What Can Become a Tradition? Research Time, 01/03/2018

The term ‘resurrection’ is loaded, especially to someone who grew up in a historically Christian culture like me. It’s ironic today, because I want to talk about the resurrection of pagan religion in the West.

It was an illuminating example in a densely brilliant essay by Isabelle Stengers in The Guattari Effect. It extends a dialogue she and Guattari had when he was alive, about what it means to continue a tradition.

Question – Does a tradition need unbroken transmission across all generations from origin to now, if it’s going to be a genuine tradition?

The last several decades have seen a revival of Pagan rituals,
festivals, and genuine devotional religious ceremonies in the West.
Not only in Europe, but among settler cultures in North America
as well. But is it an authentic paganism if the tradition of the
religion was broken, and broken so long ago?

It started with an exchange between Stengers and Guattari about the nature of progress in anything’s development. The first context was how to understand the implications of evolution. If you take Darwinism seriously, you actually have to throw out any talk of higher and lower organisms.

The Medieval way of thinking ordered the world into hierarchies. The classification system in the Great Chain of Being may have been getting more complicated, and all the talk of God never needed to be said anymore. But until Darwin, you still ranked them.

And we kept ranking them after Charles Darwin the person wrote. But you now had this thoroughly materialist way of thinking about life. What does that imply for the reality of rank? Of a scale of “higher to lower” organisms by phylum or species? A chain that you moved up as you developed?

It's gone. Start from this fact – All the species that exist today are genuinely contemporary. This includes the bacteria. Folks typically think of bacteria as the lowest form of life, because one-celled organisms were the first to develop and bacteria are one-celled organisms.

But the bacteria that exist today are bacteria that have gone through nearly four billion years of contingent evolution. They’ve had just as much time as us. So if passage through time means advancement up the great chain of evolution, why are they still bacteria?

Because Earth is not the current place in an evolutionary process of creatures growing more advanced. Earth is a highly entropic system of hydrocarbons that’s had energy pumped into it for four billion years. We are the current era in a roiling chaos of highly complex contingent activity.

Bryozoans have existed for nearly 500 million years. They are
literally bags of microorganisms that live as a fist-sized single
organism. It moves, perceives, eats, excretes, and reproduces
asexually. The Bryozoans of today are utterly different from
the ones that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, except
that they are still bryozoans.

What the hell does this have to do with neo-paganism?

That conception of existence – roiling chaos of highly complex contingent activity – is an incredibly abstract description. Words heavy with very precise meanings expressed generally enough that many other contexts express it too.

Cultures change over time – contingent development in a chaotic world. The competing, older concept is the chain of being from lower to higher forms – progress as advancement in rank. A tradition consists in a common task developing over time. So you continue a tradition by relaying that task – passing it along.

Pagan religions in Europe – Greek, Roman, Celtic, Norse, and Germanic – flourished two thousand years ago. Christianity wiped out all the theology and absorbed pagan customs into its own practice, now seamlessly. New Pagans build their new tradition from archaeological and anthropological research on those ancient religions. They build their own practices from these fragments.

If you think of tradition as a chain, any temporal break ends the tradition. The reconstructed version developed in the late 20th century isn’t authentic to the organic Pagan religions of ancient Europe because of that break. There were no Pagan Yoda figures in hiding until Christianity let its institutional guard down.

But if you understand development as contingent chaos, then temporal continuity doesn't matter. Recurrence without continuity can happen, if conditions develop that make a tradition’s resurrection possible. So authenticity is a matter only of engagement, care, and a spirit of fidelity. You’re no receptacle. You can learn.

A Continuous World of So Many, A History Boy, 13/02/2018

One of the most important insights a person should have in the 21st century if you want to settle yourself, and give yourself come perspective, is this – Accept the continuity between humanity and other species.

Now, I’m not just talking about human-ape proximity. Though I am. All too often we forget how close we are to primates, how similar they are to us. All too often, we know how close we are to primates, and acknowledge it in the worst way. All too typical of us, I should say.

Seeing the continuity of your own life with that of an orangutan
isn't all that hard – they're laughing, silly, joyful, and quietly
experience such an enlightened wisdom of knowing that a loving,
silly, joyful life is the best one for creatures like us.
They're what we aspire to be.

The continuity I’m talking about today has much earlier roots, and much deeper in our bodies. Literally and figuratively.

I spent quite a few years studying philosophy of mind, and one reason I walked away from that as a major research focus was frustration – Frustration that so many researchers ignored the obvious answer to so many of their problems.

So many discussions I had and papers I read about the “hard problem” of consciousness fell to dust to me as I accepted that the human mind is a perceptual field. Our thoughts aren’t just in our heads. Our brains and nervous system develop through environmental interaction. They continue to function through complex feedback loops that we’ve been refining for our entire lives.

Henri Bergson was on to a similar way of thinking. He just expressed it in a totally different way.

The tragedy of Bergson is that he so radically misapplied true and valid philosophical principles of becoming. In the most notorious* example from his work – No Henri, the cause of life getting more complicated isn’t a force of life energy constantly struggling against the inertia of matter’s torpor.

* And simplest to explain.

But yes, large amounts of matter interacting in complex systems that constantly generate energy – say, from giant balls of gas falling in on themselves until they become nuclear fusion furnaces that can be stable for billions of years – tend to become more complex over time.

Here's the life story behind that set of links. At 21, mystified why Chalmers
thought consciousness was a hard problem at all. At 22, puzzled why Putnam
even had to argue that meaning was more than thoughts or neuronal flickers.
At 23, Merleau-Ponty gave me a wonderful vocabulary to let me walk away
from Chalmers’ limited point of view. At 24, learning the biological ground
of that wonderful vocab from Varela. At 25, learning the power and ubiquity
of life and memory to grow, refine, and develop a creature thanks to Allen
and Hofstatder. If you let the problems be your guide, you’ll figure them
out. Don’t specialize too early.

Bergson’s ideas are much more useful today – better applicable to the current state of human science, where we understand that complexity really is everywhere. And his concepts of what consciousness is, and what its roots are, matter today too.

Think about Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness – that a scientific understanding of consciousness will never help us understand the experience of consciousness. An essential premise of that concept is unspoken, but necessary for someone to arrive at that concept at all.

Consciousness is exclusively human, and only humans experience the world as a phenomenal sensory field. Absolutely untrue.

Everything that is capable of action in response to external stimuli – whose reaction to fields of force and affects in its environment – is conscious. That covers every organism. Humans have peculiarly complicated and complex perceptual fields, because we’ve refined our powers of communication and memory with language and technology.

But all those actions are mechanisms. They aren’t deterministic in the most strict sense, because organic responses are based on feedback loops – previous responses condition future responses. The feedback loop is the most rudimentary form of memory.

Even the simplest organisms perceive because their responses are actions – the movement of response itself originates internally and kicks off a feedback loop of the organism with its environment which couples them into a single dynamic field.

Add Bergson to the history I’ve strung together. Even if he might not have realized he’d become a member.

