09.29.05
The Wars Over Evolution II
The two books reviewed by Lewontin certainly deserve a response/essay from the perspective of the ‘eonic effect’ data, with its associated idea of the ‘eonic evolution of civilization’:
The New York Review of Books has an article by R. Lewontin.
The New York Review of Books
Volume 52, Number 16 ยท October 20, 2005
The Wars Over Evolution
By Richard C. LewontinThe Evolution-Creation Struggle
by Michael Ruse
Harvard University Press, 327 pp., $25.95Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution
by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd
University of Chicago Press, 332 pp. $30.00
Here are a few preliminary thoughts: I reviewed Ruse’s book at Amazon, there to protest politely Ruse’s way of isolating Darwin as the sole champion of science, as he threw everyone else (prior to the Synthesis) into ‘evolutionism’ camp.
The question of evolution is like the story of the blindmen and the elephant, everyone sees only a part. There were multiple perspectives before Darwin in a scattershot effect, Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, Kant and the teleomechanists, Hegel, the Marxists., the embryologists. Darwin’s theory effectively reduced Lamarck, the real founder of evolutionary theory, to a monist reductionism from which it has never recovered.
Ruse’s (and Gould’s) complaints about evolutonary progress miss the point. He is protesting the clumsiness of all attempts to sort out biological and cultural evolution. And thus it is apt that the second book reviewed should appear with Ruse. But as Soren Lovtrup pointed out a theory of evolution is by definition about ‘progress’ if the term can be defined properly, which is surely is not in current thinking.
Note how the idea of evolution is born before Darwin matched with progressionism, perhaps progress, in the first Darwin and Lamarck. Quite natural, but then the ideological confusion starts. Spencer struggles with it, theory showing its hand in the match with classical liberalism. Economics and biology are getting scrambled, then will be projected backward onto biology, then people will actually try to strip ‘Darwinism’ from its moorings to reapply it to society! Here appears the truly junk science rubbish about ‘memes’. Such thinking seems to appear every September at History & Theory listserve in a new attempt to storm the gates of the subject already quite ideological enough in the original muddle over Adam Smith.
This needs a longer essay. But in the ‘eonic model’ we take a different approach. We ask, when did evolution stop, and history begin, construct a transition model for the two, with a formal ‘evolution of freedom’ to express the two levels of final result. This allows us to bring evolution in the present, in a certain sense, there to see that ‘evolutionary theory’ is a dependent variable in the ‘eonic evolution of civilization’, and that the scattershot spectrum is nicely clustered around the Great Divide at the end of the modern transition.
Progress can be reexpressed as a property of the eonic sequence, but with a distinction between ‘eonic progression’ and the ideas/theories of progress appearing at the indicated moment.
Finally our theorist turns into an ‘eonic observer’ of his own immersion in the sequence.
Hot stuff, if studied with the care needed to visualize how it works.
All this might relieve of the steady production of bilge on the subject of evolution, evolutionism, and the heroic ’scientist’ producing theories that are cribbed notes from Adam Smith.
Patience, and….
get started with the eonic model