-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of david buchanan Sent: Friday, May 18, 2007 12:03 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MD] Social Darwinism
Kriminel said to dmb: So Dave, you think ideas and societies do not evolve? Or do they evolve on the basis of some supernatural principle? dmb says: Neither. I'm following James and Pirsig in saying that mechanistic explanations of evolution are empty and the idea that it is all driven by the desire for mere survival is a ridiculous concept. But denying the fact of evolution or attributing it to supernatural forces is even more ridiculous, of course, and I'm certainly not suggesting any such thing. Kernal said: Volitional evolution? Is that like eugenics or Think and Grow Rich? You know there was this guy Lamarck and he claimed... dmb replies: Huh? Isn't eugenics based on classic social darwinism, a.k.a. amoral survival of the fittest? I think so. And think and grow rich? Isn't that Susie Orman of PBS fame, which I'd never watch by the way? (I follow the theory that wealth is for the mediocre; one has to be smart enough to know how to get the money but stupid enough to believe that money is equal to the good life.) In any case, neither of those things have anything to do with my point about volition vs mechanism. As I understand it, evolution is driven by the desire for betterness and survival is just one particular species of better. Better is a relational concept of course. There is something we desire beyond the preservation and perpetution of existence. In a million billion tiny ways everything moves toward bettterness, single celled organisms and philosophers are going to be dealing with entirely different kinds of better, but this is what drives evolution in any context. I think of it as an impulse to transcend any given situation that doesn't seem quite good enough, whether that means moving away from physical danger or inventing a new metaphysics. Betterness is a vague word, but there is a clear and basic idea in it. It implies a will at work in all these tiny particular cases, not a blind mechanism. A positivist might see volition as some kind of miracle, but I don't. It seems quite natural and completely ubiquitous. It makes a heck of a lot more sense because evolutionary theory has to account for improvement, not just change and variety. There is an apparent direction that can't be explained in terms of mechanisms, functional fit or random mutations. dmb _________________________________________________________________ More photos, more messages, more storageget 2GB with Windows Live Hotmail. http://imagine-windowslive.com/hotmail/?locale=en-us&ocid=TXT_TAGHM_migratio n_HM_mini_2G_0507 moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
