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Forking ‘David Deutsch misquotes Karl Popper's The Myth of the Framework 2’ by Dennis Hackethal

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The inductivist or Lamarckian approach operates with the idea of *instruction from without*, or from the environment. But the critical or Darwinian approach allows only *instruction from within* – from within the structure itself.
In fact, I contend that *there is no such thing as instruction from without the structure*, or the passive reception of a flow of information that impresses itself on our sense organs. All observations are theory-impregnated. There is no pure, disinterested, theory-free observation. (To see this, we may try, using a little imagination, to compare human observation with that of an ant or a spider.)
Francis Bacon was rightly worried about the fact that our theories may prejudice our observations. This led him to advise scientists that they should avoid prejudice by purifying their minds of all theories. Similar recipes are still given.^14 But to attain objectivity we cannot rely on the empty mind. Objectivity rests on criticism, on critical discussion, and on the critical examination of experiments.^15 And we must recognize, particularly, that our very sense organs incorporate what amount to prejudices. I have stressed before (in section II) that theories are like sense organs. Now I wish to stress that our sense organs are like theories. They *incorporate* adaptive theories (as has been shown in the case of rabbits and cats). And these theories are the result of natural selection.

However, not even Darwin or Wallace, not to mention Spencer, saw that there is no instruction from without. They did not operate with purely selectionist arguments. In fact, they frequently argued on Lamarckian lines.^16 In this they seem to have been mistaken. Yet it may be worth while to speculate about possible limits to Darwinism. For we should always be on the lookout for possible alternatives to any dominant theory.
I think that two points might be made here. The first is that the argument against the genetic inheritance of acquired characteristics (such as mutilations) depends upon the existence of a genetic mechanism in which there is a fairly sharp distinction between the gene structure and the remaining part of the organism: the soma. But this genetic mechanism must itself be a late product of evolution, and it was undoubtedly preceded by various other mechanisms of a less sophisticated kind. Moreover, certain very special kinds of mutilations *are* inherited – more particularly, mutilations of the gene structure by radiation. Thus if we assume that the primeval organism was a naked gene, then we can even say that every non-lethal mutilation to this organism would be inherited. What we cannot say is that this fact contributes in any way to an explanation of genetic adaptation, or of genetic learning – except indirectly, via natural selection.
The second point is this. We may consider the very tentative conjecture that, as a somatic response to certain environmental pressures, some chemical mutagen is produced, increasing what is called the spontaneous mutation rate. This would be a kind of semi-Lamarckian effect, even though *adaptation* would still proceed only by the elimination of mutations – that is, by natural selection. Of course, there may not be much in this conjecture, as it seems that the spontaneous mutation rate suffices for adaptive evolution.^17
These two points are made here merely as a warning against too dogmatic an adherence to Darwinism. Of course, I do conjecture that Darwinism is right, even on the level of scientific discovery, and that it is right even beyond this level: that it is right even on the level of artistic creation. We do not discover new facts or new effects by copying them, or by inferring them inductively from observation, or by any other method of instruction by the environment. We use, rather, the method of trial and the elimination of error. As Ernst Gombrich says, ‘making comes before matching’:^18 the active production of a new trial structure comes before its exposure to eliminating tests.

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Forking ‘David Deutsch misquotes Karl Popper's The Myth of the Framework 2’ by Dennis Hackethal

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