The President’s Council on Bioethics was established by President Bush in 2001 to “advise the President on bioethical issues that may emerge as a consequence of advances in biomedical science and technology.” Under the chairmanship of Leon Kass, the Council published a number of reports on subjects such as cloning and stem cell research. In these reports, the Council relied heavily on the concept of “human dignity” as a guiding principle of bioethics. This spring, under the chairmanship of Edmund Pellegrino, the Council published a reader, “Human Dignity and Bioethics“, to expand and clarify the concept of human dignity. The neglect or dismissal of evolution in this volume is striking. Many of the contributors ground human dignity on a literal reading of Genesis. For example, Robert Kraynak writes, “the Bible and Christian theology may make the strongest case for human dignity because they recognize that human dignity is a mystery: the special status of man cannot be reduced to any set of essential attributes but rests on the mysterious ‘election’ of man as the only creature in the universe made in the image of God.” Patrick Lee and Robert George (a member of the Council) argue, “Human beings are fundamentally different in kind from other animals, not just genetically but in having a rational nature.” One could question what they mean by “fundamentally different”; more importantly, they never consider how the differences between humans and other animals arose. Pellegrino himself, in considering the origin of human dignity, asks rhetorically, “is [dignity] simply the fortuitous outcome of the intersections of the laws of chance variation and natural selection?,” but then makes clear that he discounts this idea because he never mentions it again. In fairness, the volume does contain a few dissenting voices, notably those of Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland, but the above quotes reflect the tone of the book.

Even if evolutionary biology will not by itself provide the foundation of ethics, our understanding of ourselves, and of our rights and our obligations to one another—and the way this understanding guides medical research and medical practice—should at least recognize and acknowledge our evolutionary origins. It is troubling that the most prominent group of bioethicists in the United States seems not to accept the idea that humans arose by a Darwinian process of evolution by natural selection. The gap between evolution and medical ethics is as great as the gap between evolution and medicine itself.