[tt] Meme 132: School of Darwin Studies: A Proposal for GMU
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Meme 132: School of Darwin Studies: A Proposal for GMU
by Frank Forman
sent 2008.2.4
[Hanson, Bostrom, and Hughes are in the proposal.]
First the abstract:
The proposal describes a school devoted to using ORDERED SERENDIPITY to
develop the ideas of Charles Darwin. Darwin pioneered the notion that major
changes (new species) are the result of the accumulation of small, random
changes, filtered though natural selection ("survival of the fittest").
Such Darwinian processes are now found everywhere. The school will
cross-fertilize ideas not just from beyond biology, psychology, economics,
and other disciplines in the arts and sciences but law, medicine, and
computer science as well. Darwin also revolutionized the study of that
eminent product of a Darwinian process, namely ourselves, our hopes, and
our limitations. A conference, "Darwin among the Disciplines: The
Re-Enchanted World that Charles Darwin Started," will precede the School.
Scholars from twenty disciplines are described. Every effort has been made
to incorporate the critics of Darwinism and the overly enthusiastic
Darwinists.
Now a note of explanation, and then the whole proposal:
I sent this proposal to George Mason University, but it didn't fly. I can
only speculate why, as many people have told me it is an excellent idea,
well expressed. I now offer it to the world, to establish an entire school,
or just hold a conference, "Darwin across the Disciplines: The Re-Enchanted
World that Charles Darwin Started."
The idea of such a conference might well have occurred to you, but perhaps
only fleetingly. The fearsome prospect of investing the sunk costs of
looking up websites and e-mail addresses and writing summary descriptions
of the work of each scholar may well have prevented the preliminary work
toward holding such a conference, much less setting up a whole school.
My guess that the reason my proposal didn't fly is based upon the fact that
it got no response at all. The president of George Mason, Alan Merten, is a
gentlemen, so I figured that he realized that, outside the Washington,
D.C., suburbs and Charlottesville, Virginia is very much part of what H.L.
Mencken denominated the Bible Belt. He must have instinctively grasped that
the more conservative members of the Commonwealth (state) government would
threaten to jeopardize GMU's funding if he dared even propose such a thing
as a whole school devoted to Darwin or even hold a conference. This, in
spite of my every effort to include the best critics of Darwinism. He
couldn't tell me so, for fear of its being repeated. Hence the silence.
I want to emphasize in the strongest possible terms that, while
disappointed, of course, I hold no anger or resentment toward either
President Merten or George Mason University. Merten, along with his
predecessor, George Johnson, have done absolutely magnificent jobs in
making GMU the most innovative university in the country, beginning with
the bringing of the economics faculty of the Center for the Study of Public
Choice from Virginia Tech to GMU and--its most major other accomplishment,
there being too many others to list--for establishing a law school I
instantly recommend to anyone thinking of going to law school, even if
qualified for one with allegedly higher status. Those taking graduate
economics or law not only exert influence far out of disproportion to their
numbers but gain so many different perspectives that they are uncommonly
creative. I am proud to be the third Ph.D. in George Mason's history,
having written my dissertation under James M. Buchanan, finishing in 1985.
(I studied under him and another founding father of public choice
economics, Gordon Tullock, in the old days at the University of Virginia,
1966-68.) My dissertation was the only one in any field to discuss both the
size distribution of galaxies in the universe and why the brains of
primates are too big! The dissertation has been turned into a book, _The
Metaphysics of Liberty_ (Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic, 1989).
Available at http://www.panix.com/~checker/meta.htm
I'm also sending this as you might not know just how widespread Darwin's
ideas have become. And I have my thoughts on just what Darwinism, in a
sense broader than the specific ideas of the great man, is and what it
means. Comments welcome!
My next step will be to send this to a great many university charitable
foundations and say, hey, some grateful alumnus may come out of the
woodworks and offer $100 million to your university. This seems to happen
every month or two, often at surprising places. Here is a concrete proposal
that would really place you on the map. Discuss it with him. Just offering
to name a building after him will not be enough.
I hereby place my proposal in the public domain. So feel free to steal its
ideas, try to set up your own conference or school, and cruelly distort and
misrepresent my thoughts!
+++++++++
SCHOOL OF DARWIN STUDIES
A PROPOSAL FOR GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY
by Frank Forman, GMU's third Ph.D., economics, 1985
checker at panix.com
September 30, 2007
ABSTRACT
The proposal describes a school devoted to using ORDERED SERENDIPITY to
develop the ideas of Charles Darwin. Darwin pioneered the notion that major
changes (new species) are the result of the accumulation of small, random
changes, filtered though natural selection ("survival of the fittest").
Such Darwinian processes are now found everywhere. The school will
cross-fertilize ideas not just from beyond biology, psychology, economics,
and other disciplines in the arts and sciences but law, medicine, and
computer science as well. Darwin also revolutionized the study of that
eminent product of a Darwinian process, namely ourselves, our hopes, and
our limitations. A conference, "Darwin among the Disciplines: The
Re-Enchanted World that Charles Darwin Started," will precede the School.
Scholars from twenty disciplines are described. Every effort has been made
to incorporate the critics of Darwinism and the overly enthusiastic
Darwinists.
IN MORE DETAIL
Charles Darwin is important: He changed our understanding of the living
world and man's place in it, just as Copernicus changed our understanding
of the place of the earth in the universe.
Darwinism is important: That new species came into being was commonly
accepted by scientists by the time Darwin published The Origin of Species
in 1859. What Darwin did was to find a plausible mechanism, by way of the
accumulation of large numbers of spontaneous variations (mutations) of
traits of organisms, processed through natural selection ("survival of the
fittest"). Darwinian-like processes have been discovered independently in
many, many academic fields and are sometimes even engineered. And it is
from his later book, The Descent of Man (1871), that features of that
eminent product of Darwinian evolution, namely us, are informing the social
sciences and humanities about the hopes and limitations of reform.
A School of Darwinian (Evolutionary) Studies would be important: George
Mason could become the first university to offer degrees in a fabulously
multi-disciplinary field, where scholars would garner hints from other
disciplines about how Darwinian-like processes work over there and seek to
apply them over here. GMU reputation's secured as a place where fertile
ideas are welcome, it will be able to attract scholars in fields that have
suddenly become less remote from biology.
Graduates from a Darwinian studies program at GMU will be well-trained in
what is the hallmark of the gifted, namely being able to think along
multiple pathways. (Giftedness is not the same as intelligence, which is
the ability to reason along a single pathway.) These graduates will
generate an influence as disproportionate as those in Public Choice and in
the law school do.
Accordingly, GMU could be called a "gifted university," meaning one that
fosters creativity in its scholars, in an atmosphere of ORDERED
SERENDIPITY, as well as students by having multiple paths of thought in
intercommunication.) Diplomas would be issued in specific department of the
School.
Step I: Start with a conference, "Darwin across the Disciplines: The
Re-Enchanted World that Charles Darwin Started," first. Time for 2009, the
200th anniversary of Darwin's birth as well as the 150th anniversary of
publication of The Origin of Species. Let the sparks fly on Darwin and
morals and religion, the big issue on the political right, and on Darwin
and human variation, the big issue on the political left. Allow each
participant to bring three others, at most one other from his own
institution, who would be a prospective faculty member. House everyone in
dormitories for a week. Feed them. Chop speakers off after fifteen minutes
(900 seconds exactly). Have lots of breaks during and between sessions.
Step II: Found a "Center for the Study of Darwinian Processes." This will
be serve administrative function, such as coordinating conferences,
visiting scholars programs, and a journal across the disciplines, called
Journal of Darwin Studies. The Center will also manage a website and
discussion groups.
Step III: The Center will also inaugurate "Darwin's Chapel," a hour-long
Sunday service that opens with a hymn George Mason himself could have sung,
then a reading from Darwin's works, then a "sermon" from a scholar about
some aspect of Darwinism (20 minutes), with 30 minutes for responses from
the congregation. A closing hymn. (Well, maybe this particular name would
not go over very well! A weekly lecture series is a must.)
Step IV: Establish a full School of Darwin (Evolution) Studies which will
reach beyond Arts and Sciences into the School of Law, The Volgenau School
of Information Technology and Engineering, the College of Education and
Human Development, and the College of Health and Human Services. If this is
too much right away, just establish a Department of Darwin (Evolution)
Studies that will encompass only the College of Science and the College of
Humanities and Social Science. At the very least a Master of Arts in
Interdisciplinary Studies for Darwinian Studies can be established, and
right away.
The proposal describes how profoundly Darwin's ideas has effected our
culture, and then give a long and growing list of possible candidates for
the conference and the school across twenty disciplines, picked
individually for their potential to interact with each other. Also listed
are several critics of Darwinism, to invite to the conference, though not
necessarily to join the faculty (for wont of academic qualifications), to
give a balance.
++++++++++++++
TABLE OF CONTENTS OF THE PROPOSAL
I. WHAT HATH DARWIN WROUGHT!
A. Darwin in a Sentence
1. Emergent novelty
2. Randomness
3. Selection (Survival of the Fittest)
B. Darwinism in a Larger Context
1. Darwin and his times
2. Progress
3. Social Darwinism
4. Reform Darwinism
5. Future Evolution
C. Darwinism as a Special Case
II. DARWINISTS ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
A. For the More Immediate Future
1. Anthropology
2. Biology
3. Computer Science
4. Economics
5. Education
6. Engineering
7. History
8. Law
9. Linguistics
10. Literature
11. Mathematics
12. Medicine
13. Memetics and/or Music
14. Philosophy
15. Political Science
16. Psychiatry
17. Psychology
18. Religion
19. Rhetoric
20. Sociology
B. FARTHER AHEAD
1. History of Ideas
2. Art History
3. History of Statistics and Probability
4. A Nietzsche Scholar
5. Postmodernism
6. Elizabethan England
7. Processes other than Darwinian Ones
8. Too many more!
C. CONTROVERSY
1. Intelligent design
2. Noted conservative skeptics of reductionist Darwinism
3. A Noted religious critic of over-enthusiastic Darwinism
4. Enthusiastic proponents of Darwinism
5. A left-wing proponent of Darwinism
6. A left-wing critic of reductionist Darwinism
7. A controversial Darwinian on homosexuality
8. Futurists
9. Two organizations that specialize in speculative ideas
III. THOUGHTS ON STRATEGIC MATTERS
A. The Name of the School
B. Urgency
C. Credentials
D. A Big Conference, "Darwin across the Disciplines"
E. A Center for the Study of Darwinian Processes first?
F. A Critical Mass
G. An Incomparable Education
H. Darwin's Chapel
IV: APPENDICES (TWO SPECULATIVE DARWINIAN REFLECTIONS)
A. A Short Discursive Darwinian Reflection on Modern Art
B. Why Do the Controversies So Furiously Rage Together? With a bow to the
Bible and Handel's Messiah.
