Homo sapien is an aggressive primate species sharing a common ancestor with Hominini genera. Objectivism reifies Homo sapien into humanity by rejecting the primacy of nature and ignoring that humans are essentially apex predators which have eliminated all competition. Objectivism corresponds to this struggle for existence only by framing humanity in heroic terms rather than the brute Darwinian reality.
Did Rand ever specifically address Darwinism and On the Origins of Species?
Man evolved from a quadrupedal rat-like, which itself evolved from some kind of reptile. At some point, our remote ancestors had gills and swam in the ocean. None of these animals could talk, write books, build skyscrapers or program computers. Some of our mammal cousins survive by licking lichen off of rocks, others run really fast and rip the throats out of their prey, we cannot do either of these things. Do you now see the flaw in your thinking? (Clue: I used a particular relevant verb in that sentence).
3 hours ago, hedonic said:
Objectivism corresponds to this struggle for existence only by framing humanity in heroic terms rather than the brute Darwinian reality.
Objectivism does not correspond with or concern itself with “humanity” or the species.
It is to be understood through the lens of individuals.
Flourishing is the heroic act of a mortal being capable of thinking, it is also firmly embedded in the possibilities and eventualities of the reality of leading one’s life. As such Objectivism is about reality and nothing else.
On 10/25/2022 at 10:36 AM, Boydstun said:
. . .
I do not think we should join philosophers in their old arm-chairing of the evolution of consciousness or self-consciousness. We should rather overrule them or congratulate them with findings of modern developmental cognitive psychology***** and anthropology. For example, Michael Tomasello’s A Natural History of Human Thinking should be used to grade the arm-chair folk. One sorry blindness of philosophers from Descartes to Schelling is their failure to notice the fundamental social requirements for human consciousness.
. . .
Welcome, Hedonic, to _Objectivism Online. _I like very much that you have shown the photograph of (I’ll assume) yourself. It is a help in keeping visceral that one is writing to a human being.
Wouldn’t you say that behind the rise of Homo sapiens as tops in violence with other animals was their evolving brain for better communication with each other and for greater creativity in techniques, weapons, and other utilities? It strikes me that humans got to be winners against other animals by getting greater intelligence useful for socially organized defenses and for better discernment of subtleties of nature. Humans came onto the American continents from the west and won against the sabertooth tiger. Nature remains a dangerous giant, as when there are earthquakes, but the pretty good survivability of humans against the elements and disease and starvation and wild animals seems to me due to human intelligence.
There is a tendency in humans to personify nature and collections of individual people. They tend to make up invisible powerful person-like spirits or gods. Humans tend to blame themselves when something goes bad for them in the world. An they tend to give credit for the good things they have made by themselves to the non-human higher spirits and gods.
I think it is alright to somewhat personify human kind in the old way of speaking with the term man. One can keep in mind that one is speaking of our kind across its history of particular developments, calamities, and successes. At the same time, by man one can speak of the outline of an individual who carries human kind in its composition. He deserves a pat on the back, and he can be sketch of a role model for human goodness, while recognizing full well the haywires of human kind past and present. Where there is no fallibility, there is no intelligence.
I have previously compiled the information that directly answers your question. When I find it, I’ll add it to this thread.
Humans evolved to possess the faculty of reason and to be able to live by it. This made a crucial difference.
13 hours ago, hedonic said:
. . .
Did Rand ever specifically address Darwinism and On the Origins of Species?
Objectivist philosopher Lennox
Objectivist philosopher Binswanger
Cf. Haeckel:
Ernst Haeckel was the premier champion of Darwin’s theory of evolution in German lands. Darwin’s Origins of the Species (1859) had come into German translation in 1860. Haeckel mastered the theory and soon embraced it. Some of Haeckel’s work in biology provided significant evidence for the theory beyond evidence mustered in Origins. In that work, Darwin had withheld judgment on whether humans were descended from other animal species. Since the eighteenth century in Germany, there had been speculations concerning the development of life from hypothetical amorphous forms into the greater articulation and ramification seen in species today. Thinkers such as Herder and Schelling had included in these pre-Darwinian accounts of species transformation speculations of how human kind had arisen. Haeckel charged immediately from Origins to the conclusion that humans descended from other, less perfect animals, and he alleged in print new implications for human nature and society. In 1871 Darwin would publish his own evolutionary conclusions and conjectures concerning humans (see Richards 1999, 135–45).
