A Bit More Darwin

1. Thanks to Ivan the K, John Murley and the other people at RIT for a great time. The large audience was very attentive, and the questions were both smart and respectful. One student did try to explain our anxious experience of existing for a moment between two abysses—which I brought up as an obvious limit on the Darwinian claim that we’re wholly at home in nature—as caused by some hunter gatherer dilemma. Even if that we’re true, the account of origins wouldn’t make the experience of contingency any less real or any less contingent. That one reason why it’s not that important to me whether or not evolution happened (I don’t think our species has evolved at all since it emerged). I assume evolution did happen, but I judge Darwinian explanations of our behavior according to what I can see with my own eyes these days. I’m generally not particularly impressed.

2. In response to the comment below about Darwinianism emerging as part of the modern perception that nature is nothing but material to be subjected to our conscious manipulation, I would say that, although many have employed Darwin in that spirit, Darwinian Larry is right that the truest use of Darwin is against our modern perception that the “I” is free from nature. We’re stuck with being natural beings, and so we’re stuck with virtue. The surest route to happiness and “completion” is through attentive deliberation about how to satisfy best the desires we’ve been given by (evolved) nature. Darwin, of course, has a unrealistically flattened view of who we are by nature, and so he can’t convince we who have a consciousness of our personal freedom and personal EROS that what we’ve been given by nature is good enough.

3. Contrary to what you might think, I was surely more pro-dolphin that Larry. Although I said (as a point of provocation) that the (ontological) distance between me and a dolphin is greater than between a dolphin and rock, I still endorsed, in the spirit of environmentalism, our conscious and willful decision to keep dolphins around. One strange (and both good and bad) thing about Larry’s Darwinian conservatism is its total absence of environmentalism. E.O Wilson, meanwhile, is a pretty paranoid environmentalist, because he’s given a lot of thought about what we can do to non-conscious and non-volitional nature with our conscious and volitional evolution. Larry seems to have a lot of confidence that (evolved) nature can take care of itself against all our illusory efforts at techno-liberation.

More on Darwin, Christianity, and the Puritans soon.