Step 10: Vine Deloria, evolution, and learning from each other when we disagree

Vine Deloria was an Indigenous academic and activist with a first degree in science and with sustained involvement in the American Philosophical Association later on. He mentored many of the following generation of Indigenous philosophers and enjoyed such respect that his obituary in 2005 likened his passing to the training wheels having been taken off.

This is not the profile of someone I would have expected to be an evolution denier! And yet, an evolution denier is exactly what Vine Deloria is. Other Indigenous philosophers referenced here, as a rule, strongly disagree with Deloria on this point - as do I. And yet, it is going to turn out that some of Deloria’s reasoning on this point - albeit not the point itself, in the end - is going to be highly relevant to the remaining steps, and it is also going to become clear why we needed Deloria’s take on things to show us this. Polkinghorne’s intellectual teeth are going to be subject to some wear and tear in step 10.

By the way, Deloria is well aware of the complexities involved. His work happily discusses the fact that a quantum field may show parallels with the wind nilch’i discussed in Viola Cordova’s PhD thesis, but that this is not the same as nilch’i being able to be reduced to a quantum field because the quantum field can be quantified and nilch’i can’t.

—> Can you remember where to go if you are looking for exact references? Step 1 and step 2 will tell you where to find them.

Still, Vine Deloria is an evolution denier, and I may as well say that I raised my eyebrows when I first found out. I am as Western as I expect many readers to be, and that means when I have two apparently contradictory pieces of information, my gut response is to try and keep one and to throw out the other. It doesn’t come naturally to me to juggle them both for a while to try and make sense of it all, and then see. An Indigenous idea of disagreement as progress, while being something I like to try and practise as well as preach, is not embedded in the fabric of my unconscious: I have to think about it first.

It is going to turn out that in the case of Deloria and evolution, juggling two apparently incompatible ideas for a while makes sense, though.

To keep things manageable, step 10 is just going to look at those aspects of evolutionary theory which are relevant to Deloria’s criticism of it, and it is also just going to look at those aspects of Deloria’s thought which are relevant to evolutionary theory. (Deloria has authored more than twenty books.)

Let’s see what Deloria’s trouble with evolution is all about, and then what evolutionary theory would say to defend itself. Then, using this information, it will be easier to see why both have a point, and also why this doesn’t mean that the truth is in the middle, but somewhere much more interesting than that.

Firstly, in Deloria’s worldview, Western evolutionary theory is based on an individual that is lonelier than in Deloria’s experience of reality. Deloria defines personality as a unique life force which is at the same time part of the life force of the whole. Its relationships with those around it, human and non-human alike, are part of it and cannot realistically be seen as separate from it.

We don’t tend to think about this much in the contemporary West - but, when we take a closer look, we will find that we are, in a way, aware of at least some aspects of Deloria’s point on interrelatedness every time we sniff the milk before we drink it. It is not that we don’t think about our interrelatedness at all: we just seem to stop thinking about it once we have thought about the biochemistry of it. We don’t tend to think of it as a meaningful relationship at the same time as its being one of biochemistry.

Evolutionary theory would partially defend itself here: Niko Tinbergen, for example, one of ethology’s founding fathers, grounded much of his thinking in existing concepts of evolutionary theory. This included an admission near the end of his career that his and Konrad Lorenz’s research suffered because it didn’t pay enough attention to the feedback an individual received from its surroundings. Tinbergen and Lorenz were active from shortly before World War 2. The version of evolutionary theory they would have had access to at the beginning has since been superseded: step 5 talked about cabbies, violinists, and songbirds showing interaction between nature and nurture. In other words, evolutionary theory now knows better than to dismiss the importance of feedback to an individual organism’s development. It already knew better even at the time Deloria published his work, and this is in part due to Tinbergen’s engagement with it that led to his above admission. The trouble was that hardly anyone else was aware for a long time: the discipline of evolutionary biology failed to disseminate its new findings. Tinbergen acknowledged his error in the 1960s. And yet, the cabbies and violinists were still “news” in 2011, appearing on the BBC News website - presumably on an assumption that they would be “new” to most people; otherwise they would have been in the science section or nowhere on the BBC website at all. Misuse of evolutionary theory to justify discrimination - for example, with the type of thinking prevalent around the time of World War 2 - is going to be more difficult once the cabbies’, violinists’, and songbirds’ neurophysiological adaptations have become common knowledge. Perhaps we can each tell one more person about them.

Vine Deloria’s second criticism of evolutionary theory, relatedly, takes issue with its idea of the survival of the fittest. Given Deloria’s above conception of what a person is, this is to be expected: if we are all living beings in relationship, then a theory that appears to separate some perceived wheat from some perceived chaff among us is going to feel inappropriate.

