For those who did not read Andrew's comment to the previous blog post (Darwin article from The Economist), here it is.
Well, that last paragraph is certainly out of nowhere. Weird that the article is called "Unfinished Business," when the author thinks we are ready to "halt ... natural selection in its tracks," whatever that could possibly mean.
I also don't see how the discovery of new restrictions on the directions evolution may take makes it any less materialist or any more purposeful of a process. I guess I don't really get what the point of this article was supposed to be, other than a broad history of Darwinism, with the field of economics loosely associated with it a couple of times.- Andrew
Mon Mar 16, 06:30:00 PM
I understand the gist of the objection, but not the specifics. The "unfinished business" part relates directly to taking Darwin beyond the merely material (although not random, all evolutionary explanations to date deal with strictly material outcomes). I think the unexplained appreciation of beauty is the example used. The thrust of this article (and others) on the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth is that understanding the evolutionary process and its mechanisms may allow us to either remove ourselves from that process, or make more deliberate use of the process. Whether either of these approaches is desirable is another conversation entirely.
Of course, the point of the article was to provide a broad overview of Darwin's thought and how others have used that to move to the next logical steps through further observation. And to note the continuing fear and fight reactions that Darwin's conclusions still cause. This is an article aimed at those with very limited understanding of the evolutionary process and what that really entails. People such as moi.
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Yeah, but the thing is there's nothing else anywhere in the article to suggest that we have any control over evolution whatsoever. I don't know where he is pulling that from. Understanding a complex natural phenomenon does not allow us to put a stop to it or even necessarily control it. Look at weather, or gravity. Natural selection continues to happen as long as a species lives and procreates in an environment, and the only way to affect its outcome (and even this gives unpredictable results) is to select which members get to survive, based on some intentional design. Applied to humans, this idea is called genocide.
There has been some interesting work done regarding the evolution of human epiphenomena which are not strictly biologically based, such as language and culture, but this guy doesn't really have anything to say about that, beyond mentioning its existence in one sentence just before the crazy last paragraph. Even the stuff about economics taking account of Darwinian evolution is based on genetically hard-wired behavioural tendencies, rather than memetically learned traits of a cultural environment.
I take "Unfinished Business" to refer to the fact that we are still evolving, which is why I find the last paragraph so confusing and misguided. As an introduction to evolution, this article is sloppy and at times downright misleading. (And I know you've read Darwin's Dangerous Idea, so you can't claim to be a complete naïf on the subject.) If you're interested in how genetic evolution has shaped human behaviour in particular, Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape is a far more informative and compelling read.
- Andrew
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