Tuesday, June 21, 2005
(9:04 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Evolutionary Reductionism is Stupid
Ogged has a post in which he says that evolution is a way of accounting for facts about the world and has no bearing on the question of God. Joe O responds:The most influencial current evolutionary thinkers are atheists. This isn't going to help things in Kansas, but a correct understanding of Evolution is deeply incompatable with belief in God.I respond:
Many people believe in directed evolution where God puts his thumb on the scale to get mankind intelligence or moral capacity. If you believe this, you can't correctly understand human intellegence and moral capacity. Because, human intelligence and moral capacity were produced by evolution, not God.
So, for example, there is a reason why treatment of people out of our group (iraqi civilians) is so much worse than the treatment of people in our group (us soldiers). Fucked-up things happen in wars. And they probably have an evolutionary origin. Which doesn't mean you can't avoid either wars or the fucked-up behavior, but you have to work at it.
Could it be that those behaviors you mention are influenced by biologically encoded traits that are a result of evolution, but also by the development of human civilization, which has a logic all its own? After all, biological evolution is ultimately based on complex chemical interactions, but no one denies that biological evolution has its own logic that is not simply determined by the laws of chemistry -- and so on, all the way down.I post this (a) to be self-indulgent, (b) because there is every chance that this comment will be ignored now that I'm no longer one of the Chosen Few who posts thirty comments a day at Unfogged, and (c) because that comment represents a decent formulation of an opinion that I've long held (see the title to this post) without fully thinking it through. The position that I have outlined is still compatible with a materialist outlook, but it would be a more Lacano-Hegelian position, arguing for the existence of Geist or the Symbolic Order. My criticism would apply to all versions of vulgar materialism, of which the evolutionary strain seems to be the most prevelant (probably because it was adaptive at some point for us to be attracted to evolutionary reductionism).
So it's possible that in order to understand human beings, we need to understand their social life, and we need to engage with previous attempts to understand that social life (such as, say, Christianity) on their own level, rather than making this short-circuit of pretending that it's wholly determined by some "lower" level.
Not that materialism is some kind of sine qua non for me! By no means!
UPDATE: Joe O responded to my comment. I was just sore because the first comment I left was ignored.
