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
Epistemology On innovation 11 Aug 201226 Aug 2012 [I’ll continue the congenital beliefs series soon. Also chocolatarianist political theory] [Late note: Stefano Ghirlanda has pointed me at two papers he has coauthored on just this topic. In one, published in PNAS, he and his colleagues investigate a model of cultural innovation. In another, as yet unpublished, they argue that “creativity… Read More
Freedom On the Gates arrest 26 Jul 200918 Sep 2017 I’m a long way away from this event which is taking up so much of the media’s attention in the States. So of course that means I have to say something about it. Read More
Book Grayling on Fuller 9 Sep 2008 I am presently reading Fuller’s Dissent over Descent, but here’s A. C. Grayling’s review in advance of mine. The money quote: The demerits of ID theory itself – so woeful as to be funny: in this world of ours, with so much failed experiment of life, so much repetition and… 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…