Knowing Knowledge IV: Humanity as Pinnacle, Dialogues, 20/03/2015

My discussion yesterday with Steve Fuller ran for so long that we didn't get a chance to cover two more interesting issues that came up in Chapter Two of his Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History. So we talked about them here, Fuller's thoughts on David Hume and a central concept of modern evolutionary theory.
• • •
Dear Steve;

Two other ideas in this week's chapter struck a chord with me, but I wanted to explore them separately from the larger discussion about theodicy that we've gotten into. Nonetheless, I think they're genuinely important. One is a quibble in the history of philosophy, and another has some lessons for the modern revival of theodicy concepts in science and politics. 

Films like Roman Polanski's The Tenant explore the
horror of a fragmenting personality, but the
freakiest aspect of Hume's philosophy is the prospect
that all personality is always already fragmented.

The smaller question is about the hate you get on for David Hume. You describe him, if I could use your economic epistemic terms from a previous chapter, as a supply-side theorist of knowledge. Your account of Hume also fits with the traditional interpretation of him as an epistemic skeptic that was canonical for so long in Analytic philosophy, particularly thanks to the influence of Bertrand Russell.

Hume also embodies what appears in your text as a fundamental contradiction. He's part of a tradition of secular liberal political philosophy thanks to his skeptical writings on religion and the existence of God. But his conception of how individual humans are actually built precludes the strong notion of the discrete individual person that political liberalism needs to function. 

A person is not a discrete, unified individual in Hume's thought, but a fluctuating jambalaya of different and mutually inconsistent forces and processes (which Hume called passions), whose unity is retroactively constructed through an exercise of memory. And that memory can get quite faulty.

What's more, Hume's own explicit everyday political beliefs were retrograde by our standards, and even some of the standards of his day. Essentially, he was a monarchist and a racist. 

But Hume's theory of subjectivity was, in its substance, a major crack at an assemblage conception of personality. From this philosophy, its contemporary form arising from the work of Gilles Deleuze, the subject is a singular contingent formation of particular kinds of forces. A complex machine constituted from the continuing collision of other complex machines. 

The political articulation of this theory of subjectivity is an experimentalist anarchism that encourages trying out new ways of making subjects. I make this connection of political philosophy with the ontology of subjectivity in my own upcoming book, Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, available this August from Palgrave McMillan.

Artist John Barker's depiction of the Battle of
Marston Moor, a brutal event in the English Civil
War. I sometimes think that most of our stereotypes
about Britain would be very different if more
people understood the long-term cultural heritage
of the English Civil War. I don't fully understand it
myself, but I know it's significant.

It's really quite unfortunate for Hume that he had come to the political conclusions he did, but he was unlucky to have lived in a time whose social climate just didn't offer the political articulations of his theory of subjectivity. 

If he had lived in continental Europe during the medieval period, he would have seen how well his anarchic conception of the subject fit with the communitarian, locally-networked politics of free cities like Mainz and Worms. As it is, his political culture was shaped by the authoritarian statism of the aftermath of the English Civil War and the unification of the United Kingdom.

The other point I wanted to discuss is about evolutionary theory, particularly your philosophical interpretation of convergent evolution. You're right that straight Darwinian natural selection doesn't have the conceptual capacity to cope with the fact of convergent evolution. 

But convergent evolution isn't quite enough to preserve an account of biological evolution that accords directly with theodicy. An essential idea of the specifically Christian theodicy is that humanity is made in the image of God. As such, humanity is something of a pinnacle of life. Creation does take on something of a purpose, a telos, whose embodiment is humankind.

Convergent evolution just doesn't get you there. It's more of a pragmatic scientific principle, as I understand it. Living creatures will face similar problems throughout a planet's evolutionary history, and similar problems will have similar optimal solutions. 

For example, the problem of how to get around an environment soaked in light is an issue wherever the sun can shine. Developing photoreceptive abilities is an optimal solution. The camera model of the eye in particular is the optimal model of a photoreceptive organ in an animal that needs detailed focus on objects at various long-ish distances. That's why camera eyes have developed independently in vertebrates, cephalopods, and annelids. We all have to solve similar problems of quickly adjusting our vision while we move.

Knowing what humanity shares with worms is
remarkably instructive in learning about the
processes of evolution.

There's a further political problem with the concept of humanity as the image of God in theodicy, which is that it blinds us to our own species-level maladaptive behaviour. If humanity, as the closest creatures in nature to God Herself, is the pinnacle of creation, and our powers and existence are essentially entwined with the telos of being itself, then it becomes difficult to conceive how anything in our nature could harm nature as a whole. 

Human behaviour, no matter what it is, could never harm the natural order of God's universe because we are its material culmination. And if we do harm it, then we do so as culminations of God's order, bringing the order of Earth's creation to its purposive end.

This denies the central motive of environmentalist thought, which I describe in more detail in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, still forthcoming from Palgrave McMillan this August. The environmentalist idea is that humanity is currently the most maladaptive imbecile of a species on Earth, stumbling into accidental species suicide by covering the planet in so much pollution that we cause a new mass extinction.

Environmentalism asks us to take responsibility for our own industrial actions, not for the sake of God, but for the sake of ourselves and everything else that we share the planet with. To do that, we must accept that human existence is contingent, and that we, like many other species in our world's history, have prioritized our immediate prosperity but jeopardized our long-term survival in doing so. 

A theodicy where we are the image of God holds us off from our collective forehead smack of humility because it privileges humanity's being. That privilege keeps us from understanding how God could allow our extinction, how God could permit the pinnacle of His creation to, as my favourite Clinton* once said, drown in our own shit. 

* That would be George Clinton, and the track would be the spoken-word introduction to Funkadelic's masterpiece "Maggot Brain."

Theodicy's concept that existence is the ordered expression of God or the Divine generally speaking makes perfect sense to me. I think I've held such a belief about existence and divinity for some time now, though I never thought to call it a theodicy. But a theodicy where humanity occupies a privileged place in nature strikes me as even worse than simply untrue. It's maladaptive.

• • •

Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y'all have knocked her up
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe
I was not offended
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit

Dear Adam,

Thanks originally to T.H. Huxley (who recast Hume as a proto-Darwinist) but more influentially to Bertrand Russell, David Hume has become contemporary philosophy’s go-to guy to show that you’ve got the angels on your side. 

I first noticed this as a teaching assistant to Annette Baier, who taught one of Pitt’s introductory philosophy courses in the early 1980s. She was then touting Hume as a virtue theorist comfortable with multiculturalism, not Russell’s radical sceptic who might prove a nuisance in mixed company. 

In recent times, as you point out, the continentals have gotten in on the act, with Deleuze – and more to the point, Anglophone Deleuzians – honing in on Hume’s ‘bundle of perceptions’ theory of the self as a precursor to the protean idea of ‘assemblage’. Moreover, considered in light of the relatively little use that empirically minded philosophers like Mill made of Hume prior to Huxley’s makeover, I conclude that Hume has been overused and quite possibly overrated.

