11.25.05
Bethel and Gould
Stranger Fruit has links to Chris Mooney’s discussion of Tom Bethel’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Science which is filled with a host of rants that are easy targets for Mooney’s attack on the Republican War on Science. Reading Bethel on the environment is downright alarming. But then the discussion gets into evolution at Sciencegate and we have the reincarnation of a twenty-five year old argument between Bethel and Gould, one that is a strict stalemate due to the hopeless confusion of both sides. Remarkably it is Bethel who seems to charge Darwinists with ideology, as Gould defends Darwin. The question of the tautology of the fitness criterion aside the issue of evolutionary progress really does, contra Gould, constitute a problem for Darwin. Gould rightly attacks Victorian ideological versions of the idea of progress, but this begs the question of how to do it right. Gould’s tenacity in defending Darwin on natural selection is a puzzle to me. The man in revolt against the paradigm has delayed its passage with this obstinate defense of Darwin.
The way out of this stalemate can’t occur without actual evidence of evolutionary progress. Actually the evidence is all around us, but we can’t see it because two levels of evolution are so overlaid that we confuse them. My eonic model can sort out those two levels for history, and that allows us to see that the dynamism of progress and the idea, with its ideologies, are too separate things. Armed with that clue we see the basic rightness of Lamarck’s initial take on evolution (not to be confused with his theory of adaptation): On one level there is progression, on another adaptation, and/or deviating lines of development. Darwinists forbid themselves the first level, forever confusing the issue.
I find it alarming therefore that Bethel in the midst of his other dangerous confusions should be the one to point this out.
Here’s the gist, and it need only be taken on provision: Evolution is a braided macro/micro double process, the macro is almost never visible, but requires higher evidence density that we normally have. My eonic effect is one of the few good examples, and it makes clear how easy it is to miss the macro part. This macro represents the progression aspect, I won’t say progress. The micro represents the part that we tend to confuse with evolution, and there natural selection does indeed seem the key, but only in earlier evolution.
The point is that Gould’s statement that Darwin will be with us for some time may well be true, but only because we could be condemned forever to our evolutionary blindness, which conservatives won’t rescue us from.
Critque of Evolutionary Economy
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_tautology.html