am i teasing?
the answer to the gould-dawkins debate is...
you won't like this. really.
one day, people will look at the canid fossil record for north america over the late 20th and early 21st century and notice that both the larger and smaller forms disappeared at about the same time, making way for an intermediate form. if made solely using 21st century science, the deduction will likely be that a warming climate made it harder for the larger form to survive, and the smaller form rapidly speciated to fill the niche. gould would essentially make a lamarckian argument that increased rates of mutation followed as a result of the climate change, whereas dawkins would argue that the fossil record is incomplete, and the variation that lead to the intermediate form is simply lost.
but, we're living through this; we know they're both wrong.
what has happened in the canid population is that coyotes and wolves have hybridized, and the hybrid form has outcompeted both of the source forms.
i do believe that this observation in canids - as well as, soon, in ursids - should have long term implications in resolving this debate.
and, who is right?
there is simply neither a solid logical argument nor any convincing evidence to back up gould's argument for lamarckian reactions to environmental change. gould is not making an epigenetic argument, either. he's explicitly arguing for variable mutation rates, as a reaction to the environment. so, gould is wrong. full stop.
and, dawkins' variation is actually right in front of him in the form of the two ancestral species, he just doesn't realize it. in a mechanical sense, he's essentially correct, even if he's missing the way it works.
i looked into this in 2003-2005ish. so, it will come up in 2033-2035ish.
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
it might not be clear from the sample i've published since 2013 (i know. it's still a lot.) but i've actually written extensively in opposition to stephen jay gould, who i don't think was a very good scientist.
the article points out that dawkins has mentioned kropotkin only sporadically and mostly dismissively, which i believe is true, and then quotes both gould and chomsky (who i have much more respect for.) liberally on the topic of kropotkin. i don't see any use in flailing against that, and don't actually have any specific rebuttal to anything that was cited.
but, i broadly dislike gould, and broadly prefer to avoid citing him.
the article points out that dawkins has mentioned kropotkin only sporadically and mostly dismissively, which i believe is true, and then quotes both gould and chomsky (who i have much more respect for.) liberally on the topic of kropotkin. i don't see any use in flailing against that, and don't actually have any specific rebuttal to anything that was cited.
but, i broadly dislike gould, and broadly prefer to avoid citing him.
i also think that the article is presenting a confused concept of group selection when it means to be talking about kin selection, which i think is the better commonality between wilson and kropotkin
in the context of his mutual aid theory specifically, it really is kin selection and not group selection that should be being discussed.
and, in the context of homo sapiens, as well as primates in general, it is pretty clear that we have very developed concepts of kin selection guiding our evolution at every step, and have from the start of the clade.
in the context of his mutual aid theory specifically, it really is kin selection and not group selection that should be being discussed.
and, in the context of homo sapiens, as well as primates in general, it is pretty clear that we have very developed concepts of kin selection guiding our evolution at every step, and have from the start of the clade.
i think that maybe the point that the author is missing, in the moment if not more generally, is that there is no "after the revolution".
abolishing the state is not something that happens at 3:00 next wednesday afternoon, but a process that will carry on for the next ten thousand years.
so, to say something like "anarchists wouldn't be anarchists if they rejected the concept of human nature" is to essentially fall into a lenninist trap. it assumes a day after the revolution exists, and we'll still have the same nature, and will still need to restrict ourselves. neither marx nor any of the early anarchist thinkers, all of whom were ultimately hegelians remember, would have seen the revolutionary process as anything like that - they would have all seen it as a, well, evolution from one state of society to the next.
yes, there will be punctuated periods of necessary violence, as the struggle brings itself to a head.
but, we don't really have to sit here and wonder about what happens after the revolution, because that's not how this actually happens.
abolishing the state is not something that happens at 3:00 next wednesday afternoon, but a process that will carry on for the next ten thousand years.
so, to say something like "anarchists wouldn't be anarchists if they rejected the concept of human nature" is to essentially fall into a lenninist trap. it assumes a day after the revolution exists, and we'll still have the same nature, and will still need to restrict ourselves. neither marx nor any of the early anarchist thinkers, all of whom were ultimately hegelians remember, would have seen the revolutionary process as anything like that - they would have all seen it as a, well, evolution from one state of society to the next.
