#174

Karl Popper on Old and New conception of Darwinism, Hindu Denominations Explained

1. Karl Popper on Old and New conception of Darwinism

In place of a picture of the environment that attacks us with 'tooth and claw', I see an environment in which a tiny little living creature has succeeded in surviving for billions of years and in conquering and improving its world. If: therefore, there is a struggle between life and the environment, then life has triumphed. I believe that this somewhat revised conception of Darwinism leads to a completely different view from that of the old ideology, namely to the view that we inhabit a world that has become more and more agreeable and more and more favourable to life, thanks to the activity of life and its search for a better world.

But who wants to admit this? Today everyone believes in the persuasive myth of the total maliciousness of the world and of 'society'; just as formerly everyone in Germany and Austria believed in Heidegger and in Hitler, and in war. But the mistaken belief in maliciousness is itself malicious: it disheartens young people and leads them astray into doubts and into despair, and even into violence. Although this mistaken belief is essentially political, the old interpretation of Darwinism has nevertheless contributed to it.

A very important thesis forms part of the pessimistic ideology, namely, that the adaptation of life to the environment and all these (to my mind wonderful) inventions of life over billions of years, which we are not yet able to recreate in the laboratory today, are not inventions at all, but the product of sheer chance. It is claimed that life has invented nothing at all, it is all the mechanism of purely chance mutations and of natural selection; the internal pressure of life is nothing more than self-reproduction. Everything else comes about through our struggle, indeed blind struggle, against each other and against nature. And things (in my view, wonderful things) like the use of sunlight as food are the result of chance.

I maintain that this is once againjust an ideology, and indeed a part of the old ideology. To this ideology, by the way, belong the myth of the selfish gene (for genes can only function and survive by co-operating), and the revived social Darwinism that is currently being presented as a brand-new and naively deterministic 'sociobiology'.

I should now like to put together the main points of the two ideologies.

1. Old: Selection pressure from without functions by killing: it eliminates. The environment is therefore hostile to life.

New: The active selection pressure from within constitutes the search for a better environment, for better ecological niches, for a better world. It is favourable to life in the highest degree. Life improves the environment for life, it makes the environment more favourable to life (and friendlier for man).

2. Old: Organisms are completely passive, but they are actively selected.

New: Organisms are active: they are constantly preoccupied with problem-solving. Life consists in problem-solving. The solution is often the choice or the construction of a new ecological niche. Not only are the organisms active, their activity is constantly on the increase. (The attempt to deny activity in humans - as the determinists do - is paradoxical, especially with regard to our critical mental activity.) If animal life began in the sea - as we may suppose - then its environment was in many respects fairly uniform. Nevertheless the animals (with the exception of the insects) developed into vertebrates before they went on to land. The environment was equally favourable to life and relatively undifferentiated, but life itself diversified into an unforeseeably large number of different forms.

3. Old: Mutations are a matter of pure chance.

New: Yes; but the organisms are constantly inventing wonderful things that improve life. Nature, evolution and organisms are all inventive. They work, as inventors, in the same way that we do: using the method of trial and the elimination of errors.

4. Old: We live in a hostile environment that is changed by evolution through cruel eliminations.

New: The first cell is still living after billions of years, and now even in many trillions of copies. Wherever we look, it is there. It has made a garden of our earth and transformed our atmosphere with green plants. And it created our eyes and opened them to the blue sky and the stars. It is doing well.

Source: In search of a better world: lectures and essays from thirty years

2. Hindu Denominations Explained