If we are speaking of equality, we might ask equality of what? Economic Equality? Political Equality? Spiritual Equality? I suppose, even if we narrow things to Economic Equality, we might ask whether it is equality of opportunity or equality of income which should concern us. However if we are speaking of Darwin's theory of Evolution, we can't ask what sort of Evolution we are talking about. Darwin was a biologist. He was talking about the evolution of the various species people could see around the world. His thesis was that species compete with each other for scarce resources in the same way that people compete with each other. Those who are more productive, efficient, or 'robust' in the sense of being able to tolerate adversity, prevail. We may say that 'the fittest survive'. The world is like an obstacle course where some species fail and go extinct while others burgeon. In this context 'fitness' means navigating the 'fitness landscape' and reproducing. Any species which is flourishing is fit enough for its landscape- unless some competitor (e.g. an invasive species) suddenly turns up. This does not mean we can't imagine a species which is even more fit- e.g. a race of Supermen who can fly and who are invulnerable to bullets- its just that which is imaginary doesn't really compete with that which actually exists.
Amartya Sen does not understand this. Some 30 years ago he wrote in the LRB
On the Darwinian View of Progress
Darwin saw that economic competition had resulted in his country progressing greatly. It had become the richest country in the world. Its Navy ruled the waves. It had a vast and growing Empire. The reason for this was its superior efficiency, productivity and adaptability. His race was flourishing in Australia and Canada. It ruled a large chunk of South Asia. Sooner or later, it would take over vast territories in darkest Africa.
Darwin was saying that certain species- including the one to which he belonged- had progressively taken over more and more terrain while other species- e.g. the Mauritian dodo- had gone extinct. This was progress, from the point of view of the species which survived and expanded. As for the point of view of the losers- they simply didn't exist because they had gone extinct. Thus Darwin's theory was objective, not subjective. It was positive or alethic, not normative or subjective.
It is now a century and a third, almost exactly, since the publication in 1859 of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. In this period the view of evolutionary progress introduced by Darwin has radically altered the way we think about ourselves and the world in which we live.
It would be fairer to say that Darwin reflected the spirit of his age rather than that he caused it to change very radically.
There are very few events in the history of ideas that can be compared in terms of power, reach and impact with the emergence of the Darwinian analysis of progress through evolution.
Progress had already occurred. More powerful than Darwin was the notion that God was an Englishman or that Providence or 'Manifest Destiny' had specially favoured the Anglo Saxon race. Darwinian ideas suggested that Indians, being sheltered from war by Pax Britannica, would degenerate and become more incapable of ruling themselves even if they belonged to 'martial races'. One result of the spread of Darwin's 'dangerous idea', along with those of Herbert Spencer, was that Indian intellectuals turned away from Religion and, in Bengal and Maharashtra, embraced muscular nationalism. Evangelical Christianity took a big hit. Darwin was compatible with karma but not bodily resurrection.
There are, however, several distinct components in the Darwinian understanding of evolutionary progress,
There is no notion of 'evolutionary progress'. There is adaptation to a changing fitness landscape but no 'telos' or arrow to evolution. It isn't the case that man will give way to the Superman and the Superman will give way to whatever shite it was that Aurobindo believed in. Abhijit Guha would point out Sen's errors shortly after this essay was published.
and it is possible that the profundity of some of the elements may make us less conscious of the dubious nature of others. In particular, Darwin’s general idea of progress – on which his notion of evolutionary progress is dependent – can have the effect of misdirecting our attention, in ways that are crucial in the contemporary world.
This is nonsense. Darwin's generation had seen great progress in science and commerce. But Darwin was aware that mankind had stagnated or degenerated in many parts of the world. The Whites would not necessarily replace the stupid darkies- not to mention the feckless Irish- because the latter might just breed faster and become more tolerant of deprivation. Indeed, perhaps Whites needed to be protected from wage competition with mentally stunted brown people, not to mention the benighted Catholics, who, however, bred like rabbits.
It can be argued that there are three distinct components in the Darwinian analysis of evolutionary progress: an explanation of how evolution works;
Darwin could not give any such explanation. Mendel's work inspired the current neo-Darwinian synthesis.
an idea of what constitutes progress; and a substantiation of the way evolution brings about progress. Of these three, the first is thoroughly profound both in interpreting what is going on in the world and in opening up a powerful general line of reasoning, viewing change and transformation in terms of evolution and natural selection. Exacting questions can, of course, be raised about the aptness of the particular processes on which Darwin himself concentrated, and there are other divisive questions as well. For example, an important issue concerns whether the analysis should be conducted in terms of selection of species (as combinations of phenomenal characteristics) or of genotypes (as combinations of genetic features). It is often more convenient to talk in terms of species (as Darwin did),
because he didn't know about genes or genotypes.
but natural selection is transmitted through inherited characteristics
no. Natural selection occurs at the level of the phenotype. Animals which do stupid shit die off. This can reduce the species population to a point where reproductive failure occurs.
and that relates to genotypes. Though species and genotypes are closely related, they are not congruent.
A species is a bunch of genotypes which can inter-breed. But what matters is what organisms do. If it is maladaptive, phenotypes get killed off and once a certain threshold is reached the whole bunch of genotypes constituting the species goes extinct- i.e. ceases to be able to reproduce.
But these are secondary differences within a shared approach, and the power and far-reaching relevance of evolutionary analysis in general are hard to dispute.
But such analysis still comes down to the common sense proposition that if a high enough proportion of members of a species do stupid shit- i.e. fail to adapt to the fitness landscape- then the species as a whole may go extinct- i.e. cease to be able to reproduce.
Similarly, it is possible to have reasonable disagreements on the extent to which these evolutionary ideas can be used in other, particularly ‘social’, areas, such as the selection and survival of institutions and behaviour norms – fields of application which Darwin himself had not identified.
It was obvious that institutions and behaviours which are stupid and mal-adaptive can lead to the people clinging to such institutions or behaviours being conquered or otherwise swamped by others who are less fucking stupid.
But there is little doubt about the general usefulness of adding evolutionary lines of reasoning to other methods of social investigation (even though the more extreme applications have attracted some not entirely undeserved criticism).
There is little point criticizing those who say 'stop doing stupid shit!' unless, obviously, you are a Bengali buddhijivi.
These issues have been much discussed already, and I shall not take them up here. In the threefold classification of elements in Darwinian analyses of evolutionary progress, I shall not grumble at all about the explanation of how evolution works. My focus is on the idea of progress underlying Darwinian lines of analysis.
Darwin, as a mid-Victorian, expressed a mid-Victorian creed. Then the fucking Irish started rising up not to mention the fucking Welsh and the fucking proletariat. Even women started demanding the vote.
Our Characteristics and Our Lives
Darwin had a clear conception of what he saw as progress, and he judged the achievements of evolution in that light. ‘And as natural selection,’ he wrote in the concluding section of On the Origin of Species, ‘works solely by and for the good of each being,
because guys who jump off cliffs in the belief that they can fly are being done a favour by 'natural selection' when they go splat on the ground
all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.’ Progress was seen in terms of the production of ‘endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful’. Darwin took ‘the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving’ to be ‘the production of the higher animals’.
