Re: Darwinism=Capitalism

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Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 17:30:46 +0000 (UTC)

Michael Ragland wrote:
I would like to thank Michael for
posting this article.
History of Darwinism
Peter J. Bowler:
[Peter J. Bowler is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at
the Queen's University of Belfast.]
snip<
.But what about the "struggle for existence," with its apparently harsh
implications? the Victorians welcomed Darwin's emphasis on struggle
because they saw it as the stimulus to individual and racial progress --
this is "social Darwinism."

JE:-
Yes "racial progress" was not separated from "individual" progress
hopelessly confusing group selection with organism selection. It was
Wallace who argued for group selection. Darwin did not include it within
his theory.

MR:
European racism was common during Darwin's time. It was out in the open
and it was a "given" that Africans, aborigines, etc. were racially
inferior to European man and civilization. Although Darwin didn't
include group selection in his works and apparently rejected it he was a
man of his times. He wrote of the need of exterminating the inferior
races. Look up "Darwin's Morality" on google groups and you will see
this. In a very real sense Darwin was the first Social Darwinist. The
difference is in Darwin's scientific work he did not promote Social
Darwinism but in his letters to others he at times expressed Social
Darwinian views which could not be totally reconciled with individual
selection. In his scientific works Darwin posited individual selection
as the basis of natural selection but in some of his writings he
referred to the survival of the fittest between races.

Bowler Quote:
the "invisible hand" which
economists saw coordinating individual selfishness for the benefit of
society could now be seen as generating an advance toward higher things.

JE:-
It was Adam Smith who coined the "invisible hand" of capitalist society.
Logically it was equivalent to Darwinian natural selection where the
selectee remained the individual and not the society (no group selection
was required).

MR:
You contradict yourself when you state, "However, capitalist market
place competition can allow individuals to compare their gains/losses on
a cognitive basis. This provides all sorts of problems that do not exist
using competition by default."

Bowler Quote:
But it was not just a question of struggle eliminating the unfit. Many
scientists and social thinkers were Lamarckians, including Herbert
Spencer, the philosopher who coined the term "survival of the fittest"
-- widely regarded as the greatest social Darwinist. Struggle forced
individuals to improve themselves as well as weeding out the few totally
unfit to survive, a view that many would see reincarnated in modern
Thatcherism. the original social Darwinism was as much Lamarckism as
Darwinism.

JE:-
Spencer was in serious error. He took the "natural" out of Darwinian
_natural_ selection because his "survival of the fittest" logic did not
differentiate between competition by intent and competition by simple
default. Each living form just does the best it can for itself while
remaining unconscious of how other forms are doing in competition
against it. Natural selection is competition by default. This includes
human natural selection. However, capitalist market place competition
can allow individuals to compare their gains/losses on a cognitive
basis. This provides all sorts of problems that do not exist using
competition by default.

MR:
Why wouldn't natural selection allow individuals to compare their
gains/losses on a cognitive basis? Are you suggesting Darwinian
evolution in human beings requires us to be "unconscious" or
"unintelligent of how other forms of life are in competition with us?
Are you suggesting Darwinian evolution in human beings requires us to be
"unconcious" or "unintelligent" of how other humans are in competition
with us? Let's take a likely example from our evolutionary past. Let's
say there is a food shortage and there are two human groups which live
in proximity of each other. One group decides to kill the group except
for their women and steal their food. They accomplish this and in a
primitive way compare their gains/losses on a cognitive basis. They
understand they have made gains. They have eradicated the males of the
rival group, got extra *** and more food. I don't necessarily see any
conflict between competition by intent and competition by default. They
are one in the same.

JE:
Competition by intent can very quickly became politically exploited.
Hitler argued that certain racial types were superior to others because
his fitter types could murder the supposed weaker types. His argument
was group selective and an act of intent (not a Darwinian default act of
individual selection). It did not represent Darwinian logic even if may
have represented Spencerian logic. It took WW2 to prove that Hitler's
"weak" were fitter by default using individual and not group selection.
Man works via his brain and not just via brawn. Even Darwinian strength
lies in a unique human adaptation: trade. Hitler destroyed free markets
and trade so he and his ilk became hopelessly weak compared to those
that didn't.

MR:
I don't believe in Darwinian selection where the selectee is merely a
product of individual selection. That's not to say I dont accept the
validity of individual selection as a result of natural selection but
that there is more at work than just individual selection. It could be
that individual selection and group selection are in someway cross
purposed and nested within each other as apparently David Sloan Wilson
thinks altruism and selfishness are.

JE:
Hitler didn't destroy free markets and trade.

