Evolution and Socialism/Communism

[Alejandro C]

I don't know the answer to this, so I'm posing it to all of the smart(er than me) people on this board: How does evolution and the great ideas of Darwin coincide with the revolutionary left ideas? Does evolutionary thought necessarily lead to nihilism? Does evolutionary thought finally point to a one true objective reality that mankind has been searching for for so long? And if so how do those conclusions enlighten our views of politics? Do these ideas (such as morality is nothing but a by-product of evolution) destroy those precious thoughts that we are morally right and everyone else is morally culpable?

I've been thinking about these things for a long time, and haven't come up with any answers except that probably yes, evolution(ary thought) leads to one objective truth of the world, and that politics is probably only a by-product of evolutionary instincts, via heuristics and instincts.

[Buffalo Souljah]

Well, during Stalin's reign, the name Darwin was a taboo. Bourgeousie views on genetics were trounced upon (with even songs written to declare the insanity of "random" genetic mutations). The prevailing Soviet genetivist, Lysenko put forth a contradictory and highly nebulous theory that all genetics were objective and environmentally determined, that "genes" were pure illusion and that different species adapted to and incorporated changes of their environment into their genetic makeup and passed these changes into their progeny. Of course, none of this was scientifically sound, but Lysenko managed to win over the support of the Party and this became Party ideology well into the 60's.

[Alejandro C]

Ok. . . unfortunately I'm aware of the so called Lysenko school, but that seems to have been pretty obviously proved wrong. How about the influence of more accepted theories? How might these influence/change our ideas?

[mikelepore]

The idea that evolution is directional, or leads to outcomes that are advanced in some way, is a popular misconception. What evolution leads to is better adpation of living things to survive long enough to reproduce in their particular environments. In our own cases, we got these analytical brains out of it, but that sort of thing isn't the general rule. Much more common would be claws to grab food, colorful spots to attract mates, or something along those lines, much less grand than these nice brains.

[Buffalo Souljah]

How does evolution and the great ideas of Darwin coincide with the revolutionary left ideas?

There is no sociological or psychological correlate to evolution. it is principally a biological process, having to do with basic biological processes (genetic makeup, reproduction and so forth), so, practically, there is nothing that can be said to be applied to the social sciences or to theory from evolutionary theory. There is no "evolving business" or "evolving community" in the pure biological sense. Read Steve Jones on this issue. He writes extensively on the misconceptions and false liberties taken in the social sciences towards evolution.


Does evolutionary thought necessarily lead to nihilism? Why would it? Evolution just is, there's nothing more to say about it.


Does evolutionary thought finally point to a one true objective reality that mankind has been searching for for so long? And if so how do those conclusions enlighten our views of politics?

Again, evolution concerns itself principally with biological processes, so there is nothing that can be said about "man" or "society" as far as regards evolution. It is a theory that applies exclusively to biological processes (genetics, reproduction, etc.).


Do these ideas (such as morality is nothing but a by-product of evolution) destroy those precious thoughts that we are morally right and everyone else is morally culpable? THis would be in the ballpark of Herbert Spencer and the 'social Darwinists' and their often times a priori asserions about culture, and, again, have no bearing on evolution proper.

Genes are very complicated things and they serve many functions. There are basic codes that are present in each gene that necessarily appear in every cell. They are like subnet masks and parsers in coding. These are things that reappear in many different places and have many different purposes, but are nonetheless virtually identical throughout. Genes mutate sporadically, and it is the study of how these mutations affect the ability for an organism to cope (or not cope) with its environment that consitute evolution. Nothing more or less.

Hope this helps clear things up.

[anticap]

This doesn't go quite to what you were driving at, Alejandro, but I never pass up an opportunity to recommend Kropotkin's Mutual Aid (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotkin-peter/1902/mutual-aid/index.htm), which dispels much of the right-wing (mis-)applications of evolution.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Alejandro:


How does evolution and the great ideas of Darwin coincide with the revolutionary left ideas?

