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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Aesthetic Insight12/04/2005 15:14:35At the new exhibit on Darwin at the natural history museum in New York, the curators try to put us through the experience of making a scientific discovery, specifically, that of evolution by natural selection. We see some of the organisms Darwin saw in South America and are led through his chains of reasoning to see their relatedness. One thing, however, that interested me was the attribution of his natural selection mechanism to the economic theories of Thomas Malthus. Malthus imagined that the realities of agricultural production compared to the dramatic increase of the human population would lead to a situation of cutthroat competition in which only the fittest would survive. This mechanism, Darwin realized, analogically occurs in the natural world. I felt great sympathy because some of my own recent theological thinking comes from a simulation designed by another economist, Thomas Schelling. But then there was also a panel there about a comment Marx had made. While he expressed great appreciation for Darwin's work (and sent him a signed copy of Das Kapital), he also criticized Darwin's reading of Malthus, whose selection mechanism was meant precisely not for the plant or animal world but for people. Darwin may have been right as a zoologist but he needs to get straight his reading of the economists. This reminds me of the kinds of criticism leveled at social Darwinists later on, who would go ahead and apply the selection mechanism right on back to people again. Then the scientists would come out, as Marx did for the economists, saying, You're reading Darwin wrong! But in fact what they are doing is exaclty what Darwin did, and likely what any great thinker does, linking seemingly disperate ideas and then testing them to discover truths. And that is the pattern of the stochastics of ideas and interpretation. We hear rumors of what folks are doing in their own language, transfer it to ours, and come out with something entirely different. The big problem with social Darwinism is that it managed to absorb the scientific authority that biological Darwinism had gathered for its own use. Different disciplines and languages should be allowed to borrow from one another, but borrowing should not be confused with the real thing. It should be recognized for what it is- real innovation, and as a result judged like a brand new child. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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