Group

Here is 81 year old English philosopher Mary Midgley's review of
Darwinist philosopher Daniel Dennett's new book "Freedom Evolves".

Interestingly, Midgley notes that Dennett seems to have quietly dumped his
view that Darwinism is a "universal acid":

"In this book Dennett does, on the whole, supply these excellent
qualities. He uses a much more conciliatory tone than he did in
Darwin's Dangerous Idea. There is no more fighting talk here of
Darwinism being a "universal acid", eating through all other
thought-systems and radically transforming them. There is not
much rhetoric about sky-hooks, and there is absolutely nothing
about the fashionable doctrine now known as "evolutionary
psychology".

But Midgley notes, "Only one relic of extreme neo-Darwinism remains,
namely, the doctrine of memes":

"Memes are supposed to be a kind of parasitical quasi-organism
that function as genes (or possibly as units) of culture, producing
behaviour patterns by infesting people's minds just as biological
parasites infest their bodies. These mythical entities were invented,
somewhat casually, by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene as a
supplement to his story of the causal supremacy of genes, and the
current huge popularity of evolutionary thinking has caused the idea
to catch on despite its wildness. It supplies people outside the
physical sciences with something that looks to them like a scientific
explanation of culture - "scientific" because it looks vaguely like
genetics, and because it does not mention human thought and
feeling. In Darwin's Dangerous Idea Dennett ardently embraced this
story, offering memetics as the only truly scientific way of
explaining culture. .... Yet, quite gratuitously, alongside this
admirably realistic approach, Dennett still insists that memes - he
explains them as comparable to liver-flukes, genuinely external
to humans and having their own interests to promote - are its
true scientific explanation."

But the problem is, "On memetic principles, the only reason why he and
others campaign so ardently for neo-Darwinism must be that a neo-
Darwinist meme (or fluke) has infested their brains, forcing them to act in
this way"!:

"Occam, however, was surely wise in suggesting that we should not
multiply entities beyond necessity. Might we not reasonably ask:
how does memetics apply to Dennett's own case? On memetic
principles, the only reason why he and others campaign so ardently
for neo-Darwinism must be that a neo-Darwinist meme (or fluke)
has infested their brains, forcing them to act in this way. That is, of
course, a less welcome notion than the similar explanation of the
idea of God which is their favourite example. (As Dawkins put it,
God is perhaps a computer virus.) But if you propose the method
seriously you must apply it consistently."

Steve

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http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,904441,00.html

Guardian

[...]

Fate by fluke

Daniel Dennett has charted a new and welcome course between free will
and scientific determinism in Freedom Evolves, says Mary Midgley

Saturday March 1, 2003
The Guardian

Buy Freedom Evolves at Amazon.co.uk

Freedom Evolves
by Daniel C Dennett
309pp, Allen Lane, o20
"Concern about free will is the driving force behind most of the resistance
to materialism generally and neo-Darwinism in particular.

"Free will is an evolved creation of human activity and beliefs, and it is just
as real as such other creations as music and money... Recognising our
uniqueness as reflective, communicating animals does not require any
'human exceptionalism' that must shake a defiant fist at Darwin... We may
thus concede that material forces ultimately govern behaviour, and yet at
the same time reject the notion that people are always and everywhere
motivated by material self-interest."

This is the burden of Daniel Dennett's new book and it is really welcome.
As he points out, educated people today are often trapped in a strange kind
of double-think on this topic. Officially, they believe physical science calls
for determinism, which proves they have no control over their lives. But in
actual living, most of the time they assume they do have this control. They
ignore their supposedly scientific beliefs rather as their ancestors often
ignored threats of eternal punishment. Yet those beliefs can still cause deep
underlying anxiety, confusion, guilt and a sense of futility.

Dennett shows he has grasped this odd situation. He quotes, with some
alarm, a passage from a science-fiction book in which an amoral character
triumphantly cites Dennett's book Consciousness Explained as proving
finally that we have no free will, we cannot control our actions, and thus
that we can have no duties. He rightly insists he never said this. But he
does see now why people may think he did.

The trouble is that, in these discussions, what chiefly gets across to the
reader is not so much the detailed arguments as the general tone, the
rhetoric, the way the emphasis lies. And writers like Dennett, who want to
promote a worldview centring on science, are indeed often somewhat
hostile to the concept of free will. They treat it as an ally of traditional
religion and a prop of the penal system. They do not readily notice that it is
just as necessary to today's secular morality, which centres on personal
autonomy. These campaigners aim to get rid of the immortal soul. But the
last thing they want to do is to lose individual freedom.

In this book Dennett does at last grasp this nettle. He tries much harder
than he has before to show that he understands the importance of our inner
life. He devotes much of the book to dissecting the mistaken notion that
"science" requires us to write off that inner life as an ineffectual shadow.
Determinism, he says, is not fatalism. Fatalism teaches that human effort
makes no difference to what happens, and we know this is false. Human
effort often does make that difference. What makes this effectiveness seem
impossible is not science but the rhetoric that has depicted the mind as a
separate, helpless substance being pushed around by matter.

That rhetoric grew out of Descartes' dualism and an atomistic simplification
that dates from the 17th century - the conviction that a single simple
pattern, found in the interaction of its smallest particles, must govern the
whole of nature. Particle physics, which at that time dealt in very simple
ultimate particles like billiard balls, must therefore supply the model for all
other interactions. All complexity was secondary and somehow unreal.

