Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake.
Our modern society is in love with Darwin. Our ideas about nature, evolution, society and ourselves have been shaped by this man. It seems like every reasonable person in the world agrees that Darwin’s theory is correct and useful. Darwin’s theory aims at explaining how species evolve and become new species through the means of what he called “Natural Selection”, which was defined by him as follows: “This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection”. In other words, traits that benefit the individual tend to be preserved over time, while injurious traits tend to disappear. Traits that are not beneficial or detrimental are not affected by Natural Selection.
The accusation that this definition is tautological is nothing new and is well known, but it is generally ignored. A tautology is a statement that is true in every possible case. For instance, a statement like “The car is red because it’s not green” can’t be false because everything that is red is, by definition, not green. This statement is true but it’s useless as an explanation because it doesn’t give any information other than what is implied by its terms. Darwin’s critics accuse him of crafting a tautological statement because in his definition “favourable” or “beneficial” traits are defined as those that are preserved, and traits that are preserved are of course those that are favourable or beneficial. In other words, what Darwin says is that traits that are preserved are preserved. For instance: A Darwinist would say that human thumbs exist because they provide an advantage for the survivability of the species, so humans with thumbs have always been more successful at being alive and passing on their genes than human species without them. But if humans had no thumbs we could make the exact same argument, mutatis mutandis. Because of course what already exists has a higher chance of continuing to exist than things that no longer exist or that have never existed. Another example: Individuals who are born with healthy reproductive organs are more likely to pass on their genes than individuals who are born infertile. In both cases we can see “natural selection” in action. Both “explanations” are obviously true, but they are tautological, they don’t add any new information.
So the theory of Natural Selection explains nothing, and while scientists and biologists may admire Darwin and “believe” in Natural Selection, especially in opposition to creationist explanations, the truth is that Darwin’s book On The Origin of Species is an artifact of the past and university curriculums hardly devote any time to it. If people were to suddenly forget all about Darwin our understanding of evolution would remain roughly the same - although we would lose his contributions in other fields. Nowadays people seem to think that “evolution” and “natural selection” are synonyms but that’s not true at all. Evolution wasn’t a new concept to educated people back in the XIXth century, and everyone grasped the concept of heritability. So why was it so important, or why was it considered important, and why did it cause such a revolution in our understanding of nature? The answer is: Because of the concept of struggle for existence. People have always known that animals and humans change throughout the generations, but Darwin’s theory asserted that everything in nature, both animal and human, is determined by a struggle for scarce resources, that is, by an economic problem. Again, this is something that everyone who has felt hunger or desire to reproduce has understood to some degree, but before Darwin nature was much more than simply being alive and reproducing yourself. It was a divine creation, it had meaning, it had truth, it spoke in a rich language understandable to humans. Darwin’s theory made this language unintelligible, because it showed that an economic mindset was enough to understand nature for the purpose of fulfilling our needs. If a car is red, we don’t need to know the owner’s preferences or the manufacturer’s motivations in order to know that it is not green, and this knowledge is enough to use it. The fact that humankind descends from apes was polemic only because it showed that humans and apes have the same needs and aspirations, even if they had different evolutionary strategies to acquire them. But this is the conscious part, the part that everyone acknowledges. There’s also an unconscious consequence of the theory of natural selection: That nothing exists outside the struggle for existence.
This last idea is what makes Darwin’s theory so apt for the modern world. Science can overcome Darwin, modern society seemingly cannot. And even though biologists don’t pay much attention to him, Darwin is still quite popular in politics, philosophy, and social sciences. Because if there’s something at which modern society is particularly good, it’s at providing the means for existence and reproduction. So a theory of nature that asserts that this is all there is to it it’s bound to be popular, because it justifies the current state of affairs and exalts it as the best possible outcome of a long evolution towards an efficient society. All other possible alternatives are overcomed, and any possible development can only follow its example. Politically, liberals love it because it justifies and naturalizes their belief in the free market, and marxists love it because it promises future and exciting developments when men conquer the course of the evolution of their species with their own hands. Philosophically it solves the problem of how living creatures were created out of lifeless things, and it solves it in such a way that is comprehensible for human cognition. But the most peculiar development comes from the social sciences. First, came the social Darwinists who tried to apply the principle of survival of the fittest quite literally, but after WWII this became impossible for political reasons. We now have evolutionary psychology, a field that instead of trying to control human behavior creates a mythology around it, providing panglossian theories for human behavior that explain nothing and are therefore impossible to prove or disprove, but that provide a common ground between the general public and solicitors, drivelers, quacks, pickup artists - in a world, charlatans of all kinds. Everybody wants the secret to “hack” human behavior. There’s a particular internet subculture of men who are frustrated with modern society and with the changes in gender roles, and who look in evolutionary psychology for mating strategies to end their loneliness, believing that the atavistic caves where man supposedly learned to be man are like the rooms in which they spend most of their lives, without realizing that it is the selfishness of modern society that created this idea of the primitive caveman and that erodes human connections by reducing them to a mere survival strategy.
