• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 650 0

biologists call these patterns “arms races,” invoking the image of how each move in the technology of warfare has evoked a countermove, all the way from the stirrup and the lance to the SAM missile and the stealth bomber. Arms races occur at many different levels of the biological domain all the way down to the DNA. We have come across them before in this book. There are whole research programs devoted to the evolutionary arms races between copies of selfish genes that live together on the same chromosomes for millions of years and struggle constantly to exploit one another.

As arms races speed up, they increasingly limit the biologist’s ability to predict the future course of evolution, for biologists cannot tell how individual groups or species temporarily locked in competition or cooperation with each other will break out of the pattern. This is because variation is constant and blind. The “space of alternative variations” through which mutation and gene shuffling can “search” for new and improved adaptations is huge. It cannot be charted by any biologist. And even if biologists could do so, exactly which variations actually emerge is an equally insolvable problem. Whenever members of groups find themselves competing (or for that matter temporarily cooperating against some third gene), small variations in the traits of each will continually emerge. The variations are random and can’t be foreseen by anyone. Eventually, one variation or other will provide one of the animals with an advantage over a competitor. Or it will provide an opportunity to take advantage of another animal’s temporary cooperation. In biology, nothing is forever; no matter how long a pattern or a regularity holds, it will eventually be overthrown, and overthrown in a way that biologists can’t predict. This is the problem faced in agricultural and medical technology. Eventually, every breakthrough in antibiotic or pesticide research is overtaken by an unforeseen new random variant in its target population.

Natural selection is the process Darwin discovered operating in natural history. Human history is just the recent natural history of Homo sapiens. So the study of human history can’t be any more predicatively useful than the study of natural history. In fact, it has to be much less useful. Soon after the Darwinian process passed through 13.6998 billion years of evolution and arrived at us, the arms races became fast, furious, and pervasive. Nothing in human culture remains constant long enough to be relied on to forecast the future.

Once humans appeared on the scene and began competing, first with the megafauna, then with Homo erectus and the Neanderthals, and finally with one another, the arms races ceased to be conducted only between genetically inherited traits. Now they began also to be fought between variant behaviors, tools, strategies, moves, and countermoves that were and continue to be culturally transmitted and selected.

The design space of biological variation is huge. It’s all the genetically possible ways in which traits can change. The design space of human cultural variation is many, many, many orders of magnitude larger. It’s all the behaviorally possible ways in which human traits can change. And the environments—the cultures that filter the behavioral variants—are themselves changing continually as well. The combination of unaccountable variation filtered by continually changing environments makes the future of human evolutionary trajectories totally unpredictable, no matter how much we know about their past trajectories. That’s why history is bunk.

Human history is a thoroughly Darwinian process. Like all other Darwinian processes, it can’t repeat itself, not even as farce. It is always and unpredictably producing novelty, which historical study can’t anticipate. The lesson of history—both natural and human—is that there are no lessons to extract from it.

SCIENTISM HAS TO BE DARWINIAN ABOUT HUMAN AFFAIRS

If human affairs really are Darwinian, then like biological processes, they will have no meaning, and they will be driven