Here's an article:

Report: Neutral nations' trade kept Nazi war machine going
 Spain, Turkey respond to U.S. details on use of looted gold
June 2, 1998
Web posted at: 1:42 p.m. EDT (1742 GMT)
In this story:

Neutral nations traded with Nazis, aided refugees

Key war material sold to Germany
Spain rejects U.S. accusation
Turkey to investigate claims
Related stories and sites

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Neutral nations, while also doing legal business
with World War II Allied forces, played a key role in keeping Nazi
Germany's war machine running by doing business worth hundreds of
millions of dollars, according to a new U.S. government report.

The report -- presented Tuesday by Undersecretary of State for Economics
Stuart Eizenstat -- concludes that although Switzerland was Nazi
Germany's main banker, other neutral nations like Sweden, Portugal,
Spain, Turkey and Argentina provided Nazi Germany with goods and tools.

Although the neutral countries' trade with Germany between 1939 and the
end of the war in 1945 has never been a secret, the new report details
what Nazi Germany bought with the gold which German troops looted from
the central banks of occupied nations and confiscated from Holocaust
victims.

"The cumulative trade of the World War II European neutral countries
helped to sustain the Nazi war effort by supplying key materials to
Germany essential to their conduct of the war," Eizenstat said.

In many cases, the neutral nations, which also traded with the Allies
and said they feared a Nazi invasion if they cut off German supplies,
continued helping the Nazis until near the end of the war.

"In many cases well past the point where, from the Allied perspective at
the time, there was a genuine threat of German attack," Eizenstat added.

Neutral nations traded with Nazis, aided refugees

Despite the record of economic Nazi succor, the U.S. report said, the
neutral nations at the same time helped refugees escape almost certain
death in concentration camps where 6 million Jews were exterminated.

Excerpts from Eizenstat's presentation of the
report

"Our most significant finding..."
"The Swiss National Bank must have known..."
Spain helped 30,000-40,000 refugees; Portugal allowed 5,000 to pass
through to America; Sweden saved 7,000 Danish Jews and 20,000-30,000 in
Hungary; Turkey helped 100,000 flee; and Argentina accepted
25,000-45,000 Jews, the most of any Western nation during the war.

The United States accepted only 21,000 Jewish refugees during the war,
without significantly raising or even filling quotas.

"America's response to the early stages of the slaughter of European
Jews was largely one of indifference," said Eizenstat, who heads the
U.S. government team reassessing wartime actions.

Key war material sold to Germany
According to the report:

Sweden, one of Germany's largest World War II trading partners, supplied
iron ore and ball bearings.

Portugal and Spain provided nearly all of Germany's tungsten, used to
produce weapons-grade steel.

In some years, Turkey provided 100 percent of Germany's chromite, used
to harden steel to make armor.

Argentina also did business in wartime goods but was most helpful as a
Nazi sympathizer.
In all, those five neutral countries handled $500 million in assets for
the German government and its citizens during the war and dealt in $300
million in looted gold, the report said. That would be $7 billion in
today's dollars.

Assets included those from war trade and from private individuals and
companies that held foreign bank accounts.

In this context, Eizenstat welcomed the recently published findings of a
Swiss government report which said that Switzerland's central bank --
the biggest buyer of gold from Nazi Germany -- made no effort until late
in the war to ensure it was not getting gold stolen from Holocaust
victims.

Spain rejects U.S. accusation

Spain denied the allegations that the country, then led by dictator Gen.
Francisco Franco, sold war material to Adolf Hitler in exchange for gold
stolen from Jewish victims.
"Spain did not launder Nazi gold stolen or looted from the Jews,"
Foreign Minister Abel Matutes said in response to the Eizenstat report.

Matutes said Spain stood by its investigation into the issue that
confirmed the country acted correctly in its business dealings with Nazi
Germany.

Turkey to investigate claims

Turkey said Tuesday it was ready to investigate allegations that it
received wealth looted from Jews during World War II in payment for war
supplies to the Nazis.

A recent U.S. government report, which was part of the report presented
by Eizenstat Tuesday, concluded that $300 million in looted gold,
estimated to be worth $2.6 billion today, was routed through Switzerland
to pay Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Turkey for German supplies and
armaments.

"Turkey has nothing to hide," Foreign Ministry spokesman Necati Utkan
told reporters.
He said a commission headed by a state minister would investigate.

Correspondent Jerrold Kessel and the Associated Press contributed to
this report.

Bowler Quote:
Evolution without Darwin the most extreme reaction against Darwinism is
the Fundamentalist return to the Genesis creation story. But some
evolutionists reject the Victorian emphasis on struggle. Many early
twentieth-century thinkers insisted that the Victorians had been blinded
by the ideology of competition. Nature was not dominated by struggle,
and progressed by developing increasing levels of cooperation. the
author Samuel Butler dismissed Darwinsm as a "nightmare of waste and
death," while the playwrite Bernard Shaw wrote that if the selection
theory were true "only fools and rascals could bear to live." their
revulsion is shared by many modern opponents of the selection theory who
find its emphasis on trial and error impossible to square with the
development of purposeful structures. Butler and Shaw both saw
Lamarckism as the most plausible alternative -- but in the 1920s
Lamarckism was eliminated from science by modern genetics.

