Comment by auganov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by auganov | Hacker News Reader

When people go to a grocery store does it really make sense to think about evolution and natural selection? Every part of the modern food shopping experience has been designed by humans. Even the food itself. It's strange to consider a chimp's hunting instinct somehow relates to, say, a human's evaluation of what's a good deal in dollar terms.

Evolution and Me: Darwinian Theory has Become an All-Purpose Obstacle to Thought Rather than an Enabler of Scientific Advance. by George Gilder

https://www.discovery.org/a/3631/

"These evolutionary sex wars were mostly unresolvable because, at its root, Darwinian theory is tautological. What survives is fit; what is fit survives. While such tautologies ensure the consistency of any arguments based on them, they could contribute little to an analysis of what patterns of behavior and what ideals and aspirations were conducive to a good and productive society. Almost by definition, Darwinism is a materialist theory that banishes aspirations and ideals from the picture."

If Darwinian theory is tautological, why was it so controversial? Indeed Darwin knew it would be, and so kept it secret for decades after conceiving it. Why does it continue to be controversial to this day in some places, such as the U.S., to the degree that organizations like the one you cited (the Discovery Institute) are dedicated to dismantling it?

The core of Darwinian theory is not "what survives is fit; what is fits survives." The core of it is: 1) Life can multiply extremely rapidly, outstripping the available resources to live on, meaning that only some offspring can survive (this comes from Malthus) 2) There is random variation in the characteristics of offspring, some of which will prove more successful at survival and reproduction than others. 3) The action of (1) and (2), starting from some unknown point of origin of life, can explain all the variation in types of life that we see around us today, from fungi to humans.

None of these are tautologies.

I think you misunderstood the person you’re responding to. They are saying that the way we take in calories is so far removed from the environment we evolved in that any Darwin comparison is smoke and mirrors. IMHO they are spot on.

Gilder co-founded Discovery so you'd have to assume this essay is somewhat representative of the kind of thinking that inspired its creation. I've read plenty of Gilder and I honestly don't know what his exact views on the origin of life are. I'm sure he has his problems, but doubt they have much to do with whatever the original opposition to Darwin was. The point is very much that it doesn't matter. A purely deterministic and materialistic theory of evolution could be perfectly true, yet one has to concede it cannot possibly give us much of an edge in solving today's problems. The meat article made me think of Gilder's essay because it's a perfect example of trying to employ Darwinian thinking when it cannot possibly help.

That’s because Darwin’s is an observation of self-replicating systems in general and not an abstract idea or new concept. It’s tautological that the most successful self-replicating systems are the ones most successful at self-replicating. Fitness is by definition being successful at dealing with the environment in regards to self-replication. Darwin’s in the general sense is in my opinion not a theory but a fundamental observation of what is. The only theory is that there’s a continuous lineage of living systems that evolved one into one other. But that’s more of a teleological issue and can be understood as a theory subject to rejection.

Darwin’s theory is that the diversity of life, the nested hierarchy of traits noted by taxonomists before him, can be explained by that fact about replicating systems — and doesn’t require more than that and mutation.

Darwin explained an open question (“why do taxonomies look like this?”) by relating it to fitness and to trait changes via artificial selection (eg, breeding horses and dogs). That’s why it’s about how finches developed traits in nature — because repeated fitness selection in nature like farmers breeding lineages could account for differences in animals.

That the “fit survive” isn’t the theory — just a fact about the world.

> That the “fit survive” isn’t the theory — just a fact about the world.

In Darwin's time the idea that "the fit survive" was very much a theory.

A competing idea that we might call "the just survive" was the basis of trial by ordeal and trial by combat, of prayers for healing and rescue, and of holy wars. Many people still believe that God chooses who survives, and thus do not accept survival of the fittest.

“Survival of the fittest” is a statistical observation of a population ensemble. You can be otherwise fit and eager to replicate and be hit by a truck. Or you can be sick and almost infertile but got someone pregnant. So Darwin doesn’t explain the human condition and why the just might fall due to sickness or the wicked become rich and prolific. That only Heaven knows.

> So Darwin doesn’t explain the human condition and why the just might fall due to sickness or the wicked become rich and prolific

You're changing the measure. Just-ness is not a measure of Fit-ness. Nor is Wicked-ness a measure of Unfit-ness.

I’m saying that “survival of the fittest” and the existence of God can coexist.

I don’t agree it’s tautological. His theory had predictive power.

In a sense, it's true that it's tautological, but only in that we often don't know for certain what was fit, or why. And we often can't.

For Darwin's finches, we can make a good guess, but some animal appearances or behaviors (e.g. the most beautiful snakes [1]) we just have to shake our heads. We know the snake's beauty (in our eyes) must have increased fitness since it was conserved, but how?

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+most+beautiful+snake&t=brave&i...

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