As several comrades have pointed out, Darwin's ideas relate to the origin of the species and not the class war; as Engels noted:


"1) Of the Darwinian doctrine I accept the theory of evolution, but Darwin's method of proof (struggle for life, natural selection) I consider only a first, provisional, imperfect expression of a newly discovered fact. Until Darwin's time the very people who now see everywhere only struggle for existence (Vogt, Büchner, Moleschott, etc.) emphasized precisely cooperation in organic nature, the fact that the vegetable kingdom supplies oxygen and nutriment to the animal kingdom and conversely the animal kingdom supplies plants with carbonic acid and manure, which was particularly stressed by Liebig. Both conceptions are justified within certain limits, but the one is as one-sided and narrow-minded as the other. The interaction of bodies in nature -- inanimate as well as animate -- includes both harmony and collision, struggle and cooperation. When therefore a self-styled natural scientist takes the liberty of reducing the whole of historical development with all its wealth and variety to the one-sided and meagre phrase 'struggle for existence,' a phrase which even in the sphere of nature can be accepted only cum grano salis [with a grain of salt -- RL], such a procedure really contains its own condemnation.

"...I should therefore attack -- and perhaps will when the time comes -- these bourgeois Darwinists in about the following manner:

"The whole Darwinists teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes's doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes ["war of all agaisnt all" -- from Hobbes's De Cive and Leviathan, chapter 13-14] and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus's theory of population. When this conjurer's trick has been performed (and I questioned its absolute permissibility, as I have indicated in point 1, particularly as far as the Malthusian theory is concerned), the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved. The puerility of this procedure is so obvious that not a word need be said about it. But if I wanted to go into the matter more thoroughly I should do so by depicting them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad naturalists and philosophers.

"4) The essential difference between human and animal society consists in the fact that animals at most collect while men produce. This sole but cardinal difference alone makes it impossible simply to transfer laws of animal societies to human societies....

"At a certain stage the production of man attains such a high-level that not only necessaries but also luxuries, at first, true enough, only for a minority, are produced. The struggle for existence -- if we permit this category for the moment to be valid -- is thus transformed into a struggle for pleasures, no longer for mere means of subsistence but for means of development, socially produced means of development, and to this stage the categories derived from the animal kingdom are no longer applicable. But if, as has now happened, production in its capitalist form produces a far greater quantity of means of subsistence and development than capitalist society can consume because it keeps the great mass of real producers artificially away from these means of subsistence and development; if this society is forced by its own law of life constantly to increase this output which is already too big for it and therefore periodically, every 10 years, reaches the point where it destroys not only a mass of products but even productive forces -- what sense is their left in all this talk of 'struggle for existence'? The struggle for existence can then consist only in this: that the producing class takes over the management of production and distribution from the class that was hitherto entrusted with it but has now become incompetent to handle it, and there you have the socialist revolution.

"...Even the mere contemplation of previous history as a series of class struggles suffices to make clear the utter shallowness of the conception of this history as a feeble variety of the 'struggle for existence.' I would therefore never do this favour to these false naturalists....

"6) On the other hand I cannot agree with you that the 'bellum omnium contra omnes' was the first phase of human development. In my opinion, the social instinct was one of the most essential levers of the evolution of man from the ape. The first man must have lived in bands and as far as we can peer into the past we find that this was the case...." [Engels to Lavrov, 17/11/1875. Spelling altered to conform to UK English.]

And, when it comes to explaining even human evolution, Darwin's theory is not all that good. On that see the following book:

Stove, D. Darwinian Fairytales (Encounter Books, 2nd Ed., 2006).

This was written by an atheist who thinks that Darwin's theory is the best we have, despite its serious weaknesses.


Does evolutionary thought necessarily lead to nihilism?

Why should it lead to nihilism?


Does evolutionary thought finally point to a one true objective reality that mankind has been searching for for so long?

Well, no more than there is a 'true form' of, say, a cat that evolution has been aiming at for millions of years.


