Salisa lohavittayavikant

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Prefatory Remark

See also: https://salisa-lohavittayavikant.com/2023/03/30/college-essays-seriatim-introduction-remarks/

These essays are not to be taken as factual or absolute, although they mainly are. They represent caricatures of a young mind in an attempt to arrive at her own ideal truth.

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The attempt to cast and frame the debate in the history of evolutionary thought with “Darwin” and “Darwin’s theory” as catchwords seems to me the old science-chestnut promulgated by the wiseacres who are more interested in the face and the flesh and the fluff and the frill rather than the fount and the force, in this case, of scientific concepts and ideas as they evolve and develop through time and in context, and the fruits of such knowledge resulting from the historical process in the form of compelling substantives—ferreted out by merits and demerits, intersubjectively assessed and improved (as Popper rightly emphasised—it is the intersubjectivity of individual scientists that underpins the objectivity of scientific enterprise) based on careful observations, investigations, arguments, and analysis. The endeavour to be superciliously ahistorical, as in effacing the entire scientific period known in Julian Huxley’s coinage as “The Eclipse of Darwinism,” and antithestically parochial as in touting the Manichean fable of Truth-seeking men of science parrying the incessant and mounting salvo of Bible-thumping men of faith is altogether less embarrassing than the conflation of Darwin’s theory with the theory of evolution. 

My additional remark on this piece, as someone who abhors the crude contraption styled by pop-science writers to streamline a prevailing scientific paradigm (Larmarckism is a theory of evolution—a once respectable rival later embraced by Darwin himself albeit as a limited, subsidiary driver propagating the mechanism of evolutionary change—it just falls short of being the theory of evolution as appraised by learned contemporaries and specialists, hence, “Every single person who died before Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859 was ignorant of humanity’s origins, because they knew nothing of evolution”), is that to make short shrift of a rich and complex intellectual tradition via a homeric hymn to its forefather is an insensate form of idolatry. While the peddling of information in other places is not entirely uncritical—an engaging and factual style à la popular scientific writing—the treatment of anti-Darwinian stances is indigent; painted with the broadest of brush, with “vitalism” in the crosshairs couched in the dismissive, supremer-than-thou, intelligence-signalling language that misrepresents a complex thought enterprise as an espousal of predominantly ‘religious’ and ‘emotional’ entities and characterises non-scientific knowledge (non, un, or anti surely refers to some vague, unarticulated, unformulated criteria established by the author with mainstream as touchstone) as paltry or epistemically, not doubtful or suspect, but overtly pathological and just “plain wrong.”

(It therefore strikes me as perplexing that Haeckel defined four periods in the history of biology as thus:

“(1) first empirical epoch: Linnaeus; (2) first philosophical epoch (Naturphilosophie): “fantastic-philosophical morphology,” Lamarck, Goethe; (3) second empirical epoch: Cuvier; and (4) second philosophical period: Darwin”

We may be living in a post-Darwin era, but consider Karl Beurlen’s account characterising the tradition encompassing Linnaeus, Lamarck, Darwin, and the Renaissance and Enlightenment authors as that of “objective thinking” in contrast to the “subject-matter-related thinking,” the former with a thought-style fundamentally mechanistic and empiricist—the embodiment and extrapolation of which can be illustrated in an advanced form by the tendentious selection of citation by a contemporary cast of mind (strangely skating around that obvious fly in the ointment in the same letter it was procured from—his theory of pangenesis) figuring Darwin, a man of calibre and range, in a portrait chiefly, rigidly, and honourably scientific and barren:

“But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes…”

)

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There has never been an enterprise quite dynamic and monumental whose enduring legacy is much furnished and enlivened by continuing disputes and discussions among the faithful apostles and heretical gainsayers, between full-blooded reformers and constructive skeptics, as it has been for Darwinism. The terrain in which the ideas are fought has changed considerably and is fraught with much disagreement and difficulty that Stephen Jay Gould, in a ruminating and sensible manner of a “practical philistine,” sets forth a set of Godilockean verities in his seminal tome, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: “an operational way to define ‘Darwinism’ (and other intellectual entities) in a manner specific enough to win shared agreement and understanding among readers, but broad enough to avoid the doctrinal quarrels about membership and allegiance that always seem to arise when we define intellectual commitments as pledges of fealty to lists of dogmata”. The minimally binding and maximally central and abstract stipulates that result from his reformulation of Darwinian logic, symbolised as three major branches of Scilla’s coral fossil (a shared penchant for analogues, I surmise, enkindles his deep affinity for Darwin, of whom he is ranked as one of the greatest admirers and fiercest critics), set out a most propitious tone for modern Darwinism or the Darwinian framework (taken with little regard for its subtle contrast with an affiliated notion of similar import, foundation, the analysis and juxtaposition of which was wondrously elucidated via Gould’s architectural analogy of the Duomo of Milan at the opening of Structure) which seems to render Darwin’s theory and its fundamentals forever unassailable in a fortifying edifice which may relegate or subsume other evolutionary forces as secondary, circumscribed, or ancillary. 

