Yesterday I talked a bit about the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon. Frequently, in discussions of human-caused extinctions, I hear sentiments expressed such as, “Well, such an extinction is lamentable, but in the end it was just Darwinism in action. Humans are part of nature too, and the now-extinct species just couldn’t evolve to co-exist with the human species.”
This sort of attitude betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. There is no normative aspect of “Darwinism” or natural selection. “Evolution” is a word that is used to describe a process in nature, just like “global warming” or “gravity” or “forest fire cycle”. It’s not some mystical ideal we should aspire to, nor is it something that human activity cannot alter. Of course, just like global warming, gravity, and forest fire cycles, neither does it mean that we should actively try to alter the process, nor does it mean we shouldn’t research the likely results of our attempts (such as whether or not they have a chance of success).
There’s a similarly mistaken popular idea that evolution is some natural force that drives species inexorably toward some higher purpose, or represents a progression to more complex and sophisticated organisms. You see this all the time in how people use the word “evolve” in non-biological contexts to mean “improved into something better or more sophisticated,” as opposed to simply “change”. The late Stephen Jay Gould discusses this misunderstanding at considerable length in his book Full House.
Humans may not have any responsibility to prevent the extinction of all species (some estimate as many as 30,000 species go extinct every year), but when it comes to actively causing the extinction of species, we should at least take a hard look at the real cost of our actions, rather than trying to absolve ourselves of blame by invoking some mythical, unstoppable hand of Darwinism.
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March 20th, 2007 at 6:02 am
I agree with you fully on the misuse of “evolution,” in that a lot of people seem to have it cross-wired with “progression.” Not to hijack the conversation too much, but what about progressivism? We don’t see much of it these days (thank you, the Right Reverend “The End of History”), but surely human *societies* have the capacity to get better, and ought to. And yes, I recognize the difference between “capacity” and “ought,” so treat them as two separate questions, Mr. Has-a-real-job. I ask because I’ve been reading a lot of Ernst Bloch lately and rather like utopianism as a defensible moral and ethical position.
While I’m injecting my scattered thoughts all around, I might also mention the following. While I, like you and (Bill Quinn, from whom I stole the quote), “hate people who don’t have control over their own semantic fields,” you have to at least acknowledge that one person (or three, or twenty people) probably aren’t going to stop the memetic*/semantic shift of “evolution” to “progression.” It’s frustrating, but it’s the way language works.
We’re likely to get a linguist in the department quite soon, although unfortunately too late I think for my classwork.
* I mean this spelling: “meme-like evolution” as opposed to “mimesis.”
March 20th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Oh, I (as a full-blooded card-carrying descriptivist) have no problem with people changing the meaning of words at will; semantic shifts are inevitable. My frustration isn’t that the meaning of “evolution” is changing, but rather that the *reason* why it’s changing is (at least in part) due to a fundamental lack of understanding of biological evolution.
Not familiar enough with progressivism, utopianism, or Mr. Bloch to make an educated statement on that front, however. Any recommended reading?