Evolution's First Philosopher: John Dewey and the Continuity of Nature

5. Can Evolution Tell Us What to Do?

Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education. —John Dewey (M9:56) 찞 Dewey viewed the evolution of culture, language, consciousness, and intelligence as indicating one value that supersedes all other values. This point is the logical center of Dewey’s pragmatism. As Dewey would say, all ends are not of equal worth, but there is one, growth, that has no end beyond itself. Let us examine what he means. DOES NATURAL SELECTION HAVE FORESIGHT? Nature has no end, no aim, no purpose. There is change only, not advance towards a goal. —John Dewey (E1:213) WHEN WE ASK IF evolution can tell us what to do, let us be clear that we are asking if the principles of evolution can give us guidance, as we consciously select and execute certain actions, that is, as we conduct our daily affairs. The 75 FIVE Can Evolution Tell us What to Do? problem for ethics is how we decide what conduct to embrace and what to reject. Furthermore, a naturalized ethics would seek to establish its conclusions about conduct based on what we know about our species, and from the previous discussions, one can see that we do know quite a lot. The question is, what have we learned about our species that can serve to enlighten our conduct? Natural selection, as Dawkins observes in The Ancestor’s Tale (2004:276), is always tinkering: here shrinking a bit, there expanding a bit, constantly adjusting, putting on and taking off, optimizing immediate reproductive success . Survival in the future centuries doesn’t enter into the calculation, for the good reason that it isn’t really a calculation at all. It all happens automatically , as some genes survive in the gene pool and others don’t. Is there any direction to nature’s tinkering? Only if we look backward, like children looking out the rear window of their parents’ car, seeing where they have been but not knowing where they are headed. We are seriously undermining our understanding of ourselves if we see all of biology that came before as having been there mainly to produce us. We are committing what Dewey calls “the fundamental fallacy of physical ethics,” which means that we should “utterly deny that the physical world, as physical world, has any end; that nature, as nature, can give birth to an ideal” (E1:214, 213, respectively ). We have to avoid the old trap of entertaining the idea that the ultimate end of anything, its real meaning, must be its perfection. It is not the point of natural selection to perfect us as human beings. Please do not allow this argument from design to creep in on you, because it will screen off Dewey’s profound argument. If we do make that mistake, then it does seem reasonable to ask, where is nature taking us? But nature is not taking us anywhere . So, if you harbor the notion that evolution cares any more about us than any other of its creations, you are blocking your understanding of the species. This becomes clearer when one considers a small dinosaur named troodon. Troodon (tro’-eh-don, wounding tooth) is frequently referred to as the smartest dinosaur because it possessed at least two unique characteristics. It is the only dinosaur that had both an opposing thumb and brain folds. As paleontologists always point out, if it had not been for the extinction of the dinosaurs, the existence of Homo sapiens on earth would be very doubtful . If the asteroid that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs had missed the earth, and dinosaurs had been allowed to continue to evolve, it is likely that the troodons would be studying their evolution in place of us studying our own. Would troodon have developed a brain with a limbic system? It is possible, but I doubt they would have named it the mammalian part of their brains. MORALITY NATURALIZED 76 We are here because of a certain amount of luck, not because nature had any bias in our favor. All this is to say that there was (is) no design built into the universe that made our existence any more probable than that of the troodons. Given this chancy history, how would we ever decide what is the right thing to do? Some say that we must appeal to...