Reply to Xavier L. Simon's comment.

• Author: Montanye, James A.
• Position: CONTROVERSY

I share Xavier Simon's evident belief that the interstate to hell (and other bad places) is paved with misbegotten altruism. Among my purposes in writing about the intersection of Darwinian evolution, religion, and government was to show that this road also is marked at a critical junction by behavioral predispositions that bias judgments and decisions against the principles of classical liberalism.

Simon's comments raise several points that warrant clarification.

Evolution is not an infallible process. Charles Darwin considered this fact in The Origin of Species (New York: Penguin, [1859] 1985). He concluded that "[n]atural selection will not produce absolute perfection, nor do we always meet, as far as we can judge, with this high standard under nature" (p. 229). With regard to the behavioral predispositions that are "slowly acquired through natural selection, we need not marvel at some instincts being apparently not perfect and liable to mistakes" (p. 447). I characterize these mistakes as "flaws." Darwin went on to note that sexual selection is even "less rigid in its action than ordinary selection" (p. 193), so it is intrinsically more prone to mistake. These observations and insights lie at the core of modern scientific thinking about evolution.

Nature does not learn by trial and error. Evolution simply fits organisms into local environments. The process is not rational, directional, or normatively judgmental. Rather, it is harshly binary: survival or not, reproduction or not. Mutations that are disadvantageous on balance are extinguished within a few generations. Conversely, mutations that are advantageous on balance survive and spread. Some advantageous mutations, such as those that engender a predisposition toward cooperation, shelter collateral mistakes that persist indefinitely when the force of selection pressure is too blunt to eliminate them surgically.

Evolution's success at explaining physical and behavioral adaptations has attracted considerable interest outside of biology. Scholars describe changing conditions in many fields (including economics) by combining the trappings of Darwinism with ideas about rationality and learning. Darwinian evolution, however, does not--indeed, it cannot--transmit acquired characteristics to future generations. Synthetic theories frequently end up describing Lamarckian-style mechanisms that are antithetical to Darwinism.

Colloquially, evolution is synonymous with the idea of development and...