Is natural selection over-used as an explanation?
The environment offers organisms certain constraints in which to operate. If an organism manages to procreate, then it has certain qualities that allow it to survive within the parameters set. Natural selection 101.
However, the nature of constraint seems to offer a varying amount of freedom within the constraint. So long as the minimum requirements to survive are met, then any additional qualities are purely icing on the cake.
This freedom can of course be limited by another constraint, most importantly that of scarcity. If space, nourishment, mates, etc are in a limited supply, then the satisfaction of these needs/desires is not guaranteed. From this initial constraint of scarcity comes the constraint of competition, and thus the cut-throat gladiator arena of life emerges.
However, life is not just one continuous desperate panic to escape death and get laid, at least not usually, or at least not when we scale up in intelligence.
Intelligence, or more specifically, reflective representation, would then be generally correlated to environmental manipulation, or the ability to change the environment (or yourself) to make your life easier. This ability offers organisms to refine the efficiency of their processes above and beyond the lower level of bare necessity. Can I sit down and program on a single small laptop, and thus get paid and survive? Sure. Can I do it better (defined as more efficient) with multiple monitors, and still get paid the same amount and survive? Yes. It's not necessary, but it allows me to minimize my effort and maximize my productivity.
Thus, there exist "pockets" of freedom, in which adaptations in organisms are not specifically derived from a need to survive, but instead derived from other concerns. These concerns may be derivative from a need to survive. But all this shows is that freedom can develop beyond the initial need to survive.
Because of this, I've been wondering how much evolutionary science can hope to explain in biological systems. In particular, I'm wondering about evolutionary psychology, which from what I have read in it tries to explain practically everything by appealing to the natural selection, or evolutionary "advantages". Religion, for example, is seen as evolutionary advantageous, and is somehow explained as a way of maximizing childbirth. Art and music, ditto.
But if we take into account these pockets of freedom, then we can see how certain adaptations are entirely causally inert in regards to survival. The structure keeping the organism has already been met - any extra fuel will thus be used in pursuit of goals outside of survival.
Of course, like said before, the existence of goals can be derivative from the need to survive, since goal processing would have been helpful in managing and implementing plans necessary for survival. This habit, then, is carried down from this initial need and "re-used" in processes outside of survival itself.
So, in one sense, it does seem correct to say that everything we have and do are due to natural selection - we wouldn't have these basic derivative processes without natural selection. But in another sense, this explanation is so broad as to become meaningless, and discounts the existence of freedoms that aren't focused on survival.
Therefore, appeals to evolution as an explanation for a phenomenon should be taken in caution. A phenomenon needs to be consistent with evolutionary theory, but it need not be entirely explained by evolutionary theory.
However, the nature of constraint seems to offer a varying amount of freedom within the constraint. So long as the minimum requirements to survive are met, then any additional qualities are purely icing on the cake.
This freedom can of course be limited by another constraint, most importantly that of scarcity. If space, nourishment, mates, etc are in a limited supply, then the satisfaction of these needs/desires is not guaranteed. From this initial constraint of scarcity comes the constraint of competition, and thus the cut-throat gladiator arena of life emerges.
However, life is not just one continuous desperate panic to escape death and get laid, at least not usually, or at least not when we scale up in intelligence.
Intelligence, or more specifically, reflective representation, would then be generally correlated to environmental manipulation, or the ability to change the environment (or yourself) to make your life easier. This ability offers organisms to refine the efficiency of their processes above and beyond the lower level of bare necessity. Can I sit down and program on a single small laptop, and thus get paid and survive? Sure. Can I do it better (defined as more efficient) with multiple monitors, and still get paid the same amount and survive? Yes. It's not necessary, but it allows me to minimize my effort and maximize my productivity.
Thus, there exist "pockets" of freedom, in which adaptations in organisms are not specifically derived from a need to survive, but instead derived from other concerns. These concerns may be derivative from a need to survive. But all this shows is that freedom can develop beyond the initial need to survive.
Because of this, I've been wondering how much evolutionary science can hope to explain in biological systems. In particular, I'm wondering about evolutionary psychology, which from what I have read in it tries to explain practically everything by appealing to the natural selection, or evolutionary "advantages". Religion, for example, is seen as evolutionary advantageous, and is somehow explained as a way of maximizing childbirth. Art and music, ditto.
But if we take into account these pockets of freedom, then we can see how certain adaptations are entirely causally inert in regards to survival. The structure keeping the organism has already been met - any extra fuel will thus be used in pursuit of goals outside of survival.
Of course, like said before, the existence of goals can be derivative from the need to survive, since goal processing would have been helpful in managing and implementing plans necessary for survival. This habit, then, is carried down from this initial need and "re-used" in processes outside of survival itself.
So, in one sense, it does seem correct to say that everything we have and do are due to natural selection - we wouldn't have these basic derivative processes without natural selection. But in another sense, this explanation is so broad as to become meaningless, and discounts the existence of freedoms that aren't focused on survival.
