Word: monod
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...Small's ecological lament for the disappearance of The Blue Whale (Columbia University); in philosophy and religion, Martin E. Marty's Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (Dial); and for translation, Austryn Wain-house's heroic failure to quite transform French Nobel Prizewinner Jacques Monod's prolix inquiry into biological evolution Chance and Necessity (Knopf) into readable English...
...This Monod-style philosophy has special implications for man, which Monod is equally lavish about pointing out. Behavior, he believes, acts to orient the pressures of selection, but is not itself distinct from the invariant chemical composition of the organism. Man's great break with the rest of the natural world came with the development of linguistic capabilities (by chance again) which led-to-the enlargement of the brain (by selective pressures, again) and the ensuing host of conscious performances. Man, then, is bound as much as any other organism to his history as an evolutionary freak: A purely random...
According to Monod, this realization shatters the image of man created and nurtured by Western religions and social movements. In addition, this new view of man is incompatible with the present attitudes toward man of most of these religions and ideas: therefore, the old philosophies are misleading, even dangerous. The worst offender, singled out by Monod, is historical materialism. "Looking back, how well one sees that, from the time of its birth, historical messianism based on dialectical materialism contained the seeds of all the woe later generations were to harvest." The notion of "scientifically" established laws of history is completely...
...addition, in the western world, there is "a disgusting farrago of Judeo-Christian religiosity, scientistic progressism, belief in the 'natural' rights of man, and utilitarian pragmatism." All these notions are unacceptable in the light of Monod's revelations. There can be no reliance on an "animist" concept of a covenant between man and nature...
Scientific insight and knowledge point out the inevitable conclusion that we are accidents, unique but not particularly special. Monod, as a philosopher-biologist, is in the position to point this out. What western man does with this information is anyone's guess. Foresight is another casualty of Monod's theory of random biochemistry...