Ironically enough, Gould’s diatribe against the concept of “adaption,” as wrought and fashioned by the adaptationist program, in his Spandrel paper applies equally well to his own exaltation of “natural selection,” of its creative force and power, as the evolutionary lynchpin: 

“In natural history, all possible things happen sometimes; you generally do not support your favoured phenomenon by declaring rivals impossible in theory. Rather, you acknowledge the rival, but circumscribe its domain of action so narrowly that it cannot have any importance in the affairs of nature. Then, you often congratulate yourself for being such an undogmatic and ecumenical chap. We maintain that alternatives to selection for best overall design have generally been relegated to unimportance by this mode of argument.”

Similarly, Marjorie Grene proffered similar caveats:

“But concepts—and perhaps, especially, evolutionary concepts—have a way of expanding by cannibalising other concepts that ought also to have a role in the whole explanatory framework. ‘Adaptation’ seems to be particularly susceptible of such abuse. For example: the theory of natural selection is a two-step theory; there is random variation—plenty of it—and inheritance of those available characters that happen to prove slightly better adapted in given circumstances than the available alternatives. So undirected variation basically a kind of randomness, not only selection, is an essential ingredient in the process. Moreover, biologists must recognise, if they think about it, the constraints imposed by past development—constraints of form, behaviour, and physiology—within which variation and selection must take place. Differences in ‘tempo and mode’ of evolution, too, may complicate the story. As the evolutionary synthesis developed, however, the conceptual plurality of the first—and founding—versions receded; and as Gould puts it, the synthesis hardened.”

After having stumbled to clearly formulate the bedrock of Darwinism and chanced upon Gould’s stipulates which proved rather unhelpful for a pupil so elementary and superficial in her learning (as it was perhaps too generous and overarching a model, too intricate and thoroughgoing an analysis, too skilfully and deftly a subsumption of partially or wholly contrarian or deviated ideas and their variations that any fixation of the “non-Darwinian” or “anti-Darwinian” label can only guarantee an outcome wildly precarious and intrinsically suspect), the above extract provided a good starting point for defining its chief and vital precepts in order to make sense of the early dismissal of Darwin’s theory, which was confined not only to the assaults carried out by the theologians and religious zealots of the days, or the opaque grouping of an ‘emotionally-motivated’ lot, but by scholars of reputable intellectual status such as John Herschel and Charles Lyell, both of whom had impressed and influenced Darwin’s outlook and methodology—with the former calling the core of his principles, “the Law of higgledy-piggledy,” and the latter finding objectionable the implication of nominalism of species concept the law of inherited modification seems to entail.

Darwin’s theory is not a theory of evolution, but a theory of evolution by natural selection—or with natural selection as a primary mechanism of evolution. It decrees not only that evolution exists, the idea that had preceded Darwin as early as the late 18th century in Buffon, Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, Von Baer, and Lamarck who believed in the idea of ‘transmutation of species’, but that it is necessitated, brought about, and directed by a set of provisos or key ingredients which will be formulated as follows:

1. Natural selection as a major evolutionary force (as opposed to secondary or mere adequate)
2. Natural selection as operating on directionless genetic mutation, or random variation (as opposed to directed variation)
3. Random variation as gradual and cumulative; microevolution ‘by creeps’ (as opposed to saltationism and punctuationism; or microevolution ‘by jerks’)
4. Natural selection operating on random variation as engendering and perpetuating not only the abounding diversity and complexity of life in a biota, but the whole biosphere

The subsequent rejections of Darwin’s ideas were thus based on various grounds, as the strict formulation of mechanisms of evolution and their corresponding exposition in Origin of Species rewards near, though not all, exclusivity to the phenomenon of selection by environments and competitions at the expense of other explanatory models.Some embraced the idea of selection, but did not privilege it as a preponderant force in nature, failing to satisfy condition (1). Many felt that natural selection, as a sole or main operating mechanism, could not sufficiently mould adaptations of organisms and direct evolutionary development of species on a larger scale, failing to fulfil (4). Others based their objections on the ground that the increasing complexity of organisms, in morphology or physiology, logically entails the development or progression towards higher life form left unaccounted for by the haphazard nature of arbitrating external force or the undirected small-scale mutation. Lamarck and Spencer believed that the accumulative effects of acquired modification directly provide adaptive values and a basis for an evolving lineage as they are inherited across generations; others proposed alternate theories with different elements and degrees of teleology and progressionism. It was the beliefs in propensity towards some form of progress, or “orthogenesis,” a term denoting a panoply of theories and thinkers including those in evolutionary biology—from zoology to embryology to physiology—which had a strong hold, and not “vitalism”—a putatively supranatural concept expediently charitable to ab absurdo style of refutation—of which it is only a small part.

