Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, June 02, 2013

The Left Has No Need of Evodevo Crapola

Upgraded and adapted from an ongoing exchange in the Moot:
The vicissitudes of historical struggle and the value of concrete details of sociocultural diversity are radically underdetermined by evolutionary adaptation. Just because a few folks on the left enamored of the latest fashions in scientistic reductionism have managed to shoehorn a comparatively more progressive outlook into the profound error of social Darwinist thinking -- Peter Singer's A Darwinian Left is a recent example, Kropotkin provided a classical example -- doesn't make the underlying error into a truth, doesn't make this mode of argument more useful in the longterm than defenses of progressive outcomes and lifeway diversity on terms pitched at the level of their actual stakes instead, and it also doesn't change the fact that these arguments and assumptions are far more often used for reactionary purposes (like justifying racist accounts of crime and poverty, like justifying sexist misallocations of science education funding, and so on) than progressive ones.

3 comments:

jollyspaniard said...

Scientific theories explain observable facts. It's difficult to see how scientific theories can be applied to politics. Evolutionary Theory is just fine where it is and I don't see many biologists espousing a need or a utility to see their field mapped onto politics.

Everyone is turning to science for rationalizations nowadays including a lot of cults.

jimf said...

> Everyone is turning to science for rationalizations
> nowadays including a lot of cults.

Well, fewer people believe in angelic visitations nowadays, so Science
is where the authority comes (or needs to be seen to come) from.

Dale Carrico said...

Let's ask this scientician...