Different in degree or kind: a book agrees with Adler (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, February 08, 2016, 21:05 (2998 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: A philosophy professor who sounds just like Adler:-http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Evolution-Nature-Evolutionary-Explanation/dp/0198250045/re...-David's comment: Smells of Adler's thinking. The difference in humans is enormous, and NOT required for survival. Ask both how and why!-I shall only reproduce one quote, as it sums everything else up:-“O'Hear examines the nature of human self-consciousness, and argues that evolutionary theory cannot give a satisfactory account of such distinctive facets of human life as the quest for knowledge, moral sense, and the appreciation of beauty; in these we transcend our biological origins.”-I am not going to minimize the gulf between our consciousness and that of our fellow animals, but I simply cannot accept the basic premises of this argument. All organisms are embarked on a quest for knowledge (a) of their environment, and (b) of how to cope with it and with any problems that might arise in the course of their existence, because if they were not, they would not survive. It is the scale of their search that marks the difference, but in the context of evolution, yet again it seems to me essential to point out that survival is not the only driving force: without the quest for IMPROVEMENT, life would not have needed to go beyond bacteria. Darwinian evolution attributes improvement to random mutations, followed by natural selection, but if we attribute it to a conscious quest (survival and improvement would probably have been very closely linked in the early days of homo), our own expansion of knowledge can be seen as an extension of that driving force. As regards morality, it always pains me to hear the subject even mentioned in this way. It's as if the writer has never heard of social organisms, which could not survive if they did not have clear rules to live by. Human societies down through the ages have also had different moral codes, but so long as those codes held society together or were not replaced by those of conquering nations, they survived. Social efficiency is the basis of morality, and I would argue that our morality is an extension of all the codes that have enabled other social organisms to survive. -I agree that in both cases - the quest for knowledge and the moral sense - our self-awareness has driven us far beyond our immediate needs, and that may also be the case with aesthetics. I don't know why Henry Hippo prefers Helen Hippo's looks to those of Hillary Hippo, or why Lily Lark prefers Larry's song to that of Leslie, any more than I know why some people prefer Monet to Magritte, or Bach to Beethoven, or blondes to brunettes, but although I accept that there is a difference here between the pragmatic and the aesthetic, they need not be unconnected.
 
In brief, for all the gulf in scale, I don't see why anyone should believe that our quest for knowledge and our moral and aesthetic sense are not an evolutionary extension of the same characteristics to be found in our animal ancestors.