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To: grey_whiskers
it is an interesting approach to claim Darwinism refutes leftism

For whatever reason, leftists clearly were uncomfortable with pure Darwinism almost from the start. Most of the left finally seems to have given up on the issue, but for most of the last 150 years they strongly preferred, and sometimes stubbornly clung to, Lamarckian as opposed to Darwinian versions of evolution.

The last anti-Darwinian broadside I can think of from a Leftist was Jeremy Rifkin's Algeny. That was from the 70's IIRC. There are probably more recent examples. I haven't followed the antievolution literature closely in recent years, but leftist anti-Darwinism seems to have subsided.

There also has been, and may well still be, strong anti-Darwinian sentiments among many "newage" religion types, which might be considered part of the left. Examples are Rupert Sheldrake with his theory of "morphic resonance," Francis Hitching (The Neck of the Giraffe) and William Fix (The Bone Peddlers). Some "newage" religions are explicitly antievolutionary (not just anti-Darwinist) e.g. "Krishna Consciousness" and the Raelians; and many others, while not explicitly antievolution, insist on lurid scenarios of earth history and the genealogy of the human race that are wildly contradictory to any and every scientific account, e.g. Madam Blavatsky's Theosophy.

229 posted on 07/23/2006 3:54:05 PM PDT by Stultis (I don't worry about the war turning into "Vietnam" in Iraq; I worry about it doing so in Congress.)
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To: Stultis
Thanks for the updates...based on your post, I see that the left often rejects and/or fears Darwinism; my question is how many people on the explicitly pro-Darwin side use Darwinism as a bludgeon against collectivism...

(trivial way to do so is via the logic in The Wisdom of Crowds, btw)

Cheers!

231 posted on 07/23/2006 3:59:45 PM PDT by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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