From: Alan McGowen <beaver.cs.washington.edu!gnosys!hpindbu.cup.hp.com!alanm>
Subject: Re: Darwinism, social and otherwise
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 23:16:20 GMT

Original-Sender: Alan McGowen <hpindbu.cup.hp.com!alanm>

Martha Dunham sounds an alarm against the use of science to support a
political point of view, and emphasizes the much-cited political (or
evaluative) neutrality of science as a reason why such use of scientific
ideas is unwarranted:

>
> Alan McGowen has expressed some important thoughts in his last few
> postings, but I cringe at his use of the ideas he has taken from ecology
> and from the theory of evolution by natural selection.  Scientists try to
> explain how things work.  They generally shy away from statements like
> "that's the way it SHOULD work".  This seems to be what Alan McGowan is
> implying, however - that natural selection is the right way, and that we
> should follow wherever it leads us.  Even more, he implies that we should
> second guess where we are being led so we can get there faster.  His use of
> established scientific thought to underscore his political views is as
> insidious as earlier use of Darwinism to justify genocide.
>

First of all, let me say that my position is certainly not value-free, as
I think I have made abundantly clear. The question, in my view, is whether
one's values should be *informed* by science, or ignorant of science; I believe
that they should be informed. It is one thing to deplore the mass extinction
crisis in which the Earth is convulsed; it is another to be able to trace
that crisis to its causes in the expansion of human numbers and human power,
and it is a third thing to attempt to formulate values which could bring the
crisis to an end. At every step of this, scientific understanding is involved.
True, at no step does science say: "you ought to value diversity", or "you
ought to end the extinction crisis". But if you *already* value those things,
which is better -- to use scientific understanding to try to find the
(political and normative) path out of crisis, or to leave your values
disconnected from the workings of reality? Isn't the latter path the path
of alienation and dispowerment?

I can't help but wonder, whenever I hear it emphasized that science has no
business poking its horns into politics, whose ox (to push the methaphor)
is being gored? This is the same sort of argument which has been circulated
around nuclear winter and global warming, though there it was possible to
focus on the technical points as to whether the danger was real. Here, there
is no doubt that immense amounts of biological diversity are being lost at
an accelerating pace. So the focus is (rarely) on the technical points about
species/area relations, etc. and more often directly on the political "threat"
of an intrusion from science.

And the "threat" is real -- ecology has been called "the subversive science"
for a good reason -- the more you learn about it, the more you can see that
the basic values and beliefs which underlie most of human activity are out
of synch with the biological reality of how the earth works. As Aldo Leopold
said, you become aware that we are living in a world of wounds.

True, biological science cannot say to you: you *must* value a diverse
planet, rich with a complex past and filled with the evolutionary opportunity
of the numerous niches created by all that diverity. Perhaps you prefer the
moon, or the Earth after a mass extinction. But be warned that those are not
places where humans are adapted to live, and you are deluding yourself if
you believe that we could certainly thrive there.


>         I am not saying his ideas are to be compared to those of the
> various people who espoused social Darwinism.  At the very least, he would
> have us head in a different direction.  To use a (perhaps inappropriate)
> analogy - one who claims to know where natural selection is headed is
> similar to one who declares himself High Priest.  The fact is, no one knows
> where the knife will carve next.  We only can determine what is present
> now, and struggle to piece together some idea of how the knife may have
> carved in the past. It seems therefore inappropriate to invoke Darwin's
> theory of natural selection to support ANY political views.

This is like saying that it is inappropriate to invoke the laws of
thermodynamics to support any political (or economic) views. The fact is
that politics and economics proceed in reality, and reality is governed
by such things as natural selection and the laws of thermodynamics. You
can choose to ignore that fact, or to be informed by it, and which you
choose may well make a major difference in politics and economics.

>
>         As I suggested at the beginning of this post, this does not
> automatically negate everything Alan McGowan says.  If we choose to live in
> balance with nature, it makes sense to look to peoples who have done so in
> the past.  We should be aware, however, that this is our own choice.  If
> nature really preferred balanced ecosystems, then we would all be
> single-celled organisms - complex lifeforms would never have evolved.

I'm not sure what Martha means by "really balanced ecosystems". Complex
ecosystems (e.g. tropical forests) of great diversity with many multicellular
organisms exist and are able to maintain themselves for extremely long periods
of time -- surely that suggests that they are "balanced" in rather important
ways: against rapid shifts of species composition, for example. The origin of
complex multicellular lifeforms has more to do with the large genome sizes
which become possible given meiosis than with any preference of nature for
"imbalanced" ecosystems.

