ApostateAbe
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2002
- Messages
- 1,299
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Basic Beliefs
- Infotheist. I believe the gods to be mere information.
Self-described progressive thinkers tend to take themselves to be Darwinists. This is not quite right. They accept Darwin's theory of evolution, sure, but with a key exception: they don't accept Darwinism as it relates to human psychology. On this application, they are insistent on involving the theory of evolution as little as possible. So, it is misleading to call them Darwinists, for their progenitor is not so much Darwin, but it is Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-originator alongside Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Modern progressive thinkers are not true Darwinists but Wallacists.
Though Wallace generally agreed with Darwin about the general explanation of life, Wallace was compelled to split with Darwin on the matter of human psychology, in his 1870 article titled, "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man." He argued that natural selection could not sufficiently explain the higher mental powers of humans, including forming abstract ideas, carrying on complex trains of reasoning, continual foresight of contingencies, law, government, science, and the game of chess, as all of these mental powers were well beyond what is needed for survival. Most puzzlingly, he even dismissed the explanatory relevance of sexual selection, which was Darwin's preferred explanation for the high mental powers of humans, as expressed in his 1871 book "Descent of Man." Darwin proposed that females tended to sexually select the more intelligent males, for a runaway process much like what produced the peacock's tail. But, no, Wallace instead thought that humanity's higher mental powers are best explained through "some intelligent power," that "a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction." Wallace later insisted that he was NOT referring to God. Perhaps he considered outer-space aliens as a possibility, but he left it ambiguous. His main point was that natural selection did NOT serve as a good explanation.
One way or the other, Wallace finds common ground with the modern Wallacists. The Wallacists don't know exactly what accounts for the high psychological powers of people on average, nor what would account for differences in psychological powers either within groups or among groups, things considered easy questions for full Darwinists. The Wallacists can agree only on leaving genetics out of the equation entirely.
Wallacists include the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, author of The Mismeasure of Man, which blasted the whole science of intelligence (IQ) for its "biological determinism," "innateness," "inborn biology," "reification" of an adjective, and "racism." Another such successor includes Richard Lewontin, whose biological perspective was so anti-racist that he strongly discouraged even the hypothesis that the selective forces of skin cancer and Vitamin D affected racial skin color variations, as such hypotheses are mere "stories." The slur of "just so stories" has become a favorite slur against evolutionary biology, a slur intended to nip uncomfortable hypotheses in the bud. In 1975, Lewontin and Gould co-signed a denunciation of Wilson's newly-proposed "sociobiology" theory, which they expressed as the "primacy of natural selection in determining most important characteristics of human behavior." Among many other problems, they claimed, such a theory provides a basis "for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany."
This Wallacist perspective was mainstream among liberals in their own time and remains mainstream today, not just among liberals but among almost everyone. Among popular discussions of the most hated criminals, such as mass shooters, there are many proposed causes of such criminal behavior: he was abused as a child, he was neglected as a child, he was raised Christian, he was raised non-Christian, he was corrupted by public schools, he played violent video games, he got sucked into an ideology, he took drugs, he loved guns, he hated people, he was just lonely and miserable. At no point have you ever heard that maybe a large part of the influence came from the genes he inherited from his parents nine months before birth. And yet we absolutely know, from heritability studies, that 50% of criminal variants absolutely must be accounted for by genetic variants, a certain fact that has been corroborated through split-twin studies, adoption studies, and family pairings of every sort, time and time again. 50%, yes, but, since Wallacism is mainstream and true Darwinism is taboo, approximately 0% of this point makes it into the public discourse. It is much the same with public discussions of other psychological traits, such as intelligence, addiction, sex drive, and personality types, all established to be highly heritable traits.
So, if you think of yourself as a Darwinist, maybe you are actually a Wallacist.
Though Wallace generally agreed with Darwin about the general explanation of life, Wallace was compelled to split with Darwin on the matter of human psychology, in his 1870 article titled, "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man." He argued that natural selection could not sufficiently explain the higher mental powers of humans, including forming abstract ideas, carrying on complex trains of reasoning, continual foresight of contingencies, law, government, science, and the game of chess, as all of these mental powers were well beyond what is needed for survival. Most puzzlingly, he even dismissed the explanatory relevance of sexual selection, which was Darwin's preferred explanation for the high mental powers of humans, as expressed in his 1871 book "Descent of Man." Darwin proposed that females tended to sexually select the more intelligent males, for a runaway process much like what produced the peacock's tail. But, no, Wallace instead thought that humanity's higher mental powers are best explained through "some intelligent power," that "a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction." Wallace later insisted that he was NOT referring to God. Perhaps he considered outer-space aliens as a possibility, but he left it ambiguous. His main point was that natural selection did NOT serve as a good explanation.
One way or the other, Wallace finds common ground with the modern Wallacists. The Wallacists don't know exactly what accounts for the high psychological powers of people on average, nor what would account for differences in psychological powers either within groups or among groups, things considered easy questions for full Darwinists. The Wallacists can agree only on leaving genetics out of the equation entirely.
Wallacists include the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, author of The Mismeasure of Man, which blasted the whole science of intelligence (IQ) for its "biological determinism," "innateness," "inborn biology," "reification" of an adjective, and "racism." Another such successor includes Richard Lewontin, whose biological perspective was so anti-racist that he strongly discouraged even the hypothesis that the selective forces of skin cancer and Vitamin D affected racial skin color variations, as such hypotheses are mere "stories." The slur of "just so stories" has become a favorite slur against evolutionary biology, a slur intended to nip uncomfortable hypotheses in the bud. In 1975, Lewontin and Gould co-signed a denunciation of Wilson's newly-proposed "sociobiology" theory, which they expressed as the "primacy of natural selection in determining most important characteristics of human behavior." Among many other problems, they claimed, such a theory provides a basis "for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany."
This Wallacist perspective was mainstream among liberals in their own time and remains mainstream today, not just among liberals but among almost everyone. Among popular discussions of the most hated criminals, such as mass shooters, there are many proposed causes of such criminal behavior: he was abused as a child, he was neglected as a child, he was raised Christian, he was raised non-Christian, he was corrupted by public schools, he played violent video games, he got sucked into an ideology, he took drugs, he loved guns, he hated people, he was just lonely and miserable. At no point have you ever heard that maybe a large part of the influence came from the genes he inherited from his parents nine months before birth. And yet we absolutely know, from heritability studies, that 50% of criminal variants absolutely must be accounted for by genetic variants, a certain fact that has been corroborated through split-twin studies, adoption studies, and family pairings of every sort, time and time again. 50%, yes, but, since Wallacism is mainstream and true Darwinism is taboo, approximately 0% of this point makes it into the public discourse. It is much the same with public discussions of other psychological traits, such as intelligence, addiction, sex drive, and personality types, all established to be highly heritable traits.
So, if you think of yourself as a Darwinist, maybe you are actually a Wallacist.
