The Critical Rationalist Vol. 01 No. 04 ISSN: 1393-3809 31-Dec-1996
5.1.4 Misconception 2: Words
5.1.2 What Spencer Meant To Say?
(62) As detailed in the previous section, once the premises for natural selection are granted (and this is an empirical question) then the outcome--"the survival of the fittest"--is assured. That is, if we adopt these premises as axioms, in the sense of a formal logical system (i.e. they are taken to be "true" by definition), then "the survival of the fittest" becomes a theorem of the system, which is to say, in the strict terminology of formal logic, a tautology.
(63) This is, of course, a technically valid point;
but it can hardly be called a criticism. It
amounts to interpreting Spencer's phrase only
as the (necessarily "tautological")
conclusion of a certain deduction--rather than as an
implicit assertion of the truth of the premises which
lead to that conclusion. This is at best pedantic, at
worst misleading. It is equivalent to saying that
(say) is a tautology--given the relevant
properties of E, m and c. As Maynard Smith has
put it,
Of course Darwinism contains tautological features: any scientific theory containing two lines of algebra does so...
(64) This is such a peculiar misconception that it seems difficult to believe that it should genuinely arise. In practise I suggest that it does not normally arise in isolation, but may be combined with one of the other distinct misconceptions yet to be described. Having said that, there is at least one case where this misconception seems to have been uniquely involved:
The notion of natural selection depends on the empirically verifiable observation that offspring on the average resemble their parents more closely than they do the other members of the population, that individuals are not all the same; that all environments are not the same. Concepts such as natural selection by the survival of the fittest are tautologous; that is, they simply restate the fact that only the properties of organisms which survive to produce offspring, or to produce more offspring than their cohorts, will appear in succeeding generations.
Eden does seem to use the correct interpretation of Spencer's phrase (notwithstanding the fact that he immediately goes on to use "survive" in the sense of I-survival rather than L-survival); but insofar as he describes it as a tautology he merely seems to mean that any valid deduction ("restatement") from true premises is a "tautology". While formally correct, the observation does not add anything except, possibly, confusion.
(65) Consider also, the following comment from Dawkins:
Biologists thought they needed a word for that hypothetical quantity that tends to be maximized as a result of natural selection. They could have chosen `selective potential', or `survivability', or `W' but in fact they lit upon `fitness'. They did the equivalent of recognizing that the definition they were seeking must be `whatever it takes to make the survival of the fittest into a tautology'. They redefined fitness accordingly.
I suggest that what Dawkins means here is that fitness can be (indeed has been) defined as whatever it takes to make "the L-survival of the fittest" into a logical consequence of the existence of heritable fitness variations and competition. I should emphasize that, in context, Dawkins is not suggesting that this "tautology" can be translated into any criticism of Darwinism; but, as with Eden's version, I still find the reference to "tautology" to be confusing and gratuitous.
5.1.4 Misconception 2: Words
5.1.2 What Spencer Meant To Say?
The Critical Rationalist Vol. 01 No. 04 ISSN: 1393-3809 31-Dec-1996
Copyright © 1996 All Rights Reserved.
TCR Issue Timestamp: Tue Dec 31 17:37:08 GMT 1996