From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 16:51:44 -0500
Subject: 2. Foundations of Darwinian Evolutionism


Subject:  2. Foundations of Darwinian Evolutionism
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 13:57:33 -0500
From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Reply-To: nietzsche-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU 
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 13:57:23 -0500
From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Reply-To: deleuze-guattari-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
------------------------------------------------

(c) 1998 Correa&Correa

A NIETZSCHEAN CRITIQUE OF EVOLUTIONISM, OLD AND NEW
(Doing harm to evolutionism)

2.  Foundations of Darwinian Evolutionism

	Spencer did not so much re-encode Darwin in Social-Darwinism, as his
views converged with those of Darwin.  In a very real sense, what
Spencer came to so ably encode by restoration of the term 'evolution',
already had its own presuppositions, its implicit conditions which we
should not refrain from examining.  Darwin's theory, in this sense,
cannot be simply reduced to admitting that (1) organic variations are
inheritable, (2) that they vary in discrete transmittable elements (his
'gemmules'), and (3) that these variations are small but cumulative,
leading to a gradual change.
	(...)
	What characterizes specifically Darwin's theory is another set of
postulates, precisely those that, one way or the other, Nietzsche
attacked:

	1.  The concept of the survival of the fittest as based upon the notion
of a struggle for subsistence and reproduction.  This is a key mechanism
for the selection of modifications, for it is through the survival of
the fittest that the strongest force (in an operational sense) is made
manifest and selected as a 'favourable variation'.  This, of course, is
complementary to the Malthusian notion that the natural strategies of
reproduction always yield an excedent designed to serve as background on
which the 'selection of the fittest' operates; just as it is
complementary to the unquestioned notion that the predominant instinct
of the living is self-preservation (food and reproduction).

	2.  The postulate that all variation must be haphazard, random, such
that the 'right' direction can only be determined in hindsight: it is
the environmental pressure to favour the best or strongest modification
which must select from a multiplicity of randomly existing modifications
which one is the 'fittest'.  

	 3.  Finally, the philosophical postulate of materialist phenomenology
- in the sense that the struggle for existence is a 'natural' and
material condition and all the forces at stake are material forces, it
being understood that "matter is the stuff of all existence and that all
mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products" (S.J. Gould).  

	These then are the postulates Darwin effectively needed in order to
establish not just his principle of a natural selection, but above all
the notion that natural selection is 'the creative force of evolution'.  

	Darwin's theory posited an evolution that had no inherent direction,
but where  natural selection filled the role of the *creative force*
that builds stages of adaptation.  Spencer, on the other hand added the
notion of evolution as development from a lower to a higher order of
complexity - organizing the stages of adaptation in an order of
progression.  A moral direction is now explicitly given to the selection
of inheritable modifications, while self-preservation becomes
interpreted as the result of the 'cooperation' of environmental and
hereditary factors (external forces of selection and internal forces of
modification - forces in the Spencerian sense): "as a biologist, Mr.
Herbert Spencer is a decadent; as a moralist, too (he considers the
triumph of altruism a desideratum!!!)" (WP, #53).
	(...)
	Neo-evolutionists may pride themselves that science has long divorced
from the popular and anthropocentric concept of evolution as a
progression from the single cell to its highest state, the human being;
yet this distance from Social-Darwinism preserves an anthropocentric
bias of its own, a Malthusian prejudice - since the fittest is qualified
in the context of a 'struggle for existence' (Darwin's expression).  

	How does Gould escape this bias, or appear to escape it?  By arguing
that Darwin's concept of the fittest is not a political notion but an
engineer's operational concept: the very notion of what constitutes the
criterion of fit already implies, in Gould's words, an "improved
design": "fitness by an engineer's criterion of good design".  

	But this is utilitarianism revisited - fitness as a function of use:
"for one must ask 'useful in relation to what'?" - and it necessarily
remits us to the problem of the evaluation of forces under selection
which Nietzsche focused upon.  What is fit but that which in hindsight
is seen to have survived?  How can we then infer that the survival of
the fittest is not simply the survival of the survivors, a finalism in
hindsight that explains nothing, since only use can identify the
selected function?  

	This is why it is so amusing to see the contortions of certain
Darwinists, like Gould, who want to preserve the best of both worlds:
retain the notion of evolution as purposeless so as to be able to deny
the concept of progress, but sneak the latter through the back door, in
the suit of the engineer, when one is pressed to escape the tautology
that survival of the fittest is just survival of the survivors - which
explains nothing.  How can there be improved design without either some
complexification of order or some advance on the part of the adequacy of
an organ towards its objective function?  That is the properly speaking
Darwinian conundrum which Spencer tried to fill - the moving sand of
evolutionism.


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