A philosophical/grammatical analysis of the events described in evolution theory does not lend any support to the evolutionary concepts of survival, advancement, replication and selfishness:
Evolution is marked by death, not survival. Nothing survives.
Advancement of a species means its dying out and replacement. Extinction of a species means its dying out and nothing taking its place.
Nothing is replicated, for the identity that supposedly marks out the object of replication isn’t itself replicated.
Selfishness as life’s purpose does not describe life’s forms, but describes the imagined forms that populate the invented world described by evolution theory and its other-worldly laws of replication and survival.
In evolution theory we are witnessing the unacknowledged birth of a new religion - endorsed as such by its commitment to a type of supernaturalism. It is a religion for a modern, technical age, a religion founded on ideas taken from a Biblical template. The idea of “advancement of the species”, like the golden calf, steals the actualities of personal and social transformation and uses them to drive the idea and promise of material transcendence or advancement of the species. This material transcendence, in turn, is supported by evolution theory’s idea of the replication and transmigration of identity of individuals and species across the boundary of death - a supernatural idea, surely. This idea also supports evolution’s moral idea of a selfishness that purportedly strives, selfishly, for replication and transmigration, for which the antidote is Dawkinian altruism; more Biblical themes.
Philosophy needs to come to evolution theory for it is sorely in need of it. I think that we will be surprised by what we find, and by the way in which we have misled ourselves on the nature of our own project - evolution theory.
Basically you’re asking, what is mind, self and memory in the scheme of things? … What does ‘mind’ have to do with the human body, which having evolved, is the handiwork of the gene, created for its safe perpetuation in its own way and for its own ends?
Focusing on the gene makes no difference - nothing survives through evolutionary replication, copying, advancement or survival.
Interestingly, you draw attention to another oddity of evolution theory - experiences can supposedly affect matter in evolutionary theory. That alone should point to its unworldly or supernatural status. Philosophically or grammatically, causation is reciprocal, but is there really mind over matter?
Although I don’t accept many of your arguments - they seem to exhibit a fallacy of confusing concepts as applied to a collective vs. concepts applied to a particular member - I too share a concern that evolution is rivalling creationism in its dogmatism and that there’s a lack of precision in applying it - specifically when evolutionary concepts are used to explain life’s origins. Some examples of this lack of precision:
References to evolutionary purposes of changes in species sounds fairly teleological to me
The extrapolation to evidence for changes within species to the creation of species.
The mere passage of a LARGE amount of time in change seeming to justify evolution in and of itself.
Now granted, I’m no creationist - evolution is the best theory we have for describing changes in species and I don’t expect a sudden refutation of its tenets, merely refinement (as far as species change in concerned). But it’s applied too broadly without a whole lot of evidence or explanation behind it in some instances, and in its effort to battle creationist dogma its proponents seem not to have taken the lessons of that history but instead consider any question of it to be sacrilege.
However we wish to describe or classify the changes we find in lifes forms, we must not introduce supernatural ideas about individual survival or species advancement unless we wish to build a religion.
I’m fine with the physical classifications that evolution theory uses at the moment, whatever they are. I’m not fine with the non-physical gloss that, increasingly, looms over them.
Evolution doesn’t mean anything. It is a physical classification.
Once we start asking for the meaning of evolution, we leave evolution theory behind and start answering with reasons why we made the classification.
Evolution does, in fact, have a very clear meaning. Provide me with the theory of Evolution and your critiques of it and we can continue. I’ll even take slightly outdated versions so I can point you in the right direction.
Fuck it, I’ll take Spencer’s (entirely incorrect and misappropriated) maxim.
I subscribe to the gene selection theory of evolution.
Genes, as structures, survive.
Advancement, if used at all, can only mean change that enhanced the survival. Nothing more. No gene existing today, in whatever organism or species, is more “advanced” than any other. All of them are more “advanced” than the genes that were present in the past gene pool, but are no longer present.
The gene structure is replicated.
Theory of evolution doesn’t claim selfishness as the “purpose” of life (it doesn’t claim life has any “purpose” at all). It explains emergence of complexity from simplicity in terms of gene selection with genes acting “as if they wanted to survive and increase their presence in the gene pool”. There sure are loaded terms like “selfishness”, “survival of the fittest” etc, but the theory itself can be described in terms completely of emotionally neutral words. For example “survival of the fittest” can be replaced by “differential survival” and “selfishness” by “self-sustaining”.
