Episode 168: Darwin’s “Origin of Species” (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: So, Seth, what's the thing that's gnawing at you from this reading that you want us to talk more about?

0:04 Seth: I'm trying to think of a diplomatic way of saying this. I think I understand why this was a big deal at the time, but why is it a big deal now?

0:15 Mark: His dangerous idea has swept the nation, swept the intellectual world. We do have people like Dan Dennett that write books directly, you know, or Dawkins that take it straight up.

0:29 Wes: I just wonder, does Seth mean why is it a big deal in the sense of scientifically? Or why is it a big deal for people who object to it? What are they so threatened by? Like, what do you mean exactly, Seth?

0:41 Seth: So what I mean exactly is reading slash, listening to it. The ideas don't seem radical to me. Like the idea that organisms adapt to environmental conditions with the wild card of mutations thrown in, and that the ones that are best adapted have a tendency to survive and procreate, and the ones that are less well adapted have a tendency not to. I mean, if you are not tied to some kind of religious concept of the divinity, and if you don't feel somehow validated by having been a product of that process, that you need somehow to have God reach down and touch you with a divine spark. What is so exciting about all of this?

1:31 Mark: I've been playing around with a hypothesis that Darwinism fundamentally makes over your way of thinking about the world in the same way that maybe the thought of Freud or Marx does that. You read folks like Dennett talking about religion, talking about ethics. You know, we had Pat Churchland on. She's definitely a neo Darwinist of some sort, that it just gives you a set of problems and potentially a way of wanting to describe all human behavior through this evolutionary lens. And so it's interesting to me as another species of that and trying to understand that code.

I don't know that it's as pernicious. You know, I haven't seen people basing their whole politics, for instance, on Darwinism. I think they did not too far after Darwin's time with social Darwinism and things like that. But the kind of gross ways of doing that are so obviously silly, and they're not in accord with how somebody like Pat Churchland would apply this kind of stuff. And it just seems like it's a less direct. You know, it's not like you could give Freudian analyses or Lacanian analyses, psychoanalytic analyses of every piece of cinema and every piece of political action or cultural artifact.

But it's a little harder to do that from a Darwinian perspective, you know, unless it's really like you're competing for mates by doing that. That's a less interesting vocabulary of talking about social phenomenon.

3:06 Dylan: I mean, to me, there's a certain amount of just something historical going on. Like, if you read the introduction, Darwin points to a long history of people who basically are in his camp. And there certainly were people who agreed with him or they had huge debates, but they were all from people who were convinced of evolution. They were arguing about what form it took. But it's also the case that it struck a nerve. And maybe it's just because of the particular interpretation of Christianity that was going on at the time and the notion that it touches on human exceptionalism in maybe a way similar to the exceptionalism of the Earth being at the center of the universe.

The Copernican revolution. Copernicus was not the first person by far to ever have said that the Earth moved around the sun and the sun was at the center of things, rather than the Earth being the center of things. But probably a combination of when he said it and the way he said it struck a nerve. And for Darwin, it seems to be even more controversial. It's more controversial to say that human beings are not exceptional in a way that somehow makes them selected by God than it is to say that the heavens are like the earth. And maybe we're just less sensitive to that.

Maybe the four of us are less sensitive to that than the people that I hear in the coffee shop talking about evolution and how much a bunk it is and try to use scientific explanation to undermine evolution itself.

4:50 Mark: Yeah, certainly some of the specific things. You know, he does talk about the eye, the example or one of the things I read said the use of the eye as the example goes back to Galen or somebody like that of talking about the eye in particular, something that is so advanced and perfect. And the fact that Darwin specifically addresses that, you know, in his first edition in the objections that he anticipates and talks about how it might seem like you couldn't go in small degrees to something like an eye. Well, let's look at some animals that have more primitive photoreceptors that we wouldn't call it an eye, but it reacts to light in some way. Or he points to how lungs might have been developed, how.

5:33 Dylan: What are the swim bladders?

5:35 Mark: Swim bladders was that it helps.

5:38 Dylan: Helps fish be buoyant, regulate their depths.

5:40 Mark: There you go. So some of this is still alive. And also just. It really fascinates me. I know this is one of the things that's still discussed in the literature. I don't know that this is the way that it has shaken the earth. But just how. It's a different kind of scientific theory than we've seen before, just in terms of it's probabilistic and it doesn't even pretend to be pointing out what the actual cause. Right. The actual cause of the actions are. The regular stuff of physics and biology. Saying this happens because of natural selection is actually just pointing to a high level pattern in the change of frequency of traits over time, given environmental conditions and blah blah, blah.

It's not actually talking about an agent of any sort, conscious or unconscious. There's not even a blind watchmaker that goes in there and manipulates things. It's just that over time this is a pattern that we can pick up.

6:32 Dylan: It makes nature way more interesting to me that the structures of organisms arise out of the individual interactions of the laws of nature itself without it being willed.

6:47 Seth: Right.

6:47 Dylan: It's part of the soup of interaction.

6:51 Mark: Well, and also just the probabilistic thing. Like you could tell me, Dylan, that physics, now quantum physics deals with probabilities and things, but the physics of his time, no, you should be able to measure in any given circumstance how is the billiard ball going to go given so much force applied to it in a certain direction that happens without exception. It's not just that.