But it is clear that man became man not by surviving or by conquering the means to preserve and reproduce himself, but by the conquest of the unnecessary. As Gaston Bachelard(1) puts it: “Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of necessity”. Furthermore, there’s no evidence for the existence of a “survival instinct” anywhere in nature. We believe ourselves to be smarter than animals because they risk their lives in pointless endeavors, they are mostly unable to plan ahead and to cooperate for their survival as we do. But who said they needed to? If everything life needed is to survive, then asexual organisms would be the pinnacle of evolution, everything that has come after it is useless and inferior by this standard. While it is true that a struggle is necessary to exist, if existence were its only goal, if one could not risk even existence itself in exchange of something else, this struggle would be meaningless. Sexual reproduction is an example of a struggle where individual existence is put into question, because it bridges the gap between two individuals and creates something new. It is luxurious and exuberant, as life itself. This is something that has always been quite clear for humans since the dawn of time, but that seems incomprehensible now. Biology can progress through Darwinism but only by obscuring the mystery of life, turning it into something miserable and petty, like human economy. This progress is nothing but a change of perspective, focusing one thing and ignoring another. But as all perspectives are, in principle, equally valid, it’s only desire what moves us towards something else and something better than our trivial everyday existence and its meaningless struggles. Is it not, as Georges Bataille puts it, the tiger’s fruitlessness what makes it the king of the jungle? By predating on other animals, that eat other animals, that eat plants, and so on, the tiger splurges a huge amount of the jungle’s resources. Some would say that it serves the purpose of maintaining the balance of the ecosystem, but couldn’t this balance be imposed by the tiger itself? Its existence would then be more than a struggle for existence, it would be a struggle to impose its own norm, its own will, its right to splurge. This struggle would be unintelligible without the base of mere existence, because individual existence imposes a period of activity and silence, a discrete grammar for the tiger’s individuality to express itself, but the meaning of the tiger’s behavior can only be confused with its grammar by a fool. The tiger itself is but an echo of something infinite.
(1)Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire.
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Notes -
Feels like this theory of yours says too much. Like anything with a self filter is supposedly a tautology.
At most you have just managed to convince me that tautologies are fine.
What do you mean by self filter? I believe I've only claimed that Darwin's theory is a tautology. For the rest, depends on what you mean by "fine". Should we burn Darwin's books? I guess not. Should we continue believing that the theory of Natural Selection has any explanatory value? Definitely not.
How would you alternatively define evolution and natural selection so that it has explanatory value?
I am perhaps confused on how it's a tautology in the first place.
The traits that species have they will tend to have because those traits are beneficial to their survival and reproduction. That is because survival and reproduction are filters on the possible types of living things that can exist. That seems to have explanatory value. Especially in comparison to the alternative explanation which was "God did it".
I don't need any alternative definition of evolution because Natural Selection is not a definition of evolution. Natural Selection is, supposedly, the mechanism that explains evolution. So evolution is just that, there's nothing tautological about its definition. I don't see any way of defining Natural Selection that would make it non-tautological, and thus this post. I don't offer any alternative explanation for evolution either.