Thus, I see you as going against the grain of Hume’s own thinking – and not simply because he didn’t live in the right times. The bundle theory is basically designed to demonstrate the illusory nature of any sense of a substantial self, which includes a self that is capable of experimentation in the sense you suggest. 

You are already attributing too much autonomy (or will) to the bundled self, which Hume denies. Any sense of self that we think we have is a product of faulty memory and wishful thinking, and once we recognize these in-built liabilities we’ll be able to live saner lives. Here Hume is really like Epicurus and Buddha – and Wittgenstein. The Humean self may be open to a wide variety of experiences that result in various personal reconfigurations but it is not one that would take responsibility for having initiated those experiences.

John Locke wrote when the concept of
consciousness was literally a new idea.

My own view is closer to Locke’s, who also had doubts about the idea of a substantial self. Indeed, he identified the self with the legal concept of the ‘person,’ an entity constructed for ‘forensic’ purposes, which is to say, to attribute responsibility. Locke didn’t deny the sort of psychological complexity that Hume highlighted but concluded that our ‘consciousness’ (a neologism in Locke’s day for second-order divine-like awareness) intervenes and we just draw a line and take – and are recognized as having taken – ownership for a range of thoughts and actions. 

The physical body provides the default locus for defining the jurisdiction of such interventions – i.e. the self that is mine versus the selves that belong to others. As the American founding fathers demonstrated, you can then get some serious politics out of what would otherwise be empiricist vagaries.

Now, the point you raise about convergent evolution is correct, I’m afraid to admit – namely, that it need not eventuate in our species as the crown of creation. However, there is a strong chance that it will eventuate in a species that might be reasonably called Humanity 2.0, leaving open just how much of Homo Sapiens it will actually incorporate. 

Figures in the Lamarckian tradition promoting convergent evolution seem to have thought this way, not least one of my schoolboy influences, that renegade Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who saw in the anticipated convergence the Second Coming of Jesus, or the Omega Point.

But we don’t need to go this far. The man who most effectively contested Stephen Jay Gould on his own palaeontological turf, Simon Conway Morris, has observed that over the course of evolution, the basic morphologies of organisms have become fewer and more similar. 

There is no need to postulate a divine hand or even natural selection to suppose that symbiosis and cross-species mimicry are playing a significant role here. In fact, one might even go so far as to suppose that the ultimate state of convergence will realize something like James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, whereby humans (when ecologically well-behaved) function as the brain of the superorganism called ‘Earth.’ My guess is that this line of thinking would be quite congenial to you.

A brief rebuttal to Steve on my environmentalism.
I'm uncomfortable thinking of humanity in the
stewardship role as I see here. I don't see how we
can make the progress required to do it right at least
until Humanity 8.0. The ideas I have for science-
fiction literature featuring my character of Alice
can explain better than a photo caption.

However, being more humanist than you, I don’t see things panning out quite this way. Much of the history of technology has been based on biomimicry at varying levels of abstraction from the organisms imitated (e.g. airplanes do what birds do but rather differently). 

The Bible certainly exhorts people to learn from nature, but what happens to nature afterwards is an open question. After all, scientists are also developing an ability to freeze-dry DNA for future use, which would allow us to keep various species ‘on tap’ should we need or want them around. So the exact normative role of ‘Nature’ in our thinking needs to be made clear, especially as we are clearly developing godlike powers. 

For me it means that ‘Nature’ should not function as a static – euphemistically called sustainable – vision of the ecology. Such a move is little more than environmental fetishism, since various combinations of known organisms might well live well together under radically different environmental conditions. 

And even when this turns out to be false, we will have learned something and our capacities for generating organisms will permit us to try again. The corollary of ‘No pain, no gain’ is ‘Life is a hypothesis.’

21st Century Kropotkin II: The Continuity of History, Research Time, 08/07/2014

A few years ago, I presented some of my work in environmental philosophy at the Summer Institute for American Philosophy, a short version of a paper about the usefulness of John Dewey’s ontological thinking for environmentalist ethics and ecological metaphysics. The paper, in longer form, was eventually published in Environmental Ethics. 

At the conference, I met the ageless Joseph Margolis, who was the keynote speaker. One of the interesting conversations he and I had over the week was about the nature of time, and history in particular. He and I disagreed over what could properly be called history. With his Hegelian influence, Joe understood history as an entirely human affair. With my ecological way of thinking, I understood history as a function of change itself, which means that everything in the universe has a history, and all our histories affect each other. 

An advantage to Kropotkin's view of history is that he
doesn't separate the pre-history of humanity from the era
of civilizations that left detailed records.

Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid offers a take on history similar to mine, but arrives there for different reasons. The book, as I’ve said in previous posts, is weird. I don’t think I’ve read anything like it before, which is a commendation as far as I’m concerned. It understands the political associations of mutual aid and communal life as evolutionary adaptations of self-conscious social beings. He explains how this is so by situating the human race in an unbroken continuity of evolutionary history.

Now, Kropotkin’s evolutionary chronology has distinct disadvantages. It’s extremely brief, covering essentially just under two chapters of a book that does largely concentrate on human history. Since the book was written over the 1890s, Mutual Aid doesn’t have nearly the depth, breadth, and detail that contemporary accounts of the evolution of life on Earth can muster. While our own knowledge does remain incomplete, today we do have a better grasp of what kinds of creatures dominated the past epochs of Earth’s biosphere, and rely less on the notion that contemporary animal and plant species can be extrapolated back in time with little change because of their ‘hierarchically’ ‘lower’ place on the ‘scale’ of evolution.*

* I include these terms in scare quotes because hierarchical concepts don’t even really make sense in contemporary evolutionary theory. Kropotkin uses them because they are the terms contemporary to his own time. 

Henri Bergson was one of the most popular philosophers of
the early 20th century, but he remains a cult figure today.

But despite these failures of the technical aspects of evolutionary knowledge, Kropotkin offers a vision of Earth’s history and biological evolution as a single duration. Writing in the 1890s, he was already articulating in his scientific and political writing what Henri Bergson was doing in his concurrent philosophical work. Time and Free Will developed the basic concept of duration, and his subsequent books put it to work. A duration was a single continuous flow whose internal changes were a unified process, affects affecting affects (if I can make a reference to stoic philosophy, causes causing causes causing causes). Each duration was qualitatively different.

The boundaries between durations were sketchy in Bergson’s philosophy. In some contexts of his writing, a duration was an absolute, but in other analyses, what constituted a duration depended on what a thinker herself chose to examine as such. 

I don’t know how much of Bergson’s work Kropotkin was exposed to, and I don’t know if anyone has ever taken the question seriously. But if Kropotkin could be said to analyze human history in any way, I would understand him as conceiving of human political history as the later stages of a duration that encompassed all that was known of the changes that constitute the history of animal life itself, from his genesis to his own day.

It’s a very novel way to think about human history, and I think we could all benefit from taking this point of view more often.