7:14 Dylan: Well, typically you're pointing to something important. I think Mark, in that there is the probability going on there, but there has to be a seed of randomness in it that he doesn't talk about as much. He talks about insofar as he talks about variation being there. But you're right to point out that that variation has to have some kind of engine of randomness in it that allows for those varieties to happen. Because of the determinism you're talking about. You wouldn't get the varieties without there being some kind of randomness. Unless you said that it was a pseudo randomness that came from just how many different kinds of combinations of interactions there are between organisms and their environment and the time and so forth that generates that variation.

But it seems like the variation has to be there by itself and gets selected out by the environment. And that substrate of variation is there naturally? That substrate of randomness is there naturally.

8:21 Mark: Well, just the selection also has an element of probability in it. Right. You can't just say that organism is more fit than his fellows so he will survive and have more offspring. Like. No, that happens more often than not. Maybe, but that still might be a very small number. It's a very small effect. It's not going to hold for any one individual necessarily.

8:43 Dylan: Yes, and that might be part of what rubs people the wrong way as well, is that we're talking about species as the entities on which the selection is happening. But for any individual, maybe it's even arguably deterministic for each individual, they'll either survive or they won't survive based upon the selection.

9:04 Mark: Deterministic, but not predictable based on fitness. So, like, what good is it to have a science if you can't predict what's going to happen?

9:12 Dylan: Well, but why isn't it predictive? Right. Are you saying that prediction based upon populations isn't predictive?

9:18 Wes: It's not predictive. What phenotypes are going to appear they can't predict.

9:22 Dylan: That's true. That's true. But it doesn't keep it from being predictive. It's just not deterministic.

9:27 Wes: Well, in what sense is it predictive?

9:29 Dylan: Well, you can make a prediction about the percentage of survivors there will be given a certain condition.

9:36 Wes: Right.

9:37 Dylan: In a fairly mathematically robust way, you can describe all kinds of features of populations of organisms with the same kind of precision that you can describe radiation.

9:50 Wes: Right.

9:50 Dylan: Depending on the conditions, there are degrees of die off and so forth. And radiation has the same kind of underlying random character to it as well. You will never be able to predict for a given uranium atom when it will decay But I can tell you that it'll have a 50% chance of having decayed within a certain amount of time. That's the best I can do. But I can make very predictive measurements of a whole bunch of uranium. I can get a block uranium and I can tell you how much of it's going to be left after a certain amount of time.

10:24 Mark: So we can predict things about overall populations we can't really predict, I don't think. I guess only in a laboratory setting could we, say, come up with a fitness rating of some particular trait. Maybe you could even just consciously introduce it so it's not. Or you do some sort of artificial selection to get things going. But then you let the environment that you've set up, let's say we're dealing with microscopic organisms or something, so this is less cruel than if you're head of a bunch of sheep. And then you can predict, like, how many generations is it going to take for this trait to become this prevalent or something like that. Like that seems the kind of thing that you just can never predict in nature.

11:04 Dylan: But Wes pointed out that breeders do this all the time. They do this with respect to selecting traits out. But you also, in that fitness measure that you described, are you trying to get to having a fitness measure that will give you some judgment about an individual organism, or is it just a metric that applies to the population?

11:26 Mark: Yeah, you're acknowledging, yes, there's randomness regarding individuals, but when you look at the population as a whole, this is a scientific prediction. And I'm just trying to determine under what possible circumstances would it be predictable when a trait is going to appear, how long it's going to take for it to spread through a population, how long speciation is going to take. Like all these things are just so contingent on natural factors and move at such a glacial pace that. No, this is more like archeology. There's no prediction involved. It's all after the fact. Looking at structures of the hand of a bat versus the hand of a bird.

12:07 Wes: I think you could say the same thing, though, about, you know, suppose we were complete determinists and we wanted to give a complete picture of the universe and the location of every particle and what it's doing at any given time through all history. We don't have that predictive power in the sciences because we don't. We're never going to know enough. So even what we're calling random, we could still be determinists. And if we knew enough, we would know exactly what mutation is going to occur if it didn't depend on probabilistic quantum stuff.

Let's just rule that out and say we're completely determinists. Everything is fixed. We would still call these mutations random relative to the functional needs of the organism, and because there's such a great variety in them. But if we were determinists and knew everything about the universe and had a complete description and knew all the laws, theoretically, we could say what every mutation is going to be, we could say what every succession of animal forms is going to be. We could give a complete picture of the universe through all time. And then what we're calling randomness just turns out to be a reflection of our own ignorance.

13:20 Dylan: It's like the weather.

13:22 Mark: And you have pointed out exactly how one could be a Spinozic religious compatibilist with evolution. Of course, there are many. We had some at UTexas, some deeply Christian philosophers, whose a major part of their work was defending evolutionary theory, that of course these things are compatible. You don't need special acts of creation. Just like we were saying in the Spinoza episodes, God acts through ongoing laws. And so this is the mechanism, these are the ongoing laws. And the fact that if you walked outside of the human perspective and could actually see the whole thing, then the way Spinoza puts it, God's will and the actual things that happen in nature are one in the same.

So the fact that something happens and God as a being that has a temporal vision would be aware of this, that's the same thing as to say for Spinoza, that God actually did it. So there you go, there's no conflict. Well, so what else is. Seth, I know you were asking the question, what is possibly interesting here? Did nothing pique your interest in terms of, Is it really just a bunch of loser creationists arguing against this? And for anybody who's philosophically sophisticated, there's really nothing to be gained here.

