If the intelligent-design side in the evolution debate doesn’t receive the support you might expect from people who should be allies, that may be because they haven’t grasped why the whole thing matters so urgently. I got an email recently from a journalist whom I’d queried on the subject. “All told, I’m on the ID side of the debate,” he wrote, “but it isn’t a pressing interest for me.”<\/p>\n
\nProfessor Singer, bioethicist at Princeton University, assesses the worth of an individual living creature by cognitive measures — rationality and self-consciousness. Merely being human confers no special right to life on a creature. In Singer’s hands this idea become a license for murder:<\/p>\n
A chimpanzee, dog, or pig…will have a higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for meaningful relations with others than a severely retarded infant or someone in a state of senility. So, if we base the right to life on these characteristics, we must grant these animals a right to life as good as, or better than, such retarded or senile human beings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n<\/div>\nBy Singer’s calculation, a healthy adult pig has a stronger claim on our protection than a newborn human infant or a human adult suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Killing a human “non-person” would be no weightier an act than snuffing out a mackerel. Practically speaking, if killing a hemophiliac infant could be shown to benefit a healthy infant, measuring the comparative prospect of each for a “happy” future, then Singer would approve murdering the baby with hemophilia. He would have us employ human non-persons in medical experiments before we use healthy animals.<\/div>\n<\/div>\nObviously, these are monstrous views, sustainable by an otherwise decent person only in the kind of privileged academic setting where scholars live and think in isolation from reality. Unfortunately, it’s precisely the philosophical foundations of decency that are undermined by the Darwinian perspective. If taken deeply to heart, Darwinism erases the distinction, the right of protection, that a human being earns simply by being human. After all, there’s nothing special about belonging to our species over any other. All the species are part of a continuum of life bubbling up from history without guidance, purpose or meaning.<\/div>\n<\/div>\nThe respect in which such ideas are held in prestige society can’t help but have a morally corrosive effect that trickles down and outward to the rest of the culture. When they are honest with themselves, Darwinists admit this. In his book, Smith quotes Richard Dawkins, who entertains a fond daydream in which scientists find a living human\/chimp hybrid, able to breed with both species and thus finally proving that human beings are just another kind of animal:<\/div>\n<\/div>\nWe need only discover a single survivor, say a relict Australopithecus<\/em> in the Budongo Forest, and our precious system of norms and ethics could come crashing about our ears. The boundaries with which we segregate our world would be shot to pieces.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Smith is at his very best as he spells out the ethical implications of blurring the human-animal distinction. Not all living things can be valued as equally precious and deserving of life. There has to be some kind of a scale on which creatures and their claims to protection are measured. If being human confers no merit, what does?<\/div>\n<\/div>\nSay we discard the Biblical idea that the human countenance bears a divine stamp, the image of God. Then the standards advanced by Peter Singer seem entirely plausible. Moral value, writes Smith, would accordingly be based on the “capacities of each individual<\/em>.” Such a “standard would obliterate universal human rights.” Smith cites Mortimer J. Adler, who explained what could all too easily follow from a society’s decision to cast off human exceptionalism:<\/div>\n