As the
NeoDarwinian synthesis goes into terminal nosedive the last ditch hope
would seem to blend natural selection and directionality, a tactic
drastically evident in Wright's book, which achieves a new level of
confusion with its teleological argument based on natural selection and
game theory, bestseller candy. Not science, please! The result is
pseudo-"philosophy of history" masquerading as science. What grounds do we
have for applying evolution to history? Life is confused enough without
scientific Darwin dummies playing theoretical Charles Chaplin. It is an
odd fact that biologists claim a science of evolution in unobserved times
while historians are critical of claims for a science of history in
observable times. This should make us suspiciously skeptical of any
argument claiming both history and evolution in one sweep. No theories are
likely to have such universal range. History and the evidence it shows
must speak for itself and is under no requirement to conform to the
assumptions about earlier evolution of Darwinists. Applying Darwinian
natural selection to history is a complete fallacy that has forever
confused cultural evolutionism with racist Eurocentric nonsense. This
can't be repaired except by abandoning natural selection, for the
suggestion is the dangerous idea of cultural selectionism. The world's
'primitive' people have suffered enough from this phoney science. The
debate over directionality in evolution by Darwinians(viz. Gould, Full
House, Willis, The Runaway Brain) fails to consider that the appearance of
directionality almost by definition contradicts the implications of
natural selection. Here Gould in debate with Wright is at least
consistent. Thus the attempt to make them compatible won't work.
Kauffman's At Home in the Universe is careful thus to distinguish his
different processes. The fanstastic use of the theory of games is not
evidence, but hypothetical speculation. We have no evidence whatever that
genes for altruism arose through natural selection.(David Stowe, Darwinian
Fairytales),and the theory of games, as a mathematical toy, however
interesting, will not resolve the issue and is too lightweight to be a
candidate for the 'logic of destiny'! This book is the second this year on
evolutionary directionality to cite Kant's seldom cited essay Idea for a
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. It is not clear if he is
responding to this other book (by John Landon, World History and the Eonic
Effect)which answers Kant's challenge to find 'nature's hidden plan'
directly through periodization and shows the only simple way to infer
directionality as this can be taken in world history, data that springs
from observations beginning in the nineteenth century. Evolution in
history shows a clear global character with long range sequential and
parallel evolution, a far cry from anything in Darwinism. And we see that
the 'evolution of ethics' is presented to us directly in history if we can
see it. No theory of history can omit this data. Wright's misleading
treatment of the theme of 'asocial sociability' might seem plausible to
some in Kant's at first puzzling essay, but fails to consider the
background of his famous Critiques and also that this is not given as a
solution but a problem to be solved. Kant cannot be made a Darwinian and
was wise to the fallacy of mechanical explanations of ethical will long
before the onset of sociobiology (although he would seem to have supported
'evolution').Along with this we find the obligatory citation of Isaiah
Berlin and Karl Popper on historicism. Wright actually claims he will
bypass their objections and find a novel escape from their strictures, but
it is hard to see his answer. The total confusion of directionality and
teleology is evident everywhere. The problem of historical laws is
connected to the famous Kantian antinomies, the third of freedom and
causality being the ultimate source of Berlin and Popper's views. To
attempt a hybrid between natural selection and teleology via the theory of
games is notably confusing and won't stand. The point is that there is no
'theory' that is causal unless you renounce 'freedom', this and a host of
variants that were prominent in the golden age of Universal History.
Evolutionists make fun of this and promptly fall into all the traps. In
Kant's wake dealing with the evolution of freedom in explicit terms we
find such as Hegel, lately Fukuyama. Sociobiologists are noted for their
blundering in this area with conservative renditions of liberalism and
fail to consider that one of the proper themes of historical evolution is
just this 'evolution of freedom', which cannot be made scientific (and
prone no doubt to whiggish confusion). The philosophers of history were at
least clear about their subject. Wright's argument summons all the old
phantoms of historicism and hardly passes muster beside Popper's critique
of the original leftist versions. John Landon nemonemini@eonix.8m.com
