1 July 2022

Evolving (part 3) - scientific and natural

Parts 1 & 2 of the Evolving series explored our everyday use of the words evolve and evolution. 

We¹ have rather strange ways of talking about how biological evolution works. When we talk about life-forms evolving, we imbue a random, undirected, aimless process (Darwin's 'descent with modification') with agency, intention and purpose (part 1). We tell stories of change, and of life progressing and improving. 

When we tell 'evolution stories' (with agents and purpose), we add moral judgements about improvement. We meld the two contradictory dictionary meanings of evolution into a hybrid² concept of 'descent with modification (technical meaning) toward improvement and a better state (non-technical meaning)'. This sits behind many moral judgements about the 'value' of various life forms, particularly about non-human animals, e.g. saying that humans are the pinnacle of evolution (part 2).

Our 'stories' of evolution work more like metaphor - a simplifying shortcut - than being an accurate description.

This story of 'evolving' and improving is now the dominant way that we understand the world - not limited to explaining biodiversity (as Darwin intended his theory). We refer to societies, cultures, ideas, businesses, technology, musicians, language (and more) as evolving. 

And that leads to some very dangerous ideas. 

Darwin didn't mention 'progress' because it's not a scientific concept

In part 2, I pointed out that at the time Darwin published On the origin of species, the words evolve and evolution were already imbued with all the expectations and needs that humans have to understand change as purposeful. The words encapsulated the Enlightenment belief in the ongoing progress of life toward higher states (a rather religious looking secular claim!). That's why Darwin didn't use those words to describe his ideas. 

But others soon rebranded Darwin's 'descent with modification' with the words evolving and evolution. This allowed people³ to accept his ideas without changing their beliefs about the value of various life forms (including human ascendency), and assumptions about progress toward 'higher' lifeforms. None of which fit with Darwin's theory. 

And it caught on. In fact, Darwin's work provided a 'sciencey' explanation for the existing belief in 'progress'. Soon, the dominant story of life became the story of 'evolution as progress'.³ ⁴

That sounds okay - improving and progress is good, right? Except that such concepts involve moral judgements, for example, 'lower' versus 'higher' lifeforms. It also entails making moral judgements about people and societies: 'bad' versus 'good' societies, and 'better' breeds of people. 

Moral statements about progress are based on subjective, personal, or culturally specific ideas about what is good and bad (for example). A moral judgement starts from such an idea and then finds and interprets or distorts the evidence to justify it (the opposite of Darwin's approach). 

Applying evolution to individual people

Darwin's theory was quickly pressed into service as a seemingly 'science-based' explanation for some prevailing values about which humans were better than others. This idea was proposed, unsurprisingly, by those who considered themselves the superior folk.

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was one of the first to interpret 'descent with modification' as the basis of all progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. (Just because you're a polymath, doesn't make you right!)

But he went further. Spencer suggested evolution was also the process by which humanity would continually improve, and the natural mechanisms described by Darwin resulted in progress toward the ultimate development of the perfect human in the perfect society. 

It was Spencer who coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest', in a speech to parliament in 1852 (seven years before publication of On the Origin of Species, using the ideas being widely and furiously debated in the lead up to the publication). When Spencer was talking about the 'fittest', he was referring to people in mid-19th century Britain. He used the concepts underpinning (his mis-interpretation of) evolution to insist that people in poverty should not be assisted. He thought this would hinder the perfectibility of humans.

This opens the door to the generally nasty idea called 'social Darwinism'. (Oh, leave Charles out of this, will you!) Based on the belief that humanity was on a path of continual improvement, evolution was misused to justify that certain humans (and certain races) were superior to others; they were 'more evolved' (always done so by the superior 'races' again, strange that!). 

Along these lines, Frances Galton (Darwin's cousin) promoted the idea that it was important to stop 'inferior' people breeding. He founded the 'science' of eugenics - the idea that humanity can be improved by selective breeding - which led to horrendous and inhumane actions against various people (racial cleansing in the Nazi Holocaust and compulsory sterilisation of certain groups of women as recently as the 1970s being just two examples). 