Mutual Aid II: How Living Can Inform the Life Sciences, Research Time, 26/06/2014

Continued from yesterday. Peter Kropotkin was not an ignorant political theorist alone, but a biologist and proto-ecologist with deeply held and detailed political beliefs. As I said yesterday, it is utterly ridiculous to derive a moral principle directly from a scientific principle. This is precisely the fundamental idiocy of Social Darwinism. It took the principle in the evolutionary theory of the 19th century that the engine of change in natural systems is conflict among individuals for resources, and turned this into a moral principle.

If the natural order of things was a ruthless struggle among individuals for life, then there is nothing unjust about structuring your society along lines of conflict. Those who have achieved much have won the struggle for survival and have, in doing so, demonstrated their fitness. Those who have lost have only proven their natural inferiority. The weak and enslaved were so because it was in their nature to be defeated, and any attempt to improve their lot went against the way of nature. The fact of victory by violent means justified violent means to victory. The subjugation of weak peoples by military strength merely articulated the true order of nature: the strong will dominate the weak. Such conceptual idiocy justified exploitation and empire.

Young Peter Kropotkin, an admirable man
with an admirable beard.

Kropotkin’s political theory was anarchistic, and the arc of Mutual Aid describes how the kind of cooperative relations among animals survive in humanity in the form of community and neighbourly relations. As a scientific endeavour, it’s one theoretical perspective on how altruism arises. Such a holistic approach to science should become more prominent in evolutionary biology, at least at the most broad conceptual level. My friend Y is working on a doctoral dissertation in the philosophy of science, a critique of the conceptual blockages in evolutionary population studies that prevents the quantitative science from understanding the development of altruism.

I think, at least given my preliminary engagement with the work so far, that Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid can provide a great service for researchers running up against the altruism problem in evolutionary biology. Where passing on genetic material is an evolutionary priority, the individual, or at least its kin, take precedence, and the notion that one could sacrifice oneself for the sake of an unrelated fellow is inconceivable. However, such behaviour happens frequently. 

This theory used to be extremely puzzled by social insects such as ants, whose colonies were populated by drones that would never reproduce. So they had to come up with the notion of group selection, which, after a fashion, makes no radical conceptual changes to the notion of individuals struggling to pass on their genetic material. Instead, it only treats the group as a super-organism, statistically.

This is just the wild speculation of a philosopher whose work in evolutionary theory concentrated more on ecological concepts than problems of inheritance: Mutual Aid could be a useful theoretical starting point to re-evaluate some basic concepts of the science. Kropotkin didn’t make the same mistake as all those Social Darwinists did, although it may seem as though he did and he has been summarily dismissed in some discussions of the relation of science and morality as having done so. This essay from 1997 by Stephen Jay Gould explains why he didn’t better than I could.

In short form, Kropotkin could think more easily about the problem of altruism because he didn’t have to deal with the wrinkle of inheriting DNA as the primary goal of evolution. But there’s a conceptual subtlety about inheritance that too many discussions of evolutionary theory seem to miss. Ultimately, natural selection and evolutionary change is driven by the inheritance (or lack thereof) of genetic material from generation to generation. But all Kropotkin had to see on his expeditions to Siberia were animals desperately banding together to help each other, as a group, survive hostile conditions.

And in the actual life of organisms, that’s all we know too. No animal, apart from a human with a passing familiarity with contemporary evolutionary theory, ever plans its actions with the intent of perpetuating its genetic legacy. It just wants to survive. If it survives better in a harsh environment by banding together in a group as a social creature as they all share their efforts, so much the better. A group whose members turn against itself can’t survive when environmental conditions become truly harsh. 

Here is how a political principle derives legitimately from a scientific investigation. The investigation has revealed some fact about the world which can guide the practical activity of the human race. Humans are social animals who survive and thrive evolutionarily better as groups than isolated individuals. We coordinate our societies through political means. A politics that values mutual aid over ruthless individual competition will be more likely to ensure that such a community survives an ecological catastrophe. 

Existence works probabilistically. Thinking of an individual alone, whether genetic material survives into a future generation is a matter of certainty: it either does or not. But when an entire population is taken into account, the likelihood of a given individual passing on its genetic material will depend on the vitality of its group. Momentary sacrifices for group survival make sense if we’re all in this together. The science of inheritance will be incomplete until it fully incorporates this ecological contingency, and the greater chances of survival through teamwork and group effort, into its mathematical models. 

Mutual Aid I: Moral Lessons from Evolutionary Theory? Research Time, 25/06/2014

If there is any single notion that all scientists, historians of science, and philosophers of science can agree on, it’s that it is ridiculous to try to derive moral principles from scientific discoveries and interpretive frameworks. There are many reasons why one should never do this. 

But the reason that I prefer to concentrate on in my own thinking is that the movement is much too simple. Moral principles and systems are complex cultural creations that develop over centuries of a community’s physical constitution. Simply extrapolating a scientific principle along a straight parallel into a moral guiding principle is a philosophically awful move. But this move is the conceptual foundation of Social Darwinism. 

Social Darwinism was the largest cultural movement to emerge from evolutionary theory, and it has given the theory a bad name ever since: the notion that the natural order of the world is ruthless competition among individuals, and that it is right and natural to structure human society at all levels that those who can stomp on more people as they rise to the top of society should, because they are able. I have even still found myself discussing this idea with students, who at first seem to consider it seriously. It’s precisely the most dangerous kind of poor thinking that exists: It’s so easy.

A young Charles Darwin, the most unjustly
vilified scientist in human history.

The name itself was an insult to Darwin’s own views about evolution, which were so nuanced, you would almost believe that he was a brilliant scientist who carefully considered his theoretical interpretations and constructions, and meticulously organized his massive collections of observational data. 

I mention this because I’ve started reading some anarchist political philosophy to sort through ideas for the final third of the Utopias project outline. I already have the basic shape of the first two thirds, but this last, purely political section still needs some conceptual work. Peter Kropotkin was the first person I began reading in this regard, mostly because he was the one I’d read before. I was first introduced to his work in my undergraduate degree, in a political theory course offered by Memorial’s political science department. Michael Wallack was the professor, and we were reading Kropotkin in dialogue with selected works of Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse in that last half of that course. So I had some haunting familiarity with his works already.

The full manuscript of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid is actually another work that seems to make something like that illegitimate move from a scientific theory immediately to a parallel in prescriptive moral philosophy. At least, this is the popular account of the book. As I explore it further, I’ll have something else to say. A book doesn’t have the legacy Mutual Aid does without being more nuanced than the idiots who took up Social Darwinism.

Already, Mutual Aid impresses me, at least in providing an alternative conception of how evolution works than the Darwinian mainstream of his time. Darwin did his seminal fieldwork in the tropics, with a booming population of species and individuals squabbling over a lush landscape. Kropotkin did his in the wastelands of Siberia, where a sparse and dispersed population of all creatures helplessly scrounged for whatever occasional scraps of sustenance they could find in the desolation. In such an environment, creatures have to band together for a slim chance to avoid starving to death. Kropotkin’s detailed observations of animal behaviour in these harsh ecosystems were the basis of his biological framework of the evolution of mutual aid. To be continued . . .

