Salisa lohavittayavikant

It began when I was slithering down one of the Sukhumvit streets on the rare pained occasion that an out-of-doors sojourn to any place at all is less of a tedium than what the paradisiacal inner world, well-curated and well-crafted, has to offer — the svelte and tenuous world of different registers and flavours, of diverse undertones and overtones, of tenors and strains, of wits and wisecracks, of whims and whams, of gustoes and pathos, of thoughts and themes that irrevocably bind one to the ethereal and the historical and the threads athirst to bridge them. But the miserly world of the senses, of the mere sluice of sensory experiences — without any intellectual content or logical coherence or aesthetic unity — is, to many, supposed to inspire a sort of vivacity, electrify an amperage, or douse astir those dullards and deadheads without any inscape, being two-part bland and three-part blech.

Alas, I am periodically exposed to the elements and a happy felicity has re-introduced a familiar tune to my ears. A jazzy saxophone rendition of a contemporary Thai ballad, an old record released during my early years of youth, and as such, had a reminiscent stronghold on me. It is not an august tune, nor is it a spell-binding one. Extremely poor in influences, its tendency merely rounds out the extent of its potentiality afforded by the limited mediums and expedients. One happily evinces neither a start nor a sursaut at the hearing of it. No wrenching in the heart nor whirling in the head. A simple linear progression through a passage of varying pitches.

But atop the trusses and the columns are, if one is blessed with enough acuity and fortune to witness, a perched pediment, a crowning capstone, a vestal spire. There is a saying in German, regarding a certain hygienic and aesthetic practice common among men, that a tree without the surrounding copses is well-disposed to appear more estimable i.e. more towering than its veritable height. The opposite is true for a height of a remarkable presence — one tails off more favourably amidst the frigidity and foppery of the poppy stumps. The more flagging the outlying undergrowth, the less bounteous the land, the more staggering the sight. What would sufficiently explain the seminal growth, the outsized canopy, the fructifying frondescence, in an expanse where others do not grow beyond the height of a stubble? What is the alchemy, a legerdemain even, that fuses and enkindles in a barely tepid cauldron a grandee beyond its kith and kin?

The auteur of the original composition turns out to be such a grandee: a Thai musical prodigy. A Thai prodigy, you clamour? What an oxymoron! A barefaced putrefying verisimilitude! A country that venerates jackboots and thundercunts, that slavers at pissants and pinchbecks, that prostates at the behest of worthless old maids and senescent dotards, a country whose hatred and envy towards their children, nay towards their fellow human beings, could scorch the earth twice over — how could such a self-defeating, self-hating, self-immolating nation ever produce a genius of any standing?

How could such a scurvy excuse of a culture — for vainglorious culture requires commensurate pretense, however slight, to some form of moral edification or spiritual purification; a culture which desires, demands and relishes no more and no less than the total and thorough destruction of those under its aegis to whom its existence is beholden; a culture which commits, celebrates and consecrates in blazing offense a universal malefaction against an amour propre of any and all statures, in each and every of its stations, with a malevolence that is its plinth, with a malediction that would be summoned with a stinky, milk-lipped scowl under the staid veil of hoary wisdom — produce a single fecund head of illimitable and formidable greatness? How could such folks, bereft of an inner patois or a mediated outpour characteristic of an enlightened culture, amount to anything beyond the impulse-bound, muck-bemired, tear-bedewed scatological-suds that is their lives? What would they know of a genuine actuation towards the higher and nobler world of mental summits? Of joyous revelry, fervid enthusiasm and intellectual ecstasy? Of the most cheerful wisdom and the principled achievement of the highest order?

---

Epilogue

‘The Roaring Twenties,’ both Twenties — a fated dalliance, a renascent rebirth of that bygone decade which symbolises freedom, prosperity, creativity, culture and progress — has filled my mind with hopeful longing, not in the least evoking a fanciful allusion to the possibility of the third unheralded era: my Twenties. Indeed what a marvelous decade! Marvelous in (spite of) all its trances and turmoils, all its trials and trepidations, all its thralldom and triviality and temerity.