yes, there will be punctuated periods of necessary violence, as the struggle brings itself to a head.
but, we don't really have to sit here and wonder about what happens after the revolution, because that's not how this actually happens.
the author of that article is also misrepresenting the views of kropotkin (and others) on the topic of "human nature", and even goes so far as to contradict the thrust of the article by actually quoting kropotkin, which is a little ironic given the prose.
kropotkin, like most liberal-leftists of the era, including most socialists and most anarchists, accepted a tabula rasa concept of human nature, stemming ultimately from rousseau. he wasn't a hobbesian. he didn't believe in original sin.
it's an anachronism, but we're standing in 2019 and not 1899, so we should just go ahead and cite gramsci, which we mostly get via chomsky & herman, nowadays. we're in a weird period, where people don't really read anymore, and consequently don't really hold consistent politics; people that call themselves leftists nowadays no longer seem to really care if they're just a mess of contradictions, as products of capitalism, themselves. but, the standard leftist position on human nature, which kropotkin held like everybody else, is supposed to be something like this:
1) humans have no fixed nature. tabula rasa.
2) but, capitalism is evil. and, the capitalist class controls how we think, through it's dominance of education and media.
3) therefore, we're taught to be complete pieces of shit from the time we're born. that is the reason we're assholes - the system teaches us to be assholes.
4) to reverse this, you need to abolish the system.
and, then what? well, then we have a debate is what. do we embrace an anti-intellectualism and demand that education is abolished altogether, in fears that it will teach us to be evil all over again? that's the primitivist position, and it's out there, but it's hard for anybody to take seriously, unless you have a fetish for the dark ages. more often is that anarchists tend to push concepts of decentralization, horizontalism and radical levels of democracy, when it comes to education. i've published a short work on what i think an anarchist grade school ought to be like to my appspot site on the side.
so, you're going to see a lot of debate and a lot of dissent on the topic, actually. it's one of the points where we have as many different approaches as we have different strains of anarchism.
but, the commonality on the anarchist left is supposed to be a combination of rousseaulian tabula rasa with gramscian social conditioning, and a consensus that you have to abolish the state to undo the programming. kropotkin's views fall pretty much in the centre of that consensus, even if some of the language that we use nowadays postdates him.
kropotkin, like most liberal-leftists of the era, including most socialists and most anarchists, accepted a tabula rasa concept of human nature, stemming ultimately from rousseau. he wasn't a hobbesian. he didn't believe in original sin.
it's an anachronism, but we're standing in 2019 and not 1899, so we should just go ahead and cite gramsci, which we mostly get via chomsky & herman, nowadays. we're in a weird period, where people don't really read anymore, and consequently don't really hold consistent politics; people that call themselves leftists nowadays no longer seem to really care if they're just a mess of contradictions, as products of capitalism, themselves. but, the standard leftist position on human nature, which kropotkin held like everybody else, is supposed to be something like this:
1) humans have no fixed nature. tabula rasa.
2) but, capitalism is evil. and, the capitalist class controls how we think, through it's dominance of education and media.
3) therefore, we're taught to be complete pieces of shit from the time we're born. that is the reason we're assholes - the system teaches us to be assholes.
4) to reverse this, you need to abolish the system.
and, then what? well, then we have a debate is what. do we embrace an anti-intellectualism and demand that education is abolished altogether, in fears that it will teach us to be evil all over again? that's the primitivist position, and it's out there, but it's hard for anybody to take seriously, unless you have a fetish for the dark ages. more often is that anarchists tend to push concepts of decentralization, horizontalism and radical levels of democracy, when it comes to education. i've published a short work on what i think an anarchist grade school ought to be like to my appspot site on the side.
so, you're going to see a lot of debate and a lot of dissent on the topic, actually. it's one of the points where we have as many different approaches as we have different strains of anarchism.
but, the commonality on the anarchist left is supposed to be a combination of rousseaulian tabula rasa with gramscian social conditioning, and a consensus that you have to abolish the state to undo the programming. kropotkin's views fall pretty much in the centre of that consensus, even if some of the language that we use nowadays postdates him.
i do want to correct a part in that essay, about malthus.
