Sunday, 7 November 2010

The Philosophy of Evolution Theory

A philosophical/grammatical analysis of the events described by evolution theory does not lend any support to the evolutionary concepts of survival, advancement, replication, or selfishness:

Evolution is marked by death, not survival. Nothing survives.
Advancement of a species means its dying out and replacement. Extinction of a species means its dying out and nothing taking its place.
Nothing is replicated, for the identity that supposedly marks out the object of replication isn't itself replicated.
Evolutionary-driven selfishness as life's purpose does not refer to life's forms, but refers to imagined forms that populate the invented world described by evolution theory and its other-worldly laws of replication and survival.

In evolution theory we are witnessing the unacknowledged birth of a new religion - endorsed as such by its commitment to a type of supernaturalism. It is a religion for a modern, technical age, a religion founded on ideas taken from a Biblical template. The idea of "advancement of the species", like the golden calf, steals the actualities of personal and social transformation and uses them to drive the idea and promise of material transcendence and advancement of the species. This material transcendence, in turn, is supported by evolution theory's idea of the replication and transmigration of identity of individuals and species across the boundary of death - a supernatural idea, surely. This idea also supports evolution's moral idea of a selfishness that purportedly strives, selfishly, for replication (aka transmigration), for which the antidote is Dawkinian altruism: more Biblical themes.

Philosophy needs to come to evolution theory for it is sorely in need of it. I think that we will be surprised by what we find, and by the way in which we have misled ourselves on the nature of our own project - evolution theory.

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