A selection from WHEE:

We confront one of the paradoxes of evolutionary theory, one in which the observer is himself immersed in evolution, where he is constructing theories that might cause his own behavior to change in the present. This paradox is relatively unimportant with respect to the vistas of deep time, but assumes greater and greater importance as ‘evolution’, albeit transforming into history by our definition, closes on the present. This results in the ‘non-linear’ self-interaction of agent and theory in the present. Consider the difference in your behavior if you believe, or disbelieve, in Darwin ’s theory. Popper also indicated one aspect of this in what he called the Oedipus paradox :

The idea that a prediction may have influence upon the predicted event is a very old one. Oedipus, in the legend, killed his father whom he had never seen before; and this was the direct result of the prophecy, which had caused his father to abandon him. This is why I suggest the name ‘Oedipus effect ’ for the influence of the prediction upon the predicted event.[i]

Our beliefs about natural selection  contain a subtle prediction about what will happen if we ‘act out the theory’. We can see from the eonic effect that no higher culture will be the result! Quite the contrary. If the rules of the game were survival of the fittest the long term trend toward empire would go unchecked, and democracy and equalization, connected with freedom induction, would be superfluous.

If we assume that natural selection is ‘how things are’, the source of all higher complexity, we put a premium on its ‘mechanism’, e.g. competition, and the ‘acting out’ of selectionist presumption as a curiously inverted ethic. We should be wary that something is missing in our understanding! Clearly the generalization about selection must be false, somewhere. We can see this if we consider this paradox: if survival of the fittest produces altruism, then won’t more competition produce greater altruism? Shouldn’t we disregard ethics and altruistic action long enough to produce more ethically altruistic men? This contradiction takes many forms, and strongly suggests, independently of the evidence (which isn’t provided in any case) that natural selection is a false generalization, and that a ‘boundary present’ issue must be taken into consideration in theories of evolution, as opposed to theories of physics.

There would seem to be many evolutions at work, natural selection, and whatever produced its antithetical constructs, viz. altruism. This is the blunder that causes Social Darwinism . The only solution is to remember that theory itself is historically embedded. We have no external observers doing objective theories of evolution. This is why the religionists tend to see the paradox sooner, and so disconcertingly tweak the Darwinist, to his befuddlement. His hi-tech smart theory was supposed to override the issues of religion. But we can see that religion, however primitive, is a series of injunctions, ‘shoulds’, statements about what the ‘observer’ should do in the future, agree or not. Not a theory at all, it nonetheless respects the transition from past to present, to future. It wishes to script the action of the agent, from the present to the future. It is a statement about potential. We need to distinguish then these ‘free action’ scripts, from theories or generalizations taken to be universally valid. And that, with grim finality, is the end of simplistic theories of evolution. The problem is that theories of physics, in their spectacular success, defined from the start the meaning we give to science, but we can see that this definition starts to break down almost at once, and that theories of evolution are going to be an order of magnitude more difficult, confronted with this stubborn non-linear effect.

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[i] Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 13.