6 ms·

Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, 150 Years Later

27 points by Hooke 6y ago

yters 6y ago
Strange that Darwin's theory of human evolution was so culture bound. One would think looking to the science would transcend culture to a greater degree.
- ska 6y ago
  > One would think looking to the science would transcend culture to a greater degree. I don't see why. Nothing humans do transcends culture (tautologically), so pretending it does or could won't get you far. Best you can do is try and understand the effect.
  - yters 6y ago
    Well, for instance in computer science all the theorems are completely culture free, so it is not impossible. But it is indeed difficult, and to be expected for the most part.
    - ska 6y ago
      You are making a category error here. Culture doesn't produce a theorem (or a work of art, or a [fill in the blank]), but the people that did produce it necessarily operate in a culture. Among other things this affects what work gets done supported, what people do it (and get supported), how the results are communicated (and if) etc. As a student it effects what you are taught, what you are told is important, and what areas you are pointed towards. You can't tease this stuff apart. Part of the process of becoming a scientist is to become acculturated to that science.
      - yters 6y ago
        Yes of course there are cultural influences. But it seems some branches of STEM are fairly immune to the opinions of the surrounding culture. E.g. what can we say is victorian about any mathematical conclusion? Yet Darwin's supposedly scientific conclusions in this work appear to be very culture bound.
        disconcision 6y ago
        i guess i'd argue that the more abstract something becomes, the more its original motivations tend to be obscured. this is the nature of abstraction, for better and worse. i'd hesitate to say though that this means more abstract ideas are less culture-bound in the sense of being value-neutral. an abstract idea still carries at least the implicit assertion that this is an idea worth paying attention to, at the unavoidable opportunity cost paying attention to others. and ideas which seem entirely free-floating are probably worth paying special suspicion to.
        yters 6y ago
        I would agree with that. There is often a practical question motivating comp sci and mathematical discoveries. The difference from Darwin's case is the mathematical conclusions are never wrong, regardless of the underlying motivation. That is what I mean by culture free. Change in culture cannot change the validity of mathematical deductions. On the other hand, Darwin's conclusions in Descent of Man are wrong, and he appears to have drawn these conclusions due to his cultural bias.
        wombatmobile 6y ago
        Yes, the maths that underpin a nuclear power plant exist independent of any culture, but the same cannot be said of the decision to deploy that plant in a rain forest on the edge of an ocean where a village has survived for millennia.
- wahern 6y ago
  Even today there is no genetic model that can explain the emergence of human altruism--non-kin eusociality. Eusociality among kin, such as naked mole rat sisters and bee clones, is trivially modeled using selfish gene theory. But no one has yet proposed a stable model for its emergence and persistence outside close kin groups. And in fact humans are the only species that exhibit this phenomenon. All other forms of cooperation in nature can be explained by selfish gene theory (that is, individualized sexual selection benefit directly commensurate with the individualized risk), or as non-stable outliers (e.g. a cat befriending a bird). Apparently Darwin believed in a group selection-type model, as still many do, even though its been disproven (at least refutations have never been overcome). And if you believe in group selection I suppose one would find it easy to rationalize racial models, Victorian or otherwise, especially if you were born on an island or otherwise believed substantially physically segregated human groups--and therefore segregated sexual selection dynamics--was typical. Indeed, even today anthropologists are severely allergic to the possibility of rapid gene flow, especially back flow, of specific genes. The notion that there could have been back flow of genes into Africa is anathema, which makes it easier even for scientists to conceptualize humanity as groups of islands, rationalize group selection theories, and be more credulous of narratives whereby some groups "advance" faster than others--because good genes wouldn't individually leak out, and bad genes wouldn't individually leak in. But that's only a partial defense of Darwin. The very fact that humans are the only species to exhibit inexplicable non-kin eusociality, while all these proposed models would apply equally well to any other species (suggesting they're incomplete, because mass selfless cooperation is quite obviously a powerful group advantage if attainable), hints at a massive gap in our understanding of our own evolution, counseling against strong positivist claims about how human evolution worked and continues to work. IOW, Darwin could have been more humble.
  - babesh 6y ago
    You are looking at the wrong level. It is tribal reproduction that is being optimized. An individual is just a cell of that tribe and doesn’t even need to reproduce as long as the tribe reproduces. This is just like how your hair doesn’t have to reproduce as long as you do. Also, it isn’t your genes that matter but the relative distribution of traits in a population. https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/giants.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/giants.html Look at the related reading. Look at the Catholic Church.
chx 6y ago
