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    Politics as If Evolution Mattered: Darwin, Ecology, and Social Justice
    Politics as If Evolution Mattered: Darwin, Ecology, and Social Justice
    Politics as If Evolution Mattered: Darwin, Ecology, and Social Justice
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    Politics as If Evolution Mattered: Darwin, Ecology, and Social Justice

    By Lorna Salzman

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    About this ebook

    In this scientifically authoritative essay collection, Salzman, a seasoned and provocative environmentalist, demonstrates how evolutionary theory penetrates nearly all aspects of human society. She faults social justice movements for their short-sighted focus on human needs to the exclusion of nonhuman nature and stresses the potential of evolutionary thought for replacing religious and secular ideologies with an ecological paradigm for broad social change.

    Salzman's special concern is the resurgence of irrationality, anti-intellectualism and anti-science attitudes.. She explodes the myth of genetic determinism promoted in popular media, discrediting the belief that natural selection involves violence. In place of the arbitrary "economism" of socialists and the free marketeers' faith in untrammeled economic growth, she envisions a human society modeled on interdependent self-regulating natural systems.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateAug 25, 2011
    ISBN9781462034772
    Politics as If Evolution Mattered: Darwin, Ecology, and Social Justice
    Author

    Lorna Salzman

    Lorna Salzman, a professional environmentalist, formerly worked with Friends of the Earth and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. She co-founded New Yorks Green Party and was a Green Party candidate for Congress in 2002 before seeking the Green Party presidential nomination. She and her husband are active birders and mushroom hunters and continue to live in New York.

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    • 1/5
      This book suffers from sloppy writing, sloppy editing, sloppy thinking, and sloppy science. At times, the author does a reasonably good job of evaluating the science, but then slips into incredible misstatements and monstrous mistakes. When discussing evolution, she manages to be at least somewhat accurate, but when she gets into the topic of ecology, she slips into anti-science viewpoint, often creating straw men scientists and burning them down with the help of the noble savage and a slew of new age gobbledygook. There are some very good ideas in here, but they're hidden inside a dung heap. It's always a shame when you have a reader who agrees with many of the big points you're making, and your manner of making them is so outrageous it leads them to keep marking the spots with No! In a short book (90 pages) I made so many notes, sometimes on totally poor writing, but many times on poor thinking, that the book is nearly double in length from my notes. This is not the book you want.

    Book preview

    Politics as If Evolution Mattered - Lorna Salzman

    Contents

    Introduction

    Why Darwin Matters Today

    The Evolutionary Debate

    Science vs. New Age-ism

    Ecology and Evolution

    Evolution Misunderstood

    Evolution’s Balancing Act

    Sidestepping Evolution

    Biodiversity

    The Threat of Genetic Manipulation

    Counter-evolutionary Technologies

    Ecosystems as Models for Human Systems

    Progress and Purpose

    Humanity in the Biosphere

    The Ecological Imperative

    Formulating a New Agenda

    for Social Change: Nature Comes First; Nature Bats Last

    Afterword

    Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

    Recommended Reading

    Introduction

    Evolution, more than any other scientific field of study, intersects with almost every social and political subject today. Daniel Dennett has described this characteristic felicitously by calling it the universal solvent. It has the capability of shaping public discourse in a more rational and ethical direction than the mass media, pop trends and political ideologies allow.

    Activists and the general public might be puzzled by the notion that an understanding of evolution could enrich and increase the effectiveness of movements for social change. While these movements (after several decades of foot-dragging) are slowly absorbing the ecological principles at work in many of today’s challenges such as climate change, nuclear power, genetic manipulation and biodiversity losses, most people have not yet grasped the connection of ecology and evolution. Once grasped, this understanding will have tsunami-strength impacts on the strategies and objectives of these movements.

    Progressive social change movements in particular are susceptible to the cry that the personal is political and give weighted attention to trends such as Identity Politics, spirituality and the proclamations of religious leaders who have finally begun integrating environmental concerns into their sermons—and unfortunately vice versa, as did one leading liberal rabbi who called for a president filled with the spirit of God.

    Add this to the body of post-modern thought which regards science as socially constructed and denigrates the notion of universal truths, and one starts to understand how irrationality, distrust of science and a belief that subjective thought reflects reality actually represent regressive, even subversive, societal trends that undermine science, education, social justice, ethics, and our political process.

