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. --- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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