                           20020602.00

     Last evening Rebekah brought over her science project to
show to us.  It included, among other things, the hypothesis that
the shape of the leaf is the consequence of random variation and
natural selections, as an adaptation to maximize photosynthesis.

     There is of course no reason, why the Darwinian scheme
should not also be applicable to the evolution of plants;
although it is usually invoked to refer only to the evolution of
animals in particular humans.

     There are arguably a large and indefinite number of
biophysical and biochemical factors which affect and which are
affected by the shape of a leaf, e.g. effect of wind,
temperature, gravity, evaporation, surface tension, structural
integrity, resistance to stresses; and this list is only the
introduction to a for practical purposes endless catalogue of
issues that will arise in the course of further biophysical and
biochemical analysis.

     The characteristic of the classical Aristotelian causes,
matter, form, effect and purpose is not that they were faulty,
but that they were in essence heuristic; their apparent validity
rested on their presumed explanatory power, and this explanatory
power was psychological only. It created an objective matrix of
merely apparent knowledge.

     The ultimate significance of the Darwinian theory is not
that it provides positive knowledge: but it makes objective the
essentially subjectiuve Socratic recognition of ones own
ignorance. And this objective ignorance is expressed in two ways:
It is expressed in the concept of randomness. That which is
random is not accessible to rationalization and is as such beyond
human knowledge. To say that something is random is to assert not
only that its causes are unknown but that they are unknowable.
The concept of randomness is the modern expression of the ancient
notion of chaos.  The other way in which objective ignorance is
expressed is by the notion that evolution is so gradual as to be
unobservable by the human mind.  The fact of natural selection is
an inference, the efficacy of which is contingent on an extent of
time so vast that it approaches, however asymptotically, the
limit of an infinity of years, or eternity.  This asymptotic
approach to eternity is positive assertion of ignorance: since
the infinity of time is inaccessible to cognition, the asymptotic
approximation to an infinity of time is likewise an expression or
an admission of ignorance.

     The social and political circumstances of the theory of
natural selection, however, entail its application as positive
knowledge and entail also its application as social policy; where
both applications are in (dialectical) contradiction of the
Socratic assertion of subjective ignorance. The imperative to
know and the imperative to act are both of them social
imperatives.

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