Re: Darwin's Dangerous Idea-No Middle Ground


John Wilkins wrote:
> allanm wrote:
> > John Wilkins wrote:
> >
> >>Larry Moran wrote:
> >>
> >>>On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 08:28:46 +1000, John Wilkins <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>[snip]
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>>Dennett is not regarded as a biologist, although he's a wicked philosopher of
> >>>>mind and knows a fair bit about current neurophysiology, he's a philosopher of
> >>>>biology in this respect. He's widely regarded even when people think he's
> >>>>wrong, because he attacks the right issues.
> >>>>
> >>>>Incidentally, all the topics being discussed here are phislosophical ones.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>Agreed. You need to keep reminding people that Dennet is a philosopher and
> >>>not a scientist. Some people mistakenly believe that he has made positive
> >>>contributions to science. (There's no doubt that he has made *negative*
> >>>contributions to science by helping to promote confusion between science and
> >>>philosophy.)
> >>>
> >>>When it comes to science, Dennett is Dawkins' lapdog. I suspect that laps and
> >>>dogs are reveresed in the field of philosophy.
> >>
> >>Confusion between science and philosophy is endemic and needs no Dennett to
> >>add to it, for it comes from both sides. Dennett certainly likes Dawkins' view
> >>of things, in part because (I hypothesise) as a neurophilosopher who very much
> >>likes the AI and ALife programs, he finds the digital metaphor appealing. But
> >>Dennett is his own man, and makes his own mistakes as well.
> >>
> >>Even Kim Sterelny is his own man, and able to modify his views from the
> >>initial Dawkins stance. What you need to understand is that philosophers had
> >>real trouble approaching evolution for a long time (there's a book explaining
> >>why listed below) and Dawkins appeared to offer a way in. And in fact arguing
> >>against Dawkins has given philosophers real traction - in philosophy you often
> >>need someone who is interestingly wrong to make progress.
> >>
> >
> >
> > 'Wrong' is a broad term, but I assume you mean in relation to his
> > main themes - the gene as the unit of selection, the 'arms race',
> > a taste for adaptive explanations, a distaste for group-selective ones.
> > But has some piece of research come up which demonstrates that genes
> > *don't* compete with each other for limited loci in future
> > populations? Is there some reason why the reductionist/adaptationist
> > view *demands* a continual fiddling with phenotype, and therefore must
> > be discarded if stasis is the norm? I'm only guessing as to what you
> > aren't keen on, of course.
>
> My issue with Dennett is one of emphasis. Punk Eek is only one small aspect of
> it. The major objection I have is that he treats evolution as an abstract
> process of information generation according to algorithms, and treats genes as
> cybernetic objects. The panadaptationism is I think wrong and confused, and to
> an extent falls from this cybernetic bias - he thinks that optimisation
> algorithms are the heart of evolution, when most diversity is generated
> through stochastic sampling (drift), and this leads also to a gene centrism.
> Most of what is important in biology is neither genetic nor optimising.

I thought you were talking about Dawkins (whom I have read; of Dennnett
I have only read Consciousness Explained). I'd agree that stochastic
change is a major part of the picture, but this itself is illuminated
by the gene-centric view. For example, even within a stable ecosystem,
and genomes perfectly 'good enough' for that environment, ongoing
change takes place, obviously, at the level below the organism. Each
gene is a competitor for the limited loci available in the population.
Simple algorithms do allow us to deduce the statistical constraints
with which replicating entities must deal. The population dynamics
which constrain populations of individuals, an interface of statistics
and a billion real histories, (but mathematically expressible), must
apply equally to populations of genes. A population of n (diploid)
individuals will have 2n loci for each gene, and while steady state or
nearly so, this is a Malthusian limit of sorts. Within this
population-within-a-population, fortunes wax and wane, the rare can
become ascendant, the common die out, for both stochastic and selective
reasons, not fully independent of the "host organisms'" fortunes, but
not wholly consequent on them either.

> >
> > Dawkins seems to get short shrift round here, but I think the
> > reductionist/adaptationist view is an important part of the puzzle. Not
> > the whole story, but D himself doesn't claim that it is, in the
> > extremist form with which he is (wrongly) tarred.
>
> Reductionism is a misnomer. This is not about reducing one type of description
> to another, which is what reductionism means.

I use the term as (I think) Dawkins means it, and Futuyma, when he
talks of Dawkins being 'too reductionist' for many.

> It is about making every causal
> process a genetic one.

Nothing much changes in biological terms over evolutionary timescales
without something genetic happening, though I may be misunderstanding
your meaning here - 'adaptive', perhaps. The causal processes which
determine which genetic changes survive are of course many and varied,
and arguments over their relative importance rage among people who know
what they are talking about, and therefore a bit beyond my armchair
view. (Suppose (for example) a researcher had a room containing a
subset of the same clonal drosophila population, inserted a dividing
wall, and waited n years until two species had formed: what would be
the 'causal process' of speciation here? The researcher? The wall
between the rooms? What if one of the rooms was destroyed halfway
through? Beats me.)

But, I do wonder (with Sterelny) how much influence background, even
politics and religion, can have on one's preference for what, from
where I sit, seems often a matter of taste. To me, a biochemist, social
realist, political apathist, computer programmer, Dawkins' view has
much appeal. Gould, say - left-wing idealist, palaeontologist - was
famously much less taken with it.

> And the most significant aspect of evolution is, in my
> view, thermodynamic. That is to say, economic or ecological.

Philosophers! That's three different things, to me!

> >
> >
> >>Cunningham, Suzanne. 1996. Philosophy and the Darwinian legacy. Rochester:
> >>University of Rochester Press.
> >>
> >>--
> >>John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
> >>University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
> >>Servum tui ero, ipse vespera
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
> University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
> Servum tui ero, ipse vespera

.

Relevant Pages

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