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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1739 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 1, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is there a general term for the sort of broad political position of 'secular/atheist individual who believes in Darwinian evolution so deeply that he is led to reject liberalism, high modernist utopianism, and much of the "Enlightenment" project'?

Are you talking about social Darwinism?

That might be a subcategory of what I'm talking about, but not everyone goes as far into laissez-faire as they do (after all, we're social animals, and building cooperative communities is part of our extended phenotype).

What does it mean to "believe" in Darwinian evolution?

To actually take it seriously as something that matters in the world, including the present day; and not just treat it as a creation myth — something of the long, long ago — to serve as an alternative narrative to Genesis.

In slightly less broad terms, to recognize things like Darwinism meaning you can have telos without a (conscious) telos-giver (what makes an adaptation an adaptation?); or to reject the creationist-adjacent idea that evolution is always so "crude" and "random" that even the smallest amount of Intelligent Design will always do better (that's how you get High Modernism). Back in the last century, quite a lot of effort into AI was about trying to work out how to Intelligently Design a mind top-down, while others worked on more evolutionary, bottom-up methods like neural networks. Well, who proved more fruitful there? Or recognizing that there isn't one single "environment" to which creatures — or social institutions — adapt, but countless local ecosystems. Just as there's no "perfect bird" — only birds perfectly adapted to particular conditions in particular places — there is no single "ideal government," only governments ideal for a particular people, in a particular place, with a particular culture, at a particular time in history. (I seem to vaguely recall de Maistre having said something relevant to this point.)

It's about recognizing that the idea that some armchair "experts", with just a couple months of mental work, will necessarily "outdo" the products of evolution — whether that's the folks confident about vast enhancements without trade-off via genetic engineering, tankies who think that this time their socialist central planners will beat free markets, or Seeing Like a State-style High Modernist social engineers.

I mean, there are plenty of people who don't, disproportionately on the right.

This is so easy a dunk as to not be worth posting, but do you honestly think people on the left believe that Darwinian evolution applies to the human brain? I'm not seeing any major political faction which meaningfully believes in evolution.

See, you're already adding qualifiers like "meaningfully". For you to believe "meaningfully" seems to mean that you have to accept the conclusion that brains of different ethnicities have been subjected to divergent evolution enough to have significant impact on group capabilities.

I think "believe in" is the proper breakdown, as from Pratchett:

It’s hard to believe in the gods, he thought, when certain people are never struck by lightning. Why doesn’t it happen? If the gods wanted people to believe in them, they’d show themselves occasionally. That’s the whole point.

After all, you never needed faith in the postman. You just knew the postman would come, rain or shine, and deliver the mail. You didn’t have to believe in him. He was just there.

It was the same with the gods. They were just there, too, and you didn’t have to believe in them any more than you had to believe in the sky. You just knew they were there.

And if you didn’t believe in something, then it couldn’t help you.

By that standard, most biologists don't "believe in" evolution, it's simply there. My guess would be that someone who "believes in" Darwinian evolution uses it as a guiding principle and might do things like driving increased competition or having a lot of children. Or maybe a completely different set of beliefs. It's not like social movements stick close to their namesakes.

You just knew the postman would come, rain or shine, and deliver the mail. You didn’t have to believe in him. He was just there.

Yeah, until the Postal Service goes on strike. There are a lot of things we believe in without critically analyzing them, just because our beliefs are never challenged. But that doesn't mean they can't be.

And if you didn’t believe in something, then it couldn’t help you.

I love Pratchett, but he is making an exact opposite of the correct point here (which is fine because guess what, he's writing fantasy). The sky works the same whether you believe in it or not. You can believe the sky is totally fake, but it won't change any practical result - you can still fly an airplane, enjoy sunbathing and get wetted by the rain. However, I am not sure the concept of "evolution" is the same way. If you're a biologist and you accept it, would your actions and results be different than if you did not? The sky is the territory. The evolution is a map. It may be argued it is a great map - so be it, but it's still a map. You can choose to reject a certain map and use another one - with better results or worse, but you can. You can't "reject" a territory - you can ignore it, but that'd be still just a change of a map (to a much worse one).

Dark enlightenment / NrX / Moldbuggian Silicon Valley reactionary philosophy in general. More of a 2007-2017 thing though, even though Moldbug and Thiel are still somewhat influential.

Perhaps, but Moldbuggian solutions in particular seem, at least to me, more about making High Modernism more efficient — and cementing the power of technocratic Blue elites — through eliminating (the pretense of) democracy (and the Landian variety is anti-human).

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