Evolution can take many forms, move in many different directions, involve many different types of sub-processes.
Darwin's theory of evolution was far too restrictive.
I don't pretend to have any type of a background in biology -- other more recent biologists than Darwin have taken up their different issues with Darwin, some of whose issues with him I have tried to capture briefly in my last essay.
However, I come back to a statement that one of my readers wrote to me because I view it as one of the underlying theses of Hegel's Hotel.
Neal said:
The Big Bang (Theory) stretched the fabric of space and (suggested) that layers of reality may be piled up in super symmetry.
I have found this assertion to be true in all of my research, all of my reading and writing.
What this idea allows for is the possibility of the doctor to move into the realm of psychology and psychotherapy and see similar processes at work; the economist to move into the realm of politics and/or law and find similar processes at work, the philosopher to step into the realm of biology and find similar processes at work...and so on. Extrapolations can be made, lines can be drawn between two points, three points, four points on a graph, and much of the picture can be filled out using a combination of personal experience, greater or lesser amounts of research, and the same type of logic and principle used in one field of human endeavor -- applied to another.
Such is the case with 'Hegelian Dialectic Logic' and with 'DGB Post-Hegelian, Dialectic Logic'. Before we start here, I would like to emphasize that there is a significant difference, a significant distinction between 'Hegelian Idealistic Dialectic-Epistemological Logic' and 'DGB Multi-Bi-Polar, Dialectic, Humanistic-Existential Logic'.
The first important distinction is that DGB Dialectic Logic is much less 'deterministic', more 'free-will, existential' oriented. Hegelian Dialectic Logic was 'pre-existential'. Hegel did much to map out the path for existentialism -- particulary his work on 'the master-slave relationship', and his ideas relative to the shaping out of the concept of 'work-alienation' -- which Marx jumped all over and took to a whole new level of philosophy.
However, this having been said, Hegel was still primarily concerned with the 'epistemologically idealistic' -- as witnessed by his concept of 'The Absolute'.
Now a lot of 'anti-Hegelians' hate Hegel's concept of 'The Absolute' -- and frankly, I don't like it either. It is too 'pretty' when talking about 'human behavior', too 'deterministic', and too 'idealistic'.
Whenever man is involved there are going to be significant elements of 'unpredictability' -- making 'predictability' and 'determinism' a very unsure thing at best.
Using the 'dialectic' and 'dialectic logic' there are some things that we can reasonably predict -- and some things we can't.
Did anyone seriously predict the recent crash of Wall Street and the American Stock Markets? The Real Estate Market?
I don't profess to be an economist anymore than I am a biologist but how many economists predicted what happened on Wall Street in the fall of 2008?
I think if anyone did predict it -- and to be sure, there are probably a few of you out there that did -- it is now quite obvious that they would have probably sold their house in the spring or even the summer of 2008 -- waited for the collapse in the fall -- and been buying a nice, new and better house for the same amount of money this winter or spring. Similarly, with the stock markets. Everyone would have sold their stocks last spring or summer -- and we wouldn't have lost so many 'billionares' this year as reported by Forbes Magazine. Even the impeccible Warren Buffet isn't the top man anymore. He lost 9 billion dollars more than Bill Gates last year.
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Warren Edward Buffett (born August 30, 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska, United States) is an American investor, businessman, and philanthropist. He is one of the world's most successful investors and the largest shareholder and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.[4] He was ranked by Forbes as the richest person in the world during the first half of 2008, with an estimated net worth of $62.0 billion.[5], plummeting to $37 billion in early 2009, causing him to slide from #1 to #2 in the Forbes Billionaire List behind Bill Gates after losing $9 billion more than Gates. Often called the "Oracle of Omaha,"[6] or "the Sage of Omaha",[7] Buffett is noted for his adherence to the value investing philosophy and for his personal frugality despite his immense wealth.[8] His 2006 annual salary was about $100,000, which is small compared to senior executive remuneration in comparable companies.[9]
When Buffett spent $9.7 million[10] of Berkshire's funds on a private jet in 1989, he jokingly named it "The Indefensible" because of his past criticisms of such purchases by other CEOs.[11] He lives in the same house in the central Dundee neighborhood of Omaha that he bought in 1958 for $31,500, today valued at around $700,000.[12] Buffett also is a notable philanthropist.
