Torn Apart Notebook

Darwin’s ecology and methodology

Here’s what I want to show in the first section of my book:

1. Darwin operated under a specific ecology called the “economy of nature” or “polity of nature”. Individuals are at war with each other because they are competing over limited resources. Nevertheless, ecosystems are in perfect or near perfect harmony. Darwin’s economy of nature is, like Lyell’s, dynamic (as opposed to static, like Lineaus’s). It undergoes occasional extinction. New species come to exist to take advantage of the gaps in the economy of nature left behind by extinct species.

2. The “mystery of mysteries” is how do new species come into existence, and the economy of nature is restored?

3. Darwin understands that the mystery of mysteries is an instance of a large scale regularity (harmony of ecosystem) that emerges from the chaos of the various ways that individuals live, die, reproduce within the struggle over limited resources. How does large scale harmony emerge from chaos? To answer, Darwin seeks a universal law, like Newton’s laws of motion and gravity.

4. Darwin’s commitment to a Newtonian method is so great that he eschews the pioneering work of demographers like Quetelet and (his own cousin) Galton who are pioneering statistical methods (not universal laws) of causal analyses of large scale regularities that emerge from the chaos of individual variation.

The trick of the section on methodology—that hooks to the second section of the book—is to clearly articulate the difference between two ways of explaining large scale regularities that emerge out of local, individual chaos.  The first is Darwin’s: to seek a specific natural law to explain a specific case of the phenomena (the origin of species within a dynamic economy of nature).  The second is statistical (and eventually adopted by neo-Darwinians): to adopt a method to analyze the case-by-case conditions upon which large scale regularities emerge.