Evolutionary antagonisms and the progress of three categories of traits

Author:

Zakariya Nasser

Abstract

AbstractDarwin in The Descent of Man deliberates over the question of progress in relation to three categories of traits – aesthetic, moral and intellectual – attending to their interplay. The later formulations of Thomas Henry Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace shift and reframe the terms for weighing together progress and the relationship across these traits, downplaying the role of aesthetic assessments. Huxley and Wallace invoke ‘antagonisms’ countering, respectively, ‘ethical progress’ and ‘cosmic process’, ‘humanity – the essentially human emotion’ and ‘physical and even intellectual race-improvement’. Thereafter, evolutionary antagonisms reappear – whether to endorse, dismiss or overcome them – and they remain relevant in evolutionary arguments, whether made explicit or left implicit. Following a thread of ongoing appeals to this interplay of traits and corresponding antagonisms invoking Huxley's 1893 lecture ‘Evolution and ethics’, implicit differences appear in the treatment of aesthetic, moral and intellectual development. These treatments maintain the progress that their own ethical systems represented, even while granting moral variation and conceding independent/alternative notions of the beautiful. They generally took as granted the uniformity of intellectual judgements, where evolutionary progress was both ethical and intellectual/scientific, even when speculating on the development of different types of mind. As characteristic of future-oriented visions of progress by the first decades of the twentieth century, sexual selection was subsumed under natural selection.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

General Engineering

同舟云学术

1.学者识别学者识别

2.学术分析学术分析

3.人才评估人才评估

"同舟云学术"是以全球学者为主线,采集、加工和组织学术论文而形成的新型学术文献查询和分析系统,可以对全球学者进行文献检索和人才价值评估。用户可以通过关注某些学科领域的顶尖人物而持续追踪该领域的学科进展和研究前沿。经过近期的数据扩容,当前同舟云学术共收录了国内外主流学术期刊6万余种,收集的期刊论文及会议论文总量共计约1.5亿篇,并以每天添加12000余篇中外论文的速度递增。我们也可以为用户提供个性化、定制化的学者数据。欢迎来电咨询!咨询电话:010-8811{复制后删除}0370

www.globalauthorid.com

TOP

Copyright © 2019-2024 北京同舟云网络信息技术有限公司
京公网安备11010802033243号  京ICP备18003416号-3