Dawkins

Went to see Richard Dawkins speak last night at the 92nd Street Y here in Manhattan.

Dawkins quotables (paraphrased, I'm not a journalist, y'know):

"Assigning a religion to your child is a form of child abuse."
"Religious faith is one of the great evils in the world today."

Less sound-bite-wise and more substantially, Dawkins sought to separate over and over his belief in Darwinism as a rational scientist (it is the only supportable hypothesis today for how the world's creatures have come to exist) and his distatse for Darwinian politics, which he frequently equates with Thatcher / Reaganism (as he puts it, the strong shall thrive and the weak shall die).

Now, there's no doubt that the scientific basis for the evolution of creatures today does not imply evolutionary dynamics are the proper source for knowledge or understanding in the political sphere. Neither are fluid dynamics, ant colony behavior, or cosmology the proper source for understanding of human political events.

But, for fairly understandable, though wrong reasons, people like to generate parallels between the evolution of the species and the evolution of the body politick. There is no connection, properly understood.

The process of evolution is that by which an unthinking force, manifesting itself through the actual unthinking behavior of agents within a system, can create superior survival characteristics among replicating entities. These replicating entities can be creatures, cellular automata, even evolutionary processes themselves.

Now, comfortable dons frequently peer out from their tenured Volvos to gaze upon the brutish world of layoffs and acquisitions, contracts lost and won, and IPOs and bankruptcies and declare that the State of Nature obtains. And particularly when the capitalist class defends this system, profs are apt to infer that it is self-interest, rather than enlightened knowledge of human behavior, that drives this political support.

It's quite the opposite however. The Reagan-Thatcher agenda: rule of law, property ownership, non-interference by government (which, rather than ruling by persuasion as individuals must do, rules by compulsion
through fines, injunctions, and imprisonment) is in fact the proper poltical philsophy for an advance creature that has acquired foresight, language, culture, the ability to think, and conciousness. For it is exactly this valuable individual that needs her rights defended against those of her peers that would take away her material sustenance or philosophic independence.

It is state-run societies, with their sublimation of the individual, to the state, the ideology, or the clan, that come closest to the Darwinian evolutionary context. It is in these societies that the individual must compete for a zero-sum

The one arena in which the evolutionary dynamic has come into play in human events, and where it should be recognized as such, is in institutions. Institutions are survival machines that have adapted over time to serve the needs of its constituent members. In many cases, if not most, the rules by which and institution has thrived are arbitrary and appear on paper to be just as good as those reasonable rules by which it does not govern itself. These unthnking agents, with their unthinking rules, rise or fall according to the its members derive from its particular feature set. In the same way that evolutionary forces cause a cheetah to run very fast, a hummingbird to beat its wings inordinately quickly, or a koala to move unreasonably slowly, they have caused institutions to shape themselves in response, not to the theoretical optimum maximizing behavior, but to the exigencies of their actual environments. As such, there is a degree to which institutions can not be dissected by a rational, deductionist method, for of course elements wil appear as silly as do our eyebrows, elbows, and little toes.

All in all it was a fun evening, and I would especially recommend that you change your whiskey preference to Johnny Walker Black Label, if that's at all conceivable, as they were absolutley wonderful sponsors of the event. The drinks they were serving were even heavy-handed on the pour!