Consider Peter J. Bowler in The Non-Darwinian Revolution:

“My suggestion is that Darwin’s theory should be seen not as the central theme in nineteenth-century evolutionism but as a catalyst that helped to bring about the transition to an evolutionary viewpoint within an essentially non-Darwinian conceptual framework. This was the ‘Non-Darwinian Revolution’; it was a revolution because it required the rejection of certain key aspects of creationism, but it was non-Darwinian because it succeeds in preserving and modernising the old teleological view of things.”

(The idea of ascendency to a higher-plane of biological order is not new. Take the scala naturae passage from Aristotle’s History of Animals:

“Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation, nor on which side thereof an intermediate form should lie … In plants there is a continuous of ascent toward the animal. In the sea there are certain objects concerning which one would be at a loss to determine whether they are animal or plant … In regard to sensibility, some animals give no indication whatsoever of it, while others indicate it, but indistinctly … And so throughout the entire animal scale there is a graduated differentiation in the amount of life and the capacity for motion.”

However, the nature of and the proposed mechanisms responsible for this progression can be made a subject of scientific scrutiny. The recapitulation theories, as posited by Meckel, refurbished as Meckel-Serres Law, Von Baer in his four laws of embryology, and Haeckel with his shorthand description “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” echo stages of organismic development by augmentation and supersession of ancestral traits—reifying Aristotle’s great chain of being sensu lato—and have been decisively discredited by the advent of Mendelian genetics. 

)

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In fact, the end of the nineteenth century saw few Darwinian converts, with Lamarckean, orthogenetical, or saltational principles appealing to scholars and savants of the period. Structuralism, which confers greater influence on the dynamics of structural or architectural development and constraints and in corollary relegating the role of heredity and selection as subordinate, also became prominent as a school of thought gaining a number of followers. The emergence of modern synthesis or neo-Darwinism, the incorporation of Mendel’s law of inheritance after its discovery in 1900 with Darwin’s law of natural selection, quelled the non-Darwinian oppositions in scientific community but not entirely eradicate them. The saltationist theory, which can be aphorised as ‘evolution in a single step’, has taken on several reformulations and variations, from the ‘explosive radiation of form’ to labels such as “mutationism” and “macroevolution” (De Vries, Bateson, Goldschmidt), and has been taken up by the modern doctrine of “punctuationism” or “punctuated equilibrium” as expatiated and popularised by Gould and Eldredge. Gould insisted that his reformulated theory of evolution was a Darwinian descent. John Maynard Smith, an exponent of Darwinian orthodoxy, arrogated Goldschmidt’s “Hopeful Monster”—a saltationalist mutant of large phenotypic effect—as an essentially Darwinian idea: “We are now familiar with the idea that gradual changes in the parameters of a dynamic system can, at critical points, lead to sudden and discontinuous changes in system behaviour. It seems certain that gradual changes in genetic constitution can lead to discontinuous changes in phenotype,” in addition to stressing its inevitable capitulation to the executive power of natural selection.

Other inadequacies of the precedency of natural selection as they were perceived were examined, for instance, in pertinence with the concept of nonadaptive differentiation between closely related species—situated in the boarder context as ‘non-adaptive’ evolution or variation—the oppositions which were well-documented and well-chronicled in William B. Provine’s paper on Wright. To elucidate the meaning of non-adaptive view of evolutionary change, consider the following passage by Provine:

J.B.S. Haldane, for example, argued in The Causes of Evolution (1932) that natural selection was the primary mechanism of evolution in nature, yet added this caveat:

But when we have pushed our analysis as far as possible, there is no doubt that innumerable characters show no sign of possessing selective value, and, moreover, these are exactly the characters which enable a taxonomist to distinguish one species from another. This has led many able zoologists and botanists to give up Darwinism. [Haldane, 1932, pp. 113-4]

When the ecologist Charles Elton published his first book, Animal Ecology (1927), it appeared in a series edited by Julian Huxley and had a glowing introduction by him. In the book, Elton, who had worked with Richards as well as Huxley, summarised the Richards and Robson article in Nature (1926) with approval:

