RE: Whitehead on Deduction (fwd)

["John M. Legge" <jlegge@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Mine, Alan, Ted,

 

I jumped into this thread when Mine mischaracterized a particular author (Dawkins).   The fact that Mine can cite others who make the same error changes nothing.  When Dawkins refers to "genetically determined" he is quite simply saying that the biochemical composition of a living creature reflects its genetic inheritance.  Creatures of differing biochemical composition have differing genetic inheritances, and the unit of difference is the gene.

 

Evolution discusses the emergence of differences and the transgenerational survival of some strains and the elimination of others.  Such reconciliation as there can ever be between scientific determinism and philosophical constructs such as free will was performed by Monod in Chance and Necessity.  Dawkin's Selfish Gene reflects and illustrates this: given that some biological endowments are more favourable to phenotypic survival than others the gene combinations associated with such biological endowments will also survive.  Monod drew up the limits within which environment could alter the outcome for individual phenotypes and beyond which genetic change was needed.

 

Stuart Kauffman has developed a rigorous account of evolution in his work on complex landscapes.  Kauffman provides an analytically complete account of both single and multiple gene transitions and characterises them as adaptive walks and evolutionary leaps.  Kauffman's contribution includes the point that, since each organism has many genes, and it is their effect in combination rather than isolation that determines phenotypic success, the fitness landscape is "rough" with many local optima.  Single changes (i.e. adaptive walks) starting at an arbitrary point on such a landscape can only lead to a small fraction of the possible optimum states.

 

Mapping Kauffman back to the Austrian/Evolutionary school's "optimism" suggests that individual action can only lead to a fraction of possible optimum states, and a society in which the scale of coordinated action was limited to an arbitrarily small fraction of the population would almost certainly lock itself into suboptimal institutional structures.  Blackwell and Eilon explore this effect (without reference to Kauffman) in their discussion of industrial innovation and the way that some innovations have required the precommitment of large resources and could not have been produced by individual action.  Twenty million rednecks with shotguns will not evolve into a strategic defense initiative.

 

Genetic determinism, when applied to society, does not say which institutions and behaviours will appear, but it can identify some that will disappear.  The Shakers abhorred sexual intercourse (even when undertaken with reproductive intent) and are no longer with us.

 

JML