Who could ever foretell that I, the least copacetic and most captious of all, would one day slough the swarthy sheen for the sanguine shine? That I would, with all my wits about me, choose to luxuriate in the lambent lights and lofty aspirations of the yonder future? Upon witnessing the divine fervour of bravura extraordinaire…

I used to have a “music” section in my old college blog, a platform which catapulted and centred as a frontispiece my love for reading and writing, a hodgepodge of finds and discoveries that one must eventually ebb out of, being a juvenile coming-of-age ledger during the beginning of one’s intellectual journey, a measly-mouthed fledging composing monodies and monologues from a papoose. The prose itself was a hard sell, being on the cusp of that nescient time where one’s English tongue still flopped uselessly in the mouth.

There was, indeed, nothing like the unleavened cants and the harrowing consternations of youth — one felt most keenly, acted most cowardly, and quibbled most prosaically. Take, for instance, an inconsequential quippage referring to one Guardian article:

What’s that quotation by Matthew Arnold on this stupendous sort of foolish liberalism? A state of moral indifference without intellectual ardour?

Let’s not do anodyne politics here, people. You know, the stock argument, the dizzy look of profound ignorance and misguided unconscientious outrage, of course, or all would be amiss. Just… No. Hirsi Ali deserves better than this.

Salisa, published in Sep 2017, “This is the New Low”

Or even more culturally involved, in response to https://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/04/grand-unified-theory-female-pain:

[…]

The post-wounded posture is claustrophobic: jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick on the heels of anything that might look like self-pity. I see it in female writers and their female narrators, troves of stories about vaguely dissatisfied women who no longer fully own their feelings. Pain is everywhere and nowhere. Post-wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, jaded, opaque; cool and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-pity might split their careful seams of intellect, expose the shame of self-absorption without self-awareness.

[…]

Leslie Jamison, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”

Some interesting insights I almost made a concession or two. But some people do believe that feelings need not have the last words; that the way one’s mind spins it determines their person. The author seems fretfully indignant that some of these are female. Is the notion of “post-woundedness” then another ingenious, evolved form of modern sexism?

A legitimate question:

How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative? Fetishize: to be excessively or irrationally devoted to. Here is the danger of wounded womanhood: that its invocation will corroborate a pain cult that keeps legitimating, almost legislating, more of itself.

Especially that psychical projection a commonplace phenomenon, wherein this narrative (“female pain”) stands in as a readily available venue for the apprehension, realisation and assimilation of repressed inner experiences, as one of the ego’s integrative activities, or even a form of wish-fulfillment.

The possibility of an ideal solution perhaps lies here:

There is a way of representing female consciousness that can witness pain but also witness a larger self around that pain—​a self that grows larger than its scars without disowning them, that is neither wound-​dwelling nor jaded, that is actually healing.

Although the post-wounded conditions seem almost necessary an aid and a context to get there (because the self isn’t merely the pain, the product of pain or the receptor for pain, it, as an agency, reacts and interacts with pain and one agency, if one is to accept such thing as individual differences, is different from another), and as a journey, if I may, more interesting, more dynamic, more faceted, more exploratory […]

We’ve got a Janus-​faced relationship to female pain. We’re attracted to it and revolted by it; proud and ashamed of it. So we’ve developed a post-​wounded voice, a stance of numbness or crutch of sarcasm that implies pain without claiming it, that seems to stave off certain accusations it can see on the horizon—melodrama, triviality, wallowing—​and an ethical and aesthetic commandment: Don’t valorize suffering women.

Though the author and I might diverge on value-systems and ideal modalities of fundamental human experience, this manifesto proves nonetheless a worthy and entertaining read […] However, let this universal ethical and aesthetic commandment be stated unequivocally, without censure or a chide: Don’t valorise suffering women; jolt them, with a scorching iron if need be.

Sylvia Plath needed not have a miscarried child, Tina Turner needed no bloodied nose, and no woman needed social affirmation to any form of emotional or physical jarrings to an extent which might override her vehicle for critical faculties—​a cut or a clout, metaphorical or not, never brings much pain, only a sharp pang of disappointment or a stunning shock of disbeliefs; a continual hacking and a prolonged clobbering might.

Personal history does consist in cyclical repetitions and some measure of psychopathological predispositions, especially in a sphere where sentiments reign, self-identity mired, and self-worth hazarded. It is wise indeed to be wary of the unconscious and what in or of ourselves we can’t fully grasp or control. Quell the instinctually or habitually destructive; never endorse it, never fertilise its hotbed of cultural sympathies, in other words, don’t normalise. If women are the historically wounded, then the answer might just be that we rectify it.