And if so how do those conclusions enlighten our views of politics? Do these ideas (such as morality is nothing but a by-product of evolution) destroy those precious thoughts that we are morally right and everyone else is morally culpable?

As the above shows, evolution has nothing to tell us about politics --, nor morality.

[The Essence Of Flame Is The Essence Of Change]

There is no sociological or psychological correlate to evolution. it is principally a biological process, having to do with basic biological processes (genetic makeup, reproduction and so forth), so, practically, there is nothing that can be said to be applied to the social sciences or to theory from evolutionary theory.
No.You see, this is one of the major differences anarchism has with the rest of the forms of socialism in pure theory and a difference that is usually not recognized by most.For Kropotkin and most of anarchists, the community is not just something that we found to demolish the need to struggle for our survival as individuals, but rather exactly one of those mechanisms we developed as a species to adapt better to our enviroment.That's why he argues that things like co-operation,social justice and solidarity is inherent to us as a means of collective survival.You should read Mutual Aid:A Factor of Evolution if you are interested.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

^^^If you read Engels's letter, quoted in my post above, you will see that Engels had already thought of this.

A more modern version of this thesis can be found here:

Ryan, F. (2002), Darwin's Blind Spot. Evolution Beyond Natural Selection (Houghton Mifflin).

[Alejandro C]

Thanks to everyone who has so far participated in this.

I think the move right now is to explain a little more about what I was thinking in the original post- because, as the replies have shown, I don't think I made my point clearly.

He is my thought process:

1. Our brains and instincts, like our bodies, are a product of natural selection.

2. Because morality has been advantageous, it was selected for, and as a result is instinctually present in our brains. By this I mean that fitness both intra and inter species increases the more our pleistocenic ancestors were able to be 'moral'. And by that I mean that the more they could cooperate, act on 'purity' principles, and all of the other things we think of as moral (sorry, I have a hard time pinning down what it means to be moral but you get the idea), the better chance that nation, tribe, group, family had to be fit (and by fit I mean have more offspring in the generational long run). Basically I mean that we were better off the more 'moral' we were so that trait was selected for. This of course assumes instincts in animals, an assumption I hope I am at liberty to take.

3. Because morality is simply a trait that was selected for, like (in some of us) dark skin, or bipedality, or opposable thumbs, that it is incidental to any actual objective truths. I hope that's clear, but I doubt I'm doing an adequate job explaining it. I mean that what we think about as 'morals' are merely a by-product of what the process of evolution has demanded in order for us (as a species) to get as far as we have. In other words, morality is extremely useful when considering, as a whole, our species' fitness. And so was a selected for trait. And so exists only in our minds, but is not an objective truth.

4. If morality is not an objective truth, and actually all of our thoughts about good and evil (right and wrong) are only traits specific to our fitness then morality/good and evil/right and wrong don't actually exist. Therefore nihilism.

I know because of my inadequate explanation there's probably a lot of semantic arguments against the above, but please try to see past those and address the ideas.

Again, thanks to everyone for your help with this. The conclusions that I've reached are not happy ones, but as far as I've reasoned they are the truth.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

I'm not too sure how morality can be 'selected for' if evolution works on gene pools. Is morality genetic? If so, which genes control it, and how would this maximise their rproductive success? And how come very few people agree on what is right and/or wrong? If morality were genetic, we'd all agree, surely?

But, this way of picturing human beings cannot be right; in that case, may I suggest you check out the following posts:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1665072&postcount=21

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1665082&postcount=23

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1665159&postcount=25

The material there shows that Darwinism is particularly ill-suited to account for anything typically human.

[Alejandro C]

I hope you'll indulge me by letting me respond to your questions and then read your links and respond to them.

To your question of: I'm not too sure how morality can be 'selected for' if evolution works on gene pools.

-Exactly right. I'm not sure how it works either. I was thinking in terms of morality being an instinct. And I'm not sure that anyone has figured out exactly how instincts and genes fit together, but mostly I'm sure that they do fit together and eventually science will figure out how. Or are you arguing against instincts?

To your question of: And how come very few people agree on what is right and/or wrong? If morality were genetic, we'd all agree, surely?

