Michael Egnor: Darwinism as Hegel’s philosophy applied to biology

_{Denyse O'Leary

September 22, 2020

Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy}

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He sees that as a framework for much of the change around us:

Nineteenth-century Darwinism was much more than a revolutionary scientific theory. It was hardly a scientific theory in any meaningful sense. Natural selection, as atheist philosopher Jerry Fodor has pointed out, isn’t a meaningful level of scientific explanation. It’s barely more than a tautology. Natural selection is an “empty” theory — “survivors survive” has no genuine explanatory power. As ID pioneer Phillip Johnson observed, Darwinism was really a new philosophical theory. It was the view that there is no teleology — no purpose — inherent to nature. Purpose in biology, Darwin insisted, is an illusion. Differential survival alone can explain “purpose” in nature. Darwin proposed that all of the specified complexity in living things is the product of undirected differential survival.
Darwinism is the denial of purpose in nature. Purpose, according to Darwin, is an illusion. Biology appears to have purposes — hearts pump blood, kidneys excrete urine, etc. — but the purposes are merely the outcome of natural selection — survival of the fittest. Darwinism purports to explain how a story can be written without purpose and implicitly without an author.
Darwinian natural selection is metaphysics, more than biology.
Michael Egnor, “Darwinism as Hegelian Dialectics Applied to Biology” at Evolution News and Science Today:

Of course it is. Just listen to Darwinians tell us how important the theory is to them.

Comments

2 Upright Biped
Like you (Seversky) for instance, whose interest is not in the pursuit of understanding reality, but in the propping up of a failed ideology.
"Materialism" could not be further apart from reality. It's, as you mention, a failed doctrine that traps the materialist inside his skull forever, without being able to escape it and therefore blocking him from direct access to the "external" world he claims materialism is "exhausting". Materialists try to salvage their unexpected and unwelcome epistemological idealism by going two routes:
- ignoring the challenge and appealing to the "hey, fellas we get results! Look at all the advances!" (This will convince the masses, most of them pragmatists and ignorant of philosophy). Being very dishonest, the materialist knows that most people won't challenge him. - trying the "map gimmick": once they are caught, they try Korzybski's map-territory strategy (Seversky being very fond of it). The problem for the materialist, is that, "being" a brain, he can't never ever escape his skull, therefore the map-territory strategy is not a valid one, just yet another materialist trick that can not fool the trained mind. The materialist only has "map", never access to the territory (external world).
Here Aristotle’s hylemorphism rescues materialists from the irrational consequences of their doctrine.
"Hylemorphism provides realistic solutions to the mistakes of materialism. Materialism traps the materialist inside his own brain from which hylemorphism frees him by pointing out that immaterial sense experience is not spatially located. The human immaterial soul explains the substantial unity of man in which his immaterial sense faculties can be present to the whole body and to extramental reality". Materialism’s Failures: Hylemorphism’s Vindication. (Aristotle is back).
Materialism, you have failed. It's time for you to leave.Truthfreedom_{September 23, 2020
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Darwinism, ie blind watchmaker evolution, is a useless heuristic. And it appears that no one knows how to test its grand claimsET_{September 23, 2020
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The agenda of the contemporary secular progressive I think can be understood by three terms they like to use rhetorically: Progressive (Hegel,) Oppressive (Marx) and Repressive (Freud.) [I’ll comment on Freud in more detail in a later post.] Both Hegel and Marx saw that at times violence (even war) would be needed to achieve societal change. From a Darwinian perspective this is nothing more that the “survival of the fittest” or in the case of war the survival of the strongest or smartest. You can readily see why the progressive (“woke”) PC left thinks nothing of employing bullying tactics to bring about their ideas of social justice-- and be forewarned they are willing to go further. We are already seeing that in the U.S. with the “mostly peaceful protests." You can perhaps also see how they can hold to positions that are, on one hand, culturally and morally relativistic yet implemented years or even months later as a new moral absolutes-- new human rights. That’s not because they ARE absolutes, it is rather because they BECOME absolutes. The idea of becoming is purely Hegelian. But who decides the new absolutes are absolutes? The people who believe they are absolutes. And, don’t think this is the result some kind of equal and fair democratic debate that leads some kind of broad based consensus. If you believe what you believe is the truth, you don’t need a majority to impose your agenda on everyone else, all you need are some key people in some key positions of power-- like judges on the U.S. Supreme Court.john_a_designer_{September 23, 2020
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Hahahahahahaha @ Sev thats you counter argument is convoluted word play that amounts to the EXACT same thing! Here if we go back and redefine “SuRvIlAl Of ThE fItEsT” the argument won’t apply as much! Bam! Holy smokes. Your argument ignores the point and intern can also be ignoredAaronS1978_{September 23, 2020
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Darwin does not allow for philosophy to exist. How can deep thoughts exist without the mind?BobRyan_{September 22, 2020
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. Don’t sweat it too much Seversky. The problem with the Darwinian mindset is not that philosophers say that “natural selection” is a tautology. A much larger problem is that it stifles all the incredible advancements in knowledge that follows it, and demonstrates its flaws. It forms the basis of a Victorian age hegemony, to be wielded and abused by Ideological materialists, like you for instance, whose interest is not in the pursuit of understanding reality, but in the propping up of a failed ideology. This is why every time you are confronted with the science and history that contradicts your beliefs, you run with all your might to the safety of 1860, to dismiss those things that Darwin never knew.Upright BiPed_{September 22, 2020
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A Good Tautology is Hard to Find
by John S. Wilkins

The simple version of the so-called 'tautology argument' is this:
Natural selection is the survival of the fittest. The fittest are those that survive. Therefore, evolution by natural selection is a tautology (a circular definition).

The real significance of this argument is not the argument itself, but that it was taken seriously by any professional philosophers at all. 'Fitness' to Darwin meant not those that survive, but those that could be expected to survive because of their adaptations and functional efficiency, when compared to others in the population. This is not a tautology, or, if it is, then so is the Newtonian equation F=ma [Sober 1984, chapter 2], which is the basis for a lot of ordinary physical explanation. The phrase 'survival of the fittest' was not even Darwin's. It was urged on him by Wallace, the codiscoverer of natural selection, who hated 'natural selection' because he thought it implied that something was doing the selecting. Darwin coined the term 'natural selection' because had made an analogy with 'artificial selection' as done by breeders, an analogy Wallace hadn't made when he developed his version of the theory. The phrase 'survival of the fittest' was originally due to Herbert Spencer some years before the Origin . However, there is another, more sophisticated version, due mainly to Karl Popper [1976: sect. 37]. According to Popper, any situation where species exist is compatible with Darwinian explanation, because if those species were not adapted, they would not exist. That is, Popper says, we define adaptation as that which is sufficient for existence in a given environment. Therefore, since nothing is ruled out, the theory has no explanatory power, for everything is ruled in. This is not true, as a number of critics of Popper have observed since (eg, Stamos [1996] [note 1]). Darwinian theory rules out quite a lot. It rules out the existence of inefficient organisms when more efficient organisms are about. It rules out change that is theoretically impossible (according to the laws of genetics, ontogeny, and molecular biology) to achieve in gradual and adaptive steps (see Dawkins [1996]). It rules out new species being established without ancestral species. All of these hypotheses are more or less testable, and conform to the standards of science. The answer to this version of the argument is the same as to the simplistic version - adaptation is not just defined in terms of what survives. There needs to be a causal story available to make sense of adaptation (which is why mimicry in butterflies was such a focal debate in the teens and twenties). Adaptation is a functional notion, not a logical or semantic a priori definition, despite what Popper thought.
Seversky_{September 22, 2020
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