In 2007, he was listed among Time's 100 Most Influential People in The World.[13] He also serves as a member of the board of trustees at Grinnell College.[14]
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There are some things however, that you can reasonably guess and predict using dialectic logic. Having endured 8 years of George Bush and the 'GOB' (Good Old Boys -- with all due respect to you Ms. Sarah Palin who fit right in there -- 'shooting wolves from planes' and 'winning the war in Iraq no matter how long it took and how many American soldiers were lost' being immensely more preferrably than the idea of 'Universal Health Care' and the idea of taking the cost of the Iraq war off the shoulders of generations of Americans to come. For the sake of your ambitious career plans, Ms. Palin, it is probably already too late but I hope you are doing lots of 'reading' while you are back up there in Alaska...sorry, couldn't resist...) -- to repeat, having endured 8 years of Bush and his GOP (Good Old Party) -- it was probably a pretty good bet that the American people were looking for some sort of 'anti-thesis' to George Bush.
They got it in Obama -- and the only criticism I can level at Obama in this early state of the new Democratic Regime is whether he will ever be able to stop his spending (and do what he keeps saying he is going to do about bringing more 'transparency' and 'accountability' to 'ear-marked, pork-barrel spending'.
Back to the dialectic. Similarly with a 'broken and separated love relationship'. Generally, when a person breaks up after a reasonably long love relationship, it is a pretty good bet to expect that the person is going to opt for 'the opposite' type of person in the next relationship. But not always. Sometimes the person might choose another lover who is 'very much the same' as the recently separated lover -- or even more 'extreme' in his or her 'similar qualities'. The dialectic -- and dialectic logic -- never generates 'perfect predictability'.
Nor does DGB Philosophy believe that Hegel's concept of 'The Absolute' has any 'idealistic' and/or 'realistic-pragmatic' value. The process of 'evolution in man' will always undergo endless good and bad mutations, good and bad compensations, that will never 'predictably' take the world -- and man -- to a better place.
I remember back in the 1970s and early 80s, there was talk about people eventually going down to about a 35 hour work week, being able to live off this salary and this shortened work week -- and let 'technology' take care of the rest.
This didn't happen. In fact, quite the reverse did. It is not unusual for a lower and/or middle class worker today to have to work 50 hours or more -- sometimes 60 or 70 hours -- and hold one, two or three different jobs to be able to make enough money to meet all the bills waiting for him and/or her at home.
Similarly, having been in the transporation (bus, van, and taxi) business for almost 30 years now, I have seen both the 'good' and 'bad' consequences of 'improved technology'. One thing I can say with certainty is this: 'positive evolution' is never guaranteed -- indeed, 'negative evolution' is just as prevalent.
Like most of you, I have witnessed the birth and the evolution of the 'computer industry' -- and 'the internet'.
For the most part, I would say there have been 'huge positive evolutionary changes' in this regard. 'Mail', for the most part, has gone the way of the dinosaur. Now we have 'e-mail' and 'chat-lines' and even 'video and audio computer contact' with a person who may be half way around to the other side of the world. Assuming our respetive computer and email systems are working properly, I can have 'email contact with my dad' in Prince Edward Island every day.
'Yahoo' and 'Google' allow unbelievable things to happen on the internet. I have access to 'the biggest library in the world in seconds' just by 'googling whatever it is I am researching'...and 'Wikipedia' is awesome in this regard as well.
20-30 years ago everyone was sitting around the same television set in the living room and/or everyone had 'their own television set in their own bedroom'. Now everyone has their own Personal Computer in their own bedroom -- or everyone is 'fighting for time on the same family computer' in a similar manner to the way husband and wives, sisters and brothers, used to (and/or still do) fight for the 'converter to control the choice of channel' on the same television).