14:43 Seth: Well, I don't know about that. I guess maybe it was my plea to try to make it more interesting and relevant without necessarily academizing it. So what strikes me about this is that the only imperative that I see, or the ultimate imperative that I see, is survival. In the text, Darwin uses the term state of nature frequently. So we are immediately drawn, you know, those of us who have any kind of passing association with the philosophical tradition, in hearing that, to thinking of Hobbes, Locke and the notion of the state of nature as being sort of nasty, brutish and short, or however it's interpreted.

15:27 Wes: So keep in mind, in the state of nature he's contrasting to domestication.

15:30 Seth: I understand that he means the state of nature versus okay, well let's start with that. So if the state of nature as Darwin describes it is in contrast to domestication, and domestication has the hand of man guiding things, the natural implication is to think that there's the hand of God guiding things. And he's fighting, trying to say, hey, there's not necessarily intentional action or design in the state of nature in the same way that we see in domestication. There's something else going on here that is random. It's more driven by environment and circumstance, which are much more controlled variables in domestication and so forth.

But you know, Mark was saying, are you going to misinterpret this in the way he characterizes the state of nature? The only non contingent value is survival. That's the point. But survival not in itself survival for the purpose of procreation. Because we have this philosophical, in many, many, many things we've talked about over the last eight years, where the notion of self preservation or avoiding self harm, this is a key virtue and it's morally right, you're not allowed to do harm to yourself, you have to preserve yourself. But there isn't that connection necessarily from a philosophical perspective to reproduction.

And so what Darwin's framework here is that self preservation is for the purpose of reproduction.

17:05 Wes: I don't understand why self preservation is for the purpose of reproduction. Okay, what do you mean by that? What does that mean?

17:12 Seth: What I mean by that is not necessarily at the individual level, but at the species level. The purpose is to persist, right? To make yourself eternal through reproduction.

17:23 Wes: Well, there's no purpose though.

17:25 Mark: I think you can talk about teleology as again, teleology doesn't mean that any of the individuals are adopting this as their purpose, but that it looks as if that's what's going on. That is the overall tendency of the organism. Unless something stops it.

17:39 Wes: No. So the reproductivity comes first. All right, let's make sure we understand that very important principle. None of this gets off the ground if there aren't already entities that happen to be self reproducing.

17:52 Dylan: It's the activity of the species as

17:54 Wes: it reproduces and then we get all the rest of it. That's sort of like a basic axiom of our system. And how that comes to be is kind of itself a great mystery. Right? How do you get cells? And how do. You could talk about RNA soup and all the things. How do things get bootstrapped up to this interesting case in which there are these self replicating entities. So that's a big question, but that's your axiom. That has to happen and that has to happen itself through a non reproductive avenue. Right. So suddenly we get these self replicating entities and then we can talk about the rest of it. So I'm just trying to think about what Seth was saying here. Survival for the. I'm trying to see if I can make sense of it.

18:33 Mark: You only have selection pressures to survive insofar as they are surviving long enough to have lots and lots of babies. Even though of course we all want to live a long time. There would be no selection pressure to live over the age of 50, say, unless you're just a really randy male over 50, that can still be siring in the population. That should not be.

18:59 Wes: I mean, there is the pressure.

19:01 Dylan: You called it selection pressure to survive.

19:04 Mark: Right. That's a shorthand way of saying that anybody who doesn't survive long enough to reproduce, then their genes get wiped out.

19:12 Wes: Well, somehow nature wasn't efficient enough to sort of engineer us to be

19:18 Mark: really

19:18 Wes: worried about our own survival and afraid of death. Or at least programmed functionally to do everything we can to avoid danger and death. Just until we've reproduced or reached a certain age. And then suddenly we give up. Okay, yeah, just kill me. There is the pressure. And that, that conatus Spinoza calls it. I mean that is basically, it seems to me, built in for all.

19:41 Mark: So wanting to survive after that is a free rider.

19:45 Seth: Exactly.

19:45 Mark: It's just that you don't. It would not be efficient to have a survival instinct that craps out a certain point. Although you could imagine the elephants that go in a certain place to die or. I don't know if there are population pressures in terms of. If there are too many of us, then we're all going to die, then you could imagine a trait being selected for. I'm not sure how this would work or at least it would be good for the, for the population. And if overpopulation was controlled by people gaining an ennui at a certain age, so they don't want to keep living. I'm not sure how that would mechanically work.

20:21 Wes: All right. So I think I finally understand what Seth is saying about survival for the sake of reproduction. He's saying the same thing as my initial point about reproductivity. The way the mechanism works is just that getting the most offspring to the table is the thing that wins out. Or something like that.

20:39 Seth: Yeah, well, I'm trying to find the normative in here and say something to the effect of what is the purpose of adaptability? What is the goal of survival of an individual? The connection between the individual and the species is reproduction. So you can't talk about the function of the aggregate without talking about reproduction. You can talk about the individual without talking about it. So if we talk about the perpetuation and diversification of species over time, the adaption of species to their environment, the only thing that validates adaption is perpetuation through progeny.

Because in any individual, or even in any generation, you can't tell whether they are more or less well suited. It's only by whether the offspring which have the traits that are selected ultimately survive longer or what have you. So in thinking about the normative aspects of the theory, that can be the only thing that has value, and I don't mean value in the sense of like it's useful, I mean it has a positive value. Is that the purpose of your surviving or not surviving is perpetuation. It's passing on whatever traits you have to your offspring so that they survive and the species continues to perpetuate.