- Exactly right again. The point is, if you look around a society like I live in (Midwest America) you can see the genetic diversity. I have dark skin, dark hair, and dark eyes, but some of my friends have white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. There is genetic variation that was caused because of the (in relative terms very slightly and very short term) separate branches of the evolutionary tree. So it follows that morality, like other selected for traits, have slightly branched and created a hetergenous society.

And now: how can you explain this: "The material there shows that Darwinism is particularly ill-suited to account for anything typically human." Again, I'll be reading those links but this seems to presuppose any links and begs for an explanation that I'm inviting you, without quotes or references but merely from your own personal understanding and ability of concision, to explain.

And once again I want to say that this has been a strange personal journey of mine and I appreciate your help in completing it.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Alejandro:


I'm not sure how it works either. I was thinking in terms of morality being an instinct. And I'm not sure that anyone has figured out exactly how instincts and genes fit together, but mostly I'm sure that they do fit together and eventually science will figure out how. Or are you arguing against instincts?

How can it be an instinct if morality is not only culturally relative, it is often relative to each individual? And if it were an instinct, we couldn't act against it (or not for long); but it is a commonplace that we all do this, and quite often. Can we act against the instinct to breath? Or to eat?

Moreover, morality is typically characterised by deliberation, and deliberation isn't an instinct. Where it isn't so characterised, it is dominated by moral laws and codes, and they can't be instinctual, or people would not have to be told what to do, they'd just know. Nor would it have to be enforced, as it often is -- when was the last time a Church, say, had to enforce breathing in its flock? But, they often enforce moral codes.


The point is, if you look around a society like I live in (Midwest America) you can see the genetic diversity. I have dark skin, dark hair, and dark eyes, but some of my friends have white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. There is genetic variation that was caused because of the (in relative terms very slightly and very short term) separate branches of the evolutionary tree. So it follows that morality, like other selected for traits, have slightly branched and created a heterogeneous society.

I'm sorry, but this doesn't follow. Individuals from around the world, with different genes often agree on the moral code they should follow, and those with similar genes often disagree.


And now: how can you explain this: "The material there shows that Darwinism is particularly ill-suited to account for anything typically human." Again, I'll be reading those links but this seems to presuppose any links and begs for an explanation that I'm inviting you, without quotes or references but merely from your own personal understanding and ability of concision, to explain.

The author I mainly refer to in those threads is David Stove, who died in the mid-1990s. He was an ex-Marxist and atheist. He argues that Darwinism is the best theory we have, but it is radically flawed when it comes to explaining human evolution. He shows that Darwin (and other Darwinians) argue that every species will reproduce up to the maximum that the available food supply will allow, so that every species will produce all the off-spring it can. But this is not true of human beings; those with access to the most food, often have the fewest children. If so, natural selection cannot work on human beings.

Inclusive fitness (invented to account for altruism) also does not work (this is the theory that an organism will sacrifice itself for close relative, etc.).

He points out that this is not so; many human beings sacrifice themselves for complete strangers, and many relatives kill each other.

Furthermore, many animals cannot even recognise a close relative. A Robin, for example, cannot tell the difference between a red rag and another robin trespassing on its territory.

He further points out that if this theory were correct, organisms that shared exactly or almost exactly the same genetic material should be perfect altruists. In that case, bacteria should be the greatest altruists on the planet, for they share exactly the same genetic material. Indeed, children should be equally altruistic toward their parents as their parents are toward them; but it is commonplace that the reverse is true. And an identical twin, for example, should be more altruistic toward its twin than its own children. This is manifestly not so.

This theory was also invented to account for the social insects. But it fails even here; sister bees, for example, share more genetic material with each other than they do with their mother, the Queen. But they defend the Queen in preference to one another.

But, you will need to read him for yourself; he is one of the best philosophical essayists since Descartes and Rousseau.

Be warned, he is also a right-wing git!

