Linguistic Darwinism: A Primer and Ender
A long time ago back in the 19th century after Darwin popped up, some of his enthusiasts wanted to apply his revealed principles such as survival of the fittest and natural selection to society and economics. They came up with a cutthroat philosophy called Social Darwinism that was popular in Britain until the welfare state began being built. Dickens' imagery is very much a view of Social Darwinism. In North America, its popularity and influence continued mostly unrestrained until the Great Depression and the growing of the national government's participation in economic life and its efforts to moderate the effects of poverty and want.
Social Darwinism's premises were extrapolations of Darwin's biological theories into the human spheres of society and economics. Like Darwin's view of the natural world, the Social Darwinists saw society's improvement coming from its shedding of the weak and needy and opposed efforts to help the impoverished or those who could not support themselves. Laissez faire capitalism is a downtown concept of the Social Darwinists although elements of Darwinism are found in National Socialist (Nazi) and Marxist dialectics. Mercy was not in Darwinist's dictionary except as their concepts worked to create the greatest good for the greater society. This was to be achieved by elimination of the sick, the weak, the impoverished, the slow-witted or anyone who was unfit for survival. Eugenics is a technique for helping along this process. Like Darwin's revealed principles foresaw unstoppable refinement and improvement in the biological world, the Social Darwinists saw social and economic improvement inevitable. The fittest survive, thus, the unit is more fit. Heylighen expresses the core concept of the Darwinists:
...if more than one replicator is using the same resources, there will be a situation of competition or conflict. Slight differences in fitness between the competitors will be exacerbated, since the more efficient replicator will gradually succeed in using more and more of the resources, leaving less and less for the less efficient one. In the long term, nothing will be left for the less fit one, with the result that only the fittest will survive.
Heylighen, ‘ "Selfish" Memes and the Evolution of Cooperation.'
Various popular modern ideas are extensions of Darwinistic principles. ‘The marketplace of ideas' and the ‘inevitability of progress' both refer to the unstoppable ascending spiral of thought and economic and technological expansion based on the Darwinistic faith. To portray Darwin as a prophet and high priest of modern thinking is no exaggeration. To the Darwinist, all life can be explained and understood only thru Darwin's revelations. Even the Darwinist term, ‘evolution,' has numerous meanings that broaden it to explain all of existence. The word ‘evolution' means not only ‘to create' but to change and also to develop.
The thought process goes like this:
1. Evolution is true.
2. All life was created and directed by evolution.
3. All life elements can only be understood within the principles of evolution.
4. The brain and language are part of life.
5. Therefore, the brain and language can only be understood using the principles of evolution.
The Linguistic Darwinists want to explain psychology and language in terms of their faith in Darwinism. Sometimes they are very funny and counterintuitive, but are always true to their faith. I couldn't help but laugh reading in Cosmides and Tooby (‘Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer') that ‘individuals who have the more sensitive retina will produce offspring at a higher rate than those who lack it.' Oh, yea. Right. So when a female is checking out a male's assets, she inquires about his retinal acuity? And vice versa? I don't think so. A much more intuitive statement would be that sexual predators carrying a big stick and dragging females away by the hair ‘will produce offspring at a higher rate' than shy people.
In another place they write in the same work:
Generation after generation, for 10 million years, natural selection slowly sculpted the human brain, favoring circuitry that was good at solving the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors - problems like finding mates, hunting animals, gathering plant foods, negotiating with friends, defending ourselves against aggression, raising children, choosing a good habitat, and so on. Those whose circuits were better designed for solving these problems left more children, and were descended from them. [boldface added]
Such a statement may be true to the evolístas' faith, but it is again counterintuitive. The Linguistic Darwinists make mating sound so intellectual when I would contend that ‘for 10 million years' (a nice round number, eh?) it was a matter of the aggressive pursuit of putting the male dinger to the female thingy. Looking back 10 million years and proving anything is not credible. The Linguistic Darwinists create an idealized scenario that can only be proved if based on their blind faith and the correctness of their assumptions. Again I insist that the sexual predators would trump any competition using those skills of ‘finding, hunting, gathering, negotiating, defending, raising or choosing.' I can state without fear of contradiction that none of us have any innate skill at any of the attributes listed in the above selection and if put in a survival situation needing these skills, the only ones succeeding would be those who learned the skills from experience. I think that the authors should go back to their offices and think about things some more.