Darwin everywhere

In general, essential scientific insights, when extrapolated out of their context, lead to rather mistaken views of reality, which surprinsingly are adopted almost as a new dogma, I guess since they are this famous scientific flavor. As one of the many examples one could mention Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity. People use to say "Well, you know, everything's relative, no? This is what Einsein said!", and of course who is to say that the sacred Einstein was wrong? No one, but first of all, the relativity of movement (that is, that uniform motion cannot be distinguished from rest) was discovered by Galileo and Newton in the XVII century, and Einstein genial insight (that a similar unification holds for space and time) does not imply at all a relatisvic view on human affairs (at least not more than after Newton's discovery ...)

There is also another common place, almost as used as the one I just described, related to Darwin and his theory of natural selection to explain the evolution of living beings. Since apparently Darwin showed that the only the fittest survive, here and there one reads that "this is natural, only the strongest survive" or "life is a jungle, you need to fight for your survival". As if Darwin, instead of a basic law to understand the evolution of living beings, had found a deep justification of the worst individualism, a new motivation for capitalism in which the role of Adam Smith's hidden hand is substituted by the more serious role of the inflexible laws or nature.

It is no my goal in this post to argue againts this unjustified application of Darwin to human affairs (which I think is fairly evident), but to reason that the evolution of human beings ceased to be darwinian many thousands of years ago, and with the advent of the greatest achievent oh human evolution, self-consciencie, began to be Lamarckian. Let me explain: in Darwin's mechanism for evolution, natural selection, the random variation of characters is transmitted to the descendants, so that after a very long period of time new species are formed. Note that characters aquired in life are never transmitted to the descendants. So if let us say a lion trains a lot to develop a much better speed to optimize its hunting, this will be not very useful to their descendants, which will not inherit any of these acquired characters.

However in Lamarckian evolution, which as we now today is not the mechanism for evolution, indeed these characters acquired in a lifetime are inherited by the descendants, so that if the above lion has developed a greater speed, this will immediately benefit their descendants and contribute to the excellence of the spcies.

Lamarckian evolution is very fast in time (it is directional) while Darwinian natural selection in not (it is random, not directional). This explains why very large periods of time are necessary for the formation of new animal species. However, human beings have the unique feature among all living beings that they can create culture and knowledge, and transmit this to their descendants, something which obviously leads to great benefits. So for humans the advantages over the environment acquired during a lifetime (say the discovery of fire) can be used immediately to their descendants, and this results in a very high pace for human evolution. Let me emphasize that Lamarckian-like evolution is only possible because of the fact that men have conscience, that is, they are aware of reality and that their place they play on it.

Consciene is a unique phenomena along all the history of the universe, and as today scientist do not have the smallest idea of how something like conscience could appear, leading to art, culture, technology and of course science! Summarizing, new time you hear that someone says "you known, life is a jungle, it is natural to fight for ouw own profit, as Darwin said", you could remark that it might or it might not be the case, but the credit should be given to Lamarck in any case .....