Nonsensical philosophical ramble with no actionable leads

selection should probably do as well. We are all at peace with the fact that people and other creatures care for their young. Economics and evolutionary biology are much the same. Helen Keller, born blind and deaf, might still have reasoned her way through much of both. Hamlet would have loved them. | love them most when they test the limits of logic, and consult the data only at the end. The theme from which both reason, as Herbert Spencer taught in the nineteenth century, is what he called “survival of the fittest.” Another philosopher, Karl Popper, found fault with this idea a century later. Popper was one of those | mentioned who disapprove of truisms. | haven’t read Popper, but gather that he thought it improper to define fitness as potential survival, and then measure it as survival. That objection is close to being understandable from an anti-truism viewpoint. But the reason why it is not quite a truism is instructive. Measurement implies an “empirical” world of data in external and observable reality. Spencer’s insight, really his paraphrase and generalization of Darwin’s, is not quite a truism because it carries the hypothesis that “potential” has an empirical meaning. Aristotle’s idea that potency precedes and explains act is called causality. Adam Smith’s friend and fellow Scotsman David Hume scarcely doubted causality, but argued correctly (I think) that it cannot be proved either by logic or by experiment. The fittest prove themselves such by surviving if and only if Aristotle was right. Natural selection simply means the untestable but little-doubted theory of causality. Spencer or Darwin or Gertrude Stein might be faulted for insulting our intelligence by stating the obvious. That shoe would fit Gertrude Stein. But Spencer and Darwin, like the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, were stating the obvious unseen. Andersen’s point was that intelligence was not the thing lacking or what the little boy supplied. It was about how tradition and mind-sets and in-groups might sometimes need a look from outside. Peer review is not enough. Sometimes it perpetuates nonsense. The little boy was not a peer, but he could tell clothes when he saw them. (“Peer”, as any theorist knows, means someone who pees on your theory.) Chapter 7 Petty’s Idea 2/3/16 2 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011061