Conclusions
David Hull probably speaks for most philosophers and scientists when he says he wants to “avoid the use of such problematic notions as ‘benefit’” in his treatment of natural selection because “their elimination from explanations of biological adaptations was one of Darwin’s major achievements” (Hull 2001, p. 57). I want to counter this attitude with a gestalt switch. In my view, Darwin does not remove value notions like benefit from our understanding of biological adaptation; he simply spells out the objective signs that reflect when those benefits play a certain kind of explanatory role. The gestalt switch I recommend is to treat Darwin’s achievement not as the elimination of value in biology but as its objectification or operationalization.
I have tried to spell out some of the fruits of one case of this sort of objectification of value in biology. That we can objectify values in science is no surprise. We do it all the time. One objectifies the aggregate economic value of a country’s commerce by measuring its gross national product, and one objectifies the social values of an individual or social group through appropriate public opinion surveys. Whether such objectifications of values in science are interesting depends mainly on the soundness of the objectification methodology and on the specific insights revealed (if any). The proof of this pudding is in the eating. If my case of objectification has any significant interest, it lies in the evolutionary activity statistics and their application in the new defense of adaptationism and the new ability to compare biological and cultural evolution. The main moral I draw from this one case study is that my value-centered view of teleology would never have born these fruits but for its objectification.18
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Figure 1
Evolutionary activity waves in Evita (top) and its neutral shadow (bottom). Note that the activity scale on the neutral shadow is inflated by a factor of three, in order to highlight the neutral shadow waves (barely visible along the bottom).
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