2.5 Huxley's Evolution #2
Last modified 07/04/2008
|
We should note that Huxley was a clear case in disguise where the
equivocation over micro and macro arises from the limitation of evolution to
natural selection. In his essay on evolution and ethics he stumbles on the clear
contradiction in Darwin's theory: why, if natural selections is the driving
force of evolution, are we disposed to oppose it in practice? Clearly something
has arisen either in tandem or in opposition to 'evolution' of the Darwinian
variety, since we have long since, it seems, evolved to something else. This
clear evidence of the gap in explanation has in fact arisen in another area of
the theory: the deficit of explanation that occurs in the emergence of ethical
behavior and the sense of morality, highly complex, that is clearly present in
man. And here Darwinism simply draws a blank. To be sure, Darwinists have
attempted limited explanations by taking one ethical trait, altruism, and
attempting to show how this can arise via natural selection. But the problem
with this is, first and foremost, the abstraction of the argument without data
or demonstration, and the clear implication that evolution is of mechanical
machines who react altruistically in a pure mechanical sense without any ethical
awareness. That the evolution of an ethical agent must presuppose the evolution
of consciousness, a factor Darwinists can't even begin to explain, is a caution
against the facile treatment of altruism, which in any case is but one isolated
aspect of the ethical behavior of human organisms.
Thus Huxley bumps himself directly into the macro/micro camp of those who sense that evolution has two levels. Further, we might note that in his essay on evolution and ethics he is one of the first to intuit what Jaspers later codified as the Axial Age, with his ruminations on the Indian and Greeks in their crucial placement in the 'evolution' of civilization. Huxley zeroes in on the answer to his puzzle, but doesn't understand it.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||