The gist of their conclusions is that very closely allied species practically never differ in characters which can by any stretch of the imagination be called adaptive. If natural selection exercises any important influence upon the divergence of species, we should expect to find that the characters separating species would in many cases be of obvious survival value. But the odd thing is that although the characters which distinguish genera or distantly allied species from one another are often obviously adaptive, those separating closely allied species are nearly always quite trivial and apparently meaningless. [Elton, 1927, p. 184]

To paint a more concrete picture of a similar line of argument, take Alfred C. Kinsey’s discussion on the wing-length of Cynips:

One of the basic taxonomic characters used by Kinsey was wing-length:

There seems no basis for believing the shortened wings or any of the concomitant variations of any adaptive value to any of these insects. The short wings are not confined to warmer or colder climates, and long- and short-winged forms of various species are active at the same season in the same localities. The field data suggest nothing as to the survival value of these outstandingly basic modifications of structure. [Kinsey, 1930, p. 34]

Subsequent accounts were derived to resolve the issues of non-adaptive characters segueing into a section on Wright’s ‘random genetic drift,’ featuring an obligatory mention of Mayr’s ‘founder effect’ and the emphasis that Wright’s intellectual loyalty principally lies with Darwin—with the ‘drift’ generating novel and copious genetic variations well in keeping with the slogan, “copious in amount, small in extent, and undirected,” and ultimately subjected to the pressure of natural selection. The most interesting excerpt as chosen by Provine to retrace Wright’s influences was the subsection on David Starr Jordan, who proposed an alternative to “the survival of the fittest” with “the survival of the existing”:

In his writings on evolution Jordan constantly emphasised what he called “the survival of the existing” as a mechanism alternative to survival of the fittest in the origin of species, and pointed out the implications of this mechanism for systematics:

The process of natural selection has been summed up in the phrase “survival of the fittest.” This, however, tells only part of the story. “Survival of the existing” in many cases covers more of the truth. For in hosts of cases the survival of characters rests not on any special usefulness or fitness, but on the fact that individuals possessing these characters have inhabited or invaded a certain area. The principle of utility explains survivals among competing structures. It rarely accounts for qualities associated with geographic distribution.

    The nature of the animals that first colonise a district must determine what the future fauna shall be. From their specific characters, which are neither useful nor harmful, will be derived, for the most part, the specific characters of their successors.

Jordan’s idea at the turn of the nineteenth century might resonate with, bear some relevance to, or throw light upon one aspect of the theory of “niche construction,” a resurgent dimension in the development of evolutionary thought. The orthodox ultra-Darwinists or Neo-Darwinists, the ‘hard’ modern synthesists, the selectionists and adaptationists with peculiar penchant for strict Darwinian natural selection—whether these characterisations be an effect of caricature or outright fabulism—must fight shy of espousing a fundamentalist precept whereby other explanatory factors in evolution are considered as moribund as Mendel’s wrinkled peas in his monastery garden. Darwin who wished to be exonerated from being co-opted into the movement whose theorising from the first principle, in the main the doctrine and practice of some philosophers and cultists, cautioned against dogmatism in the sixth edition of his Origin of Species: 

As my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position—namely at the close of the Introduction—the following words, “I am convinced that natural selection has been the main, but not the exclusive means of modification”. This has been of no avail. Great is the power of misrepresentation.

A literature one must cite in support of Darwin’s pluralistic thinking to bolster a claim—in consideration from the same paper by Provine, adumbrating the nineteenth-century landscape:

In the Origin, Darwin proposed at least seven distinct mechanisms of evolution, gradual natural selection operating upon small heritable individual differences being, of course, the most important. Next to natural selection, Darwin thought the use and disuse of parts was most effective mechanism of adaptive evolution. Family selection, as in the cases of altruistic social behaviour or neuter castes, was a third and far more restricted mechanism of adaptive evolution.

In addition to these three mechanisms of adaptive evolution, Darwin proposed (and here is the surprise to most neo-Darwinians) four mechanisms of nonadaptive evolution. These were (1) sexual selection; (2) directed variations, when, according to Darwin, certain rather strongly marked variations simply spread over a population in the absence of selection (1872, p. 72); (3) correlated variation — a maladaptive or nonadaptive character was correlated with another of adaptive value such that their combination was positively adaptive; and (4) spontaneous variations that simply appeared spontaneously and were passed on by heredity (the appearance of a nectarine on a peach tree was one of Darwin’s examples).