Nothing survives. Genes die. They don’t survive in their replication.
What’s an “enhancement”? We can always cite a case of living longer than living less. Living for five minutes is an enhancement on living for four minutes and 59 seconds, and living for four minutes 59 seconds is an enhancement on living for four minutes and 58.9 seconds.
Selfishness. I can only reiterate what I wrote: we can’t have anything to be selfish for if nothing survives death. And nothing survives death, not even genes.
You can’t argue that the blueprint for a structure is replicated. Materials are replicated, not plans, designs and structures. If you argue that a plan or structure is replicated then that looks like transmigration of an immaterial substance or soul.
“Differential survival” is a worse phrase than “survival of the fittest”. The former suggests that individuals or species survive death by, despite replication, being different. The latter suggests that survivers are fit by definition, and not fit by “surviving”.
The ‘survival’ that is referred to in the theory of evolution is the survival of the structures/patterns that are capable of making copies of themselves when represented in matter. Materials are never replicated, not in organisms nor anywhere else. A copy of a printed page isn’t a magical duplication of every particle of the page into another. It is a copy of the pattern on the original to another page. A replica is always a replica of a pattern.
You seem to be obsessed with the death of individual organisms and something surviving such death. As long as there is life, some genes survive. The genes present in the bodies of the organims alive today (you and me included) survived the deaths of millions and billions of such bodies.
I am not sure you want to call the pattern/structure of a gene, a soul, then you would have souls making copies of themselves instead of transmigrating. Also you would have to treat each individual as a collection of many souls.
‘Survival of fittest’ suggests that there is some a-priori fitness that determines survival, something that is not meant by the theory. Some genes survive for longer than others and those that survived are the fittest (fitness being a-posteriori definition). That is why I suggested ‘differential survival’. Anyway, I am not worried about what phrases are used as long as the meaning is understood.
A pattern that survives death matches the description of the soul in that both are immaterial, and both survive death of their material substrate.
Life is marked by death, and nothing survives death, not even genes. Organic, living matter decays, has accidents, and death is known to it.
Anything that survives is declared to be the fittest a posteriori. And it is hard to see how an a priori fitness can be declared in that case.
What we have to ask is whether an a posteriori definition is merely a label tag that relabels a survivor, with no informational input. And unless there is an a priori definition of fitness then it is no more than a relabelling.
Tradition.
If I hand my child a tradition and they in turn hand it to their child, etc…, does this mean that this tradition (a way of doing something) is not passed because it is not a physical thing beyond the teaching and action of it (information)?
"Passing a tradition on " is a physical metaphor of handing something over to another person. And “survival” of a tradition is a metaphor for maintaining a tradition across the death of individuals and generations. But the tradition does not itself survive.
I don’t really give a shit how you want to word the damn thing.
Call it whatever you want.
You clearly understand the action that is being described.
You therefore clearly understand that the action is continued, just as sex continues even though it’s not my dad and mom having sex that I partake in now, but instead me and my wife having sex.
This genetic impulse to have sex continues and does not stop because of a previous ancestor’s death.
You are going off about things not existing as if stating their impermanence as a solid object in and of themselves is any indication in the occurrence not existing itself at all.
That is simply not accurate.
A pattern is a pattern because of the arrangement of things themselves based on causal information in some format or another.
If I put these words in this arrangement, then I have created a pattern and this pattern indicates the arrangement of these words; the words themselves are the physical objects - binary code in a computer infrastructure - and the arrangement of them is the pattern.
Saying evolution doesn’t exist because a pattern is not a tangible thing is like saying seasons don’t exist because the solar cycle is simply a measure.
It’s superfluous.
Since my (rather basic) question has remained unanswered, I’ll post the definition that opens the Wikipedia article on the subject:
I fail to see how the criticisms leveled in the OP pertain to that definition. Indeed, I fail to see how the criticisms leveled in the OP pertain to any cognizant definition of Evolution, hence my asking what definition the OP is employing.