    New challenges to the direction and fate of civilization arise each day. Environmental articles and books document the degradation of the earth’s natural systems and the impact on human welfare. But the response of the environmental movement and social change activists remains sorely inadequate. Consequently progressives regress to simple moral issues like peace and poverty rather than confront the complexities of science and the challenge of reconciling innate human imperfection with democracy, peace and human rights.

    While scientists and environmentalists try to understand the relationships of non-human animals to their environment, they have neglected to do so with humans and human society. Unlike nonhuman species, humans are gifted with the ability to choose with deliberation the conditions of their existence. Tragically, their choices in contemporary industrial society, even when motivated by ethics and compassion, are proving to be not merely inadequate but fatally wrong.

    It is perhaps human nature to resist the stark reality of fallibility and the role of chance in evolutionary processes. But it is precisely the lack of an evolutionary perspective in movements for social change—a recognition of the laws of nature—which deprives them of the necessary insight into the parameters of human existence, the insight that could provide a substantive guide for a social reform agenda not in conflict with the natural world. A growing backlash against science on the Left and the Right only exacerbates the situation.

    The central dilemma of modern humanity is the failure to adapt our behavior, institutions and objectives to certain realities which we ignore or defy through our faith in technology and religion. This defiance is at the root of our ecological crisis along with the delusion that the human species or society can be perfected.

    There are four areas most lacking in ecological and evolutionary understanding, broadly speaking: Ideology (religious or secular); Technology; Social Justice; Human Ethics. Under Ideology are grouped movements such as New Age thought, Marxism/socialism, faith and spirituality. Under Technology there are genetic manipulation, nuclear technology, resource exploitation and energy production. Under Social Justice and Ethics we have equality, equity, human rights, class/race/gender issues, intergroup aggression and militarism.

    Much effort is expended on influencing and reforming human behavior and cultural choices as if these were fresh clay to be molded at the whim of whomever is in charge. Since Earth Day 1970, when the word ecology emerged as a potential organizing idea, activist groups have competed with each other to define The Problem and, not surprisingly, have come up with solutions that fit their own political model, much like the proverbial three blind men groping an elephant and postulating three different shapes. Some activists postulate capitalism, others population growth, others human greed, others corporations, others the male gender, and others the wrath of one god or another. Few regard humanity as being one of many products of evolution or a species not endowed with special rights.

    This book lays out the evolutionary imperative which, upon closer examination, reinforces not what some consider inherent human evil (nature red in tooth and claw, competition, domination) but concepts considered ethical today: non-hierarchy, functional equality, cooperation, and interdependence. The failure of progressives and the Left to understand evolution’s lessons and the failure of liberal movements to underpin their political goals with science and rationality rather than abstract moral precepts or a priori doctrines, or to place humans within the evolutionary chronology, has created a large void into which rabid ideologues of all stripes have intruded with their own arbitrary and capricious dictates and who now dominate public discourse. The centrality of evolution and ecology—two sides of the same coin—must be recognized before any cohesive, consistent social justice movement can succeed.

    Neither Nature nor evolution can provide a moral guide for human behavior or technological and ethical choices. What they can provide is an impartial, scientific explanation of which choices are most likely to enhance human welfare and survival, and which ones are more conducive to societal collapse or species extinction. The burden of decision-making ultimately rests on human intellect and rationality, with the hope that humans will alter their behavior and institutions in the right direction. This collection of essays will try to explain the relevance of evolutionary thought to the pressing ideological, technological and ethical debates of our time.

    11.pdf

    Why Darwin Matters Today

    . . . it took nature more than a billion years to develop a good worm.

    The Sea, Robert C. Miller

    Miracle… is simply a synonym for the total absence of explanation.

    River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins

    . . . the framework of human life is all life… it is life, not man, which is the main contour, and it is ecology in general where human ecology is to be found.

    The Subversive Science, Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley

    The theories and writings of Charles Darwin, in particular his On the Origin of Species, have grown into the foundation of all modern biological thought. It is no exaggeration to say that the disciplines of biology, ecology, modern medicine and agriculture, among others, could not exist without Darwin. Without him, these would be forced to rely on random observation and anecdotal

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