TAHIR WOOD wrote:
>
> Mark, it's certainly interesting, but I'm not sure how
> relevant to the actual debate that was happening. ....
> This suggests that over long periods of historical time the
> human species may still be evolving to a discernible extent.
> Sure. But over how much historical time would it have to
> evolve to become a different species, for example with
> "significantly" (to quote the debate) different cognitive
> faculties? I would guess that a period of say 10 000 years,
> which more or less takes humanity from primitive society to
> capitalism is not nearly enough for a change of that
> magnitude. How long did it take for the various strands of
> hominid evolution to produce a human being, by contrast?
> Maybe our evolutionary anthropologists could comment on
> this. But I think that attempts to conflate historical
> processes, which to me are more about the actualisation of
> potentials of the species being of humanity over a given
> period, with biological evolution per se, are highly
> suspect. Specifically I suspect that they belong more to the
> domain of ideology than to that of science.
I don't think Lalande et al are guilty of bad science, and the internal
logic of their argument seems to stand up. In any case, why is it wrong or
indeed different to what Marx and Engels (the latter in particular) argued,
to think of the history of human society as the formation by our species of
an evolutionary Niche, that is, to think of civilisation (and its
discontents!) as an aspect, or attribute, of evolution as a whole?
I don't think we should be afraid to think in terms of both geological time
and of historical time, and to see the latter as the mediating instance
between the individual human, whose existence is fleeting, the blink of an
eye -- and the whole vast immensity of geological time. The two are
coterminous and interrelated. We cannot make some kiond of apriori
distinction between historical time and evolutionary time, as if they are
somehow ontologically distinct.
This niche which historical time constitutes, or entails, is nothing more or
less than the conscious, self-reflective praxis which forms the immanent
basis of social spatiotemporality. But this social being exists as a
reflection upon the conditions of its own existence; the whole of culture in
all its forms, beginning with the earliest reflections upon the nature of
being and the existence of God, is actually a summation of the attempt by
homo sapiens to expand its evolutionary niche and to appropriate the
totality of what exists, of the Real. It is a virtual space arising out of
the real interplay between human society and nature, and in fact both terms
(society and nature) are merely artefacts of this continuum of historical
time. Actually we do not have direct knowledge of either term; everything we
know is mediated through historically-constituted forms of knowing. This is
not a radical epistemological insight, I think. It is a commonplace by now.
But if historical time did not have an immanent quality, if it was not
transcendental, then it could not possibly form the grounds for cognition or
for shared knowledges. Historical time emerged out of geological time,
therefore, but cannot be subsumed to it; it is autonomous (as you rightly
say, this is its principal emergent property).
That is an insight which derives straight out of the evolution of thought
from Kant to Hegel and Marx. It is surely also the position of ecological
thinkers like Elisabeth Sahtouris and Vladimir Vernadsky. And moreover, this
immanent world of praxis, ie human society, is also what Teilhard de Chardin
defined as an emergent 'no�sphere'. This no�sphere is the contingent,
non-teleological result of evolution, as Stephen J Gould argues in his
attacks on evolutionary determinism. But at the same time, the no�sphere is
transcendental and its contingent origins are of no importance. The fact
that it need not have worked out this way, does not alter the radical
significance of the fact that it did and that Matter has thus evolved the
capacity for reason and for self-awareness (evolved out of the primitive
terrestrial rock which spawned all life, if you take Vernadsky's view, and
he was the father of biogeochemistry and the author of Gaia theory).
Historical time is the form in which matter reflects upon its own existence.
The coevolution of genes and culture of which Lalande et al speak is the
fundamental dynamic of historical time and is the process or dialectic
through which both the individual subject and nature as a whole are
progressively realised through and dominated by, society. It is also the
mechanism which allows these two terms (individual human subject; totality
of nature, ie the Real) to stand as equal and opposite signs. It is a
uniquely human attribute which permits the human subject to see herself in
this way, as the coeval of nature. It is the source of the so-called
spirituality which allows humans to escape the subjective sense of being
submerged in nature, and thus to be free of the fearfulness which is
universal among all other animal species.
This universal fear has many cultural survivals, as superstition, or in the
widespread belief in the evil eye coupled with the expectation that immanent
justice can fall from the sky, or that there is a providence in continual
need of appeasement. These survivals are an index of the protracted struggle
which homo sapiens endured in order to establish its niche, the niche whose
special and unique characteristic is coevolution of genes and culture. The
definition of God by medieval scholars (St Anselm, St Augustine) as a
non-arbitrary Creator which does not need appeasement, which does not engage
in arbitrary acts and does not 'force' events to occur, was a radical new
caesura between society and nature which inter alia permitted the growth of
Baconian doctrines of causality based on the notion that the Universe is
objective and law-governed.
