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To: discostu
The people deciding whether or not you get to breed even though they’re not in competition with you for a mate.

If a wolf decides to kill a deer, then the deer's ability to reproduce may be severely effected. Does this mean that the wolf may be in competition with the deer for a mate?

Eugenics is all about indirect interaction some third party is deciding who breeds and who doesn’t

Female chimpanzees will sometimes gang up on an unpopular female chimpanzee who has just given birth in order to kill the offspring. Not in direct competition for a mate anymore, but seemingly done to free up more resources for preferred offspring. If humans were to do this, would this be natural selection or not?

...heck they might even go so far as to decide who gets to eat and who doesn’t.

Like stronger animals preventing weaker animals from eating the available food. All part of natural selection.

In a well formed naturalist view there is no "third party". You must be borrowing the notion from somewhere else. The reason I agree with you that Darwin should not be blamed for the horrors of eugenics is that he had similar sensibilities -- not from his theory, but in spite of it.

90 posted on 06/18/2007 1:58:58 PM PDT by AndyTheBear (Disastrous social experimentation is the opiate of elitist snobs.)
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To: AndyTheBear

No that means the deer failed the “not become food” test.

The chimpanzees are doing fairly normal resource competition. A lot of animals that pack will go after competing offspring.

It becomes not a part of natural selection when you start having governing bodies. There’s nothing natural about a beauracracy. I’m not into hardcore naturalist views because they’re too often used to excuse aberant behavior. We’re humans, we found a way to evolve things like sympathy and social contracts, even from an atheistic we’re supposed to be better than the animals because we’re further along the evolutionary and food chains. We really don’t have the level of resource competition that would excuse being like chimps, and we have enough capacity for logic to know that the concept of “undesirable” isn’t that cut and dry.


91 posted on 06/18/2007 2:09:34 PM PDT by discostu (only things a western savage understands are whiskey and rifles and an unarmed man)
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