Salisa, published in Nov 2017, “What is ‘Female Pain’?”

Or the most politically vogue, on the topic of ‘Art Depicting A Racially Or Culturally Sensitive Subject‘:

My standard of judgement is this—insofar as the work of art expresses sympathy and acknowledges reality of the subject in question, then its aesthetic depiction should be allowed. The painting, Open Casket (2016), of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy who was lynched in a horrific incident of hate crime fails the test on the ground that the illustration doesn’t retain the elements of cruelty, inhumanity and grotesque realism which affected the victim who was real and deserving of our commiseration as any victim who had their human person dismantled due to indiscriminate hatred against their race, ethnicity or gender. In other words, the problem of romanticisation stands parallel to the contrivance of art as recreation. Insensitivity is expressed when the subject’s personal calamity (especially one with historical significance) is taken as a subject of personal amusement, entertainment or leisure.

I have no scruples with the question of ‘appropriation’—the artist’s identity should in no way affect the judgement of his or her work. It doesn’t matter whether the artist is black or white or hispanic; what is problematic is that the work lacks social and cultural awareness as to transmute a heinous and gruesome act into an object of aesthetic indulgence—for your viewing pleasure. If the painting, say, tones down its artistic embellishment or distortion—not necessarily that such creation is always plausible—but if it is rendered possible, then the defilement via an act of painting is to be judged on the same basis as an act of photographing. Romanticisation—almost contextually synonymous with trivialisation—does, indeed, limit the range of subjects of depiction for an artist. And let us not forget that a claim to collective—or “objective”—reality through self-expression (or under the guise of), not only engenders psychological harm to the families and communities of the victim—a matter of past atrocities—it expresses a certain set of judgements and sentiments which has further implications on individual realities through future atrocities which may be committed—in whichever form or scale, however subtle or slight—a matter of future repercussions.

An interesting point is then raised, onto the problem of realism as realistic as its actual subject—The Minneapolis Scaffold of Sam Durant. Does the erection of this sculpture express insensitivity towards the Native American community? “Who am I to judge what is or is not sensitive?” if I may pre-empt the question sure to be put forward. The greater purpose for platform of discussions is to sway, incite and alter. It is not reductive to recast the question in the form of “Who am I to have an opinion on the topic of which my status renders me an ineffective judge?” It perhaps is not far from the truth that even the totality of my experiences affords no sufficient understanding and empathy towards the issue at hand and the individuals affected by it. While an interpretation of realities is highly fluid, and in this particular context, historical and cultural—of which this acknowledgement conveys my grievous attitude towards publicising one—it is weighted enough, in comparison to the concern raised, as to warrant my speaking of it; not to mention that it is thought-provoking by itself. Sensitivity is a slant and ought to be judged according to its contextual position—with its historical, cultural, social and individual components considered altogether.

A question is posed, “Is realistic depiction of a victim, an event, or other invocation of past injustice—which no reasonable individual would equate it with condonation—an affirmation in a way resulting in the continuity and propagation of pernicious attitudes or is it contrariwise a denouncement?” The answer seems to be neither. A neutral observance—neutral in the case of this actual scaffold and cannot be exemplified with a better example—merely states a past happening uncoloured by any sentiments or prejudices. This observance, it can be said, embodies the prejudices, the hatred, and the inhumanity as to inflict openly a symbolic violence upon the living and future generations of those suffered. Perhaps this is true, but without a solid confirmation by the consensus of the community, by individuals of whom the issue directly concerned, the reaction appears a mere moral masturbation—a touchstone applicable equally well for non-neutral observance, in whatever sense of the term. It is impossible to gauge how a perspective may be taken towards the recount of past experience—however damnable it may be—especially with the passage of time altering its cultural bearing. But it must be argued that the creation of impartial art—if such a term may be permitted for use—should never suffer an aspersion the same way a history book is exempted from it. Realism is good. Realism is unfettered in its elements of realness and the entrusting of naked realism to mankind is a consecration of the individualism of moral judgement and conscience.

