Text 343, 240 rader
Skriven 2004-10-08 13:28:00 av John Edser (1:278/230)
Ärende: Darwinism=Capitalism
============================




Michael Ragland wrote:

I would like to thank Michael for
posting this article.


> History of Darwinism
> Peter J. Bowler:
[Peter J. Bowler is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the
Queen's University of Belfast.]
> snip<
> ..But what about the "struggle for existence," with its
> apparently harsh implications? the Victorians welcomed Darwin's emphasis
> on struggle because they saw it as the stimulus to individual and racial
> progress -- this is "social Darwinism." 

JE:-
Yes "racial progress" was not separated from "individual"
progress hopelessly confusing group selection with organism
selection. It was Wallace who argued for group selection.
Darwin did not include it within his theory. 

> Bowler Quote:
> the "invisible hand" which
> economists saw coordinating individual selfishness for the benefit of
> society could now be seen as generating an advance toward higher things.

JE:-
It was Adam Smith who coined the "invisible hand" of capitalist 
society. Logically it was equivalent to Darwinian natural selection
where the selectee remained the individual and not the society
(no group selection was required). 

> Bowler Quote:
> But it was not just a question of struggle eliminating the unfit. Many
> scientists and social thinkers were Lamarckians, including Herbert
> Spencer, the philosopher who coined the term "survival of the fittest"
> -- widely regarded as the greatest social Darwinist. Struggle forced
> individuals to improve themselves as well as weeding out the few totally
> unfit to survive, a view that many would see reincarnated in modern
> Thatcherism. the original social Darwinism was as much Lamarckism as
> Darwinism. 
 
JE:-
Spencer was in serious error.  He took the "natural"
out of Darwinian _natural_ selection because his "survival
of the fittest" logic did not differentiate between competition 
by intent and competition by simple default. Each living form 
just does the best it can for itself while remaining unconscious
of how other forms are doing in competition against it. 
Natural selection is competition by default. This 
includes human natural selection. However, capitalist 
market place competition can allow individuals
to compare their gains/losses on a cognitive basis. This provides
all sorts of problems that do not exist using competition 
by default. Competition by intent can very quickly became politically
exploited. Hitler argued that certain racial types were
superior to others because his fitter types could murder the
supposed weaker types. His argument was group selective and an 
act of intent (not a Darwinian default act of individual selection).
It did not represent Darwinian logic even if may have represented
Spencerian logic. It took WW2 to prove that Hitler's "weak" were 
fitter by default using individual and not group selection. Man 
works via his brain and not just via brawn. Even Darwinian strength 
lies in a unique human adaptation: trade. Hitler destroyed free markets 
and trade so he and his ilk became hopelessly weak compared to those 
that didn't. 


> Bowler Quote:
> Evolution without Darwin the most extreme reaction against Darwinism is
> the Fundamentalist return to the Genesis creation story. But some
> evolutionists reject the Victorian emphasis on struggle. Many early
> twentieth-century thinkers insisted that the Victorians had been blinded
> by the ideology of competition. Nature was not dominated by struggle,
> and progressed by developing increasing levels of cooperation. the
> author Samuel Butler dismissed Darwinsm as a "nightmare of waste and
> death," while the playwrite Bernard Shaw wrote that if the selection
> theory were true "only fools and rascals could bear to live." their
> revulsion is shared by many modern opponents of the selection theory who
> find its emphasis on trial and error impossible to square with the
> development of purposeful structures. Butler and Shaw both saw
> Lamarckism as the most plausible alternative -- but in the 1920s
> Lamarckism was eliminated from science by modern genetics.  

JE:-
Cooperation and competition are complimentary 
and not contradictory logics within Darwinism. To this 
very day Darwinian fitness mutualisation has not been
properly identified. Historically this has led to a false 
dichotomy rooted in hopeless political rhetoric: "altruism" Vs 
"selfishness" which has been incorrectly justified using 
Hamilton et al for over 50 years.


> Bowler Quote:
> the Rise of Genetics Darwin's theory was surprisingly modern except in
> his ideas about variation and heredity. the notion of the unit gene was
> popularized soon after 1900 and showed that characters are inherited as
> undiluted units.

JE;-
The view that each gene represents an independent 
unit of selection within Darwinism is entirely false.
Darwinian units of selection are fertile forms within
which genomic genes can only be _dependently_ selected.
This means genes are selected at the fertile organism
level of selection and not at a heuristic gene level
of selection. The gene centric view is just a misused
model of Darwinian absolute fitness.