In this respect, some things have changed, some things have not. The 'battle for control' amongst people -- Nietzsche's 'Will to Power' -- will never change. And man's will to power can take many different shapes and forms as well -- the 'will to power over people', the 'will to abuse and exploit people', 'the will to positively and/or negatively persuade people', 'the will to manipulate and fool people', the more positive 'will to self-empowerment'...
In my next essay, I will 'criticize' and 'deconstruct' an essay that I think unfairly abuses 'Hegel' and 'the dialectic'. There is something important that needs to be stated here, specifically: a philosophical system is only as good as the person who is using it. I would sooner have someone like Obama or Martin Luther King or Dwight Eisenhower or Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson running a 'dictatorship' than I would have Bush running a so-called 'democracy'.
The 'halo effect' has not completely worn off of President Obama yet -- and who knows -- in 1,2, 3, or 4 years I may be sitting here and 'seriously deconstructing Obama's actions'... The job of President of The United States of America is probably the hardest job in the world -- and no President is ever going to please everyone, every single last 'lobbyist group'.
Still, Presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson are remembered with reverence -- for good reason. They may not have been perfect but for the most part they stood for 'democracy', 'equal rights', and 'humanistic-existential values' -- and acted on these values.
Regarding Jefferson and his philosophical and personal relationship to 'slavery', I read a couple of short articles on the internet (which you can read also below) and I couldn't help but see a strong similarity between Jefferson philosophical relationship to 'slavery', and Freud's philosophical relationship to 'child abuse'. Both changed -- seemingly under the influence of economic pressures -- and self-preservation.
It is not unusual at all for man's 'ethics' to fade slowly or quickly under the influence and/or duress of 'economic pressures' -- or even 'economic selfishness'(read also: 'economic narcissism'). I include this Jefferson vs. slavery issue as a part of my distinction between 'positive' and 'negative' evolution...and the effect that 'Wild, Narcissistic Capitalism' can have on the collapse of 'Ethical Capitalism'.
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Jefferson and slavery
Jefferson owned many slaves over his lifetime. Some find it baffling that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves yet was outspoken in saying that slavery was immoral and should be abolished. Biographers point out that Jefferson was deeply in debt and had encumbered his slaves by notes and mortgages; he could not free them until he was free of debt, which never happened.[81] Jefferson seems to have suffered pangs and trials of conscience as a result. His ambivalence was also reflected in his treatment of those slaves who worked most closely with him and his family at Monticello and in other locations. He invested in having them trained and schooled in high quality skills.[82] He wrote about slavery, "We have the wolf by the ears; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."[83]
During his long career in public office, Jefferson attempted numerous times to abolish or limit the advance of slavery. He sponsored and encouraged Free-State advocates like James Lemen.[84] According to a biographer, Jefferson "believed that it was the responsibility of the state and society to free all slaves."[85] In 1769, as a member of the House of Burgesses, Jefferson proposed for that body to emancipate slaves in Virginia, but he was unsuccessful.[86] In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson condemned the British crown for sponsoring the importation of slavery to the colonies, charging that the crown "has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere." However, this language was dropped from the Declaration at the request of delegates from South Carolina and Georgia.
In 1778, the legislature passed a bill he proposed to ban further importation of slaves into Virginia; although this did not bring complete emancipation, in his words, it "stopped the increase of the evil by importation, leaving to future efforts its final eradication." In 1784, Jefferson's draft of what became the Northwest Ordinance stipulated that "there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" in any of the new states admitted to the Union from the Northwest Territory.[87] In 1807, as President, he signed a bill abolishing the slave trade.
