So it appears I'm the last person in our little circle to read Orthodoxy...

[mc776]

On the one hand I finally start to understand what helarxe and the Dan were on about back in the early '00s.

On the other:

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."

What is the logic behind the jump from the first to the second? An "innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about" has always* been my understanding. What is the philosophic and cultural context I am missing here? The worst I can imagine evolution predicting is that every so often we will have trouble drawing the line between one sort of organism and another and at worst we have to draw a line somewhere and choose something arbitrary - I doubt, having read almost the rest of the book, that Chesterton would have such a crude understanding of the problem to strawman it like that, having not done the same with the chairness of any given chair or any matter of law.

*subject to a rather embarrassing eugenicist phase in my wasted youth, which has nothing to do with the sentiment Chesterton is describing here**

**...does it? D:


ED:

The best-publicised, and for some decades, the most popular (and simultaneously, most bitterly-reviled) view of this complex of issues was Richard Dawkins' gene-selection theory. Now, but Dawkins is arguably the best science writer since Peter Medawar, and he is a formidable thinker as well. His argument has a lot of merit, and he has honed and adjusted it in rational reaction to criticism. On the other side, group selection was not very competently presented, and not very cogently thought out. It did not fare well. For a considerable period it was reduced to pockets of resistance among the incompetent and inarticulate.

I exaggerate of course, but certainly the pendulum swung so far that it became quite difficult to find anything like balanced discussions of the theme. That was the good news.

The bad news was, as I saw it, was a confusion of concepts, but it is not my field and in any case I still do not have it properly thought out. It is a difficult conceptual field.

As I see it the key conceptual stumbling-block is in our difficulties in dealing with the concept of entity. That has been a pervasive, largely unrecognised and implicit trap for the unwary in every field of science that I can think of. In spite of the attitudes of exponents of fuzzy logic, that useful and ingenious discipline does not in itself solve the problem, though it certainly has scope for wider application and, I suspect, deeper and wider development. In Darwinism, ecology and related fields things are nearly as bad as they could get. The very concept of natural selection assumes a cogent concept of entity, and no such concept has been established. In fact, I have a nasty suspicion that part of the problem is that no one concept is sufficient for the requirements of this field, or, for that matter, many other fields. And what is more, I suspect that different mental toolkits would be necessary to deal with the concept of entity in say, Darwinism and quantum mechanics.

Part of Dawkins' argument that the gene was the only, or nearly the only, or at least far and away the most important, entity in Darwinism, he modified by an expanded view of the definition of a gene. He did so well and characteristically articulately, but I still think that he fell short.

In other words, stabbing versus kicking tires.


[2014-02-15 EDIT: Just over a year later I'm sitting here trying to imagine an example of a simple discourse about some biological observation or other that makes no use of any arbitrary classification terminology, maximally respecting the fluid nature of what goes on in living populations.

It is impossible to get anything done within a reasonable time. It is like building a watch and having to reinvent the wheel and lever each time a gear is placed.

Our best hope is what we do now, take reasonable steps to pull the bones apart by the joints and divide the meat based on the easiest parts to tear. At which point it is observed that the assumption that there is a roast beast on the table to do this to says a lot.

I'm hungry.]

Comments

[helarxe]

8D