> Bowler Quote:
> Lamarckism was discredited because the genes cannot be
> influenced by the body carrying them. After some controversy, it was
> realized that genetic mutation provided a new explanation of the random
> variation that Darwin saw in every population. With Lamarckism gone, the
> genetical theory of natural selection emerged in the 1930s and 40s,
> explaining adaptive evolution in terms of the changing genetic
> composition of populations. Many biologists now regard the synthesis of
> Darwinism and genetics as the only plausible explanation of evolution.  

JE:-
Darwin's fertile organism unit of selection has not
been properly joined to Mendel's gene unit of 
inheritance. Neo Darwinism has misused gene centric
models of fitness to the extent that random processes
are now claimed to cause evolutionary changes on their own
(without any non random process such as selection).
This view reduces evolution to the status of a
non refutable theory of nature on a par with "creation
science".

> Bowler Quote:
> Genetic Determinism the development of genetics coincided with a
> strongly articulated social policy based on the view that heredity
> determines human characters. In the early twentieth century, many
> countries (not just Nazi Germany) had policies to restrict the breeding
> of the "unfit," often by compulsory sterilization. Artificial selection
> replaced natural selection in the human population -- the social policy
> known as eugenics. But who decides which characters are desirable? After
> the excesses of the Nazi regime, eugenics went underground, but our
> modern fascination with genes as the determinants of human characters
> may be reintroducing it through the back door.  

JE;-
The error has always been the deletion of
genetic epistasis as valid heritable information.
Individual fitness is not just the simple sum
of each individual genomic genes fitness. Both 
Fisher (a population genetics founding father) 
and Muller (the discover of mutation) were right 
wing bigots. It politically suited them to argue 
that individual genes have a fitness in their
own right because they could then label individuals
with certain genes as "inferior". This paved the
way for Hitler's racism. However, all genomic genes 
are known to be selected, together i.e. they 
are dependently and not independently selected. 
What Fisher and Muller did was to attempt 
to delete genetic epistasis (non additive information)
as non heritable and thus non selectable, information.
Haldane (another population genetics founding
father) created his famous "dilemma": not
enough time existed to evolve a chimp and man
from a common ancestor if heritable information
is restricted to additive genetic information
as Fisher defined it. Haldane envisaged an
very large additive human genome. It turns out 
that the human genome is tiny, just 30-40,000 genes.
The only possible way to explain millions
of heritable phenotypes is by including and not
excluding genetic epistasis (non additive genomic gene
information) as heritable and thus selectable,
information.


Muller's discovery of mutation was misused
to the extent that it replaced selection as
an evolutionary force for a period of time.
Today exactly the same error is being made 
with random sampling error. 

> Bowler Quote:
> Sociobiology the most controversial aspect of modern Darwinism links the
> genetic determination of human character to natural selection as the
> explanation of behavioural instincts. Richard Dawkins and others insist
> that natural selection explains not only the devleopment of animals
> species, but also the development of the human mind. Sociobiology, based
> on what Dawkins calls the "selfish gene", accounts for animal behaviour
> in terms of genetically programmed instincts shaped by natural
> selection. Many Darwinians insist that this programme can be applied to
> human behaviour: we are what our genes determine us to be. Most social
> scientists resist this, arguing that the human brain (admittedly
> developed by evolution) has acquired a capacity to learn from experience
> so strong that it overrides all but the most basic biological instincts.
> Unlike the nineteenth-century version, modern "social Darwinism" really
> is based on Darwinian natural selection, coupled with a strong (but
> highly controversial) faith in the power of the genes to determine human
> nature.  

JE:-
The above is false. Sociobiology and
"Dawkinsism" are only based on a misuse of 
Hamilton's rule. The Darwinian fitness maximand has
not been properly identified let alone correctly joined
to Mendel's genes. The purely pragmatic gene centric
view of today's Neo Darwinism only reflect a
backlash against the right wing bigotry of Muller
Fisher etc. Today it is the turn of the left
wing bigots to destroy evolutionary theory. Today 
organism fitness altruism and not organism fitness
selfishness entirely dominates evolutionary theory. 
What in fact has always dominated evolutionary theory 
is UNIDENTIFIED organism fitness mutualism.

>big snip<

Regards,

John Edser
Independent Researcher

PO Box 266
Church Pt
NSW 2105
Australia

edser@tpg.com.au
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