Salisa, published in Sep 2017, “On Art Depicting A Racially Or Culturally Sensitive Subject (Art As Artistic Narration Only)”

Of all the hammy nonsense I have arrogated, this one trounces most victoriously. I redact some of the content of the post, a long laborious sustenuto that started off as a footnote to an unrelated item of feuilleton which began:

The one-hour presentation I delivered on Quantum Gravity, and its necessary preparation, as a requisite for my Astronomy course was undertaken via self-directed personal-cramming […]

But to give a sample flavour:

[On Quantum Field Theory]… But if I were to have to naively outline two main approaches to understanding the lack of successful contemporary resolution to the problem (and I’ll take this opportunity to entertain both interpretations with equal respect), one would be to understand gravity as an emergent phenomenon and the other, to understand classical gravitation under General Relativity as an effective field theory (which doesn’t necessarily dismiss the possible inspection of gravity and its effect approaching the Planck scale). Gravity as emergent can be interpreted in the following way:

After all, the description of an ideal gas in terms of a large number of molecules moving at random, by Boltzmann, cannot be pursued further to actually reveal the atomic physics of the molecule. The fact that the thermodynamic description is independent of the microscopic details cuts both ways. It allows you to formulate the theory without worrying about the detailed microstructure but at the same time, refuses to reveal anything about the microscopic structure.

Thanu Padmanabhan, Quantum Themes

That is, in simplification, to view gravity as an elasticity of space-time, the same way elasticity arises out of tangible physicality of material. The elastic behaviour of an iron rod or the thermal property of an ideal gas is independent of their internal structure at the infinitesimal scale, or in the understanding of physics, the equations describing their microscopic compositions (the ideal gas law PV = nRT or PV = NKbT applies to both Helium and Argon, though their atomic arrangements are nothing alike). It is a large-scale phenomenon, so to say, and while gravity does bend light (which, under the Newtonian model, was a striking anomaly given that gravity is understood to act exclusively on particles or objects with a non-zero mass while light consists of massless photons), it is interesting to ask whether gravity acts on “individual photons” (though allow me to tag a question mark on this doubly-quoted entity). However, if one were to evoke Einstein’s model of gravitation—gravity as a distortion of space-time—we perhaps would do away with this notion of “acting on” entirely; light travels in a straight line but our new concept of space-time postulates that this straight line be the world-line, rendering the question of direct action of gravity upon matter as obsolete and possibly ill-conceived (matter, energy or any component associated with the stress-energy tensor distorts space-time, which in turn, imposes on matter and its nearby).

I’d like to make a different conclusion from Padmanabhan though, that this premise, if one were to accept as principal, not “refuses to reveal” but has nothing to reveal. It is not meaningful to imply that there exists such interconnectedness when there is none just as it is not meaningful to speak of an entity (“entity” in physics seems to me an equivocation) of which no direct or indirect consequence of it having existed can be observed […]

[…]

This emergence approach would preserve the classicality of gravitation. The approach which sees General Relativity as an effective theory would overturn the authority of Einstein’s formulations (effective means it is not fundamental, works within certain limits or scales, or describes an effect without attributing to a direct cause) and posit a new set of tools, perhaps a revised unit of basic building blocks or a new way of constructing and understanding relations, interactions and effects which are considered more underlying. General Relativity, if one were to disregard the quantum world as more primary or fundamental, held contradictory assumptions with Quantum Mechanics from the outset, in that the measurements of physical quantities—momentum, pressure, energy—are not probabilistic in nature (the components of the stress-energy tensor in Einstein’s field equation, which determine the curvature of space-time, have definite numerical values); it is a classical theory and as such, creates a conceptual problem when one tries to incorporate it with quantum formulations. However, the failure to integrate gravitation with Quantum Field Theory to produce another canonised perturbative theory is of a technical and mathematical nature, not a conceptual or philosophical one, that is, it produces nonsensical value—infinity for physical quantities—under the procedure of renormalisation; a process required in a quantisation of field.