Or if not the species, then your particular variation of the species. I don't know all the terms they're using. So that's the thing that it strikes me is that Darwin characterizes this as coming out of this like life or death struggle, right? The 10,000 seeds where only three of them will find purchase in the soil. It's this painful. It reminds me of, you know, the strife or eros being the fundamental force in the world. The world is not a Garden of Eden. It's a harsh world where everybody is struggling to survive in order to perpetuate themselves.

And the great miracle of humankind is that we've managed to abstract ourselves to some extent or elevate ourselves over that. Where we in good conscience and willy nilly do things like create art which contribute, you know, little or nothing to the perpetuation of the species. Or maybe they do, I don't know. So anyway, I'm trying to connect this back to some more traditional philosophical themes about teleology. Maybe some philosophers have talked about having children as being the goal of human existence, but it doesn't strike me as a terribly philosophical, contemplative, rational kind of thing that might be interesting in itself.

23:35 Wes: So I still think of it, talking about it as the goal, even if you're doing it metaphorically. I don't like it, sorry. Even though I do like the idea of Eros as sort of a Fundamental principle, because self replication has to be there from the ground up, and that makes the rest of it possible. You know how in the Symposium, Socrates, ultimately, his idea of what love is, it comes down to this concept of reproduction and unity. And so the reproductive element here, it is the way to higher or more complex and stable forms. Right. There's a lot of, let's say, stable forms in the universe, like, you know, an atom or even a galaxy or solar system for long periods of time.

There's a form there, and that's relatively stable. But in order to get this greater, you know, I think arguably, right, a pigeon represents something that's more organizationally complex. And to say what that means is difficult and I think is a philosophical task, but is more complex and orderly than even, let's say, a galaxy. It has more complex functional relationships between its parts and to its environment and all these dependencies. So that kind of thing can only come about through this scheme of replication with variation and selection.

So the relationship between reproduction and complexity is actually a very philosophically tight one. Functional complexity, I mean.

25:14 Seth: Right. No, I think I understand that. And maybe the word you used, imperative, is better than goal. That there's an imperative implied, or part of the notion of natural selection is that there's an imperative as opposed to a goal. So maybe we steer away from teleology by talking about this mode of force, which is really what Eros was originally anyway. It's not teleological in itself. It's just a motive force that makes things strive. I mean, I think the thing that strikes me about this is you cannot talk about selection until you talk about offspring, because it's all about validation of the adaptability of particular traits through offspring.

And the concept is if the traits that you have are not well suited, well fitted to the environment, then you will not produce offspring, or at least generationally, ultimately, your lineage will die off. And from a philosophical perspective, I think there are many, many thinkers in the history of philosophy, and the exercise of philosophical contemplation itself does not require producing offspring. That there's a fundamental disconnect between what can be counted as philosophical activity of the highest virtue, the highest good, and what Darwin is putting forth here as what we as animals in the system have an imperative to do.

And so maybe there's something interesting there about the rational. We always think of the rational versus the appetitive, or something like that, or the purely contemplative life. And this notion of, you know, you think of religious ascetics and these sorts of things that Somehow, philosophy is the activity par excellence that is tilting against the windmill of the spatial imperative.

27:19 Wes: So what if you were to see philosophy and technology and the arts as sort of the height of reproductivity, as sort of a reproductivity, as in the symposium, taken to this, done metaphorically or done as a kind of sublimation. So instead of having children and even the mind, Right. So to give an account of the mind, you have to give an account of reproduction. How the mind reproduces the world or how the mind holds it together, how the imagination holds things together from one minute to another, so that we even have an experience. It's always about this synthetic activity. So why not see the mind itself, and especially technology and the arts and philosophy as sort of the pinnacle of the principle of reproductivity?

28:05 Seth: Well, that's an interesting thought. Yeah. No, you can think of having children and creating art as sort of a similar process, right. The notion of creativity. But there is an interesting concept, and there's something interesting what you just said about the idea that by creating or generating ideas or artworks, that maybe it helps perpetuate the species by giving the species meaning and purpose, you know, in a way that having children doesn't. The challenge here is that if you accept the idea of selection, the question becomes, how does that mechanism work where children of brilliant, creative people and great thinkers aren't necessarily that themselves?

It sort of disrupts the notion of natural selection. If you say that. Well, the trait of brilliance that I have allows me to create a work of art that then can inspire and motivate many other offspring, but not necessarily my own. Right. So I like the idea poetically, but I feel like it's a challenge to the notion of natural selection.

29:14 Wes: I'm not thinking of, you know, sexual selection and all that. So it's enough to me that it could be a free rider, Right? The mind and culture and all the rest of it, it can be simply a byproduct. It doesn't itself have to be something that was selected for. It could just be a byproduct of an enormous. Almost like a sort of nuclear fission. Or maybe fusion is a better example, because once things get going, it just keeps going. But look at culture and all the rest of it and the human mind as a kind of accidental byproduct of maybe a trade that is sort of innocuous but advantageous.

And oops, you get all this other stuff. It's the nuclear effect and a sort of chain reaction effect. Maybe. But my point is that there's a reproductive factor which has to be there from the beginning for any of this to work. And in a way, we're talking about how forms get passed down over time despite the chaos and flux of matter and all that stuff. And there's almost something reproductive about the persistence of any form. You could think about that as a reproductive act over time, right?

30:20 Dylan: Well, it certainly is that way for a species. Right? Persistence over time.

30:24 Wes: Yeah, But I'm thinking even of an object, like an individual object.

