Posted on 02/12/2005 4:24:09 PM PST by snarks_when_bored
Appreciate it.
I would suspect that most freepers as well as the founder would disagree with you, as would the vast majority of registered Republicans and people in the conservative movement. Exteremist libertarians who want to eliminate all government regulation are a tiny minority, even on the right.
That being said, most freepers, Republicans, and conservatives (along with me) would agree that the amount of regulation ought to be a lot smaller than it is now.
From an evolutionary perspective, you'd also be wise to consider why no society has ever evolved where the level of government regualtion was zero.
:-}. You've got the victim thing down pretty good. Congrats.
Not overwhelmingly, no. The majority of them voted for Kerry.
I know a lot of people who won't vote for Bush, not because they're not fundamentally conservative, but because they're put off by the bogus religiosity of so many people who claim they're conservatives. You know, gobucks, people who go to Church every Sunday, and lie cheat and steal the other six days of the week? The phrase 'whited sephulcres' comes to mind.
Let's see; we have a theory of origins based on a couple who had three sons, one of which killed his brother, and they populated the earth despite the absence of any other women except their mother, with a bloodline incorporating various other incestuous relationships and internecine homicides; and you're complaining evolution is amoral?
That was one marvelous post, and was well worth repeating.
For any Lurkers interested in a definition of "matter": post 2039 of the hysterical thread
Well, it ain't my field, but I wasn't aware of it. Of course, I should have been. Thanks for the pointer.
Well, gawsh, I guess that means at least one part of the flagellar system has an evolutionary precursor. So much for irreducibility.
The mousetrap is gone, the flagellum is gone, the blood clotting system is gone, has Behe got anything left?
Indeed, I tend to use a lot of techno-jargon in my posts to discuss things which aren't all that complex but the lingo makes it sound that way. And yes, I do love to discuss the mathematics of complexity, information, randomness and especially geometric physics - all of which are relevant to evolution theory.
I will try harder to be communicative.
My point has nothing to with with the historical fact of evolution. I was speaking to the mechanism of natural selection, which is isomorphic to Adam Smith's Invisible Hand.
I find it amusing that conservatives believe the marketplace is better than economic planning at producing wealth, but can't see the same process at work in biology. Ethics and morality may require us to provide safety nets for the unfortunate, but the wealth that pays for the safety net is created by stochastic processes for generating product variation, and the unregulated and unpredictable choices of the marketplace for selecting the survivors.
It makes no difference that businesses are run "intelligently" or products are "designed." Their survival is determined by the market, not by the intelligence behind their design. Planned economies always underperform Darwinian economies.
Actually that should be Bergman, not Morris.
I don't know for sure but judging by this statement I would say that you've never run a business.
Any takers for the designated-hitter rule?
This is one of the things that creationists and IDers simply cannot see. "Matter" takes on entirely new characteristics at higher levels of organisation, and must be analyzed at these higher levels.
Evolutionists are accused of reductionism, but it is the creationists that incompetenty attempt to reduce biology to physics. The laws of physics are not broken by living things, but the laws of physics are not adequate or appropriate for the analysis of evolution.
I's not new. I've been bringing it up recently, but I've been here long enough to know what's coming up next. The creationists will soon bring up social darwinism and eugenics, genuine evils.
I am comparing darwinism and the marketplace, not to make a moral point, but to demonstrate that natural selection combined with stochastic variation can produce new, emergent things.
From a moral and ethical point of view, we need to be aware that "progress" is not implied by the process.
Most businesses fail. Even successful businesses eventually stagnate and undergo restructuring. The corporate name may survive, but the management, and often the ownership changes. From a purely objective point of view you cannot anticipate all market changes.
The ability of the marketplace to force corporate restructuring is one of several reasons capitalism is more efficient than socialism.
You beat them to it.
Curiously, the robber-baron form of capitalism produced some of the great fortunes that have persisted, and even grown, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. And even after the heyday of robber-baronism (as it were), Joseph Kennedy and his ilk still knew how to grift with the best of the old-timers, and the Kennedy's, now "old money", continue to live high on the descendant fruits of ill-gotten gains.
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