I have been teaching and doing scholarship in the field of evolution by natural selection for more than twenty years; and have been deeply interested by the theory for much longer than that. There is a real sense in which I love the theory of evolution by natural selection!
Yet, what I will describe here is how mastery of this theory included - for a long time - being trapped by the metaphysical assumptions of natural selection. Love became an infatuation which was (like most infatuations) destructive.
When operating within the theory of natural selection - when actually thinking with its assumptions, definitions and procedures - it was not possible to perceive beyond or outside it. And, since this theorising was the most difficult and high-level activity I engaged in, and since it was the major conscious focus of my life for many years (at least 15 years, full-on) this exerted a distorting effect on my whole world view.
The serious business began one afternoon in May 1994, sitting in a garden in the sun, reading an interview in Omni magazine with the evolutionary psychologist Margie Profet; and realising that that was what I wanted to do - and what I had, unwittingly, been preparing myself to do, since my middle teens.
I knew, after seven-plus years working in laboratories that: 1. I was a scientist, but 2, I was not an experimentalist - not from lack of aptitude, but from lack of interest. And 3. that theory was My Thing - I has enjoyed writing theoretical papers about my experiments far more than doing the experiments - and that is very unusual in biology.
(Biologists spend hundreds-fold more hours in doing than in thinking - and if that sounds like a criticism: it is! Doctors are even worse. Anyone in biology or medicine who has once spent fifteen consecutive minutes in really thinking about their subject, counts as an extraordinary egg-head.)
One of my greatest pleasures had been prolonged and deep conversations about biology - in the broadest and most historically-informed sense - with Dr Tim Horder, an anatomist at Oxford; where I would visit each year specifically for that purpose. I was already a doctor and a (sort-of) psychiatrist - but it was Tim that made me think as a biologist.
So, my problem had been how to become a theoretical scientist in biology; especially in a world where theoretical biology was almost-wholly mathematical-computational, but I was trained as a doctor. When I discovered evolutionary psychology, I discovered something I could do and that I was well-prepared to do - especially in relation to psychiatry.
I threw myself into evolutionary theory with immense energy and zeal - rising early to read books and papers, and seeking out people to talk-with and write-to. The learning curve was very steep, and I was writing theory papers within not-many weeks; and developing grandiose projects for changing everything...
In order to contribute to evolutionary ideas in biology and medicine, I needed to train my thinking to operate accurately within the constraints and according to the rules - and I became capable of both rigour and creativity in that field. The process led to many papers, and a book (Psychiatry and the Human Condition).
My interest in biological evolution by natural selection then broadened (strongly influenced by a computer scientist colleague, Peter Andras), and eventually became utterly abstract; as I moved into Systems Theory (of the type articulated by the German legal theoretician and sociologist Niklas Luhmann). This was (or could be understood as) an absolutely general theory of selection - understood (by assumption) as the primary and metaphysical reality. This shift was marked by the Appendix to my next book - The Modernization Imperative.
It was indeed A Theory of Everything - and I proceeded to apply it... well, if not to everything, then at least to a wide range of phenomena including university education and research, science, medicine, health services, management and modern society in general.
I was, in once sense, by now utterly trapped by my assumptions! I saw the world through selection-theory spectacles.
But, I had the advantage that although this was true at the level of habit; I was aware (thanks to this aspect of Luhmann being very explicit) of the nature of these assumptions - and that they were indeed assumed, and were not entailed.
And it gradually dawned on me that I was not compelled by these assumptions - that, indeed, they were intuitively unconvincing - and that they led to many consequences that I simply could not go-along-with... things like the destruction of all objectivity, and the impossibility of knowledge about anything (even systems theory itself, even oneself)!
So I knew that I was basing my fundamental beliefs on assumptions, I knew exactly what these assumptions were, I knew these assumptions were self-refuting; and I realised that such metaphysical assumptions have ramifying consequences of the greatest possible significance all-over life and reality.
Thus I was prepared and ready to change my ultimate assumptions, as I eventually did when I became a Christian; then again when I became (theologically, but not practically) a Mormon Christian.
That is where I am now - my interest/ obsession with natural selection went from biology, to general theory of complex systems, to metaphysics - to being focused on those first assumptions.
And I have developed a heightened awareness of the way in which we can be captured by our assumptions. The more we practise thinking within our assumptions, the better we get at doing so; but also the more prone we become to living as-if the whole of reality was actually nothing-more-than our simplified model-of-it.
