Dead-Ends and New Directions

The aim of this article is to investigate how Abraham Kuyper and some late neo-Calvinists have addressed the doctrine of creation in light of the challenges posed by evolutionary scientific theory. I argue that most neo-Calvinists today, particularly scholars from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), continue Kuyper’s legacy by holding the core principles of a creationist worldview. Yet, they have taken a new direction by explaining the natural history of the earth in evolutionary terms. In my analysis, Kuyper’s heirs at the VU today offer judicious parameters to guide Christians in conversation with evolutionary science, precisely because of their high appreciation of good science and awareness of the nonnegotiable elements that make up the orthodox Christian narrative.

Sztuka zwierząt i „paradygmat siatkówkowy” — czym nie jest estetyka ewolucyjna

In the article I defend some of the thesis presented in my book ‘Art as Adaptation: Universalism in Evolutionary Aesthetics’ (Sztuka jako adaptacja: uniwersalizm w estetyce ewolucyjnej) (2018) against the claims of my critics. I focus especialy on some misreadings regarding the explanatory power of evolutionary science. I try to show that even though evolutionarily informed aesthetics is not a handy tool for analyzing the intrinsically diverse currents of modern and neo-avant-garde art, it does an excellent job of explaining the mental tendencies and typical behaviors behind these practices. I also focus on the artistic abilities of animals and the problematic dominance of the visuality paradigm in the evolutionary approach, topics that are unjustifiably considered to be most momentous in evolutionary aesthetics.

The ontological turn revisited: Theoretical decline. Why cannot ontologists fulfil their promise?

Holbraad and Pedersen have revisited the ontological turn, suggesting that it is strictly concerned with methodology only. Holbraad goes even further, accepting an aesthetic criterion for ethnography only. This is a sign of theoretical decline. In my paper, I claim that ontologists’ tendency to overestimate the significance of ethnographic experience causes theoretical confusion. I claim that neo-pragmatic analysis can eliminate this confusion. I also argue that there is only one remaining issue from the ontological turn that is not entirely lost. A careful evaluation of all folk categories, with all its possible consequences, can boost the robustness of all competitive theories, Cognitive Evolutionary Science included.

Artificial Economics

This introductory overview explores the methods, models and interdisciplinary links of artificial economics, a new way of doing economics in which the interactions of artificial economic agents are computationally simulated to study their individual and group behavior patterns. Conceptually and intuitively, and with simple examples, Mercado addresses the differences between the basic assumptions and methods of artificial economics and those of mainstream economics. He goes on to explore various disciplines from which the concepts and methods of artificial economics originate; for example cognitive science, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, evolutionary science and complexity science. Introductory discussions on several controversial issues are offered, such as the application of the concepts of evolution and complexity in economics and the relationship between artificial intelligence and the philosophies of mind. This is one of the first books to fully address artificial economics, emphasizing its interdisciplinary links and presenting in a balanced way its occasionally controversial aspects.

Narrow and Broad Faculties in System 1 and System 2: Toward Consensus in the Debate on Modularity

Research on learning, the structure of attained knowledge, and the use of this competence in performance has repeatedly returned to longstanding proposals about how to better understand proficient use of knowledge and how humans acquire it. The following article takes up an exchange between Chiappe & Gardner (2011) and Barrett & Kurzban (2012) on the concept of modularity, one of these proposals. Despite the disagreements expressed, a careful reading of the contributions shows that they also left us with lines of discussion that will eventually sort out the relevant hypotheses and integrate findings for future research. These lines of work will contribute to a clearer understanding of an updated version of the modularity hypothesis that is also compatible with evolutionary science perspectives on learning. How might the categories of domain-specific and domain-general correspond to the distinction between competence and performance and to that of narrow faculty and broad faculty?

Vegetarian Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Victorian vegetarians envisioned the evolutionary progress of the human race from a cannibal past towards a vegetarian future, moralizing evolutionary science to vindicate their cause. This essay explores this rhetoric of vegetarian evolution and how it conjoined vegetarian identity with British identity by reinventing vegetarianism as a practice of individual liberty. The main archives I examine are the Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger (1860–1887), a major vegetarian journal from the period, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), a work of speculative fiction that represents vegetarian utopianism from an evolutionary angle. My reading of the Dietetic Reformer reveals that Victorian vegetarians imagined themselves to be at the vanguard of human evolution, with their conscious, mindful, and individual practices of vegetarianism operating as a progressive departure from what they perceived as the communal and anti-modern vegetarianism of the non-Western world. By doing so, they reshaped human evolution not only into a teleological progress, but also into a humanized process, on which individual subjects had a direct bearing through their control over daily food consumption. The rhetoric of vegetarian evolution thus addressed a deeper cultural anxiety about individual agency in the Victorian period, provoked by the Darwinian turn. This vegetarian resolution, however, as my reading of The Coming Race uncovers, contained incongruities within its rhetoric. Bulwer-Lytton’s literary representation of an evolved vegetarian species as a homogeneous heap rather than a society of self-governing individuals discloses the inherent difficulty in reconciling individual moral agency with the framework of evolutionary vegetarianism.

Sexual selection as race making

Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection, as described in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), should be viewed as a significant transitional point in the modern expression of race. Unlike earlier race theorists, Darwin proposed that sexual reproduction was not merely a testing ground of racial character, but was itself a causal force that could create new races. His account of race was distinctly modern – viewing race not in terms of blood but as a collection of population-level characteristics. Recognizing this feature of Darwin's sexual-selection theory allows us to situate Darwin's work not solely within the history of evolutionary science, but also within the structures of racism that became the governing principles of modern nation states. In other words, sexual selection is an expression of Michel Foucault's biopolitics, in which political power is exercised by states not through the contracts of liberal governance but through the management of population-level phenomena. Furthermore, by contextualizing sexual selection in this theoretical framework, it becomes possible to more clearly emphasize the importance of race in the rise of modern biopolitics.

WHY ECONOMICS IS AN EVOLUTIONARY, MATHEMATICAL SCIENCE: HOW COULD VEBLEN’S VIEW OF ECONOMICS HAVE BEEN SO DIFFERENT THAN PEIRCE’S?

More than a century ago, one of the most famous essays ever written in American economics appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics: “Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” There, Thorstein Veblen claimed that economics was too dominated by a mechanistic view to address the problems of economic life. Since the world and the economy had come to be viewed from an evolutionary perspective after Charles Darwin, it was rather straightforward to argue that the increasingly abstract mathematical character of economics was non-evolutionary. However, Veblen had studied with a first-rate intellect, Charles Sanders Peirce, attending his elementary logic class. If Peirce had written about the future of economics in 1898, it would have been very different than Veblen’s essay. Peirce could have written that economics should become an evolutionary mathematical science and that much of classical and neoclassical economics could be interpreted from an evolutionary perspective.