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Notes -
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'?
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.
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