10.25.08

Cavemen, modern men, Darwinism, and the Oedipus Paradox

Posted in Evolution at 10:32 pm by nemo

Yesterday’s post, The Caveman Mystique, dealt with the attitudes we adopt in response to evolutionary theory, or evolutionary claims about theory, and shows the way the seeming implications of that theory are adopted as a form of behavior, as if Darwinian theory justified that behavior. The article about the book is here, at Alternet: Caveman Sex: How Evolutionary Psych Pushes Sexist Stereotypes. Here is a quote from the article, note the way that the public communication of the theory becomes a model for the behavior, in this case, of men. But this is just the fallacy discussed here as the so-called Oedipus paradox, where assumptions/speculations about unobserved evolution in deep time enter into our present, and become fallacious grounds for subsequent behavior.

But having briefly outlined the evolutionary theoretical approach to sex differences in human sexual behavior, I want to talk about the popular spread of that theory, however distorted or watered down it winds up. For we find references to man’s evolutionary heritage throughout popular culture — in new science textbooks, pop psychology books on relationships, men’s magazine, and even on T-shirts. (Picture the frat dude chugging a beer in a shirt with a picture of a caveman clad in a fur pelt holding a club and with the statement “Me Find Woman.” You can actually buy these shirts on cafepress.com.) There are caveman fitness plans and caveman diets. Saturday Night Live’s hilarious “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer” and the affronted caveman of the Geico car insurance ads joke about the ubiquity of caveman narratives. More disturbingly, the Darwinian discourse also crops up when men need an excuse for antisocial behavior. One man, who was caught on amateur video participating in the Central Park group sexual assaults in the summer of 2000, can be heard on video telling his sobbing victim, “Welcome back to the caveman times.”

Popularized evolutionary discourse, or pop-Darwinism, offers men a scientifically authorized way to think about — and live out — their sexuality. Indeed, popular attention to the evolution of human male sexuality has increasingly lodged American manhood in an evolutionary logic. Pop-Darwinism has become a sort of cultural consensus about who men are. Average American guys don’t read academic evolutionary science, but many do read about science in popular magazines and in bestselling books written by enthusiasts of evolutionary psychology. Popular culture is a political Petri dish for Darwinian ideas about sex. As such, it is worth examining — even when magazine writers and television producers intentionally “dumb down” or distort more sophisticated or modest academic claims.

We have cited the material from World History And The Eonic Effect on the Oedipus Paradox here:
The Oedipus Paradox.

The point is that a theory is about a neutral observer creating a theory about evolution in passive organisms, here natural selection, from Darwin. But suddenly, as the theory proceeds into the public sphere it becomes an object of imitation by an active ‘organism’, a human in the present, who begins to apply that theory to his own behavior. This is the perfect example of the Oedipus Paradox, and it exposes the fallacy, if you reflect, of any theory of evolution like Darwin’s which is taken as a universal generalization, like a law. The fallacy arises when that generalization is taken to apply in non-linear fashion in the present of the agent or observer.
There is no reason why natural selection can’t apply to our present, but, as we reflect on this, it is surely a fallacy to consider that to be ‘evolution’.
The point is clear from the description of the behavior in question: the ‘scenario’ of ‘acting stupid as an evolutionary caveman’.
But that wasn’t evolution at all. The evolutionary process simply didn’t occur via the process of natural selection, which we can see from this example is regressive.
We get a glimpse all at once at the falseness of Darwin’s theory, which is clutching at straws, as a oversimplification for an ‘evolution’ we really don’t understand, and finally as an excuse for behavior we otherwise would not indulge in..
Time to just snap out of the Darwin fallacy, and stop giving people that excuse for anti-evolutionary behavior. Time’s up with selectionist Darwinism.

The study of the eonic effect gives us a glimpse of what we are missing, and how we can repair theories to produce a new type of theory where this fallacy is not present. But the point is that there are no universal law of evolution. Evolution is something very different from what we had thought.

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