A couple things happened last week to precipitate this discussion of Darwin. I took my kids to see the movie In TIme (see below the fold). Also, someone posted a comment here that "Natural selection does not apply to human beings". As a committed believer of evolution, I want to support that assertion- a good topic for a diary.
Here's the dilemma. I suspect that most Kossacks, like me, feel their faith is drawn more strongly to the Temple of Science than the God of Abraham. Ironically, the common misunderstanding of Darwin leads to the same rotten outcome: That the flow of precious resources to the rich and powerful elite is pre-determined regardless of our faith.
Precious resources? Money is such an abstraction distraction. In it's corporeal form, it's similar to toilet paper. But most of it just exists as a transient property of whatever electronic media they use to store data these days. The premise of In Time provides a more vivid model of how our lives are affected by economic control.
My kids are all teenagers. My paternal instinct compels me to impart my wisdom and philosophy to them. They read the Daily Kos. So now I've got an excuse for my pedantic tendencies.
My kids loved this movie. If this diary were merely a superficial hook, I would have to discuss Justin Timberlake. But it's not and I won't. What makes this movie fascinating is the premise that sets up the story line. In Time takes place in a dystopia that frankly looks pretty good to me. It certainly looks familiar. Economic control belongs to the elite, and consequently, wealth concentration has been permanently stratified. Only the most improbable of events leads to the economic mobility that sets the plot in motion.
In the course of my short lifetime, it's impossible to know if our economic stratification is permanent. But the characters in this movie know- they've been granted immortality- or rather, they live in permanent youth until they run out of money, err currency. In this movie, time is currency. A cup of coffee costs a few minutes, a bus ride is an hour or two. Time is money. The practical aspects of this currency are obvious, as are opportunities for word play: When you run out of time, you run out of time and drop dead. The characters are all living day-to-day and periodically expire. Of course the characters are unnaturally savvy. Clearly they have a keen awareness that arbitrary and systemic economic events can have life or death outcomes.
One striking aspect of the movie is that it's hard to identify the bad guy: Our only glimpse are disembodied voices on a conference call, where they discuss the need to stabilize the markets. In the world of New Greenwich, market stabilization is a euphemism for population control, an inevitable problem in immortal societies. Economic controls, such as prices, incomes and taxes are used to right-size the population.
Here, the world is divided into two tiers, those who are affected by these controls and the elite that are not. For the non-elite, survival is truly arbitrary. Missing the bus or oversleeping can have fatal consequences. This dystopia may be the most accurate representation of Darwinism: Survival is completely arbitrary. Naturally, the antagonist uses Darwin to justify the social division that insulates him from the struggle. To paraphrase: I don't have to play by the rules because I'm winning.
I don't know if these themes are apparent to everyone who watches this movie. Maybe this is merely my twisted intepretation. At any rate, I'm going to depart from the movie and make a few final observations about Darwin.
These days science is expected to have industrial, military, or other practical applications. Science is very methodological: publishing and criticism in the form of replication. In Darwin's day, science was a means of advancing oneself by admission or ranking in an exclusive club. Different outcomes, different methodology. A successful defense took place in a rhetorical framework more similar to courtroom trials, words were deliberately selected for precision. As I've mentioned in other posts, modern rhetoric has gotten so sloppy that perfectly contradictory interpretations are acceptable. The common interpretation of Darwin, either of ignorance or deliberate distortion, is that he meant survival of the strongest, survival of the fastest, or survival of the smartest. The term fittest was merely selected as shorthand.
No. The term fittest is analogous to a jigsaw puzzle piece. The fittest is the one that fits in the hole. It is neither bigger nor smaller, or otherwise distinguishable from the less fitting pieces. The idea that fittest can be ascribed to a single attribute, such as wealth, is contrary to what Darwin discovered.
For the sake of my kids, I'm including one more example. When they were small, one of them was diagnosed with Leukemia. At the diagnosis, we were told that the chance of survival was 50%. My wife demanded more clarification. She wanted to know that our child's chances were affected by our love, desperation, or religious activities. I explained that 50% of the families we met at the hospital would go home without the child they came with- nothing more and nothing less. The uncertainty doesn't even improve after 10 kids on a 20 room ward have passed. That's Darwinism.
My child who survived was more fit. But what does that mean? An army of oncologists have spent generations trying to determine a precise definition of fit under these circumstances. These days I'm told the war on childhood leukemia has effectively been won. Even so, Darwin's mysteries are as shrouded as ever.
Survival of the fittest does not apply to Human Beings
I've heard the theory of evolution compared to the theory of gravity... usually to illustrate a precise definition of the word theory. One might conclude that Darwinism (that is, natural selection) is similarly inevitable. Or at least anti-Darwinism is as rare as anti-gravity.
Not so. We have a common word for anti-Darwinism. It's called agriculture: The selection of crops and subsequent selection of genetic traits (taste, yields, durability) other than the arbitrary most fit. The human equivalent of agriculture is culture. So perhaps this poster was not entirely accurate. Darwinism has probably applied to Human Beings for most of the past 100,000 years. And at this rate, may well be applied again. But one thing is certain: Survival of the fittest does not apply to human culture.
Mon Nov 21, 2011 at 10:45 AM PT: Humans are different in that they have intelligence, and more importantly, the social intelligence that comes from communication. Using an archaic vocabulary, cultured and savage represent the two endpoints of social intelligence. Savage is predatory with arbitrary outcomes; Cultured applies artificial controls for deliberate outcomes. These two terms also seem to define the dichotomy of American political philosophy.
But I made two mistakes that need correction. One, I misattributed the quote to Darwin. Two, I did not anticipate the criticism
Mon Nov 21, 2011 at 11:49 AM PT: that evolution is only concerned with reproductive success - so whether social Darwinism is legitimate depends on whether reproductive opportunities can be correlated with wealth. Who knows?
There's clearly a sentiment that wealth and privilege are predestined, if not by God, then by the invisible hand. It's expressed in the comments below. Perhaps the disagreement is that social Darwinism is inappropriate terminology. That argument is too academic, even for me.
There are numerous examples in history where societies have pursued non-Darwin objectives (whether survival, longevity, or reproductivity) in favor of quality of life or other humanistic concerns. So social Darwinism (the kind represented by Dayton in the movie) is not inevitable. And if not inevitable, then not desirable either, at least among the Kossack community.
Finally, I didn't say it originally, and maybe it would help underscore my point. The statement Survival of the fittest isn't an axiom- it's merely a definition.