This thread is about the relation of Nietzsche’s views on biology to modern Darwinian evolutionary science. My contention is that Nietzsche fundamentally misunderstood Darwinism, sometimes even siding with it when he thought he was diametrically opposed to it—for instance in the following example:
[size=95]Anti-Darwin.[This is the title of the whole section.]—What surprises me most when I survey the broad destinies of man is that I always see before me the opposite of that which Darwin and his school see or want to see today: selection in favor of the stronger, better-constituted, and the progress of the species. Precisely the opposite is palpable: the elimination of the lucky strokes, the uselessness of the more highly developed types, the inevitable dominion of the average, even the sub-average types. If we are not shown why man should be the exception among creatures, I incline to the prejudice that the school of Darwin has been deluded everywhere.
[Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 685.][/size]
Note that this is only the first paragraph (in the manuscript: the first half of the first paragraph); the section goes on for another seven (in the MS: five and a half). But the contention I made above is already supported by this. To see why natural selection need not be selection in favour of the stronger, for instance, read the comic strip Survival of the Sneakiest.
My contention: ‘that Nietzsche fundamentally misunderstood Darwinism, sometimes even siding with it when he thought he was diametrically opposed to it’.
Nietzsche misunderstood Darwin to have thought the opposite of what Nietzsche thought.
There is no such thing as “Darwin’s notion of the survival of the strongest”. Read the comic strip I linked to.
For what it’s worth, that was exactly my reading of it too.
I don’t know in how far he studied what Darwin said, or simply heard something and thought it was a chance to attack an English (hence utilitarian, hence decadent) thinker.
Why should I do your homework? I already gave you the comic strip. It’s from the same site as this:
[size=95]Biologists use the word fitness to describe how good a particular genotype is at leaving offspring in the next generation relative to how good other genotypes are at it. […] The fittest individual is not necessarily the strongest, fastest, or biggest.
[http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/IIIE2Fitness.shtml.][/size]
Your strip supports the same hypothesis like Nietzsche, i.e. that there is no survival of the fittest, because strongest (soul), fittest or “better constituted” is the same.
If you claim Nietzsche was wrong, isn’t that your homework then?
If someone claims you are an idiot, whose ‘homework’ is that then?
You obviously only play and speculate with Nietzsche’s terms, but you never dare to put them in a context which presumably belonged to Nietzsche.
If that’s how you define “fitness”. The Darwinian definition, however, is different from yours:
[size=95]fitness (1) The relative reproductive success (including survival ability) of one set of genes relative to others. (2) Good physical or mental condition that might prove genetically heritable.
[Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind, Glossary.][/size]
The purely scientific definition is (1); yours, Nietzsche’s, and health clubs’ definition is (2). The two often overlap, but not necessarily.
Anyway, yes, the strip supports the same hypothesis as Nietzsche above. So Nietzsche was not ‘anti-Darwin’, in that respect at least.
Only from your angle. You already knew what Nietzsche said about Darwin, but you didn’t know Darwin yet. The basics of Darwinism, however, may be supposed to be general knowledge today (in the sense that any individual with a decent education can be presumed to know them). I admit that, until recently, I was behind general knowledge in this respect, and I have recently compensated for this by doing ‘homework’, yes. In the course of doing my homework, I found that comic strip, and I linked to it in my OP as the easiest explanation of Darwinism. Reading that strip, like reading my OP, is the homework assigned to anyone who wants to participate in this discussion.
Whatever. Do you agree that Nietzsche’s position as quoted in my OP is not at odds with Darwinism as explained in that strip? And that that position was therefore not ‘anti-Darwin’?
I have read now a little bit of your bastardic strip and I don’t find any Darwinism in it.
It is a joke based on multiple wrong assumptions, like crickets breed dependent on sound? Who can prove that? I have heard crickets make sound when it is heat, or at night, but never heard about breeding. Insects usually base all their deeds on smells…
Are you a bastard too?
Anyway, is your hypothesis that the “artistic man” has more chances to breed?
But how if he attracts only decadents? Decadents want no offspring and probably can have none. Just like Wagneric women who can have no children.
Do you suppose that Nietzsche really didn’t know that the ownership and regular, shared surplus of food - civilisation, in other words - does allow humans the luxury of keeping the botched and the broken? He really didn’t know?
The word “know” you use implies that what you say is true, which it isn’t. There is no qualitative difference between ‘civilisation’ and ‘the wild’. But you (inadvertently?) raise an important point: the (seeming?) contradiction between Nietzsche’s correct view of “the elimination of the lucky strokes, the uselessness of the more highly developed types, the inevitable dominion of the average, even the sub-average types” and of the fact that man is no “exception among creatures” in this regard on the one hand, and his probably incorrect view of pity on the other.
As I’ve said, Nietzsche was sometimes on the side of Darwinism (i.e., scientific fact), even if he thought he was diametrically opposed to it. But it’s well possible that he was often in conflict with scientific fact, even if he thought he was not… Do you hear what announces itself here, Faust? A Sauwelian critique of Nietzsche… Did you even think that possible?—
I’m on the verge of learning more about the probable evolutionary meaning of human morals, but I can already envision this much: pity (or compassion: Mitleiden) probably does not “cross” “the law of development, which is the law of selection” (AC 7) at all. For one thing, compassionateness, though (mostly) useless for survival purposes, is or has been of great use for reproductive purposes: for compassionateness is costly for the compassionate one, and thereby indicates that he can afford it and then some, and is therefore quite fit. Contrary to what Nietzsche thought, then, it is not a weakness, but behaviour for which man has evolved a preference. Of course, being able to remain master of one’s compassionate tendencies may indicate an even greater fitness; but in order for this indicator to be visible to the opposite sex, one must be able to show the strength of one’s compassionate tendencies as well as one’s mastery thereof.
Sau is closer and closer to his final conclusion. Step by step he will revaluate his opinions until he concludes not only is he dumb (Depp) for Nietzsche’s truths but also “possibilities”.
(p.s. pity is a virtue only among whores and serves for their “reproductive purposes” only. Did I ask Sau if he is a bastard?)
You mean you don’t find any of what Nietzsche called ‘Darwinism’ in it? For the strip is in complete accordance with actual Darwinism.
You never were very good with homework, were you, Cezar…
[size=95]Only the male crickets chirp. A large vein running along the bottom of each wing has “teeth,” much like a comb does. The chirping sound is created by running the top of one wing along the teeth at the bottom of the other wing. As he does this, the cricket also holds the wings up and open, so that the wing membranes can act as acoustical sails. It is a popular myth that the cricket chirps by rubbing its legs together.
There are four types of cricket song: The calling song attracts females and repels other males, and is fairly loud. The courting song is used when a female cricket is near, and is a very quiet song.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_(insect)#Cricket_chirping.][/size]
Mick Jagger, for instance, has seven children with four women.
As it does after any significant change of environment. ‘Civilisation’ is just one more different environment, just as there are many different environments in ‘the wild’.
P.S.: Actually, there are also many different environments within ‘civilisation’, of course. So ‘civilisation’ is a different class of environments from ‘the wild’.