Darwin accidentally set off a literary revolution- initially among Protestants like Synge & Shaw- in Ireland which would lead to what we have now- viz. the Republic having twice the per capita GDP of the United Kingdom.
It is easy to agree with Darwin that ‘there is grandeur in this view of life,’ as he put it in the concluding sentence of The Origin.
He later put in the word 'Creator' to appease the Christians.
The question is whether this way of seeing progress points us in the right direction.
What's wrong with seeing progress as involving greater perfection and beauty rather than greater imperfection and ugliness?
One distinguishing characteristic of this approach is its concentration on our characteristics and features, what we are, rather than on what we can do or be.
What we are is what we do. Yoneda's lemma applies. No doubt, I could be Narendra Modi but I prefer to be a useless tosser.
An alternative would be to judge progress by the quality of lives we can lead.
The quality of our lives is a function of what we do, not what we can do, but what we actually do. If I dined at a splendid restaurant after a night at the Opera, I have a high quality of life even if it was possible for me to spend my time getting gang-raped in a prison cell instead.
That – somewhat Aristotelian – shift of focus would not only be more in line with what we have reason to value,
No it wouldn't. Either we are actually living well or we are being fucked in the ass in a prison cell. Aristotle is irrelevant.
it could also draw our attention to issues that a concentration on the ‘highness’ of the species (or on genetic excellence) would tend to hide.
like what? Any way, nobody is concentrating on the 'highness' of any species though no doubt there are scientific researchers who are trying to work out how to 'improve' genes so that people with those genes don't suffer horribly.
Our capability to lead one kind of life rather than another does not depend only on what we are, but also on the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Only because what we are depends on our circumstances. I am a man, not a female giraffe, because of the circumstances surrounding my conception.
We can exert all sorts of influence on the nature of the world in which we live. How we view progress can, therefore, make a real difference to our decisions and resolve.
But our decisions and resolve make no real difference to anything unless circumstances grant us power in that respect.
Anthropocentrism and Human Values
I shall try to examine the contrast between these two approaches, which – at the cost of some oversimplification – I shall call respectively ‘the quality of species’ view and ‘the quality of life’ view.
Does Sen mean 'eugenic' shit about promoting the marriage of alpha type people while ensuring that ugly tossers like me have a fucking horrible life?
The former – Darwinian – perspective in its modern form might well have been better described as ‘the quality of genotypes’ view, since the characteristics that are naturally selected and inherited would be the genetic ones.
Modern science can directly change the genotype. But what matters is the phenotype. It may be that I have excellent genes. But, if I am a lazy sociopath who like stabbing people, Society is better off incarcerating me with those who might enjoy kicking my head in.
While 1 shall continue to use the Darwinian term ‘species’, ‘genotypes’ would often be a better description, but the distinction is not central to the main theses of this essay.
I suppose 'eugenic' considerations do prevail. Smart and good-looking people prefer to marry each other rather than get hitched to rancorous retards like myself.
It is not easy for the quality-of-life view to escape some anthropocentrism. This is not only because the quality of lives of other animals cannot be judged in the way that the quality of human lives can be, but also because that act of judging is a specifically human exercise.
Suppose I have a dog. It can choose to adopt my way of life- which involves lying on the couch watching Netflix and eating Pizza- or it can choose to become the companion of my flat-mate who goes jogging and enjoys throwing a frisbee around. I too may stop emulating my neighbour's cat- which leads a pretty sedentary like- and take up the active life-style of my dog. For any specific purpose, we might emulate animals or animals may emulate us. Quality of life depends on our style of life which depends on whom we imitate.
These are genuine problems,
What are they? Sen won't tell us.
and initially it might appear that they work strongly in the direction of endorsing the quality-of-species approach over the quality-of-life view. The picture, however, is more complex than that.
How? Sen won't say.
A human evaluative framework is, in fact, difficult to avoid in both of these approaches.
because it is difficult for human being to evaluate things in the manner of a fish.
Even in assessing the quality of species or of genotypes (for example, in judging what forms are ‘most beautiful and most wonderful’), our own judgments are inevitably involved.
No living being is tasked with 'assessing the quality of species'. Why not assess the sexiness of the law of gravity instead?
It is, of course, possible to replace such judgments by the apparently ‘neutral’ criterion of purely reproductive success – the ability to outnumber and outlive competing groups.
Sen is under the impression that some bunch of Professors somewhere went around assessing all the various species and giving them gold stars or frowny faces.
The evolutionary perspective has often been combined with implicit use of this apparently no-nonsense criterion.
When Sen first came to England, he met an old pal from Calcutta who said to him, 'Listen Amartya, I've just got back from the Labour Exchange. They have offered me a job as species evaluator in Aberdeen. The pay is very good and what's more I can expect rapid promotion to phylum evaluator. The trouble is, I don't have the train-fare to get to Scotland. Could lend me a couple of quid? I'll send you the money back with interest the moment I get paid.' Sen, being a good hearted fellow, handed over the cash. He was a little taken aback when this friend of his knocked on his door a couple of days later. It turned out that the job in Aberdeen had fallen through because of its implicit use of an apparently no-nonsense criteria. Still, nil desperandum. A vacancy had opened up in the Department for assessing the sexiness of Wheeler-DeWitte gravity. Could Amartya oblige with the loan of a couple of quid till pay-day?
Experiences of this sort embittered Sen. He began to feel that the whole system of evaluating everything in the Universe was problematic in some obscure, perhaps occult, manner. He began to brood about the inequity involved in such assessments. Surely, there must be a better way of deciding which Galaxies should get gold stars and which species should get a report card saying 'must try to do better'?
Species, Conservation and Animal Lives
It could be argued that since the Darwinian view takes explicit note of widely different species and genotypes, it has the advantage of broadness over the quality-of-life view, which would tend to be more closely focused on the type of life that human beings lead.
Who argues this? I suppose the answer is that if was Ken Arrow who came up to Sen and said 'from a Darwinian point of view, you are not a giraffe. This is because you are very short. Sucks to be you!' ?
For example, it might be tempting to think
though it might be even more tempting to stink by shitting yourself
that the species-oriented Darwinian perspective would be more helpful than the quality-of-life view in understanding the environmentalist’s concern with preserving different species that are threatened with extinction.
But actual environmentalists bring forward ecological arguments. They point to unintended consequences of eliminating a particular species from the food chain. Sen is under the impression that every time the Greens raise a hue and cry about some endangered species of lizard, David Attenborough turns up and says it is the most perfectly sexy and cute lizard ever. Also, it has recently been elected a member of the Garrick and thus a great quality of life.
This, however, is not at all so. Natural selection is, in fact, choice through selective extinction, and the environmental interest in preserving threatened species must, in this sense, be entirely ‘non-Darwinian’ in spirit.