JE:-
Cooperation and competition are complimentary and not contradictory
logics within Darwinism. To this very day Darwinian fitness
mutualisation has not been properly identified. Historically this has
led to a false dichotomy rooted in hopeless political rhetoric:
"altruism" Vs "selfishness" which has been incorrectly justified using
Hamilton et al for over 50 years.

MR:
Unlike you John I think there are many things about Darwinian evolution
which are not complementary, rational or well understood. Take genocide
for example which has existed in human evolutionary history thousands of
years ago to the recent present. Now some folk can seek to provide
social, economic and political explanations for such phenomena but at
the bottom level the social, economic and political are dimensions of
our biology. In other words, there is a Darwinian basis for genocide.
Obviously, Darwinian evolution is much more complex than this but that
is one of the things it includes.

You write, "To this very day Darwinian fitness mutualisation has not
been properly identified. Historically this has led to a false dichotomy
rooted in hopeless political rhetoric: "altruism" Vs "selfishness" which
has been incorrectly justified using Hamilton et al for over 50 years."
Can you properly identify Darwinian fitness mutualization? I don't think
you can. If you could then maybe you could shed some light on the
relationship between altruism and selfishness. Are they one and the same
thing? If so how? Are they mutually exclusive? If so, under what
conditions. How do they possibly interact with each other?
 

Bowler Quote:
the Rise of Genetics Darwin's theory was surprisingly modern except in
his ideas about variation and heredity. the notion of the unit gene was
popularized soon after 1900 and showed that characters are inherited as
undiluted units.

JE;-
The view that each gene represents an independent unit of selection
within Darwinism is entirely false. Darwinian units of selection are
fertile forms within which genomic genes can only be _dependently_
selected. This means genes are selected at the fertile organism level of
selection and not at a heuristic gene level of selection. The gene
centric view is just a misused model of Darwinian absolute fitness.

Bowler Quote:
Lamarckism was discredited because the genes cannot be influenced by the
body carrying them. After some controversy, it was realized that genetic
mutation provided a new explanation of the random variation that Darwin
saw in every population. With Lamarckism gone, the genetical theory of
natural selection emerged in the 1930s and 40s, explaining adaptive
evolution in terms of the changing genetic composition of populations.
Many biologists now regard the synthesis of Darwinism and genetics as
the only plausible explanation of evolution.

JE:-
Darwin's fertile organism unit of selection has not been properly joined
to Mendel's gene unit of inheritance. Neo Darwinism has misused gene
centric models of fitness to the extent that random processes are now
claimed to cause evolutionary changes on their own (without any non
random process such as selection). This view reduces evolution to the
status of a non refutable theory of nature on a par with "creation
science".

MR:
The above mentioned mutation as a cause of random variation. It has been
mentioned that genetic drift and natural selection aren't necessarily
incompatible. I don't believe random processes cause evolutionary
changes on their own without selection. But I could be wrong here. I'm
not a biologist. Let's just say I don't think random processes such as
genetic drift can cause "signifigant" evolutionary changes on their own
without selection. For the record, however, I've maintained all along in
this newsgroup that Darwinian evolution (both random processes and
selection) is to glacially slow to adapt us to our current environment
and have stressed the necessity of genetically engineering our species
in the future.

Bowler Quote:
Genetic Determinism the development of genetics coincided with a
strongly articulated social policy based on the view that heredity
determines human characters. In the early twentieth century, many
countries (not just Nazi Germany) had policies to restrict the breeding
of the "unfit," often by compulsory sterilization. Artificial selection
replaced natural selection in the human population -- the social policy
known as eugenics. But who decides which characters are desirable? After
the excesses of the Nazi regime, eugenics went underground, but our
modern fascination with genes as the determinants of human characters
may be reintroducing it through the back door.

JE;-
The error has always been the deletion of genetic epistasis as valid
heritable information. Individual fitness is not just the simple sum of
each individual genomic genes fitness. Both Fisher (a population
genetics founding father) and Muller (the discover of mutation) were
right wing bigots. It politically suited them to argue that individual
genes have a fitness in their own right because they could then label
individuals with certain genes as "inferior". This paved the way for
Hitler's racism.

