🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bu01JK.C4y@unx.sas.com> sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com (Gary Merrill)  
writes:
> 
> 
>  Most of this stuff is lifted from an old paper of my
> wife's:  "Can Darwinian Inheritance Be Extended from Biology to
> Epistemology?",

This provides a good example of what I consider the bad philosophy
of science. Not your wifes paper (she is essentially correct), but
the fact that philosophers would try to abstract Darwinian evolution
and then go around asking if this or that thing is a Darwinian evolution.

As usual, the philosophers desire to develop a theory of some 
incredibly grand thing (epistemology), and end up with useless 
mush. The value of Darwins (and derived) theory of evolution is that it answers  
questions about how traits are acquired and fixed in populations, how
new species develop, etc. When coupled
with genetics, it provides a complete, quantitative and predictive mechansim
for biological evolution. 

Epistemology is simply not open to a similar degree of quantification.

Even if epistemology did turn out to be a 'Darwinian system'
by someones definition, that doesn't change what epistemology is: the
historical development of ideas would still be a very vague, unpredictible
process lacking simple unifying ideas, and certainly little predictive
power, as there is no underlying genetic code which enforces an
orderly development process.

> And the source of new concepts
> is not located in other concepts, but in the mental activity of
> some human being.  Consequently, the way in which concepts are
> "inherited" is very unlike the way in which genes are inherited.
> Genes replicate themselves, but concepts must be "replicated" by
> human beings. 


At the level of the mushy theory desired by the philosopher, one
could easily refute these criticisms. Genes only replicate themselves
upon a given chemical subtrate. This substrate is prone to mutation. One
could say human minds are the substrate on which ideas replicate, and it
just happens to be a substrate very prone to mutation. 

The fact that then mutation would be the dominant factor in this 
theory makes it a useless theory, but philosophers seem undaunted by such.
--
Barry Merriman
UCLA Dept. of Math
UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research
barry@math.ucla.edu (Internet; NeXTMail is welcome)