The misuse of Darwin's ideas when applied to people is a very complex topic, and I have just glossed over the surface. 

For Wordly Explorations, the main point is that from Darwin's time to the present day, a distorted hybrid definition of evolving and evolution has been used to provide a sciencey veneer over moral judgements about other people.

Spencer (and many others) was blind to the many moral judgements in his views. The most dangerous implication of these ideas was that inequality and suffering is a natural part of the natural 'evolutionary' processes.   

Evolution is natural, right?

Some very human factors (covered in parts 1 and 2) are behind this misuse of evolutionary theory as an 'explanatory story' that justifies moral judgements. Those human factors include our shared human need to impute agency and purpose (i.e. improvement) in change, our deep need to see patterns and logical reasons in the world around us (including 'reasons' for poverty), and our tendency to rely on explanatory stories to understand the world. We tell ourselves 'evolution stories' with agency, intention, purpose, and usually morality. 

But we think of evolution as a science, and that evolution is nature doing its thing, and you can't argue with ideas based on science and nature, right? 

Not for the first time, we see a religious concept - 'all things are ordained by god' - persisting into a supposedly secular concept - 'the way things are is the natural result of evolution'. Both imply that 'the way things are' cannot be changed. 

The implications of this view are scary. If all life forms are on a path to perfection, those who are not human (unquestionably the highest state!) are inferior beings, right? And amongst humans, 'higher' status is a result of natural scientific processes and being more 'evolved'. This thinking allows wealthy folk to call on (their distortions of) evolutionary theory to take credit for their own wealth and social status (more evolved obviously!), to blame people experiencing poverty or suffering for their plight (clearly less evolved), and to discount the experience and even existence of 'lesser' peoples from 'other' cultures (way less evolved). 

A scientific and perfectly natural position, right?

Actually, it's an opportunistic distortion of a theory that said nothing of the sort.⁵

But you can't argue about 'the way things are' if they are natural and scientific. If evolution is natural and scientific, therefore poverty, suffering, inequality, dispossession, disenfranchisement, illness, etc. can be considered as natural parts of the evolutionary processes. 

It's obvious there is a moral overlay in any use of evolution when talking about people or groups of people. I find it an ugly morality. 

Stories of evolutionary progress take over human thought

Fairly soon after Darwin's work was published, the concepts of natural and scientific progress integrated into the distorted hybrid understanding of evolution became the only way to understand the world.

From the mid-1800s, many areas of human thought started from the assumption that 'time passing equals progress' and evolution is the natural mechanism to achieve improvement and growth.⁶ 

As I raised in part 2, this leads to teleological thinking - projecting backwards from now as the 'destination' of development, to determine how life forms (and non-living things such as societies) have 'evolved' to achieve their current 'higher state'. Our story of inevitable progress is captured in a (fairly) straight, one directional line from a lower state, through improvement, to a higher state.

The Enlightenment belief in choice-based, purposeful and natural progress was so powerful and attractive, it survived Darwin's ground-breaking work that directly contradicted it. The 'progress story' just incorporated and distorted his ideas until they fit. 

But worse, it provided this belief with a scientific veneer.

Casting back from now along that 'straight line' 

From the 19th century, those working in archaeology, anthropology, history, sociology, cultural linguistics, etc., started with this belief in a straight line of progress and improvement, and looked for evidence to fit into this belief. And, unsurprisingly, they 'found' it. 

This is a complex process to unpick, but luckily Graeber and Wengrow just wrote a book⁷ summarising this assumption in archaeology and anthropology, which serves as a good example.

They show how this unacknowledged underlying belief in 'evolutionary progress' has lead to mis-interpreting evidence or ignoring it if it didn't fit. 

Archaeology is full of such stories of misinterpreting data to fit the assumptions held by the person doing the interpreting. The predominantly white male archaeologists in the 1800s just projected backwards from their current social situation based on their prevailing values and assumptions.⁸

For example, a broadly held assumption was that in ancient societies, the natural human state - dictated by genetics - was 'man' the hunter/warrior, 'woman' the gatherer/homemaker. But this assumption is a mirror of 19th century upper class Western society and its prevailing social values. Assuming that human development had 'evolved' in a line to the current (natural and superior!) situation, anthropologists (and others) interpreted all the evidence they found to fit this assumption. For example, in the 1800s, archaeologists assumed a Viking warrior was male because of the presence of weapons in the burial site, until contemporary DNA evidence demonstrated the warrior was female. 