Would You Commit Infanticide for a Genetic Heritage? Research Time, 06/03/2014

Many of Donna Haraway’s most famous essays featured her take on the history of primatology research as a route to explore the underlying ideologies and concepts of social applications of biological science and thought. The earliest generation she described, contemporaries of the Great Depression and the Second World War, understood apes as reflecting a pure nature without the dilution of culture and egalitarian morality: brutally violent conflict among powerful men to dominate and achieve domination.

If you spell out those four layers of theoretical articulation (the primal, the political, the molecular, and the ideological), you have Haraway’s vision of how the sciences and politics interact. Now, I’m still not sure whether the ideological occupies a foundational role here. I’d prefer that it didn’t, because if an ideology determined all other modes of interpretation and thought, it would be impossible to change. That’s a paradox that would actually doom Haraway’s work. I would think that an ideology and its various articulations all exist interdependently, without a thread gaining absolute priority in generation.

The incredibly adorable Indian langur monkey.

Anyway, the essay “The Contest for Primate Nature” describes the shift in how we understand primate societies happening through the generational shift in the people studying them. Seeing this shift is very easy because they’re all students (or the students of students) of seminal sociobiologist Sherwood Washburn. From the first studies of langur monkeys’ society, they were thought to practice infanticide as an articulation of violent male dominance. Packs of langur are regularly stormed by others, when their men overthrow the leading males of the invaded troop and kill their children. This was, of course, interpreted as a matter of preserving one’s own genetic line.*

* It may sound very amateurish to say so, but I’ve always found this explanation in biological and social evolutionary science to be a little dubious. We know what kind of actions can perpetuate a genetic line, but an animal has no knowledge of evolutionary theory. Just because you see an activity in nature, don’t presume that it’s already evolutionarily optimal.

But as the generations of scientists changed, the interpretation of langur behaviour did as well. The first shift saw Phyllis Dolhinow née Jay (a pupil of Washburn) describe langur social conventions with little reference to males at all, concentrating on the roles of females and infants in the troops. The second shift, in the work of Jane Bogess (trained by an elderly Washburn and another middle-aged former pupil of his), tackled the question of infanticide head-on to find that it wasn’t there.

Yes, after the invasion and ouster/killing of the central males in the langur troop, many of the children tended to die. But Bogess could find no actual evidence that they were murdered, despite being in a better position to do so. The first generation of researchers mostly observed the animals from afar to avoid encounters with more dangerous animals, and so as not to interfere with the natural behaviour of the monkeys. By the time Bogess got to work, the observational techniques of primatology enabled her to live with the langur troop themselves. So she was able to see more of the details of their lives.

Now we can see the ideology of domination appearing again. The original studies of the langur monkeys saw invasions as a natural occurrence, and the infanticide of children by the usurpers as the natural result of securing one’s genetic line through violence. But if the infant monkeys weren’t killed to establish the dominance of the usurping males, how did they die?

Another flaw in the old ideology of nature was that it presumed that every trait and behaviour that was found in nonhuman organisms had to be explained in terms of how it was evolutionarily optimal, how it would have helped this species survive and thrive. I still see this far too frequently today. This idea presumes, essentially, that the process of evolution is done, and that everything in the natural world is the product of optimization.

The death of infants in a langur tribe after a hostile takeover happened due to stress from a variety of factors. One example is the squeezing of habitat space for the monkeys after the encroachment of human settlements around their region of India. If the langur population had enough space, then troops wouldn’t invade each other at all. The infant monkeys are casualties of pathological behaviour caused by ecological changes that the langurs have trouble adapting to. A langur troop under constant threat of invasion and with such a high infant mortality rate isn’t behaving according to the paths that developed in their calmer periods. Just because you’re dealing with a natural population doesn’t mean that every behaviour is automatically optimized. If it were, then species would never actually go extinct.

Ultimately, Haraway has traced a story of the purging of an ideology from an evolutionary science. The field no longer presumes that animal societies operate by violence to assure male dominance, or that human industrial processes have no subtle effects on animal behaviour, or that all natural behaviour is always already evolutionarily optimized to the current situation because it has been optimal in the past. Worth at least an extra paragraph or two when I eventually get back to my Ecophilosophy manuscript revisions.

Truth Comes in Degrees, Research Time, 28/02/2014

It’s very common in philosophical writing to discuss the nature of an epoch, which is usually framed in terms of what kinds of thoughts were possible. Heidegger continually refers to the modern era as incapable of understanding existence as anything but a resource. Hegel, in his writings on history, described Indians and Africans as having no history because they had no institutions or style of discourse like the Western history book. 

Yesterday’s post ended with Bruno Latour caught in the same situation. He wrote in 1991 that Modernity was dead, a framework of understanding the world whose premises had been shattered. Then in 1992, a book drops from another leading French intellectual with nerdly glasses and wavy black hair defending humanist Modernity in its purest form, and denouncing all critics as anti-democratic fascists, communists, and religious fundamentalists. This situation shows how plural humanity really is. We’re so accustomed, especially in philosophy, to demarcating what was conceptually possible for a culture according to the chronology of its great philosophical works. But the presence of these works doesn’t simply cause a blanket social change even within the discipline of philosophy, let alone the wider culture.

Likewise, the entire fourth chapter of We Have Never Been Modern is all about dealing with accusations of relativism that would fly against Latour’s central thesis that social and political factors always play a role in the construction of scientific institutions, investigations, and discoveries. Despite the presence of books like Latour’s, and others from sectors of philosophy of science like Science and Technology Studies or the affiliated and slightly diverging acronyms, I haven’t seen an introductory philosophy class where introducing ideas like Latour’s don’t result in accusations of relativism from the audience.

In other words, Latour can write all he wants about how sensible it is for us to drop our cultural presumptions that contingency results in pure relativism, and that involvement in human processes for its generation results in pure relativism. I can too, because I haven’t believed in this facile separation of necessary, certain knowledge from contingent, relative opinion in nearly a decade. I can be criticized for making the separation in such blunt terms. But my point is that most people still believe this way.

A frequent reason given for why atheists are mistrusted in wider society (aside from the shrill anger of Dawkins and Hitchens, and Sam Harris’ denunciations of Muslims in Britain that border on outright racism), is that they’re held to be moral relativists. Many people still genuinely believe that you can’t be a good person without having a religion: without having a set of moral rules in whose correctness you believe absolutely, and without believing that a god will punish you for your sins. The discussion of scientific enterprises in these contingent terms often results in the same dichotomy. If you don’t believe in the certainty of scientific knowledge, then you permit the validity of beliefs we now know to be hogwash: racialized eugenics, phrenology, phlogistonic chemistry, Galenic medicine. If there is no God, everything is permitted. If there is no Science, everything is true.

However many times we defend ourselves, I think atheists
like me will always face pressure from people who believe
that you need to believe in a God delivering you
absolute truths to understand moral right and wrong.

The problem with these statements is that people’s moral systems converge, but differ, and if you consider the history of science, there is no straight progress of enlightenment over time. Good projects may flounder, worse ideas may come to prominence: enlightenment is no more inevitable than decay. Latour offers a much more sensible and politically productive way of dealing with this impasse. After all, decay is no more inevitable than enlightenment.

