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To: Syncretic

What nonsense. Again, the correct analogies are: evolution is similar to market ecomonics; creationism/intelligent design is similar to centrally planned communist economics.


111 posted on 01/27/2006 1:32:34 PM PST by steve-b (A desire not to butt into other people's business is eighty percent of all human wisdom)
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To: steve-b; Syncretic; MineralMan; CarolinaGuitarman; Lindykim; bvw; PatrickHenry; Siena Dreaming
What nonsense. Again, the correct analogies are: evolution is similar to market ecomonics; creationism/intelligent design is similar to centrally planned communist economics.

It's amusing to note that while anti-communist anti-evolutionists "see" evolution as supporting evil Communism, the anti-capitalists "see" evolution as being part and parcel with the worst evils of Capitalism (and likewise, Communist promoters claimed it as "support", and so did promoters of Capitalism):

"The theory of natural selection, it is said, could only have originated in England, because only laissez-faire England provided the atomistic, egotistic mentality necessary to its conception. Only there could Darwin have blandly assumed that the basic unit was the individual, the basic instinct selfinterest, and the basic activity struggle. Spengler, describing the Origin as: "the application of economics to biology," said that it reeked of the atmosphere of the English factory . . . natural selection arose . . . in England because it was a perfect expression of Victorian "greed-philosophy" of the capitalist ethic and Manchester economics"
-- (Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 1962. Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution. New York: W.W. Norton p. 418).
And:
"Darwinism was also used in a defense of competitive individualism and its economic corollary of laissezfaire capitalism in England and in America."
-- ( Hsü, Kenneth. June 1986. "Darwin's Three Mistakes," Geology, (vol. 14), p. 532-534)
And:
"...the law of competition, be it benign or not, is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department"
-- (Dale Carnegie, quoted in Hsü, Kenneth. 1986. The Great Dying: Cosmic Catastrophe, Dinosaurs and the Theory of Evolution. NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, p. 10).
And:
"The fact is, however, that it [Darwinism] became very popular among the laissezfaire capitalists of the 19th century because it did, indeed, seem to give scientific sanction to ruthless competition in both business and politics."
-- (Morris, Henry and John D. Morris. 1996. The Modern Creation Trilogy. vol. 3. Society and Creation. Green Forrest, AR: Master Books, p. 83)
And:
" . . they attributed such success as they had to their industry and virtue, rather than their achievement in trampling on their less successful competitors. After all, most of them saw themselves as Christians, adhering to the rules of "love thy neighbor" and "do as you would be done by." So, even though they sought to achieve the impossible by serving God and Mammon simultaneously, they found no difficulty in accommodating Christianity to the Darwinian ideas of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, and by no means all of them consciously thought of themselves as being in a state of economic warfare with their fellow manufacturers."
-- (Oldroyd, D.R. 1980. Darwinian Impacts. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, p. 216)
And:
". . . the coal trust preached a social Darwinist ideology, conflating `survival of the fittest' with freedom and individual rights. [...] the popularity of social Darwinism in the US national ideology should be comprehended as an innovation of corporate capitalism"
-- (Doukas, Dimitra. 1997. "Corporate Capitalism on Trial: The Hearings of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission, 1902-1903." Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 3, p. 367)
And so on... It appears that the main "link" between evolution and economic systems seems to be that if someone hates both evolution and [fill in the blank], they'll see a "link" between them. And if someone favors both evolution and [fill in the blank], they'll often conclude that evolution "supports" it.

This is more a Rorschach test than any actual "link" (pro or con) between evolutionary biology and any alleged application of it *outside* of biology. All too often, people "see" what they want to see, and what they want to see is driven more by their emotions than by their rational facilities.

128 posted on 01/27/2006 2:34:09 PM PST by Ichneumon
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