Species Evolution and Cultural Freedom

• DOI: 10.1177/1065912914522343
• Date: 01 June 2014
• Published date: 01 June 2014
• Author: William E. Connolly
• Subject Matter: Mini-symposium: Species Evolution and Cultural FreedomGuest Editor: Steven Johnston

Political Research Quarterly

2014, Vol. 67(2) 441 –452

© 2014 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912914522343

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Mini-Symposium

The male Rupicola crocea is one of the most beautiful birds

in the world, being of splendid orange with some of the

feathers curiously truncated and plumose. The female is

brown-green, shaded with red and has a much smaller crest.

Sir R. Schombusk has described their courtship; he found

one of their meeting places where ten males and two females

were present. The space was from four to five feet in

diameter and appeared to him to have been cleared of every

blade of grass and smoothed as if by human hands. A male

was “capering to the apparent delight of several others. Now

spreading its wings, throwing up its head, or opening its tail

like a fan; now strutting about with a hopping gait until tired,

when it gabbled some kind of note and was relieved by

another.”

Charles Darwin (1998, 407-8).

The males successively take the field, dancing and singing,

it seems, competing to impress the females through song and

dance. The females, it seems, appraise the performances

according to their judgments of taste. As with the Amherst

pheasant who seeks “to please the females during courtship

not only raise their splendid frills, but twist them, as if I have

seen myself, obliquely towards the female, on which ever

side she be standing, obviously in order that a large surface

be displayed toward her.”

Charles Darwin (1998, 408)1.

With these examples, and myriad others, the Darwin

of 1871 corrects the theory of natural selection and sur-

vival of the fittest he had advanced in 1859. He is no lon-

ger exactly a “Darwinist.” He displays a readiness to

interpret the relational meaning and purposes of bird

behavior, and he sinks an aesthetic element deep into the

evolutionary process by observing how birds both seek to

attract one another and respond differentially to those

attempts. The aesthetic element in the matings skews the

evolutionary process in ways that exceed the simple

determination of natural selection and survival.2

Darwin, the naturalist, admits that he is unable to say

how the transmission process actually works after aes-

thetic taste is consummated and mating occurs. Moreover,

his theory is replete with Victorian images of race, gen-

der, and hierarchies of civilization. They slide effortlessly

into his readings of evolution. The anthropocentrism it

supports in which all priority is given to the human estate

in relation to other species is also sorely in need of repair.

One way to respond to such entries is to replace Darwin

with the genocentrism found in much of evolutionary

theory from at least 1970 to today. That approach faces

two problems, however. First, as we shall see further, it

seems less able than the later Darwin to render intelligible

some complex results of the evolutionary process such as

consciousness, reflexivity, responsibility, and freedom.

Second, its early proponents were themselves influenced

by a contestable model of human culture that infiltrated

into the rendering of mutation, gene replication, natural

selection, and survival of the fittest. Thus,

Ronald Fisher, working in the early twentieth century, was the

founding father of neo-Darwinism. Fisher was a mathematical

522343PRQXXX10.1177/1065912914522343Political Research QuarterlyConnolly

research-article2014

1Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

Corresponding Author:

William E. Connolly, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins

University, 338 Mergenthaler Hall, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore,

MD, 21218, USA.

Email: pluma@jhu.edu

Species Evolution and Cultural Freedom

William E. Connolly1

Abstract

When you transcend the reductionism of both genocentrism and cultural theories that bracket human being from

its species origins and biological character, a reciprocal movement between the findings of refined experience and

biological research becomes available. Drawing upon recent work in dynamic theories of evolution that respect

the human achievements of meaning, freedom, consciousness, and creativity, this essay explores how those findings

can inform our understandings and practices of freedom, and vice versa. Along the way, it criticizes the critique of

genocentrism pursued by Thomas Nagel, contending that it ignores “teleodynamism” in favor of teleological finalism.

Keywords

freedom, creativity, Margulis, Nagel, Nietzsche, teleodynamism