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Vitalism and theistic evolution by divine creation set against the backdrop of the intellectual milieu of Darwin’s seminal work, as representative of the inveighing sentiments, is dramaturgy at best and distortion at worst. It is a vexing malaise, that Protagoras’ maxim; it is however an acute malady, the amply truer words that ‘modern man is a measure of all things.’ If one recipe for genuine thinking is to be offered, for whatever style or subject of intellection, it is to stay temperate in the moderation of the unfamiliar — that something is not a fatuous mysticism just because it is being subject to the ridicule of recurrent positivism by way of its refusal to conform to the exoteric use of phraseology, language, or imagination. One should perhaps cast aspersions on the venerated Ernst Mayr for speaking nonsensically or harbouring sympathy with the illogical silly-hill-billies:

It would be ahistorical to ridicule vitalists. When one reads the writings of one of the leading vitalists like Driesch one is forced to agree with him that many of the basic problems of biology simply cannot be solved by a philosophy as that of Descartes, in which the organism is simply considered a machine… The logic of the critique of the vitalists was impeccable.

Vitalism has become so disreputable a belief in the last fifty years that no biologist alive today would want to be classified as a vitalist. Still, the remnants of vitalist thinking can be found in the work of Alistair Hardy, Sewall Wright, and Charles Birch, who seem to believe in some sort of nonmaterial principle in organisms.

One can be talking at cross-purposes with others, unwittingly and unintelligently, if one does not know what it is they talk about. The schism between these radically different ideas may be bridged by a lingua franca seeking to establish the philosophical and conceptual understanding of the issues at hand. The prerequisite for such undertaking, however, calls for a sufficient degree of intellectual humility, genuine receptiveness, and most importantly, the desire to understand—and within it the willingness to purge one’s own ideological and methodological inculcation for the sake of, or rather, in favour of a deeper and broader comprehension on all spheres and dimensions, of which the sheer range and power of human comprehension can freely and creatively exercise its influence, realising and maximising in the process its own possibilities.

To stand the ‘intelligent design’ debate on its head, consider, lastly:

The as-ifness of purpose language causes constant trouble. Taking it literally it is strangely hard to avoid. New entities therefore are invented to be cast as designer. Schopenhauer’s Will to Live and Bergson’s Elan vital, popularised by Bernard Shaw as the Life Force, have been favoured candidates. But they are currently being replaced by something much odder, namely, genes and DNA. Thus Wilson begins Sociobiology with a chapter called “The Morality of the Gene.” He there says of genes that “the individual organism is only their vehicle, part of an elaborate device to preserve and spread them with the least possible biochemical perturbation. Samuel Butler’s famous aphorism, that the chicken is only the egg’s way of making another egg, has been modernised; the organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA. More to the point, the hypothalamus and limbic system are engineered to perpetuate DNA” (p. 3)

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Endnote

¹ Evolutionary theory in German palaeontology, Wolf-Ernst Reif

² Ibid.

³ Dimensions of Darwinism, Introduction p. 7, Marjorie Grene (ed.)

⁴ Lennox, James, “Darwinism”, The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

⁵ The level of selection as proposed by Darwin will not be included as one of the postulates i.e. natural selection operating on “organism” rather than on other unit(s) of selection e.g. genes, traits, groups, species, and populations. Most evolutionary biologists and theorists consider it a non-key feature, too feeble to dethrone or attenuate the force of the Darwinian thinking. It is indeed considered to be the dispute within the Darwinian tradition, rather than over or about.

⁶ Near exclusivity but not exclusive; Darwin in the Origin in fact proposed, or rather embraced, other evolutionary processes in what has come to be known as Darwin’s “pluralistic” approach, an outlook disinterred and much disseminated by one group of his disciples in order to counteract what they saw as ‘the hardening of modern synthesis’ and ‘the triumph of adaptationism’

⁷ The less confusing word choice would be ‘speciation in a single step’ as speciation represents a snapshot event at some evolutionary juncture, rather than the evolutionary history spanning across geological periods

⁸ Current controversies in evolutionary biology, John Maynard Smith

⁹ The development of Wright’s theory of evolution: systematics, adaptation, and drift, William B. Provine

¹⁰ Stephen Jay Gould’s bon mot on Kinsey in The hardening of the modern synthesis is worth recapitulating:

Alfred C. Kinsey, who later became one of America’s most controversial intellectuals for his study of basic behaviours in another sort of WASP¹, led off the symposium with a summary of his extensive work on a family of gall wasps, the Cynipidae.

 In the following footnote on WASP:

Apologies to readers unfamiliar with American slang, but I couldn’t resist the allusion. Yes, Kinsey the celebrated wasp taxonomist is the same man who later published the famous “Kinsey Reports” on sexual behaviour in the human male and female — the first dispassionate studies, based on sufficiently large samples, of what people really do do. WASP is a colloquial American for “white Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” still, despite all our ethnicity, the largest group in our country.