30:27 Dylan: Yeah, sure.

30:28 Wes: Anything that we're going to call a thing, right. There is the element of survival or persistence. Right. That has to have some persisting element. It's a tautology, or even we couldn't be talking about it as a thing. To be a thing must have enough persisting force. And that goes formally as well. So there must be a form that persists over time, that replicates itself, loosely speaking, and using the word replication, loosely speaking, from moment to moment. And then if you look at what you get, say at the point where you actually have, let's say, self replicating molecules, is you get the chance to.

Instead of just being, say, a molecule that persists for all time. Right, Said you have a molecule that creates copies of itself, but each time it makes a copy, it allows for change, some degree of change. And that kind of reproduction or replication, what that creates the opportunity for is growth, for experimentation, for new kinds of forms, forms that are more complex, higher levels of organization, greater numbers of functional relations between parts, all that kind of stuff.

31:34 Dylan: Wes, earlier, I think that you pointed out one engine of this is just reproduction itself. I see what you mean by the analogy of persistence with reproduction, but it seems to me that you just annihilate the distinction then between mere persistence and reproduction. There seems to be something really fundamental there that is the activity of that thing. Then that part of that activity is making copies of itself as distinct from it staying itself. In particular, that it's creating a new entity.

32:09 Seth: Right.

32:10 Wes: I try to get to that in the second part of what I said.

32:12 Dylan: Okay. It seemed to me like the randomness is another added piece to it, that that variation is added to reproduction in order to get those possibilities of organization and the full flowering of evolution as governed by natural selection, that you don't get it with just one or the other, and they're not the same thing.

32:35 Wes: So ultimately what I was going to end up saying was that the reproductivity or the element of replication or mimesis and all the rest of it that we see in Arts and sciences and technology and philosophy. It's sort of the actualization of an initial principle that was there from the beginning, that had to be there from the ground up. So in other words, if you thought there was something unique about human adaptation or the mind as an adaptation, I think you'd have to argue that it's an adaptation that gives us real time adaptability to the world, the way the brain can respond to the world. It's as if it's evolving over the life of a single organism. It's as if evolution produced an adaptation that makes the organism super adaptive even over the course of individuals lifespan.

33:24 Mark: Neuroplasticity.

33:26 Wes: Neuroplasticity. There we go. So adaptability becomes the ultimate adaptation. And technology is a preeminent example of that. And the fact that we didn't have to evolve gills, or evolve whatever, it would allow us to survive in space. We can just do that technologically and we can live in any environment and be master of any domain.

33:48 Dylan: So we didn't have to evolve Gills. But in the way you're describing it, what we did evolve was technology.

33:54 Wes: Yeah. So then you have to talk about a cultural evolution.

33:57 Dylan: Yes. You would have both things going on.

34:00 Mark: Right.

34:00 Dylan: You'd have the existence of culture as an evolutionary consequence. And then culture itself may have evolutionary characteristics.

34:09 Wes: I'm thinking about the arts and sciences and culture as the byproduct of. If we saw adaptability or neuroplasticity or whatever as this ultimate adaptation, you could see culture and the arts and technology as a byproduct in a way. I don't know. So that's the extent of my philosophizing about this stuff. Sure.

34:30 Mark: That seems a fruitful and kind of a quick way to give an evolutionary account of culture as a whole without then having to go like I was talking before about what would the evolutionary biology equivalent of Freudianism or Marxism for those individuals that really insist on seeing everything through. Through that particular lens. And I think there were points in history where Darwinism attracted the kind of thought became a playground for just like, why would this particular thing. So it's not just culture as a whole. It would be like, why would this particular artwork or something.

We have to give an evolutionary explanation for why this social practice that we have. What's the evolutionary basis of slavery or something like that. Not, not just, you know, somebody, people being naturally slaves, but just having slaves in the first place. What an adaptive advantage that provided, you know, that you could be in the master slave relationship as Hegel describes it, and Bring people under your wing and work as a group in that way and, and just looking for that kind of your, your kindly wing for them to subsume their individuality under your own.

Yeah, so you could see a lot of room for people to give very creative explanations. But really I think that the more correct scientific version of that now is that traits don't really get selected for, traits only get selected against. We would expect there to be a lot of free riders and you know, not being able to plan ahead and so that your prey escapes you is a bad thing. So the people that could have more on the savannah planning skills to be able to go where the hunt down the animals, animals where they're going to be and not get impaled by them and all that kind of stuff and work as a group and have communication so you can say the animal is coming this way and so all that stuff then being able to see, yeah, okay, that would require a good amount of neuroplasticity and culturation.

And given those abilities, then yeah, you could see how everything else would just flow in upon it.

36:34 Wes: Another way to put this is there's a tendency towards taking that reproductive phenomenon that happens from one generation to another and somehow that gets made a part of the structure of the individuals that you don't have to wait a generation. That's the neuroplasticity part. And in that way you might see the arts and the sciences and the rest of it not as just some sort of accidental. It's an accident in a way, but it's one predicated on Eros, on the fundamental nature of the fact that eros and meaning reproduction drives the world. That's my warm and fuzzy speculation

37:12 Mark: I'm tempted to weigh in on. You were talking about to what extent is this a teleological theory? And so one of the Stanford Encyclopedia articles, the one on Darwinism, has a section specifically on this. It concludes. Here's a couple quotes.

37:26 Wes: Yeah, he's wrong, he's wrong, but go ahead.

