Sobre a construção das ideias científicas ou Darwin e seus demônios

Abstract

Daimons are cognitive unconscious obsessions which dominate the thoughts of the subjects. They are the fruit of life experiences, of school and family education and of the trauma which mark the life history of people. Considering science as a human practice, the construction of scientific ideas is not immune to daimons interference. That is the reason why, nowadays, we discuss the myth of scientific neutrality. The desire which motivated this thesis was my obsession to intuit Charles Darwin daimons, the marks which made him think what he thought about the evolution of the species. In this regard, we used the correspondence exchanged by him along his life, which was made available by the projects: Darwin Online and Darwin Correspondence; from notebooks B, C, D, E, M and N and from the work The origin of the species. I did not follow a strict method. The method strategies changed as new information demanded a new path. I revisited my history, my personal and school experiences, through an exegesis exercise inspired by Edgar Morin in My demons, in an attempt to understand why I became a biologist and why I decided to work with Darwinian ideas. Through the research material mentioned, it was possible for me to intuit, build and formulate three of Darwin’s daimons. First, the materialism daimon, derived from the positivist thought which marked the time he lived in. It was based on the obsession for the amount of proof and the strength of facts capable to explain a certain phenomenon related to life, that Darwin raised strong arguments which corroborate his transmutation of the species theories. From this obsession, derived the discipline which had always accompanied him. The second daimon, which I denominated deviation, directed Darwin’s views to the characteristics once despised by the naturalists from his time, because, for them, they were nothing but imperfections. However, to Darwin, they reflected nature’s language. Other deviant paths followed him. The denial of God’s existence and the principles which grounded the Anglican faith were essential to the proposition of Natural Selection as a language of nature detached from divine purposes. The third daimon which I called conceptual migration was, perhaps, the most important. This third obsession allowed to expand the understanding of life, of the ideas and of the arguments of other areas of science and knowledge. That is how it happened with the fight for survival, originated from economic theories; from the idea of gradualness and slowness of the action of strength which create new species, derived from Geology, and from the concept of natural selection, which come from dove, horses and dogs breeders as well as farmers. The mutual action of these three daimons allowed Darwin to formulate the transmutation of the species theory and made him think what he thought. As for me, another science but also another subject emerged. Darwin and the GRECOM were the cocoon which conducted my transformation towards the Biology of complexity.