 Gould then finished off a coda to Kinsey not with a bang but with a whimper:

The synthesis hardened by elevating one theory to prominence among the several that supported the primary methodological claim of the original version… The hard version had no more room for Kinsey, who was off doing something else by then anyway.

¹¹ The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, p. 141, Stephen Jay Gould

¹² Another interesting concept which directs our attention to the question concerning the adaptive value of traits is exaptation, a brainchild of Gould and Vrba

¹³ The rest appear to me variations on the same theme

¹⁴ The development of Wright’s theory of evolution: systematics, adaptation, and drift, William B. Provine

¹⁵ I’m surely not the first person to have suggested a thought along this line.

¹⁶ Toward a new philosophy of biology: observations of an evolutionist, p. 13, Ernst Mayr

¹⁷ I necessarily see that language as an embodiment and a product of a discipline much castigated and shat upon by a great many men and women of science. It goes by the name, indeed, Philosophy.

¹⁸ Beast and Man, p. 64, Mary Midgley

¹⁹ ‘Darwinian Fundamentalism’: An Exchange, August 14, 1997 issue, available on the web

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Addendum

1. All citations and quotations are subject to my britishisation, owing to the preference of my text-editing platform as well as my natural fondness for the ‘u’ and the ‘s’ as opposed to the naught and the ‘z’ in their visual aesthetic when assembled.
2. Gould wrote in an exchange with Daniel Dennett, published in The New York Review of Books, that he believed “any scholar’s views should be read in the context of cultural and personal beliefs—and I regard self-scrutiny and disclosure as the greatest of intellectual virtues.” So let me state my personal beliefs, in the case that the tone of the piece has pre-ordained the reader to make of me a religious person. I’m not a Christian. I’m not agnostic. I’m an atheist bordering on anti-theist and in a broader view religiously unaffiliated. I also believe that guilt by association has no intellectual merits whatsoever and when employed, especially in this sort of context, makes one—as an appreciator of irony—pharisaical. I also believe that great thinking—as an activity, a practice, or a tradition—is never topical.
3. “Adaptation” by Richard M. Burian, as curated by Marjorie Grene in Dimensions of Darwinism: Themes and Counterthems in Twentieth-Century Evolutionary Theory which is indeedthe source for most of the articles cited here, made me realise that I didn’t understand Darwinism at all. He sought to clarify concepts such as “adaptedness”, “adaptation,” and “Darwinian fitness” and clearing up much confusion stemming directly from the misunderstanding and misuse of these terms especially in evolutionary biology and population genetics. It is overall a subject difficult to grasp and I’m not quite certain that I in fact do—or to appropriate Gould’s interesting phrase, that I “really do do.”

I have decided to begin publishing the selections of my college essays seriatim, a personal experiment in writing in second language perhaps as I had been at the end of the tether with my first: a medium through which thoughts are confined to the concreta and the sensory, the prosaic and the mundane, through which things are yapped about rather profusely but not much said (see also: language speed and information density), where feelings replace sentiments, and emotions reality, words manners, slapstick subtlety, self-equilibrium truth, and order justice — a language to which its highest and primary, if not its only, but ineffective, purpose is to assay at resolving and maintaining tension and affinity by way of equilibrating individuals in their own meagre selves and in relation to even more meagre others.

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Here is my list:

1. Singling Out Darwin (Biology 101, Nov 2018)

Link: https://salisa-lohavittayavikant.com/2023/03/30/college-essay-seriatim-1-singling-out-darwin/

A personal commentary on one BBC editorial as the end-of-the-term essay. I could no longer find the aforementioned article on the web, but it surely contains the sentence: “Every single person who died before Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859 was ignorant of humanity’s origins, because they knew nothing of evolution.” It was not presented as a misguided or begrudged opinion piece that the publisher voluntarily lets astray in order to boast of their liberality and intellectual diversity, but came out officially as a kind of eulogic fascicle in their yearly annals of science worship, which prompted this pillory of mine.