++++++++++
I. WHAT HATH DARWIN WROUGHT!
A. Darwin in a Sentence: Darwin discovered that new species arise from the
accumulation of natural selection over large numbers of spontaneous
variations.
That new species arose was no longer controversial among scientists when
Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. What Darwin did was supply
a plausible mechanism for speciation. He had no explanation for spontaneous
variation, but, thanks to Mendel, biologists now have mutations (generally
chemical errors in copying or those induced by radiation) on genes.
Thanks to Darwin's three ideas, emergent novelty, randomness, and
selection, our understanding of the world has increased irrevocably. The
history of life, of human societies, indeed of just about everything can
appear a bottom-up, emergent process, not one driven by a master plan.
1. Emergent novelty: Differences in kind emerge from the accumulation of
small differences in degree. Darwin dealt with new species, but the notion
of novelty is everywhere and is almost everywhere gradual. Capitalism was
not planned but arose from small changes in laws governing inheritance
laws, property rights, and freedom to change jobs, plus gradual changes in
cultural attitudes toward saving and self-interested behavior. The infamous
QWERTY keyboard resulted from a decision to separate keys for letters
commonly used together to prevent jamming, a mechanical problem that was
quickly solved. The Internet, too, was not planned for a technological
future. The Advanced Research Projects Agency decided on a slower method of
connecting but one that easily re-routed in case of enemy attacks. Just
before 9/11, this looked like an unwise decision!
With emergence comes irreversibility. This is the historical sense. In
Newtonian physics, processes are all reversible. Previously in the West,
history was seen as a Vale of Tears, playing out inexorably between the
Fall of Man and the Second Coming.
2. Randomness: Darwin's notion of spontaneous variation (later called
mutations) has become a major driving force, not only in biology, but in
physics and in society as well. We often garner more useful information
from averages and other statistical measures than from knowledge of
particulars. Whether genuine randomness is one of the objective features of
the world of physics is hotly debated, but we act as if this might as well
be the case. Before Darwin's century statistics were rarely collected.
Actuarial tables were in their infancy and, with today's knowledge, badly
calculated. The notion of chance is hardly new: "I returned, and saw under
the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,
neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor
yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth unto them all."
Ecclesiastes 9:11 (977 B.C.). What is new is the taming of chance (the
title of a book by Ian Hacking) through practical and scientific
understanding.
3. Selection (survival of the fittest): This concept has moved from a
concern with the differential reproduction of organisms (or genes) into an
all-purpose metaphor for explaining things. Why are bureaucrats timid and
risk averse? Is it because the bureaucracy rewards playing it safe? Yes,
but the timidity of bureaucrats is also explained by the fact that those
who are risk-averse disproportionately become bureaucrats in the first
place.
The term "survival of the fittest" was coined by Herbert Spencer, who
preceded Darwin and who was always a bit miffed that the latter had applied
the idea to the biological realm. It is now a metaphor applied widely. See
the first appendix for reflections on how the fittest art critics survive.
B. Darwinism in a Larger Context
1. Darwin and his times: Darwin was a product of his times, a general age
of Victorian optimism, and evolution was far more equated with progress
then than now. Speciation was already generally accepted (though Darwin
himself did not come on board until 1838). Charles Lyell (1797-1875) had
already given geological evidence that the earth was far older than the six
thousand years of the Bible. (He said six million. It is in fact closer to
six billion.) The historical perspective of tracing developments back to
their roots was well underway. The notion of "survival of the fittest" goes
back to Herbert Spencer. Religion had been in decline, at least in America,
in the decades following the Second Great Awakening (think Joseph Smith.)
The British Empire, optimistic about improving the world, was in full
swing. Darwin's ideas should be placed in the context of his times.
2. Progress: Darwin himself found increasing complexity in the fossil
record. Today we would add increasing order, organization, and information
(negentropy), each of which comes somewhat at the expense of the other.
There are those who note that bacteria still rule, to which it could be
said in reply that the complexity of the most complex organism has been
increasing over time. Darwin lived in a far more upbeat era than we do now,
and it has been argued that Darwin's thought was conditioned by his times.
There are also those who question the reality (when not questioning the
very meaning) of economic and social progress if not scientific progress
itself. This is a vast subject. See, for example, Leo Marx and Bruce
Mazlish, eds., Progress: Fact or Illusion? (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1996).
3. Social Darwinism: This term is a "social construction" of
twentieth-century intellectuals to describe another current of Darwinism
that began even before Darwin, the idea that the natural laws of liberty
worked their ultimately beneficial effect when the State did not interfere
with their operation. Herbert Spencer is the best-known of these so-called
Social Darwinists, but he envisioned a world in which cut-throat
competition would be tamed with laws promoting cooperation. And Peter
Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, argued that cooperation was every bit as
much part of the laws of evolution as competition in his Mutual Aid (1902).
4. Reform Darwinism: Liberalism grew out of a reckoning that, while genetic
change will be slow, even under State-sponsored eugenics, social evolution
could be directed by the State. This term comes from Cynthia Eagle Russett,
Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response, 1865-1912 (1976). It is said
that social evolution is Lamarckian (Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was
a pre-Darwinian biologist who believed in the inheritance of acquired
characteristics), capable of cumulative learning, and rapid, while
Darwinian evolution is slow. So there is an evolution of society, an
evolution that runs on different principle than that of biology.
5. Future evolution: Looking forward from Darwin's own century, we are
becoming more and more able to direct our own evolution. This proceeded in
several directions. One was eugenics, a word coined by Darwin's nephew,
Francis Galton (1822-1911), which had quite a vogue in Europe and America
and was championed by Marxists. Top-down State directed eugenics has become
anathema (though the Chinese are said to be practicing it now), but it
lives on in as bottom-up choices of individuals to select their offspring
with ever more powerful technologies coming along to directly alter the
genes of one's children.
C. Darwinism as a Special Case
Evolutionary theory has been heavily mathematized. We all know of Gregor
Mendel's experiments with 29,000 peas between 1856 and 1863 and its use of
high-school level probability theory. Life, and mathematics, has never been
so simple since, and the oddest forms of mathematics get used in the oddest
places. It got to the point where the physicist Eugene Wigner wrote "The
Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" (1960).
He had no answer, but lots of mathematical tools turn out to work in fields
vastly different from their original domains for reasons admittedly or
unadmittedly mysterious. The mathematics of neural networks has been
applied to the frequency of student loan defaults!
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences
In a way, what has become known as the Yule process is the essence of
Darwin's own Darwinism, speciation. In 1924, the great English statistician
published a long paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society, entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Evolution." It described a
probability process, now named after its first describer, wherein a species
would give rise to two species at a certain random rate, while species
would also die off, but at a different random rate. A genus starting out
with one species may come to have two and later three species, four, on up.
And a genus that now has five species may later have only four. What
results, over time, is some genera have one species (such as ours), some
have two (dogs, I believe), and some have three, four, and so on. A curve
representing this is not the familiar normal distribution (the bell curve)
but one skewed to the right, in which there are a great many genera with
only one species. The result of this Yule birth-and-death process is now
called the Yule distribution. Yule's paper not only described the process
but tested it against data from the living world and found that there was
an excellent fit. His paper is perhaps the best indirect proof of
speciation, indirect because we rarely observe species in the making,
either by going outside or by looking a fossils closely inside. It is
surprising that the critics of Creationism have not widely publicized this
paper.
As it happens, lots of things outside biology fit the Yule distribution and
lots of distributions fit things in the living world. (And don't forget
Newton! See C.J. Pennycuick, Newton Rules Biology: a Physical Approach to
Biological Problems (Oxford University Press, 1992). For a review, visit
http://www.biophysj.org/cgi/reprint/64/5/1647.)
Darwinian processes, in other words, are just one of many processes that
explain the living world and explain (or at least get invoked) so many
other things as well. What is important is that, historically, Darwin
supplied the second example of a self-organizing system or spontaneous
order. Adam Smith supplied the first. Today, the notions of fractal
geometry, non-linear dynamic (chaotic) systems, chaos theory, bifurcation,
self-similarity, the butterfly effect abound, along with hype about "new
paradigms," from those who cannot give the correct mathematical definition
of a fractal. Their study pours over into mathematics, artificial
intelligence, computer science, economics, engineering, finance,
philosophy, physics, politics, population dynamics, psychology, robotics,
an ever-expanding list. It would do the proposed school well to hire
someone who can give the correct mathematical definition of a fractal and
restrain the hype.
II. DARWINISTS ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
This is not a list of faculty for a dream school. It is as much a list of
those who might be invited to the conference. It is mostly a showing that
Darwin's ideas have found applications in an incredible number of fields.
A. FOR THE MORE IMMEDIATE FUTURE
1. ANTHROPOLOGY
Kristen Hawkes, University of Utah, is the author of the great paper, "Why
Hunter-Gatherers Work: An Ancient Version of the Problem of Public Goods."
It turns out that hunters spend more calories in hunting than they get
ingest from their share of the animals they capture. Her answer is that
their energies are devoted to that most un-economic good, prestige. She has
also tackled the Grandmother Hypothesis, whose basic presumption is that
one will not find grandmothers hanging around and eating up resources that
could be devoted to children, unless, that is, grandmothers are helpful. It
is only common sense to claim they are, but it has been surprisingly
difficult to measure. A medium-sized controversy here. Grandmothers didn't
live that long back then.
http://www.anthro.utah.edu/people/faculty/kristen-hawkes.html
http://www.anthro.utah.edu/PDFs/hawkes1993capubgoods.pdf
http://www.anthro.utah.edu/PDFs/Papers/khAJHB15_2003.pdf
kristen.hawkes at anthro.utah.edu
2. BIOLOGY:
a. E.O. Wilson is the principle founder of sociobiology, having written the
founding book in the field and by that title in 1975. He is a "nice
atheist" (a term David Sloan Wilson below applies to himself), a true
Southern gentleman, and a tireless promoter of conservation. He is
professor emeritus at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
at Harvard University but may not spend much time there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.O._Wilson
b. David Sloan Wilson is a biologist at Binghamton University. He has
revived group selection in biology and also in religion, in Darwin's
Cathedral. Binghamton already has an evolutionary studies program, but it
offers no degrees in the field, just a certificate that one has
(undergraduate or graduate) taken enough specified courses across several
schools. These are terrific courses, but there aren't any in sociology,
literature, history, philosophy, or law. GMU has not been pre-empted
already! There is also a university in Japan that specializes in evolution,
but it's all highly technical stuff, ensconced in the biology department.