[…]

The failure to re-normalise, if one is acquainted to a degree with the history or development concerning QFT, also beset weak force when it first underwent the conventional field quantisation. Fermi’s theory of beta decay, an early formulation of weak interaction, was non-renormalisable. The higher order of approximation in perturbative calculation led to the same foundering that gravity has encountered, the divergences at high energies. Its successor, a gauge theory of electro-weak interaction (a quantum mediator of W boson was inserted in between the point of exchange, followed by some appropriate structural modifications to preserve gauge invariance and conservation of electric charge), which modelled after QED and subsequently incorporated it, provided a quantum picture of weak dynamics which then became re-normalisable. An analogy could be made between Fermi’s model of beta decay and Einstein’s model of gravitation; they are not considered rudimentary, and a more complete and rudimentary formulation is needed to bring about this successful transformation under QFT. How much is preserved of Einstein’s formulation is left to the arbitration of different approaches which seek to quantise gravitational field. I know not much of these approaches (while my presentation was titled Theories of Quantum Gravity, forty minutes were spent elucidating contexts and backgrounds starting from Relativity, and only some few last slides touched on major candidate theories—String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity—which, due to time constraints of my research and reading, ended up mere general descriptions of their methodology; as procured hastily from journalistic layman’s articles).

[…]

This AdS/CFT correspondence seems to be an emerging new concept in high energy physics which I consider, as of the present, to be too advanced for my taste (assumptions are not axioms; axioms, especially in a theoretically rigorous field like this, are not accepted facts). Einstein wrote, quite reasonably:

Experience remains, of course, the sole criterion of the physical utility of a mathematical construction. But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.

It ends with:

Modern theoretical science has benefitted greatly from intellectual pedagogy of German Rationalism—exemplified in Planck, Heisenberg, Bohr and Einstein himself. But he perhaps did not foresee the rise of such unenlightening tangle that is the contemporary speculation of impetuous nature, invoking though meekly, what philosophy called, the demarcation problem. Are there any other empirical tests for Grand Unified Theory, aside from proton decay and fermion masses? How is one to interpret the proliferation of variants of String Theories? Quantum Gravity itself lacks an expedient model used to test its validity, owing perhaps to the lack of workable invention specifying its constituents (With these practical limitations, what are we to look for? Or equally, without these practical limitations, what are we to look for?..). How much of modern particle physics falls into the domain of falsifiability? How shall we appraise this over reliance of the use of mathematics in a sphere highly specialised, highly rarefied, highly assumptive, even if their corresponding contexts are invoked in the manoeuvring of symbols and the establishing of relations? Such metaphysics in the realm of science seems to be embodied in String Theory, or perhaps any attempt to force into mould a unifying principle indiscriminate of contexts, scales, or limits.

Lastly, a general reminder, from Godel’s Proof:

… it became evident that mathematics is simply the discipline par excellence that draws the conclusions logically implied by any given set of axioms or postulates. In fact, it came to be acknowledged that the validity of a mathematical inference in no sense depends upon any special meaning that may be associated with the terms or expressions contained in the postulates. Mathematics was thus recognised to be much more abstract and formal than had been traditionally supposed: more abstract, because mathematical statements can be construed in principle to be about anything whatsoever rather than about some inherently circumscribed set of objects or traits of objects; and more formal, because the validity of mathematical demonstrations is grounded in the structure of statements, rather than in the nature of a particular subject matter. The postulates of any branch of demonstrative mathematics are not inherently about space, quantity, apples, angles, or budgets; and any special meaning that may be associated with the terms (or “descriptive predicates”) in the postulates plays no essential role in the process of deriving theorems. We repeat that the sole question confronting the pure mathematician (as distinct from the scientist who employs mathematics in investigating a special subject matter) is not whether the postulates assumed or the conclusions deduced from them are true, but whether the alleged conclusions are in fact the necessary logical consequences of the initial assumptions.

Is the subset of theoretical physics in predominance scientists employing mathematics or mathematicians employing science? The difference seems to lie in the degree to which empirical verification takes precedence in justifying a postulate or in surmising a hypothesis, in discerning a set of assumptions from a set of scientific facts, in taking caution incorporating foreign axioms or mathematical formulations, in investigating the nature and the integrity of assumptions, statements, relations, integrations, inferences, directly or indirectly, employed. And as a scientist-non-scientist distinction in general, in sustaining sufficient reservation towards analogous reasoning as a means of knowledge-production, in understanding the actual nature of pictorial representation of concepts, in exercising critical judgement towards any set of formulations one might encounter or any set of evidence purported to corroborate them, in acquiring an understanding utilising a top-down approach rather than bottom-up, in keeping in mind the big picture, in building a conceptual edifice, in being able to reason and justify a hoard of steps one has taken in their accumulation of knowledge, in philosophising, in being exhaustive and exhausting, that is, sapere aude!

