Hi Andrea, Roger, Glenn, Marty, Matt and All:
To call anyone who disagrees with Gould's view of evolution *naive*
seems arrogant to me and others who are open to the idea of
evolutionary progress. Not only does the word *evolution* imply
progress, but for every scientist you can name who agrees with Gould I
can name one who disagrees. I'm sure we don’t want to go down that
road, but just as an example, the astronomer Fred Hoyle calculated that
the odds of natural selection producing even an enzyme is on the order
of a tornado roaring through a junkyard of airplane parts and coming up
with a Boeing 747.
Measured in survival terms alone, I believe the horseshoe crab ranks as
high as anyone. I would ask those who believe a horseshoe crab is a
higher evolutionary form than a man if they would prefer to be a crab, or
a beetle, or whatever long-surviving creature they admire. If the answer
is no, then another meaning of *higher* is being relied on which
common sense brings immediately to the fore.
That meaning was hinted at by both Marty and Roger. Marty called it
*expansion of the ability to perceive quality,* and Roger nailed it by
saying *higher quality involves more experience and variety of
experience and more versatility of experience.*
What Gould and other scientists of his ilk fail to take into account in
their paranoia to keep any hint of the supernatural out of evolution is the
interior development of life forms. Ken Wilber was the first to bring this
aspect of evolution to my attention. Many evolutionists are concerned
only with objective surfaces, the bones if you will, of the evolution story,
avoiding any comment on the development of interior, subjective
properties. An examination of these properties reveals definite progress
from irritation to sensation to impulse to image to symbol to concept. In
scientific terms, there has been progress in neurological capacity, or in
subjective terms, towards greater consciousness, awareness,
experience--or as the MOQ says, towards Dynamic Quality.
The other belief open to question of Gouldian evolution is the total
reliance on chance to bring about change. Glenn and I have been back
and forth on that issue enough to bore the beejesus out of anyone.
Suffice it to say that if things just happen, it's a confession that the end
of science has been reached.
My hope would be that Roger in his forthcoming book will acknowledge
and answer legitimate alternatives to the Gould theory of evolution
(including Gould's rather odd notion of *punctuated equilibrium*) or at
least refrain from tagging Pirsig and others on the side of direction in
evolution with the pejorative term *naive.*
Platt
P.S. Roger's test pegs me as flaming Libertarian, to the surprise of no
one I'm sure.
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