consilience, 266, 276-77, 298. 18. Ibid., 255, 297. 19. Here 1 am drawing a few passages from my chapter on emergence in Darwinian Conservatism, 104-11. 20. Harold Morowitz, The Emergence of Eve~. thing: How the World Became Complex (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 21. Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936), 96-108. 22. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2 ~d edition, in The Origin of Species, and The Descent of Man, 500. 23. See Wilson. The Moral Sense; William Casebeer, "Moral Cognition and Its Neural Constituents," Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (October 2003): 841-46; and Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr, eds., Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). 24. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 94-95. 25. Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 26. See, for example, ibid., 21-24, 29-32, 34, 47-48, 75-77, 104-106, 116, 123-24, 166. 27. Darwin, Descent, 493, 501-2. 28. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1986), 6. 29. Darwin, Origin, 2.

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