[Quotes] [Philosophy, #1]
"The personal and intellectual drama of Darwin and Dana provides the main subject for this essay, but I also write to illustrate a broader theme in the lives of scholars and the nature of science: the integrative power of worldviews (the positive side), and their hold as conceptual locks upon major innovation (the negative side)." (Gould S.J., "Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History", [1998], Vintage: London, 1999, reprint, p.103).
[top]"Furthermore, on the pure philosophical plane, the Darwinian doctrine of evolution involves some difficulties which Darwin and Huxley were unable to appreciate. Between the organism that simply lives, the organism that lives and feels, and the organism that lives, feels, and reasons, there are, in the opinion of respectable philosophers, abrupt transitions corresponding to an ascent in the scale of being, and they hold that the agencies of the material world cannot produce transitions of this kind. I shall not attempt to discuss this difficult question here. Nevertheless it is clear that the view just mentioned has been that of mankind in general. That plants, animals, and man can be distinguished because they are radically different is the common-sense conviction, or was, at least until the time of Darwin. Biologists still agree on the separation of plants and animals, but the idea that man and animals differ only in degree is now so general among them, that even psychologists no longer attempt to use words like 'reason' or 'intelligence' in an exact sense." This general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of the categories Nature presents to us, is the inheritance of biology from The Origin of Species." (Thompson W.R.*, "Introduction," in Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," [1872], Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 6th Edition, 1967, reprint, p.xxiii-xxiv).
[top]"materialism n. the theory that matter alone exists. It immediately implies a denial of the existence of minds, spirits, divine beings, etc., in so far as these are taken to be non- material. It was proposed by the ancient atomists (Democritus, Epicurus) ... Its current versions, formulated with greater conceptual refinement, are often called PHYSICALISM. It has been said that during the 1960s (and since), materialism became one of the few orthodoxies of American academic philosophy..." (Mautner T., "The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy," [1996], Penguin: London, Revised, 2000, pp.341-342)
[top]"THE COSMOS IS ALL THAT IS OR EVER WAS OR EVER WILL BE..." (Sagan C., "Cosmos," [1980], Macdonald: London, 1981, reprint, p.4. Emphasis Sagan's).
[top]"These so-called M and N notebooks were written in 1838 and 1839, while Darwin was compiling the transmutation notebooks that formed the basis for his sketches of 1842 and 1844. They ... include many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism-the postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. ... The notebooks prove that ... the primary feature distinguishing his theory from all other evolutionary doctrines was its uncompromising philosophical materialism. .... In the notebooks Darwin resolutely applied his materialistic theory of evolution to all phenomena of life, including what he termed "the citadel itself" - the human mind. And if mind has no real existence beyond the brain, can God be anything more than an illusion invented by an illusion? In one of his transmutation notebooks, he wrote: `Love of the deity effect of organization, oh you materialist!...'" ( Gould S.J., ", "Darwin's Delay," in "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History," [1978], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, pp.23-25).
[top]"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." (Lewontin R.C., "Billions and Billions of Demons", Review of "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark," by Carl Sagan, New York Review, January 9, 1997. Emphasis in original).
[top]"Although many details remain to be worked out, it is already evident that all the objective phenomena of the history of life can be explained by purely materialistic factors. They are readily explicable on the basis of differential reproduction in populations (the main factor in the modern conception of natural selection) and of the mainly random interplay of the known processes of heredity." (Simpson G.G., "The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of its Significance for Man," [1949], Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 1960, reprint, p.343).
[top]"It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter." ( Haldane J.B.S., "When I Am Dead," in "Possible Worlds: And Other Essays," [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209).
[top]"From another perspective, David Lack, loyal Darwinian though he is, gives the game away. In the book I have already mentioned, he refers to Darwin's question: "Can the mind of man, descended, as I believe, from the lowest animal be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?" and he comments: `Darwin's "horrid doubt" as to whether the convictions of man's evolved mind could be trusted applies as much to abstract truth as to ethics; and "evolutionary truth" is at least as suspect as evolutionary ethics. At this point, therefore, it would seem that the armies of science are in danger of destroying their own base. For the scientist must be able to trust the conclusions of his reasoning. Hence he cannot accept the theory that man's mind was evolved wholly by natural selection if this means, as it would appear to do, that the conclusions of the mind depend ultimately on their survival value and not their truth, thus making all scientific theories, including that of natural selection, untrustworthy.' Lack concludes from this that the old opposition of science and religion is still, and must remain, an "unresolved conflict." But I think one may conclude, on the contrary, that it is the conventional logic of science, and the view of mind implied in it, that needs revision. For, as Plato argued long ago about Protagonas' "man the measure," there is surely something wrong in a theory which, at its very root, invalidate itself." ( Grene M., "The Faith of Darwinism," Encounter, Vol. 74, November 1959, p.56).
[top]"naturalism ... (in modern metaphysics) the view that everything (objects and events) is a part of nature, an all-encompassing world of space and time. It implies a rejection of traditional beliefs in supernatural beings or other entities supposedly beyond the ken of science. Human beings and their mental powers are also regarded as normal parts of the natural world describable by science. ... (in philosophy of mind) physicalism, i.e. materialism in combination with the view that mentalistic discourse should be reduced, explained or eliminated in favour of non- mentalistic scientifically acceptable discourse." (Mautner T., "The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy," [1996], Penguin: London, Revised, 2000, p.373)
[top]"naturalism. In general the view that everything is natural, i.e. that everything there is belongs to the world of nature, and so can be studied by the methods appropriate for studying that world, and the apparent exceptions can be somehow explained away. ... In metaphysics naturalism is perhaps most obviously akin to materialism, but it does not have to be materialistic. What it insists on is that the world of nature should form a single sphere without incursions from outside by souls or spirits, divine or human, and without having to accommodate strange entities like nonnatural values or substantive abstract universals. " (Lacey A., in Honderich T., ed., "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy," Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1995, p.604)
[top]"Spencer's belief in the universality of natural causation was, together with his laissez-faire political creed, the bedrock of his thinking. It was this belief, more than anything else, that led him to reject Christianity, long before the great conflict of the eighteen-sixties Moreover, it was his belief in natural causation that led him to embrace the theory of evolution, not vice versa. ... His faith was so strong that it did not wait on scientific proof. Spencer became an ardent evolutionist at a time when a cautious scientist would have been justified at least in suspending judgement. ... for him the belief in natural causation was primary, the theory of evolution derivative." (Burrow J.W., "Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory," [1966], Cambridge University Press: London, 1968, reprint, pp.180-181, 205).
[top]"By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism-of much of science, in short-that has since been the stage of most Western thought." (Futuyma D.J., "Evolutionary Biology", [1979], Sinauer Associates: Sunderland MA, Second Edition, 1986, p.2).
[top]* Authors with an asterisk against their name are believed not to be evolutionists.
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