discussions about malthus tend to get very emotional, but they're almost always based on actual specious reasoning. the connection between malthus and nazism is particularly shaky. malthus argued that the amount of resources on the planet are finite and that we will eventually outstrip them past our carrying capacity if allowed to breed without checks on the population, like predation or disease or war. hitler argued that all of these other races are inferior and need to be enslaved or annihilated to make space for the superior race(s). while i suppose it is true that both positions have something to do with population control, one is a pretty dour and entirely scientific analysis that we should probably pay some attention to, whereas the other is just pseudo-scientific nonsense that has no outcome besides pointless death and destruction. malthus never argued for a master race...
has malthus been wrong? it's not as obvious as his detractors would like to claim. we've certainly seen a lot of people starve to death over the last two hundred years, haven't we? further, malthus has a particularly poignant point in the context of imminent climate change, specifically desertification.
i know that religious groups tend to flip out at the mere mention of malthus, but i have absolutely no interest in their opinion at all, whatsoever; if you're going to push me, i'd actually advise them to pull their heads out of their asses, then clean the shit out of their ears, then shut the fuck up and listen so they can educate themselves, and stop making idiots of themselves. is my opinion clear, or should i tell you what i really think?
if you read malthus in the worst way possible, then, yes, he was more alarmist than we've seen, up to right now. the reason for this is that, by a fluke of luck, technology has happened to move faster than population growth has. by "technology", i'm referring to things like oil-based fertilizers and pesticides, as well as refrigeration, and also building technology.
so, then, what does negating malthus completely mean doing? it means swallowing the line of infinite growth. there's no way around it. we haven't crashed yet, because our growth curve has been ridiculously unsustainable, in ways that malthus could not have imagined, regardless of if you think he was a dumbass or not. we need to maintain these unsustainable growth rates in order to keep this bubble from bursting.
anarchists generally reject infinite growth, and have little choice but to adopt some concept of malthusianism along with it. on the most extreme scale, you have the primitivists and thoreauvians, who want to cut us down to a few million people. in the more moderate scale, you've got the family planning advocates that just want to get the birth rates under control, in the hopes that it prevents the need to do something more extreme. but, hovering over all of this is the reality of climate change, and the fact that we're on a projection to a series of natural disasters - famines, droughts, hurricanes, floods - that are going to take a good cut out of us, even as our ability to utilize fossil fuels in farming comes down due to scarcity.
i like the general thrust of the article. really. i do.
but, this part in the middle where the author decides to lace into malthus as an ideologue, and argue that a human carrying capacity is a racist fantasy, is really just kind of stupid.
it is true that malthus' disaster scenario has not happened....yet....because we've found ways to use all of this incredible growth in technology to our advantage in food production. "therefore, the scenario will never happen" is actually just a specious deduction from that recognition. in fact, we know that our resources are depleting faster than ever, that we're destroying the planet worse than ever and that our likelihood of a malthusian-style collapse is increasing by the decade.
i don't know when this will happen. maybe we'll develop fusion, tomorrow. maybe a spaceship will land with an anti-matter reservoir that will last us the next thousand years. who knows. but, does that sound crazy? that's what happened with the increases in oil technology and refrigeration, you just don't see it that way. your recent ancestors from the nineeteenth century would be pretty baffled at your fridge, you know.
i do know, though, that a carrying capacity is not a racist fantasy reality, but a solid scientific concept. i know that if we keep assuming infinite growth, if we don't get a handle on our use of resources, and if we continue to breed like humans, then, yes, we're going to crash - or at least certain areas are.
again - are you sure it hasn't already happened?
discussions about malthus tend to get very emotional, but they're almost always based on actual specious reasoning. the connection between malthus and nazism is particularly shaky. malthus argued that the amount of resources on the planet are finite and that we will eventually outstrip them past our carrying capacity if allowed to breed without checks on the population, like predation or disease or war. hitler argued that all of these other races are inferior and need to be enslaved or annihilated to make space for the superior race(s). while i suppose it is true that both positions have something to do with population control, one is a pretty dour and entirely scientific analysis that we should probably pay some attention to, whereas the other is just pseudo-scientific nonsense that has no outcome besides pointless death and destruction. malthus never argued for a master race...
has malthus been wrong? it's not as obvious as his detractors would like to claim. we've certainly seen a lot of people starve to death over the last two hundred years, haven't we? further, malthus has a particularly poignant point in the context of imminent climate change, specifically desertification.