Nope. We benefit by preserving a particular eco-system. Darwin was cool with people doing things which improved their inclusive fitness.
One of the most interesting and forceful theses of The Origin is that ‘it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes.’ Surviving beings, Darwin proceeded to claim, are ‘ennobled’ when viewed in the light of this process. Extinction is part and parcel of the process of evolutionary selection, and any anti-extinction view must seek its support elsewhere.
Darwin was a country gentleman. He knew that rural societies don't exterminate all predators- e.g. foxes- because they have a role in keeping down pests of various sorts. Darwin was writing for people familiar with 'game preserves'- i.e. artificially maintained ecologies. Sen is placing too much reliance on small rhetorical flourishes in Darwin's texts.
In contrast, the environmentalist is likely to get some help in this field from the rival quality-of-life approach.
We must preserve the habitat of the crested newt because many newts had deprived childhoods. Also some have recently become members of the Garrick.
The presence of a variety of species in the world which we inhabit can be seen as enhancing the quality of life that we ourselves can lead.
The Greens say that ecologies are fragile. We don't know what chaotic consequences might arise from an extinction event. The regret minimizing course is to conserve what we do not fully understand lest disaster befall.
More important, if human beings can and do reasonably value the survival of all the species that happen currently to be here
they don't.
(even the ones that are rather ‘unfit’ and ‘unselected’), then that environmental concern is better understood in terms of human reasoning (and the values we live by) than by invoking the Darwinian view of progress through ‘the survival of the fittest’.
No. The relevant view is that of radical ecological interdependence.
Furthermore, a general interest in the quality of life is more likely than the Darwinian perspective to direct attention to such matters as cruelty to animals.
No. The sort of people who get worked up about cruelty to our furry friends may have zero interest in the quality of life of those who are obliged to put up with them.
Some sensitivity to the quality of lives that living beings can lead can make a real difference to the way we evaluate alternatives in our otherwise callous world.
Because that's what we are paid to do- right? This callous world employs millions of people to evaluate the sexiness of different Galaxies and the different levels of perfection displayed by various types of amphibians.
Criterion and Comparison
How does the Darwinian approach to progress work?
It doesn't. It is mere rhetoric.
What characterises the general procedure of judging progress by the excellence of the species?
If you find cows really useful, cows are excellent. The Victorians were creating vast herds of cows in Australia and other such distant places. There were plenty of agricultural fairs where the best cows or bulls or whatever won prizes. Markets for cows existed such that superior specimens cost more money. Wealthy people paid good money for paintings of prize cows.
What is the evaluative basis of Darwin’s claim about the achievements of evolutionary progress in the world in which we live?
It is utilitarian. Darwin was as Victorian as fuck.
It is not hard to see some plausibility in the claim that there has been progress over time in the history of living beings,
the Victorian upper middle class certainly felt it had progressed and prospered.
or to find some merit in the way we have evolved from more primitive forms. For one thing, the intellectual or cultural sophistication and creativity of modern human beings contrast sharply with the world of primitive animals and vegetables, not to mention the earlier world of single cell protozoa. It is not wildly eccentric to see some glory in our world compared with a mute earth circling the sun with a specialised cargo of trillions of trillions of amoeba, or Cambrian mollusca and trilobites.
Darwin did a lot of painstaking work. He wasn't eccentric. We may object to the rhetoric he used to popularize his theory but there is really no reason for us to start congratulating ourselves on our superior cultural attainments when compared to molluscs.
However, the immediacy of that recognition has to be tempered by asking two questions about the nature of the alleged progress through evolution: by what criterion?
Utility.
And compared with what?
Molluscs. Try getting a mollusc to fix your toilet. Even giraffes are shit at the job. You need to hire a human problem.
The Darwinian choice of criterion proceeds effectively in two steps – one more explicit than the other. The first step is to judge progress by the excellence of the species produced.
That excellence was utility. Darwin's neighbours were constantly gassing on about how much more milk they were getting from their cows thanks to scientific breeding and improved fodder provision. Humans too were becoming more and more productive because technology had improved.
This is the basic Darwinian view of progress.
It was the Victorian view.
It relates, as I said earlier, to Darwin’s sense of ‘the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving’ – to wit, ‘the production of the higher animals’.
The mid-Victorians- including Marx- saw that productivity could go on rising till almost everybody could live well. The proles would come to look as elegant as the leisured class. Some of their women might even learn to read book rather than just guzzle gin.
The second step, which is much more specific, is implicit rather than explicit in Darwin’s own writings, though firmly stated and defended by many Darwinians. The excellence of the species (or of genotypes) is to be judged by reproductive success – the power to survive and multiply, and thus collectively, to outnumber and outlive the competing groups (other species, other genotypes). That complex set of achievements goes under the name of ‘fitness’, taking fitness to be reflected by survival and reproductive success. The thesis of ‘the survival of the fittest’ is indeed central to Darwinism, though the phrase itself was originally proposed by Herbert Spencer (and adopted – with some enthusiasm – by Charles Darwin). And the claim of progress, on that ground, has been developed and much extended by modern exponents of evolutionary optimality.
Darwin hoped that the higher fertility of the lower orders would be compensated for by higher mortality. There are no 'modern exponents of evolutionary optimality'. Agribusiness does go in for genetic modified 'Frankenfoods', but this a matter of economic trade-offs. Because of licensing issues, optimality isn't a desiderata.
The recognition that fitness, thus defined, must have much to do with success in natural selection is obvious enough.
There is a fitness landscape on which some do better than others. There is no fitness as such.
The question is whether it makes sense to assess progress in terms of increases in the fitness of the selected species.
This depends on what type of species we are speaking off. An invasive species may be super-fit but we may want to eradicate it to protect the native ecology.
It looks like a neat criterion, but is it cogent and persuasive?
It may be depending on the context.
Also, is it really so neat?
It is as neat enough as it is worthwhile to make it.
Fitness: Coherence and Cogency
The criterion of fitness is widely used in the evolutionary literature in quite ambitious forms.
Not really. Essentially, evolutionary algorithms are a type of Monte Carlo method which, ideally, make no assumptions about the fitness landscape. They are only used at the micro-cellular level and thus have nothing to do with 'species' or evolutionary fitness. They are just a metahueristic optimization algorithm which may or may not be useful in various contexts.
Notions of ‘optimality’ are frequently derived from judgments of comparative fitness. In terms of fitness, a species or genotype is ‘optimum’ if and only if it can outmatch all its rivals.
this is merely a mathematical convention. It has nothing to do with biological populations.
One difficulty in using this criterion arises from the fact that the comparative fitness of a given pair of alternative species would depend on the environment in which they compete for survival.
But, if you are being paid to evaluate 'comparative fitness'- e.g. deciding which breed of cattle to raise on a ranch- you study that environment and make a decision. This is purely an ideographic matter.
There is no particular reason to think that if genotype x were fitter than genotype y in environment A, then it would be fitter also in some other environment B.
There might be. It depends. It may be worthwhile doing a bit of 'discovery'.