One conservative (and frequently still popular) idea about science is that what we call science is wholly right and true, and what we call pseudo-science, or what gets relegated to the dustbin of science’s history, is wholly wrong. All my intellectual colleagues will describe how crude and over-simplified this idea is. They all hear it from their first-year students — it’s still widely believed. It’s the kind of faith in science that New Atheists have been peddling for decades.

It’s far more accurate, when talking about the history of science, to treat some models of thought as being more true or more false than others. In other words, with complex systems of numbers, truth comes in degrees. Here’s an example. If you think about the history of evolution, the standard hardline evolutionist line is that Charles Darwin was right and more creationist perspectives wrong. But now contrast Darwin with other evolutionists. Denis Diderot postulated an evolutionary account of how life arose (according to some definitions, so did Aristotle). But because they had no empirical research backing up their claims, Darwin was more right than they were. But you can’t throw Diderot on the trash-heap of history, because at least he got it basically correct that life developed through evolutionary processes.

For example, Led Zeppelin's early
records synthesized musical influences
that had never come together before,
but their modern albums sound retro
because— Sorry, wrong Robert.

Now contrast Darwin with empirically-minded theorists of evolution who postulated methods other than natural selection, like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. His vision of the inheritance of acquired traits turned out to be untrue, but he no creationist, and certainly not of the idiotic Biblical literalist stripe with the highest influence today, which even frustrate theologians. But Darwin also wasn’t right either.

Darwin never had a solid idea about the mechanism of carrying the inherited traits. Gregor Mendel’s experiments that systematized how inheritance worked were popularized only after Darwin’s death. The discovery of DNA as the cellular carrier of traits made Darwin’s theory obsolete. Nonetheless, we don’t denounce Darwin as wrong. He was just less right than evolutionary theory that was able to account for inheritance through DNA. And the first theorists of DNA were less right than most evolutionary biologists today. DNA was first conceived as carrying traits simply: that there would be ‘a gene’ ‘for’ big ears, eye colour, or proclivity to heart disease. We have since discovered that our genetic code operates in a complex relationship with protein folding in developmental processes that unfold in terms of contingencies and tendencies. Nonetheless, Watson and Crick’s generation of biologists isn’t wrong; they just held hypotheses that never worked out, because the world turned out to be more complicated.

When it comes to science, the law of the excluded middle doesn’t hold. This is true for morality, history, and all of existence. Either/or is so outdated. I like to keep my logic fuzzy.

Ghost Light: My Ecophilosophical Doctor Who, Jamming, 27/10/2013

I know that I only just instituted by “No More Sundays” idea, and I’m breaking it already. Call it a minor blogging addiction or just an idea I had on Shabbas.

You know from my having mentioned it before that I’m a published Doctor Who scholar. The depth of my work in the field is dwarfed by Phil Sandifer at the TARDIS Eruditorum, but I’ve made one contribution that was noteworthy and read. I even gained a twitter follower because of it. But I’ve had another idea as I was watching Ghost Light, one of my favourite classic series stories, yesterday.

For those of you who haven’t seen Ghost Light, don’t worry if I’m spoiling it. Really, I’m just telling you what’s actually going on, because events in the story move too fast that randomly missing a line can cause you to miss some key information for the characters or the narrative. It’s probably the most dense Doctor Who story ever written. Even in the DVD extras, the author didn’t quite explain it so well. The plot summary on TARDIS Wiki is pretty good, insofar as it describes the events that happen in the story in a linear order. That would actually be a spoiler. Once you know the basic idea behind what happening, the story now becomes about seeing all the parts of the puzzle assemble in such small, momentary fragments, then come together to make sense once you’ve connected them properly.

What I’m about to explain isn’t the narrative, but the condition of the narrative we see on television. Thousands of years ago, a survey ship visited Earth. It was a fully automated biological survey ship, meant to collect a constantly growing catalogue of all life forms that existed. The catalogue would be complete, because the ship’s mission was never-ending; only by constant additions can you have a genuinely complete catalogue of a constantly dynamic realm like always-evolving life. So in 1881, it came back, and materialized in the basement of a Victorian manorhouse, that of the Pritchard family. It found a much more complicated lifeworld to study, because in addition to its biodiversity, it also had cultural diversity, as humans had become culturally creative as well. Imaginary creations, complex mathematics and sciences, profound and complicated philosophical and religious traditions.

If Western values can be said to have reached their essence
in Victorian culture, then a defence of Western values has
a lot of explaining to do.

The ship wasn’t completely automated. It had a controller, and one other organism that was part of its in-built equipment. That other organism was a kind of simulator, a semi-conscious blob that would mimic various organisms on the planet for experimental purposes. Things went wrong when this blob mimicked the Upstanding Victorian Gentleman. Because the Upstanding Victorian Gentleman is a chauvinist imperialist bastard who believes it to be his right by his very nature to be the superior creature and conquer all others, bending them to his desires. His own desires are, of course, the most enlightened, because he’s superior to all creatures by his nature. He even cruelly misinterprets Darwinian theory to justify his egomaniacal personal and cultural sense of total superiority. In order to mimic the Upstanding Victorian Gentleman properly, you had to include these cultural beliefs.

Of course, no Upstanding Victorian Gentleman is going to put up with being ordered around by some technocratic controller. So he locks the ship’s controller in his old booth and takes her place. Here’s where things get disturbing. As in David Lynch disturbing. Because the ship fulfills its survey functions by hypnotizing surrounding organisms. They move and feel just as the ship wants them in order to perform the tasks it needs, but remember everything they did. When the controller is working as it should, one organism is taken to run the cataloguing, becoming a superpowered extension of the ship’s computer existing as pure thought and energy.

When the Upstanding Victorian Gentleman takes over the ship, all its organic survey parts start malfunctioning according to his imbecilic and egotistical conceptions of Darwinist theory and its implicit horrifying morality. The cataloguing computer becomes obsessed with the actual completion of his records, to the point where he tries to stop evolution on Earth by sterilizing the planet. The Upstanding Victorian Gentleman formulates an insane plan to take his rightful (as the naturally superior life form, of course) place at the head of the British Empire, by assassinating Queen Victoria and so proving himself strongest in the Empire. He uses the ship’s controlling powers to turn the house’s staff and family into his pawns and toys.

So much of the discussion of the story treats Light, the avatar of the cataloguing computer, as the true villain of the Ghost Light, because of his immense power and his theatrical reveal at the last cliffhanger. But he’s just as much a victim of the mimic blob’s mutiny, because the Upstanding Victorian Gentleman’s takeover of the ship’s functions has turned it into a monstrous, destructive creature. A creature that perfectly obeys the morals and metaphysical beliefs of the most upstanding Victorian gentleman.

All these attitudes the Upstanding Victorian Gentleman mimic-creature displays are precisely the attitudes of contemporary society that my ecophilosophy manuscript diagnoses and stands against: the destruction that flows from the attitude that you’re the natural pinnacle of creation, a superiority that grants you dominion, dictatorship over all other life on Earth. 

