A quote 31 Oct 2007 From J. B. S. Haldane’s 1932 The Causes of Evolution: … I must … discuss a fallacy which is, I think, latent in most Darwinian arguments, and which has been responsible for a good deal of poisonous nonsense which has been written on ethics in Darwin’s name, especially in Germany before the [first world] war and in America and England since. The fallacy is that natural selection will always make an organism fitter in its struggle for the environment. This is clearly true when we consider members of a rare and scattered species. It is only engaged in competing with other species, and in defending itself against inorganic nature. But as soon as a species becomes fairly dense matters are entirely different. Its members inevitably begin to compete with one another. I am not thinking only of the active and often conscious competition between higher animals, but also of the struggle for mere space which goes on between neighbouring plants of closely packed associations. … [p119] Evolution Race and politics Social evolution
Evolution The evolution of the nervous system 19 Sep 2009 Nature Reviews Neuroscience has a special issue out on the evolution of the nervous system. Good for them as has access… Read More
Evolution What was Darwin’s Origin actually called 29 Jul 201827 Feb 2019 So, I got caught parroting half-remembered factoids, to Down House no less, that the Origin dropped the “On” from the start of the title with the fourth edition. In my defence, I was making use of Darwin Online, the Cambridge University site that collates all of Darwin’s publications and a whole… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity New paper on polyploid speciation 27 Aug 2009 For a long time now, people have known of speciation by the multiplication of chromosomes (polyploidy), either of one’s own chromosomes (autopolyploidy) or by doubling a mismatched set from some other species’ chromosomes (allopolyploidy) to even up the numbers and gene complements. Some have thought this to be an uninteresting… Read More
Several points. One is that leading evolutionary theorists were attacking eugenics before the second world war. Another is that so-called adaptationists were not always keen to draw moral conclusions about superiority of variants and took into account the role of non-ecological selection. Later in the same book, Haldane allows that Kropotkin’s “mutual cooperation” is also a factor in evolution. Given the myth of some that neo-Darwinism, so-called, was always a moral claim, that only survival matters, and so on. Think of it as a signpost along the way…