Haeckel wrote popular accounts of his evolutionary ideas in 1868 and 1874, which became best sellers. Three decades later, he issued three more popular books on his evolutionary ethics, or social Darwinism. One of them The Riddle of the Universe (1899) sold a hundred thousand copies in its first year. “It quickly became Germany’s most popular philosophic work” (Gasman 2004, 14). In this book, Haeckel staunchly defends atheism, proclaims a scientific morality based on evolution, and derides Kant and much of Christian morality.
Cf. Guyau and Nietzsche:
In this period (1885–86), Nietzsche made a few doodles in his notebooks concerning procreation and how it might be portrayed in terms of will to power, but these were not ideas sufficiently developed and secure for him commit to publication. Some of these jottings are included in the posthumous collection of his notes called The Will to Power. Nietzsche remarks in Beyond Good and Evil §36 that procreation and nutrition are “a single problem.” He seems to be following Ernst Haeckel or following Guyau following Haeckel: “‘Reproduction’, says Haeckel, ‘is an excess of nutrition and growth in consequence of which a part of the individual is created [as becoming another individual] independent in everything’” (S 82). Nietzsche’s single solution (explanation) for this “single” problem (phenomenon) is his ubiquitous efficacious force, the will to power.
Guyau included biological fecundity in his basic characterization of all life. For human life, this encompassed not only procreation, but intellectual fecundity and practical productivity (S 76, 183–84, 214).
Sorry, hedonic, but I have not been able to locate my earlier compilation on Rand's direct address. So for now, this is all I've the time and info to contribute.
20 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:
Objectivism does not correspond with or concern itself with “humanity” or the species.
It is to be understood through the lens of individuals.
Flourishing is the heroic act of a mortal being capable of thinking, it is also firmly embedded in the possibilities and eventualities of the reality of leading one’s life. As such Objectivism is about reality and nothing else.
I inadvertently failed to include the important factor that the mortal being is one “with free will”.
So:
Flourishing is the heroic act of a mortal being capable of thinking and acting on his own free will.
Whether or not statistically speaking one may claim “humanity” IS some percentage this or that… unheroic, criminal, insane… this does not of necessity say anything about any particular person … as individual beings with rationality and free will I am the author of my own soul and am responsible and responsive to determine my life’s path from all the possibilities within my power.
21 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:
Objectivism does not correspond with or concern itself with “humanity” or the species.
. . .
Then Rand did not make claims about humans in general? We have conceptions of human being and human nature without giving attention to any families or classes with desks seating students or singing together in music class?
Rand was very concerned to grasp and convey what is human nature. She did not go Cartesian on us to find the answer. She did not conclude that man is either a rational animal or a suicidal one without looking at human kind and its history. And she showed care for humanity, each one in their good potential according with the standard MAN. As in here.
Claims about man or the human race should be integrated with all we know of our kind of being from history and from all our sciences of humans.
29 minutes ago, Boydstun said:
Then Rand did not make claims about humans in general? We have conceptions of human being and human nature without giving attention to any families or classes with desks seating students or singing together in music class?
Rand was very concerned to grasp and convey what is human nature. She did not go Cartesian on us to find the answer. She did not conclude that man is either a rational animal or a suicidal one without looking at human kind and its history. And she showed care for humanity, each one in their good potential according with the standard MAN. As in here.
Claims about man or the human race should be integrated with all we know of our kind of being from history and from all our sciences of humans.
The OP claimed the “species” as some kind of whole or collective IS aggressive. That Objectivism was not directed to the species but only some heroic fantasy representation of it. This indicated to me an implicit collective “we” perspective of thought … as a hammer see everything as a nail, I sensed an attitude that assumes “Objectivism” is just another “ism” meant for US… (the central planners, utopians, coordinating types frame everything, ethics, politics, and society in this vein… WE need something to make US better, selfless, obedient etc) I was attempting to nudge this person to understand, that NO indeed, this is not a central planners guide to utopia for some collective, not a prescription for any US, not even humanity, or the species,
it is a font of truth for everyONE, anyONE, each ONE of us who wishes to understand and to live.
SL, I understood the OP to be simply questioning the Randian view of human nature and thinking it at odds with a view informed by human evolution. (Perhaps not very well informed, and perhaps not even very interested as it turns out.)
Unfortunately, there has been no response from hedonic, and I incline to think now that this OP was just another of those posts generated from AI resources for the amusement of the perpetrator in sending us into spending time digging and talking to nobody. I’m going to stop now, making any responses to newcomers until some evidence accumulates that they are a real person sincerely wanting to talk to real people here. I know I’m a little paranoid now about what appears anywhere online these days. Evaporation of online trust was one of the near-term effect predicted by Hinton, AI guy (among other distinctions), as I recall, when he left Google.