It sums up the horror of the modern human character in dramatic form in a 75-minute cheap sci-fi story. Philosophies that have occupied a whole new modern tradition of thought, combatting the hubris of humanity, are crystallized into three episodes of Doctor Who, if you look hard enough.

There’s More to Life (and Life Sciences) Than What the Textbooks Say, Composing, 01/08/2013

I got such good readership numbers (relatively speaking) and positive feedback on my last post about the nature of sophists and philosophical anoraks, that I got a little mild performance anxiety about today. But the nice thing about daily updates is that not every one needs to hit it out of the park. In fact, if I manage a well-written, popular, remarkably insightful post every two/three weeks, as I’ve done so far, I think that’s pretty good performance.

Yesterday, most of my philosophical work was spent on my post-doc proposal again, working out the best way to pitch this problem in evolutionary biology that I’d work on. It’s an unorthodox take on a philosophical problem in the field, but also one that involves some of what I’ve learned in the last two years I’ve spent working with the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. This is a collection of scholars from several different disciplines who have a shared interest in the social dimensions of knowledge. From my perspective and for my work on the subject, it examines how philosophical concepts are shaped by the public constitution of knowledge, the social aspects of thought. 

Essentially, one of my nagging questions about the discipline of evolutionary biology is why the general public seems completely unaware of any of its subtle principles. I think it’s a problem of communication and context. Within a discipline, practitioners rarely think of PR. And outside a discipline, general science education rarely gets into much of the detail of a science where the disputes and varieties of interpretations tend to arise. Most people learn science from pop-sci books and textbooks. The former tend to oversimplify complex concepts for a reading public presumed unable to understand complexity. The latter present everything in a discipline as a readymade set of facts. 

Both forms are horribly inaccurate as to the actual state of any scientific discipline. And I think the textbook layout of knowledge is especially harmful to evolutionary biology, thanks to the political controversy that always arises around evolution. If someone learns that science as a set of facts laid out in a textbook as if they were straight dogma, and doesn’t explain any of the processes by which those scientific principles are discovered, articulated, and refined, then science is treated as just another set of dogmas in textbooks. So intelligent design advocates treat science as one more set of dogmas like theirs. Intelligent design people think genuine knowledge is clearly certain facts beyond all dispute. But that’s poppycock. Genuine knowledge is complex, subject to dispute and reinterpretation. And until we can figure out how to communicate this to the general public, science will be entangled in these ridiculous disputes for a long time.

When the Opposites Are False, the Middle Ground is Empty Space, Research Time, 24/07/2013

Being the first person since possibly Mrs Nagel to give Thomas Nagel the benefit of (so very many of) the doubts on his new book has had fascinating results already. I don’t think he’s anywhere near right, but in this case a ridiculous falsehood offers intriguing possibilities for thinking. 

Now that I’ve actually started reading Nagel’s book instead of just reading accounts of people disgusted with it, I have a much better sense of his thought process going into it. In other words, I think I see what it would look like if Nagel wrote a History Boy post about his own book. In many ways, he’s working from a conception of philosophy that no longer holds, at least from my point of view. But this conception is actually remarkably popular, because most of the philosophical work that has taken this down has gone largely unnoticed by the general population of North America (at least, but I’d say of Earth if I had easy access to those kinds of surveys), and unnoticed in pretty large pluralities of the philosophical community as well. 

First, as far as Nagel is concerned, Mind and Cosmos isn’t a book about evolutionary theory or philosophy of biology, but about philosophy of mind. It’s an extension of the same line of thought that produced “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” For Nagel, the mind — our experiences of pains and pleasures, our consciousness and non-propositional thinking — cannot be reduced to physical phenomena without losing content. There is content to thought that is non-reducible to movements of matter, and we experience it intuitively.* And since evolutionary biology is all about the movements of organic matter as it changes through the dynamics of its ecological relationships, this scientific discipline is hit with the same critique as all the others: reductivism.

* Yeah, you can probably see where I’m going with this.

His goal is to find a middle ground between the kind of thinking that makes mind the foundation of material, and the kind that reduces the mind to the material. In this specific regard, the two perspectives that he called theism and materialism are close to opposites. And he thinks philosophy hasn’t really come up with a middle ground. I have two problems with this.

There are few in the history of philosophy who
fascinate and frustrate me more than Henri Bergson.

Problem number one is that Nagel isn’t doing new work on this problem. Henri Bergson theorized this opposition in depth, developed a detailed middle ground that constituted a metaphysical philosophy more comprehensive than that of damn near every philosopher that has tackled this before or since his career, and he did it all more than 100 years ago! Bergson was especially advanced in building a detailed account of how consciousness worked, which was the entire point of his greatest book, Matter and Memory. All Nagel can do, meanwhile, is appeal to the “obvious” appearance of consciousness in experience. But consciousness is still a simple entity to him. If Nagel were to take Matter and Memory as seriously as I’m taking Mind and Cosmos right now, he’d find more than an interesting book. He’d find an intellectual predecessor who has already surpassed him in many important ways!

What prevents this is that Bergson’s reputation collapsed after his fights with Einstein in the 1920s and once Bertrand Russell was convinced that Bergson was an obscurantist, mystic-minded twat (never mind that Russell’s technical work was so dense as to be his most difficult material and Bergson wrote so clearly that he was a pop-philosophical superstar decades before Russell became one). So no one ever read him again except Gilles Deleuze and the people who followed him. And no one in analytic philosophy ever reads Gilles Deleuze. So Nagel would not be expected to have read Bergson. I was impressed to find a Bergson footnote, though that’s the only mention of him in the book, and I doubt Nagel has read his works in any detail. The footnote offers a very over-simplified account of his concept of vital force.

My problem with Nagel number two. Ultimately, I think Nagel’s project in this book is misdirected because he takes the subject matter of materialism to be divided into an opposition that’s false. His goal is to find a middle ground where there is no between to discover. Nagel still believes, along with popular culture, that mind and matter are incompatible, and that science functions by reducing phenomena to the movements of matter. I think the ontology of the future isn’t just a non-reductive materialism, but an emergent materialism, where the structures and movements of matter at a micro-level constitute wholly new entities with wholly new laws of behaviour at its progressive macro-levels. 

That doesn’t fit Nagel’s narrative of two opposing camps through which one must find a middle ground or productive compromise. But I’m not interested in fitting into his or anyone else’s narratives. I want to make my own.

The Best Mistakes to Learn From Are Those of Others, Jamming, 23/07/2013

There’ll be more fights with Hegel in the future. Today, I’m working on a proposal for a post-doctoral grant that I discovered this week, adapting some aspects of my ecophilosophy project to a perspective more purely of philosophy of biology. Writing about it here isn’t going to get into the details of the project, but I do want to explain how I became interested in this issue and why I think it’s important.

