Evolution

I think I was watching a clip of Miley Cyrus. I was scrolling through Twitter and didn't linger on it long enough to be sure, only long enough to catch the words, "I've evolved in front of you all." This put me in mind of something that intermittently troubles me: the paradox at the heart of the contemporary use of the word 'evolution'. The word is associated now mainly with Darwin, but I'm not sure we have Darwin to blame for that. I am intrigued by this question: how was 'evolution' used and what did it mean, before Darwin arrived to bring to public consciousness those ideas of natural selection and "descent with modification" with which the word then became associated? Etymology Online gives us clues, but not much more:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/evolution#etymonline_v_29764

The paradox at the heart of current use is this: it seems to lean on the authority of Darwin's theory, which has become, at least in reputation, among the most unassailable of all scientific theories, but it implicitly ascribes to it a value that is not only not affirmed in Darwin's theory, but is positively denied. That 'value' is teleology, what we might call 'end purpose'. All who invoke 'the right side of history', often by contrast with the wrong side, are -- and I believe this is usually without knowing -- also invoking teleology by implication. The phrase suggests that there is an inevitable end goal to history from which position all that preceded will be judged. But the theory of natural selection is a theory of accidental change, neither good nor bad, without any end purpose. Modernity, with the so-called Scientific Revolution, simplified theories of causation. One casualty among the causalities was the Aristotelian 'telos' or 'final cause'; that which causes things by being the end purpose and destination. 

When people use 'evolution' or 'evolve' with a positive value, as I believe Miley Cyrus did, they are implying the following: there is a scale of values, better and worse, rising to a highest value; we are evolving, meaning that we are rising on that scale to our final goal.

This is a paradox if it is being used while being conflated, consciously or otherwise, with Darwinian theory, which denies such metaphysics. It is not a paradox if this is merely an older use of the word that has survived without reference to Darwin. I think the latter possibility unlikely, but I could be wrong.

I say "paradox", but perhaps I should say "self-contradiction". I don't think it can be sustained as a living mystery in the way that we sometimes see paradox sustained.

 


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