Lawrence Auster, in a post commenting on the idiotic and occasionally dangerous fad known as “planking” (in which people take photos of themselves stretched out horizontally in odd locations), suggests that plankers deserve a Darwin Award.
So far, so good, and I quite agree. But Mr. Auster, who has an intellectually unfortunate antipathy to Darwinism, took the opportunity once again to rail against it (or to rail, I should say, against what he imagines Darwinism to be).
We read:
Collective suicidal behavior meriting the Darwin Award is no joke. Given the immigration and race policies that are being assiduously followed by every historically white country, the entire white race arguably deserves the Darwin Award. Which raises an interesting question. How can Darwinian evolution, consisting of random genetic mutations which are naturally selected because of their power to help their possessors survive and produce offspring, have produced an entire race that is committing suicide? The wholesale adoption of Darwin Award-winning behavior by the white race would seem to suggest that the Darwinian theory of evolution is not true.
Mr. Auster’s post has touched off a long thread at Mangan’s, but as far as I can tell the main point has been missed all round, more or less, so I’ll just make it briefly here.
That point is that we humans embody a disruptive evolutionary innovation. On our little branch of life’s tree (and so far as we know, only on our little branch), evolution has found an unusual corner of design space: one in which behavior is controlled not only by instinct, but also by culture and memetics. We might say that humans are the first general-purpose behavior machines — or to use a computer metaphor, the first in which hard-wired behavior has to any great extent been replaced (and even in our case only partially so, I hasten to add) by the ability to load and run software.
That has given us extraordinary flexibility, and the coupling of cultural/memetic evolution to biological evolution has meant that from a behavioral standpoint, human populations can “speciate” in very short intervals (I use the word “speciate” metaphorically here, of course).
What this means is that even more or less biologically identical human populations can have very different outcomes depending on the “software” they run. The results, however, can be every bit as “Darwinian” as you like; the wages of memetic maladaptation is still extinction. (As an extreme example, consider the Shakers, who incorporated into their behavioral software the rule that they mustn’t have children. There are no longer any Shakers.)
So the answer to the question (leaving aside for now the premise of the particular example):
How can Darwinian evolution, consisting of random genetic mutations which are naturally selected because of their power to help their possessors survive and produce offspring, have produced an entire race that is committing suicide?
…is this: that natural selection’s contribution to the scenario was simply the creation of a flexible machine for running behavioral software. That some software, however, might contain lethal bugs is itself no more an indictment of Darwinism than is the historical fact that the fate of nearly every species that has ever lived has been extinction.
Mr. Auster also wrote this, in response to a commenter who said that his example might be a case of previously adaptive behavior becoming maladaptive in a changed environment:
A new or changed environment can explain a species dying out. But it can’t explain a species systematically adopting an entirely new behavior leading to its destruction, since the new behavior, not enhancing survival and reproduction, would not be naturally selected.
But this gets the temporal sequence exactly backward: first comes variation (the new behavior), and then selection. “Destruction” — i.e. extinction — is how selection does its work. In other words: mutation proposes, selection disposes.
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Buckminster Fuller used to call human beings nature’s anti-entropic device . . . until entropy got the best of him.
Jeffery Hodges
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The claim that an ‘entire race is committing suicide’ is not an anomaly of the Darwinian settlement, but a highly contentious opinion or hyperbole which is being used to test, as it were, the truth of evolutionary science.
That modern liberalism is leading to some very undesirable ends – including perhaps even the destruction of Western civilization – does not suggest this endeavour, like suicide, would be an intentional undertaking. On the contrary, liberals believe we’re moving in an opposite direction and making political and moral progress towards a better world.
As for ‘planking’: Well, people do dotty things. There are many ways of reacting to this sort of propensity, but I don’t think we need either Darwinism or a General Theory of Idiocy to explain it.
Well, Alex, all I wanted to address in this post was the proposition’s validity as a test of Darwinism. Although I do think the European peoples have engaged in some terribly self-abnegating behavior in the past few decades, I agree with you that it’s questionable to view it as suicide for suicide’s sake.
Re “planking”, I can’t say it’s any more idiotic than some of the things I did in youth. As you say, people do dotty things. IF they’re dotty enough, and they do them young enough, selection can take notice.
I realize this isn’t the sort of question I’d normally allow myself (in my defense, I had a very rare encounter with a fluid known in the American South as ‘moonshine’).
Is the “Missionary Position” equivalent to planking?
I’d say any living thing is anti-entropic, Jeffery — in the short run.