Swenson, R., 1997. "Evolutionary Theory Developing: The Problem(s) With Darwin's Dangerous Idea," Ecological Psychology, 9(1), 47-96, 1997.

 

Paper Outline (Section Headings):

 

INTRODUCTION

Old Dualist Deductions in New Packaging

Dennett's Darwinian Pedigree, "Whig" History, and the Evolution Revolution

 

"DARWIN'S (DENNETT'S) DANGEROUS IDEA(S)," THE "DARWINIAN REVOLUTION," AND THE SCOPE OF EVOLUTIONARY DISCOURSE

What Was Darwin's Idea?

The Idea of Evolution

The Fecundity Principle, the Idea of Natural Selection, and the Core of Darwinian Theory

The Idea(s) That Evolution is an Algorithmic Process, or That We Are All Descended From Algorithms, or That All Agency and Meaning Come Into the Universe With Algorithms, Was/Were Not Darwin's Ideas

Darwin Did Not Say "Give Me Mere Order And I Will Give You Design"

 

THE IDEA THAT AGENCY CAME INTO THE WORLD WITH BITS OF PROGRAM TURNS THE EVOLUTIONARY FACTS UPSIDE DOWN, INVOKES FALSE TELEOLOGY, AND BEGS THE BIG QUESTIONS

Algorithmic Processes Have Been Produced By Evolution, But Evolution Is Not An Algorithmic Process

Laws, rules, and the modeler's fallacy

Life Is Autocatakinetic, Not Algorithmic (Your Grandmother's Grandmother Was Not A "Macro")

Life as metabolic

Invoking Algorithms to 'Explain the Active Agency in the Universe" Is Illegitimate Teleology

The myth of the selfish replicator

The function of DNA (like the words on this page) depends on its inactivity

The "memic theory of mind"

The Idea That Evolution Is for the Benefit of Potentially Immortal Replicators Is False for a Number of Reasons

Perpetual motion

Life at its terrrestrial foundations is a planetary prokaryotic process.

Which replicators?

 

THE ACTIVE NATURE OF LIVING THINGS DOES NOT DEFY UNIVERSAL LAW BUT FOLLOWS DIRECTLY FROM IT

Living Things as Things That "Defy the Laws of Physics"

The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics

Boltzmann's Hypothesis of the Second Law as a Law of Disorder: Why "Organic Evolution" Was Thought to Negate "Physical Evolution"

The Law of Maximum Entropy Production or Why the World is in the Order Production Business

Returning to the balancce equation of the second law, and making the implicit explicit for the first part of a two-part answer

The law of maximum entropy production-dissolving the postulates of incommensurability

From extension to intension

 

THE MAJOR CHALLENGES TO DARWINISM HAVE HARDLY BEEN CONTAINED

It Is the Situational Logic That Needs Explaining

back to abstract

 back to references

 back to main