I should probably self-impose some maximum percentage of blog posts I devote to poking fun at stuff at National Review, but I can’t resist commenting on George Gilder’s essay “Evolution and Me” from the most recent issue. (Subscriber only, but mirrored at the Discovery Institute.) It’s an impressive farrago of hoary old creationist canards (Darwinism is a tautology!) and some arguments that are strikingly original just by dint of being such wacky gibberish that it hadn’t occured to anyone to offer them before.

Gilder reveals that he first became suspicious of evolutionary theory sometime in the 60s, apparently on the grounds that both left and right could invoke evolutionary ideas to support their pet principles. (Why this shouldn’t just suggest that either some of the particular arguments were wrong, or that maybe scientific truth doesn’t unambiguously cut in one political direction isn’t clear.) He goes on to make clear that his understanding of evolution hasn’t developed any since then by associating it with zero-sum thinking, and asserting that capitalism’s power to “transcend war by creating rather than capturing wealth” is “a concept entirely alien to the Darwinian model.” Which would come as a surprise to the folks who’ve been studying the evolution of cooperation that whole time… and for that matter, to the Russian anarchist Kropotkin, who in 1902 wrote Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.

The core of Gilder’s argument, though—and I use the term in the loosest possible sense—involves a muddled attempt to infer some kind of Platonism from information theory and quantum physics, an attempt I assume is supposed to seem impressive, if not intellgible, to people who don’t know anything about the relevant disciplines. For instance:

The failure of purely physical theories to describe or explain information reflects Shannon’s concept of entropy and his measure of “news.” Information is defined by its independence from physical determination: If it is determined, it is predictable and thus by definition not information. Yet Darwinian science seemed to be reducing all nature to material causes.

This is, of course, total nonsense. You could just as well say that a book cannot contain information, because its contents (once it’s printed and sitting on my shelf) are “determined.” The point of “predictability” in information theory is that, for instance, if you tell me that we’ll have a poker game every Tuesday evening, an additional list of the precise dates of poker night gives me no new information, because I could’ve easily extrapolated that from what I already knew. Unpredictability in the sense of “not generated by any fundamentally lawlike process” just has nothing to do with it. The whole thing is clogged with these sorts of category-errors, reminiscent of nothing so much as physicist Allen Sokal’s famous parody of postmodernists’ abuse of scientific concepts, which contained such howlers as the claim that the axioms of “choice” and “equality” in set theory reflected its “nineteenth-century liberal origins.” (Needless to say, neither are remotely connected to “choice” or “equality” in a political sense.) “Irreducible complexity,” similarly, is used in a variety of confusingly distinct ways.

Before collapsing into pure poetry (“Transcending its materialist trap, science must look up from the ever dimmer reaches of its Darwinian pit and cast its imagination toward the word and its sources: idea and meaning, mind and mystery, the will and the way.”) Gilder expends a lot of energy trying to make some kind of point about the importance of recognizing that the “information” contained in some medium is conceptually distinct from its physical substrate. I think this is supposed to be a stinging point because Darwinism is “materialist,” or something like that. But it’s a very weird point to raise against a theory that, in its most abstract form, can apply simply to “replicators” exhibiting “variation” and “heredity” and subject to “selection pressure,” whatever they might be and whatever the specifics of each process. Similarly, his mysterian reverence for emergent properties in complex systems just stunningly misses the point: It’s as if some budding economist, upon hearing about the coordinating power of the “invisible hand,” constructed a shrine and made burnt offerings to it. This is cargo cult science: An abundance of buzzwords, a dearth of evidence that Gilder has any very clear idea what he’s talking about.

ADDENDUM: There’s a longer takedown at The Panda’s Thumb with a plethora of comments. There’s also a suggestion that we adopt the word “Gilderdash” to describe this sort of incoherent mash of impressive-sounding terms and concepts the author appears not to understand, which I’ll heartily endorse.