Why I Am Not A Darwinist

Though I am certain it was not his purpose in saying it, the eminent geneticist, Richard Lewontin, ever honest, laid out the problem with accepting natural selection as a law of nature or, in fact, accepting it even as a real thing instead of an entirely artificial concept having no more existence in nature than other eventually discarded ideas.  From his introduction to his book "It Ain't Necessarily So."

It is not only in the investigation of human society that the truth is sometimes unavailable.  Natural scientists, in their overweening pride, have come to believe that eventually everything we want to know will be known.  But that is not true.  For some things there is simply not world enough and time.  It may be, given the necessary constraints on time and resources available to the natural sciences, that we will never have more than a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system.  For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them.  In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them.  Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were.  Over and over, in these essays reproduced here, I have tried to give an impression of the limitations on the possibility of our knowledge.  Science is a social activity carried out by a remarkable, but by no means omnipotent species.  Even the Olympians were limited in their powers.

It is a remarkably frank and honest statement.  One which, I am sure, Lewontin understood both some necessary consequences of and many of the implications that could be drawn from it while remaining entirely within the bounds of reason and honest consideration.  I am not sure if he realized that thinking about what he said could lead someone to the conclusion that natural selection is very likely an illusion, clung to for a variety of reasons, many of those merely ideological but by even responsible biologists out of the desire to have some explanation for how species diverged and the diversity of life we observe came about in evolution.  I'd had increasing doubts about the quality of the theory of natural selection as I read about it more while looking at the disaster of its application through eugenics.  I had realized that it was not much like other established laws of science in physics and chemistry and even some in biology that were based on direct observation of organisms, living and their available corpses (so many of those killed so they could be studied).

As Lewontin said,

"For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them.  In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them." 

Those conditions define two of the biggest problems with establishing natural selection as reliable in the ways that the holdings of the physics and chemistry are.   If that were not bad enough, the enormous length of the period that evolution covers, now known to likely be more than three and a half billion years, makes it certain that, by an enormous percentage, the vitally important evidence testing the theory is certainly lost forever and will never be available.   Those trillions and trillions of unavailable organisms which either left or failed to leave offspring, the factors in their lives which determined their reproduction or failure to reproduce, are the very subject which would be necessary to study in order to confirm the existence of natural selection or to come up with better explanations.

It is entirely possible that were even a representative sample of those stupendously many organisms available to study (and there certainly wouldn't be "the time and resources available" for such a study) that a multitude of different forces and factors could be found that are, actually, responsible for the multitude of life around us.   I would bet my last cent that mere chance and random events would be more of a factor than the "fitness" that Darwinism imposes as the universal law governing biology and the required frame through which evolution and biology are to be seen, though there is no way to test that, either.

Other people, including the influential philosopher of science, Karl Popper,  have made other and very serious observations of problems with natural selection as science.  He, I think very reasonably, said that the entire idea was tautological.  I can't recall who said that natural selection actually meant " the survival of the survivors", which is certainly what it boils down to.

Defining "fitness" as mere survival unreasonably assigns a quality to those organisms which left offspring due to mere chance events, events that killed off even genetically identical organisms in perfect health.   An identical twin could be hit by a car, eaten by a predator, a clone fail to thrive by taking root in the shade of a larger plant while its identical twin matured and left surviving offspring.  The mere failure to leave offspring or that success, under natural selection, would impose the quality of "fitness" on merely random events due to mere chance when that quality is entirely irrelevant to the event and its results.  And what you say of identical twins, would be true of other members of a family or group or species who are not identical but otherwise as "fit".

Furthermore, once you begin to include random events, chance events, accidental events and events which are decisive in determining their success in leaving offspring but which have nothing to do with an organism's "fitness" such as which animal a predator notices and chooses to kill, you have to include the liklihood that those would fall equally on the "fitter" as they would the "less fit" who might be "chosen" by mere chance to survive and leave offspring than the "more fit".  By any analysis under natural selection, that mere chance event would be indistinguishable from the idea of natural selection at work weeding out the "unfit" leaving the traits of the "fitter" for propagation into the next and succeeding generations.

And what you can say about the unwarranted imposition of "fitness" on mere chance, could also be true of undiscovered forces and entirely unknown and undefined "things" that were at work, bringing about that diversity over those enormous eons and in that effective infinity of numbers.  If "there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak," then it's quite possible that not only are the forces defined by natural selection not there but that there are others that are either not observed or masked by the analysis forced by the universal requirement to see natural selection when you can't observe it is there.   There is, certainly, no means of knowing in any event in the lost, unobservable past, if anything like natural selection is relevant to the outcome.  And over the enormous number of such events, certainly more than one of those possibly determining the success in reproduction of an organism during its life, multiplying the "mere" number or trillions of organisms by a large factor, that means there is no way to determine the strength of natural selection as a factor in the entire phenomenon of evolution over the course of billions of years.   It is quite possible that even if it exists, natural selection may be of effectively no importance and there is no way to determine if that is or is not the case.