It could, thus, frequently be the case that there would be no dominance of one alternative over another (independently of the actual environment).
It could equally be the case that there is such dominance because all the other alternatives involve dying immediately.
Of course, one alternative might well be worse than another in all the different relevant environments, and such an alternative could be eliminated from the set of ‘efficient’ possibilities to be considered. But it is not unreasonable to expect that there would be many non-comparabilities among the ‘efficient’ alternatives: better in some circumstances and worse in others and therefore not generally rankable vis-à-vis each other.
Nothing is rankable- save arbitrarily- because the future fitness landscape is not known. Sen is a pedagogue. In his line of work, it may be important to rank students in order of stupidity or sycophancy or whatever it is that his shitty subject selects for.
There is scope here for using some broader mathematical notions of maximality that permit such incompleteness (as has been systematically done in applications of mathematical reasoning in other ‘unruly’ fields, such as social choice theory)
No there isn't. Social Choice is useless shite. Evolutionary algorithms can be useful in certain contexts.
rather than the more full-blooded version – simple optimality – that seems to be currently favoured in the evolutionary literature.
because it is useful. The thing is merely a way to cut through computational complexity to get to a good enough approximation for a specific problem.
Note may also have to be taken of possible intransitivities, alternative x may outmatch y, and y may outmatch z, but x may not be able to outmatch z.
One can't speak of transitivity if the alternatives themselves can't be properly specified. They are 'intensions' without a proper 'extension'.
This type of possibility can arise from the plurality and heterogeneity of favourable conditions that the different alternatives may have.
In which case, the alternatives can't actually be fully specified. One can point at them but one can't say what they are. They are not mathematical objects nor can they be terms in a logical calculus.
The process is not altogether different from the way tennis player x may be able to defeat player y, and y may be able to defeat z, without it being altogether clear that x can in fact vanquish z.
But he may do so. So long as there is no 'Dutch book'- i.e. no way of placing a sequence of bets on players with an Expected profit- no scandal arises. Arbitrage does the ranking for Bayesians.
Intransitivity and incompleteness may be particularly liable to occur when there are inter-dependences in the competition for survival, related particularly to the simultaneous presence of different competing groups of genotypes or species.
In other words, in life Sen-tentious shite is useless shite. Ecologies are ideographic. Those with expert knowledge can suggest improvements or alert us to threats. They can't rank all possible alternatives or decide what is the optimal mix of bio-mass for a terrain.
The criterion of fitness can be made coherent and congruous by dropping some of the deceptive neatness.
No. It will remain shit.
The view of progress that would emerge from such a criterion would have ‘holes’ and ‘gaps’, but it would not, then, be based on such arbitrary assumptions as the environment-independence of fitness rankings, or the presumed adequacy of simple pair-wise comparisons.
No. The view that would emerge is that evolution isn't about 'progress' or 'optimality'. On the other hand, co-evolved processes tame complexity and so evolutionary algorithms can be useful. What Sen has been doing all these years has been utterly useless.
Given the enormity of the task of finding adequate criteria for progress, that price might be well worth paying.
Provided the price is no more than one derisive fart.
But whatever virtues there might be in the claim that increasing fitness is a good way of judging progress, neatness and simplicity are unlikely to be among them.
No. It is neat and simple to say that such and such hominid species had higher fitness because it spread over a wider geographical area and replaced older indigenous lineages. It is also fine to say that gene therapy can help some particular class of people. Progress means having a better life than your parents.
The deeper difficulties with the use of fitness as a criterion of progress lie elsewhere, however. The most basic question is of course: why? Why should success in reproduction and survival be the yardstick of achievement?
Because not being alive means you can't achieve shit.
But before I pursue this question further, I should say something on the second question related to the claim of evolutionary progress, viz. compared with what?’
being dead. Why do so few Neanderthals run Fortune 500 companies. It is because they died out long ago. Shame but there it is.
Fitter than what?
Dead peeps. There are folk around today who may look pretty unfit. But our lineages may be wiped out while theirs thrive ten thousand years hence.
There are two rather different ways of identifying rival species or genotypes for comparison of reproductive triumph. One is over time,
that's the only way to do it
and the other across alternative possibilities.
we don't know what those are. One could make arbitrary guesses but anybody can do that.
The first involves assessing the species or genotypes of each period compared with what obtained earlier. But since the respective environments in the different periods were also dissimilar, the historical success of victorious species need not tell us very much about their general superiority in fitness.
Sure they can. A species which is dependent on just one food source- e.g. Pandas- is less fit than one which can adapt to different food sources. Moreover, one which can change the entire environment to suit itself is higher up the chain than one which would go extinct if some minor change in its terrain occurred. Fitness is related to robustness.
Presumably a species flourishing in one period would have had some specific advantages in the then environment, but this line of reasoning does not lead to any conclusion about general progress over time, going beyond advantage in the local and proximate environment.
unless that local and proximate advantage quickly turns into a global advantage.
Darwin’s thesis about ‘all corporeal and mental endowments’ tending ‘to progress towards perfection’ through ‘natural selection’ is hard to sustain even when progress is seen entirely in terms of fitness.
But it is equally hard to reject because rhetorical terms mean whatever the rhetor had in mind. Fitness is robustness and species which thrive all over the place have greater fitness than those confined to remote jungles and mountains. This may be because they are domesticated, or self-domesticated.
More can, however, be said in Darwin’s direction if we are ready to accept as our criterion, not fitness in general, but certain straightforward physical characteristics such as efficiency of mechanical design.
That is irrelevant.
Indeed, in his Evolution in Action (1953), Julian Huxley
who was part of an active eugenics tradition which attracted interest from Indian statisticians
used just such a criterion of mechanical efficiency to identify progress over time. For example, he noted the secular improvement in the running speed of horses and in the grinding ability of their teeth.
This has been happening for hundreds of years because of selective breeding programs.
More recently, extending this type of argument further and much more ambitiously, Geerat Vermeij
a specialist in molluscs
has proposed, in his Evolution and Escalation (1987), that there have been sweeping improvements over time
the last 600 million years
in some generally favourable features for survival, so that modern organisms are better able to deal with a variety of environments going well beyond the particular one in which they happen to live. Vermeij has sought a causal explanation for this in his finding that ‘the biological surroundings have themselves become more rigorous within a given habitat’ over long spreads of time – a phenomenon which he calls ‘escalation’.
Complex eco-systems, with high diversity, are likely to be more efficient, that is productive, but may also be less robust.
These empirical findings are illuminating and the related analyses are also significant, but the conclusions about evolutionary progress over time cannot but be tentative and relatively modest.
They can be as precise as it is useful for them to be.
A species that survives and reproduces relatively better than another in a more ‘rigorous’ environment need not invariably perform better in less rigorous surroundings (or in an even more rigorous environment). In establishing evolutionary progress over time, the problem of variability of fitness with surroundings cannot be adequately eliminated by the postulate of increasing environmental rigorousness over time.
But it can be eliminated if less robust species can be shown to have died off. You can't argue with the fossil record.