MR:
As you've been informed before there are scientists who are working on
genetic epistatic models but the results are very preliminary. When you
are talking about genetic epistasis you are most likely talking about
things like canalization, genetic assimilation, etc. and we currently
still don't know much about these things. It's not so much the deletion
of genetic epistasis as valid heritable information as it is an
incredible lack of knowledge about it. I agree individual fitness is not
just the simple sum of each individual genomic genes fitness. But then
you get into the debate over reductionism and emergence. How can higher
levels of organization be explained by the lower parts of organization.
So far there isn't a satisfactory answer although theories of
self-organization try to fill the gap. My own view is it will take the
coalescense of many fields of physics, biology, etc. over a long time to
accumulate enough knowledge to the point where we can finally piece
together the relationships between altruism and selfishness, genecentric
and genetic epistasis, individual selection and group selection,
emergence and reductionism, etc. In fact, although we have acquired some
knowlege there seem to be so many opposing schools in science none of
which by themselves is probably totally right. Maybe this will always be
the way it is but I think once we learn much more about the universe and
especially ourselves there will be more holism in science than currently
exists.

JE:
However, all genomic genes are known to be selected, together i.e. they
are dependently and not independently selected. What Fisher and Muller
did was to attempt to delete genetic epistasis (non additive
information) as non heritable and thus non selectable, information.
Haldane (another population genetics founding father) created his famous
"dilemma": not enough time existed to evolve a chimp and man from a
common ancestor if heritable information is restricted to additive
genetic information as Fisher defined it. Haldane envisaged an very
large additive human genome. It turns out that the human genome is tiny,
just 30-40,000 genes. The only possible way to explain millions of
heritable phenotypes is by including and not excluding genetic epistasis
(non additive genomic gene information) as heritable and thus
selectable, information.

MR:
Could you expand on what you mean by non-additive heritable selectable
information? Are you referring to canalization and genetic assimilation?
How would such information be selectable and responsible for the
millions of heritable phenotypes?

JE:
Muller's discovery of mutation was misused to the extent that it
replaced selection as an evolutionary force for a period of time. Today
exactly the same error is being made with random sampling error.

Bowler Quote:
Sociobiology the most controversial aspect of modern Darwinism links the
genetic determination of human character to natural selection as the
explanation of behavioural instincts. Richard Dawkins and others insist
that natural selection explains not only the devleopment of animals
species, but also the development of the human mind. Sociobiology, based
on what Dawkins calls the "selfish gene", accounts for animal behaviour
in terms of genetically programmed instincts shaped by natural
selection. Many Darwinians insist that this programme can be applied to
human behaviour: we are what our genes determine us to be. Most social
scientists resist this, arguing that the human brain (admittedly
developed by evolution) has acquired a capacity to learn from experience
so strong that it overrides all but the most basic biological instincts.
Unlike the nineteenth-century version, modern "social Darwinism" really
is based on Darwinian natural selection, coupled with a strong (but
highly controversial) faith in the power of the genes to determine human
nature.

JE:-
The above is false. Sociobiology and
"Dawkinsism" are only based on a misuse of Hamilton's rule. The
Darwinian fitness maximand has not been properly identified let alone
correctly joined to Mendel's genes. The purely pragmatic gene centric
view of today's Neo Darwinism only reflect a backlash against the right
wing bigotry of Muller Fisher etc. Today it is the turn of the left wing
bigots to destroy evolutionary theory. Today organism fitness altruism
and not organism fitness selfishness entirely dominates evolutionary
theory. What in fact has always dominated evolutionary theory is
UNIDENTIFIED organism fitness mutualism.

MR:
I don't know. I think we can all agree Darwin's theories are sound but
they contributed to Social Darwinism. Whether one wants to believe
Social Darwinism was an accurate reflection of Darwinism is up to them.
In a similar vein there are some sociobiologists and evolutionary
psychologists who have a social, political and ideological axe to grind
much as the Social Darwinists did. Because of the times we live in they
are not as blatant and the movement hasn't picked up the steam the
Social Darwinist movement did. But it could. Folks like Rushton,
MacDonald, Jensen, Murray and innumerable others have a strong influence
on certain segments of the population. Scientists seek to explain human
behavior but one falls into the trap of the naturalistic fallacy by
declaring such human behaviors e.g. aggression, war, rape, eliminating
the mentally and physically defective, genocide, etc. are evolutionarily
adaptive, "good" or "morally right". There are some sociobiologists who
state this is human nature and therefore there is nothing wrong with it
and it should not be avoided. All the aforementioned "scientists" either
paint other "racial" groups as genetically inferior based on IQ
standards or like MacDonald blacken Judaism and Jews by positing their
so-called evolutionary survival mechanisms against Gentiles. Again, its
not as blatant as Social Darwinism was but the message is essentially
the same.

big snip<
Regards,
John Edser
Independent Researcher
PO Box 266
Church Pt
NSW 2105
Australia

"It's uncertain whether intelligence has any long term survival value.
Bacteria do quite well without it."
 Stephen Hawking

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