Natural selection sifts traits for adaptive fitness in an environment, i.e., having more babies that themselves reach reproductive age and propagate themselves. Period. There is no suggestion in the theory that a trait that promotes adaptive fitness is morally better, more valuable, more worth preserving, more beautiful, more complex, more interesting or anything that would in any sense could as "higher."
Organisms can end up with a set of traits that do not change at all in ant significant way for hundreds of millions of years (sharks) because their set is about as adaptively optimal as it can be. More complex life forms can be wiped out in mass or other extinctions because traits that were adaptive hen they evolved them were not adaptive in a changed set of circumstances.
If we annihilate ourselves with nuclear war or global warming, the cockroaches (another ancient, largely unchanged survivor for many hundreds of millions of years) will inherit the earth, and the spirit of Darwin will look placidly down and nod, thinking to itself that all is as it should be -- the theory is vindicated.
True, there's a popular misunderstanding that melds the great chain of being in a modern form with evolutionary development, stretching from single-celled organisms at the bottom to Man at the pinnacle; 19th and early 20th century social Darwinists notoriously used this confusion for racist purposes. But it's scientific rubbish; from the point of view of evolution, Man is no "higher" than a protozoan, and the only question to which evolution wants to know the answer is, is the collection of heritable traits wrapped up in this organism maximizing or at least satisficing adaptive fitness?
It's really precisely because evolutionary theory is a great leveler of all natural hierarchies, not because it puts humans as descendants of "lower" forms of life, that the fundamentalists have always correctly identified the theory as the enemy of their project. For them, God so loved human kind that gave his only son as a sacrifice so save us. For Darwin, God could not care less. It's a big cold empty indifferent universe out there and if there is meaning and value in it, we make it ourselves.
--- Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:
> Joanna wrote:
>
> >>
> >> The terms 'higher' and 'upward' are, alas, left
> utterly undefined.
> >>
> > Yes. It always struck me how similar the
> evolutionary picture was
> > to the older great chain of being. Only diff being
> that in one you
> > have man at the top, and in the other, God.
> >
> > And the industrial revolution + capitalism changed
> our metaphors so
> > that the latest is always the best. Put those two
> together and you
> > have some of the less scientific underpinnings of
> evolutionary theory.
>
> The quoted passage is from a book criticizing the
> ontological
> foundations of orthodox evolutionary theory. You
> can't rationally
> conclude from the fact that the terms aren't defined
> in that passage
> that they aren't defined in the rest of the book or
> in Whitehead's
> work as a whole.
>
> Here's a passage from another work, Adventures of
> Ideas, providing
> some elaboration and explicitly indicating the
> relation to Plato.
>
> "The factor in human life provocative of a noble
> discontent is the
> gradual emergence into prominence of a sense of
> criticism, founded
> upon appreciations of beauty, and of intellectual
> distinction, and of
> duty. The moral element is derivative from the
> other factors in
> experience. For otherwise there is no content for
> duty to operate
> upon. There can be no mere morality in a vacuum.
> Thus the primary
> factors in experience are first the animal passions
> such as love,
> sympathy, ferocity, together with analogous
> appetitions and
> satisfactions; and secondly, the more distinctly
> human experiences of
> beauty, and of intellectual fineness, consciously
> enjoyed. Here the
> notion of intellectual distinction, or of fineness,
> is somewhat
> broader than that of 'truth', which is ordinarily
> cited in this
> connection. There is a grandeur of achievement in
> the delicate
> adjustment of thought to thought, which is
> independent of the mere
> blunt question of truth. We may term it 'beauty'.
> But intellectual
> beauty, however capable of being hymned in terms
> relevant to sensible
> beauty, is yet beautiful by stretch of metaphor.
> The same
> consideration applies to moral beauty. All three
> types of character
> partake in the highest ideal of satisfaction
> possible for actual
> realization, and in this sense can be termed that
> beauty which
> provides the final contentment for the Eros of the
> Universe.
> "For European thought, the effective expression of
> this critical
> discontent, which is the gadfly of civilization, has
> been provided by
> Hebrew and Greek thought. Its most adequate
> expression, so far as
> concerns literary delicacy and definition of the
> issues involved, is
> to be found in Plato's dialogues." Adventures of
> Ideas, p. 12
>
> Ted
>
>
>
> Ted
>
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