popper, deutsch, dawkins and darwin

Hi DD - I was wondering...why did you list Dawkins as one of your four
strands? I wouldn't say he's a historically important figure in Science,
though certainly he's a v.significant contemporary of yours. But he
hasn't produced important theories, or dramatically advanced any that
are pre-existing, or has he?

He wrote a landmark popular science book about the gene-centric view,
and gave it the 'selfish gene' label, but he was only writing about the
gene-centric view, he didn't invent it. He did introduce the idea of
memes, and that was his idea, so perhaps you elevated him because of
that. But that would mean Darwinian Evolution - Evolution - wasn't one
of the strands at all.

Or, if Dawkins was meant to represent Darwinism in its corrected 'New
Synthesis' form, then do you still stand by that judgement call, or in
hindsight would you now say the fourth strand is the modern
manifestation of Darwin's idea?

On the subject of Darwin's Idea, now turning to Popper. He - Popper -
surely is a very significant historical figure who contributed a great
deal of original work. Those volumes of brilliance are all his. But his
Big Idea...the simple concept that glues all of his theories together
and makes the body of work profound - is the same as Darwin's Idea, or
do you think not? I am interested to know your reasoning, and in the
meantime will advance my own.

We're talking about Darwin's natural selection. The way I see it, the
argument favouring an independent discovery by Popper,  would be that he
- Popper - does define the components in a completely different way, and
as such the 'mechanism' he ends up with is different...one difference
being it is no longer 'natural' selection. And since Darwin's mechanism
definitively is 'natural selection' all of this would suggest Popper's
discovery was independnet and his own. On the face of things, it does
seem like a compelling line of argument.

But the above argument, and I think probably all possible variations of
the argument, really is totally misconceived and mistaken. The reason is
not because there is anything wrong with the reasoning itself. Nor is it
because any of the assertions within the reasoning are wrong, or
innaccurate. Popper did add originality in the way he defined those
components, and the resulting mechanism is clearly radically different.
It could even be that Popper's mechanism sits above Darwin's where
'natural selection' is a sort of special case.

All of this can wholeheartedly be accepted in the strongest possible
terms, and it won't make a jot of difference. Because the misconception
that falsifies the argument that Popper's idea was original and not
Darwin's is way more fundamental than any of that, and takes place
before the pro-popper argument is created in the first place. The
misconception is actually about Darwin's Idea.

What is Darwin's Idea...what made - and makes - 'natural selection' so
powerful and definitive? Is it the specific, detailed, definitions of
the components? How can that be so, when Darwin only vaguely grasped
what he saw must be happening? No.

The reason natural selection is profound is the opposite of that. The
'force' of natural selection emerges when a set of separate
observations/insights are considered together. Those underlying
observations or insights - or components - do become extremely important
in their own right, taking on distinctive non-trivial (and in their own
right, evolving) definitions. But they don't have to be detailed. They
don't even have to be non-trivial. They can be stated vaguely, and
'natural selection' will still emerge when the set of them are
considered all together, and all the profound implications right there
along with it.

Natural Selection is the structural arrangement - juxtapositioning - of
individual phenomena that considered alone might or might not - but
*need not* be - interesting. The reason the discovery is called
profound, and Darwin regarded at the top most table of scientific
greats, is because natural selection has to happen. And the reason it
has to happen is the independence of the emergence of it, to components
which descriptively are reducibe to the vague/trivial.

From trivial roots arises Natural Selection and that is why it is
profound, and why people knew it was correct generations before science
had a handle on how it worked. The explanation for where does the
substance come from is the increasingly substantial relationships
between those components, ultimately leading to natural selection
itself. And so by direct implication of how it comes about, Natural
Selection is a *structure* level conception that describes an
emergence...not just of natural selection itself, but the knock-on also,
of its attributes of power, far-reachingness and profundity that made it
famous and Darwin a genius. Those attributes are literally the robust
attributes of that deceptively simple underlying structure of
relationships.

And so those are the terms on which Darwin's Idea are, and must be,
defined - and this is why Popper's idea does not, and cannot, qualify as
original to Popper. Different though it is in its specifics, at the
*structural* level Popper's Big Idea is identical to Darwin's. The same
underlying components, with the same relationships arising, delivering
the same insights of far-reaching profundity. It doesn't matter what
differently Popper did in his specific definitions, because those
definitions can stripped back - reducible - to a trivial/vague core.

At that abstract/stucture level the only differences between Popper's
and Darwin's mechanism, are negatively scored against Popper. There is
less true independence, because some of Popper's components invoke large
assumptions....about human rationality, the human condition and so on.
Maybe all of it correct, or substantially or mostly correct, or at least
partially. Who knows...but what it definitely is is a very large and far
extending stack of assumptions. And the profundity of natural selection
is - as described above - very much a function of the absense or
minimization of assumptions, and it is for that reason it it can be said
that - by definition - it is not possible that Popper successfully
preserves the profundity of Darwin's Idea across into his version of
natural selection.

Which is not to say Popper's version lacks profundity. But it is
dependent on how well all those assumptions reflect the real world.
Which is the normal structure of dependencies for pretty much every
scientific theory...except Darwin's.