[Dooga Aetrus Blackrazor]

I always have a difficult time when people ask me about morality. Is it objective, relative? Is it a product of evolution? Whenever people ask these questions they never tell me "what morality is." Morality is a word. A chair could be morality if we decided to call it that.

The issue is that are you defining morality as "what people should do given X" or "how people think about X" or "how people react to X." I think these sort of definitional distinctions are the cause of many disagreements between ethicists.

It's probably quite evident that certain characteristics, such as empathy, that have moral implications are variables in the equation when it comes to evolution. They can be desirable or undesirable traits for the survival of an organism, depending on the situation.

In an idealistic fashion, you can have widespread moral theories about "what would be ideal." In real life, these have limited usefulness depending on the extent one sympathizes with moral rationalism.

I can enter a society with three other people. Three of us can decide that if we all cooperate, things will be better for us. In the middle of the night, someone is slaughtered. The person says they didn't like how the person behaved. It annoyed them, upset their sentiments, or otherwise. You can tell them how they should get over it, and they might agree. But they'll still act in such a way. You see this in certain cases with serial killers who feel guilty and continue acting as they do.

I actually think morality is incredibly malleable and should be organized in a mathematical fashion based on collective agreements. I don't think there is any force compelling people to do this, in a metaphysical sense. It's just common sense to organize in certain ways.

I have metaphysical positions on morality that favor utilitarianism. But they're the equivalent of an intellectual crossword puzzle. I'm not expecting anything useful to come of it. Nash equilibrium is probably morality. But morality is just a word to describe how we would like people to behave to get the "good" whatever vague concept that is.

Morality is an utter confusion and one of the messiest and unorganized philosophical disciplines. Almost anything passes as a moral argument because many moral theorists accept sentiments and intuitions as arguments that counter rational conclusions.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Comrades might like to read this from the latest New Scientist:


What Darwin Got Wrong

by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini

READERS in search of literature about Darwin or Darwinism will have no trouble finding it. Recent milestone anniversaries of Darwin's birth and of the publication of On the Origin of Species have prompted a plethora of material, so authors thinking of adding another volume had better have a good excuse for it. We have written another book about Darwinism, and we urge you to take it to heart. Our excuse is in the title: What Darwin Got Wrong.

Much of the vast neo-Darwinian literature is distressingly uncritical. The possibility that anything is seriously amiss with Darwin's account of evolution is hardly considered. Such dissent as there is often relies on theistic premises which Darwinists rightly say have no place in the evaluation of scientific theories. So onlookers are left with the impression that there is little or nothing about Darwin's theory to which a scientific naturalist could reasonably object. The methodological scepticism that characterises most areas of scientific discourse seems strikingly absent when Darwinism is the topic.

Try these descriptions of natural selection, typical of the laudatory epithets which abound in the literature: "The universal acid" (philosopher Daniel Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995); "a mechanism of staggering simplicity and beauty... [it] has been called the greatest idea that anyone ever had... it also happens to be true" (biologist Jerry Coyne in Why Evolution is True, 2009); "the only workable theory ever proposed that is capable of explaining life we have" (biologist and ethologist Richard Dawkins, variously). And as Dennett continues in Darwin's Dangerous Idea: "In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law."

Golly! Could Darwinism really be that good?

Darwin's theory of evolution has two connected parts: connected, but not inseparable. First, there is an explanation of the taxonomy of species. It is an ancient observation that if you sort species by similarities among their phenotypes (a phenotype being a particular creature's collection of overt, heritable biological properties) they form the hierarchy known as a "taxonomic tree".

This is why most vertebrate species are more similar to one another than they are to any invertebrate species, most species of mammals are more similar to one another than they are to any species of reptiles, and so forth. Why is this? It is quite conceivable that every species might be equally different from every other. What explains why they aren't?

Darwin suggested a genealogical hypothesis: when species are relatively similar, it's because they are descended from a relatively recent common ancestor. In some ways, chimps seem a lot like people. This is not because God created them to poke fun at us, or vice versa; it is because humans and chimps are descended from the same relatively recent primitive ape.

