I am not convinced that the Nazis should be lumped together with the predatory corporatists on Wall Street. Many of the Nazis seem to have believed that there is to some extent survival of the fittest group, in competition with other groups, for social animals like humans, and that they made up the fittest group. The Wall Street crooks pretend that they believe in survival of the fittest individuals, in competition with other individuals, when actually they depend greatly on their membership in one or more elite groups, in competition with other elite groups and the group composed of the masses. The Nazis, however flawed their information, were somewhat honest with themselves and others about what they believed. The Wall Street predators, however, appear to consistently lie about their beliefs and their situation.

The Wall St. corporatists have no morals except greed and the 'bottom line', if you can call those morals. The Nazis had morals, just very warped morals. I have no doubt that the corporatists would murder six million plus if it suited their pocket books. In fact they may have, in their wars of acquisition. I've always believed that the earth has no room for such 'people'. That they rule the earth says little for our species' survival. As bad as the Nazis and the Communists were, I think corporatists are the most evil entities the world has ever seen.

David Loye's intriguing essay about applying "content analysis by word count" to Darwin's Descent of Man proves more to me about 150 years of crappy indexing than it proves about the author's original intent when his famous theory of human evolution and natural selection was published.

Merely because the word "love" appears 50 times more frequently in Darwin's text than the phrase "survival of the fittest" appears does not help much to establish that what Charles Darwin really meant to say was that love made the world go around.

Happy Valentines Day - Charlie, Abe and everyone.

Bill from Saginaw

The point that David Loye makes is a very important one and should not be missed.

Of course our brains have developed enough so that we have a great degree of free will and using that free will and our ability to think we can either do great things or we can mess things up royally. Beliefs which are wrong and destructive lead to the latter course. One such belief is the belief that it is natural for humans to be selfish and ruthlessly competitive. That has been the conclusion that many have come to from their incomplete, limited understanding of Darwin's work.

What David Loye is saying is that Darwin believed that at the human level of evolutionary emergence, moral sensitivity becomes a more important driver for evolution. This is not something that Loye assumes just from the word count - as is incorrectly assumed by one of the people who commented - it is stated by Darwin, Loye points out, in a section labeled concluding remarks. If this was what was taught to us for the last 150 years or so, we might have avoided the atrocities and the cruelties of the Nazis, the communists and, yes, the damage done by corporations in capitalist countries such as the U.S.

Ideas are very, very powerful and this idea of selfish genes and survival of the fittest as the most important natural driver in humans has done a lot of damage. I guess it's easy to believe in it when we see so much evil-doing around us but that's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy, isn't it? Or is it a vicious cycle of beliefs leading to actions which lead people back to the beliefs. Belief in ruthless competition leads to institutions and people that ruthlessly compete and end up hurting and traumatizing us. This leads people, now traumatized and surrounded by ruthlessness, back to the belief that there's not much of a moral sense and that it's natural to have ruthless competition. In addition we have a history of brutality which certainly led to our ancestors belief in the brutish nature of humanity, and to our own willingness to believe in it.

But what about what we know in our hearts? Don't we know that we feel for total strangers when we see them suffering? Don't we know that we ourselves don't care only about our genes' survival and competing at any cost? Haven't we heard of people who have risked their own lives for those of strangers? How can we not know that a moral sense is important to us? How can we ignore the truth that's in our hearts? How can we not see that if morality can exist and is an important part of one of us, it is natural for it to exist and be an important aspect of all of us? How can we not see how human morality has improved conditions from centuries past? How can we not see the atrocities, the ruthlessness, the destructive competition, the pettiness, and the lies as a what it is – not a natural part of our evolution but a virus is that endangering our very survival.

Darwin understood this a century and a half ago. We need to understand it and to spread the word. Thank you, David Loye, for doing that. With the climate crisis, nuclear weapons and all the other types of destruction that we have used our brains to be able to create, it’s time we use our brains to think logically and emotionally about what is obvious – our species is destroying itself and using the “survival of the fittest” paradigm to do it. It’s time, way past time, for us to see what Darwin saw so long ago. Love and morality is what needs to drive humanity!

Evolution and the associated genetics are of great complexity, and I do not find it likely that any simple explanations are very helpful. I thought it had been accepted by many for decades that there were evolutionary pressures to make humans act for the group benefit, but that there were also other evolutionary pressures pushing humans to act for individual benefit. Certainly males have always competed with each other to become dominant among the males and to mate with more females, but, at the same time, the more the children of such relationships develop in a healthy and secure environment, the more likely that mating will actually pass on genes for generations, and the health and security of that environment is largely dependent on the level of cooperation in the group.