There is an interesting argument about causality contained within the
concept of 'coevolution'. Events and processes may entail each other, or be
attributes or conditions of existence of each other, without being locked
into deterministic causality. Social evolution entailed changes in the human
genome, by means of various feedback processes. *Within* the human
evolutionary niche, altruism and co-operation were selected for, because
these strategies optimised the survival-chances of Selfish Genes. The
progressive engulfing of the whole of reality by contents of the human
species-niche entails a progressive spread of altruism to the rest of
nature, ie, the sphere coextensive with but external to this evolutionary
niche. This is both logical in adaptational terms, and intuitively
reasonable. It is also the cardinal point about Teilhard de Chardin's
concept of no�sphere
This conception of conditions entailing rather than causing each other makes
it possible to avoid problems of teleology, causality and determinism. It
means that the emergence of the no�sphere does not at all exclude
contingency, on the contrary. Each contingent event subjects its own
successors to the logic they inherit and which it prescribes or sets down. A
society which wills its own ends and thus becomes conscious-for-itself,
imposes a teleology on nature. Stephen Jay Gould insists upon the importance
of contingency in biological evolution. In his view (as Jim Farmelant has
said) if we recould recreate the conditions that existed on earth at the
beginning of its history and thus rerun earth's history there is every
reason to expect that evolution would take quite different turns than what
it did in fact take.
In Gould's view chance is a major factor in evolution. And this leaves very
little scope for teleology in his conception of evolution. Gould has argued
that the same is true for human history as well. However, his thinking
contains numerous errors. Regardless of how alien and cold the universe is,
order is thinkable and therefore exists. More: chaos is *not* thinkable
without order. If one understands that teleology (for a materialist) is not
something providential and external, but merely the immanent expression of
what is determinate in an origin, then there is no contradiction. Gould's
rejection of teleology is based on the same kind of philosophical
misunderstanding as Dawkin's evolutionary reductionism. Neither grasp the
logic of society--nature interactions as a material dialectic. Incidentally,
when Richard Dawkins debated Lyn Margulis about competition v. cooperation,
Margulis' notion of endosymbiosis, which depends upon the interplay in
ancient evolutionary times of parasites and hosts, is also radically
non-deterministic but it is at the heart of modern Gaia theory.
Endosymbiosis was an earlier instance of coevolution in which 'altruism' was
selected for.
The subsumption of nature within society is a continuing process but one
which has clearly-marked inflection-points or step-changes. Homo sapiens is
a result of the coevolution of culture and genes, which created the
preconditions for the emergence of hominids with large brain capacity,
hardwired speech and cognitive capabilities, etc. These characteristics
emerged from and depended upon, intra-group processes, not just from the
blind interaction of the individual hominid with the wider environment as in
the mechanistic conceptions of sociobiology. As Tahir Wood argued, emergent
attributes can become autonomous and can and do efface their own origins.
The human lifeworld is now autonomous and is the determining influence in
both negative and positive ways, on evolution as a whole and on the
direction taken by the planetary ecosphere. Whether the Almighty intended
such an outcome or whether Gould is right and evolution is radically
stochastic, is besides the point, because teleology has arrived in any case
and we are it. This seems intuitively to rule out any long-term regression
by the human species to stages earlier passed through (hunter-gatherer
stage, etc), even if such detours are possible in the short-term and even
though complete extinction is perhaps still possible (but homo sapiens
probably now has the technological prerequisites to ensure its own
immortality and to inundate the rest of the universe with life, even if some
catastrophe like runaway warming made this planet uninhabitable).
My point about the kind of arguments Lalande etc deploy is essentially
simple and also it is optimistic about the future. It is clear that the
sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have got it wrong. We are not
(as phenotypes) the passive playthings of blind instinctual drives located
in the genes. We are not only capable of taking charge of the Selfish Gene:
if Lalande et al are right, we always HAVE been in charge, and the whole
ascent of humankind has precisely been because co-operation and altruism
became dominant motifs in the life and evolution of groups, because the
process of creating an evolutionary Niche selected this kind of behaviour as
the most successful adaptation by *selfish* genes. And once the process was
embarked upon, not only were its own origins effaced by its subsequent
development, but we in a sense burnt our bridges: there is no road back. We
cannot become hominids again. As individuals (phenotypes) we can only
survive within a sufficiently complex and differentiated evolutionary niche.
The problem today is that (for reasons Lalande et al also discuss) we face a
stepchange on our circumstances, and for the first time we shall have to
adapt to a less complex (not more complex) world with declining (not
increasing) energy. It will be a high-entropy, low-energy world with
badly-damaged ecological life-support systems. We may not survive this
stepchange. But if homo sapiens becomes extinct it will not be, as in the
pessimistic neo-malthusian argument, because we are genetically incapable of
altruism. We are *eminently* capable of adapting, and we should avoid
political passivity, fatalism, escapism and dysfunctional self-interest,
even while we adopt the fundamental malthusian insight into the
unsustainable nature of capitalism. Only if we are very unlucky will we
become extinct, for example if we initiate runaway warming.
Mark Jones
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