A Book I can't Recommend
Apr. 4th, 2006 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forsythWhen I'm in my more responsible moods, I try to read things that disagree with me every so often. It's occasionally possible I can be wrong, and we've been told since we were kids that other points of view can be important and educational. And, I figure if nothing else, I'll at least find the reasons for believing what I do, and find ways to counter the counter-arguments.
Sometimes, it's interesting and rewarding. Sometimes it's physically painful. Sometimes I just sit there boggled. Sometimes it's like my own private re-enactions of MST3K. Sometimes, it's like debating which restaurant is better without ever agreeing.
Unfortunately, this time, it's not one of the better ones. I'm reading Darwinian Fairytales, despite my own better judgment. The premise of the book is evolution doesn't apply to human beings. I saw it on the shelf at work, read the back and the blurbs on the book cover, and kinda shook my head. Then I was thinking about it, and figured I should go ahead and read it, despite the blurbs that seemed to be missing a big part of how evolution actually works. They're just blurbs, after all.
My bad feeling started with the introduction, by some other guy. He talks about "fog and dogmaticisim" on the side of the "Darwinians" as much as the fundamentalists, and as evidence, quotes an anecdote about a friend of his, an "eminent biologist", who, when given a copy of Darwinian Fairytales, leafed through and said "But this is terrible!" "This is awful!" And since then, he has "noted with amusement how sensitive to criticism the Darwinian faithful are." Personally, I suspect the unnamed "eminent biologist" was talking about the quality of the science, not going "OHNOES! Someone is criticizing evolution!" Then, the introduction guy introduces the author of the book, David Stove, as "an intellectual demolition expert," whose targets include "the Enlightenment, feminism, Freud, the idea of progress, leftish views of all kinds, Marx, ... metaphysics, modern architecture and art, philosophical idealism, [Karl] Popper, religion, semiotics, Stravinsky, and Sweden, ... Also, anything beginning with 'soc'." Uh huh. Okay, a conservative philosopher, gt it. But hey, whatever, doesn't mean he's always wrong, though his list of attacks is really pretty goofy, to me.
So we move on to the preface, where the actual author of the book speaks. He says he has no objection to evolution (which he keeps calling "Darwinism", the same way "Intelligent Design" proponents do, another bad sign), but only so long as it applies to everything except humans, and he denies that natural selection is going on "within our species now, and that it ever went on in our species, at any time of which anything is known." He professes, however, to be of "no religion", and that he thinks it "overwhelmingly probable" that our species has evolved from other sort of animals. It seems to me you can't really hold both those views at the same time, but again, I give him the benefit of the doubt. He also explains he's not a professional biologist, merely a former philosopher, who happens to have "40 odd years' acquaintance with Darwinian literature and a strong distaste for ridiculous slanders on our species." Which puts us on equal footing, since I'm not a professional biologist either. But it sure seems to me he's missing a couple of really big and obvious points, and distorting what things actually mean, which I'll attribute to ignorance rather than malice, since I don't know the guy.
This has really gotten pretty long, so I'll try and sum up the big problems with his arguments I've seen so far. His first chapter is devoted to naming three types of "Darwinists", and how they solve the "dilemma" he invokes at the beginning of the chapter, which I'll quote. "If Darwin's Theory of evolution were true, there would be in every species a constant and ruthless competition to survive: a competition in which only a few in any generation can be winners. But it is perfectly obvious that human life is not like that, however it may be with other species." This seems to be his main argument. And it's an argument that shows a distinct lack of understanding of natural selection, evolution, and reproduction.
It's not just about survival. It's about reproduction. But that's not even the fundamental flaw in his argument. Well, there's several fundamental flaws in his question, and even more in each of his chapters, which I may do individually, or after I read the book. But since he's starting from a faulty question, is it any wonder his answers come out wrong?
First, he's looking at too small a picture. Natural selection isn't just within a species, it's between species too. You know all those scary statistics about how many species go extinct every day? Most of the time, it's because they're competing with humans for food, or habitat. And frankly, we're kicking the rest of the world's collective ass, for the most part. While there's variances in how "fit" an individual human is, collectively, we tend to be more fit than other species, so for most of history, there's been room for us to expand into, by driving out or killing off the other animals that lived there. Collectively, we've been winning.
