POSTSCRIPT: BIONOMICS vs. SOCIAL DARWINISM

1. It is important to distinguish bionomics from social Darwinism and other social theories. One important aspect of all forms of social Darwinism is the idea that all important human characteristics are predetermined genetically.

2. In its worst racial form, social Darwinism cultivated the belief in the genetic inferiority and superiority of various races dependent upon the particular prejudice of the ruling class of the time. Politically, a social Darwinist is a Right-wing capitalist who believes that in the struggle for prosperity, the capable succeed and the incompetent fail.

3. Today, we know that the central claim of racial social Darwinists is utterly false. Important genetic differences do exist among individuals. But, despite the most determined efforts, no scientist has ever found statistically important differences in the intelligence of ethnic, racial, or social groups.

4. The logic of economic social Darwinism is even more flawed than that of racial social Darwinism. Before the invention of the first tools, when prehumans lived much like other animals, there was a direct linkage between genes and "economic" success. Those able to find food lived and reproduced. Those who didn't, died off. But as human knowledge accumulated, the link between genetic and economic success weakened and ulitmately snapped.

5. The theories of human sociobiologists, the modern-day followers of social Darwinism, eventually will collapse because the most human of human behaviors never will be traced to sequences of genetic code. Creativity, rational thought, and inventivness set humanity apart from all other creatures precisely because they are products of our conscious minds, not results of our genetic programs. Thinking is instinctive: what one thinks is not.

6. The intellectual bankruptcy of social Darwinism and the confusion created by human sociobiology does not, however, mean that students of society have nothing to learn from biology. A profound relationship does exist, but it is far more subtle than imagined by proponents of these flawed ideologies.

7. The bionomic perspective holds that the human species' uniqueness flows from the mind's ability to reduce the laws of nature into sequences of written symbols - coded information.

8. Except for the few scraps of this vast body of human knowledge that we each happen to memorize, all knowledge exists outside of human bodies. Our total distilled technical knowledge is recorded externally not internally as is the genetic information in each cell.

9. Each realm of information, external and internal, evolves independently. While social Darwinists and sociobiologists believe that human culture is an extension of genetic information, bionomic theorists propose a parallel relationship between an ecosystem based on genetic information and an economy derived from technical information.

10. Social Darwinists and human sociobiologists see the similarities between genetic and cultural evolution as a homology (a type of similarity based on common descent). Bionomics, by contrast, sees the similarity between biologic and economic systems as an analogy (a type of similarity that emerges independently, without common descent).

11. The bionomic argument holds that economic development - and the social change that flows from it - is shaped not by genes but by technical knowledge. In this century, wherever advanced technologies have been adopted, cultural chasms once thought to be insurmountable are narrowing to the vanishing point. Europe's current unification is just one example of this process.