Around a year or two later after I composed this assignment, I summarised my then thought in a correspondence which could be taken as a brief sketch of what I attempted to say but ended up opining with a needless sprinkle of citations:



I believe there is a strand of thought that posits that since the ascendency of science in roughly the eighteenth century, especially in the intellectual sphere, nature and science have splintered off from one another. Scientific materialism, an epistemology which views nature as consisting of mere matter, aids in the devaluation and destruction of the natural world, that full of living and dynamic processes and entities is now thoroughly exploited and colonised for the most inane human activities and consumptions. And how remarkable the intelligence inherent in lower forms of life! Octopuses are increasingly known for its cognitive intelligence and ant colony has its own complex social division and organisation. Equally tiny brains such wasps display what recent researchers believe to be a skill in logical reasoning. I am not quite convinced that such complexity of life and cognition emerges from mere Darwinian natural selection, which amounts to survival from a pool of divers genetic variations. There is such thing as an intelligent design. How such things are I am reduced to or rather stupefied into immediate silence

I agree with you that evolution is less a theory in the sense in which the term is often used. It is indeed a hypothesis. In my view, the theory of evolution is an old chestnut established to glorify the triumph of scientific paradigm over and above its oppositions, which without a latitude of thought one would seek to include only religious fervent and superstitious shamanism. I believe there is a more nuanced and logical view, perhaps with a small vitalist tint, that can satisfactorily explain the evolution of life and its diversity compared to the one offered by darwinism. In the same manner and spirit as you I believe, I did out of indignation and grievance decide to take down a notch what I deemed to be supercilious thinking in the sphere of science, which in that particular occasion was a veneration of the said scientific idea in vogue. It was however not in the form of a verbal confrontation but a written essay in my biology class which sought to dispel the myth that the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species suddenly heralded the age of enlightenment and the certainty of scientific truths. His theory of natural selection still remained a controversial doctrine at the closing of the century and it had been rejected and questioned on various grounds by scholars of the period. 



2. TBD

3. TBD

“Has it not always been beneath our attention, a genuine waste of time and mental resources, to pen about a culture so grim and distasteful — about morally worthless people, mentally rudimentary, emotionally undeveloped, intellectually challenged, psychologically non-existent?”

“Why such a vindictive spirit passing undue judgement without proportions! Surely the wide-sweeping judgement a misuse of that thinking faculty which ought to be nuanced or precise if not grounded or truthful in its application and enterprise?”

“You mean to elevate the highly materialistic, the unimaginative, unintellectual, unspiritual, incurious; those without wide generosity or deep sympathy or, God forbids, without heightened thoughts and emotions? The “pig satisfied”, the exceptionally mediocre, inconsequential, insecure dunces squawking raucously at one another?”

“I point specifically to those incapable of thinking or acting logically and ethically: the abusive browbeating fetid filth of wasteful space; the screaming bullying psychotic hag at one’s place of employment; the low-minded, intolerant, unsophisticated, emotionally dysregulated infant who wishes to be revered based solely on some random number extrinsic to their person and quality and circumstance.”

“Ah, so you mean the poor inconsequential soul who banks their entire moral worth on their inborn characteristic like some feudal ignoblesse⁠ imbecile? The “random number extrinsic to their person and quality and circumstance” — that insipid vacuous yardstick which slots them as above or below others for which subsequent maintenance of illusion is precarious and perennial and only by dint of denigrating others below their ‘caste’ (a mass psychotic idea to be defended by those that are in great measure obtuse).”

“Indeed, that is what makes them poor and inconsequential; it is a haphazard two-barreled act of mercy and damnation: a quality of having no qualities; a quality in substitute of actual qualities; a quality as an excuse, as an avoidance, as an aversion from assaying some actual notable qualities; a quality that in the tragic end negates its own existence: an in-quality that diminishes its bearers to such an extent that they need to, in turn, diminish others in order to feel good about themselves, or to feel themselves at all.”

“I too attest to that and like you bear witness to an obscene system which paramount to its continuance is a covert practice of diminishment and denigration, of intimidation and inequity, of self-immolation and self-entombment. What was it that you had penned in the past: Let them be blinded by the multitudes of brute stupidities .. Let them do to themselves what they do to us! Let them dehumanise! (Salisa, 2016).”

“I did! How flattering that someone can conjure that watchword of mine when I was only a fledgling who had too much feeling and too much sense and not much else. I believe that is originally a Conradian idea by the by. Horror! Horror!”

“Horrid! Horrid! will be your most prominent exclamation perhaps.”

“This may surprise you but I do not provision my attention towards those blinkered bunch evidently below my stature, let alone being affected by their obnoxious presence unless obliged by a labour contract. I may be bourgeois in that sense but I am uniquely above them — the blinkered bunch — bereft of a sociological imagination (their outbound attention and awareness stop short of borders, if ever beyond themselves) and verily without deeper cognizance (their inward perception and enrichment stop short at the epigastric region). Neither am I in want of that quintessential characteristic one would bequeath to a zoological inferior: the inability to differentiate between themselves, their emotions and their acts and the constancy and predicament with which they would correspond in a manner so predictable and elementary and melodramatic. I am of course haranguing about what to me is one of the greatest achievements of my life: a developed psyche, an actualised self, an intellectual center or a moral compass on which a person builds and expands upon the greater they age. Unlike those critters that are mere processing plants of victuals outputting sewage.”

