All general assertions aside, the question is if what Dawkins is saying is basically true or not, on his scientific terms.
Is evolution (the concrete factual understanding as well as the actuality of the birth and decendence of any living organism) really as a whole a matter of the concept/mechanism Dawkins has in mind? He is taking a certain analysis, the way we look at the genetic expression (which is not itself generally the same as selection, as I understand) and extrapolating from this as if this was what was "happening" on some general and fundamental way.
Quote:
The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people.
In a question; why does Dawkins only mention the narrow range of possibility of genetic expressions, in such orderly phenotype variations as he does? I think it is clearly his intent to draw a correlation, at least, between Darwinism (natural selection), and what as a whole is happening in evolution.
Dawkins is alluding here (albeit just as arbitrarily as he says), to a principle of evolutionary fitness guiding discrete phenotype arrangements, in a discrete set of human beings (genius and other human virtues we value could theoretically be considered possible bases of evolutionary fitness). This is something quite like darwinian natural selection, at face value, or by the arbitrary association he draws. But is it? He is intending in a rhetorical expression that evolution as a whole is as much implicitly constructed this way, as it is reduced to this, as if the proof were in the pudding. Dawkins says the gene is just basically expressing itself (as he does elsewhere) I take it.
So lkay that is one view, at least as I understand. On another view, the way we look at genes in their possibilities is just something analytical, an isolated concept in a broader view of things and not as a whole reductive. Genetic expression is not necessarily the same as what is happening. To look at or examine DNA as potential human possibilities, is something we do in a conceptual way. Our understanding of human genetics isn't understood as a whole in any implicitly guided way, as natural selection. In particular, it is not so much that human possibilities just seem to pop up so arbitrarily in a gene pool, it's that Richard Dawkins is himself arbitrarily projecting this broad correlation to natural selection, without the principle (such as a model of human evolution) really being seen.
I think Stephen Jay Gould's criticism could not be more apt:
Quote:
Amid the variety of their subject matter, the ultra-Darwinists share a conviction that natural selection regulates everything of any importance in evolution, and that adaptation emerges as a universal result and ultimate test of selection’s ubiquity.
Stephen Jay Gould
It seems Dawkins view is actually generally ambivalent to a prospect of human fitness coming through birth and genealogy. I am repeating myself from previous posts, but it is not like such a virtue of human genius that he mentions (whether principally Darwinian or not) just pops out of a gene pool, by chance of being born rather than "unborn". This is just his concept of genetics speaking.
There is much more consistency in genetics, we can at least see. Ravi Shankar's daughter Anoushka is talented sitar player, in part, because she was passed some good genes. While we can't necessarily ascribe any overt meaning to this, I know of, or any fundamental understanding, that, on a whole, is what we assume theoretically (in more theoretical traits, based on grounded principle) is happening if humans evolve. That is likely the "fact" of evolution that Dawkins is getting at, which is no less theoretical. I agree with the importance to look to some principle of fitness, Darwinian theory, completely. I disagree with the reductionism.
Do I know of and am I able to define human fitness, or a theory of human evolution, in certain terms? Well, no, but I don't feel unnecessarily urged to definitions of life, where according to standing facts, they are not possible. Are humans even necessarily evolving? Maybe not. But your father, and your fathers father, and your fathers fathers father, and his fathers fathers fathers father - all had to strive for fitness and pass something down, and not by chance, as a whole, even if we live in a very nurtured or conditioned existence and social darwinism is not exactly anyone's cup of tea. But these are human possibilities, in historical detail, as what they are. And we can see at least as much consistency in genetic expression, as we can in artificial selection (breeds of plants and animals). I don't know what it all means, and I am no expert_ but to the contrary of this puzzlement of many expert evolutionary biologists - are DNA really even like little "potential" humans, as Dawkins says? That is the question.
I'd say that is a conceptual stretch. He is stretching, broheim! I can admit it is interesting to think about and stretch a concept, to see how pliable and useful it really is for pragmatic explanations, our pliable ways of understanding, in a theoretically driveb world, but it is a stretch just in that sense.