>
> > A niche is (...) a kind of natural common law, or natural justice, which
> > reasonable organisms observe in order that the whole commonwealth of life may
> > go on.  [That is a very controversial statement which most biologists would
> > reject...]
>
> It certainly is.  It is an individual's opinion, derived from his personal
> understanding of a scientific theory.  I emphasize, it is an opinion only,
> NOT supported by science.  The consequences of natural selection can also
> be interpreted somewhat differently, for example:  If humans step out of
> the bounds of their niche, natural selection will ensure that they are
> slapped back into place (microorganisms always have room to work).  This
> interpretation could lead, as Peshewegunzh suggested, to the political
> belief that anything we do is ok, because if it weren't we couldn't do it.
> Yet it is as good an interpretation of natural selection as any other, in
> the eyes of science.

If epistemology were our only interest, this would be as good an
interpretation. But we are also organisms with goals of life, and it makes
a difference to us (if not to natural selection) whether or not we become
extinct, and whether or not the world our descendents inherit will be as
biotically impoverished as if a global nuclear war had occured, which
seems the likeliest outcome of business-as-usual. Given that the biosphere
is capable of generating diversity with time, it makes sense for us to
value that ability, and the coevolution of niches which supports it. The
concept of a coevolutionary equilibrium (which I called "the commonwealth
of life") is a scientific concept -- the extent to which it dominates
ecosystem dynamics as opposed to patch dynamics or more "individualistic"
ideas is controversial. That we should value it and attempt to further it
is political: but the alternative is to live in a world in which any
disturbance or damage we create is just fine and dandy so long as we survive
it -- and we know where that leads.

So, no it is NOT supported by science that you have to want a rich,
healthy biosphere -- you may prefer the moon, or at least a clearcut.
But *if* you value the Earth's life, it behooves you to examine your
values in the light of what it takes to maintain rich, diverse life:
it takes *room*, room for evolution to proceed, for adaptation to be
maintained, habitat space. And that *room* is what we gobble up with our
numbers and our economies. There is no escaping the fact that unless
we are prepared to give up some space and some resources for other kinds
of life, other kinds of life will continue to dwindle. If that is what
you prefer, by all means support it.

Remember though (and this is especially a propo of Martha's remark that
I want us to "anticipate" natural selection for ourselves and hasten
it) -- there is never any guarantee of survival in evolution: species
can, and occassionally do, evolve themselves into extinction, often
through overspecialization, or the hypertrophy of some characteristic
(such as intelligence?). Anticipating the paths of danger and the
paths of promise ahead of us and attempting to speed down one path vs
another is the very thing that humans have specialized at: cultural
evolution augmenting biological evolution. There is little choice as
to *whether* we will do this -- the choice is whether the path we
choose will be as informed as possible, or goverened only by ignorance
and greed. And which is more likely to lead to an early extinction for
our species?

>
> At this point (or even much earlier!) some might be horrified at the
> implication that scientists can just charge ahead, searching out new
> explanations for the world with utter disregard for the political
> consequences.  They would be misinterpreting me.  Scientists, being humans,
> are political beings and should be aware of political consequences.
> Science, as a method of inquiry, is expected to be objective, giving
> explanations of how things work the way they do, but not how they SHOULD
> work.

But there are constraints. To the extent that we have common goals -- and
survival is one -- science is relevant to the politics and economics which
are supposed to reach those goals: stripping off the Earth's ozone layer,
for example, is not compatible with survival, and the economist or politician
who would advocate against CFC emission controls on the grounds that they
will cost jobs and productivity is simply an ignorant fool: one whose
values are totally uninformed by how the world really works. I should say,
at *best* an ignorant fool -- in some cases there really may be a difference
in fundamental values, e.g. if it is thought better to grab as much as we can
now and let future generations survive as best they may. But here too, science
can be relevant, helping one to analyze the probable consequences of one
set of values or another.

Finally, I want to respond in particular to the statement that "The fact is,
no one knows where the knife (of natural selection) will carve next." The
fact is that we *do* know that our actions have an immense, often dominant,
effect on that knife. Whether the knife pares away much of the biosphere
depends on how well we can use our own knack for cultural evolution to become
a species which is compatible with the rest of life. At present, we are
not such a species, and the prognosis is not good. Let's not be frightened
away from the effort to discover *how* we must change by warnings that you
mustn't mix science with politics: however well-intensioned, that amounts
to the advice to do nothing.


------------
Alan McGowen

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