Over at the University of Chicago, there is also an evolutionary studies
program, but it does not deal with the social sciences. Likewise for
Princeton and probably several other places.
http://evolution.binghamton.edu/dswilson/
http://evolution.binghamton.edu/evos/
dwilson at binghamton.edu
c. Martin Mahner, born in 1958, a philosopher of biology, is currently the
executive director of the Center for Science and Critical Thinking (Zentrum
für Wissenschaft und kritisches Denken) in Bonn, a group similar to
organizations in the United States that are critical of Creationism,
homeopathy, and the paranormal. Before that, he co-authored a key
philosophical work, Foundations of Biophilosophy (Berlin: Springer-Verlag,
1997) with Mario Bunge, who supplied the background philosophy, while
Mahner supplied the biology. The book is undertakes to rigorously exclude
improper uses of teleology in biology. The question of overall purposes in
evolution is a recurrent one, and Mahner will keep any discussion of it
precise.
http://www.gwup.org/ueberuns/whoiswho/mahner_martin_english.html
mahner at gwup.org
d. Eshel Ben-Jacob, born 1952, is physicist at Tel Aviv University, but he
has taken the statistical tools used in physics and astronomy and moved
them over to the study of bacteria. He has written innovative papers on
bacterial communication networks, self-organization of bacterial colonies,
how such systems regulate the evolution of their components, and how
natural intelligent systems, from bacterial colonies to the United States
Congress (no, he is not making that claim) differ from artificial
intelligence. It is important to get an evolutionist working across
specialties, who studies little things. He has published in as many
different places as Gordon Tullock!
http://star.tau.ac.il/~eshel/
eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il
e. A good primatologist, a good paleontolgist, a good behavioral ecologist,
and a good specialist in the emerging conjoining of evolution and
development ("evo-devo"), which deals with master genes that regulate the
development of regular genes (which allows for evolution to be much speeded
up). No names to recommend currently, the new school needs to have several
scholars who serve as fountains of knowledge for those in other disciplines
to draw upon.
f. A scholar specializing in biological differences. After all, variation
is what allows selection to take place. This, of course, will irritate
those of a certain political orientation, but all signs point to the fading
of this opposition.
g. and Gordon Tullock
3. COMPUTER SCIENCE:
a. John Koza is the man to get. He's the one who pioneered the notion of
genetic programming. Rather than trying to comprehend a program with a
complexity that exceeds the human mind, he generates thousands of
variations and selects the ones that work best.
http://www.genetic-programming.com/johnkoza.html
john at johnkoza.com (best) or koza at stanford.edu
b. Need to find scholars specializing in both artificial intelligence and
artificial life, which resides only inside computers. These modes of
evolution supplement those of natural selection and the artificial
selection of crops and animals. Indeed, it was partly by observing
artificial selection that Darwin was led to his discovery of natural
selection.
4. ECONOMICS
a. Peter Boettke is right at George Mason and is as original and
broad-based thinker as any in the department. He should certainly get most
involved with the new School. In fact, it will be impossible to keep him
away!
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/pboettke/bio.html
pboettke at gmu.edu
b. Robin Hanson (born 1959) is also at George Mason. A futurist, deeply
concerned with the future evolution of man and post-humans, he has written
a number of ingenious articles on the subject. The future School of Darwin
(Evolution) Studies should come to include several other future-oriented
scholars.
http://hanson.gmu.edu
rhanson at gmu.edu
c. David Levy is also right at George Mason. His interests are wide, even
for GMU. He has written about the economics of those who appealed to the
Greek gods (relevant to religion), about the economic ideas of ordinary
people (to be connected to the default economics inherited from the Old
Stone Age), and, of the greatest concern to Darwin Studies, the views of
economists during the same Victorian Era in which Darwin lived.
http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/faculty_bios/dlevy.html
http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/workpapers.html#Levy
dlevy at gmu.edu
d. Robert H. Frank teaches economics at Cornell. One of the very best
writers in the profession (along with Deirdre McCloskey and, of course,
Buchanan and Tullock), he has written several books that combine
evolutionary thinking and economics. Among his books are Choosing the Right
Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status (Oxford University Press,
1985), Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions. (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1988). More recently, he has been inquiring into the
nature of happiness, in Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of
Excess (Princeton University Press, 2000) and Falling Behind: How Rising
Inequality Harms the Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007), books that will go decidedly against the grain of
libertarians like Peter Boettke and provide an articulate and challenging
balance. He is a contributor to the monthly "Economic Scene" column in the
New York Times.
http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/faculty/profiles/frank/
http://www.robert-h-frank.com/
rhf at cornell.edu
e. There is an entire Department of Institutional and Evolutionary
Economics at Universität Witten/Herdecke, http://www.uni-wh.de/. There are
a bunch of evolutionary economists elsewhere, but specific recommendations
will have to come later. This translated page gives a flavor of the
projects. Keep this for later!
http://64.233.179.104/translate_c?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.uni-wh.de/wiwi/hp/evooek/inhalt.php&prev=/search%3Fq%3Devolution%2Bsite:http://www.uni-wh.de/%26num%3D100%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26rls%3DGGGL,GGGL:2006-34,GGGL:en
f. and Gordon Tullock
5. EDUCATION
In a sense, Darwin is everywhere in education, since neurology and the
brain are big concerns with educators. And the Culture Wars debates over
the teaching of evolution are everywhere, as are accusations that the
alleged sink-or-swim philosophy of education is "Darwinian." Or that
"Darwinian learning" means learning by trial and error. But Darwinian
insights about our how the mental toolkit we inherited from the Old Stone
Age constrains workable education are surprisingly hard to find. This would
parallel the difference between the study of medicine to proximate causes
of diseases and a Darwinist approach (see below) that looks to the remote
evolutionary roots of diseases for different insights. One such insight
that has been made is that we are story-tellers by nature rather than
didactic learners, building up our knowledge from first principles. Keep
looking!
6. ENGINEERING
Henry Petroski, born in 1963, is a professor of civil engineering and
history at Duke University. Now we don't build a lot of bridges and let the
fittest ones, the ones that didn't collapse, survive! Civil engineering is
not Darwinian in that sense. Bridges do collapse, and what human can do,
and do not do enough, is to learn from the collapses. Petroski specializes
in failure analysis. He is the author of several eminently readable books,
the latest being Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design (Princeton,
2006) as well as books about ordinary objects, such as The Evolution of
Useful Things (1992), and The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance
(1990). He is a tireless speaker, and his presence at George Mason would
contrast with the general tenor of Darwinist doctrines, which are usually
thought to operate unconsciously.
http://www.cee.duke.edu/faculty/petroski/
petroski at duke.edu
7. HISTORY
a. Cynthia Eagle Russett is a historian at Yale and the author of Darwin in
America: The Intellectual Response, 1865-1912 (1976). Her book did far more
than cover the American reaction, where one learns that not a few American
divines embraced Darwin from the beginning. She went into the whole
prehistory of Darwinism and notes that Herbert Spencer, who coined the term
"survival of the fittest," was forever miffed that it was Darwin, not he,
who extended the idea to the biological realm. She went on to write Sexual
Science, not nearly as good as book and has since gone further down the
road of feminism. Her politics are hardly conservative. Her husband, Bruce,
is a fine political scientist, also at Yale, and the editor of The Journal
of Conflict Resolution. George Mason will probably have to offer both of
them positions in order to pry them both away from Yale. He will, of
course, fit in fine at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution.
http://www.yale.edu/history/faculty/russett.html (Cynthia)
http://www.yale.edu/polisci/people/brussett.html (Bruce)
cynthia.russett at yale.edu and bruce.russett at yale.edu
b. The proposed School definitely needs a biographer of Darwin himself.
There's nothing better than having someone who can freely quote what the
great man himself has said and who can situate Darwin in his time. No
specific recommendations.
8. LAW
a. Mark Grady, of course, is a law professor at UCLA. He has brought
evolutionary perspectives into many of his law journal articles. If he can
run a whole law school, he can run the new School of Darwin (Evolution)
Studies. Don't dare ask him to, since he left George Mason to get away from
administration! Without a doubt, he would be delighted to come back if he
could just teach.
http://www.law.ucla.edu/home/index.asp?page=519
grady at law.ucla.edu
b. Todd Zywicki is right here in the law school. A polymath writing law
review articles about any number of subjects, he teaches a course called
"Rule of Law." This is as crucial a topic as constitutional government and
private property. A google search <"law school courses" "rule of law">
turns up discussions of the emergence of the rule of law in post-communist
Eastern Europe and other countries such as the Philippines and South
Africa, the preservation of the rule of law during national emergencies,
and its application to foreign affairs, but these are directed to current
affairs. Zywicki's course is one of very few (another is at the University
of Chicago Law School) are devoted to its historical emergence in Europe.
Since one of the main themes of Darwinism is the idea of history itself, as
the accumulation of small, seemingly random, changes, this itself would
mean that Zywicki would fit right into the proposed School.