37:28 Mark: The serious philosophical issue can be put directly, simply and directly in selection explanations of adaptations. Are the functions served by adaptations a central and irreducible feature of those explanations? If the answer is yes, the explanations are teleological, jumping to the end of that selection explanations are then a particular kind of teleological explanation, an explanation in which that for the sake of which a trait is possessed, its valuable consequence accounts for the trait's differential perpetuation and maintenance in the population.

In other words, it's a description at the level like if you actually Want to explain what, why something provided fitness, then you actually do have to, as somebody explaining, talk about sort of the goal that it was shooting for. There should be nothing troublesome about that because it doesn't actually assert that teleology is something internal to the system. Like you might say still that an individual organism has internal to its makeup. I think you could give, you know, a fairly uncontroversial biological take that the organism is a system and it has its life and health and growth in a certain way kind of built in as a built in goal.

And you could talk about the mechanisms for that, that there's DNA, but then there's all sorts of, you know, other regulatory sorts of things, very specific biological things that when something goes wrong, you have pain. That's a sign that tells you to, you know, that really is I think teleological. But the fact that when you're talking about a population and differential survival within a population, you're not talking about an organism at all. You're not talking about a system in the literal sense, like an organism's system at all. So in that sense talking about the teleology of that system really is more purely metaphorical than if you're talking about the teleology of an individual organism, which maybe even that you'd want to, you know, if you're a mechanist, if you don't want to be a vitalist, then you want to somehow explain that in terms of, of more fundamental question.

But I think that it's at least a live issue that maybe you can't get rid of teleological explanations on there. But with Darwinism, yes, you really are, it's just purely a way of talking about things. I don't think it's an accident that Dan Dennett, one of our most famous neo Darwinists, his most recent book is all about the evolution of minds. But he has this thing I think we've talked about before, the intentional stance that you could even look at something that you know does not have any consciousness or built in purposiveness or something like that, you know, so if you're talking about your toaster, you know that it was made to make toast.

And so you could talk about the fail safes of oh well, if there's an electrical problem then it'll automatically eject because it's kind of trying to make the toast. But you know that if you're doing that, that you don't mean that it has intentions, that it has an internal teleology or anything like that. And so in the same way I. You're applying the intentional stance when you talk about a biological system in the way that a Darwinist would. But there's nothing pernicious or intentional in the teleological, in the old fashioned Aristotelian sense going on there.

40:41 Dylan: Part of the problem is that any kind of directedness, we start talking in teleological explanations right away. We do that when we say things like the water wants to be at the lowest point in the valley or the atom wants to be at the lowest energy state. And we very quickly personify anthropomorphize. Any kind of activity. I was going to say any kind of activity that has a direction. I'm having a hard time imagining an activity that doesn't have that. I can't point to it having a kind of direction, at least abstractly, that it's changing from this to that, and that there must be some kind of reason for it to change from this to that, and that it must be better for it to go from this to that. All that's wrapped up in it.

41:32 Mark: Right, Better in the sense that the system tends toward that. You know, it's a very circular way of talking.

41:38 Dylan: Yeah, but that's the way we talk about it, right? That there has to be a reason that it goes from this to that. And very quickly we end up saying, well, it has to be better for it to do that, despite the fact that we make all kinds of qualifications, say no, actually it has nothing to do with it being better, has it to do with being more fit. That it has its inherent direction that it's going. And then we select for ones that happen to be fit enough to continue in that direction to make it through the barrier of our selection.

42:07 Wes: So there are a bunch of efficient causes that go into all that. And to give a teleological kind of things, we have to say that there's a goal which is a cause, and that that goal is internal to the organism. So an acorn's end, its goal is to become a tree, and that goal is the cause of its becoming a

42:32 Mark: tree on some weird level of abstraction.

42:35 Wes: Yeah, you know, whatever that means.

42:37 Dylan: So what other natural laws follow that? Like I would say that the principle of minimum energy is not teleological in that sense.

42:47 Unknown speaker: Right.

42:47 Mark: And that's why these chemical and physical ones are good analogies for the way we actually should take evolutionary explanations. They are more like the chemical and physical ones than like the acorn example, which is legitimately teleological, even though there is also no mind at work, presumably.

43:05 Dylan: And that's because the acorn isn't acting in accordance with a particular law or the embodiment of a physical law, but is. The acorn holds within itself its end.

43:17 Wes: The end is not the cause, in contemporary scientific theory. The end actually has no causal role.

43:23 Dylan: I know that, but that's the distinction we're making about teleology, right? Is that in a teleological explanation, the end does have a causal role.

43:29 Mark: And if you want to say the end. So somewhere in the acorn is the blueprint of the tree, and that blueprint is playing a causal role. Obviously it's not sufficient the fact that you have a certain genetic code or whatever. You need food, you need all sorts of other things, but any living thing, its end as encoded in it, in whatever way it is, actually forms part of the causal nexus that gets it to its end, that gets it to turn into what it does. And that's not the case if you're talking about the equilibrium of a chemical reaction or something, or of an ecosystem.

44:04 Dylan: So in the way you just described it, Mark, then individual organisms all have teleological ends, but their species may not. We don't want to deny that the acorn is supposed to become a tree under the right circumstances, yada, yada, yada. But that is its direction, right?

44:22 Wes: Well, that is the thing. All things being equal, the causal factors will add up to that happening, right?

44:28 Dylan: Yeah.

