The following is a Counterpoint
By Robert Hudson
David Brooks' recent column, ''Look around you: Darwin is everywhere today,'' posits that evolution of species pretty much explains it all. It is all the rage among those who are truly up to date with their thinking. I respectfully disagree.
I will be the first to admit that Charles Darwin was a very smart man. His ability to observe and make sense of nature helps us to better understand this wonderful world and the various species of life that inhabit it.
But Darwinism simply cannot explain several things, especially when it comes to man. For those interested in the subject, Robert Godwin addresses it quite capably in his book, ''One Cosmos Under God: The Unification of Matter, Life, Mind, and Spirit.''
How, for instance, can evolution account for art and music? How on earth, by ''monkeying around'' with paint and noise, did early humans stumble upon a way to liberate spirit from air and matter, to achieve a radiance and harmony well beyond the physical properties of light and sound?
Or, consider language. According to the great philosopher of science, Stanley Jaki, the theory of natural selection must ironically ''be proposed in the medium called language, which remains even today as unexplained on a Darwinian basis as it was when Darwin tried to cope with it.'' In other words, language accounts for, and, therefore, transcends, the theory of evolution. Thus, it cannot be accounted for by Darwin's theory, and to think otherwise is to attempt to give birth to your mother.
Natural selection does nor care that we are happy or fulfilled, only that we survive to pass our genes along to the next generation. So why should a brain that was selected by evolution so that it might be able to mate, hunt and forage a little more successfully than apes, also be capable of art, music, literature, science, moral ideals, religious truths? Most everything human have done with their mind in the past 40,000 years -- at least all of the really interesting things that define us as human -- has been completely and utterly superfluous from the standpoint of natural selection.
After thousands of generations with nothing to show for it except an unending series of similar hand axes, there was an almost instantaneous -- by evolutionary standards -- creative explosion about 40,000 years ago. Man, all over the world, began to create utilitarian objects that were, from a standpoint of survival, far more beautiful than they had to be. It had nothing to do with survival of the species; therefore, Darwin's theory cannot account for it. And yet, it is fact. I believe that Darwin's theories are generally sound, but there is something more at work here.
The writer lives in Pelham.