The evidence has changed, but the 'stories of evolutionary progress' long told based on its misinterpretation are embedded in our understanding of the ancient world.

There is no 'straight line of progress' 

Graeber and Wengrow debunk the idea of a 'straight line of progress': the various theories of simple-to-complex stages of human cultural development. They provide extensive evidence that human societies have not 'evolved' in a straight unidirectional line from 'lower states' (savagery, barbarism) to 'higher states' (villages, cities). And they explain that not only are the categories of 'low' and 'high' entirely subjective, the idea that 'higher' equals 'larger' equals 'more structural complexity' and this equals 'better' is also a subjective judgement. 

The assumption of a line of development from 'lower' to 'higher' forms is found across human thought. Marxist thinkers around this same time proposed steps in progress for forms of domination 'evolving' from primitive communism towards slavery, feudalism and capitalism, with the next step of evolution to be socialism. Political thinking also had its assumed steps in 'evolutionary' progress, from autocracies ('low' states) along a line that ends with liberal democracy as the 'highest' form of the state, allowing the greatest prosperity, personal liberty and wellbeing. 

It's everywhere once you notice it. 

Remember that Kant said such teleological thinking was supposed to be a helpful metaphor for thinking - a shorthand to simplify complex ideas. Well I don't think it's been helpful at all. 

The story of natural and scientific 'evolutionary progress' along a straight line to the present has been misleading and limiting, as well as damaging and dehumanising. This thinking allowed Europeans to justify colonialism, exploitation, and expansionism to liberate and 'improve' other 'backward' 'less evolved' cultures. It provided a 'scientific' argument for the oppression of women and children by men. And more. 

And it's still with us.

Looking for equivalents to genes, selection and inheritance

While useful to explain biodiversity, evolution ('descent with modification') does not provide a good template or metaphor for human social and cultural changes. 

But that hasn't stopped the people trying to use it. 

In many areas of thought, social theorists have proposed various 'social' equivalents to the three key 'biological' components in Darwin's theory of 'descent with modification' - variation in genes, competition (or selection), and inheritance. This has limited academic thought to describing cultural change with their three analogous components, and adopting Darwinian methods, tools and concepts to explain diversity and complexity in cultural systems.

For example, as an analogy for genes, Richard Dawkins proposed the concept of memes as 'units of culture' (ideas, beliefs, patterns of behaviour, etc.) that are passed on through 'cultural evolution'. It's a particularly weak theory with no clarity about what is and isn't a meme, there's no natural selection for continuation (rather there is personal preference and social connections), and there's no clear mechanism for transmission or 'inheritance' (with genetic inheritance entirely different from learning). Dawkins later distanced himself from the idea, but the point is, the belief that evolution is THE way to explain everything, in this case cultural change, inspired him to come up with a unit analogous to a 'gene'. 

Really, it was nothing more than thought experiment, based on a dubious assumption, not based on evidence, and not credible as a theory of social change. Examples like this infect so many all areas of human thought. 

What it shows is that if we expect one story, if we believe we will find 'cultural progress through evolution', then we will interpret or create things to support that story. We fall into myth-making. We look at historical evidence from our contemporary position with a teleological assumption that the whole purpose was to get to now. We look at anthropological, history, social change, etc., and interpret it through the filters of the moral values that we currently hold. 

Even as a metaphor, evolution is not a helpful way to understand social and cultural change.

It's a metaphor gone mad. 

Societies do change, but not by evolutionary mechanisms 

So, how like biological evolution is cultural change. Not at all really. In fact it's a completely wrong concept, a metaphor looking for evidence, a set of values looking for a scientific justification. Human behaviour, motivations, needs, relationships and idiosyncrasies are all factors in social changes; these are all goal-orientated mechanisms.⁹ Our ideas of social and cultural 'progress' are entirely subjective.

