One of the confusions of the Darwin debate that has retarded discussion is
the interior polarization of the debate within the limits of the old
paradigm, and there a compromise has long confused the issue. We can see it
as the issue of punctuated equilibrium gets reabsorbed into the mainline,
over the issue of 'natural selection'. That has made the debate, oftern with
its left-right polarization, very important, yet wrong on both sides, however
vital the leftist challenge of sociobiology. This is an unconscious effort to
make the debate a sort of 'in-house' matter, when the real problem is much
deeper.
While one can respect the challenge of Gould, or anyone else, to the idea of
progress, its total elimination from the picture has completed confused the
debate, which needs a new terminology to distinguish evolution of trilobites
from Victorian propaganda, please. I could write fifty postmodern pages
denouncing progress, but it does not follow that the whole evolutionary
process is proven to be purely random.
Anyway, this subtle compromise in the middle of the 'debate' has let the
Creationists a la Philip Johson steal a march on the whole subject, though no
doubt not for long. The debate has changed gears, and the old Dawkins
momentum continues, but the issues are different, cf. a work such as J.
Schwarz' Sudden Origins, which I might briefly describe in another post. The
old Dawkins line is obsolete, and if you look closely at the better
specialized literature they have nervously conceded the point. We see that
it was never necessary to claim that 'slow evolution of the eye' occurred
through incremental steps. A series of hox genes switched on will produce an
eye! Times are changing.
It is unproven, probably FALSE, that natural selection is anything but a side
factor (but on those terms important) in the evolution of complexity. Anyone
who says otherwise needs very strong proof, and not the usual blah blah about
dishes of bacteria, or germs surviving cloroz.
In a message dated 5/24/2001 11:30:02 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
To escape the clutches of E.O. Wilson is not to escape those of
S. J. Gould, and the assumptions of basic Darwinism still bedevil analysis
even as the banishment of all ideas of progress simply compounds the
confusion. For the idea of progress in the docket of ideology, in addition
to
its excision from all discussion of random evolution, leaves all in
confusion. We should a more complex theory to explain progression in one
form, as macroevolution, and the individual's actions, as freedom,in
another,
as a sort of microevolution. In any case, we are still 'looking for the
answer',without the gimmicks of sociobiological reductionism and this book
explores a host of interesting avenues in a liberating, though eclectic mix
of themes from Veblen to Marx.
John Landon
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website on eonic effect
http://eonix.8m.com
http://www.eonica.net