The current consensus is that Darwin was almost certainly right about this. There are plausible exceptions, notably similarities that arise from evolutionary convergence, but evidence from a number of disciplines, including genetics, evolutionary developmental biology and palaeontology argues decisively for Darwin's historical account of the taxonomy of species. We agree that this really was as brilliant an idea as it is generally said to be.

But that cannot be the whole story, since it is not self-evident why species that have a recent common ancestor - as opposed, say, to species that share an ecology - are generally phenotypically similar. Darwin's theory of natural selection is intended to answer this question. Darwinists often say that natural selection provides the mechanism of evolution by offering an account of the transmission of phenotypic traits from generation to generation which, if correct, explains the connection between phenotypic similarity and common ancestry.

Moreover, it is perfectly general: it applies to any species, independent of what its phenotype may happen to be. And it is remarkably simple. In effect, the mechanism of trait transmission it postulates consists of a random generator of genotypic variants that produce the corresponding random phenotypic variations, and an environmental filter that selects among the latter according to their relative fitness. And that's all. Remarkable if true.

Compelling evidence
But we don't think it is true. A variety of different considerations suggesting that it is not are mounting up. We feel it is high time that Darwinists take this evidence seriously, or offer some reason why it should be discounted. Our book about what Darwin got wrong reviews in detail some of these objections to natural selection and the evidence for them; this article is a brief summary.

Here's how natural selection is supposed to work. Each generation contributes an imperfect copy of its genotype - and thereby of its phenotype - to its successor. Neo-Darwinism suggests that such imperfections arise primarily from mutations in the genomes of members of the species in question.

What matters is that the alterations of phenotypes that the mechanisms of trait transmission produce are random. Suppose, for example, that a characteristic coloration is part of the phenotype of a particular species, and that the modal members of the ith generation of that species are reddish brown. Suppose, also, that the mechanisms that copy phenotypes from each generation to the next are "imperfect" in the sense given above. Then, all else being equal, the coloration of the i + 1th generation will form a random distribution around the mean coloration of the parent generation: most of the offspring will match their parents more or less, but some will be more red than brown, and some will be more brown than red.

This assumption explains the random variation of phenotypic traits over time, but it doesn't explain why phenotypic traits evolve. So let's further assume that, in the environment that the species inhabits, the members with brownish coloration are more "fit" than the ones with reddish coloration, all else being equal. It doesn't much matter exactly how fitness is defined; for convenience, we'll follow the current consensus according to which an individual's relative fitness co-varies with the probability that it will contribute its phenotypic traits to its offspring.

Given a certain amount of conceptual and mathematical tinkering, it follows that, all else again being equal, the fitness of the species's phenotype will generally increase over time, and that the phenotypes of each generation will resemble the phenotype of its recent ancestors more than they resemble the phenotypes of its remote ancestors.

That, to a first approximation, is the neo-Darwinian account of how phenotypes evolve. To be sure, some caveats are required. For example, even orthodox Darwinists have always recognised that there are plenty of cases where fitness doesn't increase over time. So, for example, fitness may decrease when a population becomes unduly numerous (that's density-dependent selection at work), or when a species having once attained a "fitness plateau" then gets stuck there, or, of course, when the species becomes extinct.

Such cases do not show that neo-Darwinism is false; they only show that the "all else being equal" clauses must be taken seriously. Change the climate enough and the next generation of dinosaurs won't be more fit than its parents. Hit enough dinosaurs with meteors, and there won't be a next generation. But that does not argue against Darwinian selection, as this claims only to say what happens when the ecology doesn't change, or only changes very gradually, which manifestly does not apply in the case of the dinosaurs and the meteorite strikes.

So much for the theory, now for the objections. Natural selection is a radically environmentalist theory. There are, therefore, analogies between what Darwin said about the process of evolution of phenotypes and what the psychologist B. F. Skinner said about the learning of what he called "operant behaviour" - the whole network of events and factors involved in the behaviour of humans and non-human animals.