Survival and reproduction are filters but have no explanatory value because every living creature survives and reproduces itself, or dies. That's the definition of being alive: Surviving and reproducing. So when we say that a living creature has a trait that's benefitial for its survival and reproduction, what we are really saying is that a living creature is alive because it has the means to be alive. There are filters that are not tautological. For instance, recessive genes are so called because they have a lower probability of passing a specific phenotype from the parents to the offspring. This allows us to understand why some traits are expressed and other aren't by acquiring new information: Genetics.
That kind of feels like saying Newton's discovery of gravity was useless because we already knew things fell to Earth.
You seem to vary between saying Natural selection is a useless thing to know, and blindingly obvious and thus says nothing.
I'd say its blindingly obvious NOW. But Darwin was answering a real question that people had in his time:
Why are there different species everywhere? Why isn't it just the same kind copied and pasted everywhere? That is why the book was called On The Origin of Species.
The idea of a branching tree of life was new. The idea that simple selection pressures for survival in the environment could eventually lead one species to become two was new. The idea that we might all be descended from one shared species was new.
And natural selection is the base answer to "why" of all species traits. If you've ever had a pedantic young kid repeatedly asking "why" then you know what I mean by a base answer.
Why do fish have fins?
So they can swim better.
Why do fish need to swim better?
So they can catch prey, or escape from predators.
Why do they want to escape from predators?
Because they want to live and not be eaten.
Why?
Because if they didn't want to live and be eaten they would have succumbed and they wouldn't be around.
I alluded to it earlier, but the previous "base" answer for all such questions was "god did it". And in other branches of science people chase those "theory of everything" type answers. Physics does not currently have such an answer. You can keep asking "why" in physics and eventually you wind up with "thats just how it is" which is the equivalent of "god did it".
I think you are confusing the "base" answer with a tautology.
I also disagree with some of the other posters and yourself in here that say Natural Selection is something that life would always have. You just aren't thinking outside the box enough. There is a literary genre called LITRPG where main characters are often sucked into video game universes. In those places life often doesnt follow natural selection. It is instead the whims of the gods or the system administrators that determine what creatures exist, and what traits those creatures have. The bible has a specific story (Noah's Ark) that suggests that all the creatures on Earth were picked by God/Noah and that is the only reason they are still around. That isn't natural selection, its god selection. And that is what many people believed.
It's funny because nowhere in the book does Darwin explain what a species is or how is it originated, but more to the point, Carl Linnaeus would like an amicable word with you, because you seem to ignore the fact that a century before Darwin people were already talking about "A branching Tree of Life". Hell, even Aristotle understood the concept and studied the "Tree of life" of the isle of Lesbos. I won't bother to prove that the rest wasn't new either. What was new, and I'm getting tired of repeating it, is the idea that nature was bound by XIXth century England's economic principles. Why are different species everywhere? I actually don't know, but I do know that Natural Selection explains nothing, because it only says that diverse species exist and copy-pasted species don't. But in fact both exist, and that also proves Natural Selection right. This is both obvious and useless, because it provides no new knowledge. The fact that you ignore history doesn't mean that what's obvious now wasn't obvious before. England's XIXth century ideas weren't obvious, and England's navy, without which Darwin wouldn't have been able to gather evidence from all around the world, was not useless either.
For the rest, when other people and I say that Natural Selection is an inherent trait of life, we mean to say that it is so only in possible universes. This is of course an arbitrary limitation because we don't actually know for sure what's ultimately possible and impossible, but such arbitrary limits are necessary to have any sort of meaningful conversation, since I can make up an universe where up means down and down means soup and nothing makes sense and you would understand nothing of what I'm saying. So of course you can make up an universe in your mind where Darwinism isn't tautological, but that doesn't prove anything.
And you know, you could take any biology book and change "Natural Selection" by "God" and nothing would change, the meaning of the text would remain the same. The difference being that Natural Selection is a tautology, while God is simply unknowable. Both explain nothing but one is more clever than the other.
Popularizing / synthesizing was an important part of intellectual work back in the day. Just because other scholars knew about it, or had even written works on it doesn't mean it was widely accepted. I think if I remember correctly Darwin published earlier than he planned because he thought someone else would beat him to the punch. Carl Linnaeus' wikipedia mostly says he did taxidermy, I don't see anything about natural selection or evolution. The wikipedia on Aristotle says he believed in Teleology as an explanation for why there were different species. Its not clear to me that the greeks even knew of the problem, because they didn't have the aristocratic nerds out there collecting beetles, fossils, and weird taxidermied animals.