[1] Being conversant with a history or philosophy of science, or at the very least of their own field, rescues one from being a votary of science or what Schiller called, in his phenomenal inaugural lecture, “a bread-fed scholar.” Although academe is largely an economic apparatus with a clear established hierarchy and authority governing appointments, nominations and publications, what shall be expected of “truth” in such place? “I sing the song of him whose bread I eat” has not only held good in all times, but in all places it seems.

[…]

[2] On second thought, no mathematics or logic should have a final say on what we are or are not capable of excelling (computational system and nature are markedly different; we can’t fully grasp the latter, and the laws we ascribe to them are always a post hoc description of observational occurrences). The limitation of any aspect of nature is what we ought to verify not reckon by means of human reasoning. For instance, Special Relativity posits that nothing travels faster than the speed of light, but our universe does, for one, expand faster than the speed of light (another thing to note of this commonly misinterpreted deduction: simply that human can’t will it, in no way, suggests that nature can’t). So take my suggestion above as a mere parallelism drawn to illuminate the meaning of my assertion.

[…]

Salisa, published in Dec 2017, “What Is This Turning Into?”

In fact, I have worked up, back in the days, quite a roster of scientific ideas in de rigueur garbs against which I would wager: quantum computer and its whole charade, Higgs boson, black hole, some or most of astrology including but not limited to the big bang theory and the expansion of the universe, any non-probabilistic interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Pardon my blasé naiveté; I profess my alliance with Popper as laid out in his obscure paper edited by Mario Bunge, “Quantum Mechanics Without the Observer,” one of the most brilliant of its kind). It is difficult indeed when one deals with a dunghill of experimental artifacts. But these are the shiny trinkets of youth — trifles with which one disports and dallies oneself during the deadening bouts of boredom or ennui.

Re-reading https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/08/14/darwinian-fundamentalism-an-exchange/ (an endnote for my essay a causerie ago):

This electronic “flame” begins: “At the risk of sounding grandiose, I hereby declare myself to be involved in a bitter feud with no less a personage than Stephen Jay Gould. It all started in 1990, when I reviewed his book Wonderful Life…. Gould, alas, has paid me no mind…. Savvy alpha male that he is, he refrained from getting into a gutter brawl with a scrawny marginal primate such as myself.”

Go in peace, Mr. Wright. You may declare all you want, but fighting is like the tango, and I decline. You too, Dan Dennett. I wish you no ill, and I’m sorry if I offended you both by not paying enough attention to your work—the only common theme, in the absence of any intellectual response, in their replies printed above. But as T.H. Huxley said of Richard Owen, in a parody of Dryden’s line about Alexander the Great refighting all his battles during a drunken monologue—“And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain”—life is just too short for occupying oneself with the slaying of the slain more than twice.

SJ Gould, 1997

Glenn Gould (pilfered from my old albeit embarrassing and to-be-defuncted “electronik Diary unto which…“):

The problem begins when one forgets the artificiality of it all, when one neglects to pay homage to those designations that to our minds – to our reflex senses, perhaps – make of music an analyzable commodity. The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it. And when that happens, when we forget these things, all sorts of mechanical failures begin to disrupt the function of human personality. When people who practice an art like music become captives of those positive assumptions of system, when they forget to credit that happening against negation which system is, and when they become disrespectful of the immensity of negation compared to system – then they put themselves out of reach of that replenishment of invention upon which creative ideas depend, because invention is, in fact, a cautious dipping into the negation that lies outside system from a position firmly ensconced in system.

G Gould, 1964

And N Gould D:

Although I cannot draw or paint, when I write I feel pictures intensely within. Arguments have shapes, forms, lines, tensions, structural qualities. When they aren’t right they are ugly and clumsy and don’t fit. But when they are…ah, they look and feel sublime in the mind’s eye of a waking dream. They have immaculate strength and beauty, are formidable and enduring, an architecture of the intellect.

Right now I have a half-formed landscape with rubble strewn around it… will take some struggle, beautiful agony of devotion, to build it so it soars.

N Gould D, 2018

The Goulds are verily magnificent creatures, especially the last, whom I called “Sebastian” after Johannes Sebastian Bach, for whom my greatest love is reserved.

*****

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.

*****

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…”

)

*****

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. 

)

*****

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).

*****

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)

******

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

******

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.

---

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