Driven from within
These analogies are telling. Skinner's theory, though once fashionable, is now widely agreed to be unsustainable, largely because Skinner very much overestimated the contribution that the structure of a creature's environment plays in determining what it learns, and correspondingly very much underestimated the contribution of the internal or "endogenous" variables - including, in particular, innate cognitive structure.

In our book, we argue in some detail that much the same is true of Darwin's treatment of evolution: it overestimates the contribution the environment makes in shaping the phenotype of a species and correspondingly underestimates the effects of endogenous variables. For Darwin, the only thing that organisms contribute to determining how next-generation phenotypes differ from parent-generation phenotypes is random variation. All the non-random variables come from the environment.

Suppose, however, that Darwin got this wrong and various internal factors account for the data. If that is so, there is inevitably less for environmental filtering to do.

The consensus view among neo-Darwinians continues to be that evolution is random variation plus structured environmental filtering, but it seems the consensus may be shifting. In our book we review a large and varied selection of non-environmental constraints on trait transmission. They include constraints imposed "from below" by physics and chemistry, that is, from molecular interactions upwards, through genes, chromosomes, cells, tissues and organisms. And constraints imposed "from above" by universal principles of phenotypic form and self-organisation - that is, through the minimum energy expenditure, shortest paths, optimal packing and so on, down to the morphology and structure of organisms.

Over the aeons of evolutionary time, the interaction of these multiple constraints has produced many viable phenotypes, all compatible with survival and reproduction. Crucially, however, the evolutionary process in such cases is not driven by a struggle for survival and/or for reproduction. Pigs don't have wings, but that's not because winged pigs once lost out to wingless ones. And it's not because the pigs that lacked wings were more fertile than the pigs that had them. There never were any winged pigs because there's no place on pigs for the wings to go. This isn't environmental filtering, it's just physiological and developmental mechanics.

So, how many constraints on the evolution of phenotypes are there other than those that environmental filtering imposes? Nobody knows, but the picture now emerging is of many, many of them operating in many, many different ways and at many, many different levels. That's what the evolutionary developmental school of biology and the theory that gene regulatory networks control our underlying development both suggest. And it strikes us as entirely plausible.

It seems to us to be no coincidence that neo-Darwinian rhetoric in the literature of experimental biology has cooled detectably in recent years. In its place, we find evolutionary biologist Leonid Kruglyak being quoted in Nature in November 2008 (vol 456, p 18) thus: "It's a possibility that there's something [about the contributions of genomic structure to the evolution of complex phenotypes] we just don't fundamentally understand... That it's so different from what we're thinking about that we're not thinking about it yet."

And then there is this in March 2009 from molecular biologist Eugene Koonin, writing in Nucleic Acids Research (vol 37, p 1011): "Evolutionary-genomic studies show that natural selection is only one of the forces that shape genome evolution and is not quantitatively dominant, whereas non-adaptive processes are much more prominent than previously suspected." There's quite a lot of this sort of thing around these days, and we confidently predict a lot more in the near future.

Darwinists say that evolution is explained by the selection of phenotypic traits by environmental filters. But the effects of endogenous structure can wreak havoc with this theory. Consider the following case: traits t1 and t2 are endogenously linked in such a way that if a creature has one, it has both. Now the core of natural selection is the claim that phenotypic traits are selected for their adaptivity, that is, for their effect on fitness. But it is perfectly possible that one of two linked traits is adaptive but the other isn't; having one of them affects fitness but having the other one doesn't. So one is selected for and the other "free-rides" on it.

We should stress that every such case (and we argue in our book that free-riding is ubiquitous) is a counter-example to natural selection. Free-riding shows that the general claim that phenotypic traits are selected for their effects on fitness isn't true. The most that natural selection can actually claim is that some phenotypic traits are selected for their effects on fitness; the rest are selected for... well, some other reason entirely, or perhaps for no reason at all.

