Darwin and Keynes

I'm thoroughly enjoying The Metaphysical Club and highly recommend it to anyone interested in philosophy, history of thought, or American history. I found this passage on Darwin interesting, and it reminded me of Keynesianism:

""He was a Darwinian for fun," wrote Henry Adams about Heny Adams in The Education of Henry Adams. He meant that he had, as a young man, regarded the theory of natural selection as unproved, and probably unprovable, but had accepted it anyway. Two of the most striking things about the reception of Darwin's theory are the degree to which it was regarded, even by its supporters, as highly speculative, and the speed with which it was nevertheless assimilated by younger intellectuals. "One could not stop to chase doubts as though they were rabbits," as Adams explained. "One had no time to paint the surface of Law, even though it were cracked and rotten. For the young men whose lives were cast in the generation between 1867 and 1900, Law should be Evolution". Darwinianism dropped into a cultural configuration already aligned to accomodate it. Its fitness was generally appreciated before its rightness was generally established...

...On [William] James's view, two incorrect lessons were drawn from the success of On the Origin of Species. The first was the conclusion that science is an activity that is properly independent of our own (or our society's) interests and preferences. Darwin's book had, of course, scandalized the faithful; one way to defend it wwas to explain that the scientist can only stick to the facts. But for James, anti-Darwinian scientists like [Louis] Agassiz were mistaken not because they ignored the facts in favor of preconceived theories, but for the opposite reason - because they collected facts without a working hypothesis to guide them. When we look at Agassiz's work we think we are seeing a confusion between science and belief. But what we are really seeing is a disjunction between those things. This is what Asa Gray meant when he said that Agassiz had no scientific explanation for the phenomena he observed; for Agassiz had only his observations on one side and his theory on the other. His science wasn't theoretical and his theory wasn't scientific. His ideas are edifices for generating data. Darwin's theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz's closes them...

...The other wrong lesson James thought people took from On the Origin of Species is, in effect, the flip side of the first. It is the belief that evolutionary science can lay a foundation for norms - that natural selection serves as a kind of "bottom line" arbiter of merit. This is the doctrine of the "survival of the fittest," a concept that originated not with Darwin, but with Herbert Spencer, seven years before On the Origin of Species appeared. It makes the logic of evolution the logic of human values: it suggests that we should pursue polices and honor behavior that are consistent with the survival of characteristics understood to be "adaptive" and it justifes, as "natural", certain kinds of coercion. In a society that had just been through a civil war the appeal of Darwin's theory, on this interpretation, is plain...

...James believed that scientific inquiry, like any other form of inquiry, is an activity inspired and informed by our tastes, values, and hopes. But this does not, in his view, confer any special authority on the conclusions it reaches."

It goes on to talk about an openness in understanding the import of science, and James's idea of "pluralism" which I think fits very well with Keynes's openness to experimentation in policy and his care to couch the General Theory very clearly in cautions and qualifications that how and to what extent it can be applied in any given social setting is an open question. The "Keynesian revolution" has been compared to both Copernicus and Einstein in the past, I think for good reason. I think there's good reason to draw parallels to Darwin as well in trying to flesh out an account of this particular scientific revolution. Prior revolutions have been called up for various reasons - Copernicus to illustrate the elegant overthrow of a classical system that had become burdened with all sorts of stop-gaps, Einstein was used by James Galbraith to compare the unification of space and time with Keynes's unification of monetary theory and macroeconomics. Darwin, I think, is a good illustration of how in scientific revolutions the combination of a lot of anticipations and antecedents, as well as a fortuitous period in history can combine to cause the speedy adoption of a theory that frames what a lot of people have been hinting at in just the right way. It also illustrates some of the pitfalls of a speedy adoption of a theory.