Bugsy,

Physics is a science too, but we eventually had to abandon Newtonian physics in the light of a better idea.

"All I can see is that you have taken pretty much all the mechanisms whereby negative natural selection can take place and lumped under the banner ‘competition’. Cooperative social behaviour as well as mutualism or symbiotic biological phenomena and anything that might be a ‘beneficial’ interaction (i.e. positively affects selec tion) between two individual organisms get lumped under the banner ‘cooperation’."

That is not true. I do not make such a simple delineation. As Yabby, Peter Hume and Darwin would insightfully tell us, we can understand cooperative behaviour from the perspective of (competitive) individuals. What I am saying is that we are also able to look at all behaviour (including competitive) from the collectivist perspective, and that it makes more sense if we look from both directions.

"I really get the feeling that you were thinking pretty much of only human beings and society when you wrote this piece."

I am a metaphysical philosopher. In this, I believe that there is a consistent pattern (a relatively simple pattern rooted in polarity) by which all of nature is bound. While it is true that political and economic philosophy have been the main direction of my studies over the last couple of years, evolution theory has been a favourite subject for a long time.

Peter Hume,

Have you got a reference for Marx asking to dedicate Capital to Darwin? I read somewhere that he'd asked him to write a forword to one of his books but never found the reference again.

Marx did like Darwin. I presume that Marx thought that humans are somehow able to overcome their competitive, animal nature and become loving, cooperative beings. (a major flaw in his thinking.)

Poirot,

I look at four primary motivations for all conscious beings: Toward sensual pleasure, toward being in control, toward empathy and toward fairness. As humans, we just have more of the more conscious aspects of those. Is that higher?

We do live in communities, but we are also individuals.

Thanks Graham (I think?), but I'm no less uncomfortable for it :P

Gilbert, yes, physics is a science. It's constantly tested and updated. But noone has 'abandoned' Newtonian physics. In fact, much of it is still exceptionally useful for day to day operations and is still taught in high schools (and universities) because it works. It just doesn't explain everything, so the bits that don't fit the data are updated with better ideas. Darwin had no idea what genes were, and so his ideas on mechanisms of inheritance are updated, not abandoned. That being said, I have no idea what your point is with that statement.

That you are a metaphysical philosopher is apparent, because you sure don't sound like a scientist.

"I look at four primary motivations for all conscious beings: Toward sensual pleasure, toward being in control, toward empathy and toward fairness. As humans, we just have more of the more conscious aspects of those. "
Well there's your problem right there...

> Have you got a reference for Marx asking to dedicate Capital to Darwin?

No I haven’t sorry and I forget where I read it. But as I recall, Marx asked Darwin if he could dedicate Capital to him, and Darwin declined.

I think the reason why Marx admired Darwin so much was because of his achievement in explaining such an extraordinarily big, complex and variable body of facts with a natural, parsimonious and evolutionary explanation. And of course Marx aspired to do the same with another big, complex and variable body of facts, namely economic history. Also, evolution from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ stages was very much in vogue in the 19th century. The reason Marx claimed that his was “scientific” socialism was because he purported to have discovered a historical law, by which earlier economic systems inexorably gave rise to later ones, primitive communism leading to feudalism, feudalism to capitalism, and capitalism to socialism. But it wasn’t science: it was his mere opinion.

I really think the competitive/co-operative dichotomy that you are trying to establish across a broad range of disciplines is a furphy.

Remember, Darwin spent 20 years actively seeking out as many objections to his theory as he could find, and taking account of them, before he published. He didn’t just ignore valid objections and push on regardless as you are doing.

What is mistaken in Genesis’s, your and Marx’s theories, is what Darwin got right. Grand schemes, and evolutionary schemata, are no good unless they can accurately take account of how they arise out of individual actions. In evolutionary theory, there is a need to understand the actions of individual organisms at the margins of subsistence. In economics, there is a need to understand individual actions dealing with individual units of resources at the margins of utility.

This is not to belittle the importance of groups, collectives, associations, societies. But to understand them first and foremost from the point of view of collectives, rather than the individual bodies that comprise them, is like trying to understand the heavens first and foremost as constellations. It’s a fallacy.

Gee Bugsy, watch out, the rot is setting in. First you’ll agree with me on this, and then you’ll agree with me on that, and before long the next thing you know is, you’ll be against aggressive violence on principle.

I know how Bugsy feels. I've had a couple of experiences lately where Peter and I have agreed with each other....most unsettling indeed, Lol.

Gilbert,

I really think you should try and obtain a copy of Koestler's "The Ghost in the Machine". It deals mostly with hierachal order, but he covers a lot of ground in general, including evolutionary theory,etc. He also concentrates of the self=assertive verses the self-transcending or integrative tendencies in human behaviour - from both biological and social angles.

talk about error built on miss-conceptions

darwin said a population of 1000 pigeons
would gradually devolve to the genus mean
[the bluebarred rock-dove [+ wildtype]

darwins finches waver betweeen long beaked and short beak
dependant upon if the season is dry/wet

next [Isaac Newton''atoms that move around bumping into one another"..clearly atoms surrounded by electrons neutrons etc
cant bump together....either your decieved/decieving.. or he is

next traits dont dominate the environment
the enviroment favours certain traits
to better survive or fail

"paradox and polarity as central to nature"
is plainly using absurd buzzword's

polarising the parradox
..under a skin of psuedo-science spin

what genetic laws ..are in play within p&p?

same with "social organisation and high levels of freedom"
when we NEED ..supress freedoms ..to create social harmony.
policing morals...lol... means freedom to who...
fat/cat elites ..social oppertunists ..bankers ..securities traiters ..polititions..?

progression in nature..?
[not in our days]

"thesis” and the “anti-thesis”,
[do you count your delusions
as thesis or anti-thesis]

your artyicle is typical media pap
selling the deluded on evolution as science fact..!

i thought you might have actual fact...lol

instead read the same ol regurgitated spin/pap

then throw in jung lol and 'anima/animus, extrovert/introvert systems theorists, ..nature being composed of holons; ..which simultaneously form a part* of larger holons....TALK ABOUT A LOAD OF CCCCRAP

who you trying to fool?

duel rivers of deciete
is more like it

evolution... the joke you have when you only got THEORIES