In 2000, Steve Jones' Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated was published. Does anyone know whether twenty years later is there another update?
mr_toad 6y ago
> Darwin thought that human diversity could—and ought—to be described through race. What is this based on? Darwin was openly critical of the prevalent theories of race and argued that we were all one species.
- nwah1 6y ago
  >The reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts—and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ’struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed—and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults.” - Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
  - jokoon 6y ago
    Maybe virtue is subjective, and nature doesn't really care about good or bad. If one projects his moral values, and is not able to think neutrally, it's going to lead to a biased knowledge.
rsj_hn 6y ago
It was inevitable that cancel culture would take a few swings at Darwin since he generated a really big idea that, while it seems obvious to us now, really wasn't before: That the accumulation of small changes and trials can result in an end state that creates a work of far higher intelligence and insight than the best that anyone could design on a blank slate. So it was a way of explaining how nature can appear so wonderfully designed just by undergoing a series of small mutations, each of which appear insignificant. This idea than infected so many other fields, from business competition leading to better products than would have been possible in a planned economy to social conservatism that viewed cultural and moral traditions as the result of evolutionary processes and thus imbued with collective wisdom superior to that of the individual philosopher. And as far as I know, there is basically no known counter to this except to argue that the conclusions of Darwin are morally repugnant and must, therefore, be wrong. So obviously, people who tend to view the world through a rigid moral/immoral lense or who love to design utopias in their heads are going to take exception to Darwin. They are not going to let Darwin's steady whisper interrupt their Grand Plan to Save The World and Bring Justice to Mankind or to create the new Jerusalem in England or anywhere else. But I think Darwin will win in the end, and those who criticize him today are going to look just as foolish as those who did in the past.
- jokoon 6y ago
  Social darwinism is a problem. Darwin warned about it. The problem is when people reinterpret darwin for their own political interest, and apply it in civilization, in ways that is convenient for them. Generalizing an idea or theory to different domains is not always virtuous.
  - rsj_hn 6y ago
    "Social darwinism" is an ill-defined slur, usually coming from the left, to describe situations where people advocate for regressive tax cuts and other things that reward societies' "winners". The analogous right wing slur would be "social engineering", whenever people on the left adopt various utopian projects to transform society, such as the eugenics movement, or wealth transfers, etc. Neither have much to do with long run evolutionary processes, they are all temporary short run things. To really be an evolutionary process you would need to control the success function, but you can't just create whatever success function you want, you need to feed that state back to the next generation in a stable way over many generations, but the exact same thing that makes a real success function stable is what prevents the ideologue from changing it. If every generation could make their own success function, then no evolutionary process would be at work. So it's important to tease out what is meant, and when there really are pre-conditions for evolutionary processes, then these must be recognized as operating, but when these do not exist, using the name of Darwin isn't going to make them exist.
betwixthewires 6y ago
> We owe it to our species to break the link between Darwin’s inchoate offerings and their perceived social implications. Outdated science-inspired narratives alienate people from our shared-origins story, making it difficult for many people to claim it for themselves. Who cares? Facts are facts. I don't subscribe yo a racial or ethnic delineation between civilized and uncivilized (in the evolutionary sense) but if it were to become clear that some evidence of this phenomenon exists, why should we take the social implications of science as important? What's true is true. Find the answers. If you take anything beyond the evidence of fact into consideration you stray from truth. Fuck social implications.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  > I don't subscribe [to] a racial or ethnic delineation between civilized and uncivilized (in the evolutionary sense) but if it were to become clear that some evidence of this phenomenon exists, why should we take the social implications of science as important? The premise of your postulate is not a factual question - it is a social construct that necessarily involves arbitrary value judgements. Who is more civilised than whom? It depends on what you mean by "civilised". The only way you will ever prove that a person of one race is more "civilised" than a person of another race is by rigging the definition of "civilised" to favour your preferred outcome. That's exactly what the Spanish, Portugese, British, Germans and French did in the Americas, the British did in Australia, the Belgians, French, Germans and Dutch did in Africa and Indochina, and the Han Chinese are doing in Tibet and Xinjiang.
  - betwixthewires 6y ago
    >Who is more civilised than whom? It depends on what you mean by "civilised". The word " civilized" has a meaning. There is nothing subjective about it. You can objectively measure the results of a community being more civilized, and you can point out traits of a community that are responsible for it's success.

