Evolution Discussion - Landon's and Prugovecki's Posts

Re: Evolution Discussion & John Landon's/Eduard Prugovecki's message: I find these comments here to be most interesting and helpful to me in my own considerations of the Darwinism issue. My own reply is interspersed in with each of the messages.

John Landon Wrote:

I agree with this assessment. Evolution (as Evolution)(and for the time being, not as biological adaptations …) is unknown territory What is it? What are we dealing with? Is this Evolutionary Macro-Process a subset of Complex Systems Dynamics or something akin to Quantum phenomena (that operates on the level of cosmology rather than on the level of subatomic systems)? While it may display characteristics that are in line with any of these things, we just don’t know what it exactly is. I mean, the process’s physicality (meaning its structured operative matrix of matter, energy, force relationships)(rather than its physicality as ‘essence’ or ‘whatness’) even is of a quality we are unsure about. It is an environmental factor that determines the adaptation of physical and biological systems over time? Or, if is ‘naturalistic’, how does its physicality differ from the causality of environmental determination? That is the problematic catch of this discussion. I might be willing to venture a guess that “environment” differs from “nature” here in terms of its being an interior feature of material systems rather than an exterior one (that is, a process whose only indicators are looking at a system over a long period of time and seeing its results, considering a physical entity in terms of WHOLE-PART distinctions wh/ X constitutes a physical thing existing in a universal, environment Y, with nature being the systematic structural-operative linkage between X and Y). It’s probably not a satisfying explanation of the topic; still it ventures forth a hypothesis of the nature-environment dilemma for our discussions.

One other concern: I’m a little bit puzzled about this need to separate history from earlier evolution. Why do we need to if they are part and parcel of the same operative function over time (first in biological adaptation on this planet and then in human social development)? If evolution does “behave like [world] history” [World History and the Eonic Effect], then why possibly would we even have to make such a distinction? The only thing we’d be changing in our analysis might be the circumstances under which CHANGE takes place; but the same overall Eonic evolutionary mechanism would still be the same. The drum and drumbeat wouldn’t change; what would be affected by this drumbeat would change, and the specifics of how that drumbeat played in with the things that were affected would change. True, we wouldn’t see exactly the kind of “free action scripting” we see in human societies; but the “fast action” “spikes” of development, the “transitions”, and the “stream”/ “sequence” of evolutionary development would still be there in earlier evolution, wouldn’t they? …

<Darwin's theory is always dangerous because it makes people unconsciously suspicious some form of mayhem is the clue to cultural advance. This nutty idea is concealed in Darwin PR, but always lurks there. So be apprised of the limits of Darwin's theory.>

“Selection”, “Chance”, “Randomness”, and “Mayhem” : All these terms bespeak a universe of free wheeling change, utter chaos, and “catastrophe” (to use Paul Ziolo’s term from Chaos, Catastrophe, and Psychohistory). They seem to contradict our ideas of direction to history and order to the universe. The problem is: we may be missing the point if we just dismiss them as not applying to reality and the process of historical dynamism. My own notion is that such factors do exist, and that they do mean what they’ve been explained as meaning in reference to evolution, history, and human affairs. They’re part of the (metaphorical) “nightmare” (C,C, and PH) we see in the world (& there’s no use in downplaying their starkness and glaring quality of paradox since they are a “real” part of the “real” world)(even though we as analysts may not be always comfortable with the terms “nightmare”, “catastrophe”, etc.). But the true mystery is that, they – the occupants of this dicey, makes no sense, universe – exist ultimately in a cosmos of order [albeit a complex order]. The very randomness/selection-ability/chance - in which physical entities reside and exist under - forms a pattern and directionality over time. It literally writes its own program over time, even in the midst of its very tendency towards coincidence and chance behavior. HOW? Maybe randomness isn’t as random as we believe it to be,, maybe chance phenomena and the ‘spaces’ in which it operates form of sort of “attractor” for entities in process to be pulled towards and line up with,, or maybe whole system—element relations in the universe precipitates entities creating their own courses or “tracks” (directionality) out of the very randomness in which they swim. So we can’t say,’ just non-directionality exists in the world’ or ‘just directionality exists in the world.’ They both exist, and that’s the [tensional] paradox we must make due with as thinkers on this matter.

Eduard Prugovecki Wrote:

< ... Already, various avant-garde academics ... are viewing human communication as 'discourses of power.' Many people believe what new Darwinism underscores: that in human affairs, all (or at least much) is artifice, a self-serving manipulation of image." (Robert Wright, "The Moral Animal," Vintage Books, 1994, p. 325)>

This is a good point. I think the problem, however, arrives from the fact that all social science has been couched in such “power” terms from the outgo of the field. What’s more important to social science (social affairs to the shaping of policy) or (social scientia to the understanding of social behavior)? Well, if social science espouses both functions and did so from the outset of its conception as a field of inquiry, then the potential for looking at communications in terms of ‘power discourses’ would be there from the beginning as well. Unfortunately, at the heart of such a model – unless a level of objectivity and neutral distance is maintained in a scholarly analysis – is all too much ideology and the justification of an agenda through one’s social thought.

Therefore, in order to avoid the problems that come from a consideration of “discourses of power”, we must regain the epistemological rigor and objective distance that comes from sidestepping the pitfalls of ideological scholarship (at least to the degree of keeping our intellectual heads about us in the academic arena, esp. when matters of “ought” are raised).

If we don’t, we’re bound to run into the “self-serving manipulation of image.”