But his work is much more than this. He has taken a keen interest in
evolutionary psychology and has contributed an entry, "Evolutionary
Psychology" to the soon coming Encyclopedia of Law and Society: American
and Global Perspectives.
http://mason.gmu.edu/~tzywick2/
tzywick2 at gmu.edu
c. For future mining operations, here's a link to "Unusual Law School
Courses." As the proposed School develops, GMU will become a place
generally attractive to original thinkers:
http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2005/10/unusual_law_sch.html
Also try: http://volokh.com/posts/1130256537.shtml
d. For yet more mining, here is a listing from the Gruter Institute, whose
mission is "advancing interdisciplinary research and teaching in law and
the biologically informed behavioral sciences,"
of law professors already teaching courses connecting law and evolutionary
psychology:
"To encourage teaching about the links of evolutionary biology and ethology
with the law, the Gruter Institute has assisted in the planning of courses
at various law schools. Many Research Fellows of the Institute have
introduced seminars on law and behavioral biology at their universities,
for example: E. Donald Elliott and Roger Masters at Yale Law School;
William Rodgers, Jr. at University of Washington Law School; Owen Jones at
Vanderbilt University Law School and Arizona State University College of
Law; Ray Coletta at McGeorge School of Law, David Herring and Lawrence
Frolik at University of Pittsburgh Law School; Oliver Goodenough at Vermont
Law School; Mark Grady at George Mason University and Michael McGuire at
UCLA Law School; Wolfgang Fikentscher at University of Munich School of
Law; and Manfred Rehbinder at University of Zürich. The Institute actively
supports the introduction of such seminars in other law schools both in the
United States and in Europe."
http://www.gruter.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=88888891&Itemid=88888914
e. and Gordon Tullock
9. LINGUISTICS
Nicholas Ritt teaches linguistics at the University of Vienna. Of the
couple of hundred books at Amazon with "Darwinian" in the title, he wrote a
$100 book, destined for scholars only, Selfish Sounds and Linguistic
Evolution: A Darwinian Approach to Language Change. His present research
focuses on the cognitive and social mechanisms behind language variation
and change, using generalized evolutionary theory. The site has a paper,
"Language Change as Evolution: Looking for Linguistic 'Genes,'"
http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/vinitst.htm. The paper assumes some
knowledge of linguistics but is not terribly technical and shows that he
certainly has read widely and integrated concepts over many fields, exactly
what the scholars in the School of Darwin (Evolution) Studies will be
doing!
http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/ang_new/staff/staff_linguistics.html (for
general information about Ritt, scroll down)
http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/core2 (For fun only: Click "Visuals" on
the right frame, then "Optical Illusions" in the main frame. Keep pressing
the space bar.)
10. LITERATURE
a.. David Barash teaches psychology at the University of Washington. He
writes regularly for The Chronicle of Higher Education. His site says, "My
most recent book--coauthored with my daughter, Nell, a student at
Swarthmore College--is Madame Bovary's Ovaries: a Darwinian look at
literature, published by Delacorte. It is a good-natured, accessible, but
nonetheless serious effort to promote the field of 'Darwinian literary
criticism,' which seeks to apply evolutionary science to literature,
specifically by showing how our new understanding of human nature can
result in a more satisfying understanding of the stories we tell ourselves
about ourselves."
http://faculty.washington.edu/dpbarash/
dpbarash at u.washington.edu
b. Joseph Carroll teaches English literature from an evolutionary
standpoint at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. His books include
Evolution and Literary Theory and an anthology of his own papers, Literary
Darwinism. Notably, he has gone into postmodern theory in his article,
"Pluralism, Poststructuralism, and Evolutionary Theory,"
http://www.umsl.edu/~engjcarr/web_documents/pluralism%20aca-ques.htm
http://www.umsl.edu/~engjcarr/
jcarroll at umsl.edu
11. MATHEMATICS
a. Keith Devlin (B,Sc., 1968), the Executive Director of Stanford
University's Center for the Study of Language and Information and a
Consulting Professor of Mathematics at Stanford, is a fine mathematician
and prolific communicator. His most recent popular book is The Math Gene
(2000), but he is best known for Mathematics: The New Golden Age (2nd ed.,
1999).
http://www.stanford.edu/~kdevlin/
devlin at csli.stanford.edu
New branches of mathematics--fractal geometry, chaos theory, and complexity
theory--have gripped the public imagination and are the subject of many
pop-science books, few authors of which can give the formal mathematical
definition of a fractal. Applications range over all the sciences,
including the grand structure of the universe, where random fractal
processes are at work. This is not a Darwinian process: so far no one
speaks of "unfit" galaxies! (However, in his theory of fecund universes,
the noted cosmologist Leo Smolin has conjectured that branch universes are
slight variants of the parent universe. Darwinian variation, in other
words, though not (yet) Darwinian selection. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection.)
Other researchers have used fractals in biology, as in an intriguing but
quite technical paper, Laurent Nottale, Jean Chaline, and Pierre Grou, "On
the fractal structure of evolutionary trees,"
http://luth2.obspm.fr/~luthier/nottale/arbiomed.pdf
laurent.nottale at obspm.fr
Here is the summary: "We analyze in terms of a fractal tree the time
sequences of major evolutionary leaps at various scales: from the scale of
the 'global' tree of life (appearance of life to homeothermy), to the
distinct scales of organization of clades, such as sauropod and theropod
dinosaurs, North American equids, rodents, primates including hominids, and
echinoderms. We also apply this type of model to the acceleration observed
in the economic crisis / no-crisis pattern in Western and pre-Columbian
civilizations. In each case we find that these data are consistent with a
log-periodic law of acceleration or deceleration, to a high level of
statistical significance. Such a law is characterized by a critical epoch
of convergence Tc specific to the lineage under consideration. These
results support a description of evolutionary trees in terms of critical
phenomena."
b. Someone who is fit (!) to carry out a full, formal axiomatization of a
Darwinian process. Formalizing ideas in the exact language of set theory
does wonders to bring out hidden assumptions, which can then be checked in
the light of day. Mary B. Williams started to do this around 1970 or so,
but her work did not lead to further developments. Martin Mahner (under
biology) will be able to supply names.
c. but not Gordon Tullock
12. MEDICINE
Randolph Neese teaches in the Department of Psychiatry and Institute for
Social Research, University of Michigan. The idea of his book, Why We Get
Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, is to look, in addition to the
mechanics of disease, at its evolutionary origins, in order to ask the
right questions. We all know how rapidly viruses can mutate, but this is
only the beginning of a different approach to medicine.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nesse/
neese at umich.edu
13. MEMETICS AND/OR MUSIC
Memetics is the theory of memes, which are units of cultural reproduction,
an analogy to a gene being a unit of biological reproduction. The word was
coined by Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and most lately The
God Delusion. There is a tremendous amount of hype here, along with
counter-accusations that memetic theory is unscientific, specifically that
there is no well-defined unit of cultural reproduction. Adding a memeticist
to the School is certain to create lively discussion and controversy.
a. Susan Blackmore is far better known. Born in 1951, she obtained a
doctorate in parapsychology from the University of Surrey in 1980. She has
held a number of academic positions, including architecture,
parapsychology, and consciousness studies. She is and has been on the
editorial board of several journals, but today she is a free-lance writer.
Her best known book is The Meme Machine (Oxford University Press, 1999).
She has also written Beyond the Body: An Investigation of Out-Of-The-Body
Experiences (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1983), but she does not think such
experiences point toward the supernatural. Her book, Consciousness: An
Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2003) has also been well-received.
She would link ideas across disciplines, precisely what School of Darwin
Studies needs.
http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Blackmore
susan.blackmore at blueyonder.co.uk
b. William L. Benzon is an excellent candidate. He holds a doctorate in
cognitive psychology and is associate editor of The Journal of Social and
Evolutionary Systems, the author of Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and
Culture, which argues that music was necessary to our evolution because it
engages so many different parts of the brain. He has also written an
excellent and wide-ranging article, "At the Edge of the Modern, or Why
Prospero is Shakespeare's Greatest Creation." There seems to be no website
for him, but he can be reached at bbenzon at mindspring.com. File him under
music also.
14. PHILOSOPHY
a. Larry Arnhart teaches philosophy at Northern Illinois University has
become a most visible public intellectual, urging conservatives to embrace
Darwin. He is the author of Darwinian Natural Right and the more popular
Darwinian Conservatism.
http://www3.niu.edu/~ti0uxa1/Field_Biopolitics/Arnhart.htm
larnhart at niu.edu
b. Michael Ruse teaches philosophy at Florida State University. he is a
tireless promoter of Darwinism, a true British gentleman, and the author of
several books on the philosophy of biology.
http://www.fsu.edu/~philo/RuseCV.pdf
mruse at mailer.fsu.edu
c. Roger Scruton (B.A., 1965) is among the best and most thoughtful
conservative thinkers today. He is quite informed about Darwinism but is
skeptical about its reductionism and is among the best ones to keep
enthusiastic Darwinists in line. He defended religion in a debate with
Richard Dawkins and others in March, 2007, though he does not seem to be
religious himself. He has held several academics posts and is currently a
visiting professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of
Buckingham.
http://www.intelligencesquared.com/event_past.php?d=20070327 (about the
debate)
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0078.html (The article,
"Dawkins is Wrong about God")
http://www.roger-scruton.com/rs-cv.html
cmichel at wma.com (his agent, Caroline Michel)
d. Peter Singer is a hugely controversial philosopher at Princeton. He has
written about animal rights, euthanasia, and our duties to the poor. He is
also the author of A Darwinian Left.
http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/
http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/faq.html
psinger at princeton.edu
e. Timothy Shanahan is a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount
University in Los Angeles. He is such a polymath, having taught courses in
Darwinism and Christian Belief, Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Mind,
Theory of Knowledge, Philosophy of Science,
Philosophy of Human Nature, Cognitive Relativism, On the Nature of Things,
Immortality & the Meaning of Life, Philosophy & Film, Irish Moral/Political
Philosophy, that he could do any number of things for the proposed School.
His best known book is The Evolution of Darwinism: Selection, Adaptation,
and Progress in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Such an historical perspective is of necessary importance to the School.
File him under religion, too, and maybe even under a new category of
Darwinian film studies. Who knows what brand new forays there could be! He
would bring much congeniality and humor to the School, having written such
statements as this:
"My other main scholarly interest of late has been considering
philosophical issues connected with terrorism. I organized a conference on
Understanding Terrorism: Philosophical Issues, at Loyola Marymount
University, September 11-13, 2003. The conference brought together
scholars, both civilian and military, to consider such issues as how
"terrorism" and the "war on terrorism" might be conceptualized, moral
issues connected with targeted killing and pre-emptive strikes, the status
of captured terrorists as criminals or as prisoners of war, and the
legitimacy of torture interrogation. A collection of papers from the
conference was published as Philosophy 9/11: Thinking about the War on
Terrorism (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2005). I'm presently completing
a book-length philosophical analysis of the conflict in Northern Ireland
known as "the Troubles," tentatively titled Ireland's Troubles and the
Morality of Terrorism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).
