"Is Man Just Another Animal?" Professor Steve Jones says...

[phildwyer]

It still comes back to language, as human culture and history is predicated on having language as a means of transmitting meaning.

True.

 

[phildwyer]

What?
gorski is going to get a friend.

He's already got one in me. He's the best read person on here--not that I agree with everything he says, but he knows his continental philosophy, which very few Anglophones do.

 

[gorski]

Where would the fun be, if we agreed on everything?!?

 

[phildwyer]

Skimming through the thread, it looks like yet another example of the misunderstandings that arise from Anglo-American ignorance of dialectics. A rather extended example, but that's the basic problem here afaict.

Is that pretty much it Gorski?

 

[phildwyer]

Ah yes, I've just come across the Scientistic Turn. It usually crops up on the 5th or 6th page of these threads.

Butcher's used to be pretty good at demolishing Scientism, where's he gone?

 

[bimble]

No, the strongest argument is to do with history and culture.

Only human beings have history and culture, in the sense that our perceptions of the world vary with context--in striking contrast to animals.

This is pretty obvious really. The truly interesting question is: why has our particular historical moment produced the misconception that human beings are animals?

I have the answer and if I can be bothered I will come back and explain it in due course.

Ok. Please explain:
If Homo Sapiens is not an animal, what is it?
Do you think that this "misconception" occurring at this historical moment might have something to do with the discovery of evolution?

None of this detracts from the specialness of humankind, our unique capabilities, potential and responsibilties. The question is just framed so wrongly that it's the wrong question, surely.

 

[phildwyer]

I check this thread every now and then but every page is pretty much the same.

Aye. Not only that, it's pretty much the same as about 500 other thread on here over the years.

To me though, that makes it more interesting rather than less. It suggests that it speaks to a central ideological dispute.

My own view is that capitalism is a system predicated on reification, so it's hardly surprising that capitalist ideology would portray human beings as animals--which is to say bodies without souls.

 

[phildwyer]

Ok. Please explain:
If Homo Sapiens is not an animal, what is it?

An animal with a soul.

 

[TruXta]

Have you no new tricks Phil? Still peddling the same old crap?

 

[bimble]

An animal with a soul.

oh. a soul! That explains it. cheers.

 

[phildwyer]

Do you think that this "misconception" occurring at this historical moment might have something to do with the discovery of evolution?

That's unlikely, because evolution was "discovered" by Anaximander in 400 BC.

When you say "evolution," you probably mean Darwinism. Darwinism is evolutionary theory adapted to conform with capitalism, by suggesting that the competition of individual organisms is the motor that drives evolution.

 

[phildwyer]

oh. a soul! That explains it. cheers.

But what do you mean by a "soul?"

 

[phildwyer]

Have you no new tricks Phil? Still peddling the same old crap?

Silence, fool. We're about to have an interesting conversation without you.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

My own view is that capitalism is a system predicated on reification, so it's hardly surprising that capitalist ideology would portray human beings as animals--which is to say bodies without souls.

It is extraordinary how both you and gorski constantly get this point wrong - in that this is not what other people are saying. I - and others - would, as a result of the evidence, extend minds to other animals. You think that doing this is in some way meant to be taking away from the idea of human minds. It isn't.

Really, it amazes me how you both get this wrong despite being repeatedly told that you're misrepresenting the position.

 

[gorski]

Phil, soul is music you like, non?

Seriously, you think anyone here would get Hegel at all?!?

 

[gorski]

But what do you mean by a "soul?"

Indeed, very telling, when you have to ask the right Q...

 

[phildwyer]

Seriously, you think anyone here would get Hegel at all?!?

Not yet. It's not really fair to expect it of them. Brits don't do Hegel at university.

Anyway, don't you think you need to grasp some Kant before you can get Hegel? At least the First Critique? That would be my starting place if I were instructing this lot.

 

[bimble]

That's unlikely, because evolution was "discovered" by Anaximander in 400 BC.

When you say "evolution," you probably mean Darwinism. Darwinism is evolutionary theory adapted to conform with capitalism, by suggesting that the competition of individual organisms is the motor that drives evolution.

I have never heard of Aximander. So someone got there first? That's interesting.

It looks like maybe you misunderstood Darwin.
Did you know that towards the end of his life he was obsessed with the lowly earthworm? He kept them all over his house, on top of the piano even. He understood that the earthworm was the essential animal that made everything else possible, including us with our giant ridiculous brains.
The competing components were never the individual but the species, as more recent DNA research has shown, the individual is nothing, is not going anywhere.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

*thread disappears up own arse*

*wanders off*

 

[phildwyer]

It is extraordinary how both you and gorski constantly get this point wrong - in that this is not what other people are saying. I - and others - would, as a result of the evidence, extend minds to other animals. You think that doing this is in some way meant to be taking away from the idea of human minds. It isn't.

Yes, I understand that. But you'd have to admit that there's a qualitative difference between human and animals minds, I take it?

Once you concede that, we can begin to discuss the nature of that difference.

 

[gorski]

Phil, I did mention it in the previous thread and even Butch weighed in, slapping them with "you're having a pre-kantian discussion here"... So, if they don't listen to him, what chance do I have?

 

[phildwyer]

I have never heard of Aximander. So someone got there first? That's interesting.

It is very interesting. It makes one wonder why most people believe Darwin "discovered" evolution. I think it's because his theory of evolution is capitalist ideology.

But it's not really a matter of having "got there first." People have always accepted the basic fact of evolution, it's a question of which theory is most coherent.

