> And of course this invokes the whole bourgeois "Idea of
> Progress" (which, according to Gould, Darwin attempted explicitly to
> exclude from his evolutionary theory but also, unfortunately, allowed
> often to creep in.)
That was because Darwin was a "materialist" of the kind criticized in the third thesis on Feuerbach i.e. he believed reality to be made up wholly of externally related meaningless fragments of matter in law determined motion. The positivist distinction between facts and values follows from this. There is therefore no objective basis for judging one set of circumstances, e.g. those in Abu Ghraib prison, to be better or worse than any other.
All that could objectively be said about evolutionary development was that it demonstrated "direction" i.e. you could place states in the process in temporal order. No objective grounds were available for claiming that the process was "progressive" in a value sense e.g. no objective basis for judging human existence to be better or more valuable than the existence of rocks. You're also contradicting the position when you claim that some matter in motion is sadistic torture.
It hasn't got logical space for the "causes" this implies.
Ted