Naturally, I'm hoping to produce a companion screenplay (minus many of the
scholarly footnotes) and to secure movie rights. I'm thinking that Arnold
Schwarzenegger would be perfect to play Tony Blair. I'm reserving the role
of Margaret Thatcher for myself."
http://myweb.lmu.edu/tshanahan/VITAE.html
http://myweb.lmu.edu/tshanahan/Scholarship.html
tshanahan at lmu.edu
15. POLITICAL SCIENCE
a. Paul Rubin is a professor of economics and at Emory University and has
published extensively in law and economics journals, as well as in biology
journals. He is a fine Public Choice man, as well as a law and economics
man. He best know work is Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of
Freedom (2002), which explains why we do have freedom but also why full
libertarianism is out of reach.
http://www.economics.emory.edu/Rubi.htm
prubin at emory.edu
There are a several others.
b. and Gordon Tullock.
16. PSYCHIATRY
Anthony Stevens and John Price, Evolutionary Psychiatry: A New Beginning
(London: Routledge, 1996). The basic idea is similar to that of Darwinian
medicine, which is to dig into evolutionary origins for hints on what
treatments to use.
17. PSYCHOLOGY
a. David Buss, born in 1953, is a professor of psychology at the University
of Texas in Austin. He uses evolutionary psychology to shed light on mating
strategies, conflict between the sexes, status, social reputation,
prestige, the emotion of jealousy, homicide, anti-homicide defenses, and
most recently stalking. His many books include The Evolution of Desire:
Strategies of Human Mating, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the
Mind, Sex, Power, Conflict: Evolutionary and Feminist Perspectives (as
co-editor of an anthology), and The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is As
Necessary As Love and Sex. He heads the Individual Differences and
Evolutionary Psychology program there and directs the Buss Lab.
http://www.davidbuss.com
http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Group/BussLAB/David_home.htm
dbuss at psy.utexas.edu
b. Geoffrey Miller (born 1965) is an assistant professor of psychology at
the University of New Mexico. His book, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice
Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Random House, 2000) is
inventive and ingenious speculation at its best. He argues that Darwin's
other method of evolution, sexual selection, is what drove humans to become
the creative creatures they are.
http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/lg_gmiller.html
gfmiller at unm.edu
c. Steven Reiss (born around 1942), professor of psychology at Ohio State,
studies disabilities, anxiety, and (for our purposes) the basic human
drives. Drives do not directly connect to biological fitness, and Reiss had
used a statistical technique called factor analysis to cluster them into
what turns out to be sixteen factors. Vengeance and competitiveness tend to
go together, while neither go together with a desire for romance (and sex)
or for aesthetic experiences, which themselves go together.
Romance-sex-aesthetics (surprisingly) do not belong to the same cluster as
the desire for raising one's own children. Reiss speculates on the
evolutionary advantages of each of these sixteen desire clusters, but his
prime efforts have gone into finding out what they are. What is especially
fascinating is his search but failure to find a seventeenth cluster,
corresponding to spirituality. See his 2004 article, "The 16 Strivings for
God, " Zygon, 39, 303-320, http://nisonger.osu.edu/papers/reiss_2004.pdf.
So here's a linkage for George Mason between psychology and religion. Now
GMU will be forced to get a good historian of religion, for the creator
religions that by far dominate the world today are Bronze Age products,
suggesting that there has not been enough evolutionary time since the Stone
Age for a seventeenth desire for spirituality to have emerged. Into the
fray must go disputes over what religion vs. spirituality mean. A
philosopher of religion will have to added to the GMU faculty, too! The 16
Basic Desires are: curiosity, romance, independence, saving, order, family,
idealism, exercise, acceptance, honor, social contact, power, vengeance,
status, tranquility, and eating (in no particular order). On the other
hand, emotions cluster into the "Big Five" of joy, surprise, anger, fear,
and disgust. (Guess which is specifically human.) A specialist in emotions
and evolution can be searched for later.
http://faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/reiss/
http://nisonger.osu.edu/reiss.htm
reiss.7 at osu.edu
d. Robert Wright is a journalist and author and promoter of Darwinism to
the public. He is a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and
gives a generally liberal spin on Darwinism. His best known book is
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (1999).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wright_%28journalist%29
http://nonzero.org
nzfeedback at nonzero.org
18. RELIGION
a. David Sloan Wilson (Binghamton University) is already under biology.
b. Pascal Boyer is a professor of Individual and Collective Memory at
Washington University in St. Louis and teaches in both the psychology and
anthropology departments. He is the author of the well-known Religion
Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought.
http://artsci.wustl.edu/~pboyer/PBoyerHomeSite/index.html
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/%7Eanthro/blurb/b_boyer.html
pboyer at artsci.wustl.edu
c. Larry Iannaccone is right at GMU in the economics department. The lone
sociologist, Stephen Sanderson (below), plays off the tension between the
economist's (proximate) utility maximization and the biologist's (ultimate)
fitness maximization. Be wary of loading up too many economists! Iannaccone
will know where the scholars are who study religion from the standpoint of
fitness, as opposed to utility. We need both, since we have things like
love and emotions generally that do the motivating indirectly, and
sometimes they do a bad job of promoting fitness (getting one's genes
replicated).
http://economics.gmu.edu/faculty/liannaccone.html
larry at econzone.com
See also http://www.economicsofreligion.com/
There is no shortage of evolutionary approaches to religion, and these are
just two names. After the School of Darwin (Evolution) Studies gets going,
the next enterprise for expanding George Mason should surely be building a
first-rate religion department. A successful and exciting School of Darwin
(Evolution) Studies should go a long way in making GMU attractive to
scholars of religion.
19. RHETORIC (ROVING GADFLY)
a. Deirdre McCloskey (B.A., 1964) is a professor of economics, history,
English, communications, and social thought at the University of Illinois
at Chicago. Starting out as a standard economist, moving toward analyzing
the rhetoric of economics, she is one of the most cross-disciplinary folks
around. She is the best writer in the entire economics profession. Books
include The Rhetoric of Economics and most recently The Bourgeois Virtues:
Ethics for an Age of Commerce. She is not an outright advocate of Darwinian
approaches, nor an opponent, but will quickly spot the rhetoric, valid and
bogus, that Darwinians use. It is essential the new School have a roving
gadfly, and she will fit the bill.
(You know the rhetoric. Conservatives who bawl for "limited government" are
not facing liberals who demand un-limited government. These conservative
just want a government much smaller than it is. And liberals who say Reagan
"eliminated" welfare should say that, at most, there was a decreasing rate
of increase of spending on welfare programs. McCloskey will sniff out the
rhetoric on all sides. She will argue, though, that rhetoric is inescapable
and does not ipso facto mean someone is trying to slip something over.)
http://www.deirdremccloskey.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deirdre_McCloskey
deirdre2 at uic.edu
b. and Gordon Tullock
20. SOCIOLOGY
Stephen K. Sanderson (born 1945) has retired from Indiana University of
Pennsylvania and has moved to the University of California at Riverside. He
was one of the speakers at the 2000 convention of the Association for
Politics and the Life Science, which was held in D.C. There were several
talks about the reception of sociobiology into other fields. Sociology was
the most resistant. Sanderson has written the only book, The Evolution of
Human Sociality: A Darwinian Conflict Perspective (2001), that puts
sociobiology into sociology. It is a brilliant and thorough book, but it
was too early politically in America. It was, however the subject of a
conference at the University of Innsbruck. The conference papers are being
published later this year or early next year by Paradigm Publishers as a
book entitled The New Evolutionary Social Science: Human Nature, Social
Behavior, and Social Change. He would be a major catch for the faculty.
http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Theorists/Sanderson/MajorWorks.html
stephen.sanderson at ucr.edu
B. FARTHER AHEAD
1. HISTORY OF IDEAS
GMU needs someone who can relate Darwinism in the whole picture of what Max
Weber called "the disenchantment of the world" (Die Entzauberung der Welt,
literally de-magification). The general idea is that, with modernization
comes secularization. And, indeed, this happens. However, there are counter
forces at work to re-enchant the world. The balance, over the last half
century, has been for religion to increase. (Or, maybe religion is just
taking different forms, like. New Age spirituality replacing traditional
Christianity.) Bogus ways of viewing the world, like Marxism and
Freudianism, move in wherever there is a demand for totalistic
explanations. So Freudianism survived even to the date that William
Benzon's article on Prospero was probably finished (his last citation dated
1982) because of its relative fitness in providing a whole rhetoric with
which to understand the world. There have been a great many of these
all-explanatory world pictures in the past, and we have forgotten how much
the Great Chain of Being infused medieval and early modern thinking. No one
pays attention to the nine orders of angels anymore, but the lowest of them
served as a bridge between man and god. Such thinking was long gone by
Darwin's day, but one must ask what was, in fact, the view of the world
that Darwinism replaced. Virtue was still a big matter, but it was thrown
out with the Christian bath water. It is now making a comeback. Quick: what
were the reigning theories of geology before plate tectonics? How did blood
move about before Harvey found it circulated? What caused diseases before
germs did? What about witches, fairies, goblins, sprites, ghosts? What was
the major order of reptiles to come along after the rise of the class of
mammals? Nearly everyone will have to look it up. The answer is snakes.
Then again, how much has Darwinism played in the disenchantment of the
world, compared to Protestantism itself, capitalism, bureaucracy, and
scientism?
2. ART HISTORY
An exhibition on Art Nouveau, 1890-1914 at the National Gallery of Art in
2000 covered America and several European nations. What was striking was
that many of the artists were preoccupied with themes of evil. Now one
might have thought that this preoccupation would have been greatest in the
two countries where Darwinism had its greatest impact (the United States
and Britain), as Darwinism was widely seen as a threat to Christianity,
which was seen as the major force in keeping evil at bay. But no, the fear
of growing evil was common also in France and Germany. It's as though evil
were part of the Weltgeist (unliterally, "in the air.") An art historian
specializing in the period could shine light on Darwinism as part of a
larger historical movement.
3. HISTORY OF STATISTICS AND PROBABILITY
A major surprise of the hundred top non-fiction works in English during the
last century, as determined by a panel selected by the Modern Library, was
Ian Hacking's The Taming of Chance. The notion of randomness is a central
feature of not just of biology but of our whole way of thinking. Cynthia
Eagle Russett speaks of the "genetic method" broadly as viewing history as
the accumulation of usually random events, a viewpoint that scarcely
existed more than a few decades before Darwin. History was earlier seen as
the Vale of Tears between the Fall of Adam and the Second Coming, unfolding
by intelligible principles. This is another deep trend, along with the role
of chance.
4. A NIETZSCHE SCHOLAR
He viewed Darwinism as a philosophy for English shopkeepers, but he is
simply unavoidable.