 

[phildwyer]

Phil, I did mention it in the previous thread and even Butch weighed in, slapping them with "you're having a pre-kantian discussion here"... So, if they don't listen to him, what chance do I have?

Ah good, I'm glad he hasn't given up. He was always good at taking the piss out of Truxta and his ilk.

I know you don't like BA, but he does know his Kant and Hegel. Unlike 99.99% of people here.

 

[bimble]

It is very interesting. It makes one wonder why most people believe Darwin "discovered" evolution. I think it's because his theory of evolution is capitalist ideology.

But it's not really a matter of having "got there first." People have always accepted the basic fact of evolution, it's a question of which theory is most coherent.

No, people have not. When Trump gets gone for instance, the man who will be president of the USA sincerely believes that Darwin tried hard but was wrong, and that in fact God created man and woman, presumably the American ones first. This is not something on which you can assume any shared understanding, yet, sadly.

 

[gorski]

He meant people with something upstairs, people who dare think, pioneers who influence others, tops of the mountains, showing the way, I think...

 

[phildwyer]

No, people have not. When Trump gets gone for instance, the man who will be president of the USA sincerely believes that Darwin tried hard but was wrong, and that in fact God created man and woman, presumably the American ones first. This is not something on which you can assume any shared understanding, yet, sadly.

When I say "people" I meant "educated people."

Not that uneducated people aren't people, obviously, but there's little point in taking their views into account on subjects about which they can know nothing. We'll never get anywhere if we have to keep on pausing to correct the likes of Trump and Truxta.

 

[phildwyer]

He meant people with something upstairs, people who dare think, pioneers who influence others, tops of the mountains, showing the way, I think...

Heh, you got there just before me. Great minds etc.

 

[ElizabethofYork]

What a pair of patronising wankers.

 

[bimble]

An unintended happy consequence of this sorry thread is that I right now feel very happy that I didn't take up an offer to study philosophy at a university and did other stuff instead.

 

[gorski]

OK, since some have asked me, not knowing the ABC: Social Darwinism - Wikipedia

Evolution - Wikipedia - check "History of evolutionary thought":

The proposal that one type of organism could descend from another type goes back to some of the first pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, such as Anaximander and Empedocles. Such proposals survived into Roman times. The poet and philosopher Lucretius followed Empedocles in his masterwork De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things).In contrast to these materialistic views, Aristotelianism considered all natural things as actualisations of fixed natural possibilities, known as forms. This was part of a medieval teleological understanding of nature in which all things have an intended role to play in a divine cosmic order. Variations of this idea became the standard understanding of the Middle Ages and were integrated into Christian learning, but Aristotle did not demand that real types of organisms always correspond one-for-one with exact metaphysical forms and specifically gave examples of how new types of living things could come to be.

In the 17th century, the new method of modern science rejected the Aristotelian approach. It sought explanations of natural phenomena in terms of physical laws that were the same for all visible things and that did not require the existence of any fixed natural categories or divine cosmic order. However, this new approach was slow to take root in the biological sciences, the last bastion of the concept of fixed natural types. John Ray applied one of the previously more general terms for fixed natural types, "species," to plant and animal types, but he strictly identified each type of living thing as a species and proposed that each species could be defined by the features that perpetuated themselves generation after generation. The biological classification introduced by Carl Linnaeus in 1735 explicitly recognized the hierarchical nature of species relationships, but still viewed species as fixed according to a divine plan.

Other naturalists of this time speculated on the evolutionary change of species over time according to natural laws. In 1751, Pierre Louis Maupertuis wrote of natural modifications occurring during reproduction and accumulating over many generations to produce new species. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon suggested that species could degenerate into different organisms, and Erasmus Darwin proposed that all warm-blooded animals could have descended from a single microorganism (or "filament"). The first full-fledged evolutionary scheme was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's "transmutation" theory of 1809, which envisaged spontaneous generation continually producing simple forms of life that developed greater complexity in parallel lineages with an inherent progressive tendency, and postulated that on a local level these lineages adapted to the environment by inheriting changes caused by their use or disuse in parents. (The latter process was later called Lamarckism.) These ideas were condemned by established naturalists as speculation lacking empirical support. In particular, Georges Cuvier insisted that species were unrelated and fixed, their similarities reflecting divine design for functional needs. In the meantime, Ray's ideas of benevolent design had been developed by William Paley into the Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802), which proposed complex adaptations as evidence of divine design and which was admired by Charles Darwin.

The crucial break from the concept of constant typological classes or types in biology came with the theory of evolution through natural selection, which was formulated by Charles Darwin in terms of variable populations. Partly influenced by An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) by Thomas Robert Malthus, Darwin noted that population growth would lead to a "struggle for existence" in which favorable variations prevailed as others perished. In each generation, many offspring fail to survive to an age of reproduction because of limited resources. This could explain the diversity of plants and animals from a common ancestry through the working of natural laws in the same way for all types of organism. Darwin developed his theory of "natural selection" from 1838 onwards and was writing up his "big book" on the subject when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a version of virtually the same theory in 1858. Their separate papers were presented together at a 1858 meeting of the Linnean Society of London. At the end of 1859, Darwin's publication of his "abstract" as On the Origin of Species explained natural selection in detail and in a way that led to an increasingly wide acceptance of concepts of evolution. Thomas Henry Huxley applied Darwin's ideas to humans, using paleontology and comparative anatomy to provide strong evidence that humans and apes shared a common ancestry. Some were disturbed by this since it implied that humans did not have a special place in the universe.