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'Natural elimination' instead of 'natural selection'

Had Darwin not been under the spell of fanciers, he may have called his discovery “natural elimination” and reserved “selection” for the rare cases of fixation and stabilization of advantageous varieties. What is eliminated? The lethal and the luckless. In this alternate universe, the history of biology, and its contemporary predilections,would be vastly different. Instead of fitness, we would speak of chance. The recipe for escaping natural elimination? Take normalcy and add luck. Luck is the necessary ingredient for the good enough; often it is the sufficient one, too.

The organic law of the balancing between the volumes of organs

“…One cannot meet a body more cramped from front to back.” But he also thought to explain, in universal terms, the giraffe’s thriving in spite of such disproportionality. He credited the “organic law” of “the balancing between the volumes of organs,” whereby “asystem of organs acquires a dimension out of proportion only when other organs are restricted and reduced by an equivalent amount.” This notion of physiological trade-offs was axiomatic among scientific minds of the era and is maintained even in today’s evolutionary language. As Goethe wrote and Darwin quoted in the Origin, “The budget of Nature is fixed, but she is free to dispose of particular sums by any appropriation that may please her. In order to spend on one side, she is forced to economize on the other side.” Saint-Hillaire thought the giraffe’s disproportions a “memorable” example of this law at work.

The domestication analogy run amok

One cannot blame the giraffe for leading evolutionists astray. It did not choose its strangeness and celebrity, the qualities that made it such an inviting target for theorists’ assumptions of adaptation. Chapter 2 takes up this assumption directly. Why were Darwin and his interlocutors so certain that traits were adaptive in the first place? In some cases, such as that of the finches discussed in Chapter 3, there was good evidence. But in many other cases, all that theorists had to go on was a mistaken analogy between nature and domestication. They thought the jungle was like a farm, where a breeder called natural selection wrought ever-finer creatures from one generation to the next. This analogy ran amok, we will see, is foundational to the selectionst dogma that continues to afflict thinking about evolution and its ethical consequences.

Such a consequential weapon could never be the claim of one country alone...

Firs, Mivart argued that if having a long neck was so advantageous, “we ought to have seen at least several forms, similar to the giraffe, developed from different Ungulata… Being needful, there should be many animals with it.” In other words, if the long neck is adaptively beneficial, why is it not seen among related animals? Darwin retorted that there are events, in the hiotory of humanity, that occurred in one country but not in others. This seems an ungraceful pirouette. The long neck, as Darwin saw it, was not any odd event in the giraffe’s evolution but its survival edge. Such a consequential weapon could never be the exclusive claim of one country, as the nuclear arms race reminds us.

Answers tend to die young, but a good question lives forever.

The giraffe’s carreer as a scientific challenge seemed to be over. Posterity’s verdict was unanimous - Darwin was right, Lamarck was ridiculous, affair closed. After Darwinism solved the mystery of the neck, biologists lost interest in the giraffe for nearly a century. But the case was reopened when field researchers studied giraffes in Africa.The accumulating facts reveal many holes in the canonical understanding.

Evolutionary biologists invert the scientific principle

In science, methodological neutrality is expreses by the null hyptothesis, namely that every relationship between phenomena is, by default, the fruit of chance. The burden of refutation weighs on the researcher. You don’t have to prove innocence of justify chance.

Wenn Hunde sprechen könnten...

Karel Čapek:

Wenn Hunde sprechen könnten, dann fänden wir es vielleicht genauso schwer, mit ihnen auszukommen, wie mit anderen Leuten.

The essence of mathematics, physics, and biology

Again, I question the roles of novelty and merit in the selection process. But though I come to this subject from my same philosophical perspective, I might add that there aee serious and even trailblazing biologists on my side. True, none of them has offered a comprehensive complementary theory to explain what Darwin and his followers leave out. Even so, I take heart from the words of Sydney Brenner, who won the Nobel Prize for his efforts in discovering messenger RNA (mRNA). “Wheras,” Brenner explains, “mathematics is the art of the perfect and physics the art of the optimal, biology, because of evolution, is only the art of the satisfactory.” Species need not be perfect or optimal, only satifactory. Fancois Jacob opposes in his autobiography Jacques Monod’s Cartesian idea of nature to his: “I saw nature as a rather good girl. Generous, but a little dirty. A little messy. Working in a piecemeal way. Doing what she could with what she found.”

The absurdity of intelligent design

Partisans of intelligent design argue in bad faith, so they might still claim my views on behalf of their mistaken ideas. In fact, my arguments vitiate theirs; there is a strong corellation between the uqiquity of neutrality and the falseness of intelligent design. That is because intelligent design is parasitic on selectionism. Intelligent design begins from the premise, supplied by selectionism, that species are optimized. ntelligent design takes Darwin’s analogy to domestication as more than figurative, asking how the perfection of nature - or, in Wallace’s case, the human specifically - could possibly be achieved without the intervention and direction of an intelligent force, a great cosmic breeder or sculptor. In contrast to both selectionism and intelligent design, the theory of the good enough turns our attention to nature’s many imperfections. Because nature is not optimzed, intelligent design advocates are actually assigning waste and mediocrity to the handiwork of an omnipotent being of supernatural intelligence. Why venerate such a lazy and inept God? When we temper our selectionist expectations, the absurdity of intelligent design emerges in even sharper belief.

Why should we struggle and strain when we are all good enough?

In chapter 10, I conclude with an exploration of what humanity’s safety net means for ethics, resolving that competition within society is a fool’s game. We need far less excellence than we cultivate. We do it anyway because the best of our neurons, those that rescued us from extinction, are underemployed and overqualified - not because doing so is necessary or even, in many cases, useful. More often, it is crushing. Being excellence-driven myself, I am well placed to know to futility and the masochism of this pursuit. Though our capitalist institutions tell us that we mst constantly strive, that nature ordains competition to be the best and reap the rewards, nature in fact offers no rewards beyond survival and reproduction. Both are assured by a safety net that allows us to be just fine even though we are so much less than optimal. Why should be struggle and strain when we are all good enough?