5. POSTMODERNISM
The term is badly defined and its practitioners widely derided. But a major
theme of the pomos is the failure of the Enlightenment project, where the
application of reason would lead opinion to converge approximating to
truth. (This hope was shattered in six seconds on the Dealey Plaza:
thousands of books later, there is no convergence whatsoever on who shot
JFK.) The Darwinian notions of the sheer diversity of evolution and of the
limits of our three-pound brains find echoes in post-modernism. One person
on my list, Joseph Carroll, has gone into postmodern theory in his article,
"Pluralism, Poststructuralism, and Evolutionary Theory." And Deirdre
McCloskey (under rhetoric) is a pomo. GMU should cast as wide a net as
possible. The relationship between post-modernism and Darwinism requires
thorough attention.
http://www.umsl.edu/~engjcarr/web_documents/pluralism%20aca-ques.htm
6. ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND
Elizabethan England was a time of upheaval quite a bit like our own. Then,
it was a period between the collapse of certainties guaranteed by the Roman
Catholic church (the Great Chain of Being) but before the coming of new
certainties offered by experimental science. Today, moral certainties that
came from religion have been undermined by Darwinism but new moral
certainties are just beginning to be developed that stem from a melding of
the biological and social sciences. Without knowing whether the instructor
of the history course in Early Modern England is a specialist in the period
(or even his name: the GMU website is hard to navigate), a School of Darwin
Studies could recruit more than one scholar of the Elizabethan period, who
would interact with scholars studying the social upheavals brought about by
Darwinism and discuss parallels. Scholars would become more attracted to
GMU because of the spirit of cross-linkages that the School would stimulate
throughout the entire university.
7. PROCESSES OTHER THAN DARWINIAN ONES
The world is full of patterns we can recognize but cannot explain. A
perfect example is Bode's Law (dating from 1766), which states that the
distances of the planets follows an orderly spacing whereby each planet is
twice as far from the sun as the previous one. It works well for Mercury,
Venus, Earth, Mars, but not Jupiter. Jupiter is where planet no. 6 ought to
be. The law was saved when the first asteroid was discovered in 1801.
Saturn and Uranus fell into line. Neptune was off and Pluto badly off.
Perhaps it is no surprise that Pluto was "plutoed," when the General
Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer
met its definition of a planet in 2006. (The verb means to demote or
devalue something and was chosen to be the 2006 Word of the Year by the
American Dialect Society.) There is no known reason for this pattern of the
spacing of planets. Astronomers cannot yet test Bode's Law in other solar
systems, but the law holds up when computer models of random planetary
systems are generated by the bushel. This does not stop Intelligent
Designers from invoking Bode's law as a regularity that could not have
arisen by chance.
Ordered Serendipity: There are many examples of unexplained regularities
that pop up across disciplines. They get highly mathematical, too, and go
by names like chaos theory, complexity theory, and fractal geometry.
Formulas from one field turn up in other fields (biology to economics was
one of the first) and suggest explorations to see if further analogies are
to be had. Call this ordered serendipity. George Mason could not now hire
an outstanding mathematician who has mastered these new, cross-disciplinary
mathematical techniques and peddle them around GMU. But with a School of
Darwin (Evolution) Studies roaring, GMU could get maybe a whole bunch of
mathematicians drawn in by the excitement.
8. TOO MANY MORE!
There are so many applications of applying an offshoot of evolutionary
theory called genetic algorithms that George Mason would have to double in
size to accommodate them all. Here's from an article, "Genetic Algorithms
and Evolutionary Computation," by Adam Marczyk,
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/genalg/genalg.html
"As the power of evolution gains increasingly widespread recognition,
genetic algorithms have been used to tackle a broad variety of problems in
an extremely diverse array of fields, clearly showing their power and their
potential. This section will discuss some of the more noteworthy uses to
which they have been put.
* Acoustics
* Aerospace engineering
* Astronomy and astrophysics
* Chemistry
* Electrical engineering
* Financial markets
* Game playing
* Geophysics
* Materials engineering
* Mathematics and algorithmics
* Military and law enforcement
* Molecular biology
* Pattern recognition and data mining
* Robotics
* Routing and scheduling
* Systems engineering."
Perhaps a general scholar, knowledgeable about these scientific fields
could join the faculty of the new school directly. Finding specialists in
these fields who can communicate across disciplines, the major theme of the
new School, may not be easy.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm
GMU will have to decide the extent to which to bring in specialists who
have the soundest academic credentials but whose work is not easily
communicable to those in the social sciences and humanities. Attracting a
good computer science man who is a great communicator could well allow a
beefing up the computer science department with excellent scholars, even if
they cannot communicate broadly with the public.
C. CONTROVERSY
GMU will have to decide on the optimal level of controversy that a School
of Darwin (Evolution) Studies might generate. There will be resistance from
the more conservative members of the Commonwealth for the funding or even
the creation of the School. This can be allied by including critics of
Darwinism at the Conference, "Darwin through the Disciplines: The
Re-Enchanted World that Charles Darwin Started." Here are some critics and
some over-enthusiastic Darwinists.
1. INTELLIGENT DESIGN
If the School is to generate controversy over the very hiring of an
advocate of an idea that has little traction in the academic community,
here are two of the best ones. A willingness to debate, and even to hire in
the School later, the best representative of intelligent design theory will
give GMU a reputation for exceptional open-mindedness. One recalls LBJ's
remark about why he did not fire J. Edgar Hoover: "It’s probably better to
have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in"
(New York Times, October 31, 1971).
a. Michael Behe is the best-known advocate of intelligent design. He is a
professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a senior
fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He
advocates the idea that some structures are too complex at the biochemical
level to be adequately explained as a result of evolutionary mechanisms. He
has termed this concept "irreducible complexity."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Behe
http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/faculty/behe.html
mjb1 at lehigh.edu
b. Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? is
another critic of evolution with academic credentials. He holds a Ph.D.
from University of California, Berkeley in Molecular and Cell Biology and a
Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Yale University. Like Michael Behe, he is a
fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, the
leading group advocating intelligent design.
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=41&isFellow=true
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Wells_%28intelligent_design_advocate%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icons_of_Evolution
2. CONSERVATIVE SKEPTICS OF REDUCTIONIST DARWINISM
a. Roger Scruton is the best one to get to keep enthusiastic Darwinists in
line. He defended religion in a debate with Richard Dawkins (a militant
atheist and the best-known advocate of Darwinism except maybe E.O. Wilson)
and others in March, 2007, though he does not seem to be religious himself.
Scruton is among the best and most thoughtful conservatives living today.
He has held several academics posts and is currently a visiting professor
in the Department of Philosophy, University of Buckingham. He is listed
under philosophers above.
http://www.intelligencesquared.com/event_past.php?d=20070327
(about a debate on religion)
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0078.html (An article,
"Dawkins is Wrong about God")
http://www.roger-scruton.com/rs-cv.html
cmichel at wma.com (his agent, Caroline Michel)
b. Leon Kass, the former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics
but still a member, is a professor in the Committee of Social Thought at
the University of Chicago and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
. He is well-known as a "bio-conservative" who is wary about the use of
technology that threatens to transform away the better features of our
humanity. He has spoken out against stem-cell research and therapeutic
cloning. There may be no one who better articulates these positions, argued
from the collected wisdom of the ages, rather than from revealed religion.
The Wikipedia article is a good one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Kass
http://www.bioethics.gov/about/kass.html
w-harms at uchicago.edu (William Harms, (773) 702-8356, media contact)
The Journal, The New Atlantis, is the major journal articulating warnings
against runaway technology. Several writers for this journal are potential
candidates representing the underside of Darwinism.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/about
c. and Gordon Tullock, though he would not be happy with the conservative
label.
3. A NOTED RELIGIOUS CRITIC OF OVER-ENTHUSIASTIC DARWINISM
Mark Noll, now at Notre Dame, is probably the most widely-respected
Evangelical scholar outside of Evangelical circles. He engages in civil
discussions with those of different religious persuasions. He is not a
Creationist, however, but he has fine objections to runaway Darwinism.
http://history.nd.edu/people/all/noll-mark
Mark.Noll.8 at nd.edu
4. ENTHUSIASTIC PROPONENTS OF DARWINISM
a. Richard Dawkins (born 1941), a hyper-Darwinist, has also been mentioned
as the author of the celebrated The Selfish Gene, but his latest book, The
God Delusion, one of several recent books by militant atheists, is certain
to generate controversy.
http://richarddawkins.net (Official site)
contact at richarddawkins.net (Do not send attachments.)
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/index.shtml
(Unofficial site)
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Biography/bio.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins
Try to get Scruton and Dawkins at the same time..
b. Daniel Dennett is professor of philosophy at Tufts University and
Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies there and a noted atheist. He
is best known in the profession for his work in the philosophy of mind but
to the public at large for Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the
Meanings of Life (1995), which the Wikipedia article describes as a
"controversial book which argues that Darwinian processes are the central
organizing force in the Universe. Dennett asserts that natural selection is
a blind and algorithmic process which is sufficiently powerful to account
for everything from the laws of physics and the creation of the Universe
through the generation and evolution of life to the ins and outs of human
minds and societies."
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm
ddennett at tufts.edu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_Dangerous_Idea
c. Tom Wolfe (born 1930). It is not generally known that he holds a
doctorate from Yale in American Studies. The title of his dissertation was
The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among
American Writers, 1929-1942. Though not lacking in academic credentials,
he has not pursued an academic career. He is an enthusiastic Darwinist who
repeatedly denied free will in "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,"
http://orthodoxytoday.org/articles/WolfeSoulDied.php. He tends to reduce
all drives to status, just as leftists commonly reduce them to power,
instead of dealing with all sixteen identified by Steven Reiss. He will be
fun to have around, both at the conference and in the new School.
http://www.tomwolfe.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wolfe
5. A LEFT-WING PROPONENT OF DARWINISM
Peter Singer, the philosopher, has already been mentioned as a Darwinist on
the political left.