Jefferson attacked the institution of slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784):
“ There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.[88] ”
In this same work, Jefferson advanced his suspicion that black people were inferior to white people "in the endowments both of body and mind."[89] However, Jefferson did also write in this same work that a black person could have the right to live free in any country where people judge them by their nature and not as just being good for labor as well.[90] He also wrote, "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. [But] the two races...cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them."[34] According to historian Stephen Ambrose: "Jefferson, like all slaveholders and many other white members of American society, regarded Negroes as inferior, childlike, untrustworthy and, of course, as property. Jefferson, the genius of politics, could see no way for African Americans to live in society as free people." At the same time, he trusted them with his children, with preparation of his food and entertainment of high-ranking guests. So clearly he believed that some were trustworthy.[91] For a long-term solution, Jefferson believed that slaves should be freed then deported peacefully to African colonies. Otherwise, he feared war and that, in Jefferson's words, "human nature must shudder at the prospect held up. We should in vain look for an example in the Spanish deportation or deletion of the Moors. This precedent would fall far short of our case."[92]
On February 25, 1809, Jefferson repudiated his earlier view, writing in a letter to Abbé Grégoire:
“ Sir,—I have received the favor of your letter of August 17th, and with it the volume you were so kind to send me on the "Literature of Negroes." Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunity for the development of their genius were not favorable and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making toward their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family. I pray you therefore to accept my thanks for the many instances you have enabled me to observe of respectable intelligence in that race of men, which cannot fail to have effect in hastening the day of their relief; and to be assured of the sentiments of high and just esteem and consideration which I tender to yourself with all sincerity.[93] ”
In August 1814 Edward Coles and Jefferson corresponded about Cole's ideas on emancipation:
“ Your solitary but welcome voice is the first which has brought this to my ear, and I have considered the general silence which prevails on this subject as indicating an apathy unfavorable to every hope[94] ”
The downturn in land prices after 1819 pushed Jefferson further into debt. Jefferson finally emancipated his five most trusted slaves (two his mixed-race sons) and petitioned the legislature to allow them to stay in Virginia. After his death, his family sold the remainder of the slaves to settle his high debts.[95]
Jefferson and slavery
Jefferson portrayed
on the U.S. Nickel
1938–2004
2005
2006–present
Jefferson owned many slaves over his lifetime. Some find it baffling that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves yet was outspoken in saying that slavery was immoral and should be abolished. Biographers point out that Jefferson was deeply in debt and had encumbered his slaves by notes and mortgages; he could not free them until he was free of debt, which never happened.[81] Jefferson seems to have suffered pangs and trials of conscience as a result. His ambivalence was also reflected in his treatment of those slaves who worked most closely with him and his family at Monticello and in other locations. He invested in having them trained and schooled in high quality skills.[82] He wrote about slavery, "We have the wolf by the ears; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."[83]
During his long career in public office, Jefferson attempted numerous times to abolish or limit the advance of slavery. He sponsored and encouraged Free-State advocates like James Lemen.[84] According to a biographer, Jefferson "believed that it was the responsibility of the state and society to free all slaves."[85] In 1769, as a member of the House of Burgesses, Jefferson proposed for that body to emancipate slaves in Virginia, but he was unsuccessful.[86] In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson condemned the British crown for sponsoring the importation of slavery to the colonies, charging that the crown "has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere." However, this language was dropped from the Declaration at the request of delegates from South Carolina and Georgia.
In 1778, the legislature passed a bill he proposed to ban further importation of slaves into Virginia; although this did not bring complete emancipation, in his words, it "stopped the increase of the evil by importation, leaving to future efforts its final eradication." In 1784, Jefferson's draft of what became the Northwest Ordinance stipulated that "there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" in any of the new states admitted to the Union from the Northwest Territory.[87] In 1807, as President, he signed a bill abolishing the slave trade.
