blogjou
It seems like at least the European CORONA crisis is coming to an end, so I need another socially accepted excuse for never being around anywhere. A blog!...an organism's sole purpose was to cover its expenses
Optimization is the heart of breeding. Before breeders bent nature to human whim, an organism’s sole purpose was to cover its expenses. In the context of breeding, the organism’s purpose is to provide humans as much as it can, at least the expense. Even the earliest breeders of the Fertile Crescent couldn’t settle for whatever supplied their own subsistence, since the had to feed growing numbers of nonproductive people such as chiefs, soldiers, and priests. Margins were bordn. Nowadays, with a vastly larger human population, optimization is imperative. Thanks to the domestication analogy, humanity is convinced that this sort of optimization is necessary in nature too.
Humanity stops at nothing
Wheras nature knows enough, humanity stops at nothing. The cult of excellence venerates just one winner - or, in some cases, one especially important loser. In nature, there are many good enoughs. The survivors and reproducers are multiple and varied.
Chance governs life, waste is everywhere, novelty is the exception
Optimization is the sort of thing neoclassical economists dream about. It combats chance, waste, and stagnation, but these are the consitutive properties of nature: chance governs life; waste is everywhere; novelty is the exception and stasis the rule. And because there are never two identical individuals, at least one in any pair is not optimized. Whereas the art of breeding consists in creating the next improved model, more functional and standardized than the last, nature prefers none of that. Domestication, the foundation on which Darwin’s understanding of nature is built, has one enemy: nature itself.
Natural selection and eugenics
By inferring natural from artificial selection and thereby favoring selection over elimination and toleration, Darwin not only fostered an enduring intellectual error but also set the table for the horrors of eugenics. His defenders have separated him from this legacy of death and oppression by distinguishing his evolutionary ideas from those of Spencer and Galton and by pointing to his own avowed preferences. Rather than espousing improving the human stock by terminating the unfit, Darwin argued for uplifting the disadvantaged through welfare policies, which he saw as expression of “the instinct of sympathy, which was originally caquired as port of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered…more tender and more widely diffused.” But we should not absolve him so easily. The discoverer of natural selection was certainly humane, but he also warned against the suicidal aspect of his disposition: “No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man… Excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” Again – for the point cannot be made often enough – natural selection describes the way that humans act, not the ways of nature; it ascribes human modes of action to nature. Thus did nature become an authoritative supporter of social competition and hierarchy.
No one has ever equated evolution with stagnation
Change is the exception in nature and conservatism the rule. “Stasis is data, stasis is data, stasis is data,” was Gould’s mantra. “Say it ten times before breakfast every day for a week, and the argument will surely seep in by osmosis.” He meant that evolution cannot reasonably be a theory of change alone, for stasis is everywhere, and this observation counts, too. Dawkins agrees: “Although evolution may seem, in some vague sense, a ‘good thing,’ especially since we are all the product of it, nothing actually ‘wants’ to evolve. Evolution is something that happens, willy-nilly, in spite of all the efforts of the replicatios (and nowadays of the genes) to prevent it happening.” In nature, stagnation is good and change is bad unless proved otherwise. We shouldn’t glean too much from Gould’s and Dawkins’s enunciation of this principle, though. They are arguably the two best-known evolutionary writers of their generation, but in practice, the discipline and its public communication are viscerally change-oriented, always emphasizing variation and not adaptation. Not for nothing is the word evolution often used synonymously with progress and development. No one has ever equated evolution with stagnation.
Color blindness was certainly not elected
But while color blindness was certainly not elected, it is not so bad that the afflicted have to be eliminated. Had Darwin gone with natural elimination and exploret its implications, the persistence of these mutations would cause no theoretical difficulty. He would have inoculated the theory of evolution against most of its lingering contradictions, the misunderstandings it provokes, and the resistance it encounters. Where natural selection follows clear rules of breeding at odds with the products of evolution around us, natural elimination allows the idiosyncrasies observed in nature. At the risk of importing the subject even here, one might say – metaphorically – that natural elimination sometimes closes one eye and naps, allowing lousy variations to endure. And sometimes it closes both eyes and takes its shot, killing off the good and the bad alike. Natural elimination has no direction, goal or bias; it is as volatile as it is indifferent.
The principle of breeding
Darwin had celebrated the capacity of ruthless selection to obtain comparativelty minor results: “Lord Rivers, when asked how he succeeded in always having first-rate greyhounds, answered, ‘I breed many, and hang many.’”
A conceptual metaphor does for arguments what scaffolding does for buildings.
There is, in theory, nothing wrong with using an analogy in the course of arguing for natural selection. A conceptual metaphor does for an argument what scaffolding does for buildings. […]
The creators of new thought styles must have one-track minds
Darwin’s defensiveness may also have been a product of blind love. As the founder of a scientific paradigm, he was especially devoted to its vindication. Ludwig Fleck, an inspiration behind Thomas Kuhn’s development of the concept of paradigm shift, noted that creators of new thought styles must have one-track minds. Others are entitled to partake of several approaches, but the revolutionary is left to secure his or her own. For Darwin, this meant a degree of obstinacy in the face of criticism. There was no other way to make such a huge difference in the history of truth.
Never discard a genius's idea...
Never discard a genius’s idea. I uphold that although the domestication analogy is wrong, it can render great service to knowledge if, and only if, it is turned on its head. Instead of inferring natural selection from artificial selection, we should infer from emestication what nature is not. In what follows, I explore what breeders do in order to isolate how their values and activities produce results different from what occurs in nature. We will see here the true source of the eugenic and capitalistic ethics ascribed to evolution: not natural law but human hybris.