There is another basic problem in drawing conclusions about evolutionary progress from these over-time comparisons: the problem of what can or cannot be ascribed to evolution as such.
Everything can be ascribed to evolution. The alternative is to say God performed a miracle.
It is obviously arbitrary to attribute all the developments that occur over time to the process of evolution.
No. It is arbitrary to attribute developments to God performing a miracle or Aliens showing up in flying saucers.
In particular, some changes may be brought about by transitory natural events. Evolution, on its own, need not have resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs opening up a different line of development which eventually produced human beings.
The fitness landscape changed because of the transitory event. The dinosaurs evolved into birds or Professors of useless shite or some such thing. Some little rodent evolved into what we are now.
We clearly owe a vote of thanks to the impacting asteroid – if that is what it was – which, some sixty-five million years ago, exterminated the dinosaurs, but helped us, at long last, to evolve. Even if we argue from our point of view (eschewing that of the dinosaurs) that there has been progress over time, we cannot conclude that evolution itself has brought about this progressive change.
Yes we can. What is the alternative? To say God sent the asteroid and then blessed a particular mammalian lineage?
All this gives us reason to look not over time but across sets of alternative possibilities:
the fossil record actually exists. Alternative possibilities are not visible.
in particular, to judge the species that have emerged in comparison with others that did not emerge or were eliminated. How reasonable is the claim that the ones which made it were ‘optimal’ in that environment?
We don't know the relevant constraints. The way things are may be optimal, they may not. We don't know. It doesn't greatly matter if some say 'we live in the best of all possible worlds' while others say 'by paying more attention to impartial observers on the Planet Pluto, things could be made more optimal or equitable or some other such shit.'
Things are not all that easy here either. The ‘fittest’ to which Darwin or Spencer referred could be the top of a local class only – of the alternatives that happen to come up to compete with the particular species in question.
No. Fittest means fitter than the competition. It doesn't mean the fittest possible in the opinion of a cretin. It could easily happen that those 'at the top of a local class' aren't particularly fit, but if their employees or loyalists are fitter than their challengers, then this is still a case of the fittest surviving because the killed those less fit who tried to fuck with them.
There are many factors – systemic as well as accidental – which could have prevented the emergence of other competitors.
That is irrelevant. The fittest soldier in the platoon is the one who did best in relevant competitions. It does not matter that if disabled lesbian goats had received the right kind of gene therapy then they would have been considered fitter by impartial spectators from the Orion Nebula.
‘Development constraints’ – a topic in evolutionary biology – both scale down and complicate the optimality claims that can be made.
No they don't. There can be no talk of optimality save with respect to relevant constraints.
The problem becomes even more complex when we consider not just variations of existing organisms, but altogether different organisms that could have emerged in some alternative scenario of world history with different development constraints and different draws on the lottery of nature.
This is utterly foolish. Those 'alternative scenarios' weren't fit enough to perpetuate themselves and thus appear in our time line.
The epic heroes with superhuman powers like Gilgamesh or Arjuna or Achilles, who did make the fictitious world more exciting (if not altogether peaceful), may well have been unfeasible creatures, but it is hard to rule out of consideration every counterfactual possibility that could have made us fitter even in the environment in which we find ourselves today.
It is easy to do so. For any such 'counter-factual' see if there is any evidence to back the claim. If there is, try to get in on the ground-floor by investing in it.
Depending on circumstances and chance, many other alternatives could have come up. The evolutionary analogue of ‘all is for the best in the best of possible worlds’ badly needs a clearer identification of what can be taken as ‘possible’.
No it doesn't. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and clever scientists are working very hard on finding out what is or isn't possible.
Thus the across-alternatives version of the thesis of evolutionary progression, when scrutinised, can at most claim some kind of local optimality – success with respect to a limited class of alternatives.
That is the only sort of evaluation we can make. Sen had to grade the papers his students submitted. He couldn't award a gold star to the paper the Plutonian Socrates who also happened to be a disabled Lesbian goat would have submitted.
And even this small success depends on the acceptability of evolutionary fitness as the primary criterion of judging progress.
This is like saying that establishing who is the fittest soldier in the platoon depends on the acceptability of evaluating only actually existing beings, as opposed to characters in fairy stories,
Why fitness?
It is clear enough that fitness is good for the survival and multiplication of a species – indeed that is exactly how fitness is defined. But why should it be, in itself, the criterion of progress?
Because progress involves continuing to exist. If more territory is occupied, or a species rises in the food chain, that is progress.
Survival advantages may come from very different types of characteristic, and there is no particular guarantee that they make lives pleasanter or richer or nicer.
Yes there is. You have to be alive to have a pleasanter life. Being fit, other things being equal, is nicer than being unfit and feeling like shit.
Consider, for example, Patrick Bateson’s pointer to the fact that ‘male polygynous primates that fight with other males for females have much larger canines than male primates that are characteristically monogamous’
Why consider any such thing? We slaughter primates easily enough and our canines are small. Some of us may fight others for females.
While the reproductive and survival advantages for those with better fighting teeth may be clear enough (I do not wish to venture an opinion on this delicate subject), one wouldn’t take it for granted that enormous canines were intrinsically wonderful – that monogamous primates which lacked them would necessarily be envious of their giant-toothed cousins.
Similarly we would not take it for granted that Sen eats only dog poo. Nevertheless, that is what we may choose to believe.
The fact is we may envy a guy is unfit and who will die shortly because he has a marvellous singing voice. This does not change the fact that we are fitter than that person.
It is not hard to think that Charles Darwin had a rather inadequate basis for taking natural selection to be the unambiguous promoter of what he called ‘the good of each being’, and for seeing it as the way to ‘perfection’.
It is easy to understand that Darwin benefitted by talking up his big idea. His point was that you don't have to believe in God to feel good about yourself. You could see yourself as the favoured child of Evolution instead.
We recognise many virtues and achievements that do not help survival
unless they do. We can't be sure.
but which we have reason to value, and on the other side, there are many correlates of successful survival that we find deeply objectionable.
No we don't.
For example, if a species of vassals – some variant of homo sapiens – is kept in inhuman conditions by some tribe of tyrants and that species adapts and evolves into being not only very useful slaves but also dogged survivors and super-rapid reproducers, must we accept that development as a sign of progress?
This is an imaginary scenario. The fact is, humans have practiced slavery but that is a question for politics, not biology.
An exact analogue of this is, of course, imposed on those animals on which we feed.
Either some people get by without feeding on animals or they get conquered or otherwise displaced.
But such an arrangement would hardly seem acceptable for human beings,
Slavery may not have been acceptable for slaves. They had little choice in the matter.
and it is not at all clear that it should be acceptable in the case of animals either.
It is not at all clear that life in this universe- as opposed to emigration to planet K-Pax- is acceptable to certain nutters.
