“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, July 22, 2010

Survival

Darwinian survival means “happening not to have died before you pass on your DNA.” This is a very minimalist definition. Evolution is a cheapskate—it always chooses the cheapest way of doing anything.

So anything like a sermon on why survival is the basis of all our ethical decisions is very strictly secondary to stuff that my DNA is taking care of in any case. So I don't have to...

I make plenty of ethical decisions not based on survival. In fact, sexual selection (another Darwinian mechanism) is pretty tough on sheer survival (as any lovelorn human can tell you).

Looking at survival as anything more than a generalization based on self-replication (does a molecule “want” to survive?) is, in short, just another spin of the correlationist wheel. Survival inevitably becomes a teleological reason to do things. And if you want to be a Darwinist, you have to kiss all forms of teleology goodbye.

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