Empiricism and evolutionary theory

Empiricism and evolutionary theory

While I was thinking about Hume, it occurred to me that empiricism and evolution theory are closely related.

In empiricism, we learn from empirical encountering. Our knowledge adapts to the change of our environment, physical environment and biological environment.

In evolution theory, living systems go through natural selection from empirical encountering. Life adapts to the change of our environment, physical environment and biological environment.

Once we attribute our knowledge to empirical study instead of God, evolutionary theory becomes inevitable. That is why Hume was both a major developer in empiricism and evolutionary theory. His contribution to evolutionary theory was trivialized.  

Empiricism does not repel logic and mathematics, or genetics. (We will leave genetics to later discussion.)  On the contrary, empiricism helps uphold logic and mathematics. With empiricism, nothing is sacred. Hence logical inconsistency in a theory has to be answered, no matter how sacred a theory is. For example, there is a logical inconsistency in special relativity. It has to be answered. You can’t claim “While the result is correct, the explanation is misleading.” If the explanation is misleading, even after the best effort for one hundred years, whether the result is correct should be open to debate. Instead, those who question Einstein are portrayed as evil and those who abide to Einstein are portrayed as martyrs, as in the Netflix version of Three Body Problem. At the same time, Einstein is portrayed as a godlike figure, as in the movie Oppenheimer.

Kant’s theory is a reaction to Hume, a reaction to empiricism, a reaction to evolution theory. With Kant, absoluteness is restored. Kant’s method is to package sacredness  with science, instead of religion, as science has gained greater prestige over religion. Later Marx would call his theory scientific socialism. Even later, social theory becomes social science wholesale.

Kant has been hailed as the greatest philosopher of the last two thousand years. He rose to prominence not because he uncovered some profound truth, but because he packaged some sacred untruth as “scientific”. This Kantian brand of new science has a series of problems, inconsistency with empirical facts, inconsistency with logic.

Why the works of Hume on empiricism and evolution are trivialized? With empiricism and evolution theory, nothing is sacred, nothing is permanent. The current social system is not sacred. The ruling class is not sacred. It is not the end of history. The dominant ideology is not sacred. The dominant theory is not sacred. Everything is subject to questioning. Especially, the permanence of the ruling class is questioned. Hence, an evolutionary theory of society is often labelled social Darwinism, to make it disrespectable.