44:29 Mark: And so you could say that likewise, an individual organism, part of its direction is to reproduce, but it is not for its population to adapt to local conditions and have spontaneous variation that gets selected and thereby increasing complexity. Like, that's just not part of the story of why the organism does what it does in terms of the causes of the organism. It's a different, higher emergent level of explanation.

44:54 Dylan: Yeah. And part of that's because the organism is an element of the species and the thing that is evolving is a species, not the organism.

45:02 Seth: What you described also, Dylan, is the bias towards success, the bias towards the. The outcome. I mean, one of the things that Darwin makes abundantly clear is that most things are born, especially in the plant kingdom, most things are born to die. The purpose of the acorn, if you look at it statistically, is not to become a tree, but to. But to dry up and to be

45:26 Dylan: getting by a squirrel to end up

45:30 Wes: in the house of a squirrel.

45:32 Seth: That's exactly right. And it's just our optimistic bias towards the winners, I guess that makes us think that that's what its teleology is.

45:41 Dylan: I see why you're saying that. But the fact that it isn't successful doesn't. Most of the time it has a

45:48 Wes: disposition to do certain things.

45:51 Dylan: Yes, it's born out of itself. Right. There's strong reason to say that the acorn has not realized its potential. It's been thwarted because of some circumstance. The lack of realization of its potential is really a constraint on it. It doesn't keep it from still having had a potential that could be realized.

46:14 Seth: Well, I understand what you're saying, but what is it about this explanation that rubs us the wrong way? Out of 100 acorns, three will turn into trees and 97 will get eaten by squirrels and they'll nourish those squirrels. So the disposition of the acorn is to become food for the squirrel and there's some small minority that don't. And their job is to become trees to produce more food for squirrels.

46:43 Wes: But that's not the disposition. So there's a lot of internal force in the acorn to grow. Right. There's causal stuff going on that if it's in the right conditions, it's going to grow. There's not anything causally internal to the acorn that would make it become squirrel food. All those causes are external, extrinsic. So the idea of intrinsic causes is important. It's got a genetic blueprint. It's got a lot of stuff that's just going to happen because of that unless something extrinsic interferes with it or doesn't give it the right environment to happen in or something.

47:17 Dylan: So the closest thing to having an intrinsic cause that the acorn was part of would be the ecology that acorns are part of. That ecology that give nourishment to the squirrels. It's become a little abstract at that point because I'm making the analogy of an ecology with an organism, which may not be a good analogy.

47:35 Seth: No, it has become more abstract. But it's a better species level explanation than talking about the intrinsic disposition or motives of the individual. So looking at things from the aggregate level, the way they function at the aggregate level with other things, is a better way of looking at species, which is ultimately what Darwin was trying to do is to talk about aggregate level and species behavior. But he breaks it down and describes it talking about individual traits. So that's maybe part of the reason why the difference gets confusing. I'm just trying to make the point that there is already a normative.

We are applying certain kinds of values already to our interpretation. I understand, Wes what you're saying about this, given all things being equal, that the goal of the acorn or the, the disposition of the acorn is to grow into a tree and not to become food. But I feel like already that language is layered with value and with the perspective that comes from our own human desire to grow individually and to flourish this notion of flourishing. So I don't know that we're not applying a concept of flourishing that we cherish ourselves onto individual things.

48:57 Wes: Yeah, I don't see it that way. I don't see saying it has a disposition and as a normative thing. But I'd have to think more about this. Extrinsic versus intrinsic. What is the entity to which something is extrinsic or intrinsic? This gets us back to the problem of what a species is. But yes, we are making a lot of assumptions when we say define an entity and say what's extrinsic and what's intrinsic?

49:22 Mark: Let's just do what Darwin would do when faced with these questions and just let's talk about the details of pigeons.

49:31 Seth: Actually it seemed like hummingbirds were a big one too, that he liked to. Not just pigeons, there are lots of them.

49:38 Mark: Yes, we didn't really say that. I don't think what the circumstances of publication here. This will kind of be my closing just to take it back to something easier to grasp than what we've been, what we've been trying to come to grip with. He's known that he went on this trip around the world as sort of a research assistant in the 1830s and produced these notebooks through 1837. Through 1839. He produced a 39 page draft of this. The Theory of Natural Selection 1842, a 230 page draft of it in 1844 after he took time out and wrote a bunch of books on geology and things.

And then he started working on the Big species book in 1856. But then after two years of doing that, so that was going to be like his exhaustive thing that would prove all this data, that would prove natural selection. In 1856 he received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace outlining very similar views to his. So in other words, if he waited any longer to publish, then somebody else was going to steal his thunder. So he was encouraged in the next year and a half after that to pair the Big Species book down to just take these, some of these examples out, throw it in a shorter book, make some more general conclusions and that's what we're reading here.

Even though it went through A number of, between 1859 and 1872, more additions. Those were mostly, it seems like, to kind of fill in a few gaps and answer critics, you know, to make it more persuasive. But he never, like, tried to finish the big species book, and he certainly never tried to add back in all the data the more scholarly stuff that would really secure his conclusions according to his original ambitions. So I think that's awesome. He comes across as just like, if he just set out for, while he was writing this to like do a review of literature, given that he did not have online databases or anything like that, to just come up with the perfect examples for each.

Like, I don't think he could have done it. It's only because he had prior years and years been collecting these stories from other people about what happened when they added that tree to that yard that was then cut off from everything else, and how many species resulted from that. Or the information about new species introduced in America and how you would think that for a species to do well in a new area would kind of have to be similar to the other ones that were there. No, it's actually the species that were way different that added. You know, I think it basically doubled the number of genera as new plant species were introduced to the US because basically there was an empty ecological niche that these things that were different enough from what was there could just come in and move into the unfilled niches and potentially trample over a lot of the native species.