“So many words! Any last utterance?”

“What you take to be the basis of your faux superiority is a delusion as pitiful and farcical as a congenitally deaf man imagining he could hear Bach: bastardising and bandying words as if one is linguistically challenged — out of depth, out of mind, a stock clown to me.”

“But darling, certainly that shabby-genteel demographic is unstintingly benevolent in their wholly rendered munificence?”

“Based on your learned observation, experience, and reading of history and of men, for surely no man’s judgement on society is sound without an intelligent grasp on the rudiments of human psychology, what do you reckon, with your intuitive probe, will succeed as the monstrous machinations of this century and beyond?”

“A tiddler you are and to speak with such pomp and pessimism of the world you know so little about.”

“Experience is overrated, my dear. Worse, it coarsens men’s sensibilities, and in some tragic case, at one vicious stroke.”

“You doomsayer and scaremonger – insensate, fanatical, gormless – with no appreciation for what mankind has hitherto achieved. Always scouring for the indicia of moral, political, and intellectual declensions to your heart’s content.”

“Isn’t it true that some men see all humanity’s woes by harking back to the past and others by glimpsing askance at the future? There is no sense bickering with the past and its ideals, for the world has moved on. Any counsel of moderation which you may kindly proffer – the “pragmatism” of piecemeal social engineering or meliorist politics – to what may appear to you as a poor little critter spelunking caves and catacombs, remember that we are facing the greatest existential challenge known to man perpetrated by none other than that generation of the world with decades of experience and ratiocination. So worldly, in fact, that they have developed high talents for absconding from their knavery, poltroonery, and chicanery with complete impunity.”

“You are speaking such vague, moralising nonsense, dear, and with such jaundice. Truly as if your generation is the least benighted of us all.”

“Nay, we are the most, which is why the harried remnants and vexations of their wholesale patrimony – those capricious contingencies of our predecessors now institutionalised and streamlined – will irrevocably, inexorably, inenarrably be catastrophic. The rubicon has been crossed. The future is, tout court, that of ‘a boot stamping on the human face – forever.’ A geyser of perorated nonsense you were quite keen about that. A quiddity of mine that surcease from mental labour is sometimes sought in the wild, venturesome flights of fancy – the recrudescence of that old habit of procrastination. Whatever happened to those days when I waxed indignant about baculum and my particular brand of misfortune indeed.”

— 28 Dec 2018

As I once opined, I’d rather read Henry Miller than read Proust. I actually like Miller, if not enamoured by him (I once used Miller’s life-affirming quote in one of the potpourris I wrote in college). What a wondrous writer! So misogynistic and whorish and brilliant he was canonical to the tee, quite risque to give you a palpable warmth, but not overt enough to rouse ickiness, and so elegant and surreal and compulsive. I feel ennobled reading him, save the passages where he pulled an Epstein and, well, raped a woman. It strikes me as honest and authentic, in his oblique and fanciful way. What Proust depicted was a man connivingly and covertly misogynistic and insecure and infantile, a quite emotional and irrational man, the fact veiled by his possession of a phallus. An educated and sophisticated man who fell for a woman without qualities (not of a Musilean stripe, mind you). He pulled a Professor Unrat, of a variant quite original it was comical (unlike Francine Prose’s adaptation, whose title reflected that of a 1930s film, itself an adaptation on Mann’s book). We could not see her for who she is through the lens of a paradoxically self-obsessed man who is not in love with himself as much as he is an airheaded coquettish woman of dubitable origin and station. She is Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson made interminably tedious and wretched, a distaste that would have been discernibly felt if the reader is not weighed down by, well, a phallus.

I remember the pseudonymous Palermo from La Casa de Papel airing how much he loves Proust amidst his marshalled hostages. Of course he does, and it is starting to make sense now. The person to whom I opined my hatred of Proust was actually my then partner, who was kind enough to reassure me that his mother did not like him either and that Proust was probably writing about a hopeless love interest of his, whom the scholars now believe to be an American by the name of Willie Heath. If so, I applaud Proust. Schadenfreude in conjunction with pity is one of the few reasons to write about anyone, or anything for that matter. Proust becomes readable again, by a happy fact that it was not the creation of a self-obsessed and entitled man who thought he could memorialise his own pitiable dalliance and get away with it.