Evolution is a hot concept these days. One might hear the word almost anywhere. We live in a history conscious time, and evolution in a general sense is just the logging into a system of historical changes. But, as used technically in different fields, it doesn't mean exactly the same thing in all of them. The word originally arose in connection with biology, with what we now know as biological (or organic) evolution. By about the Nineteen Fifties one theory of organic evolution -- the modern Darwinian theory (neoDarwinism) -- had become triumphant in evolutionary biology (my own field for about 20 years).

Well, in biology, evolution is an inferred fact from dated fossils. Biological organisms appear to have changed over millions of years. So we can say that the word 'evolution' refers to a process of change. This process is not the same as the Darwinian theory constructed to explain it, despite urgings by the National Center for Science Education (the political lobbyists for neoDarwinism in The US). Facts and natural laws need to be distinguished from theories that might explain them. Unfortunately, in many fields (even among many biologists not specializing in evolution), and even in the street -- say, among Creationists -- organic evolution and the neoDarwinian theory are today usually not distinguished from each other.

Now, in its most general sense in science, 'evolution' just means progressive change. That's how physicists, chemists, astrophysicists and sociologists use it. In these fields it is usually taken to be predictable (hence 'progressive'), as in the changes producing the main sequence of stars, or in the "evolution" of alcohol during fermentation. I have argued that predictable progressive change should instead be called 'development', because, in biology (where both terms are widely used) development (as in embryos) is distinguished from evolution in that way. Organic evolution is taken to be not predictable, largely because neoDarwinian theory is based completely on chance occurrences, as emphasized so strenuously by the late Stephen Jay Gould, who wanted to rule out all notions of progress from organic evolution. So, we have organic evolution as a subclass of evolution neat -- {evolution {organic evolution}}. That is: {any old change {unpredictable change}}.

Chance, or accident, is the source of everything new in neoDarwinian theory. Mutations occur by chance -- that is, without regard to what the organisms getting them could use. Chromosomes recombine by chance. Matings result from chance meetings. The environments of organisms change unexpectedly. New species (in the supposed most common mode of species formation) result from the haphazard scattering of separated populations of organisms. Seeds and animals disperse by random wanderings (since they are not supposed to think or plan). New directions in evolution arise because previously unused abilities of organisms allow them to survive, for a while, in a new habitat. This is called preadaptation or prospective adaptation, like: fishes that already were walking on the bottom of the sea were preadapted, just by chance, to coming out and colonizing land. Given his attitude toward quantum mechanics, we can infer that Einstein might have said that the neoDarwinian theory is a theory of "higgledy-piggledy"! This emphasis on randomness as the fountainhead has its original source in ideological attempts to exclude the possibility that some god might be directing evolutionary changes. (It's amusing in this light to note that it is impossible to distinguish a random event from an arbitrary one, and the latter could, of course, be the result of an intentional and creative act!)

Concerning the ideological aspects of evolutionary biology, how could a process that supposedly produced us not have ideological implications? Science is not free from ideology, as in fact, Marxist evolutionary biologists were insisting back in the early '80's of the last century. Long before that, the connection of Darwinism to Capitalist ideology was pointed out, given the influence on Darwin's thinking by texts like those of Malthus. Capitalism valuates the growth of firms, while in Darwinism we have the relative growths of different types in a population. It was said that Darwin read Capitalism into Nature when he formulated competition between different types in a population for reproductive hegemony as the basis of evolutionary change in biology. Subsequently Social Darwinists justified their particularly brutal view of the human economic situation by appealing to its naturalness -- Nature red in tooth and claw! More recently those Darwinians known as Sociobiologists promoted similar views, which an even more recent group known as Evolutionary Psychologists have tried to ameliorate. They however, still have the basic mechanism of reproductive competition between various types in a population as the motor of evolution, producing natural selection (as must any Darwinians). And so, we who are here today would be the offspring of a series of ancestors who outcompeted (by successfully outreproducing) the ancestors of other possible folks who are not here instead! Competition is therefore the source of all good, based on a random -- that is, pointless -- production of teams. Pointless? Insofar as nothing is directing the evolutionary process, and it is not developing in any particular direction, it is without any intrinsic meaning. Steve Gould was fond of noting that it was just pure accident that our lineage did not go extinct long ago, as most kinds of animals have.

It needs to be noted that there are today at least four groups that have an "interest" in shaping our culture's creation myth. (I use 'myth' in its ethnographic sense of an account of what we are, where we came from, and what we should be doing to reflect those origins.) There are, most prominently, the neoDarwinian evolutionary biologists, who feel that they, as scientists, ought to have exclusive rights to interpret organic evolution. There are, actively contesting them in the US, Christian based Creationists (although fundamentalists in all three of the Abrahamic Faith Religions would presumably have a stake in the Genesis story). Then there are, somewhat less prominently, the Marxists, who object to the notion of genetic determinism that almost automatically follows on the heels of the neoDarwinian idea that only genetic information can be passed on from one generation to the next, reflecting the properties of the winning genotypes in the reproductive competition. They promote instead the idea that Man can be molded by social arrangements regardless of inherited predispositions. Finally there are the ideological Capitalists, for whom the valorizing of competitive production in our basic myth can only be a good thing.

Well, does the current Darwinian theory (neoDarwinism) satisfactorily explain organic evolution? Most biologists believe that it does (I am one of the skeptics). Well, if it did, would it be true? No. At least not until it has been compared with other possible theories that might also explain it. It would be almost impossible that only a single theory would be capable of explaining some phenomenon if that phenomenon could be described in fewer statements than would exhaustively describe it in detail. Has Darwinism been tested against other possible theories? Most biologists think an earlier version of it was tested against a theory known as Lamarckism, early in the last century. There was then also a mutation theory, a version of which was co-opted into neoDarwinism. Since then no scientific theory has come forth to challenge it. A few texts have tentatively challenged it with alternative suggestions throughout the last century, but have been ignored. It is my view that Darwinians have actively prevented the serious development of any other theory of evolution in biology -- you might say that they have been practicing the competition that they preach! And, of course, the theory has been developing in a society committed to the economic theory which Darwinism reflects -- Capitalism. In such a setting the neoDarwinian theory appears to be overwhelmingly plausible, and so its explanatory adequacy (its "truth") is undermined because overdetermined.