07.11.09
Wright’s contradictions: darwinism vs directionality
In the unending cascade of media crap on Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God (it makes good copy), we have this interview at Alternet: What Makes Religion a Force for Good or Evil?, and we can dispose of Wright’s pretensions in short order:
Darwinian assumptions and evolutionary psychology don’t allow arguments about directionality or purpose in evolution or history. And the crap game theory that Wright peddles ad infinitum won’t change that.
So if history/evolution looks directional then Darwinism fails.
Since Wright’s Non Zero came out in 2000 just after WHEE and the later book resolves the confusion with a new approach to historical evolution, it would seem a bit of a hangover to be rehashing these fallacies on Alternet in 2009.
All of this fits into a bigger picture in which you speak of a direction or an arrow of history. Could you talk about that?
RW: There are two separate issues: whether there’s direction in both biological evolution and human history, and whether that direction signifies some kind of purpose. That’s one, that’s an analytical question.
There clearly has been a direction in the sense of growing complexity through biological evolution. That’s not to say that all organisms are always getting more complex, but if you go back to an earlier time and find the most complex organism, the envelope of complexity tends to rise with time.
And since cultural evolution started really moving 10,000 years ago, there’s a growing complexity of human societies. You go from hunter-gatherer village to agrarian chiefdom to ancient city-state and so on. Today, we’re on the verge of globalized organization. So there’s a direction toward growing complexity, that’s hard to deny.
It’s a separate and much more difficult question whether that signifies something you could in some sense call “purpose.” First of all, you can mean a lot of things by purpose.
Then the next question: Is the purpose on balance a good one? In other words, is the direction tending toward the good? And I don’t really have a simple answer to that question.
I’m not a technological utopian, but I do think there’s one dimension along which human history, broadly speaking, has brought moral progress. That’s expansion of the moral compass, in the sense of getting people to acknowledge the fundamental humanity of people of different ethnicities and nationalities.
As far as anthropologists and archeologists can tell, 15,000 years ago, if hunter-gatherers saw somebody they’d never seen before, and you didn’t know where they came from, and there were four of you and one of them, you’d probably kill him. Theirs was not a highly cosmopolitan situation.