So he's just an inside encyclopedia. Just made him very fun to read. There's obviously a lot of fun stuff to follow up on this. Maybe we should do one on social Darwinism or something like this. But we could see what the hunger of the audience is, see what the

52:34 Seth: health of Wes is.

52:35 Mark: Wes, give us your closing before you expire.

52:38 Wes: I was just gonna read some of Hume in his kind of the way he predicts some of this.

52:44 Mark: Do it.

52:45 Wes: It's kind of long. So he's trying to explain how you could get all these well adapted animals out of just randomness. And so he's imagining that there's an unguided force which just throws all of matter into all these different positions, and most of it is just chaos. But eventually you get a form that is self sustaining, and it's self sustaining even though its parts are in motion. Right? We're all composed of stuff that is in flux. So it's a stable form that inheres in this unstable, perpetually changing flux. So he says, thus the Universe goes on for many ages in a continued succession of chaos and disorder.

But is it not possible that it may settle at last so as not to lose its motion and active force, yet so as to preserve a uniformity of appearance amidst the continual motion and fluctuation of its parts? This we find to be the case with the universe at present. Every individual is perpetually changing in every part of every individual, and yet the whole remains in appearance the same. May we not hope for such a position, or rather be assured of it from the eternal revolutions of unguided matter? And may not this account for all the appearing wisdom and contrivance which is in the universe?

Let us contemplate the subject a little, and we shall find that this adjustment, if attained by matter of fact, of a seeming stability in the forms, with a real and perpetual revolution or motion of parts, affords a plausible, if not a true solution of the difficulty. This motion of the parts, by the way, will become important to what Darwin calls variation. Right. So it is in vain, therefore, to insist upon the uses of the parts in animals or vegetables and their curious adjustment to each other. I would fain know how an animal could subsist unless its parts were so adjusted.

In other words, what explains the parts being so well adjusted to each other is just that there's a survival mechanism that went through a lot of experimentation, and when finally the parts got adjusted in the right way, that's what allowed the animal to survive. Do we not find that it immediately perishes when this adjustment ceases and that its matter corrupting, tries some new form? It happens, indeed, that the parts of the world are so well adjusted that some regular form immediately lays claim to this corrupted matter, and so on. This really is at a very high level of abstraction, the same sort of picture that Darwin is presenting, the sort of succession of trial and error that inevitably leads to stable forms.

What I like about the Hume thing is it's just a good way at getting, you know, he calls it a blind, unguided force. And I think that's, of course, what bothers people about Hume's account here and about natural selection. They're looking for something that actually is teleological in the sense of involving an intention. For them, the meaningfulness of the universe requires some sort of grand intention on the part of a part of a deity. Someone has to care. And the suggestion this sort of order, which seems to imply that someone cares, can actually be explained by a blind, unguided force.

That's a big disappointment.

56:01 Dylan: I think that was a fine Way to end. I don't have anything else to add.

56:04 Seth: I like the idea of the blind, unguided force. Because if you can't take stock of where you stand and have wonder and gratitude about what it is that you are right in this moment without having to justify that by recourse to some external explanation for it, I think you're missing out on something.

56:26 Mark: Well, if Wes is going to quote Hume, then I'm going to quote Lucretius. No, I'm not going to read Lucretius. But yeah, there are earlier versions of this. Empedocles was the earliest one that I saw in the literature here. But I will point people at the Stanford article if you want to read about those folks and how closely they approximated Darwin. Not that close. But it was a persistent minority position against the Platonic essentialism that went through Aristotle in some form and the Christian thinkers that maybe the watchmaker is blind. It's not his fault.

Our closing song is going to be I Live from Jason Falkner presents Author Unknown. Listen to my interview with Jason on Nakedly Examined Music Episode 47@NakedlyExaminedMusic.com I thought this well reflected the theme of having a purpose in life only insofar as you can mate. And then that's pretty much all you can ask for. Next time we are going to talk about something a little different, a movie. We're gonna watch the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo and read a bunch of scholarly articles about that. So we'll post the list of those@partiallyexaminedlife.com upcoming so you can read along with us insofar as you can track these things down.

Thank you people for listening. Why don't you go join our Facebook group and check out the blog partiallyexaminedlife.com and may. You could write for us or you could participate in the conversations there. Maybe you could join Not School and start your own Darwinism reading group. There are many, many, many ways to get involved or just don't. Just regress. Okay. Good night, everybody.

58:06 Wes: Good night.

58:06 Dylan: Good night.

58:25 Unknown speaker: Swear to God. Cause my heart sticking me right through my eye she's the one that I seen smiling me when she's driving by But I tell you I

58:43 Dylan: pretend I

58:44 Unknown speaker: just to say to myself if I had you I could never ask for anything again as long as I live if I had you I could never ask for anything again as long as I live. Now and then ask a friend to make it happen we're introduced. She says we've met I don't think so I remember a face like that she's just standing Better show what faith looks like if I had you I could never ask for anything again as long as I live I live, I live, I live. If I had you, I could never Long as I live if I had you I could never ever ask for anything again as long as I live if I had you I can never ask for anything yet as long as I live if I had you I can never ask for anything I get as long as I live I live, I live,

1:01:00 Mark: I live.