Since that time, as Dennett points out, all the sciences, including physics,
have dropped that over-simple model. They find complexity and variety of
patterns everywhere. That is why we now need scientific pluralism - the
careful, systematic use of different thinking in different contexts to answer
different questions.

In particular, we are now finding steadily increasing complexity throughout
the developing spectrum of organic life. The more complex creatures
become, the wider is the range of activities open to them. And with that
increase goes a steadily increasing degree of freedom: "The freedom of the
bird to fly wherever it wants is definitely a kind of freedom, a distinct
improvement on the freedom of the jellyfish to float wherever it floats, but
a poor cousin of our human freedom... Human freedom, in part a product
of the revolution begat of language and culture, is about as different from
bird freedom as language is different from birdsong. But to understand the
richer phenomenon, one must first understand its more modest components
and predecessors."

Interestingly, this evolutionary view of human freedom is quite close to the
one Steven Rose suggested in his excellent book Lifelines. Thus, two
writers who started from opposite positions in the sociobiology debate
have both, on reflection, reached similar conclusions on the relation
between freedom and evolution. They both make the central point that our
conscious inner life is not some sort of irrelevant supernatural intrusion on
the working of our physical bodies but a crucial part of their design. We
have evolved as beings that can feel and think in a way that makes us able
to direct our actions. This means, of course, that the self is a much larger
and more complex thing than the detached soul which Descartes thought
was the essence of our being. We operate as whole people. Our minds and
bodies are aspects of us, not separate items. They do not need to compete
for the driving seat.

As Dennett points out, this holistic approach certainly works better than
the simple libertarian attempt to avoid fatalism by interrupting determinism
with patches of quantum indeterminacy - an attempt that could only
produce spasms of randomness, not freedom. Dennett's and Rose's path
between randomness and fatalism is surely essentially the right one. But it
needs to be worked out with great care and sensibility.

In this book Dennett does, on the whole, supply these excellent qualities.
He uses a much more conciliatory tone than he did in Darwin's Dangerous
Idea. There is no more fighting talk here of Darwinism being a "universal
acid", eating through all other thought-systems and radically transforming
them. There is not much rhetoric about sky-hooks, and there is absolutely
nothing about the fashionable doctrine now known as "evolutionary
psychology". Only one relic of extreme neo-Darwinism remains, namely,
the doctrine of memes.

Memes are supposed to be a kind of parasitical quasi-organism that
function as genes (or possibly as units) of culture, producing behaviour
patterns by infesting people's minds just as biological parasites infest their
bodies. These mythical entities were invented, somewhat casually, by
Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene as a supplement to his story of the
causal supremacy of genes, and the current huge popularity of evolutionary
thinking has caused the idea to catch on despite its wildness. It supplies
people outside the physical sciences with something that looks to them like
a scientific explanation of culture - "scientific" because it looks vaguely like
genetics, and because it does not mention human thought and feeling.

In Darwin's Dangerous Idea Dennett ardently embraced this story, offering
memetics as the only truly scientific way of explaining culture. But in
Freedom Evolves he does not really need this device any longer. The need
for it has vanished because he is now endorsing human thought and feeling
as real parts of nature - genuine activities, not supernatural extras - part of
normal causality and therefore capable of explaining what happens in
culture. Yet, quite gratuitously, alongside this admirably realistic approach,
Dennett still insists that memes - he explains them as comparable to liver-
flukes, genuinely external to humans and having their own interests to
promote - are its true scientific explanation.

Occam, however, was surely wise in suggesting that we should not
multiply entities beyond necessity. Might we not reasonably ask: how does
memetics apply to Dennett's own case? On memetic principles, the only
reason why he and others campaign so ardently for neo-Darwinism must be
that a neo-Darwinist meme (or fluke) has infested their brains, forcing them
to act in this way. That is, of course, a less welcome notion than the similar
explanation of the idea of God which is their favourite example. (As
Dawkins put it, God is perhaps a computer virus.) But if you propose the
method seriously you must apply it consistently.

And if you do that, you should surely see that it is pure fatalism. This
quaint remnant is perhaps the only serious flaw in an otherwise really
admirable and helpful book.

£ Mary Midgley's most recent book is Science and Poetry (Routledge)

Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
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"Three mechanisms are supposed to prevent behavior that can lead to fraud
and compromise in scientific research. The first is the peer review system,
by which committees of specialists in a field determine the merit of the
individual proposals submitted for funding. The second is the referee
system, by which scientific papers are sent out for review to qualified
reviewers who recommend whether the papers should be published,
changed, or rejected. The third mechanism is the replication of
experiments. In theory, other scientists attempt the same experiment; if
they cannot replicate the results, the claimed result is dismissed.
Replication of experiments, however, rarely takes place; there is almost no
money available for it, or in it. Why should peer reviewers allocate some of
the limited funds to duplicate what has already been done? Also, a scientist
who simply replicates other researchers' results would soon be labeled a
hack and wouldn't get further funding. Instead, rival scientists try to
establish their reputations by extending the results in some way. ... Grant
peer review, journal peer review, and experiment replication are supposed
to make science self-correcting. But Impure Science illustrates that
preeminent people involved in science are repeatedly defeating these
mechanisms. If science is at all self-correcting in the United States, it is
despite the efforts of some of these powerful individuals, not because of
their efforts." (Bell R.I., "Impure Science: Fraud, Compromise and Political
Influence in Scientific Research," John Wiley & Sons: New York NY,
1992, p.xiv)
Stephen E. Jones sejones@... or senojes@...
Home: http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones
Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CreationEvolutionDesign
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