Maybe we can say evolution is not particularly guided by in overtly rationalistic way, led forth by human values and traditional ideals, or morals (which would be naive to think) and maybe it is not limited to the classical reductive mechanisms to the contrary, either, as Dawkins is talking about. That is where I stand, and I think it is important that it doesn't just have to be one or the other.
I stated earlier in the first few posts of this thread, in way of evidence, that genetic "propensities of learning", found without innate basis, have been observed in the social groups of monkeys. This suggests evolution does not necessarily reduce to traditional conceptual oppositions of nature vs. nurture the usual opposition of conditioning and instinct, but that we can apparently come by our instincts, or nature, in crucial ways through, and only through conditioning, or learning in certain ways - something that is only observed in higher mammals.
This could presumably be a mechanism at play in human symbolism, for instance, as some biologists have theorized. Probably we should assume that much, theoretically, in view of this mechanism, in general. How it is working through a complex human symbolism, (as opposed to just higher mammals) would have to be theoretically projected, in part, but there is not necessarily a problem with that. To speak of hypothetical theory that has such a thorough empirical basis, even if it is not reductive to it - is the way modern theoretical science often works.
A theory of evolution, as a whole, is just not so reductive, or not so rather pedagogically or rhetorically convenient in general, as Dawkins writes. Evolution, (as clear as it may be as a basis for inquiring between intellectually curious people) is without any doubt, underdetermined, in theory.
The genetics, and the evolutionary mechanism that Dawkins is endorsing, as an overt causal explanation of organic life in this passage, is an appeal to classical theoretical mechanics of biology, and a paradigm that in a way will seem like Newtonian theory to modern physics, in years to come. It is not wrong, but an analytical or conceptual view that may in time seem overemphasized in its determinism, and in the general contention that phenomena may reduce to its particular paradigm of explanation.
Stephen Jay Gould; from "Darwinian Fundamentalism"...
Quote:
(...)Charles Darwin often remarked that his revolutionary work had two distinct aims: first, to demonstrate the fact of evolution (the genealogical connection of all organisms and a history of life regulated by “descent with modification”); second, to advance the theory of natural selection as the most important mechanism of evolution. Darwin triumphed in his first aim (American creationism of the Christian far right notwithstanding). Virtually all thinking people accept the factuality of evolution, and no conclusion in science enjoys better documentation. Darwin also succeeded substantially in his second aim. Natural selection, an immensely powerful idea with radical philosophical implications, is surely a major cause of evolution, as validated in theory and demonstrated by countless experiments. But is natural selection as ubiquitous and effectively exclusive as the ultras propose?
The radicalism of natural selection lies in its power to dethrone some of the deepest and most traditional comforts of Western thought, particularly the notion that nature’s benevolence, order, and good design, with humans at a sensible summit of power and excellence, proves the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent creator who loves us most of all (the old-style theological version), or at least that nature has meaningful directions, and that humans fit into a sensible and predictable pattern regulating the totality (the modern and more secular version).
To these beliefs Darwinian natural selection presents the most contrary position imaginable. Only one causal force produces evolutionary change in Darwin’s world: the unconscious struggle among individual organisms to promote their own personal reproductive success—nothing else, and nothing higher (no force, for example, works explicitly for the good of species or the harmony of ecosystems). Richard Dawkins would narrow the focus of explanation even one step further—to genes struggling for reproductive success within passive bodies (organisms) under the control of genes—a hyper-Darwinian idea that I regard as a logically flawed and basically foolish caricature of Darwin’s genuinely radical intent.
The very phenomena that traditional views cite as proof of benevolence and intentional order—the good design of organisms and the harmony of ecosystems—arise by Darwin’s process of natural selection only as side consequences of a singular causal principle of apparently opposite meaning: organisms struggling for themselves alone. (Good design becomes one pathway to reproductive success, while the harmony of ecosystems records a competitive balance among victors.) Darwin’s system should be viewed as morally liberating, not cosmically depressing. The answers to moral questions cannot be found in nature’s factuality in any case, so why not take the “cold bath” of recognizing nature as nonmoral, and not constructed to match our hopes? After all, life existed on earth for 3.5 billion years before we arrived; why should life’s causal ways match our prescriptions for human meaning or decency?
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/06/12/darwinian-fundamentalism/
Edited by Kurt (06/21/16 06:29 PM)
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