File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_2000/nietzsche.0009, message 107


From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 16:53:19 -0500
Subject: 4. The myth that all variation is random


4. The myth that all variation is random
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 14:03:20 -0500
From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Reply-To:  nietzsche-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU 
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 14:03:01 -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)

4.  The myth that all variation is random

	There is chance and there are chances.  Probability theory is designed
to calculate the chances of an event - the outcome of 'games of chance'
like dice and roulette.  These are purely mechanical and macroscopic
games, where uncertainty is operational and not essential: a relative
chance, a chance of the most probable.  But as Monod pointed out in
'Chance and Necessity' three decades ago, the concept of chance takes on
an absolute connotation when speaking of coincidences, the intersection
of two independent lines of events: it is not merely the least probable,
but the essentially unpredictable we are then confronted with - as with
the reverse potential of a catalytic reaction.  Now, this postulate of
an absolute chance has been taken to mean that, for example,
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle establishes a core instance of
absolute chance for quantum events; or, similarly, that in the relation
between the genetic code and its functional consequences there is an
absolute or 'essential' chance at play because of their complete
independence.
	(...)
	Elsewhere (...) we have provided physico-mathematical evidence that
denies the foundation of Born-Heisenberg's principle - a problem which
is not separable from what science means when it speaks of
particle-events.  But as Monod puts it - such evidence could hardly
affect the absolute independence of a mutation in DNA and the
determination of its functional effects 'on the plane of protein
interaction' (p. 115).  It is this notion of a synthesis between really
heterogenous elements or series, with all its arbitrariness, which also
marks Bergson's concept of 'creative evolution' - as opposed to
Spencer's concept: 'creative evolution' is not a revelation of a
teleological programme (a natural hierarchy of forms) built into nature;
something like such a 'revelation' only occurs in embryological
development, not in speciation and intra-species variation.  Here, in
Bergson's concept of a creative evolution, we are instead confronted
with an 'absolute newness', a 'creative prodigality' which in no way
permits any notion of a hierarchy of species based upon a supposed
complexity of functions, and yet must take into account the process of
generation of diversity, the process of differentiation.
	(...)
	We must go beyond Monod and his own neo-Darwinian limitations.  The
nail was squarely hit on the head by Nietzsche, when he criticized
Darwinism and Spencerism for placing 'adaptation' in the foreground,
over and above the primary nature of life, the 'essence of life, its
will to power' (GM, II, 12).  Adaptation, or forces of adaptation -
forces of self-preservation and reproduction, are forces of the 'second
rank', reactive forces, not active ones - in Nietzsche's words, they are
'a mere reactivity' (Ibidem).  It is in this context that he regards
Spencer as the epitome of nihilist science: "indeed, life itself has
been defined as a more and more efficient inner adaptation to external
conditions" (Herbert Spencer)" (Ibidem).  Such 'science' robs life of
its "fundamental concept, that of *activity*", by putting adaptation
first.
	(...)
	The moment Life is disrobed of its essential power, it is Survival -
the cultural image of Life - we are dealing with, not Life, whether it
is in science or philosophy, and even and above all, in the study of
biology.  Specifically, with regard to the genealogy of Life, or its
creative evolution in speciation, we disrobe it of its power as soon as
we put forward reactive forces as primary forces.  This is a procedure
with a *political* aim, at the level of science itself - to eliminate
from consideration the 'vital élan' at departure (in other words to
eliminate any bioenergetic considerations, since our reading of Bergson
is a micro-functionalist one); to abstract from the *internal activity*
of the will to power; to discard the form-giving forces, the active
forces, the plastic and creative forces that make adaptation viable to
begin with:

	"The influence of 'external circumstances' is overestimated by Darwin
to a ridiculous extent: the essential thing in the life process is
precisely the tremendous shaping, form-creating force working from
within which *utilizes* and *exploits* 'external circumstances' - the
new forms molded from within are not formed with an end in view; but in
the struggle of the parts a new form is not left long without being
related to a partial usefulness and then, according to its use, develops
itself more and more completely" (WP, 647).