I mean I guess if you just want to focus on chapter 4 of his book, and ignore the other 13 chapters, then yeah its a shit theory at explaining how new species come about. But he wrote a book to explain the process of speciation, and Natural Selection is only part of that book.
The book barely contains any economics. Its mostly a dry description of a bunch of animals, interspersed with what is now middle school biology. Darwin was among (and was himself) nerdy beetle collectors and taxidermy enthusiasts. Not economists with an agenda. If they had wanted to do economics, they could have just done that instead. There were plenty of contemporaries debating economics at the time.
You say that, but I don't think you realize how whacky some of the ideas people had about our planet were. Aristotle that you mentioned earlier was responding to a contemporary of his when he talked about different species. His contemporary thought animals just randomly formed out of fire and air, and the ones with good bodies just survived. While all the weird "monsters" died out.
Step 1 was figuring out if we were in the whacky god-controlled universe, or in a physics and rule based universe. And that was a live debate at the time that Darwin was writing his stuff. You are basically just writing off the whole importance of that debate at the time and giving the win to Darwin. And then you assign all the arguing in the actual debate to just being a proxy debate about something else. Its like a weird conspiracy theory mixed with alternate history.
You can't though. Quite a bit about the biology textbook changes. Creatures survive because god says so is significantly different than "creatures survive because they can reproduce and survive in the environments where they live". And the idea that creatures survive because god creates a specific role/niche for them to survive and coordinates the whole ecosystem like a great puppetmaker or watchmaker was specifically the idea that Darwin was arguing against. Others in the thread have pointed out multiple predictions made by "natural selection". I'm not gonna bother, Darwin won the debate over 150 years ago as far as I'm concerned. He and his cabbal of nerdy beetle collectors and dead animal stuffers.
Lol, that's cute. You meant to say TAXONOMY not taxidermy. Of course neither Linnaeus nor Aristotle spoke about evolution or natural selection, I never said they did. I said they knew about the branching tree of life, because that's what taxonomy is. But don't worry, there are also a bunch of people who spoke about the evolution of species before Darwin. Would you like me to list them? And just so you know, Aristotle was a huge nerd and spent his free time studying and collecting mussels in the Mediterranean.
And yes, I'm only criticizing Darwin for his theory of Natural Selection.
You know, there's really no proof that we don't live in the whacky god-controlled universe, so the discussion is not over. I'm noy saying Darwin had an economic agenda, but the implications of his theory are economic. That's why I said that there were conscious and unconscious consequences for Darwin's theory.
You say:
And why is that? Well, because of Natural Selection of course! Now change Natural Selection for "God", and how does that change anything? If this is a popularity contest then yes, Darwin is winning by a landslide. But Darwin wasn't arguing against the idea of a watchmaker God, that was Dorkins. Darwin was agnostic, and never meant to refute the idea of God. I honestly don't care about winning any debates here, who cares if I'm right and some XIXth century fella was wrong.
Don't do this. Its a very annoying thing to do in a conversation.
Pretty sure I meant meant taxidermy. But the difference is trivial. They were a bunch of weird nerds that shared around stuffed animals. The taxidermy is what allowed Taxonomy to advance at the time. Its a lot easier to do taxonomy if you can look at a bunch of taxidermied specimens right next to each other. So the guy that advanced taxonomy did it via taxidermy. Seems accurate to say he did either thing.
Imagine how much more he might have learned if he was surrounded by a leisure class aristocracy interested in "natural studies". Alas, not our timeline.
I'll reiterate that I think this is strange because its one part of a larger text he wrote on the Origin of Species.
There is a difference in saying "because of [symbol without a defined meaning]" and saying "because of [symbol with concrete definition]". I think you are kind of equivocating between the two.
Sort of like the difference between a cop answering why they pulled someone over with "because they were driving 15mph over the speed limit" and "because they looked suspicious".
Natural selection adds more evidence to the "god didn't do it" pile.
Pretty sure this has gone in circles. I'll read any response you post to this specific comment, but I think I'm done with the conversation and won't respond here anymore.
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