The authors’ reading of Darwin is, however, unhistorical. It projects back onto Darwin, a deeply teleological thinker who lived and died in the nineteenth century, some of the tenets of twentieth-century neo-Darwinism. But more important for our purposes is that it leaves them without a leg to stand on when it comes to opposing transhumanism and other Promethean projects. The fact that the Roses, like other intelligent and well-meaning leftists,
do oppose these projects points again to the tendency of progressivism to become conservative in the face of the contradictions that result from the attempt to realize the progressive project in practice. Nevertheless, it is clear that identifying good reasons to oppose Prometheanism will demand a firmer theoretical foundation than the one that the Roses’ progressivism can provide.
Perhaps such a foundation is provided by what one could call “
Darwinian conservatism,” represented by thinkers like Darwin himself and, in more recent times, the likes of E. O. Wilson, James Q. Wilson, Roger Masters, Larry Arnhart, and Jonathan Haidt, who, whether they identify as political conservatives or not, seek to ground human morality in an understanding of the evolved, semi-enduring biological nature of human beings. But this foundation, too, is weak, and the Roses make some cogent and compelling objections to it: for instance, evolutionary psychologists claim to explain the similarity of human moral beliefs across time and space — but when they claim that variation simply represents different “expressions” of the same universal moral principles, they leave us with a theory that, as the Roses say, “explains everything and therefore nothing.”
Moreover, even if evolutionary psychology could provide an empirical explanation of conventional moral principles, this would not amount to a normative justification for acting in accord with those principles, much less an argument against supplementing natural selection with artificial selection and technology. As Thomas Nagel argues in his recent book
Mind and Cosmos, moral realism requires a nature conceived in non-Darwinian terms, or in terms that are not completely or comprehensively Darwinian — a truth, Nagel argues, which in turn suggests that teleology and value are ingrained in the natural world. But science has no duty to provide us with what we want or even what we need, despite the hopes of the Darwinian conservatives that we can buttress morality with biology instead of religion or an older anthropology.
We are left, then, with the question of whether all opposition to Prometheanism is ultimately rooted in religion — in a sense of divinely ordained limits to human nature. Or can it be rooted in a secular respect for the human being, for human dignity, for tradition? Whatever the answer, what is needed is an understanding of human nature that goes deeper than what the popular trends in the biological sciences offer. The moral challenges created by modern biotechnology may best be met not by deepening our commitment to modern biological science, but by turning to the wisdom found beyond it.