Last year, Thomas Nagel wrote what was probably the shittiest book of his career, Mind and Cosmos. It’s a critique of orthodox evolutionary theory on the grounds that the slow, gradual pace of evolution by natural selection couldn’t have accounted for all the radical changes of species in the relatively short amount of time animal, plant, and fungoid life has existed on Earth. Taking this at face value, he has a point. Natural selection is such a slow and dicey process that it can’t work for major changes. Not only that, but species change is often the result of environmental changes, which can happen remarkably quickly. But natural selection is a slow process of incremental change over many generations. If an ecological niche disappears or radically changes in a generation or two, the pace of natural selection can’t keep up with that kind of change. Instead of a species transforming through the pressure of ecological niche changes, it becomes extinct. So there has to be another method of evolutionary development.

While I don't always admire Nagel's work, I
do admire his hair.

Fine and dandy. Then Nagel screws everything up, including what chance he might have had for a successful career in his old age. Because he says the only alternative to the orthodox Darwinian point of view is a creationist perspective, or at least a weird kind of teleology where mind or some mind-like force directs the evolution of life. This man is a living legend in philosophy, and this is where he ends up? A lot of the, shall we say, informally written reviews of the book I read online in the months after its release dismissed and insulted Nagel: I’ve read words like senile, ridiculous, moronic, wasteful, and downright dangerous. He writes in a country, the United States of America, where a significant number of politicians are actively working to destroy all science education in the name of their dogmatic and oppressive religion, the Biblical literalism of aggressive evangelical Christianity. Frankly, it’s impossible to write anything publicly about evolution in the United States and avoid politics. Closed-minded evangelical Christians are setting up conditions where, in a generation or two, there will be no more young scientists coming from huge swaths of the United States, simply because there will be millions of people for whom their only science textbook was the Bible.

One idea this research project would involve is giving Nagel the benefit of the doubt, while at least acknowledging the disastrous effects of a philosopher of his stature giving his weight to the political programs of Christian authoritarians who want to create an American population of dutiful sheep who submit themselves completely to their control and their religious dogma. Because there’s a growing literature of evolutionary scientists who critique orthodox Darwinism and the principle of gradualism in species development from within the science itself. Christian de Duve, Harold Morowitz, Robert Hazen, and Simon Conway Morris all write scientifically rigorous work that provides a detailed theoretical framework for there being some kind of directionality or converging set of tendencies in biological evolution, while keeping anti-scientific creationists in the backwoods where they belong. And a lot of this work was anticipated by Stephen Jay Gould. A great review of Mind and Cosmos is here, and the author calls out Nagel better than I can for now.

That’s how I became interested in the subject: wondering how someone like Nagel, whose work from the 1970s I admire so much,* could have fallen so far from the pinnacle of his thought. There would be two pillars to this project: examining the actual alternatives to orthodox Darwinism within respectable evolutionary biology, and examining why Nagel (and quite possibly a substantial mainstream in evolutionary biology itself) ignores this alternative work, and acts as if one either accepts a too-rigid dogma of evolution by gradual natural selection or escapes science altogether. It would combine my skills in philosophy of science with what I’ve learned from social science about examining intellectual influences, heritages, and citation networks.

* Sometimes, I think everything but the computer technology was better in the 1970s. This was the prime of American cinema, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, gay culture exploding into the open, punk, funk, disco, and the very first house music coming out of Detroit. Then I remember this was the decade of Derrida’s worst books, and I realize that nothing is ever perfect. Also, it’s just more of the too-easy romanticism of the past: I was born in 1983, so I don’t have to remember the shitty parts of the 1970s if I don’t feel like it.

The goal is using Nagel as a case of a larger tendency to polarize debates about evolution, diagnosing why this polarization exists, how it creates its most destructive effects on the disciplines of evolutionary biology and the philosophy thereof, and figuring out solutions and paths out of the morass.

Origin Is Another Word for Only Survivor, Research Time, 11/07/2013

Nimrod the Neanderthal butler
in Ghost Light also bears more
than a superficial resemblance
to Phil Sandifer, author of
TARDIS Eruditorum, and the
man who first told me about
Jean-Louis Dessalles.

Another book I’m reading at the moment is Why We Talk by Jean-Louis Dessalles. First, some acknowledgements. I’m halfway through this book, and I’m incredibly thankful to Phil Sandifer for telling me about Dessalles through his essay on the 1989 Doctor Who serial Ghost Light at TARDIS Eruditorum. The actual essay on Ghost Light is kind of insane, with its paragraphs wildly arranged in the essay according to a ridiculously erudite formula. I think it’s a satire on Ghost Light’s reputation in the Doctor Who community as being far too dense, disordered, and packed full of ideas for its plot to unfold sensibly in 75 minutes. It didn’t help that the music volume on the transmitted and VHS versions was louder than the spoken dialogue. But it’s clear to follow if you pay attention. And maybe watch twice. You don’t like your TV to be challenging sometimes?

Anyway, back to Dessalles. His book is an exploration, in the terms of evolutionary biology and history, of how language developed. I can’t yet tell you how well he achieves this goal because I haven’t yet finished the book and I’m not about to search the internet for spoilers. But one element of Why We Talk, which Phil pointed out in the Ghost Light essay, was its account of what an origin is. Frankly, Dessalles’ conception of origin (or rather his destruction of the traditional conception of origin) is a foundation point for the utopias project.

Our usual concept of origin has been around about as long as the Myth of The Fall, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the state of nature let the concept survive into an atheist context. Origin = Eden. Our origin is the state of perfection from which our development has been a corruption from this pure state. What twaddle.

Instead, we have a wonderful demystification of all our myths and legends about origins. We often think of origins as a Tower of Babel moment (more religious imagery sneaking into our supposedly atheist scientific philosophy!) where the phenomenon in question was birthed in its single, unified, and authentic form. Diversification occurs with time, and the authenticity of the origin’s unity is lost. Instead, the origin of all that exists today is the common ancestor of the diverse yet related bodies that exist today. To take Dessalles’ example, all languages that exist today can be understood as having evolved from a single common ancestor language. 

But this wouldn’t be the Ur-language, the first implying the only. Instead, that common ancestor used to exist in an atmosphere of similar linguistic (or biological) diversity as there is today. It’s just that the descendants of those other languages have since died out. So it will go in the future as well. Many languages that exist today will die out, and the survivor languages will diversify into a new variety. There's a paragraph-long quotation in the above-linked Ghost Light essay if you want to read it in Dessalles' own words. Or you can find a copy of the book; it's very good and worth reading the whole thing if you're into the intersection of evolutionary biology and culture in a manner that's intelligent, knowledgeable, and insightful.

However, you might still ask how the diverse collection came to exist in the first place. That’s a legitimate question to which I can’t come up with an answer in a space as limited as a daily blog entry. I’ll let you know what Jean-Louis says when I finish the book.

Not only would I recommend reading Why We Talk, you should also consider watching Ghost Light, one of the best stories in Doctor Who, with a mind-blowing script and stellar performances from all the actors, especially Sophie Aldred, who was pivotal in setting up the nature and role of the Doctor Who companion for the 21st century.