Valuing and Reasoning
There is need for reasoned evaluation in choosing our criterion of progress,
No there isn't. Any shithead is welcome to gas on about any sort of shit. I might say there is a need for such shite to be spouted only in a obscene manner whereas you may prefer the thing be done in a pseudo-reasonable manner by shitheads like Sen. But this is a purely subjective matter.
and the job can hardly be handed over to natural selection.
Which is what does the job anyway. On the other hand, we might want some proper evaluative mechanism being used for 'gain of function' research on viruses or genetic modified foods just in case there are unintended adverse consequences.
But how sound and reliable is our ability to judge?
Sen is useless. Others may not be.
It can be pointed out that whatever values we may espouse and whatever ability to reason we may have developed are themselves results of evolution.
competitive pressure may winnow out certain types of reason which motivate social choices.
Some argue from this that our reasoning ability has been specifically selected to give us survival and reproductive advantage, and its use for any other purpose cannot be justified.
Alternatively, one could say that no method of justification is justified if it leads to the loss of the ability to justify shit because you are dead or someone else is eating your lunch.
Others argue that the selection of our reasoning abilities stacks the odds in favour of our endorsing the criterion of evolutionary success, since we ourselves are the product of that process. Do these arguments undermine the relevance of our evaluative reasoning? I believe they don’t.
Only because such 'evaluative reasoning' is useless.
It is a non sequitur to argue that since our ability to reason may have evolved through survival advantage, it can be used only for that purpose.
No. We don't know what 'survival advantage' is. Thus there is no way to show that this argument is fallacious. While we are alive, anything we do may have survival value if not for ourselves then for our species. If we do stupid shit and die, maybe we are enabling the rest of our species to avoid that particular type of stupid shit.
Our faculties are not, in general, specifically tied to a single purpose. Our sense of colour may have helped us to survive better (in locating a prey or avoiding a predator), but that is no reason why we should fail to see the beauty of Cézanne’s or Picasso’s colours.
Creating such beauty may increase reproductive success. We ourselves preserve certain species which are beautiful or whose behaviour has aesthetic value.
No matter how and why our ability to reason may have developed, we can use it as we like, and scrutinising the criterion of reproductive success or survival advantage as a yardstick of progress is among its possible uses.
We can do stupid shit- that's true enough- but for how long before we are displaced by more sensible people.
The other objection is not particularly telling éither. There might well be good reason to think that we are more likely to be favourable to the world as it is than other creatures, resulting from other scenarios and living in other possible worlds, would be.
There is no good reason to waste time gassing on about this.
But that fact in itself need not undermine the relevance of our values.
What makes our values 'relevant' is their ability to evaluate themselves while being emotionally supportive of cats traumatized by their incessant sodomization of imaginary dogs from the thirty fourth dimension.
The more interesting issue is whether this interdependence makes us approve of everything we find and endorse the products of natural selection in an uncritical way.
This isn't interesting at all. This is why nobody asks you if you endorse zebras in an uncritical way. On the other hand, you can always broach the subject yourself by saying 'my Uber driver asked me a really interesting question today. This had to do with whether I endorsed aardvarks which, as you may know, are the product of natural selection.' Sadly, it is this sort of conversational overture which causes people to shun you at cocktail parties.
There is nothing to indicate that this is the case. For example, pain can have great survival advantage in acting as a signal to which we might respond, but that does not make us think that pain is a good thing to have.
For the same reason that people don't think it is good to be sentenced to jail for fraud. You should be avoiding jail or the horrible pain you will experience when you get gang-raped in the prison shower.
Indeed, we may abhor pain, even in a context in which we readily accept its incentive role. Any incentive system can operate on the basis of the carrot or the stick, and while the two may be comparable in terms of signalling and inducement, we often have very good reasons for favouring a system of carrots over one that relies on sticks.
We may want girls to bake us a nice cake rather than kick us in the balls if we try to grab their tits but, sadly, have to settle for the latter as proof of reciprocated romantic interest- more particularly if we are married to the female in question. I'm not saying this is what happens to me. It is the sort of thing which could happen to anybody.
When some twenty-five hundred years ago, Gautama Buddha left his princely home to seek enlightenment, he was driven by dismay at the misery of human existence, at the sufferings of disease, old age and death, and there certainly was no inability there to disapprove of the way we have emerged.
No. He was attracted by the figure of the renunciant sanyasi. He left home to become one such himself.
Nor is there any incongruity in Buddha’s judgment that killing animals and eating their flesh is a terrible way to live even though nature has tended to favour the devouring of one species by another.
Indian vegetarians were doing well enough back then.
Individuals and the Type
Aside from the general difficulty of there being many things which we value other than survival, there are also some more specific problems. One of the most important relates to the fact that evolution is not much concerned with individual survival at all,
Evolution is also not concerned with the survival of any particular species- or, indeed, of Life itself. It is merely the name we give to the process by which species evolve and go extinct.
whereas we, as individuals, tend to take some interest in that subject. Tennyson got it right, when – about a decade before the publication of On the Origin of Species – he complained against nature:The previous two lines are 'Are God and Nature then at strife?. That Nature lends such evil dreams'. Tennyson was complaining that his pal had died. It was little consolation that his race continued to do very well. God was an Englishman, right enough- but He appeared to be more concerned with the expansion of the Empire than in safeguarding the life of Hallam.
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life.
For one thing, natural selection shows little interest in our well-being or survival once we are past the reproductive age.
No. There is evidence that longevity of the parents or even the grandmother improves reproductive outcomes. Sen has not noticed that human infants are neotenized and require a lot of care for significantly longer than our primate cousins.
For another, in the scale of selectional advantage, a lowering of the death rate even among the younger ages could easily get less priority than reproductive vigour, if the latter on balance contributes more to the proliferation of the species or the genotypes.
Again, there is no evidence for this view for our own species.
There are, thus, two quite different ways in which natural selection is ‘careless of the single life’.
Only because people die, families may not do so for hundreds or thousands of years.
It cares little about the length of the individual life, and it cares even less about the quality of that life.
It doesn't have feelings.
Indeed, natural selection does not promote anything which we may have reason to value,
which is why we supplement natural selection with selective breeding and comprehensive ecological management.
except to the extent that this coincides – or correlates – with propagational advantage.
Even here, we alter reproductive outcomes for our food sources. Darwin's people already knew there was artificial selection. Was there also natural selection or had God decided what animals and plants should exist once and for all?
Genetic Improvement and Eugenics
It is not unfair to say that the Darwinian perspective, seen as a general view of progress, suggests concentration on adapting the species rather than adjusting the environment in which the species lead their lives.
Nonsense! The English knew they had changed and were continuing to change their landscape. They had colonies on different continents which had introduced 'Old World' animals and plants which had displaced native species.
It is therefore not surprising that this view of progress had the effect of directly encouraging one type of conscious planning, viz. that for genetic improvement.
Not at that time. All there could be was eugenic arguments for selective breeding or sterilizing imbeciles.
The eugenics movement, which flourished around the turn of the century, was influenced by Darwinian arguments about the survival of the fittest. It championed the idea of lendliing a ‘helping hand’ to nature in breeding better genetic types, mainly by limiting the propagation of the ‘less fit’ variants. The policies advocated ranged from intellectual persuasion to forced sterilisation.