Secondly, he ignores intelligence. Intelligence is complicated and makes things in regards to evolution a LOT more complex. For humans, genetic evolution has largely been replaced by cultural evolution. Genetic evolution's still around, witness people being born without wisdom teeth, or appendixes, or so on, but cultural evolution works a lot faster and changes faster than genetic evolution. If, for example, you have one tribe of hunters that's a little faster than another, but the second tribe invents spears and bows, the second tribe is gonna out-hunt, out-breed, and out-fight the first tribe. Even with equal tech, the slight genetic differences won't matter very much, since arrows and spears are faster than any human can run. So it comes down to tactics.
The other thing about intelligence is it complicates the definition of success. With intelligence and groups of people comes society, where there's definitions of success besides how many kids you spawn. Getting your ideas passed along can be as important (or more important) than passing along your genes. Which isn't directly relevant to his first question, but does matter for some of his later arguments.
Another problem is he seems to be ignorant of r/K selection theory. Basically, there's two different goals for reproductive success. The first is to have a zillion kids and hope some of them survive long enough to breed. That's what is used by frogs and bugs and fish and such, mostly. There's very little investment in each individual kid, but there's a lot of kids. The r is for reproduction.
The K is for investment. The opposite side of the coin is having fewer kids, but making sure those kids survive to become successful. Species with a higher K value tend to have a lot less kids, longer lives and/or larger size, and take more care of their young. Humans, obviously are a high K value species (in general), even the biggest human families seldom reach double digit number of spawn. But the ones that do get born tend to survive (even in the worst environments, where childhood deaths are at like 50%, that's a damn sight higher than the 90% or so for things like flies.) So no, there's (usually) not going to be competition with 90% death rates in humans. That's not how humans breed.
I may stop every couple of chapters and point out the flaws I've found, rather like Slacktivist has been doing with the Left Behind novels. And as much as it's been paining me to read the inaccurate and completely off science through parts of this, it's given me a few good ideas (which I'll try and make into a sensible post later) while I've been finding the places where he's wrong. So I'm not getting absolutely nothing out of the book, but I'm getting it from the negative space of the book.
And I'd be inclined to agree with the unnamed "eminent biologist" mentioned in the Introduction. The science in this book is pretty terrible and awful.
Sometimes, it's interesting and rewarding. Sometimes it's physically painful. Sometimes I just sit there boggled. Sometimes it's like my own private re-enactions of MST3K. Sometimes, it's like debating which restaurant is better without ever agreeing.
Unfortunately, this time, it's not one of the better ones. I'm reading Darwinian Fairytales, despite my own better judgment. The premise of the book is evolution doesn't apply to human beings. I saw it on the shelf at work, read the back and the blurbs on the book cover, and kinda shook my head. Then I was thinking about it, and figured I should go ahead and read it, despite the blurbs that seemed to be missing a big part of how evolution actually works. They're just blurbs, after all.
My bad feeling started with the introduction, by some other guy. He talks about "fog and dogmaticisim" on the side of the "Darwinians" as much as the fundamentalists, and as evidence, quotes an anecdote about a friend of his, an "eminent biologist", who, when given a copy of Darwinian Fairytales, leafed through and said "But this is terrible!" "This is awful!" And since then, he has "noted with amusement how sensitive to criticism the Darwinian faithful are." Personally, I suspect the unnamed "eminent biologist" was talking about the quality of the science, not going "OHNOES! Someone is criticizing evolution!" Then, the introduction guy introduces the author of the book, David Stove, as "an intellectual demolition expert," whose targets include "the Enlightenment, feminism, Freud, the idea of progress, leftish views of all kinds, Marx, ... metaphysics, modern architecture and art, philosophical idealism, [Karl] Popper, religion, semiotics, Stravinsky, and Sweden, ... Also, anything beginning with 'soc'." Uh huh. Okay, a conservative philosopher, gt it. But hey, whatever, doesn't mean he's always wrong, though his list of attacks is really pretty goofy, to me.