On 7/25/2024 at 3:50 AM, Boydstun said:
Sorry, hedonic, but I have not been able to locate my earlier compilation on Rand’s direct address. So for now, this is all I’ve the time and info to contribute.
Well that is what I’m primarily interested in . What Ayn Rand herself said about Darwinism and natural selection. She seems to have been silent on this subject for the most part.
21 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:
The OP claimed the “species” as some kind of whole or collective IS aggressive. That Objectivism was not directed to the species but only some heroic fantasy representation of it.
This is it in a nutshell. Ayn Rand was a self-confessed romantic and Objectivism is no less romantic in contrast to the Darwinian aggression which underpins a species which 98.8 percent genetically similar to Pan troglodytes.
14 minutes ago, hedonic said:
This is it in a nutshell. Ayn Rand was a self-confessed romantic and Objectivism is no less romantic in contrast to the Darwinian aggression which underpins a species which 98.8 percent genetically similar to Pan troglodytes.
So, even if what you claim were true in reality, and I make no reference whatsoever to my understanding of what you truly believe, merely assuming what you claim is absolute truth…
can you choose not to act as the 98.8 percent do? can you choose to be in the 98.8 percent or the 1.2 percent? if you have an innate tendency or drives or aggression can you determine whether or not you act on them and when you do, how you act on them?
can you obtain knowledge? do you have free will… can you choose how to live based on that knowledge? is it possible there is something you might learn by studying Objectivism? something that might enrich your life or help you in your exercise of free wlll?
3 hours ago, hedonic said:
in contrast to the Darwinian aggression which underpins a species which 98.8 percent genetically similar to Pan troglodytes.
That “percentage similarity” figure is highly misleading, a better statement is that there are 35 million differences. Darwin had absolutely nothing to say about DNA, he only spoke vaguely of gemmules, particles of inheritance, which in fact was a theory developed by the Greeks millennia earlier. Philosophically-speaking, the specific mechanism is irrelevant, what matters is that traits are inherited from parents. From which it follows that two beings with the faculty of reason will by nature have an offspring with the same trait. It is equally self-evident that there is some mechanism of change of traits: Darwin set forth a scientific basis for understanding how that happens. His was a scientific theory of history (one not correct in all details) whereas Objectivism is a philosophical theory of the nature of man. For which reason (different subject matter) Rand would not have addressed your implication. As I explained above and as is well known in evolutionary science, there are massive substantive differences between humans and apes especially in cognition.
1 hour ago, DavidOdden said:
Darwin had absolutely nothing to say about DNA, His was a scientific theory of history (one not correct in all details)
He had nothing to say about DNA because it hadn’t been discovered yet. Indeed Mendelian inheritance wasn’t rediscovered until the early 20th century. The modern synthesis explains macroevolution quite elegantly. Objectivism is appealing to human exceptionalism and is quite speciesist. I put it to you that the Caledonian Crow has advanced cognition as any human and its rights should outstrip those of humans.
3 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:
do you have free will…
The question should rather be is Objectivism rendered obsolete if free will does not exist.
On 7/24/2024 at 8:29 AM, hedonic said:
Homo sapien is an aggressive primate species sharing a common ancestor with Hominini genera. Objectivism reifies Homo sapien into humanity by rejecting the primacy of nature and ignoring that humans are essentially apex predators which have eliminated all competition. Objectivism corresponds to this struggle for existence only by framing humanity in heroic terms rather than the brute Darwinian reality.
Did Rand ever specifically address Darwinism and On the Origins of Species?
6 hours ago, hedonic said:
Well that is what I’m primarily interested in . What Ayn Rand herself said about Darwinism and natural selection. She seems to have been silent on this subject for the most part.
@hedonic There are a few places where Rand addressed Darwin’s achievement directly. On one occasion, in presenting “The Objectivist Ethics”, she added a footnote of clarification, by way of tuning to Darwin, probably at the urging of her younger associates. You can spot that note easily; it is the only footnote. That concerns the reduction of long-recognized teleological actions at the vegetative level to the process of natural selection in the modern understanding. That is, a benefit to life of a poplar tree, for example, routinely comes about, but not by an intentionality (God or nature-spirit) or irreducible final causation behind the suitable outcome. I say “added” because Rand had earlier read her essay at a public-intellectual venue at University of Wisconsin in Madison (photo attached) with the caveat in her footnote absent.
