Re: Darwinism--Hume, Kant, and design

[nemonemini@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I am completely open to suggestions about otherwise interpreting
Hume's views on biology and--evolution (?). Wait, the fact of
evolution was still not entirely clear in the period indicated,
although within a generation it would be Lamarck who would put forth
the first real theory of evolution, with a mechanism we now don't
accept. He is deepsixed now because we assume Darwin   found the real
mechanism of evolution (and also at the time because of his radical
reputation in the French Revolution. Darwin was good at playing the
conservative 'whig' note that made the theory take off). Hume's views
would require careful study, as you note. But I think that they both
stumbled in the direction Stuart Kauffman has resurrected: not only
chance, but 'causality', applied to biological explanation. That is,
what 'causes' life, and so on. It looks like chance as explanation
answers that question, but actually it just avoids it.

Hume  seem to have had intuitions about 'self-organization and
vegetation', i.e. he along with Kant can see that life requires a
novel explanation in the wake of Newton, yet within the bounds of
science, and this has problems as seen in the fallacy, we suspect
strongly, of design arguments, etc...
 To say that Hume then considered natural selection seems to me
ambiguous and I doubt if they both would have automatically assented
to anything like natural selection for it is not intuitive that pure
chance can produce evolution!!!! Only after a century and a half of
Darwinism do we take that for granted. It is worth considering that
the debate over chance, law, and design occurred first in physics in
the century of Newton, and even in Newton there are still divine
inputs, and the 'will' is allowed to violate the law of conservation.
These people were thinking the basics as to the whole, we seem to
have lost that ability. Newton's point is fundamental. How the blazes
do you fit man into this new physics? This is not quite the same as
current debates over free will and physics. We simply assume its all
naturalistic in a special reductionist sense, dish out research
funds, and do over and over the nineteenth century bumper car routine
between the naturwissenschaft and geistewissenschaft. After all that
I still can't spell the darn things. The nadir is the sociobiological
explanation for ethics via natural selection. I really doubt if Hume
would have bought such nonsense. Kant attempted powerfully to grapple
with this issue. But the tide of idiocy has overwhelmed us.

So I wouldn't exactly know how to pin down Hume.


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