27 points by Hooke 6y ago

Strange that Darwin's theory of human evolution was so culture bound. One would think looking to the science would transcend culture to a greater degree.

ska 6y ago
> One would think looking to the science would transcend culture to a greater degree. I don't see why. Nothing humans do transcends culture (tautologically), so pretending it does or could won't get you far. Best you can do is try and understand the effect.
- yters 6y ago
  Well, for instance in computer science all the theorems are completely culture free, so it is not impossible. But it is indeed difficult, and to be expected for the most part.
  - ska 6y ago
    You are making a category error here. Culture doesn't produce a theorem (or a work of art, or a [fill in the blank]), but the people that did produce it necessarily operate in a culture. Among other things this affects what work gets done supported, what people do it (and get supported), how the results are communicated (and if) etc. As a student it effects what you are taught, what you are told is important, and what areas you are pointed towards. You can't tease this stuff apart. Part of the process of becoming a scientist is to become acculturated to that science.
    - yters 6y ago
      Yes of course there are cultural influences. But it seems some branches of STEM are fairly immune to the opinions of the surrounding culture. E.g. what can we say is victorian about any mathematical conclusion? Yet Darwin's supposedly scientific conclusions in this work appear to be very culture bound.
      - disconcision 6y ago
        i guess i'd argue that the more abstract something becomes, the more its original motivations tend to be obscured. this is the nature of abstraction, for better and worse. i'd hesitate to say though that this means more abstract ideas are less culture-bound in the sense of being value-neutral. an abstract idea still carries at least the implicit assertion that this is an idea worth paying attention to, at the unavoidable opportunity cost paying attention to others. and ideas which seem entirely free-floating are probably worth paying special suspicion to.
        yters 6y ago
        I would agree with that. There is often a practical question motivating comp sci and mathematical discoveries. The difference from Darwin's case is the mathematical conclusions are never wrong, regardless of the underlying motivation. That is what I mean by culture free. Change in culture cannot change the validity of mathematical deductions. On the other hand, Darwin's conclusions in Descent of Man are wrong, and he appears to have drawn these conclusions due to his cultural bias.
        wombatmobile 6y ago
        Yes, the maths that underpin a nuclear power plant exist independent of any culture, but the same cannot be said of the decision to deploy that plant in a rain forest on the edge of an ocean where a village has survived for millennia.
wahern 6y ago
Even today there is no genetic model that can explain the emergence of human altruism--non-kin eusociality. Eusociality among kin, such as naked mole rat sisters and bee clones, is trivially modeled using selfish gene theory. But no one has yet proposed a stable model for its emergence and persistence outside close kin groups. And in fact humans are the only species that exhibit this phenomenon. All other forms of cooperation in nature can be explained by selfish gene theory (that is, individualized sexual selection benefit directly commensurate with the individualized risk), or as non-stable outliers (e.g. a cat befriending a bird). Apparently Darwin believed in a group selection-type model, as still many do, even though its been disproven (at least refutations have never been overcome). And if you believe in group selection I suppose one would find it easy to rationalize racial models, Victorian or otherwise, especially if you were born on an island or otherwise believed substantially physically segregated human groups--and therefore segregated sexual selection dynamics--was typical. Indeed, even today anthropologists are severely allergic to the possibility of rapid gene flow, especially back flow, of specific genes. The notion that there could have been back flow of genes into Africa is anathema, which makes it easier even for scientists to conceptualize humanity as groups of islands, rationalize group selection theories, and be more credulous of narratives whereby some groups "advance" faster than others--because good genes wouldn't individually leak out, and bad genes wouldn't individually leak in. But that's only a partial defense of Darwin. The very fact that humans are the only species to exhibit inexplicable non-kin eusociality, while all these proposed models would apply equally well to any other species (suggesting they're incomplete, because mass selfless cooperation is quite obviously a powerful group advantage if attainable), hints at a massive gap in our understanding of our own evolution, counseling against strong positivist claims about how human evolution worked and continues to work. IOW, Darwin could have been more humble.
- babesh 6y ago
  You are looking at the wrong level. It is tribal reproduction that is being optimized. An individual is just a cell of that tribe and doesn’t even need to reproduce as long as the tribe reproduces. This is just like how your hair doesn’t have to reproduce as long as you do. Also, it isn’t your genes that matter but the relative distribution of traits in a population. https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/giants.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/giants.html Look at the related reading. Look at the Catholic Church.