Evolutionary theory would at least partially defend itself here, too. First and foremost, its very own first step is all about random variations, and thus about diversity! It is only in a second step that it then claims that the “fittest” will succeed. The first step - of random variation, and thus of diversity - already makes life quite difficult for anyone who wants to misuse evolutionary theory to justify discrimination. The second step - of the “fittest” then succeeding in sticking around long enough to pass on their genes - admittedly does have a history of having been simplified to justify crude bullying tactics. However, better-informed understandings of “fitness” manage to take relationships into account, and to show that elbowing everyone else out of the way doesn’t reliably get a creature very far. Marc Bekoff, for example, tells interesting stories of cooperation between coyotes, and he is far from the only one.

Deloria’s third criticism of evolutionary theory is that its classification of individuals into species just looks at their physiology, and fails to take into account that their potential roles in relationship with others may not be exclusively related to particular aspects of their physiology.

Even on this third point, evolutionary theory would probably defend itself, although it is going to struggle now because no contemporary Western scientific theory is going to have the same understanding of a living being’s role in relationship that Deloria is referring to.

—> When you think back to step 4, can you say in your own words why not? (A tip: look for Leroy Little Bear’s elements of philosophical unity in diversity between Indigenous worldviews.)

What evolutionary theory might say in its defence on this third point is that it is more than happy to accept de Waal’s wasps’ facial recognition using a different pathway from humans’, corvids’, and sheep’s: its very own terminology even makes provision for it, and distinguishes between homology and analogy. This means that it is well aware that living beings categorised as belonging to different species may nonetheless show similar traits in relationship. (Then it might bite its lip and go quiet while it thinks about the fact that it has only partially engaged with Deloria’s point.)

Still, looking at the defence that evolutionary theory has been able to put up, it does look as if Deloria’s evolution denial has thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Thinking back to the relationship between Newtonian physics and the findings of quantum theory in step 4, it is more likely that we are looking at another instance of a very similar dynamic: there was no need to throw out Newton, either, when quantum theory appeared. All that had happened there - and all that seems to have happened here - is this: contemporary Western science has come up with a theory, and it has now turned out that the theory can’t successfully relate to everything that it comes across in the world, but only to some of it. That doesn’t make the theory wrong; it only makes it incomplete. In its incompleteness, it is going to be in good company, because all our theories are going to be incomplete a) because of what John Polkinghorne said about verisimilitude, and b) because both quantum theory and Indigenous philosophers have shown that we can’t anticipate everything that we might be involved in co-creating.

That’s one part of step 10’s job done: I have said why I still disagree with Deloria’s evolution denial.

But what about the other part? I promised at the beginning that something special was going to emerge in (not despite!) the very aspect of Deloria’s thinking that I continue to disagree with - which is his evolution denial. So, what’s so special about that, when I have just said I still disagree with it?

I think about it this way: looking back on Leroy Little Bear’s elements of philosophical unity in diversity from step 4, it is clear that Deloria must be talking about more than about Bekoff’s cooperating coyotes when he talks about the world being more complex than evolutionary theory will admit. Leroy Little Bear saw us as co-creators, participating in the continuing becoming of a world which is material and spiritual at the same time. As far as Leroy Little Bear and Vine Deloria are concerned, Marc Bekoff’s cooperating coyotes are doing more than making sure that they work together to kill enough food to be strong enough to pass their coyote genes on. As far as Leroy Little Bear and Vine Deloria are concerned, those cooperating coyotes are, in their own, non-verbal way, accomplished jazz players in Brian Burkhart’s multi-species jazz band, and every sound they make is not only physical, but also imbued with meaning. In fact, Brian Burkhart credits much of his thinking to Vine Deloria’s mentorship, and it is when reading the two together that a sense of “evolution-plus” takes shape. In a forerunner of Brian Burkhart’s jazz analogy, Deloria’s comments on evolution have, at first glance, softened two contemporary Western dualisms into non-binary ones: the individual is now not in opposition to the whole, but in a relationship of mutual support, and the same goes for the sacred and the material, which are also no longer in opposition, but two sides of the same coin.

At second glance, though, it becomes clear when we look at the jazz analogy that the above two dualisms aren’t really two dualisms at all in a paradigm that locates the sacred in our relationships here in this world: it is as we respectfully respond to each other in the continuing, shared becoming of the jazz band that we share in the sacred and in the material alike. It is as the individual and the whole find each other in a dynamic of mutually responsive co-creativity that the sacred in the material comes into play.

It is no surprise that evolutionary theory on its own, coming from a context of a mostly Cartesian conception of science, couldn’t really relate to all that: we’re going to need Spinoza in step 11 to help us approach it, courtesy of Viola Cordova’s work first pointing out why this is going to be helpful.

What has already become clear now, though, is that Polkinghorne’s intellectual teeth, and Indigenous understandings of disagreement as progress, were well worth paying attention to here: it has been well worth holding on to two initially incompatible ideas (in our case, of evolutionary theory and of Vine Deloria’s scepticism of it) to see if they can make sense together after all. Looking back over step 10, I don’t think we could fully appreciate one without also giving space to the other.