So we move on to the preface, where the actual author of the book speaks. He says he has no objection to evolution (which he keeps calling "Darwinism", the same way "Intelligent Design" proponents do, another bad sign), but only so long as it applies to everything except humans, and he denies that natural selection is going on "within our species now, and that it ever went on in our species, at any time of which anything is known." He professes, however, to be of "no religion", and that he thinks it "overwhelmingly probable" that our species has evolved from other sort of animals. It seems to me you can't really hold both those views at the same time, but again, I give him the benefit of the doubt. He also explains he's not a professional biologist, merely a former philosopher, who happens to have "40 odd years' acquaintance with Darwinian literature and a strong distaste for ridiculous slanders on our species." Which puts us on equal footing, since I'm not a professional biologist either. But it sure seems to me he's missing a couple of really big and obvious points, and distorting what things actually mean, which I'll attribute to ignorance rather than malice, since I don't know the guy.
This has really gotten pretty long, so I'll try and sum up the big problems with his arguments I've seen so far. His first chapter is devoted to naming three types of "Darwinists", and how they solve the "dilemma" he invokes at the beginning of the chapter, which I'll quote. "If Darwin's Theory of evolution were true, there would be in every species a constant and ruthless competition to survive: a competition in which only a few in any generation can be winners. But it is perfectly obvious that human life is not like that, however it may be with other species." This seems to be his main argument. And it's an argument that shows a distinct lack of understanding of natural selection, evolution, and reproduction.
It's not just about survival. It's about reproduction. But that's not even the fundamental flaw in his argument. Well, there's several fundamental flaws in his question, and even more in each of his chapters, which I may do individually, or after I read the book. But since he's starting from a faulty question, is it any wonder his answers come out wrong?
First, he's looking at too small a picture. Natural selection isn't just within a species, it's between species too. You know all those scary statistics about how many species go extinct every day? Most of the time, it's because they're competing with humans for food, or habitat. And frankly, we're kicking the rest of the world's collective ass, for the most part. While there's variances in how "fit" an individual human is, collectively, we tend to be more fit than other species, so for most of history, there's been room for us to expand into, by driving out or killing off the other animals that lived there. Collectively, we've been winning.
Secondly, he ignores intelligence. Intelligence is complicated and makes things in regards to evolution a LOT more complex. For humans, genetic evolution has largely been replaced by cultural evolution. Genetic evolution's still around, witness people being born without wisdom teeth, or appendixes, or so on, but cultural evolution works a lot faster and changes faster than genetic evolution. If, for example, you have one tribe of hunters that's a little faster than another, but the second tribe invents spears and bows, the second tribe is gonna out-hunt, out-breed, and out-fight the first tribe. Even with equal tech, the slight genetic differences won't matter very much, since arrows and spears are faster than any human can run. So it comes down to tactics.
The other thing about intelligence is it complicates the definition of success. With intelligence and groups of people comes society, where there's definitions of success besides how many kids you spawn. Getting your ideas passed along can be as important (or more important) than passing along your genes. Which isn't directly relevant to his first question, but does matter for some of his later arguments.
Another problem is he seems to be ignorant of r/K selection theory. Basically, there's two different goals for reproductive success. The first is to have a zillion kids and hope some of them survive long enough to breed. That's what is used by frogs and bugs and fish and such, mostly. There's very little investment in each individual kid, but there's a lot of kids. The r is for reproduction.
The K is for investment. The opposite side of the coin is having fewer kids, but making sure those kids survive to become successful. Species with a higher K value tend to have a lot less kids, longer lives and/or larger size, and take more care of their young. Humans, obviously are a high K value species (in general), even the biggest human families seldom reach double digit number of spawn. But the ones that do get born tend to survive (even in the worst environments, where childhood deaths are at like 50%, that's a damn sight higher than the 90% or so for things like flies.) So no, there's (usually) not going to be competition with 90% death rates in humans. That's not how humans breed.
I may stop every couple of chapters and point out the flaws I've found, rather like Slacktivist has been doing with the Left Behind novels. And as much as it's been paining me to read the inaccurate and completely off science through parts of this, it's given me a few good ideas (which I'll try and make into a sensible post later) while I've been finding the places where he's wrong. So I'm not getting absolutely nothing out of the book, but I'm getting it from the negative space of the book.
And I'd be inclined to agree with the unnamed "eminent biologist" mentioned in the Introduction. The science in this book is pretty terrible and awful.