6. A LEFT-WING CRITIC OF REDUCTIONIST DARWINISM
Philip Kitcher, born 1947, a philosopher at Columbia University, is a
prominent critic of sociobiology on the political left (he might dispute
the label). He is the author of Vaulting Ambition (MIT, 1985), one of the
earlier attacks on sociobiology and, most recently, Living with Darwin:
Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith (Oxford, 2007). The School needs
polymaths above all, and Kitcher has covered not only the philosophy of
science and biology in particular but also Richard Wagner and the
philosophy of mathematics. Between 1995-7 he was a member of the NIH/DOE
Working Group on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Human
Genome Project. His wife, Patricia Kitcher, is a well known Kant scholar
and philosopher of mind who is Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities at
Columbia and chair of the university's philosophy department. So GMU would
have to lure her away also.
http://www.columbia.edu/~psk16/ (Philip)
psk16 at columbia.edu (Philip)
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/philosophy/fac-bios/kitcher_pat/faculty.html
(Patricia)
pk206 at columbia.edu (Patricia)
7. A CONTROVERSIAL DARWINIST ON HOMOSEXUALITY
Gregory Cochran will lead us into hotter waters. A physicist, who like
Eshel Ben-Jacob has gotten interested in biology, he has reasoned that,
since homosexuals vastly under-reproduce and are not known for indirectly
spreading their genes by being exceptionally good uncles, homosexuality
cannot be genetic and is therefore likely to be the result of an infection.
This upsets those who hold that it is immoral to classify homosexuality as
a disorder. Cochran has also advanced selection explanations for the mental
superiority of Ashkenazi Jews.
http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/backup/An_Evolutionary_Look_at_Human_Homosexuality.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathogenic_theory_of_homosexuality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Cochran
gcochran9 at comcast.net
8. FUTURISTS
a. Nick Bostrom takes us into the future of human evolution. He was born in
1973 and is a philosopher at Oxford University and directs the Future of
Humanity Institute there. He is a tireless promoter of what are called
transhumanist technologies, such as cloning, artificial intelligence, mind
uploading, cryonics, and nanotechnology.
From his home page: "As this page shows, I put my nose in many pots. But
the unifying theme is big picture questions for humanity. Some of these
questions are about ethics and values. Others have to do with methodology
and how we make predictions or deal with uncertainty. Still others pertain
to specific concerns and possibilities, such as existential risks, the
simulation hypothesis, artificial intelligence, life-extension, human
enhancement, and the transhumanist movement (involved as co-founder and
chair of the World Transhumanist Association)." He teasingly adds: "As a
species, we are not adept at thinking about these questions.
Pessimistically, one might hold that we are so bad at thinking about them
that it is a good thing that we usually ignore them. Attempting to wake up
without succeeding would only give us bad dreams. Perhaps. But how will we
know unless we try?"
http://www.nickbostrom.com/
nick at nickbostrom.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom
b. James Hughes is a Left-transhumanist. He is a bioethicist and
sociologist teaching health policy at Trinity College in Hartford,
Connecticut. Hughes served as the executive director of the World
Transhumanist Association from 2004 to 2006 and currently serves as the
executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies at
Trinity College. He seeks to assure that future technologies be made
available to all and is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic
Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (2004). For a
review of the book, see http://jetpress.org/volume14/forman.html for
"Transhumanism's Vital Center," in The Journal of Evolution and
Technology,.
http://internet2.trincoll.edu/facProfiles/Default.aspx?fid=1004332
James.Hughes at trincoll.edu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hughes
http://changesurfer.com/ (his website)
9. TWO ORGANIZATIONS THAT SPECIALIZE IN SPECULATIVE IDEAS
They are the Pacific Institute and the Edge Foundation. Several of the
suggested faculty have either written for these groups or have been
discussed there. They are another source to find faculty that will
contribute novel ideas.
http://pacificinstitute.org
http://edge.org
How many of the folks here generate ideas that will last, as opposed to
those that are off the wall, out to lunch, and over the top? Who knows!
These foundations can afford to take the risks. GMU will have to be more
cautious.
III. THOUGHTS ON STRATEGIC MATTERS
A. The Name of the School
The very name Darwin can evoke negative reactions among certain
conservatives in the Commonwealth legislature, who may strive to prevent
the creation of a School of Darwin Studies. The political left, too, is not
comfortable with Darwin, as it posits a fixity in human nature beyond the
manipulation (by these same leftists). To counter this, bring in several
from the list of possible faculty or conference speakers.
Calling it a School of Evolution(ary) Studies might be preferable, but
Darwin as central as Martin Luther in causing an old order to collapse.
Using the name Darwin suggests perhaps an over-concentration on the past,
but evolution suggests over-concentration on technical matters.
B. Urgency
It is only a matter of time before some other university comes up with the
idea of starting a full School of Darwin (Evolution) Studies. So far, there
are only evolution studies departments within biology departments, a
certificate for taking a number of evolution-related courses in other
departments (Binghamton University), and just recently a minor
undergraduate area (SUNY at New Paltz). George Mason could expand
immediately its Master of Arts of Interdisciplinary Studies to include one
in Darwin (Evolutionary) Studies, but this step would be too small.
Several times a year, it seems, some grateful alumnus gives $100 to a
relatively unknown but dear alma mater. Indeed, Washington University in
St. Louis is no longer so little known because of these gifts. George Mason
has the inestimable advantage of not being in the grips of political
orthodoxy as most other universities and hence will attract scholars and
students from a much larger pool. It's proximity to the nation's capital
and many high-tech firms is also an advantage.
C. Credentials
This is just the trade-off between the need for George Mason to hire those
with the best academic credentials, to hire cross-disciplinary innovators
who stand to become recognized later, and to hire thoughtful critics.
D. A Center for the Study of Darwinian Processes first?
This would be an intermediate step toward an entire school (or department)
and would bypass, for now, the problems of deciding on how to staff a
school, as opposed to letting students take relevant courses all over the
place. Those affiliated with such a center can churn out ideas that cross
disciplines. A Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies should be
offered only after a center is in place.
E. The Conference, Darwin across the Disciplines: The Re-Enchanted World
that Charles Darwin Started
These are further remarks. Darwin has widely been given the blame for
disenchanting the world, reducing the status of man in the universe beyond
what had already been accomplished by Copernicus. He has also been accused
of abolishing morality, man becoming merely an agglomeration of tissues
without a purpose. This is emphatically not true of Darwin himself, a true
naturalist, who only marveled at the creative powers of the evolutionary
process. He further strove to underpin our moral behavior in our
evolutionary past. And the removal of the complex populating of the world
with a Great Chain of Being (nine orders of angels, nine orders of devils,
and so on) effectively went out with austere Protestantism before the rise
of science. What we have now is a world made up of a few kinds of identical
simple things (electrons, quarks). It is how they combine by way of
cumulating small, random changes that creates the enchanting marvels of the
world. But each speaker will have his own splendid idea about how Darwin's
ideas makes his own world one of wonder and enchantment.
"Re-enchantment" refers to the great German sociologist Max Weber
(1864-1920), who not only gave the world the notions of the Protestant
ethic and the "routinization of charisma" but also the disenchantment of
the world (die Entzauberung der Welt, literally de-magic-ification). This
is the "secularization thesis," that with modernization comes
secularization. It is said that the world of magic reached its final end
among French peasants in the last quarter of the nineteenth century because
of fertilizer: farmers could now see cause and effect on crop yields at
work, removing a need for good crop angels and bad crop demons. Weber
feared that the development of rationalization, bureaucratization, and
legalization would result in an "iron cage" from which there is no escape.
"Not a summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy
darkness and hardness, no matter which group may externally triumph now."
What has happened during the last half century is that the forces of
disenchantment continue but those of re-enchantment have overridden them,
resulting in an increase in religion everywhere (even in Europe, where
"spirituality" has replaced traditional Christianity). What could take the
place of religions, in all their functions, should be a major theme of the
conference.
A second theme of the conference could be that Darwinian findings about
human nature place constraints on the possible. Before the constraints were
placed by God in the form of commandments. But they are so similar that
there is even an older book called The Biology of the Ten Commandments.
Larry Arnhart, the author of Darwinian Conservatism is represented in the
potential faculty list.
F. A Critical Mass
It will take a critical mass of scholars at GMU for many others to consider
leaving well-recognized positions and move to Fairfax. It could be a whole
school or nothing or nothing much. GMU will really be put on the map, if
enough big donors can make it possible. Once that happens, GMU will be able
to get scholars to relocate to Fairfax it could scarcely have dreamed of.
Here are just a few possibilities:
1. Religion is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. Right now, GMU is not
now in a position of inducing religion specialists to leave good religion
departments to come to Fairfax. If Darwin (Evolution) Studies has religious
specialists, scholars who are not evolutionary oriented will become
attracted. George Mason will then be able concentrate on building an
outstanding religion department. It was good luck, and Karen Vaughn's
entrepreneurship, that got the Center for the Study of Public Choice to
relocate from Blacksburg.
2. A first-rate scholar of 19th century Britain, who will be eager to place
Darwin in his historical context.
3. No one has thought up the notion of "the survival of the fittest
galaxies," but galaxies do evolve and there are some interesting parallels
between the cosmic and living realms having to do with fractal geometry.
Darwinism isn't the only evolutionary process in the living world, in other
words. So an astronomer might well want to come to GMU to help out.
G. An Incomparable Education
It is certainly the case that Jim Buchanan's boys are showing in positions
of influence vastly exceeding their numbers, and the same goes for
graduates of the law school. As global competition heats up, there will be
a growing demand, not for those who have mastered a subject so much as for
those who have been educated to think across disciplines and recombine
ideas. The true mark of giftedness is this quality, on top of raw
intelligence. Darwin studies covers a far more widely ranging territory. If
the school has a healthy share of critics of Darwinistic reductionism and
(alleged!) Darwinist disenchantment, this will not be a danger.
H. Darwin's Chapel
The first hymn, as stated in the abstract, will be one George Mason could
have sung, but the closing hymn could be a later Protestant one or, indeed,
from any religion in the world. Here's an example:
"Turn back, O man, forswear thy foolish ways.
"Old now is earth, and none may count her days.
"Yet thou, her child, whose head is crowned with flame,
"Still wilt not hear thine inner God proclaim."
"Turn back, O man, forswear thy foolish ways."
Music: Old 124th, Genevan Psalter, 1551. Words (1916) by Clifford Bax
(brother of the composer Arnold). This is an anti-war hymn.
http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/t/u/turnback.htm. Click on the MIDI right
now!
Given George Mason's large commuter population, it is may not feasible to
require students in School of Darwin (Evolution) Studies to attend Darwin's
Chapel, wear a coat and tie, and sing the hymns, but they should be
required to write a short essay about the sermon. There is no better way to
learn to be a good writer than to do it. Essays must be graded, the average
grade made known with the degree. The faculty will find grading these
papers to be a nuisance. Too bad.