That is not your main focus in this thread of relationship of Rand’s view of human beings and Darwin’s, given his scientific advance. Lots of philosophers tried to report out implications of the Darwinian revolution, usually its implications for religion, ethics, and politics, as you surely know. I mentioned some German ones upstream, and I imagine you know the English ones (which Rand mentioned in her essay “For the New Intellectual”, which you can readily access). The top implication you draw about human beings from your assimilation of Darwin is that humans are the top predators. That is not enough. Native Americans had the intelligence to set grass on fire such that a bunch of buffalo would stampede themselves off a cliff so that these humans could get food and clothing from the buffalo. It is plain that it is high human intelligence that makes his kind the top predator (NOT that more than anything else, he is consumed with predation) and tops at adjusting his surroundings and consumptions to his kinds’ needs and desires. What makes you think Darwin says or implies otherwise?
One thing that Rand rejected when imputed from biology of animals to man was instinct (as you may know if you have read Rand’s text that is Galt’s Speech in Atlas Shrugged or N. Branden’s The Psychology of Self-Esteem or Peikoff’s Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand). So far as I know, instinct theory was nothing affected by Darwin’s revolution. Correct me if I’m wrong on that. Rand took the same view taken by Schopenhauer on instinct in humans: it is displaced by intelligence in humans. Schopenhauer kept himself educated on the latest discoveries in biology, but his life ended just before Darwin’s first book on evolution. The issue of instincts in humans preceded the revolution and continues to the present. Instinct in humans has certain more particular specifications by Freud for his special endeavor. As you may know, Rand rejected Freud’s picture of the human psyche. You can read about that in the book by N. Branden I mentioned, should it interest you.
There is a place where Rand speaks of the far past of humans where she should have been using actual anthropology, brain evolution, and so forth. But, perhaps falling into the error you have proposed, hedonic, she instead imagines (rather as in Plato’s use of myths) an individual who makes some crucial original step of great benefit to subsequent human kind. When I find that text, I’ll let you know.
For now let me leave you one text in which Rand spoke directly of modern evolutionary understanding. This is from an essay with a somewhat metaphorical title “The Missing Link”.
Quote
I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent. [All of her followers were supporters of Darwinian evolution.] But a certain hypothesis has haunted me for years; I want to stress that it is only a hypothesis. There is an enormous breach of continuity between man and all the other living species. The difference lies in the nature of man’s consciousness, in its distinctive characteristic: his conceptual faculty. It is as if, after aeons of physiological development, the evolutionary process altered its course, and the higher stages of development focused primarily on the consciousness of living species [and on brains and communication, I’d add!], not their bodies. But the development of a man’s consciousness is volitional [which is supported by distinctive brain process, I’d add!]: no matter what the innate degree of his intelligence, he must develop it, he must learn how to use it, he must become a human being by choice. What if he does not choose to? Then he becomes a transitional phenomenon—a desperate creature that struggles frantically against his own nature, longing for the effortless “safety” of an animal’s consciousness, which he cannot recapture, and rebelling against a human consciousness, which he is afraid to achieve.
For years, scientists have been looking for a missing link between man and animals. Perhaps that missing link is the anti-conceptual mentality.
2 hours ago, hedonic said:
The question should rather be is Objectivism rendered obsolete if free will does not exist.
I would reframe… is ANY philosophy, any form of knowledge, and any morality or ethics rendered pointless for you to try to pursue or act upon if you actually have no free will? And to be more specific, if you actually have no free will why bother pretending to choose to reject or accept Objectivism or any philosophy?
Classic instance of fallacy of “the stolen concept”.
“..is the fallacy of using a concept [e.g. free will] while denying the validity of its genetic roots, i.e., of an earlier concept(s) [free will] on which it logically depends.”
Takes a free will to deny free will.
2 hours ago, hedonic said:
I put it to you that the Caledonian Crow has advanced cognition as any human and its rights should outstrip those of humans.
We can’t nail jelly to a tree, you need to make a concrete claim, support it with evidence, then we can tell you what Objectivism has to say about the claim. Apparently DNA difference was a red herring, so was the supposed “aggressive” trait of mammals being inherited. Now we move to an assertion about crows and rights. Point me to an author who is a crow, or an engineer who is a crow. Plainly, you cannot. Your argument reduces to the illogical claim that since a crow has more advanced cognition than a tardigrade, crows have the same “rights” as humans. You fail to understand the unique nature of human cognition. Yes, we are speciesist, blame the crows for failing to evolve adequately. Name-calling is not a valid argument. Try to make a concrete claim that has a relationship to Objectivism: spell out your logic, don’t just blurt out your conclusion.