In the modern world, I do not see most of the conflict as arising from "selfish" genes or the belief that such genes exist or predominate, but as resulting from the myriad difficulties involved when small groups merge in forming larger groups, often by force, particularly since humans evolved in small groups. Though the formation of large groups is sometimes forced, it is also sometimes voluntary, as there are certain economic and security advantages from belonging to the large group, even though there are a number of disadvantages as well.

And it is clear that humans are not yet well-adapted to large groups even though this process of merging has been going on for thousands of years (I suspect this is part of the reason marriage and sexual relationships generally are so problematical). Humans usually end up forming small groups within the large group, and those small groups sometimes become powerful and abusive towards the larger group. Also, humans in large groups often engage in devastating conflicts with those in other large groups without good reason and without benefit to the great majority of members of the large groups (often because some small group within a large group instigated it).

kg -

Very nicely said. I agree that love and morality should become the driving forces for humanity, collectively. The sticky point remains of course, whose morality? Yours, mine, the Talibans', or the Zionists'?

Darwin suffered from God hassles, and accusations of being a nonbeliever, throughout much of his life. Lincoln faced a whole armed society of God-fearing plantation slaveholders, emerging from the ordeal with a lot of blood on his own hands.

I did not mean to imply that David Loye was merely counting words and was not properly analyzing Darwin's substance. My point remains that content analysis by word count in this instance says much more about the editors' indexing myopia than it says about Charles Darwin's place in the whole intelligent design/evolution debate.

How do you suppose it came to be that there were 95 mentions of love in Descent of Man, yet the term got indexed only once until just now, in the age of Google?

How did it happen that even though survival of the fittest as a slogan shows up only twice in Darwin's text, variations upon that turn of phrase were seized upon to provide a gloss of intellectual underpinning for a bizarre, diverse array of basically destructive human political movements - the white man's burden as justification for 1800's colonialism, Jim Crow separate but equal, eugenics, nazism/Aryan supremacy, the University of Chicago school of unregulated corporate market capitalism with its invisible hand, Leo Straus' elitist, anti-democratic political philosophy, and even Reaganomics' core axiom that today's rich masters of the universe got rich in the first place chiefly because they excel in entreprenurial skills and spirit?

Somehow, the forces of militarism and material greed managed to coopt the words and distort the message of Darwin much like they did with Jesus.

"It's every man for himself!", the elephant shouted, dancing among the chickens.

Bill from Saginaw

I recently had the privilege of attending a presentation/dialogue given by David Loye in California that was of course much more detailed than his post here.

Truly an intriguing and relevant body of work, I encourage everyone to attend a presentation by Dr. Loye or to obtain his books.

His is an important view to hear, read and see.

EJ Wensing
US Virgin Islands

Ken from Atlanta

We all agree with David. So we a preaching to the choir. What obstacles are we facing in our attempt to propagate this truth? Where are the levers of power that we can push to move the Darwin debate in our favor?

Ken

David Loye

I am frankly overwhelmed by the eloquence and intelligence of comments so far to my article The Ghost at the Birthday Party. This is not soft soap. I have in the past been dismayed by the lack of same in response to so much earnest and good work by others online.
I'm particularly impressed with the sophistication of these comments. Evolution is a far more complex process than we're taught to reduce to the handy tag of survival of the fittest or selfish genes. At the same time, as some of these comments bring out, it's really very simple in the end. That is, in the sense of the love and moral sensitivity thrust versus the thrust backward of hate and moral insensitivity. Freud tabbed it the thrust of Eros versus Thanatos. In Maslow it's the stand pat or backward thrust for the Defense motivation versus the thrust ahead of Growth and Metamotivation. This underlying dynamic has been expressed now over many centuries by an astounding number first of spiritual, then of philosophical, and more recently scientific visionaries. I feel good about my own work in the development of the Global Sounding as a new measure of global health and wellbeing---the first measure to provide a way for any one of us to measure whether policies, programs, contemplated actions of all kinds are likely to advance, or check in place, or drive us backward in evolution. I show what it is and how to easily put it to work in Bankrolling Evolution: A Program for a President (with naturally Obama on the cover) and Measuring Evolution: A Leadership Guide to the Health and Wealth of Nations. Available through online book sellers worldwide, or thru book stores in the U.S. Pardon me for ending with a commercial, but believe me nearly two decades of going up against the paradigm on behalf of Darwin's ghost has forced me to it!