chx 6y ago

In 2000, Steve Jones' Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated was published. Does anyone know whether twenty years later is there another update?

mr_toad 6y ago

> Darwin thought that human diversity could—and ought—to be described through race. What is this based on? Darwin was openly critical of the prevalent theories of race and argued that we were all one species.

nwah1 6y ago
>The reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts—and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ’struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed—and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults.” - Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
- jokoon 6y ago
  Maybe virtue is subjective, and nature doesn't really care about good or bad. If one projects his moral values, and is not able to think neutrally, it's going to lead to a biased knowledge.

rsj_hn 6y ago

It was inevitable that cancel culture would take a few swings at Darwin since he generated a really big idea that, while it seems obvious to us now, really wasn't before: That the accumulation of small changes and trials can result in an end state that creates a work of far higher intelligence and insight than the best that anyone could design on a blank slate. So it was a way of explaining how nature can appear so wonderfully designed just by undergoing a series of small mutations, each of which appear insignificant. This idea than infected so many other fields, from business competition leading to better products than would have been possible in a planned economy to social conservatism that viewed cultural and moral traditions as the result of evolutionary processes and thus imbued with collective wisdom superior to that of the individual philosopher. And as far as I know, there is basically no known counter to this except to argue that the conclusions of Darwin are morally repugnant and must, therefore, be wrong. So obviously, people who tend to view the world through a rigid moral/immoral lense or who love to design utopias in their heads are going to take exception to Darwin. They are not going to let Darwin's steady whisper interrupt their Grand Plan to Save The World and Bring Justice to Mankind or to create the new Jerusalem in England or anywhere else. But I think Darwin will win in the end, and those who criticize him today are going to look just as foolish as those who did in the past.

jokoon 6y ago
Social darwinism is a problem. Darwin warned about it. The problem is when people reinterpret darwin for their own political interest, and apply it in civilization, in ways that is convenient for them. Generalizing an idea or theory to different domains is not always virtuous.
- rsj_hn 6y ago
  "Social darwinism" is an ill-defined slur, usually coming from the left, to describe situations where people advocate for regressive tax cuts and other things that reward societies' "winners". The analogous right wing slur would be "social engineering", whenever people on the left adopt various utopian projects to transform society, such as the eugenics movement, or wealth transfers, etc. Neither have much to do with long run evolutionary processes, they are all temporary short run things. To really be an evolutionary process you would need to control the success function, but you can't just create whatever success function you want, you need to feed that state back to the next generation in a stable way over many generations, but the exact same thing that makes a real success function stable is what prevents the ideologue from changing it. If every generation could make their own success function, then no evolutionary process would be at work. So it's important to tease out what is meant, and when there really are pre-conditions for evolutionary processes, then these must be recognized as operating, but when these do not exist, using the name of Darwin isn't going to make them exist.

betwixthewires 6y ago

> We owe it to our species to break the link between Darwin’s inchoate offerings and their perceived social implications. Outdated science-inspired narratives alienate people from our shared-origins story, making it difficult for many people to claim it for themselves. Who cares? Facts are facts. I don't subscribe yo a racial or ethnic delineation between civilized and uncivilized (in the evolutionary sense) but if it were to become clear that some evidence of this phenomenon exists, why should we take the social implications of science as important? What's true is true. Find the answers. If you take anything beyond the evidence of fact into consideration you stray from truth. Fuck social implications.

wombatmobile 6y ago
> I don't subscribe [to] a racial or ethnic delineation between civilized and uncivilized (in the evolutionary sense) but if it were to become clear that some evidence of this phenomenon exists, why should we take the social implications of science as important? The premise of your postulate is not a factual question - it is a social construct that necessarily involves arbitrary value judgements. Who is more civilised than whom? It depends on what you mean by "civilised". The only way you will ever prove that a person of one race is more "civilised" than a person of another race is by rigging the definition of "civilised" to favour your preferred outcome. That's exactly what the Spanish, Portugese, British, Germans and French did in the Americas, the British did in Australia, the Belgians, French, Germans and Dutch did in Africa and Indochina, and the Han Chinese are doing in Tibet and Xinjiang.
- betwixthewires 6y ago
  >Who is more civilised than whom? It depends on what you mean by "civilised". The word " civilized" has a meaning. There is nothing subjective about it. You can objectively measure the results of a community being more civilized, and you can point out traits of a community that are responsible for it's success.