1.1 Beyond Natural Selection
Last modified 05/25/2008
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The Darwin debate is misleading in the sense that two issues are
constantly scrambled together: the fact of evolution in deep time, which is
well-established, and the claims for the mechanism of natural selection, which
are less clear, and the source of much of the contention. There is a frequent
distinction between microevolution and a purported 'macroevolution', with
Darwinists generally claiming that the latter can be accounted for by a
universal generalization using natural selection. Whatever the case about
earlier evolution in deep time, the theory of natural selection tends to sow
tares in the perception and understanding of history, producing the classic
fallacies of Social Darwinism. And yet students of history experience a
difficulty in extricating its study from such fallacies, for the simple reason
that natural selection is taken as the sole and universal mechanism of
evolution. This point is sometimes denied by biologists, but without a genuine
demonstration of some other form of evolutionary mechanism, possibly some form
of macroevolution, the thesis of selectionism becomes a tacit assumption that
overrides all other perceptions.
One aspect of this is what we can call the Oedipus paradox. This phrase arises from the work of Karl Popper who cited the ancient myth of Oedipus, and the way his expectations about the future became the object of his action in the present, thus precipitating his tragic outcome. In general the assumptions about natural selection, seen as a process that occurred in the past, generate a sense of its operation as a universal law, one that will therefore apply to the future. This expectation in turn becomes the basis for a strategy of action, e.g. survival of the fittest routines, and induced competition as an expression of this 'law'. But a fallacy has entered here. Natural selection is supposed to be a blind process operating on unconscious organisms over immense periods of time. To say that a conscious agent can or should apply this as a procedure of action in his present or future because it so happened in the past is simply not a valid deduction from the facts of the case. T. H. Huxley noted the oddity of this situation, and also noted that in practice we tend to contradict the premise of natural selection in our present, for ethical or other reasons. Some other source of action has entered the picture, and we are not agents of natural selection. Something has entered our thinking, a theory, that distorts our sense of how we should conduct historical outcomes. Thus the confusion of Social Darwinist misapplication of theory. We should note in addition that we have stumbled indirectly on one of the possible candidates for 'some other process of evolution' just here: our cultural context has emerged to be something other than the play of natural selection. If we trace this cultural history we should sooner or later detect the suspected macroevolutionary processes we sense as the missing clue to the inadequacies of selectionist theories.
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