Karl Popper, I think rather obviously due to the heat he got for his critique of natural selection, backtracked and recanted his heresy, I think he was right in his critique.   There is no rational case to be made that natural selection is like the laws of physics and chemistry that are formulated through actual observations which are accurately quantified, tested and analyzed, it is actually nothing like those laws.

The bizarre results of the hegemony of natural selection within science has led to numerous hypocrisies, among the greatest of those is the often heard assertion that there is no notion of progress and directed progression in the idea of natural selection.   The refutation of that is found in the earliest documents from Charles Darwin and in those documents written by the first generation of his followers which he endorsed, especially in Haeckel.   Both Darwin and Haeckel made a major point of asserting that the elimination of the less fit would, somehow, lead to a superior stock of organisms, the very basis of Galton's eugenics.   The infamous and double speaking passage predicting a catastrophe for the human species if Victorian levels of aid and healthcare were made available to the poor is among the best known examples disproving the assertion that notions of progress towards a definite direction aren't embedded in the basic fabric of natural selection.

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected*.

That passage is full to the top with assertions of progressive development due to the working of natural selection.  The notion that survivors would be "more vigorous" than the population before that selection had effectively changed the species through weeding out traits of the "less vigorous" constitutes a progressive development.   To deny that is the baldest of lies.  Yet its inherently deterministic nature is one that is uncomfortable for the materialism that the most prominent Darwinists held as their basic ideological frame, one which could admit to nothing that couldn't be made compatible with material causation.  Certainly anything that implied design and, so, a designer, had to be suppressed even though it forced a hypocritical denial of the nature of what Darwin, Haeckel, Galton, Huxley, were asserting as they asserted it.   If there is no designer then everything about natural selection, selection being an action by a conscious selector and towards a goal, increased fitness in the population,  is problematic.

Those problems caused by what natural selection is and implies not fitting with the more basic program of its proponents, materialist monism, are many.  One of the other more obvious ones is the division of influences in heredity vulgarly condensed into "nature vs. nurture."   There is this passage from Francis Galton's memoir, right before he disposes of the troublesome issue of free will:

I had long tried to gain some insight into the relative powers of Nature and Nurture, in order that due allowance might be made for Environment, neither too much nor too little, but without finding an adequate method of obtaining it. At length it occurred to me that the after-history of those twins who had been closely alike as children, and were afterwards parted, or who had been originally unlike and afterwards reared together, would supply much of what was wanted. So I inquired in all directions for appropriate cases, and at length obtained a fair supply, on which an article in Frazer's Magazine, Nov. 1875, was written.

It was revised and added to in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1875 [43], and then incorporated into Human Faculty, 1883 (which is now republished in an exceedingly cheap form in" Everyman's Library ").

The evidence was overwhelming that the power of Nature was far stronger than that of Nurture, when the Nurtures of the persons compared were not exceedingly different. It appeared that when twins who had been closely alike had afterwards grown dissimilar, the date of divergence was usually referred to a time when one of them had a serious illness, sufficient to modify his constitution.

While there are many problems with the thinking in this passage, the biggest of those is that under materialism's monist system, there could be no meaningful distinction made between nature and nurture and any intellectual holding that asserted such a difference must be a distortion of the underlying unity that must hold if materialism is to be true.  Nature and nurture would merely be an artificial division of one entity holding any features validly assigned to either category, making them inseparable.   The problems that makes for extracting natural selection (Galton's "nature") out of that unity, assigning it a supreme percentage of its determinitive strength in questions of heredity aren't addressed in anything I've yet come across.  I haven't found it in the foremost advocate of monism among the Darwin inner circle, Haeckel, though his writing is very hard going, very tedious and very prone to being distracted by the horrific conclusions he reaches as an essential result of his Darwinian-materialist system.  He engages in the same discussion that Galton does.  Galton's and Charles Darwin's conclusions are no different, though often phrased more diplomatically, that is proven by Darwin's citations of both Haeckel and Galton in backing his conclusions. 

I have only given the barest of outlines of why the entire thing is burdened with illogical and contradictory features.  I could go much farther on how it became the enforced and habitual mode of thinking about these things when it never should have been.  Out of which its legal and political manifestations in eugenics, horrible social policy enhancing and enforcing inequality, and its most extreme forms in extermination programs arose.  Yet on such a basis millions of people had their most basic rights stripped from them, their right to reproduce, their right to make that determination for themselves, and in the more extreme forms their right to continue living.   Not only people individually but entire groups were deprived of their rights and lives, their extinction held by the most revered of scientists, whose glorification is a requirement of maintaining your respectability in polite society, to be a boon for the human species.

* Note:  I have analysed this passage a number or times, pointing out how Darwin undercut his assertions about "aid which we feel compelled to give" constantly in a way he did not undercut his far stronger and more persuasive predictions of catastrophe".  It is only one of many, many passages in which Darwin asserted the benefits of those he deemed of lesser fitness dying to those who survived them.  Related to those is in his exchange with G. A. Gaskell, giving his reasons for rejecting birth control over the kind of "elimination" by "savages" he credits with the salubrious results he asserts in The Descent of Man.  Darwin's hope for the eventual replacement of other populations around the world with superior British stock is a real revelation of just what he had in mind.