Re: [asa] Evangelicals, Evolution, and Academics Introduction now available

Hi Jim,
   
  I'm not sure if you're hearing what I'm saying or not, but it sure seems you're listening, for which I'm glad. First, yes, my 'take on evolution' is constrained - it simply must be! As is yours, though if you lean toward Total Evolution (TE/TE) then it is 'less constrained' - I'm not sure what limits you place on evolutionary theories, but I am fairly clear about what limits I place on them. What you meant by 'arbitrary' is unclear to me, perhaps you'll explain.
   
  Second, you used the word 'selection' several times in your post. It almost appears that anything that 'selects' can/should be considered within an evolutionary paradigm or framework. With this, as a human-social thinker, I strongly disagree. And I actually even have Charles Darwin partly on my side on this (without doubt, A.R. Russell fully supports my point, not yours)!
   
  Darwin distinguished between 'artificial selection' and 'natural selection.' I distinguish between 'human selection' (not necessarily following Russell, though he said this after Darwin died, but I use it as a human-social scientist) and 'natural selection.' Your claim, and George's, that "humans are part of nature" (which of course I accept too!), when it is elevated to mean that therefore 'human selection' counts as 'natural selection' anyway, is missing the main point. I find it misleading at best (it ignores Darwin's natural/artificial and my natural/human) and dehumanising at worst because it discounts the sovereignty of human-social thought (you may not notice this, but it is a HUGE point in the discussion, predominantly silent at ASA). We in human-social sciences have our own methods and need not be dictated to by 'natural selection' covering 'human selection' like a blanket excuse. Let us be free and see how we contribute to human understanding in a different
 way, a complimentary though independent one from natural sciences!

  You also smuggle in value judgements in your view that mousetraps 'evolve' i.e. you say 'better.' (But let's leave that aside as it opens up a whole jaunt into why evolutionism failed in early 20th century cultural anthropology.) Likewise, saying "It matters not who or what caused the technology to change incrementally," is preposterous. Please forgive my directness, but how do you turn people - living , breathing, human persons with names, faces, hearts and histories - into passive zeros so easily!?! The notion of evolution = incremental change (as you seem to imply) may work on one side, but it fails badly in the human-social realm where leaps and jumps exist; not all changes are incremental.
   
  The critique of 'selection' is met on the physical sciences side by Don C. If you don't like how I've met it, then probably discussion with him is more suitable.
   
  Warm Regards,
  Gregory
   
  
Jim Armstrong <jarmstro@qwest.net> wrote:
  At the palpable risk of jumping in so late in this discussion, I hear what you are saying from your view, but your take on evolution (even biological evolution) seems to me to be a bit arbitrary and constrained. In the human domain, there are still selection effects at work, whether intentional or unconscious. We may think of them as something other than natural selection, but they don't seem to fit into categories like "unnatural" or "supernatural". All that is required for evolution are the essentials of change and selection (by some external mechanism). The fact that some sort of systematic selection might be imposed by "human making, agency, purpose, meaning, intentionality, goal-directness, etc.", would seem to be irrelevant, the essential transactions involved being indistinguishable from "natural selection" (selection and attrition of the unselected). This would not appeal to one who holds that human equates to unnatural, but I don't hold to that understanding,
 taking humans to be part of the natural world, however sentient and intellectually or volitionally privileged we might be.

The basic design, the underlying plan of mousetraps have arguably evolved (to my way of thinking), though not biologically. Better mousetraps are propagated preferentially. The sprung traps are quite a bit better suited for households than deadfalls or poison. A second "branch" evolution of non-lethal traps is growing in popularity, based again on a selection process. It matters not who or what caused the technology to change incrementally. It only matters that the design (and resultant product) did change, and was subsequently selected preferentially on the basis of effectiveness, size, ease of use, purchase cost, etc., at the ultimate expense of less preferred prior designs.

Our tendency is to think that biological changes sort of ooze seamlessly from one configuration to another. But at their heart, those changes too are at some scale incremental - in "steps" if you will - e.g., an altered localized DNA spelling "error", an environmentally induced alteration of a particular chemical transition, an unlikely but still possible alternate fold of a protein to a second stable physical configuration, etc. In light of this incrementalness, and the fact that these essentials of incrementalness and the companion "selection" are not necessarily confined to biology, I'm not so sure that even the biological constraint is particularly germane either, though tantalizingly convenient for narrowing a particular argument.

Or so it seemeth to me.... JimA [Friend of ASA]

       
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Received on Thu May 22 03:34:01 2008