Such selective breeding had existed for thousands of years. Many countries had rigid 'caste' systems. The belief was that miscegenation was harmful. Marrying your cousin, on the other hand, had to be a good idea- right?
The movement had many well-known advocates, from Sir Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin) to Elisabeth Nietzsche (the philosopher’s sister). The advocacy of this type of genetic manipulation had much respectability for a while, but it ultimately came into disrepute, particularly with the chilling patronage of Hitler (who, incidentally, had wept at the funeral of Elisabeth Nietzsche in 1935). While Darwin never advocated genetic planning, the eugenics approach can co-exist comfortably with the view that progress should be judged primarily by the characteristics of the species.
No. Eugenics has always been advocated on the basis that better quality specimens will do better within any particular species.
Those who see the Darwinian view of progress as providing an adequate understanding of progress in general
Progress occurs because of competition for scarce resources
must address the question of the acceptability and the limits of genetic manipulation through selective breeding.
No. They only have to go in for the thing themselves if it appears that a rival has gained an advantage through it.
As a worldview, this perspective on progress must come to terms with the contrary demands of values to which we give great importance, including autonomy and freedom.
Why? People who give importance to autonomy, freedom, sodomy, playing hockey, or whatever have to come to terms with whatever it is they need to do so as to survive. The reverse is not the case.
Design and Resolve
Even though the eugenics movement derived its inspiration and some intellectual support from Darwinism, it is fair to say that Darwin’s own focus was on progress as spontaneous and undesigned. In the context of religious belief, the most radical aspect of Darwinism was its denial of the designed creation of all species simultaneously. But the general issue of spontaneous progress goes well beyond the question of the intentionality of an outside divine being. If evolution guarantees progress,
It doesn't. Competition may do so- if greater efficiency is possible.
then the need for intentional effort on the part of insiders – us human beings – may be to that extent reduced.
Only in the sense that if Life guarantees respiration, we needn't bother to eat food or drink water in order to stay alive.
Furthermore, it could be argued that by trying to bring about progress deliberately, through changing the world in which we live, we could endanger the spontaneous working of evolutionary processes.
there could be unintended consequences. But this is also true of deciding to fart.
If we take the quality-of-species view of progress, and if we do accept that genetic selection makes us wonderfully adapted, then – it could be asked – why encourage unfit genes?
We might like a type of dog which has horrible genes. In this case, the relevant fitness landscape is aesthetic
There are, thus, two rather different directions in which we may be pushed by the Darwinian view of progress.
There is no 'Darwinian view of progress'. There was the Victorian idea of progress which Darwin shared. Later there was an eugenic pessimism which held that humans would become stupider and weaker because they were more cossetted by labour saving technology.
One suggests genetic manipulation,
which happens because it is potentially very profitable
and the other indicates inactive reliance on spontaneity.
which is the same thing as just lying on the couch watching Netflix.
The common element is, of course, silence on the case for adjusting the world to suit our needs.
This has been happening for over ten thousand years. Sen is not aware that when we build houses and cities we have adjusted the world to better cater for our needs. Perhaps he thinks houses evolved to have central heating and electric fixtures.
That gap in attention
there is no such gap
is the direct result of judging progress by the nature of the species, rather than by the kind of lives they can lead – which would have immediately drawn attention to the need to adjust the external world.
Sen's mummy adjusted the external world such that Sen didn't get eaten. On the other hand the University of Cambridge is actually a type of sentient stone forest which grew out of the earth and evolved into a place where cretins like Sen could be awarded sheepskins in silliness.
From that common Darwinian point, the activist view proceeds towards genetic manipulation, whereas the more passive view suggests trusting nature. Neither directs us towards reforming the external world.
We were re-forming the external world millions of years ago. More than two billion years ago, cyanobacteria started pumping oxygen into the atmosphere.
Sen is mindlessly importing his stupid Capabilities shite into Biology.
Darwin and Malthus
This issue links with a bigger one: the vast attitudinal difference between trusting nature in general and deliberately trying to counter its unacceptable effects.
Which is what all life-forms do.
That dichotomy can be illustrated by the contrast between Malthus’s invocation of nature to recommend social inaction, in contrast with, say, William Godwin’s active interventionism.
Malthus was replying to Condorcet. But once Condorcet became a victim of the French Revolution, Malthus's argument prevailed. It was obvious that overturing everything to create a Utopia was a quick and certain way to get your fucking head chopped off. On the other hand, in a well-run country, there was no great harm in earning a little money by writing modish shite.
In fact, Malthus was a true guru of evolutionary theory. Darwin explains in The Origin that, in part, his theory ‘is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole of animal and vegetable kingdoms’.
A population can grow in geometric progression if it eliminates other populations which compete for scarce resources. This is how you get extinction effects.
In his famous Essay on Population, published in 1798, Malthus laid the foundations for a theory of natural selection by linking the issue of survival with population growth and competition for natural resources.
Malthus was saying that even if Condorcet turned France into an egalitarian paradise, population growth would ensure that mass poverty would soon reappear.
While the work’s larger philosophical ambition was to dispute the radical progressivism of Godwin and Condorcet (as was stated in the original title of the monograph), its immediate aim was to oppose legislation to change the Poor Laws in Great Britain to make welfare payments proportional to family size.
Which would create a 'welfare trap'. One way or another, the working poor would be taxed to keep them in poverty. Emigration was a better option.
Such tampering with a process of nature
of economics. Anyway, the threat of revolution was receding because the French had fucked up.
appeared to Malthus to be a way of compounding the problem; it would be much better to abandon these deliberate endeavours to help those who could not be helped.
Charity was fine. But creating a poverty trap was foolish. In particular, subsidizing agricultural labour would reduce productivity in the economy.
Malthus did advocate – but without much optimism – voluntary restraint as a method of cutting down population growth, and here again (as in the case of eugenics) the emphasis is on adjusting ourselves rather than adapting the world outside us.
Why did Malthus not suggest that human beings create more continents or planets?
Malthus was consistently and thoroughly hostile to public action that would assist the poor, and to such public amenities as lying in hospitals for unmarried mothers and foundling hospitals for abandoned babies.
He was against 'indiscriminate charity'. But it was Rousseau who thought his duty as a father was done once he delivered his bastards to the State foundling hospital. I suppose this was patriotic of him. The orphans, if they lived, would serve in the military.
The dichotomy between leaving the deprived and the miserable to nature,
Malthus thought it natural to give charity. He just didn't want the State to create poverty traps or to subsidize inefficient agricultural producers.
and using public action to try to help them, remains important in the contemporary world.
No. There has been a lot of progress since the days of Malthus- even in India. feeding the starving is economic because even very emaciated people produce more value than they consume.
Indeed, the significance of the contrast may well have increased in recent years, with the growing tendency to let impersonal forces – the market mechanism, for example – have their way.
Sen doesn't know that Malthus's England had the market mechanism back then- as did his own Bengal.