By using the words evolve and evolution, we insinuate that existing social relationships and strata are only natural, and any change must be progress toward the 'higher' order of things. 

Sure, it's worth studying social change, archaeology, history, human behaviour and social interactions, etc. It's worth trying to understand how current social structures came to be, but it's not at all scientific to use teleological thinking about 'evolutionary progress', interpret the evidence to fit, and end up justifying Western patriarchal liberal democracy as the pinnacle of social 'evolution'. 

The least we could do is stop besmirching Darwin with terms like 'social Darwinism' or claiming that 'evolution' allows a scientific understanding of our present 'natural' situation which is unable to be contested. 

Not sciencing, moralising

In summary, we¹ think we are scientifically reasoning about evolutionary progress, when largely we are moralising.

The story (not told by Darwin) that life forms change over time through natural mechanisms to become higher life forms ('time-as-progress') has become a set of blinkers, a filter through which we see and interpret change in the  biological world, but also through which we interpret other change as well - cultural, social and individual. 

This filter carries moral values. We use the word evolution as a proxy for 'natural', 'scientific' but also 'progress', 'improvement' and 'better'. The assumption of 'evolutionary progress' means that the tools of reason and evidence are distorted. Reason and evidence do not inevitably lead to the view that human social arrangements are determined by inherited genetic factors, a sort of biological-cultural determinism.¹º 

Evolution and evolving are words with a distorted hybrid meaning - a specific technical meaning loaded with a whole lot of values and assumptions to provide a 'sciencey' justification for any number of moral judgements about people and about the world. 

To me, this is the source of many problems in human thought. 

Does language evolve?

So, I try to restrict myself to using evolution in the meaning of Darwin's 'descent with modification' - a random, aimless, unpredictably, non-goal orientated set of processes that result in the most amazing diversity of life on earth. 

If ever I find myself using the words evolution or evolving to imply something is natural, scientific, deterministic, improving or progressing, I pull myself up and examine what I am assuming.  

Source: SMBC

That might be all that can be done. Although... just because the words evolution and evolving have this meaning now, doesn’t mean it's fixed and unchangeable. Perhaps this is part of the evolution of language, lol. 😁😉😏😜

Which brings me back to my starting point (some months ago now): now that I understand more about the words evolution and evolve, what does it mean to say that language evolves? Is the evolution metaphor wrong there too? 

In the final part of this series, I will explore how we talk about the evolution of language.  


Footnotes

  1. I need to repeat: my area of exploration is the everyday use of words and what they reveal about humans; I'm not commenting on scientific use. I'm definitely not asserting that evolutionary biologists talk like this, but I have noticed many evolutionary psychologists sure do!!
  2. Pun intended: A hybrid is an offspring of two animals or plants of different subspecies, breeds, varieties, species, or genera. 
  3. Well, Western white people anyway. I can't comment beyond that. 
  4. As an aside, this thinking sits behind the assumption that economic growth is always good, and that inequality is not a concern as long as there is overall economic improvement for a society. This dangerous assumption feeds destructive forces justifying endless economic growth and 'progress.'
  5. It's actually a very old set of thoughts: bolstering that belief in human ascendency while justifying and retaining one's own benefits and privilege in life. 
  6. It is so pervasive, at least one reader might call this a 'grand narrative' - an overarching story of why things are the way they are.
  7. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, is a 2021 book by anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow. It was first published in the United Kingdom on 19 October 2021 by Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin Books). 
  8. The word for the automatic and ubiquitous belief in 'evolutionary progress' is evolutionism - the 'ism' pointing to this unacknowledged and teleological belief. It is used as a criticism. A different meaning is that used by creationists to describe adherence to the scientific consensus on evolution as equivalent to a secular religion. 
  9. Too much to say here but cultural change is way more complex, way more varied, and way more interesting than biological evolution, but I'd have to write way too much to explain exactly how. All I can say is the evolution metaphor is confusing and misleading and basically wrong.
  10. Biological determinism is the idea that most human characteristics, physical and mental, are determined at conception by genetic hereditary factors passed from parent to offspring.
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