It's a main claim of our book that, when phenotypic traits are endogenously linked, there is no way that selection can distinguish among them: selection for one selects the others, regardless of their effects on fitness. That is a great deal less than the general theory of the mechanics of evolution that the Darwinists suppose that natural selection provides. Worse still, there isn't the slightest reason to suppose that free-riding exhausts the kinds of exceptions to natural selection that endogenous structures can produce.

"All right," you may say, "but why should anybody care?" Nobody sensible doubts that evolution occurs - we certainly don't. Isn't this a parochial issue for professional biologists, with nothing cosmic turning on it? Here's why we think that is not so.

Natural selection has shown insidious imperialistic tendencies. The offering of post-hoc explanations of phenotypic traits by reference to their hypothetical effects on fitness in their hypothetical environments of selection has spread from evolutionary theory to a host of other traditional disciplines: philosophy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and even to aesthetics and theology. Some people really do seem to think that natural selection is a universal acid, and that nothing can resist its powers of dissolution.

However, the internal evidence to back this imperialistic selectionism strikes us as very thin. Its credibility depends largely on the reflected glamour of natural selection which biology proper is said to legitimise. Accordingly, if natural selection disappears from biology, its offshoots in other fields seem likely to disappear as well. This is an outcome much to be desired since, more often than not, these offshoots have proved to be not just post hoc but ad hoc, crude, reductionist, scientistic rather than scientific, shamelessly self-congratulatory, and so wanting in detail that they are bound to accommodate the data, however that data may turn out. So it really does matter whether natural selection is true.

That's why we wrote our book.

Profile

Jerry Fodor is a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini is a cognitive scientist at the University of Arizona, Tucson. This essay draws on material from their new book, What Darwin Got Wrong, published in the US by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and in the UK by Profile

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527466.100-survival-of-the-fittest-theory-darwinisms-limits.html?full=true

[Devrim]

And, when it comes to explaining even human evolution, Darwin's theory is not all that good. On that see the following book:

Stove, D. Darwinian Fairytales (Encounter Books, 2nd Ed., 2006).

This was written by an atheist who thinks that Darwin's theory is the best we have, despite its serious weaknesses.

I don't think that he challenges ideas about the basic principle of natural selection at all. He actually agrees with it. As you later note, he only doubts its relevance to humans.

What he does is creates a strawman out of the some of the worst aspects of 'Sociobiology', and then proceeds to tear it down. It has been done better and in my opinion more honestly by many others.

Devrim

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

In many ways you are right, but quite often in his book he actually goes much further, and challenges it in general.


What he does is creates a strawman out of the some of the worst aspects of 'Sociobiology', and then proceeds to tear it down.

Again, you are largely right (but I disagree that this is a 'strawman'); recall this is a very brief summary of a much more detailed and wider-ranging argument in his book -- he meant it to be provocative in order to boost his book.


It has been done better and in my opinion more honestly by many others

Not as good as his book, which, I take it you haven't read.

Philip Kitcher's book, Vaulting Ambition, is also excellent.

[Devrim]

Not as good as his book, which, I take it you haven't read.
Actually I have. I find stuff about evolution very interesting and read a lot about it. I thought this book was very disapointing.
Devrim

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

In what way?

[Wolf Larson]

I don't know the answer to this, so I'm posing it to all of the smart(er than me) people on this board: How does evolution and the great ideas of Darwin coincide with the revolutionary left ideas? Does evolutionary thought necessarily lead to nihilism? Does evolutionary thought finally point to a one true objective reality that mankind has been searching for for so long? And if so how do those conclusions enlighten our views of politics? Do these ideas (such as morality is nothing but a by-product of evolution) destroy those precious thoughts that we are morally right and everyone else is morally culpable?

I've been thinking about these things for a long time, and haven't come up with any answers except that probably yes, evolution(ary thought) leads to one objective truth of the world, and that politics is probably only a by-product of evolutionary instincts, via heuristics and instincts.
Read Kropotkin.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

A more up-to-date version of Kropotkin's thesis, and much else besides, can be found here:

Ryan, F. (2002), Darwin's Blind Spot. Evolution Beyond Natural Selection (Houghton Mifflin).