i know that religious groups tend to flip out at the mere mention of malthus, but i have absolutely no interest in their opinion at all, whatsoever; if you're going to push me, i'd actually advise them to pull their heads out of their asses, then clean the shit out of their ears, then shut the fuck up and listen so they can educate themselves, and stop making idiots of themselves. is my opinion clear, or should i tell you what i really think?
if you read malthus in the worst way possible, then, yes, he was more alarmist than we've seen, up to right now. the reason for this is that, by a fluke of luck, technology has happened to move faster than population growth has. by "technology", i'm referring to things like oil-based fertilizers and pesticides, as well as refrigeration, and also building technology.
so, then, what does negating malthus completely mean doing? it means swallowing the line of infinite growth. there's no way around it. we haven't crashed yet, because our growth curve has been ridiculously unsustainable, in ways that malthus could not have imagined, regardless of if you think he was a dumbass or not. we need to maintain these unsustainable growth rates in order to keep this bubble from bursting.
anarchists generally reject infinite growth, and have little choice but to adopt some concept of malthusianism along with it. on the most extreme scale, you have the primitivists and thoreauvians, who want to cut us down to a few million people. in the more moderate scale, you've got the family planning advocates that just want to get the birth rates under control, in the hopes that it prevents the need to do something more extreme. but, hovering over all of this is the reality of climate change, and the fact that we're on a projection to a series of natural disasters - famines, droughts, hurricanes, floods - that are going to take a good cut out of us, even as our ability to utilize fossil fuels in farming comes down due to scarcity.
i like the general thrust of the article. really. i do.
but, this part in the middle where the author decides to lace into malthus as an ideologue, and argue that a human carrying capacity is a racist fantasy, is really just kind of stupid.
it is true that malthus' disaster scenario has not happened....yet....because we've found ways to use all of this incredible growth in technology to our advantage in food production. "therefore, the scenario will never happen" is actually just a specious deduction from that recognition. in fact, we know that our resources are depleting faster than ever, that we're destroying the planet worse than ever and that our likelihood of a malthusian-style collapse is increasing by the decade.
i don't know when this will happen. maybe we'll develop fusion, tomorrow. maybe a spaceship will land with an anti-matter reservoir that will last us the next thousand years. who knows. but, does that sound crazy? that's what happened with the increases in oil technology and refrigeration, you just don't see it that way. your recent ancestors from the nineeteenth century would be pretty baffled at your fridge, you know.
i do know, though, that a carrying capacity is not a racist fantasy reality, but a solid scientific concept. i know that if we keep assuming infinite growth, if we don't get a handle on our use of resources, and if we continue to breed like humans, then, yes, we're going to crash - or at least certain areas are.
again - are you sure it hasn't already happened?
i have actually seen him mention kropotkin in more detail in a live interview, and he explicitly pushed back against the comparison, and said he wished people wouldn't make it.
i'm not so sure, myself.
again: i know that dawkins will argue the point. it might be useful for him to do so formally at some point, as i'm sure this will come up over and over. but i actually think the ideas are so similar as to essentially be the same thing, despite dawkins' dissent on the point.
https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=65
i'm not so sure, myself.
again: i know that dawkins will argue the point. it might be useful for him to do so formally at some point, as i'm sure this will come up over and over. but i actually think the ideas are so similar as to essentially be the same thing, despite dawkins' dissent on the point.
https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=65
(edit: search for dawkins in the text to see why i posted the link, although the essay is worth reading if you have the time. i post critiques in the following posts to this space)
to put it another way, chomsky famously claimed that kropotkin never "made his point", or something like that. it's often forgotten that he also said that kropotkin argued his point as well as hobbes or whomever else did, but chomsky did famously concede that kropotkin didn't really prove his case.
that was before dawkins, who has synthesized the theory that kropotkin needed to prove his case.
there's a cultural opposition to dawkins on a lot of the fake left, but the fact is that they don't know their own history, and the lot of them are actually mostly conservatives, an ideology that's been largely discarded by mainstream politics. somewhere along the way, a lot of people got very confused, as they sought and built alternatives while blurring traditional political lines.
