The Good of Eliminating Progress
by Jared* on April 29th, 2006It seems that, to many, one of the most offensive parts of evolutionary theory is that it does not contain–or actually disavowes–any sense of progress that makes humans the triumphant result. Of course this is because it clashes with religious beliefs that humans were the intended and crowning creation of God. Yet I think it is something to be grateful for, as I will explain in a moment.
Perhaps the primary reason for denying any sense of progress is that none is detectable without overlaying the data with unverifiable assumptions. When the fossil record is examined with its large parade of life-forms that have come and gone over enormous expanses of time, how can we say with any certainty (leaving religion aside) that we, or any other life-form, were the intended outcome? How do we know that we are not just precursors to other life-forms to come? Without appeals to religion such questions are unanswerable. In the popular literature some scientists debate whether something like us would inevitably turn up sooner or later. Such arguments are interesting but nothing more than intellectual gymnastics for now. (I’ve discussed before that these types of issues are a problem for any kind of historical study and for other branches of science. He specifically denied it was the case, but hypothetically speaking, if Pres. Hinckley said that hurricane Katrina was sent by God to destroy New Orleans, no objective evidence could be marshalled to discount that the destruction of New Orleans was just a chance–though not unlikely–event.)
In the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, the idea that evolution entailed some kind of progress did exist. I don’t think such views had any kind of cosmic destination in mind, but ideas put forth by Darwin mixed with those of Lamark served as a basis for a sense of human progress through evolution. These ideas were used to justify such ugly things as racism (including German superiority), downtrodding the poor, eugenics, and even war. This, in turn, fueled William Jennings Bryan’s opposition to evolution which culminated in the Scopes Monkey Trial. When the notion is adopted that human progress occurs by biologic means, it is an easy step to conclude that some groups of people should be perpetuated and others should not.
A sense of progress can also have consequences on the environment. Afterall, worrying about this or that endangered species can be viewed as an impediment to a kind of human manifest destiny. Using a sense of unfolding purpose in evolution, some may conclude that the inability of various life-forms to persist in the face of human expansion is “nature’s way.” I remember a conservative political commentator once ridiculing environmental advocates as being in conflict with evolutionary principles–as though extinction is part of evolution’s “divine” plan.
So I, for one, am glad that evolutionary theory has divested itself of any sense of unfolding progress. Aside from being unverifiable from a scientific standpoint, it is easily used to justify brutal treatment of other people as well as the rest of nature. The sciences describe the world; they do not tell us how the world ought to be.
I think that a lot of the idea concerning progress had to do with Hegelian philosophy. It was a common belief, especially among religious believers, that the course of history (human, not evolutionary) was one great march toward German Lutheranism. The parallels between this and evolution being guided to humans should be obvious. This, I think, accounts for some, though not all, of the differnce between the purposelessness of evolution and that of Newtonian physics over Aristotelian physics.
The sciences describe the world; they do not tell us how the world ought to be.
This is an interesting comment, and one I want to support, but something about it doesn’t sit with me. I want to be dispassionate about the data I produce, but at some point I think my scientific conclusions have to influence my “human” decisions. I understand what you mean that the sciences–the data, the conclusions–don’t directly dictate how people behave, but is that like saying that a gun doesn’t directly kill someone, it’s the bullet? Help me out here.
BrianJ,
Thanks for the comment. Maybe more like the gun is not responsible, it’s the person who pulls the trigger. I’m not arguing that science should not influence our decisions. Indeed, what is the point of doing science if we don’t plan on using anything we learn? But I think we need to recognize that we bring in value judgments from elsewhere also including religion, politics, and culture.
We would all prefer a world without genetic disease. Sterilizing all people deemed unfit is one way of moving in that direction, but one that most people would find repugnant. Science tells us what genetic disease are, why they exist, and hopefully ways to deal with them. How we implement that information will depend on our values.
My point here is that the world, to some extent, is what we make of it. Consider this passage from The Selfish Gene:
“This brings me to the first point I want to make about what this book is not. I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. … If you wish to extract a moral from it, read it as a warning. Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.”
Anyway, that’s a long response to your comment that basically agreed with me.
Jared, that quote from Richard Dawkins is very interesting - it is an implicit denial of strong reductionist naturalism and an explicit denial of biological determinism.
