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 -
And what is "the mechanism of selection"?
But
So yes, Darwin did say that "traits that are benefitial are preserved", or in other words "those who survive, survive". Therefore, it is a tautology.
No it isn't. My complaint is what I said it is, it's in the title of the post. As I said in another comment, if you wanna say that Darwin's theory is true and correct then go right ahead, but it is also trivial and useless.
And did you read the quote I cited? Here it is again:
In other words, Augustine argued that God selected some species to be born at specific points in time. This of course means that some other species where chosen to disappear in the same manner.
no, extinction is not implied here or required
Well, if you read the source I quoted you'd know that Augustine's doctrine of rationes seminales allowed Thomas Aquinas to move away from the essentialist position that made extinction metaphysically impossible. So yes, extinction is indeed implied.
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you missed part "and passed to offspring, resulting in spreading across population"
this is not a tautology, there could be a world running on different rules where it would not happen
Alright, so: Those who survive, survive, and therefore can reproduce. Because those who don't survive are less likely to reproduce. You don't solve a tautology by adding another. Surviving is a sine qua non condition to reproducing, the dead don't reproduce. So no, as I understand there's no set of rules that would allow the dead to breed, unless we change the meaning of "dead" to "alive".
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The mechanism of selection is:
You seem to be saying that since any definition works both ways (a coward is a person lacking courage, and a person lacking courage is a coward), then all definitions are tautologies. If that is what you are saying, then you really don't understand what a tautology is.
What Darwin actually said is that a change in the environment will cause changes in the organisms living in the environment, through the mechanism of selection. This is a very useful idea. It is so useful that it allowed the people who discovered and produced the first antibiotics to immediately understand what causes antibiotic resistance in bacteria, and how to cause it in the laboratory and also how to prevent it. You claim that people were not able to predict that resistance would happen before they observed it, even though they knew about Darwin already, but for example Wikipedia seems to disagree with you there.
Newton says that when you push left, it will accelerate to the left, and when you push right, it will accelerate to the right. Similarly Darwin says that when nature metaphorically "pushes" for dark fur to provide better camouflage from predators, then eventually prey animals will tend to have dark fur, and when it "pushes" for light fur to provide better camouflage, then eventually prey animals will tend to have light fur.
I mean you literally wrote:
It does seem that you are complaining about how all the counterexamples turn out not to be counterexamples after all.
Yes I did. We can go through it again. Here it is: "species emerged sequentially in historical time rather than all at once". Notice first that the words "select" or "selection" are nowhere to be seen. Then remember that when we talk about selection we are talking about it in the sense of selective breeding, about which animals procreate more and which animals procreate less. We are not talking about choosing which dress to wear to a wedding. You asked:
You could argue that if "species emerging sequentially" is a result of God's will, then in some abstract sense God has "selected" how and when this emergence happens, but still we cannot find in your quote anything about animals with certain traits procreating more than others. If the people who discovered antibiotics only had Saint Augustine's doctrines they may have never understood how to prevent antibiotic resistance in bacteria. So that is how it differs from Darwin's explanation.
I'm not. Why don't you focus on what I actually said? I won't respond to the "then everything is a tautology" claim because I've already done so several times on these comments, even on this very thread if I recall correctly.
No he does not.
Key word: Seem. I'm only stating that there's no counterexample to a tautology. Because I'm trying to explain that the theory of Natural Selection is a tautology.
Yes, St. Augustine is not the same as Darwin. But in practical terms, Divine Selection and Natural selection have the same explanatory value. That is, none at all.
And yes, the Wikipedia article says that Flemming "predicted" antimicrobial resistance, but he "predicted" it in 1945, that is, 17 years after he discovered antibiotics. And he "predicted" it because he already observed the resistance in his laboratory. So no, he didn't "predict" it, he discovered it.
I'm trying to understand what you are saying, but it's difficult because sometimes what you say is unclear and sometimes it's nonsensical.
Yes he does. Newton's second law of motion, does it sound familiar? F=ma? I don't understand why you would deny a basic fact like this.
Here's a simple counterexample: God protects all animals and won't allow any of them to suffer due to effects from their environment, and therefore there is no difference in survival or reproduction rates based on the traits of the animals.
You develop a miracle drug that kills harmful bacteria, but then you discover that your miracle drug is becoming less effective. What do you do? Divine Selection tells you that "God selects". What are you gonna do with that? Natural selection tells you that if you change the environment where a population of organisms live, the change in the environment can affect the prevalence of traits over generations. This allows you to explain why your drug is becoming less effective, and the explanation allows you to know how you could develop bacteria that are resistant to your drug, or how to prevent bacteria from developing resistance. So as we can see, it is exactly in practical terms that Natural selection has much more explanatory value than Divine selection.
No, I'm talking about for example this mention on Alexander Fleming's Wikipedia page:
First of all:
You mean something like this?
That is a quote from Darwin btw. Besides neither St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas believed that animals do not suffer. That counterexample of yours is nothing but a strawman.
You seem to understand it well enough to judge it as nonsensical. Or don't you understand what "nonsensical" means either? In any case, it doesn't get much clearer than this: The theory of Natural Selection is a tautology. For the rest all I can say is: ¡Oh! Pues si no me entienden no es maravilla que mis sentencias sean tenidas por disparates.
Erratum: Somebody did predict antimicrobial resistance.
I gave you a counterexample, and if a counterexample exists then logically it cannot be a tautology. This seems to be what you think also, because you were arguing that tautologies do not have counterexamples.
You now admit that natural selection is more useful as a theory than for example the doctrines of Saint Augustine, because it makes it possible to predict resistance to antibiotics. This means that natural selection cannot be a tautology in the sense that it provides no useful information.
So I guess this is game over for you, as there is nothing left of your claim. Thanks for playing, try again sometime.
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