Blessings to you all!

Superb points.

Remember, Adam Smith was also a professor of moral philosophy. His humanism also deserves a David Loye-style re-presentation.

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Howard Bloom
Howardbloom.net
Author of: The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History ("mesmerizing"-The Washington Post), Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century ("reassurin

Was not the Republican Revolution based on the notion that businessmen are the super-race?

Why, yes it was. We've been sold this meme ever since Ronald Reagan, and we all know it by heart: government bad, business good. It is still popular amongst Repubs, conspiracy folks, and libertarian types.

We can profitably interpret the last 30 years as a botched attempt to put this quasi-fascist idea into play.

It has resulted in the richest of historical ironies, as the government rides in on its white steed to rescue the very people who kept telling us how bad government is.

8 Years without a Leader

There is a very interesting book called The Aquatic Ape by Elaine Morgan which attempts to address some of our missing evolutionary history. She posits that early humans, for a significant period of time, lived in sheltered bays on warm seacoasts as semi-aquatic primates and cites physiological adaptations which are specific to humans and not found in other primates which support that theory: the 'diving reflex', the layer of subcutaneous fat, lack of body hair except where skin might rub on skin, nostrils designed to keep out water, etc.

The intertidal zone is nutrient rich, and does not require sophisticated or competitive techniques for harvesting food.
A cooperative culture is much more likely to arise from this scenario than a culture conditioned by resource scarcity in the jungle or on the savannah. Her book has been out for many years now, but has never really been acknowledged by the 'survival of the fittest' sorts. Those two citings in Darwin's book themselves make a good case for their own survival as obviously they are what appealed to scientists. You get what you look for . . .

Thank you to the author for suggesting there may yet be a future which honors moral sensitivity.

I recently had the opportunity to attend a workshop that you and Riane spoke at and was touched by your work. Have you considered David, that perhaps we aren't quite mature enough yet, as a species to stand firm on morality and love when faced with exploitive possibilities? One post suggested maturity to come to the higher morality suggested in love being the answer. While it pains me to admit this about humanity, in Kolberg's hierarchy of moral development, while there was a level of esoteric altruism available to mankind, Kolberg realized years later that not many attained that level of development, and those that did were older adults in general who had reached that stage of development along Erikson's continuum as well.

The exploitation of knowledge has been going on for much longer than Darwin's works. For instance just look at the message of Jesus and Mary Magdalene who had studied all the major religions and integrated the true message of each into a spiritual practice built on love, acceptance, and compassion. Recently the secret gospel of Magdalene has surfaced (The Secret Teachings of Mary Magdalene, by Claire Nahmad and Margaret Bailey) which supports the partnership work that Riane has written about, and had her part in the passion play not been distorted by Peter and Paul, (mysogenists of the worst kind) we might not have had to go through much of the history of the past 2000 years, including the attempts at eradication of the feminine aspect in humanity as a whole. Instead the people of the time preferred to let a criminal go and crucify a man whose whole creed was built on loving acceptance of one another. And a religion was started that has helped to set in place the inhumane treatment of anyone who does not submit to status quo.

Maturity assumes the ability to critically assess and question what is taught, written, and believed for oneself. Yet, the masses have generally been lulled into a dream state of acceptance for what any authority says to them, such as was demonstrated in the Milgram study and in the Adorno study. In that dream state any charismatic meglomaniac can convince the unthinking masses into heinous acts, such as we have seen with the likes of Hitler and Bush. Yet, perhaps we as a planetary race are moving toward evolution of consciousness through the time frame of the Mayan calendar. Dr. Carl Johan Calleman's research on the Mayan calendar has revealed a time frame for the evolution of consciousness that suggests that now is the time and that while we have been experiencing the "dark night of the soul" (for much longer than the last eight years) perhaps we may soon be ready to embrace our interdependence with one another and take that quantum leap in consciousness required to move into the second part of Darwin's theory of evolution.

Tricia Chandler, LPC

Dear new and old friends,

Did not Darwin himself contribute much to the fact that "action-oriented theory" of evolution was "buried and ignored for over 100 years" in David's words, by postponing to even mention Lamarck in his Origin until its 6th edition and by not presenting Lamarck's theory in a more affirmative way than he has done in his Descent? Namely, had not Lamarck in "Philosophie zoologique" 50 years before Darwin's Origin elaborated just such action-oriented theory of evolution of all living beings and not just of humans, putting an accent on the non / use of organs as primary mechanism of their development / regression, rather than on natural selection between random mutations?

