01.19.06
Ruse quotes from Telic Thoughts
I couldn’t resist these quotes from Ruse’s The Evolution-Creation Struggle, on Telic Thoughts.
Ruse’s book, much praised by MikeGene, is breezy enough, but I don’t ‘buy’ histories of biology much any more. Ruse has the strange view that the entire history of biology since Buffon and up to Darwin is somehow off the mark, and that Darwin alone got it straight. Even Huxley gets a bit of a shaft. He has missed the point: noone got it right! Like the story of the blind men and the elephant, we have a whole spectrum of views. So Ruse’s book is the typical distortion of the subject. One might pick out Lenoir’s The Strategy of Life for a snapshot, among a dozen, of what’s missing in the standard narrative.
Ruse is preoccupied with the idea of evolutionary progress. There I agree, many thinkers were less rigorous than Darwin, but Darwin was wrong too.
Nota bene: without a progressive process, you have no theory, but that is not the same as the ‘evolutionist’ ideologies that buzzed around Darwin’s theory, itself incapable of explaining evolutionary progress.
How were Fisher and Wright able to get away with it? They were producing professional quality, evolutionary biology and yet they were as much influenced by progress as Lamarck, Chambers, or Spencer. The answer is that they tried to have it both ways. In principle, the fundamental theory and the adaptive landscape do not have to be interpreted in a progressionist fashion. The upward path can get reversed. As landscapes change, everything might get taken back down to a lower point. We humans could become Eloi or Morlocks. So neither Fisher nor Wright made cultural values a necessary part of their evolutionary picture.
But this said, if one wanted to continue with a progressionist evolution, the opportunities were there to be grasped. For the English, it meant a kind of souped-up Darwinism, with progress really incorporated into the causal picture in a way that eluded Darwin himself. For the Americans, it meant a kind of souped-up Spencerianism, with progress really incorporated into the causal picture in a way that Spencer beyond the grave must have applauded. From Fisher’s and Wright’s theories of population genetics, it was but a few easy steps to a metaphysics of evolutionism. [p. 182]Like Ford, Dobzhansky and his followers realized that any hint of cultural values as a driving force behind their work would be fatal to its prospects for becoming a respected professional discipline. They set out deliberately to purify their own work and anything to which they gave their seal of appeal. As part of their campaign to revitalize evolutionary studies, they founded a new journal, Evolution.
Ernst Mayr, a German born ornithologist, was the first editor, and his letters to prospective contributors made very clear the need to stay away from dangerous ideas….Was the progressionist coloring of Wright’s theory a deep embarrassment to these American supporters of the synthetic theory of evolution (as they labeled the project)? Had progress become a phylogenetic relic in science, like the appendix? Absolutely not. To a person, all the new professional, American evolutionists were ardent progressionists, and for most of them that was precisely why they had been attracted to evolutionary studies in the first place. Like Cuvier over a hundred years before, they realized that for professional reasons they had to play the game of being culture value-free, otherwise there would be no grants, no prestigious university posts, no students, no respect. Evolution was their profession. But evolutionism was their obsession.
Their strategy was clever and simple. They would publish two sets of books. One professional, with no hint of progress. One popular, with much talk of progress. Two messages, for two audiences. Most instructive was the example of paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson. In 1944 he published Tempo and Mode in Evolution, in which he applied population genetics, specifically Wright’s shifting balance theory, to the fossil record. The work was spartan in its avoidance of anything extrascientific. In 1953 he published a revision of this work, with the new title Major Features of Evolution. Again, not a hint of progress or any other cultural value. But in between, in 1949, Simpson delivered a set of public lectures at Yale University which were collected into a book, The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of Its Significance for Man. Biological progress was the connecting thread throughout, and the basis of life’s major social directives. “[pp. 186-188]