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To: Ethan Clive Osgoode
Well obviously it exists in people and animals.

Good, a common point of belief! :)

The question is whether it is consistent with the picture painted by Darwinians of people and animals.

I posit that it is consistent - and in fact representative - of the theory of evolution! In certain species, group-action has taken root, to better that species. In others (like in Bengal tigers, or eagles, or baleen whales) individual tactics still dominate because that is best suited to their normal environment.

In the species I posted, it is behavior that OPTIMIZES their survival in their environment. For the Harris hawk, they normally feed on small rodents and lizards (we had very few around our place in Chile - I fed them scraps of chicken when there weren't enough lizards, just to keep them around!). In the areas they normally hunt, there is a lot of thick underbrush and the earth is filled with small holes. Escape of prey is a LOT easier than with prairie dogs in the Midwest, or salmon in the rivers of the Northwest.

For lions, their predominant prey is as big - or bigger - than themselves. It takes several to bring down a water buffalo, or zebra, or small elephant. Lions are fiercesome, powerful, and have incredible stamina - but are slow. But a pride is deadly to larger, slower animals on the open plain.

Conversely, the tiger is a solitary beast in the jungle where hunting in packs does not work, because you cannot see your prey all the time. And the tiger is larger (two or three times) than the female lion, because it must take its prey on its own. But in a jungle - where you cannot see more than 10 feet, and cannot hear past 30 (jungles are pretty noisy places), pack-hunting does not work.

Baleen whales are individual feeders. Why? Their "prey" doesn't flee at all. Krill are essentially one step above plants, in terms of intelligence...:) They float along in huge blooms. And the whales take passes through them. Easy to do, no extra energy expended.

The Orca's prey, though, tends to be herring and salmon, both of which are as fast - and MUCH more maneuverable than the Orca. Hunting in pods is really the only way to develop a steady diet (other than the occasional, daydreaming seal).

I would submit that such behavior is, by its own existence, evidence of an evolutionary path. That the fact each genus - great cats, whales, predatory birds - has species with fundamentally different feeding behaviors (the most base behavior of all - how to eat) - shows that the behavior arose because of their environmental and food-source differences, not in spite of it.

Given that, it would render the arguments about "evolution says it's always dog-eat-dog" moot; the evidence clearly indicates otherwise.

Darwinians

And by the way, I know you like to use the pejoratives "Darwinians" and "Darwinists", but if anything it is the theory of evolution, so if you have to use a name, call supporters of evolution - evolutionists (small e). It is not a god, nor a religion, nor a single man but a scientific theory profered, refined, and researched for 150 years.

Unless you refer to believers in gravity as Newtonites? Or believers in the helio-centric model of the solar system Copernicans?

65 posted on 06/14/2008 9:28:05 AM PDT by PugetSoundSoldier (Indignation over the sting of truth is the defense of the indefensible)
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To: PugetSoundSoldier
And by the way, I know you like to use the pejoratives "Darwinians" and "Darwinists", but if anything it is the theory of evolution, so if you have to use a name, call supporters of evolution - evolutionists (small e). It is not a god, nor a religion, nor a single man but a scientific theory profered, refined, and researched for 150 years.

And therein lies the problem. Defining "evolution" is like trying to nail jello to a wall. The theory is always (pardon the pun) "evolving".

68 posted on 06/14/2008 9:57:01 AM PDT by Donald Rumsfeld Fan ("Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, youÂ’ve got it made." Groucho Marx)
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To: PugetSoundSoldier
I posit that it is consistent - and in fact representative - of the theory of evolution... I would submit that such behavior is, by its own existence, evidence of an evolutionary path.

What you have done is give numerous examples of the existence cooperative behavior, something which nobody but a hard-core Darwinians, or madman, would deny anyway. You conclude this with a solemn profession of faith that, no matter what, they are consistent with some theory of "evolution", whatever you mean by that. But are they consistent with the 'struggle for life' and 'natural selection' as described in chapters 3 and 4 of Origin and in the equivalent chapters of Alfred Wallace's Darwinism, and with the thousand other such accounts given by evolutionary biologists which amount to basically the same thing?

Darwin used to handle problems the same way. He would merely describe things and then end it with a profession of faith that the things which he describes are in no way contradictory to what he wrote earlier about the Malthusian struggle for life, like so: 'I have no reason to doubt that natural selection, which always preserves favorable variations and rigidly destroys injurious ones, could not have done all the above... etc.' A good example was when he asserted that the character of the American people is due to natural selection. A mere profession of faith is enough. It is hoped that a skeptic would not look too closely at what Darwin had written about "natural selection" and notice that his profession of faith is completely at variance with the facts of American history, and human life.

David Stove calls your approach the "Soft Man" way out.

What I call the Soft Man way out can be quickly dealt with. Strictly speaking, it is not so much an attempt to resolve the inconsistency between Darwinism and human life, as a mere failure to notice that there is any inconsistency to be resolved.

The Soft Man is intellectually at ease. Having been to college, he believes all the right things: that Darwin was basically right, that Darwin bridged the gap between man and animals, etc., etc. He also believes, since he is not a lunatic, that there are such things as hospitals, welfare programmes, priesthoods, and so on. But the mutual inconsistency of these two sets of beliefs never bothers him, or even occurs to him. He does not think that his Darwinism imposes any unpleasant intellectual demands on him. So he is not drawn to postulate, for example, as a concession to Darwinism, a period even in the remote past of all-out competition among people. He leaves that kind of thing to some of the television cartoons that five-year-olds watch. Still less does he think that his Darwinism requires him to advocate eugenics, or to oppose welfare programmes, as the Hard Men do. In fact the politics of Darwinian Hard Men fill Soft Man with horror. They do, at any rate, until the suburb where he lives is taken over by blacks, or Shi'ite Moslems, or Croats, or Sikhs, or whatever.

The Soft Man is certainly the most appealing of the three ways out of Darwinism's dilemma, if we agree to call it such a way at all. Utter helplessness almost always has something very appealing about it, and intellectual helplessness is no exception to this rule; while Soft Man is an extreme instance of such helplessness, or (in Samuel Johnson's phrase) of 'unresisting imbecility'.

David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales


194 posted on 06/15/2008 8:24:27 AM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode (<<== Click here to learn about Darwinism!)
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