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To: count-your-change

Here’s a thread started by GGG today where he associates evolution with the Nazis. Goodwin’s law is in effect.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2351596/posts


443 posted on 09/30/2009 8:52:39 AM PDT by Wacka
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To: Wacka
I don't know Goodwin or by what means he could state some law but an evolutionist can recognize the implications of Darwinism as much as anyone.

Here is an excerpt from an article by an evolutionist of no mean repute:

“Analysis and critique of the concept of Natural Selection (and of the Darwinian theory of evolution) in respect to its suitability as part of Modernism's origination myth, as well as of its ability to explain organic evolution
(August 1999; [updated August 2002] )
S.N. Salthe

“its privileging the centrality of competition.
In an increasingly overcrowded world, it happens that more people are coming to believe in the evolution of organisms, including people, by way of natural selection — which works fundamentally on the principle of competition between types. You and I as individuals cannot compete in this game, but, as tokens of various types (blue eyes / brown eyes; dark skin / light skin — each of us is a nexus of many genetically coded types) our reproductive success contributes to the competition for representation of these types in the population (and of the genes governing them in the gene pool). It is curious that there is an obvious correlation between holding liberal political views and believing in evolution by natural selection — seemingly a flat contradiction! This probably ought to be the most troubling aspect of selection theory for liberals. Darwinian models have supplied motivation for social Darwinists of one kind or another ever since World War I, ranging from the German High Command at the turn of the century to some contemporary sociobiologists. We might note here that many sociobiologists hold that competition between populations (e.g., among humans, warfare) is a reasonable way to sublimate competition between types in a population (see discussion of interspecific competition in the last paragraph of (6), below). Irons’ review of R.D. Alexander's book The Biology of Moral Systems concludes that the fact that it presents such an unpleasant perspective doesn't make it wrong. The answer to this view is to bring up the social construction of knowledge, where we see that what is desired can be constructed as true. Sober and Wilson's recent book, Unto Others, devoted to tracing the evolution of altruism, is nevertheless based on competition, as any Darwinian text must be.
(If one wishes to catch the moral and philosophical flavor of Darwinian implications, the Alexander book cited above, and Monod’s Chance and Necessity are central readings.)
It has often been suggested that such social Darwinian applications are “misuses” of the theory. Well, I think that a theory that has so strong a propensity for this kind of (mis)use could properly be held to be suspect when its adherents are growing apace along with the world population. Or, more innocently, we might ask in just what way a theory that privileges competition as the source of everything is ideologically appropriate to an increasingly overcrowded world. Perhaps it is!”

Who is Goodwin?

452 posted on 09/30/2009 1:22:45 PM PDT by count-your-change (You don't have be brilliant, not being stupid is enough.)
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