Just how is it that our desires override our genetic inclinations? What is the origin of the freedom to be anything other than the product of our genes and our environment. Or in more conventional terms do we have a soul? Or some sort of libertarian free will? The type of teleological discretion that might actually make the history of humanity something other than a typecast example of neo-Darwinist evolution? Or our desires, our decisions, and our will merely epiphenomena that we give lip service to in the preface of books, and preach against the rest of the time?
Mark,
I’m not sure what you’re looking for here. Are you trying to get me to defend Dawkins’ atheism? I’m not going to. However, I haven’t read all of his books, but I’m not sure you are characterizing him correctly. Consider this quote from an interview:
“I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will. Indeed, I encourage people all the time to do it. Much of the message of my first book, “The Selfish Gene,” was that we must understand what it means to be a gene machine, what it means to be programmed by genes, so that we are better equipped to escape, so that we are better equipped to use our big brains, use our conscience intelligence, to depart from the dictates of the selfish genes and to build for ourselves a new kind of life which as far as I am concerned the more un-Darwinian it is the better, because the Darwinian world in which our ancestors were selected is a very unpleasant world. Nature really is red in tooth and claw. And when we sit down together to argue out and discuss and decide upon how we want to run our societies, I think we should hold up Darwinism as an awful warning for how we should not organize our societies.”
There is more–see especially the beginning and the end of the interview.
Jared,
“what is the point of doing science if we don’t plan on using anything we learn?”
Yeah, I certainly hope that some of my work is actually useful.
Thanks for the clarification of your point. I see now that we agree. It is difficult as a scientist, however, to conduct science without a moral spin. The reason is that we are always asking for funding, so we have to put a value on our proposed research.
Jared, my point is that Richard Dawkins is advocating a position that is not consistent with the metaphysical constraints of Neo-Darwinist dogma. A free will that can override both genetic and environmental influences, one that can debate and actually implement a future that is other than what is dictated by past conditions is a working definition of libertarian free will (LFW).
Remember the key proposition of LFW is that the past might have been otherwise. So several generations from now, if we look back and see that our decisions actually averted a more unpleasant future, rather than being mere epiphenomena of an unavoidable trajectory that we only had the illusion of being able to affect, then the defining principle of LFW is correct, Neo-Darwinist anti-teleological dogma is incorrect, and the rhetorical superstructure of the critics of Intelligent Design will have failed.
Dawkins cannot have it both ways.
Jeff (#1), I don’t think it is just a Hegelian thing. Certainly it was a fairly common belief in the US independent of Hegel. Take Peirce for whom Darwinism was very influential. Yet Peirce thought Hegel was seriously flawed. Also the notion of purpose and direction is argued by many to have arisen with the confluence of Greek and Christian thought. Indeed it was out of that mixing of ideas that our modern notions of time arose which include within them a kind of direction. So I suspect Augustine is much more influential here than Hegel. What’s more interesting isn’t the question of why we see direction but why we’ve come to abandon that view.
I’d add though that while we discount direction in evolution, that’s not entirely true anymore than thermodynamics doesn’t have a direction. It just doesn’t have an essential value to the direction.
Just to add, Peirce’s conception of evolution is rather interesting. I discuss it briefly in connection to Tomasello’s conception of social evolution and tool use. (Down in the comments)
As I have mentioned before, the time direction of the second law of thermodynamics is a function of missing information in the model concerned - in other words it is artificact of our perception of time, not a natural law. If we perceived time in reverse, the second law would operate in reverse as well. The only difference between the two directions is which boundary condition we start with the most information about. Naturally we know more about the “present” than the “future” regardless of which time direction we are moving in.
The real mystery is the high information state we find ourselves in today, a circumstance unexplainable from all known natural laws, all of which either preserve Shannon information or destroy it.
Mark, I think there is more significance to the second law and the arrow of time that you suggest.
Clark, I agree that there are certainly several related puzzles - my position is that no one (yet) has much of a basis to explain them as consequences of fundamental laws of nature.
The only known basis for the second law of thermodynamics is information theory, a theory that only admits a necessary direction in time due to phenomenological considerations (which is no small thing).
Any sort of model-independent time asymmetry has to be explained from some other principle. My preference is for information creation by LFW agents on a grand scale, but I would love to hear other ideas. Are there any out there?