Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake.
Our modern society is in love with Darwin. Our ideas about nature, evolution, society and ourselves have been shaped by this man. It seems like every reasonable person in the world agrees that Darwin’s theory is correct and useful. Darwin’s theory aims at explaining how species evolve and become new species through the means of what he called “Natural Selection”, which was defined by him as follows: “This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection”. In other words, traits that benefit the individual tend to be preserved over time, while injurious traits tend to disappear. Traits that are not beneficial or detrimental are not affected by Natural Selection.
The accusation that this definition is tautological is nothing new and is well known, but it is generally ignored. A tautology is a statement that is true in every possible case. For instance, a statement like “The car is red because it’s not green” can’t be false because everything that is red is, by definition, not green. This statement is true but it’s useless as an explanation because it doesn’t give any information other than what is implied by its terms. Darwin’s critics accuse him of crafting a tautological statement because in his definition “favourable” or “beneficial” traits are defined as those that are preserved, and traits that are preserved are of course those that are favourable or beneficial. In other words, what Darwin says is that traits that are preserved are preserved. For instance: A Darwinist would say that human thumbs exist because they provide an advantage for the survivability of the species, so humans with thumbs have always been more successful at being alive and passing on their genes than human species without them. But if humans had no thumbs we could make the exact same argument, mutatis mutandis. Because of course what already exists has a higher chance of continuing to exist than things that no longer exist or that have never existed. Another example: Individuals who are born with healthy reproductive organs are more likely to pass on their genes than individuals who are born infertile. In both cases we can see “natural selection” in action. Both “explanations” are obviously true, but they are tautological, they don’t add any new information.
So the theory of Natural Selection explains nothing, and while scientists and biologists may admire Darwin and “believe” in Natural Selection, especially in opposition to creationist explanations, the truth is that Darwin’s book On The Origin of Species is an artifact of the past and university curriculums hardly devote any time to it. If people were to suddenly forget all about Darwin our understanding of evolution would remain roughly the same - although we would lose his contributions in other fields. Nowadays people seem to think that “evolution” and “natural selection” are synonyms but that’s not true at all. Evolution wasn’t a new concept to educated people back in the XIXth century, and everyone grasped the concept of heritability. So why was it so important, or why was it considered important, and why did it cause such a revolution in our understanding of nature? The answer is: Because of the concept of struggle for existence. People have always known that animals and humans change throughout the generations, but Darwin’s theory asserted that everything in nature, both animal and human, is determined by a struggle for scarce resources, that is, by an economic problem. Again, this is something that everyone who has felt hunger or desire to reproduce has understood to some degree, but before Darwin nature was much more than simply being alive and reproducing yourself. It was a divine creation, it had meaning, it had truth, it spoke in a rich language understandable to humans. Darwin’s theory made this language unintelligible, because it showed that an economic mindset was enough to understand nature for the purpose of fulfilling our needs. If a car is red, we don’t need to know the owner’s preferences or the manufacturer’s motivations in order to know that it is not green, and this knowledge is enough to use it. The fact that humankind descends from apes was polemic only because it showed that humans and apes have the same needs and aspirations, even if they had different evolutionary strategies to acquire them. But this is the conscious part, the part that everyone acknowledges. There’s also an unconscious consequence of the theory of natural selection: That nothing exists outside the struggle for existence.
This last idea is what makes Darwin’s theory so apt for the modern world. Science can overcome Darwin, modern society seemingly cannot. And even though biologists don’t pay much attention to him, Darwin is still quite popular in politics, philosophy, and social sciences. Because if there’s something at which modern society is particularly good, it’s at providing the means for existence and reproduction. So a theory of nature that asserts that this is all there is to it it’s bound to be popular, because it justifies the current state of affairs and exalts it as the best possible outcome of a long evolution towards an efficient society. All other possible alternatives are overcomed, and any possible development can only follow its example. Politically, liberals love it because it justifies and naturalizes their belief in the free market, and marxists love it because it promises future and exciting developments when men conquer the course of the evolution of their species with their own hands. Philosophically it solves the problem of how living creatures were created out of lifeless things, and it solves it in such a way that is comprehensible for human cognition. But the most peculiar development comes from the social sciences. First, came the social Darwinists who tried to apply the principle of survival of the fittest quite literally, but after WWII this became impossible for political reasons. We now have evolutionary psychology, a field that instead of trying to control human behavior creates a mythology around it, providing panglossian theories for human behavior that explain nothing and are therefore impossible to prove or disprove, but that provide a common ground between the general public and solicitors, drivelers, quacks, pickup artists - in a world, charlatans of all kinds. Everybody wants the secret to “hack” human behavior. There’s a particular internet subculture of men who are frustrated with modern society and with the changes in gender roles, and who look in evolutionary psychology for mating strategies to end their loneliness, believing that the atavistic caves where man supposedly learned to be man are like the rooms in which they spend most of their lives, without realizing that it is the selfishness of modern society that created this idea of the primitive caveman and that erodes human connections by reducing them to a mere survival strategy.