Darwin namely admitted rather belatedly and grudgingly that there is some truth to Lamarck's hypothesis in Chapter 3 of Discent:

"Considering the strictly subterranean habits of the tucutuco, the blindness, though so common, cannot be a very serious evil; yet it appears strange that any animal should possess an organ frequently subject to be injured. Lamarck would have been delighted with this fact, had he known it, when speculating (probably with more truth than usual with him) on the gradually _acquired_ blindness of the Asphalax, a Gnawer living under ground, and of the Proteus, a reptile living in dark caverns filled with water; in both of which animals the eye is in an almost rudimentary state, and is covered by a tendinous membrane and skin. In the common mole the eye is extraordinarily small but perfect, though many anatomists doubt whether it is connected with the true optic nerve; its vision must certainly be imperfect, though probably useful to the animal when it leaves its burrow. In the tucutuco, which I believe never comes to the surface of the ground, the eye is rather larger, but often rendered blind and useless, though without apparently causing any inconvenience to the animal; no doubt Lamarck would have said that the tucutuco is now passing into the state of the Asphalax and Proteus. "

www.veravratusa.org

David Loye’s research strikes an important note at this time, 200 years after Darwin was born. It is all too easy to lump participants in debates on evolution into rationalists vs religious freaks, but it is not that simple. I was somewhat dismayed to see an entire page of letters to the editor in a Hong Kong newspaper today decrying the evils of creationism, and not a single letter addressing any of the key points on intelligent design, the misrepresentation of Darwin, nor the misapplication of some of Darwin’s ideas or the problems of neo-Darwinism in general. I didn’t see any evidence of any considered thought on the subject, simply a series of seemingly angry put-downs about the dangers of letting religion take over in schools.
Darwin was well aware of the misrepresentation of his ideas by all sides, writing in 1872 edition of The Origin of Species:

"As my conclusions have lately been much represented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of (The Origin of Species) and subsequently, I place in a most conspicuous position… the following words: ‘I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.’ This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation."

One problem is that some of the most popular and successful science writers have taken Darwin’s ideas and turned them into a kind of grand theory of everything, granting the theory applicability to domains that it has little bearing upon. Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are the most notable. Dennett, for example wrote the following in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea:

"The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the last microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand theory."

It does no such thing. It does show that life developed due to natural selection, pressures upon the individual for survival and reproduction. It provides a plausible mechanism for the way life developed and changed without the need for supernatural intervention. It says nothing about the actual origins of life, nor whether there are spiritual components to human (or other) consciousness.

Darwin is not the only scientist or great thinker to be misrepresented by modernity, and these are instances of paradigm blindness, as David Loye has pointed out. Freud was more spiritual than his English translators allowed, according to is contemporary Bettleheim (in Freud and Man’s Soul). The ancient Greeks were as much mystics as rationalists, and even Aristotle and Socrates had a mystical substrate to their conceptions. Copernicus was an astrologer, Newton was an alchemist, and so on. The danger in misrepresenting the great thinkers of human civilisation is that we also leave off the map the realms of mind that they may have utilised, but which make little sense to the scientific rationalist.

In terms of the cognitive skills that Darwin possessed, he was a great classifier. He was able to collect masses of data and categorise it mechanically into groups which made sense of it. We owe him a great debt for his genius. However he wasn’t so good at other ways of knowing, as he confessed in his autobiography. He lamented his ordinary capacity at math, and late in life regretted that he had become a kind of automaton for collecting and classifying data. His capacity to appreciate music and poetry had diminished.

I think this says something. Darwin’s single-minded focus upon one particular way of knowing retarded certain other cognitive abilities. How much of this damage is being visited upon us, and the youngsters in schools today because of the overt focus upon critical rationality? What particularly concerns me, both at a personal and professional level, is the almost complete extermination of inner worlds and the intuitive in modern society. This is not simply the case in the West. In East Asia (where I work), the situation is even worse, and children are being “mass produced” as virtual commodities in the market place. As David Loye seems to be getting at, the mentality of competition and survival of the fittest seems to have completely leached the spiritual dimensions from the human psyche, taking with them the moral sense.

Marcus T. Anthony
marcus.a@mindfutures.com
www.mindfutures.com