In fact, I've got behind me a poppers book called Objective Knowledge and it's sub-titled

an evolutionary approach. And that's no accident at all either. There's symmetry between the theory

of epistemology and the theory of evolution as we understand it. Before we understood what is known

as the Darwinian theory of evolution, the only idea that people had was these entities had to be

created. All the plants and animals that you see around you had to be created by a creator.

There was no explanatory mechanism. Some people came up with the idea of gradual change over time.

Lamarck was one such. The reason why giraffes have long necks is because their ancestors had

slightly shorter necks, so they tried to stretch their necks to reach the leaves they couldn't reach.

But again, there was no mechanism for this beyond the fact that when individual goes off to the

gymnasium and works on their biceps and their biceps get a little bigger over time, although you

can work out in the gym and increase the size of your biceps. That doesn't mean your children

are going to inherit those characteristics. So what Darwin came up with is a similar idea to what

popper had in knowledge. It was error correction. The idea that an organism would trial itself out

in a particular environment. And if it wasn't, as we say, fit for that environment, then it would

die off. But if it was fit in that environment, then it would survive. So you have this encounter

with reality between living organisms and the environment. And it's the environment that's giving

you feedback from reality and destroying those organisms that aren't fit enough to survive. The

neo Darwinist view is to give us what the unit of selection is. It's not the group or the herd.

It's not even the individual. It's the gene. It's the selfish gene idea, which comes to us from

Richard Dawkins, who says, if any one of those genes happens to be not fit for the particular

environment, that could cause the death of that organism. But the species might not go extinct.

The species might survive, but it's entire DNA will ever so subtly change over time as the

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