the fact is that the left, including the anarchist or libertarian left, is historically deeply anti-religious, as it comes so firmly out of the enlightenment. voltaire. godwin. paine. proudhon. marx. bakunin. kropotkin. malatesta. and now dawkins. these people, amongst themselves, have written some of the most brutal attacks on religion in the history of western civilization. and, these are the pre-eminent anarchist thinkers...
what somebody's going to need to do is properly synthesize dawkins with kropotkin, to give kropotkin what he needs to fill in his argument by drawing on the ideas of dawkins (and the theorists that dawkins drew heavily from). and, maybe it will be good enough to get chomsky to cede the point?
that was before dawkins, who has synthesized the theory that kropotkin needed to prove his case.
there's a cultural opposition to dawkins on a lot of the fake left, but the fact is that they don't know their own history, and the lot of them are actually mostly conservatives, an ideology that's been largely discarded by mainstream politics. somewhere along the way, a lot of people got very confused, as they sought and built alternatives while blurring traditional political lines.
the fact is that the left, including the anarchist or libertarian left, is historically deeply anti-religious, as it comes so firmly out of the enlightenment. voltaire. godwin. paine. proudhon. marx. bakunin. kropotkin. malatesta. and now dawkins. these people, amongst themselves, have written some of the most brutal attacks on religion in the history of western civilization. and, these are the pre-eminent anarchist thinkers...
what somebody's going to need to do is properly synthesize dawkins with kropotkin, to give kropotkin what he needs to fill in his argument by drawing on the ideas of dawkins (and the theorists that dawkins drew heavily from). and, maybe it will be good enough to get chomsky to cede the point?
to clarify a point.
he denies the point, but dawkins' central theory is essentially the same as kropotkin's. so, he calls himself a liberal - and in that sense, you should take dawkins as the archetype of liberalism. he is in a lot of ways the most pristine representation of liberalism, for better or worse, that has lived in any living person's lifetime; if there is a more perfect liberal since wwII, i don't know of him or her.
but, i like to say that he's a bit of a liberal in a hurry, isn't he?
and, his basic theory is actually literal anarchism.
this is why i go back to dawkins so frequently - he might not like the thought, but he is going to be one of the most important anarchist thinkers, in the long run, on par with the kropotkins and the bakunins, and operating as a kind of a bridge between chomsky and the generalized punk movement (not just the music, the meta punk moment, which is actually still winding down and has no obvious replacement, yet).
so, when i cite dawkins, i cite him in the broadest sense of liberalism, yes. but i actually cite him as an anarchist, first and foremost.
he denies the point, but dawkins' central theory is essentially the same as kropotkin's. so, he calls himself a liberal - and in that sense, you should take dawkins as the archetype of liberalism. he is in a lot of ways the most pristine representation of liberalism, for better or worse, that has lived in any living person's lifetime; if there is a more perfect liberal since wwII, i don't know of him or her.
but, i like to say that he's a bit of a liberal in a hurry, isn't he?
and, his basic theory is actually literal anarchism.
this is why i go back to dawkins so frequently - he might not like the thought, but he is going to be one of the most important anarchist thinkers, in the long run, on par with the kropotkins and the bakunins, and operating as a kind of a bridge between chomsky and the generalized punk movement (not just the music, the meta punk moment, which is actually still winding down and has no obvious replacement, yet).
so, when i cite dawkins, i cite him in the broadest sense of liberalism, yes. but i actually cite him as an anarchist, first and foremost.
this is, of course, a classic, if you haven't read it.
required reading, really.
https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Dawkins-MindViruses.pdf
required reading, really.
https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Dawkins-MindViruses.pdf
no.
this child should never, ever, ever, ever be allowed to set foot in this country ever again.
there has to be a zero tolerance policy with the family of terrorists - no exceptions, ever.
i do not want this child or anybody else in her family in my community.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/too-dangerous-to-pull-4-year-old-canadian-orphan-out-of-isis-camp-trudeau-says-1.4732977
this child should never, ever, ever, ever be allowed to set foot in this country ever again.
there has to be a zero tolerance policy with the family of terrorists - no exceptions, ever.
i do not want this child or anybody else in her family in my community.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/too-dangerous-to-pull-4-year-old-canadian-orphan-out-of-isis-camp-trudeau-says-1.4732977
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