IV. APPENDICES (TWO SPECULATIVE DARWINIAN REFLECTIONS)
A. A Short Discursive Darwinian Reflection on Modern Art
[* marks a Darwinian theme.]
Why do some painters get exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art and the
Hirshhorn Museum and others do not? I have a healthy dose of skepticism
about the merit of many painters that do get exhibited there and feel that
I myself could get exhibited if only I had the talent and the persistence.
I do have the imagination.
A great many people feel this way about modern art and think it is just a
racket. Even so, some painters get selected* and others fail for being
unfit*, even if modern art is just a swindle. (Compare "For many are
called, but few are chosen" (Matthew 22:14.)) Do the chosen have objective
merit, detected by experts but not by the layman? It is the case that
experts, whether they be wine tasters, judges at dog grooming contests, or
referees at boxing matches typically agree with one another within seven
points on a hundred point scale. This indicates that these experts have a
certain intuitive knowledge that they cannot articulate (know how as
opposed to know that). Knowledge, on any Darwinian account, is based upon
observations by the senses, and it is a knowledge that only sometimes can
be reduced to algorithmic formulae. There is no direct pipeline from
reality to the brain. David Hume noted that he never observed a connection
flipping from cause to effect, only a constant conjunction between the two,
a conjunction to which cause is inferred by pattern-seeking humans. Hume
came before Darwin's ideas, and a Darwinian will observe fundamentally that
an animal succeeds, not by grasping reality absolutely, but only better
than the next animal. Relative success in seeing conjunctions in the world
is the key to reproductive success.
But what about the idea that experts do better than the rest of us? The art
experts judge: the modern artists whom they judge as better get into the
museums. But how are the experts themselves selected? Often just by
agreeing with other experts, or by groupthink, a word that had its first
appearance in 1923. Those who vary by more than seven percent from the
other experts are not fit to survive*. If this process of expert selection
is what counts, then there is a random* process at work. Artist A attracts
the attention of expert X. Expert X praises artist A. Expert Y now feels
obliged to weigh in with his own opinion, even if he might never have
regarded artist A as worthy of his attention on his own. Now expert Y does
not want to be drummed out of the clique of modern art experts and looks
far more closely at artist A than he otherwise would have. He may not have
as high an opinion about artist A than expert X does, but expert Y will now
at least form an opinion. If expert Y happens to disagree sharply with
expert X, that may be the end of artist A's march to success. If experts X
and Y do not disagree sharply, expert Z will now weigh in with his own
opinion. And on it goes. What is random* here is artist A's coming to
occupy the attention space in the first place. There may be a strong
likelihood that artist A would not have garnered attention if expert X had
not started talking about him. It is this need for consensus of the experts
to remain experts and not be selected out* of the community of experts that
can raise a mediocre artist to get his works displayed in the Museum of
Modern Art. Random* building up of consensus is what matters.
And so it seem to this observer, skeptical as he is to the merit of much
modern art but who nevertheless frequently repairs to the Hirshhorn Museum
in quest of coming to grips with modern art. He wants to know what it is
about this evolved creature* that impels him to go on producing art (or
"art") even if he has nothing to say. Many of these artists are often the
subject of museum talks. This observer was led to appreciate Willem de
Kooning (1904-97), universally regarded by experts as one of the greats of
modern art, after one of these talks. In other words, expert A got this
decidedly non-expert X to pay attention to de Kooning. He can't articulate
what makes de Kooning meritorious in his eyes, but he feels it. He does not
feel it about several other artists hyped up by museum talkers, which
certainly shows he will never join the ranks of modern art experts, but
with this notion of the randomness* of the process of selecting* artists
for praise, he feels vindicated in his untutored opinion that a rather
large fraction of painters are not all they are hyped up to be. But he
cannot articulate why he might come to appreciate de Kooning and fail to
appreciate others. He may just be a Philistine after all. Expertise can
have its random* component but it is not entirely so.
Now there is one modern painter who is loved by the public above nearly all
others but whose status among the experts is rather low. This is, of
course, Salvador Dalí (1904-89). A certain number of experts do see merit
in Dalí, but woe to any expert who would insist that Dalí's art is at a
truly high level. An expert can get away, at best, with saying Dalí is
underappreciated. I see, as the experts do, that Dalí did indeed have
certain ideas but that he just kept repeating them over and over again. But
can't this be said for a great many artists to whom the experts attach a
far higher value? When did it become fashionable, among experts, to
minimize Dali's value? His star never really rose again, despite several
attempts. But Andrew Wyeth (1917- ) and Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) are
today more appreciated than when in their primes. The strictly "naive"
French painter, Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), is everywhere admired. To a
lesser extent so is his American counterpart, Grandma Moses (1860-1961).
Further questions suggest themselves. Why are those who disagree by a mere
seven percent from the experts unfit* to experts themselves? A general
answer is that in primates those that cooperated left more descendants
[Darwinian idea through and through]. Cooperation takes bigger brains,
which is why the brains of primates are bigger than they need to be to cope
with the complexity of the physical environment. In man, this brain
expansion has gone the furthest. Brains serve the function of promoting
social cooperation more than finding out about objective reality. "To get
along, go along" is an evolutionary fact. What demands explanation is how
it happened that a critical mass of objectivists formed in the a small,
northwestern peninsula of the vast Euroasian landmass that allowed for
respect for the facts, not for authority, to take wing. Groupthink is can
never be as bad as it once was. The astonishing thing is that Charles
Darwin was not burnt at the stake, though he seems to have suffered serious
psychosomatic illnesses from letting his quest for truth go along in ways
that undermined his own internalized religious upbringing.
Again and beyond the seven percent maximum deviance requirement to remain
an expert art critic, what about the fact that Tom Wolfe is the only member
in good standing in the elite who can get away with ridiculing modern art.
To be sure, there are conservative journals that discuss modern art, but
their writers do not move in circles as exalted as Tom Wolfe's. Members of
sub-elites typically serve on boards of other sub-elites. So a corporate
official, like Bill Gates, will serve on arts boards, hospital boards,
government commissions. (Only military big wigs seldom sit on boards.) Bill
Gates spends little time on these boards, but he does show up and he won't
ridicule modern art and instead will applaud the opening of a new museum
devoted to it.
If this sounds like sociology, it is because it is. Sociology is only a
little older than Darwinism and grew up in the wake of the industrial and
French revolutions to make sense of the great changes these revolutions
caused. (Socialism and conservatism, both, were the political responses.)
Indeed, sociology and Darwinism are much alike in that both deal with
top-down causation: in sociology, society shapes the individual, while in
biology, the environment selects* which organisms will reproduce.
My musings are laced with Darwinian language: Selection* of painters to get
into the Museum of Modern Art, selection* of experts, unfitness* of experts
who disagree with other experts by more than seven percent (obviously not a
rigid rule; indeed how it varies would be important to know) are unfit for
survival*, the survival benefits* of social cooperation, the evolutionary
origins* of the urge to paint, the evolutionary origin* of beauty in the
first place.
These evolutionary puzzles keep me going back to modern art museums. I'll
never get a job as an expert art critic. I am too irreverent to be a good
cooperator*. I don't have enough of the right genes* for whatever it takes
to be an expert in this field, even were I to cynically promote myself. But
then again, we learn from evolution theories that self-deception works
better than conscious deception, since there has been an evolutionary
arms-race* between deception and detection of deception. I don't think I
ever could stop laughing at not a few painters widely lauded by the
experts. But I'm open to stop laughing at particular ones. It's gotten so
that I am fascinated by my own evolution* as an appreciator of modern art.
B. Why Do the Controversies So Furiously Rage Together? With a bow to the
Bible and Handel's Messiah.
I have long asked myself why certain controversies show no sign of any
emerging consensus, in contrast to the Enlightenment dream that reason
would produce a steady convergence to the truth. Vested interests, of
course, explain a great deal of this lack, but forty years on, there is
still no consensus over who was involved in the assassination of John F.
Kennedy. There are simply too many loose ends, and if I had the talent, I
could formulate my own theories, account for hitherto neglected loose send,
and add one more book to the pile. The problem is that, no matter how hard
I struggle, loose ends will continue to remain and yet another amateur
scholar could write a book that would supposedly clear up the loose ends I
neglected. The cycle of new theories continues. It is as though the
Enlightenment dream ended during six seconds at the Dealey Plaze.
Be this as it may, a lack of consensus abounds in purely philosophical and
scientific fields, the most intractable perhaps being the controversy over
free will versus determinism. The case against free will has been made
repeatedly since before Socrates. The case is furiously disputed and a long
refutation ensues. That inspires an even more elaborate
counter-refutations. These continue with ever expanding sophistication,
since every thinker must deal with all previous thinkers.
My Darwinist explanation is that the concepts themselves are at the root of
the difficulty. We know from Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error: Emotion,
Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam, 1994) that reason and
emotion are not the separate but in fact quite dependent on each other.
But, and this is my hypothesis, various emotions arose at different times
due to different evolutionary pressures. One emotion says, "I am master of
my fate and captain of my soul," while another says, "I can understand a
world of cause and effect." But if I should try to get rid of the former
for the latter and argue that determinism alone matters as a matter of
conceptual truth, my emotions rebel at this conceptual sleight of hand. My
concepts must be emotionally satisfying before I am willing to utilize them
in going about the business of life. There can be no resolution at the
philosophical level that brings about a revolt at the emotional level.
Emotionally I want both to be in charge and to operate in a world of cause
and effect that I can get a grip upon. So, the debates continue, and no one
has managed to define either free will or determinism in a way that
generates a consensus of those with emotional brains. This is not just a
matter of our lack of knowledge of the human brain, I maintain.
But perhaps the question is misplaced. Why does consensus ever happen? This
was asked by Randall Collins in The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global
Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1998).
His conclusion, in the case of science, nearly alone, is that scientists
were forever chasing after new scientific instruments to move on to new
problems and simply let old controversies die away.
A more Darwinian explanation (and Collins, strangely, has looked
unfavorably upon them) is that the brains of primates, and man most
especially, are much larger than they need to be for the complexities of
their physical environments. Primates that used bigger brains to cooperate
with their fellows left more descendants. So, "to get along, go along" is
what produces consensus, as much as Enlightenment reason. Until, that is,
the Enlightenment came along. Why it did and now it did is now the mystery,
the greatest mystery of history.
[I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with
all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and
spread them.]
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