Jefferson attacked the institution of slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784):
“ There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.[88] ”
In this same work, Jefferson advanced his suspicion that black people were inferior to white people "in the endowments both of body and mind."[89] However, Jefferson did also write in this same work that a black person could have the right to live free in any country where people judge them by their nature and not as just being good for labor as well.[90] He also wrote, "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. [But] the two races...cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them."[34] According to historian Stephen Ambrose: "Jefferson, like all slaveholders and many other white members of American society, regarded Negroes as inferior, childlike, untrustworthy and, of course, as property. Jefferson, the genius of politics, could see no way for African Americans to live in society as free people." At the same time, he trusted them with his children, with preparation of his food and entertainment of high-ranking guests. So clearly he believed that some were trustworthy.[91] For a long-term solution, Jefferson believed that slaves should be freed then deported peacefully to African colonies. Otherwise, he feared war and that, in Jefferson's words, "human nature must shudder at the prospect held up. We should in vain look for an example in the Spanish deportation or deletion of the Moors. This precedent would fall far short of our case."[92]
On February 25, 1809, Jefferson repudiated his earlier view, writing in a letter to Abbé Grégoire:
“ Sir,—I have received the favor of your letter of August 17th, and with it the volume you were so kind to send me on the "Literature of Negroes." Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunity for the development of their genius were not favorable and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making toward their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family. I pray you therefore to accept my thanks for the many instances you have enabled me to observe of respectable intelligence in that race of men, which cannot fail to have effect in hastening the day of their relief; and to be assured of the sentiments of high and just esteem and consideration which I tender to yourself with all sincerity.[93] ”
In August 1814 Edward Coles and Jefferson corresponded about Cole's ideas on emancipation:
“ Your solitary but welcome voice is the first which has brought this to my ear, and I have considered the general silence which prevails on this subject as indicating an apathy unfavorable to every hope[94] ”
The downturn in land prices after 1819 pushed Jefferson further into debt. Jefferson finally emancipated his five most trusted slaves (two his mixed-race sons) and petitioned the legislature to allow them to stay in Virginia. After his death, his family sold the remainder of the slaves to settle his high debts.[95]
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Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
From Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia
Thomas Jefferson was a consistent opponent of slavery throughout his life.[1] He considered it contrary to the laws of nature that decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty. He called the institution an "abominable crime," a "moral depravity," a "hideous blot," and a "fatal stain" that deformed "what nature had bestowed on us of her fairest gifts."
Early in his political career Jefferson took actions that he hoped would end in slavery's abolition. He drafted the Virginia law of 1778 prohibiting the importation of enslaved Africans. In 1784 he proposed an ordinance banning slavery in the new territories of the Northwest. From the mid-1770s he advocated a plan of gradual emancipation, by which all born into slavery after a certain date would be declared free.
Advertisement for runaway slave, Sandy, by Jefferson; Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc.As historian David Brion Davis noted, if Jefferson had died in 1785, he would be remembered as an antislavery hero, as "one of the first statesmen anywhere to advocate concrete measures for eradicating slavery." After that time, however, there came a "thundering silence." Jefferson made no public statements on American slavery nor did he take any significant public action to change the course of his state or his nation.
Countless articles and even entire books have been written trying to explain the contradictions between Jefferson's words and actions in regard to slavery. His views on race, which he first broadcast in his Notes on the State of Virginia in 1785, unquestionably affected his behavior. His belief in the inferiority of blacks, coupled with their presumed resentment of their former owners, made their removal from the United States an integral part of Jefferson's emancipation scheme. These convictions were exacerbated by the bloody revolution in Haiti and an aborted rebellion of slaves and free blacks in Virginia in 1800.
While slavery remained the law of the land, Jefferson struggled to make ownership of humans compatible with the new ideas of the era of revolutions. By creating a moral and social distance between himself and enslaved people, by pushing them down the "scale of beings," he could consider himself as the "father" of "children" who needed his protection. As he wrote of slaves in 1814, "brought up from their infancy without necessity for thought or forecast, [they] are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves." In the manner of other paternalistic slaveholders, he thus saw himself as the benevolent steward of the African Americans to whom he was bound in a relation of mutual dependency and obligation.
By 1820, during the political crisis that resulted in the Missouri Compromise, Jefferson had come to believe that the spread of slavery into the west—its "diffusion"—would prove beneficial to the slaves and hasten the end of the institution. The prospect of a geographical line based on principle running across the country, "like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror." He feared it could threaten the union and lead to civil war. As always, his primary concern was the stability of the nation he had helped to found. Almost forty years after Jefferson's death, slavery ended by the bloodiest war in American history.
