제가 아래에 쓴 글 에 대해 intellectual wunderlust의 새로운 글 이 빨리 올라왔네요. 그래서 자기 전에 하나 더 써 봅니다.
적자생존이 항진명제(tautology)인지 하는 것은 제가 생각해낸 것이 아니라(그랬으면 얼마나 좋겠습니까), 칼 포퍼가 한 말이죠.
When speaking here of Darwinism, I shall speak always of today’s theory—that is Darwin’s own theory of natural selection supported by the Mendelian theory of heredity, by the theory of the mutation and recombination of genes in a gene pool, and the decoded genetic code. This is an immensely impressive and powerful theory. The claim that it completely explains evolution is of course a bold claim, and very far from being established. All scientific theories are conjectures, even those that have successfully passed many and varied tests. The Mendelian underpinning of modern Darwinism has been well tested, and so has the theory of evolution which says that all terrestrial life has evolved from a few primitive unicellular organisms, possibly even from one single organism…
The fact that the theory of natural selection is difficult to test has led some people, anti-Darwinists and even some great Darwinists, to claim that it is a tautology. A tautology like “All tables are tables” is not, of course, testable; nor has it any explanatory power. It is therefore most surprising to hear that some of the greatest contemporary Darwinists themselves formulate the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology that those organisms that leave the most offspring leave the most offspring. And C.H. Waddington even says somewhere (and he defends this view in other places) that “Natural selection … turns out … to be a tautology”. However, he attributes at the same place to the theory an “enormous power … of explanation”. Since the explanatory power of a tautology is obviously zero, something must be wrong here. (Karl Popper on the scientific status of Darwin’s theory of evolution)
위키피디어의 칼 포퍼 항목에도 다윈주의 논쟁에 대한 것이 있습니다.
아래 글에서 한 말도 제가 그렇게 생각한다기보다는 다윈주의가 tautology로 이해될 수 있는 방식으로 구성될 수 있다고 믿는 사람이 많고, 그렇게 구성하는 사람도 실제로 많았다는 것이구요, 그리고 다윈주의가 애국주의의 근거라기보다는 애국주의의 근거로 이용된 사례가 많다는 이야기였죠. 리처드 도킨스도 비슷한 이야기를 합니다. 그러니까 두 개의 포인트에서 intellectual wanderlust에서 하는 말이나 제가 하는 말이나 그닥 틀린 이야기는 아니지만, 실제로 그렇게 이용된 경우가 많았었다는 이야기인거죠. (이론적으로) 그럴 가능성이 전혀 없다고 하는 것은 (실제로) 그렇게 이해한 사람이 있었다는 이야기에 대한 답은 아니죠. ^^ 리처드 도킨스 인용해 봅니다.
Evolution works by natural selection, and natural selection means the differential survival of the ‘fittest.’ But are we talking about the fittest individuals, the fittest races, the fittest species, or what? For some purposes this does not greatly matter, but when we are talking about altruism it is obviously crucial. If it is species that are competing in what Darwin called the struggle for existence, the individual seems best regarded as a pawn in the game, to be sacrificed when the greater interest of the species as a whole requires it. To put it in a slightly more respectable way, a group, such as a species or a population within a species, whose individual members are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group, may be less likely to go extinct than a rival group whose individual members place their own selfish interests first. Therefore the world becomes populated mainly by groups consisting of self-sacrificing individuals. This is the theory of ‘group selection,’ long assumed to be true by biologists not familiar with the details of evolutionary theory, brought out into the open in a famous book by V.C. Wynne-Edwards, and popularized by Robert Ardrey in The Social Contract. The orthodox alternative is normally called ‘individual selection,’ although I personally prefer to speak of gene selection. (The Selfish Gene, p. 7)
그리고,
Although the group-selection theory now commands little support within the ranks of those professional biologists who understand evolution, it does have great intuitive appeal. Successive generations of zoology students are surprised, when they come up from school, to find that it is not the orthodox point of view. For this they are hardly blamed, for in the Nuffield Biology Teachers’ Guide, written for advanced level biology schoolteachers in Britain, we find the following: ‘In higher animals, behavior may take the form of individual suicide to ensure the survival of the species.’ The anonymous author of this guide is blissfully ignorant of the fact that he has said something controversial. In this respect he is in Nobel Prize-winning company. Konrad Lorenz, in On Aggression, speaks of the ‘species preserving’ functions of aggressive behavior, one of these functions being to make sure that only the fittest individuals are allowed to breed. This is a gem of a circular argument, but the point I am making here is that the group selection idea is so deeply ingrained that Lorenz, like the author of the Nuffield Guide, evidently did not realize that his statements contravened orthodox Darwinian theory. (p. 8)
손 아파서 번역은 못하겠네요. 그러니까 핵심은 집단 수준에서의 적자생존이라는 이야기는 아주 광범위하게 퍼져있는 이야기인 셈이구요, 지금은 주류가 아니지만, 꽤 많이 받아들여졌던 이야기인거구요… 나치즘과 사회진화론의 관계도 꽤나 많이 알려진 이야기죠.