	Because of the limiting conditions one must employ in the laboratory -
lethal selection under growth conditions and non-lethal selection under
no-net-growth conditions - one tends to unquestioningly assume that the
natural conditions are those of forceful adaptation to adverse
environmental changes.  It is here that the Malthusian theory of the
food vs reproduction gathers its unconscious adherents.  For the natural
conditions of selection are not those of extinction and stress, but
those of variation - the derivation of fluxes, their coexistence, their
multiplicity.  To begin with, fluxes do not so much run out as they
constantly diverge and superimpose.  And secondly, the environment is no
more determinant than it is determined, produced by the very life forms
its sustains.  Likewise for living systems, they are product and
production.  There is no such thing as adaptation to external conditions
which is not already and primarily creation of these external
conditions, alteration of flux.  This is why adaptation and structure
come after experimentation, after sensing and testing - even use comes
after form and function, but at a point, or a front, where functioning
and formation become indistinguishable (the microcosmic level).  (...)
At stake is the very understanding of will to power as will to Life or
will to Live - both biologically and philosophically, in all of its
potency and potentiality: 'The form-creating force that acts from
within' is the creative and plastic force, not the reactive forces that
occur secondarily to develop a use and constitute an adaptation. 
Adaptation is a 'superfluous teleological principle'.  It could never
serve as a creative force - since even 'procreation is the consequence
of an impotency" (WP, 654).  

	It is here that the rose is thrown.  For the real enemy of Darwinism,
is not special Creationism, but Lamarck's 'transformism' - which
neo-Darwinians use from time to time to inject 'new life' into
'evolutionism'.  The enemy is, for example, Nietzsche's pronouncedly
Lamarckian way of criticizing Darwin and Darwinism - and the enemy is
back today in the form of 'lamarckian bacteria', 'lamarckian yeast
cells', 'lamarckian cancer cells' and 'lamarckian immune cells'.  For
Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism, its modern successor, are now in trouble at
the hands of molecular and microbiologists.  Already immunologists and
other 'cell biologists' have entered the fray.  The real problem of
Darwiniana is precisely that it was Lamarck who "foretold the existence
of a truly active *plastic force*, primary in relation to adaptations: a
force of metamorphosis" (G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 42). 
It is this force which Darwinism at all cost wants to subsume under th 
teleonomic aims of a probabilistic combinatorial.  
	(...)
	What is at stake in the current combat between evolutionists and
neo-Lamarckians, is the activity responsible for speciation as much as
for Life itself.  The very definition of active force ultimately stands
in this respect not as the equivalent of the 'fittest' or the
'operationally stronger', but as the attribute of energy:

	"For Nietzsche, as for energetics, energy which is capable of
transforming itself is called 'noble'.  The power of transformation, the
Dionysian power, is the primary definition of activity." (Ibidem).  

	The problem of energetics is already the problem of activity in
Lamarck's theory.  Lamarck is not on the side of the environment against
heredity - as if heredity were the only internal force: "Whatever the
environment may do, it does not work any direct modification whatever in
the shape and organization of animals" (Philosophie zoologique", Vol. I,
p. 107).  His theory is that 'needs' evoke an internal activity which
transforms both organs and their heredity.  It is "innovative
behaviour", it is function which determines organic form - not the
environment or the randomized 'transmutation' of heredity.  

	If one seeks to find a point of confluence between Lamarck's
transformism, Nietzsche's critique of evolutionism, Bergson's concept of
a 'creative evolution", and Reich's 'orgonomic functionalism', it is
here one must search - in the 'internal activity of the form-giving
forces'.  Bergson, in this sense, indicated the two misconceptions of
evolution: the mistake of preformationism, the mistake of creationism -
that it interprets the living as a possible, or a necessary, that
becomes realized; and the mistake of evolutionism - that even though it
"will always have the merit of reminding us that life is production"
(Deleuze, G (1966) "Bergsonism", p. 98, Zone ed.), it views the living
as a pure actuality devoid of difference, internal force or internal
differentiation (the vital elan).  With evolutionism, the image of the
difference internal to forces becomes simply a matter of heredity and
descent by filiation, where all differences arise by chance and are
selected passively by the environment.  But "since they are due to
chance, these variations, however small they are, would remain external
and "indifferent" to each other (...) the mistake of evolutionism is,
thus, to conceive of vital variations as so many actual determinations
that should then combine on a single line" (Ibidem), a line of
development and evolution (hence all the nonsense about 'transitional
types').
	(...)
	Evolutionism ignores the energetic machine that composes Life and which
Life composes.  It proceeds as if the environment is defined by the
negative - stress conditions - and the internal force by the randomistic
mechanisms of heredity.  Yet, between heredity and the environment there
is an internal plastic force in a self-regulated process of constant 
experimentation, autonomous morphogenesis and self-ordering.  A vital
force that regards the changes in environmental fluxes not as stresses
but as opportunities, as challenges - necessarily challenges but not
challenges of necessity.  

	Evolutionism ignores as much the web of 'transversal' connections
between variations (involution in the Deleuzian sense, not in the
Spencerian sense), the machine nature of the biospheric process - as it
ignores the critical role of the internal element, the element with
respect to which every adaptation is second.  Against preformationism
and evolutionism, and at the limit, both the environment and the
teleonomic apparatus of heredity are an integral part of the plastic
force (one as substrate, the other as code) that selects the adequate
genotype, as we shall see below.


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