But it is clear that man became man not by surviving or by conquering the means to preserve and reproduce himself, but by the conquest of the unnecessary. As Gaston Bachelard(1) puts it: “Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of necessity”. Furthermore, there’s no evidence for the existence of a “survival instinct” anywhere in nature. We believe ourselves to be smarter than animals because they risk their lives in pointless endeavors, they are mostly unable to plan ahead and to cooperate for their survival as we do. But who said they needed to? If everything life needed is to survive, then asexual organisms would be the pinnacle of evolution, everything that has come after it is useless and inferior by this standard. While it is true that a struggle is necessary to exist, if existence were its only goal, if one could not risk even existence itself in exchange of something else, this struggle would be meaningless. Sexual reproduction is an example of a struggle where individual existence is put into question, because it bridges the gap between two individuals and creates something new. It is luxurious and exuberant, as life itself. This is something that has always been quite clear for humans since the dawn of time, but that seems incomprehensible now. Biology can progress through Darwinism but only by obscuring the mystery of life, turning it into something miserable and petty, like human economy. This progress is nothing but a change of perspective, focusing one thing and ignoring another. But as all perspectives are, in principle, equally valid, it’s only desire what moves us towards something else and something better than our trivial everyday existence and its meaningless struggles. Is it not, as Georges Bataille puts it, the tiger’s fruitlessness what makes it the king of the jungle? By predating on other animals, that eat other animals, that eat plants, and so on, the tiger splurges a huge amount of the jungle’s resources. Some would say that it serves the purpose of maintaining the balance of the ecosystem, but couldn’t this balance be imposed by the tiger itself? Its existence would then be more than a struggle for existence, it would be a struggle to impose its own norm, its own will, its right to splurge. This struggle would be unintelligible without the base of mere existence, because individual existence imposes a period of activity and silence, a discrete grammar for the tiger’s individuality to express itself, but the meaning of the tiger’s behavior can only be confused with its grammar by a fool. The tiger itself is but an echo of something infinite.
(1)Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire.
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Notes -
What Darwin's natural selection added was a description of how new species could develop through gradual, generational change and provide some good empirical examples where that was the obvious best explanation.
Yes, people know that long haired cats produce long haired kittens. Yes, it is obvious that long haired cats will survive in colder climates. What was not obvious was that, given enough time, two populations of cats would branch into distinct forms when geographically isolated, and that this would occur because the least fit would die out and the traits that made them unfit would die with them, while the most fit would survive to pass on those traits they posessed that were suitable for the local environment.
Yes, that was not obvious but that wasn't Darwin's discovery either. There were plenty of people who studied natural history and arrived to that conclusion, and there were plenty of explanations for it as well, Lamarckism being perhaps the most notorious. Darwin was indeed very good at natural history and provided very thorough evidence for evolution. But this has nothing to do with Natural Selection. The theory of Natural Selection tries to explain evolution by stating that the least fit will die and the fittest will thrive. But what does fitness mean if not the ability to thrive, the lack of which causes death? And is it not obvious that those who thrive are more likely to pass on their genes than those who die? Species change, of that there is no doubt. But are we really supposed to be content by saying that those species who survive are alive and reproduce, while those that went extinct don't reproduce anymore?
Right, Darwin did not invent thenidea of evolution. He supplied an explanation that is intuitively obvious, even tautological, in retrospect.
Bringing up the example of Lamarck is helpful. He proposed speciation through the inheritance of acquired traits. Why would he ever propose such a ridiculous idea when speciation by natural selection is so obvious?
Well, the "even tautological" part kills it, but people insist that meaningless tautologies are important, and there's no changing that.
Why would Lamarck propose that? Because it actually explains something, even if we don't have prove of said explanation. Do acknowledge the fact that modern biologists do not think Lamarck was at all ridiculous.
Inheritance of acquired traits is not a major driver of evolution. To the extent that environmental conditions are tranferable through epigenetics, the effects donnot persist through enough generations to result in speciation.
But the fact that Lamarck came up with inheritance of acquired traits as an explanation for evolution shows that natural selection never occurred to him, despite the fact that it is 'tautological'. Lamarck would not need a new theory to explain how species evolved if he knew of one that was already true.
This shows that despite being 'tautological' it was not a trivial realization.
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Yes? When reality is so simple, just accept it. Why do you desire theoretical complexity when it’s unnecessary?
It's not simple, it's tautological. Of course I accept tautologies as true, I cannot not accept them.
It’s not a tautology when viewed from a human scale perspective of time. It is hard for humans to imagine when wondering why organisms look the way they do all the potential descendants of the organisms that didn’t survive.
From gods eye perspective, I agree, it is obvious that natural selection happens. There is no logical alternative, you cannot not accept it.
Darwin didn't make this distinction between different time perspectives, but even then Darwin's explanation would be: They didn't survive because they don't exist anymore. It doesn't matter what time perspective you use, this holds true in every possible scenario.
He didn’t need to, anyway you didn’t address the thrust of my comment
You made two claims:
I rebutted this.
This is literally what I said, you are siding with me here. This is the definition of tautology, a claim that is true in every possible interpretation. Unless you meant to say that the only logical thing to do is accept Darwin's theory, on which case I'd say that's not the case at all. Even no explanation at all is better than a tautological explanation.
So which one is the "thrust" of your comment?
Yes but it doesn’t make it a tautology. A corollary isn’t any less true because it trivially follows from something else, and yet given the truth value of what the corollary follows, you also have “no choice but to accept it”.
For example, just because you explain survivor bias and how the jets that actually return are the ones that survive, you don’t actually take an issue with the “tautological nature”. The explanation is pointing at a gap in your understanding of logical consequences, which aren’t by any means a tautology. The same thing is happening here, natural selection must occur given certain conditions, and Darwin’s gift is forcing you to see the logical necessity.
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