10.28.07
Darwinism fumbles the ball on progress
Progress, what porgress?
It is a legacy of Darwinian theory that the idea of progress has fallen into confusion. The confusions of social progress, evolutionary progress, and cosmology have left secularists unable to make use of one of the defining concepts of modernity. In the final piece of confusion, Richard Dawkins sensing the dangerous contradiction in the random evolution proposed by Darwinists with natural selection has defined natural selection as non-random.
The idea of progress (cf. the classic text of Bury, The Idea Of Progress) arises in the early modern (cf. the battle of the Ancients and Moderns) in the perception that modernity was suddenly outstripping the achievements of the ancients. From there the idea proceeded to its secular apotheosis until the onset of scientism and Darwinism confused the issue, and put the idea into its current postmodern limbo. In part the problem arises from the abuse of ideology that overtook the idea in its later biography. The critique of ideology is all well and good, but to completely reject the idea is the great mistake precipitated by the onset of Darwinism
Maybe Darwinism is wrong!? Is it possible to have a true theory of evolution without the idea of progress? It would seem not. The early proponents of evolution, despite the crudity of their initial efforts, took it for granted that evolutionary progress was the key to its understanding. But a more refined or properly delimited idea of progress is needed.
That is provided, by the way, by the model of the eonic effect, where two levels of action are braided together, in a rendition of progression in steps. Lamarck, his theory of adaptation apart (which has discredited him) naturally proposed the outline of a true theory of evolution, however crude, with its two levels of action, one able to take up the burdern of progress. Darwinism, by collapsing the different levels (macro and micro) is unable to sort out the resulting confusion.
Gould was highly critical of the idea of progress, but surely he was simply wrong in his endless diatribes against progress in evolution. Part of the critique sprang from his leftist rejection of the social exploitation of the idea of progress on the part of various elites. And this is the confusion of economic progress, so-called, with overall progress.
But those are different issues.
We fail to see progress in evolution because it is hard to find, and requires something better than naive teleological thinking.
If we examine ‘eonic progression’ we see the problem solved in priniciple (but only for historical analysis) in the double action of two ‘evolutionary’ processes or levels, analogous to the micro and putative macro suspected or denied by biologists.
In general the failure to see social progress is due to the oversimplications of its proponents, and the inability to consider the long-range scale of world history. But if we periodize world history properly the reality of progress becomes obvious. The eonic effect resolves the confusion that arises from the perception of retrograde motion, due to its consideration of a discrete-continuous model, where the driver of progress and the micro field in its intermediate phases are different in their character. We fail to see the greater system of progression at work.
To have hopelessly confused the central idea of progress is not the least of the devastations of Darwinian oversimplification.
This, though, brings up another question for me. How much are secular people, particularly those of us who are impressed with the undeniable progress within modern science, committed to notions of accompanying social progress?