The Selfish Gene, Part 2
(I just finished reading Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. It's a good read. I'll split this topic into two posts: One on desire and the truth of evolutionary theory, and the other on progress in evolution. This is the second of those.)
Dawkins is sensibly and accurately clear about evolution for most of the book. He uses terms like "should", "ought", and so on, but is explicit (and repeats often) that these are metaphors for what will tend to happen due to selective pressures, and not judgements about what is really better or worse. Yet here he is on p190:
"[talking of cultural, or memetic, evolution] As in genetic evolution though, the change may be progressive. There is a sense in which modern science is actually better than ancient science. Not only does our understanding of the universe change as the centuries go by: it improves"
He's here slipped into drawing the normative conclusion from the factual premise. There's no guarantee that cultural evolution is progressive. Perhaps the ideas that survive are those that can survive, and not those that are better, or more accurate, and so on.
He even argues that religious belief may be evolutionarily successful despite its falsity, even though this is clearly at odds with the claim that all cultural evolution is progressive (p192-3 - note that he here means successful in that the belief is good at surviving and spreading, not that it benefits the believers).
Am I just being pinickity? Here are two reasons to think not:
1) It really might be true that some long standing ideas have lasted not because they at all accurately reflect reality, but because human minds are susceptible to believing them. This possibility seems both likely and worrying.
2) Richard recently mentioned "non-ideal" epistemic theory. This is an interesting case of just that. Evolution might well be a brilliant theory, but if even an intelligent expert like Dawkins can make accidents in drawing out its significance, perhaps some of us are better off avoiding belief in it. (I raise this as a thought worth considering, and certainly not as a policy recommendation!)
'may' vs. 'must'
Where does Dawkins ever claim that "all cultural evolution is progressive"? You quote him as saying that it may be progressive (as demonstrated by the example of science, which is surely an instance where cultural evolution did, indeed, turn out to be genuinely progressive). To say that he's "drawing the normative conclusion from the factual premise" is, I think, a misreading.
Fair comment. "All" was
Fair comment. "All" was possibly a bit strong.
Still, even with "may" it's a bizarre statement. It's trivially true that evolution changes things, and that, given enough changes, by chance some of those changes will be improvements. I take it that Dawkins is saying something more than this. He isn't merely claiming that evolution sometimes gets lucky. The suggestion seems to be that evolution is somehow "aiming" at progression in some cases. This is obviously false.
Another way to phrase this is that if science has improved, this is not merely because of selective pressures. It is - to put it in terms most favourable to Dawkins - because of the combination of selective pressures and the fact that humans like to eradicate falsehoods. Surely it's the latter which is really responsible for the growth of science, and not the former?
Al
Right, though I take him to
Right, though I take him to be making the trivial claim, i.e. simply warning readers not to leap from the fact that (cultural) evolution is undirected to the relativistic conclusion that our current practices (e.g. science) must be no better or worse than in the past.