Footnotes
↑ This article is based on text from the Getting Word website, composed by Lucia Stanton, February 2008.
See Also
Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation
Further Sources
Bear, Jefferson at Monticello
Betts, Farm Book
Notes, ed. Peden. Chapters “Laws” and “Manners.”
Finkelman, Paul. "Jefferson and Slavery: Treason Against the Hopes of the World." In Jeffersonian Legacies ed. Peter S. Onuf. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 181-221.
French, Scot A. and Edward L. Ayers. "The Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson: Race and Slavery in American Memory, 1943-1993." In Jeffersonian Legacies ed. Peter S. Onuf. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 418-456.
Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008. Available for purchase at Monticello Museum Shop
Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968, 461-481.
Miller, John Chester. Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. Charlottesville: University Press of Virgina, 1991.
Onuf, Peter S. "Every Generation is an Independent Nation: Colonization, Miscegenation, and the Fate of Jefferson's Children." In The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2007), 213-235.
Stanton, Lucia. "Those Who Labor for My Happiness: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves." In Jeffersonian Legacies] ed. Peter S. Onuf. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 147-180.
Stanton, Free Some Day.
--------. Slavery at Monticello Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 1996.
See selected sources on Jefferson's views on slavery in the Thomas Jefferson Portal
See selected sources on Jefferson as slave owner in the Thomas Jefferson Portal
See information on Jefferson and Slavery in The Monticello Classroom and slave life in The Monticello Classroom
View information about individuals and life within the enslaved community in the Monticello Plantation Database
Retrieved from "http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Thomas_Jefferson_and_Slavery"
Category: Slavery
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Let's step out of the realm of 'social evolution' for a few minutes and go back to Darwin's much more restrictive concept of 'genetic evolution'.
Here are some of the issues that I -- like many before me -- take up with Darwin.
1. 'Evolution' doesn't happen by 'coincidence, accident, and/or random chance'. There may be some element of this in genetics -- as there is in life in general. But 'mutation' doesn't happen by accident. 'Compensation' doesn't happen by accident'. Mutation and compensation are purposeful and directionality-oriented 'sub-evolutionary processes' -- working towards the solution of an individual and/or species problem relative to 'self-preservation'. Mutation, compensation, and productive, functional evolution are products of 'intelligent design' -- even in animals, even insects and plants -- that we would normally say have no 'intelligence'. Insects, plants, fish, bacteria, and viruses have all been around for longer than man. That is not by accident. That is by individual and species 'self-preservation-intellgent and purposeful design' factors such as genetics, mutation, and compensation...that allow the individual and/or species to continue to survive.
Plants and animals that don't 'adapt' using the 'best of their evolutionary capabilities', their 'intelligent purposeful design' capabilies, don't survive -- particularly in the face of tough environmental competitors, obstacles, hardships, changes...On the very real consequences of 'evolutionary failure', DGB Philosophy and Darwin are in complete agreement -- 'extinction' is the ultimate consequence.
What Darwin failed to take account of was the later evolving idea of 'intelligent design theory' as advocated by the most esteemed of scientists -- Albert Einstein.
In this regard, 'intelligent design theory' just like 'pantheism' and 'deism' can be viewed as different 'Freudian compromise-formations' and/or 'Hegelian dialectic syntheses' between 'Religious Creation Theory' and 'Darwin Evolutionary Theory'.
What Darwin left out were the two ideas of: 1. 'intelligent purposeful design'; and 2. an 'intelligent, purposeful designer' which may or may not necessarily be what religous people call 'God'. At a lower level of abstraction, we can just say that 'the intelligent designer' is the 'individual him or herself', and collectively, the particular 'species' itself.
And this is where I will leave my thoughts on Evolution -- or more specifically, 'DGB Post-Hegelian Dialectic Evolution' -- this cold, Friday morning of March 13th, 2009.
-- dgb, March 13th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
