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 -
I agree with the first half of your post mostly. For quite some time I've taken to saying "Law of Natural Selection" and "Theory of Evolution." You correctly explain that Natural Selection is tautological. But then you go on to use the phrase "Theory of Natural Selection" and criticize its consequences and adherents. Should I read this as "Law of Natural Selection" or "Theory of Evolution?"
It's true that as a tautology, Natural Selection is completely separate from evidence. Similarly, Peano Arithmetic (the mathematically smug way to say counting numbers) is a tautology, completely separate from evidence. It is only an empirical observation that apples and rocks and such obey the laws of arithmetic. That 2 applies placed next to 2 apples makes 4 apples. We could find out tomorrow that apples and rocks don't follow counting rules, but that should not shake our faith in counting rules: it just means reality works differently than intuition suggests. This is what happened when we discovered the cosmic speed limit and found that velocities do not combine using addition as we thought! Likewise, whether or not life on Earth was shaped by Natural Selection is simply an empirical matter, albeit not reproducible because we're talking about the past, so it's just guesswork.
As for what Natural Selection as a tautology explains, this gets into what I think the value of Darwin is. The second half of your post is completely incomprehensible to me - right about when you start to talk about "divine creation." Now i am not familiar with what people thought in 1800. I learned in school that Origin of Species was some kind of groundbreaking thing, and you seem to imply that when you say society worships Darwin. So, I am kind of guessing at the value of Natural Selection.
The value of Natural Selection is exactly that it is a tautology, that it so obviously dissolves the mystery of how you can bootstrap so much complexity in an organism without an intelligent designer. Without understanding Natural Selection, someone who knows the complexity of biology could quite reasonably hypothesize a kind of intelligent creator. If we tell him, "No that's silly, there's no God, it's simply tautological that complex creatures come from nothing" he would laugh at us! Imagine these exchanges:
They are silly! If evidence is how you show your work in empirical matters, then tautologies (math theorems) are how you show your work in logical matters. We can immediately see how obvious Natural Selection is, but it's not immediately obvious to me that we should say there is an intelligent designer, or why the fundamental constants are the way they are.
I do believe there's a confusion there because most people on this thread mix up Natural Selection and evolution as if they were the same thing. I'm aware that the term "Theory of Evolution" is used to speak about the current state of research on evolution, which is heavily influenced by Darwinism and neo-Darwinism, but I believe that there's really no "theory of evolution", just like there's no "theory of everything", there are different fields of scientific research that try to piece together evolution, but no true "theory of evolution" to speak of. Unless I'm wrong, but in any case I'm not opposed to the use of the term, I just find it confusing because it mixes several fields of knowledge and even contradicting theories of evolution. So when I speak about the Theory of Natural selection I mean just that, Darwin's theory of evolution, which is certainly the most popular but not the only one, and to me at least, not the best.
For me it's quite hard to see the value in a tautological explanation. I understand that the grounds for any human knowledge is a tautology such as A=A. But this is suffered as an arbitrary imposition by the constraints of human language, not taken literally as the "law" of anything. So to me it's quite strange seeing people defend a tautology as if it had any real value. I think you have to try really hard to find real value in a tautology, so I must, at least, salute the effort.
Now, everything is a tautology is you try hard enough as well, but there's no point to it. I'm not saying we should destroy all of human knowledge because of its tautological foundations. It's possible to start from a tautology and reach a non-tautological explanation, even if we must be aware that this explanation is only temporary because it can only be expressed in terms defined tautologically. For instance: A=A and B=B therefore A=/=B. On the other hand, Natural Selection cannot reach anything beyond what its tautological definition states.
You're right that there's no single "Theory of Evolution" - rather there is a "Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection" and also "Theory of Evolution by ..." and also... I call "Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection" just "Theory of Evolution" because I rarely hear anyone talk about the other theories.
And again, I'm afraid I don't understand the second half of your post about tautologies. How can you start from (only) a tautology and reach a non-tautological explanation? Your example with the math notation confused me too. Did you mean to give an example of an unsound implication? It seems to me that you're writing a lot of sentences, but I don't see any main idea in your post.
I feel like you didn't address my point about apples and velocity. Take a math equation that describes motion:
speed = distance / timeIsn't that tautological? Take the following claim: If I put 1 apple on a table and my friend puts 1 apple on the table, now there are 2 apples on the table because 1 + 1 = 2. Is there no value to these?Don't ask me but that's how it works. A=A is the root of all logic, so is all of logic a tautology? Maybe, from a certain point of view. All human knowledge is basically translating obvious statements into a systematic set of relations that allows us to communicate more precisely and build upon the observations of others. Math is the best example here, it basically explains nothing, but allows us to understand the world. Darwin's tautology on the other hand doesn't say anything beyond itself. The fact that all living beings survive should not be the explanation to evolution, but the starting point of any biological science.
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