People who read what I write sometimes are surprised at how often I cite the geneticist Richard Lewontin when he seems to fully believe in natural selection and Darwinism of a less fundamentalist type than reigns in even real science, as opposed to the more influential, more fascist friendly type of it that poisons the imaginations of a majority of educated people.
I have enormous respect for Lewontin, though my admiration isn't blind to what he really claims and the enormous disagreements I have with what he says. This is an answer to a spammed comment.
That kind of Darwinism is so pervasive that it is fully evidenced in the actions and declarations of some of the most vehement Darwin haters whose Biblical fundamentalism leads them to deny that evolution of species is, in fact, among the most supported ideas in the history of the life sciences. Darwinism is a vast enough and, oddly, varied enough scientific ideology to include different and often viciously hostile camps. And they can get real down and dirty about it.
On top of that Lewontin is an admitted materialist and atheist, though I would never accuse him of the idiocy of scientism. He is too honest and too forthright in his criticism of science and his acknowledgement of what it really is to say the kind of stupid things in that regard such as Bertrand Russell and so many other eminent scientists have claimed for science.
One thing he said in his famous essay-review of the very uneven book by his one time debating team partner on behalf of science and the teaching of biology in the public schools, Carl Sagan, "Billions and Billions of Demons", is something I've noted before. It's a famous passage of that review.
Lewontin came right out and admitted the extent to which it is the personal preference of his fellow materialists and not anything about science or scientific method or the discoveries of science, lead them to demand materialism or atheism under those or any other ideological labels chosen rules. It comes down to what they choose to believe and that choice of belief in material monism leads to their claims about the world.
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
I will note that I'm rather disappointed in Lewontin for the condescending phrase, "no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated," though it points out the extent to which club membership is taken as a prerequisite to have your skepticism or even informed objections regarded as worthy of consideration. Or, perhaps it's another admission that we are really dealing, at the bottom of things, not with the "objective knowledge" that science claims for itself (unless the scientists are being very carefully though insincerely scrupulous) but with a hierarchy of preferences, some of those reasonable, many of them based in peer-group interests. I would include, class snobbery. Not all of us non-initiates are mystified. I will leave addressing Lewontin's rather naive and uniformed conception of religious belief for another time.
That is a declaration of a materialist monistic ideology which claims that all of reality must have closure under a single framing. A framing which, though he doesn't state it, must be in line with human conceptions and our ability to imagine things. Any claimed humanly understood monistic system must include that filter, that it has to be limited by human understanding. Which means that anything which exceeds human limits, can't be admitted to be real, no matter how much it just goes on being.
That is what lies behind that demand of the kind that was made by Cosmides and Tooby and is ubiquitous in those who demand that unsubstantiated just-so stories, patent absurdities, entirely unsupported claims be accepted. It has to be that way because that structure of material reality MUST BE THERE DAMN IT! And shut the fuck up!, can just be an understood command without stating it. I think that the reaction of a lot of the fundamentalist rejection of Darwinism is based more on the understood command and not the arguments about evolution. I think Lewontin understands that, up to a point. Hardly any of his fellows do.
It was exactly the ideology the final confirmation of which the proto-Nazi Ernst Haeckel hooted and rejoiced that the theory of natural selection had provided in a book Darwin endorsed and praised as a work of science, The History of Creation,
Whilst, then, we emphatically oppose the vital or teleological view of animate nature which presents animal and vegetable forms as the productions of a kind Creator, acting for a definite purpose, or of a creative, natural force acting for a definite purpose, we must, on the other hand, decidedly adopt that view of the universe which is called the mechanical or causal. It may also be called the monistic, or single-principle theory, as opposed to the twofold principle, or dualistic theory, which is necessarily implied in the teleological conception of the universe. The mechanical view of nature has for many years been so firmly established in certain domains of natural science, that it is here unnecessary to say much about it. It no longer occurs to physicists, chemists, mineralogists, or astronomers, to seek to find in the phenomena which continually appear before them in their scientific domain the action of a Creator acting for a definite purpose. They universally, and without hesitation, look upon the phenomena which appear in their different departments of study as the necessary and invariable effects of physical and chemical forces which are inherent in matter. Thus far their view is purely materialistic, in a certain sense of that “word of many meanings.”
I will forego the temptation to go into what exactly was naively premature about Haeckel's declaration of the triumph of "the mechanical view of nature"* which has been rather decisively disconfirmed in the 20th century, because it still is the ideological framing that even scientists who should certainly know better, such as Lewontin, stick to out of their preference. Haeckel, along with all of the other horrors of that book, proclaimed:
This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature constitutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin.
Which I hold is one part of why Darwinism became the predominant framing of understanding taught and enforced as the only allowable point of view in science, even as massive problems in Darwin's original formulation of natural selection came up almost immediately. Haeckel confirmed that both he and Darwin held that Lamarckian inheritance was a vital necessity of Darwinism, declaring in the most scathing terms he could imagine that to hold with a genetic view of inheritance was no better than to hold with the Mosaic fable of the beginning of life. Clearly, Darwin's Darwinism was incompatible with that, though, as other Darwinists have pointed out without particulate inheritance, natural selection doesn't work. And those problems continue with subsequent neo-Darwinist framings of evolution, especially when it is held to be THE way in which species evolved with all of the Darwinistic political-economic and ideological stuff packed into that framing.
I think that Lewontin is an excellent example of how even someone as honest as he is can overlook or ignore the huge problems with Darwinism, including one which for any honest view of science, would exclude it from being considered scientifically valid.
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.
I've quoted that passage from Lewontin several times because it is such a definitive means of seeing that it can't follow valid scientific methods,it cannot be observed or measured in the lost past and its current attempts to make such determinations are not that impressive, either. If you can't observe or analyze or measure things, I don't know, but I was told you can't consider what you say about them to be contained in science.
Perhaps he would forgive one of the uninitiated for having noticed a few things about these topics.
* In other places and lectures, Lewontin warns, over and over again about the consequences of believing our metaphors are more than metaphors, yet that metaphor is one that science has fully bought into from its beginnings in Descartes, Bacon and others. There are some in the early history of science, such as Galileo and Galvani and Kepler who never bought into a monistic mechanistic ideology who clearly didn't fall into mistaking that metaphor as any more than that. What Lewontin is demanding is, in fact, the monistic view that I'm sure he would feel uneasy with knowing he shares with a Haeckel. I suspect he knows that that mechanistic view of reality is a metaphor that doesn't really work.
It is ironic that while those initiated by academic culture, believing they are entitled to all the honors and benefits occurring thereto, proclaim that monotheism is guilty of any sin they can think of, against all evidence in many cases, they cannot see that the monism they embrace, especially in the last century they lived through, had oceans of blood on its hands.
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