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To: Right Wing Professor
One reason for conflict in this thread is conflicting views of the nature of culture and society. As I see it, the foundations of culture and society are theological and philosophical. These two, working together, provide the rational for a society's ethics, and on this ground develops the sciences and the arts.

Thus if the root is bad so too is the tree. And if the tree is bad (e.g. the deplorable condition of art and music in the West today) then the cause is a problem with the roots. Part of that problem is evolution, which because it makes claims about (or at least is logically applicable to) metaphysical matters of the kind addressed by philosophy and religion, impacts the arts, politics, and other parts of the tree in a negative way.

Many argue that evolution shouldn't be applied as it is, but that's inevitable for a system which claims to supply an alternative source of ethics. It won't just be limited to changes in populations, as some have suggested in this thread. That's not how human nature works.

People don't want to be told what to do by higher authorities (even when it's in their own good: e.g. parents telling children not to touch the hot stove), so when someone comes along and offers a theory that seems to explain the world without a troublesome God who tells us what to do, it's natural that many people will embrace that theory and apply it beyond its original imagining.

All philosophies work that way, and seeing negative unintended consequences is one way to confirm that a philosophy is bad. Marxism, for example. Lots of people are still trying to find or apply a purer version (it was corrupted in the Soviet Union, China, etc.), but they don't want to think there just might be something wrong with the theory itself.

It's fair to test evolution in the same way: what are its fruits when applied, however imperfectly or however impurely? One certain fruit is that the individual should be subordinate to the species. Millions may die if humanity progresses as a result. We could wait for millions of years, for weaker races to die off slowly, or we could take the next evolutionary step and apply brainpower to accellerate the process. The latter is the approach taken by the former Soviet Union and early communist China. Pointing this out isn't an attack, just a note from the historic record.

The burden of proof is on those who would tell us not to extend the application of evolution to such logical consequences in society or, alternatively, show us how those consequences aren't logical.

297 posted on 05/07/2003 11:55:34 AM PDT by Stop Legal Plunder ("When words are many, sin is not lacking." -- Proverbs 10:19a)
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To: Stop Legal Plunder
It's fair to test evolution in the same way: what are its fruits when applied, however imperfectly or however impurely? One certain fruit is that the individual should be subordinate to the species. Millions may die if humanity progresses as a result.

What you are doing here is called appeal to the consequences. You are basically saying that what you perceive as the consequences of accepting evolution are undesirable, thus evolution should be considered false. Your first mistake is again assuming that applying a biological process to social structure is a good idea. It isn't. The validity of evolution has no bearing on the proper way to run a government. The second problem is that evolution is not falsified just because you don't like what happened in the Soviet Union. Millions have died, but this does not disprove evolution, it only proves that there have been meglomaniac leaders who were willing to use an out-of-context biological theory to a group of idiots who didn't understand the theory as an excuse for setting up a totalitarian regime.

Evolution is a theory of a biological process, period. It has no bearing on the 'proper' way to run a government. Anyone who tries to use it as the basis for social policy is an idiot, and anyone who thinks that the failure of a social policy is tied to the validity of evolution isn't terribly bright either.
307 posted on 05/07/2003 12:21:02 PM PDT by Dimensio (Sometimes I doubt your committment to Sparkle Motion!)
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To: Stop Legal Plunder
Many argue that evolution shouldn't be applied as it is, but that's inevitable for a system which claims to supply an alternative source of ethics.

Evolution does no such thing, and I would vehemently disagree with anyone, proponent or opponent, that says it does. All evolution purports to show is how species evolved from other species. It could, speculatively, accomodate the development of a moral or aesthetic sense in humans, but behavioral genetics is in such infancy as applied to humans I'd be doubtful about any such extension. We don't really know what aspects of behavior are innate in humans, so arguing how some human behvior evolved is premature.

If people choose to inappropriately deduce moral conclusions from evolution, which I would argue is just another example of the 'naturalistic fallacy', that's no more a valid criticism of evolution that analogous deductions that 'everything is relative' reflects on the truth of relativity, or that 'no matter what you do, it affects what you're looking at' reflects on the Heisenberg principle.

308 posted on 05/07/2003 12:21:21 PM PDT by Right Wing Professor
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