Therefore, appeals to evolution as an explanation for a phenomenon should be taken in caution. A phenomenon needs to be consistent with evolutionary theory, but it need not be entirely explained by evolutionary theory.
Comments (15)
Thomas Nagel nails this in his essay Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion (in The Last Word), where he says that the fear of religion is one of the background factors driving the widespread acceptance of the principle of natural selection as a kind of 'theory of everything':
//actually, googled OUP books on Darwinism and got this title, by Michael Ruse, it might be the very book you're talking about.//
Oh, and fuck Dawkins, the pretentious and ignorant twat.
You're entirely right that natural selection functions as a restraint, but it's important to remember that natural selection is one of a myriad of evolutionary mechanisms, that, only when taken together, properly define what evolution is. In simple terms: evolution <> natural selection, although natural selection is part of evolution.
Thus to properly speak about evolution, one must also take into account other mechanisms, such as niche construction (when a species adapts it's environment over time to be better suited to it), symbiogenesis (when two species co-evolve to the point that they become one species, or even 'part' of a species), co-adaptation (think flower and bee), genetic drift (variations in gene frequency), genetic mutations (changes in the DNA 'code'), sexual selection, as well as a bunch of other epigenetic factors. Evolution is complex because most of the time, it's a case of many of these mechanisms acting in concert, along with parameters like energetic constrains (especially important for abiogensis - the beginning of life), ecological carrying capacities (the capacity for an environment to sustain a population), and inter and intra species competition. Also important are questions of ecological robustness and network complexity, which help explain the 'arrival of the fittest' (or the 'evolution of evolvability'), rather than just the 'survival of the fittest'.
So one must be very clear about what is being talked about when someone 'explains something on the basis of evolution'. This doesn't mean 'to explain something on the basis of natural selection'. Evolution is an extraordinarily complicated and multi-faceted theory, and for any one living 'function', it is important to specify - at a level more precise than 'evolution' - what mechanisms are involved in 'explaining' it. If you take all this into account, it's important to recognize that what you refer to as 'pockets of freedom' can in fact be 'built-in' to evolution itself. Niche-construction, for example, is pretty much just is what you call the ability to change the environment - but this is not 'extra-evolutionary', but part and parcel of evolutionary theory itself.
In any case, evolutionary psychology is rife with appeals to "fitness" and natural selection as an explanation of behavior.
The admission that evolution is not equivalent to natural selection, however, opens up the possibility that evolution is a distinctly metaphysical aspect of the world, i.e. we should look at the world through the lens of evolution.
As for evolution qua 'metaphysical aspect of the world', I think I'd prefer to speak about it more guardedly as simply continuous with the natural processes of ontogenesis with otherwise constitute the 'world' as such, albeit specific to the biological realm. This specificity itself is an interesting question, insofar as the issue of exactly what constitutes the 'unit' of evolution - the gene, the species, an ecology? - is one that's very much open. My intuition is that alot of what we can say in fact comes down to our methodological presuppositions, rather than any ability to 'carve the world at it's natural joints' as it were.
I refer the honourable member to the book I recommended some time ago!
I wrote this a while back in a "What is Love" thread:
But see, this just shows you the very theoretical nature of evolutionary psychology. A lot of it is "just so" theories and hard to pin down what is an adaptation, or what is an "idiosyncrasy" as you might call it. There are many variables, biases, and cultural contingencies that make even an accurate hypothesis hard to distill. A lot of the mating game rituals have become their own runaway stories. Something was written down long ago, it became a trope, and the trope manifested as real in the culture, and the culture became the trope to a slight degree. What was originary and what was the trope becomes muddled. Then the trope is considered originary when it perhaps is not. Then, a reaction against the trope poses an opposite theory, but that is even worse as it is a reaction to a false original theory to begin with, and on it goes. Again, this comes down to the fact that much of it cannot be verified it "feels" true.
Quoting darthbarracuda
This is instrumentality in a way- making goals because there is no other choice. Life oppresses us with moving forward in a constant state of flux. Stasis would be non-existence. Your speculation is probably true regarding the origins of goal-seeking and its roots in survival and more specifically, survival within the framework of linguistic-based cognition.
Merely by assuming evolution is about survival of the most creative the more complex the environment becomes, it makes much more sense out of religion, psychology, and everything else. You might say everything that exists reflects the initial creative impetus of the Big Bang still expanding to this day. Mathematicians came to a similar conclusion recently upon examining causal physics and classical mathematics. They discovered that any number of simple metaphors, such as everything is composed of springs, strings, or even vibrating rubber sheets for all I know, can provide equally accurate explanations.
In particular what bugs me is when people assume that any behavior or characteristic needs to be evolutionarily advantageous. All that's really required is that behavior or characteristics aren't evolutionarily disadvantageous.
To my knowledge, Darwin actually embraced the term "survival of the fittest". And "more adaptable to the specific environment" is what it means.
Spencer was a hugely popular philosophy in his day, perhaps like an earlier Dawkins, although nowadays he is hardly known outside the Universities.