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 -
You are right, if we look hard enough we can find a tautology at the root of all human knowledge, but they are generally useful to study a share of reality. 2+2=4 may mean the same as 4=4, but by changing the terms you are providing new information: That this operation may be written differently. Pragmatically we can use this to explain many things. But when Darwin says that traits that favor the preservation of the species are preserved, no new information is gained. It describes an aspect of reality, but in terms that don't imply anything beyond themselves. Saying that everything that is red is not green accurately describes reality as well, but pragmatically fails at explaining anything.
If I introduce a species to a different environment than the one in which it evolved, what framework should I use to predict the sorts of changes most likely to occur across generations?
I could consider the traits of that species in light of how pleasing to god I think they are. Maybe slap together some hokey system of analysis based on Biblical zoological references and spend a couple decades losing arguments about it on the internet.
Or I could examine the selection pressures likely to be present in the new environment and make my predictions on the basis of natural selection. Which of these do you think is most likely to generate correct results?
Natural Selection is no basis to make such predictions, because it can only predict that what already exists will likely continue to exist, unless it doesn't exist anymore on which case it will cease to exist. Of course, if you take a shark out of the water it will die, we can predict that 100%. But do we need Darwin for that? And you know what, even if the shark didn't die, that would still "prove" natural selection...
What predictions we can make don't need Natural Selection, and those we can't make aren't explained by Natural Selection either.
So if we take a bunch of bacteria and keep exposing them to antibiotics on a consistent basis, there's no reason to worry that we might be creating resistant bacteria?
What if a species of critter that naturally occurs in two different colors gets loose in an environment full of predators that can only distinguish one of those colors well? You can't think of any way to predict what things are going to look like down the line? None at all, it's all just random to you?
Nonsense. Not only is natural selection a theory capable of generating predictions and thus not tautological, you haven't given us a reason to care if it is. Like that guy trying to tell us that the scientific method "rests on faith" last week, informing me that obviously true and useful things don't meet your arbitrary philosophical standards just tells me your philosophical standards shouldn't be terribly important to me.
You know, when people started using antibiotics they didn't really predict that bacteria would become resistant to it. And they had Darwin's theory by that time. But now that resistant bacteria exists, you tell me that's proof of Natural Selection? You see how it works? No matter what example you give me, Natural Selection will always be the correct explanation, because it is no explanation at all. If bacteria hadn't become resistant then you would tell me that it lacked the traits for its survival, and so on. That's not a prediction, that's hindsight.
As I've said, there are things that are random (as far as we know) in nature and things that aren't. Natural Selection explains all, which means it explains nothing because it cannot meaningfuly distinguish randon and non random events. Right now you would predict that if a human being ingests arsenic they would die, but what if this human had a benefitial trait that made him inmune to arsenic? Natural Selection cannot discriminate what outcome is more likely, you'd have to look at genetics and physiology, none of which have any need for the theory of Natural Selection.
Alexander Fleming (the guy who discovered the first antibiotic and got the Nobel Prize for it) talked about bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics already in 1945 in his Nobel Prize lecture. It seems he had done it in his lab, and presumably because he knew about Darwin he had a really clear idea about the mechanism behind it.
What comes to natural selection, the idea of selection was old at the time of Darwin. You select the trees that produce the sweetest fruit or the animals that have the most desirable features, and then you breed them to get new trees and animals that have more of what you like. The new idea was that nature, that is the environment around the organisms, could perform the selection, hence natural selection. You can put a bunch of cats on an island with a freezing climate and expect that the short haired ones will die off and the long haired ones will flourish and multiply, or alternatively you can expect that God's providence will allow all of them to prosper equally. Which one do you think will turn out?
Fleming mentioned that AFTER bacteria started becoming resistant to antibiotics, which had already happened by 1945. Not to the scale it happens now, but enough to be observed. Again, not a prediction.
Before Darwin people thought God was nature, and they belived He perfomed his own "selection" of living beings. How does this differ from Darwin's explanation? You'd say that God is an intelligent subject and nature isn't, but in any case God's intelligence is unintelligible to humans, so in practical terms is the same. People didn't think everything propsers equally.
Yes, and...? It seems that it was never a great mystery what mechanism leads to bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics, because scientists understood Darwinian natural selection. They knew how resistance happened, and with that knowledge they knew how to make it happen or how to prevent it from happening. If they had believed that God is making the bacteria resistant to antibiotics, or God is making the antibiotic less effective, they could have maybe tried praying, and then give up when it didn't work. It's like Richard Dawkins said: "It works, bitches!"
You seem to be saying that when all evidence in the universe confirms a theory, that makes it a tautology, but that actually just makes it true and correct. It's like you would go through every household item and drop it, and complain that you can't find a single example where the item doesn't fall down, so therefore Newton's theory of gravity is a tautology. You could try reversing antibiotic resistance by praying to God. If you succeeded then you would have disproved natural selection. If you don't succeed it just means that prayer doesn't work, but Darwinian natural selection does. It could be psychologically uncomfortable for you, but that's just reality, what can you do?
Do you have a source for this? I thought God made living beings on the sixth day and concluded that they were good and needed no further tweaking.
I think you still don't understand what a tautology is. All evidence in the known universe points at the fact that every red car is not green. Is that statement true and correct? Well yes, if that's what you wanna call it why not. But it's also dumb and useless, unless you want to use it as an example in a logic lecture. There's this common trend on this thread, where people mention Newton for the dullest of examples. For the hundreth time no, Newton did not discover that things fall down when you drop them. But Newton is a good example of a scientific theory that is not tautologic, so you can look that up.
You also seem to have quite a childish idea of religion, where religion = dumb. I guess it's because you like Richard Dawkins, or as I like to call him, Dick Dorkins. No, people didn't believe that praying was a solution to everything, the Angelic Doctor didn't wrote his Summa Theologica exploring the relation between faith and reason just to conclude that reason = big bad. I mean, there have been people who believed that but they still exist today, so being dumb has nothing to do with being religious. Furthermore, there are plenty of biologists and scientists who are religious, I'd say that most have been. For instance, Mendel was a catholic monk, but did he just sit down and pray waiting for the tastiest peas known to man to magically appear? Absolutely not, he went and invented genetics, the absolute madman.
And yes of course, I do have sources for that. It's not a polemic claim at all, there's nothing incompatible between the idea of evolution and creationism. For instance:
Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-before-darwin/#MediRevi
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