The bankruptcy of the Second World
he means the collapse of the Soviet Union
has often been interpreted not simply as the failure of a particular system of intervention, but as the impossibility of designed improvement of all kinds.
Rubbish! Every detail of our lives has had plenty of 'designed improvements' because enterprises compete with each other to get our money. Sen didn't notice that things he owned- like colour TV, microwave, C.D player etc.- had been designed very carefully and were considerable improvements over what went before.
Extinction and the Environment
The question of intervention relates
only to whether intervention is feasible and 'incentive compatible'.
most closely to social matters (of the kind illustrated by the Malthus-Godwin differences), but there are environmental issues as well. Consider the problem of the possible depletion of the ozone layer. It is quite likely that left to itself, the ozone layer depletion would eventually lead to some genetic response through evolution. For example, genotypes with less vulnerable genes may survive the radiational changes better than others and become relatively more numerous. (I have heard that we coloured people would go more slowly than you whites would, but I am not taking bets on it.)
It turned out that an appropriate intervention was feasible. The hole in the ozone layer appears to be repairing itself.
Natural selection may replace us with ‘ fitter’ people,
that is likely in any case. However, we can change some features of the future fitness landscape.
and that is part of the progressiveness of evolution. But if we value our lives and condemn disease and extinction, we would wish to consider a course of action which would vigorously resist the unfavourable change in the environment.
only if it was feasible and worthwhile to resist it. Otherwise, why not vigorously resist Gravity?
From the point of view of human beings, as we are constituted, genetic natural selection may be a chilling prospect rather than a heartwarming one.
An even more chilling prospect is the inevitable destruction of the planet yet it scarcely bothers anybody.
I don’t wish to press the contrast too sharply,
it is like the contrast between those who chop off their own heads to shove them up their own arses and those who chop off their own arse and shove it over their head. In other words, nobody actually corresponds to either type though both talk through their arse.
but a significant difference in attitude lies behind these two dissimilar ways of viewing nature, and more generally, viewing the surroundings in which we find ourselves. The dilemma was famously articulated by the Prince of Denmark: whether to put up with outrageous fortune or take up arms against a sea of troubles.
Most people just go to work though, no doubt, they might soliloquise when of strong drink taken.
This formulation might not have appealed to Darwin, if only because in his later life Darwin had come to find the Bard rather sickening.
He lost his taste for music and poetry. Shame he didn't have Netflix.
‘I have tried lately to read Shakespeare,’ Darwin says in his Autobiography, ‘and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.’ So I won’t insist on Shakespeare, but there is a point here on which, I would suggest, a Darwinian evolutionist could fruitfully reflect.
What is that point? Darwin was a biologist. A Darwinian evolutionist may be for or against a particular gene modification technique. But if the modification appears useful someone will do it
Darwinism and Our Lives
Darwin’s analysis of evolutionary progress was related to his attempt at explaining the process of evolution through natural selection and assessing its role in the genesis of species, including ‘the higher animals’. This explanatory purpose was extremely well served by Darwin’s analysis of evolution, even though, as I have tried to shffow, the idea of fitness underlying ‘the survival of the fittest’ may require more scrutiny.
No. Since species competed for scarce resources, those that won were fitter than those which went extinct. One can speculate as to the nature of the fitness landscape but fitness itself is objective and given.
Darwin also presented a view of progress in terms of the quality of the species, and more specifically the fitness of the surviving beings. This approach concentrates on the characteristics of living beings rather than on the actual lives they can lead.
Sen is saying that what we can imagine may be better than what we have. Sadly, it is also wholly irrelevant. We can't live in alternate dimensions. It is not the case that we can decide to stop breathing with lungs and decide to use gills going forward.
This aspect of Darwin’s work and influence is much more open to question.
Only in the sense that we could question the niceness of Gravity.
It tends to ignore the quality of life of human beings and other animals;
Sen said Econ was very evil because it was ignoring the quality of life of animals. Now he is against Biology for the same reason. I suppose his next step would be to condemn the Theory of Relativity because it disregards the capabilities and functionings of disabled Guatemalan goats and fails to take into account the views of impartial observers in alternative realities.
it under mines the importance of rationally evaluating our priorities and trying to live according to them;
No it doesn't. Smart and useful people are constantly doing such rational evaluation. They aren't writing nonsense for the LRB.
and it draws our attention away from the need to adjust the world in which we live.
Not to mention the need to repeal the law of Gravity.
This, in turn, tends to encourage activism in genetic manipulation (as in the eugenics movements),
selective breeding was occurring any way
or a passive reliance on spontaneous progress (more in line with Darwin’s own pronouncements).
plenty of people were already as passive and fatalistic as shit. Darwin, however, wasn't one of them.
But in neither case is much attention paid to the dependence of the quality of our lives on the nature of the adjustable external world.
'quality of life' is a subjective matter. It does not depend on something external to us.
Ernst Mayr, the distinguished zoologist and Darwinian theorist, claimed in One Long Argument that the worldview formed by any thinking person in the Western world after 1859, when On the Origin of Species was published, could not but be thoroughly different from any worldview formed prior to Darwin.
He was wrong. Charles Darwin's worldview wasn't so very different from that of Erasmus Darwin who, in turn, wasn't hugely different in his thinking from his father. What was remarkable, to my mind, is that evangelical Christianity didn't curl up and die amongst Darwin's class. To my mind, it became saner and more efficient. It's fitness increased because it decided to achieve more in this world rather than bother too much with the details of the world to come.
That is indeed so, and it’s an important fact which deserves full recognition.
Why? What good does it do? Geology had already rocked the Theological boat as had the new philology and Biblical hermeneutics. As far as India or Islam was considered, the Xtian missionaries had been taken down a peg or two.
But a worldview based on the Darwinian vision of progress can also be deeply limiting,
because biology changes slowly relative to technology, geopolitics, and global commerce.
because it concentrates on our characteristics rather than our lives,
but a worldview which concentrates on our lives rather than our characteristics would be not just more limiting, it would be completely mad. It would not be able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. It would be incapable of accommodating a structural causal model of any part of the world. It would resemble some extreme and wholly disabling type of schizophrenia.
and focuses on adjusting ourselves rather than the world in which we live.
Sen doesn't put on a sweater when it turns chilly. He raises the temperature of the globe.
These limitations are particularly telling in the contemporary world given the prevalence of remediable deprivations, such as poverty,
which had been remedied in countries which had a falling proportion of the population engaged in involuted, Malthusian, agriculture
unemployment,
which is cool provided someone keeps you fed and clothed while you look for a job
destitution,
is the same as poverty
famine
B.R Sen had shown that the world could be free of this scourge- provided Uncle Sam was permitted to send food.
and epidemics,
for which you need Sciencey guys coming up with vaccines
as well as environmental decay, threatened extinction of species and persistent brutality towards animals.
What about the brutality lesbian cats show in sodomizing disabled dogs?
We do need Darwin, but only in moderation.
We don't need Sen. He is useless.
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