In the Roger Scruton on altruism thread, some commenters have expressed confusion over the evolutionary explanation of altruism in ants. If workers and soldiers leave no offspring, then how does their altruistic behavior get selected for?
The answer is simple but somewhat counterintuitive. The genes for altruistic behavior are present in both the workers/soldiers and in their parents. Self-sacrificing behavior in the workers and soldiers is bad for their copies of these genes, but it promotes the survival and proliferation of the copies contained in the queen and in her store of sperm. As long as there is a net reproductive benefit to the genes, such altruistic behaviors can be maintained in the population.
Selfish genes, altruistic individuals.
Let’s dedicate this thread to a discussion of other counterintuitive evolutionary truths. Here are some of my favorites:
1. The classic example of sickle-cell trait in humans. Why is a disease-causing mutation maintained in a human population? Shouldn’t selection eliminate the mutants? Not in this case, because only the unfortunate folks who have two copies of the allele get the disease. People with one copy of the allele don’t get the disease, but they do receive a benefit: improved resistance to malaria. In effect, the people with the disease are paying for the improved health of the people with only one copy of the mutation.
(Kinda makes you wonder why the Designer did it that way, doesn’t it?)
2. In utero cannibalism in sharks:
Shark embryos cannibalize their littermates in the womb, with the largest embryo eating all but one of its siblings.
Now, researchers know why: It’s part of a struggle for paternity in utero, where babies of different fathers compete to be born.
The researchers, who detailed their findings today (April 30) in the journal Biology Letters, analyzed shark embryos found in sand tiger sharks (Carcharias taurus) at various stages of gestation and found that the later in pregnancy, the more likely the remaining shark embryos had just one father.
(Kinda makes you wonder why the Designer did it that way, doesn’t it?)
3. Genetic conflict between parents and offspring. Here’s a great example from a 1993 paper by David Haig:
Pregnancy has commonly been viewed as a cooperative interaction between a mother and her fetus. The effects of natural selection on genes expressed in fetuses, however, may be opposed by the effects of natural selection on genes expressed in mothers. In this sense, a genetic conflict can be said to exist between maternal and fetal genes. Fetal genes will be selected to increase the transfer of nutrients to their fetus, and maternal genes will be selected to limit transfers in excess of some maternal optimum. Thus a process of evolutionary escalation is predicted in which fetal actions are opposed by maternal countermeasures. The phenomenon of genomic imprinting means that a similar conflict exists within fetal cells between genes that are expressed when maternally derived, and genes that are expressed when paternally derived.
(Kinda makes you wonder why the Designer did it that way, doesn’t it?)
Can readers think of other counterintuitive evolutionary truths?
Addendum
4. Mutant organism loses its innate capacity to reproduce and becomes a great evolutionary success. Can anyone guess which organism(s) I’m thinking of?
phoodoo,
Actually, no. Ant altruism could be designed, and everything else not, as a logical possibility. Although to be maintained, it would need to be resistant to subversion – ie, it would need to be adaptive in nature, even if it did not arise by adaptation.
‘Darwinism’ [sic] is a general principle, but not of necessity a universal one.
Emphasizing the contrast between Lamarck and Darwin without going into too much detail?
Gralgrathor,
Not entirely. Lamarck also believed in a force for complexification that moved species up his tree of descent. That is in addition to the transmitted effects of use-and-disuse in the parents.
Joe Felsenstein,
Ah, I did not know that.
Gralgrathor,
The Wikipedia page on Lamarck explains those two forces in his theory quite well.
By the way, Lamarck also did not invent “Lamarckian” inheritance — nearly everybody at the time already believed it. He just made use of it, and his contemporaries would have astonished to hear it credited to Lamarck.
Joe Felsenstein,
As, I suppose, those living in post-Mendalian and pre-MES times would have been astonished to learn about lateral gene transfer and DNA-methylation.
Right, that was my understanding of Lamarck. Thanks, Joe.
walto,
I think the less sinister reason is that these elements became superseded when a better genetics arrived. It is, nonetheless, pretty well known that Darwin did credit Lamarck. I knew it, f’rinstance, and I’m no Darwin scholar.
Do you have some grounds for the accusation of revisionism? A comparison between the 1st and later editions of the Origin, for example?
Allan Miller,
You asked the question, but you can’t even define the question you asked. What is the theory of evolution?
That is your problem big fella.
Ditto for Darwin.
He was a dishonest plagiarizer, pure and simple.
Allan Miller,
Allan, it’s all there in (painfully voluminous) detail in Butler’s books on evolution, especially, _Evolution, Old and New_.
Allan,
You’re right. From Darwin’s preface to the 6th edition of The Origin:
It would matter not if he was a Nazi baby eating monster from outer space. Is your life full of only negativity?
Out of interest, have you actually read any of Darwin’s work? What did you think?
OMagain,
Do you mean’s Wallace’s work that Darwin stold?
FWIW, I believe that most of the plagiarism accusations (which I think are mostly silly, myself) related to Buffon and Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus.
Your point being … (??)
Allan, to walto:
walto:
walto,
For those of us who don’t have the time to read Butler, could you provide one or two of the most damning instances of revisionism?
Darwin used to be infuriated when people said that all he did was say what his grandfather had said — especially since his grandfather did not mention natural selection. Wallace lived a long life and paid much tribute to Darwin and extolled Darwin’s priority. When he wrote a book on evolution in 1889 he entitled it … (wait for it) … Darwinism!
There was various people (Patrick Matthew, Edward Blyth and some all the way back to the ancient Greeks) who mentioned natural selection. Matthew even made it the centerpiece of his theory of evolution.
Although I feel Darwin’s was the greatest contribution, it does not really matter as far as the validity of the theory goes. Newton was a fairly unpleasant man (his servant said he had only seen him laugh once) who behaved rottenly toward Robert Hooke and unfairly toward Leibniz. But that does not matter — we still honor both Newton and Leibniz for the calculus, and stand in awe of Newton’s achievements in optics and laws of motion.
Albert Einstein was generally a complete sweetie to the outside world, and a campaigner for many good causes. (He also cheated on his wives and neglected his children). I can even add some personal testimony: I had an older relative who worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in the 1940s, and in conversation with my mother she called Einstein “the dear” and in an interview said “he was always so kind and concerned about everyone”. (I inherited from that relative three letters from Albert, and they confirm his benevolence).
But does any of that affect our judgement of Einstein’s and Newton’s relative contributions to physics?
It is more than ironic that creationists are so ready to (a) say Darwin stole his work and thus should not be given credit for it, while at the same time (b) saying that anyway natural selection doesn’t work so it is no big deal.
Darwin did modify his theory through time. When the Scottish engineering professor Fleeming Jenkin (in 1867) objected that the (pre-Mendelian) mathematics of blending inheritance meant that variation would drain away rapidly and too little progress would be made, Darwin reacted by increasing the emphasis on inheritance of acquired characters in the next edition to the Origin, to enable it to contribute to the amount of new variability.
It is not that Darwin gradually eliminated reference to inheritance of acquired characters to cover his tracks — he went the other way. Only after Weismann’s work in the 1880s did inheritance of acquired characters start to lose credibility, and even then it was quite commonly invoked until the period of the Modern Synthesis in the 1920s and 1930s when people finally realized how Mendelian genetics would affect evolution.
Peter Bowler has a very good book The Eclipse of Darwinism about all the evolutionary theories around after Darwin that conflicted with Darwin’s.
Joe Felsenstein,
Yes you’re right, Joe. I guess it was Huxley and other of Darwin’s followers that succeeded in whitewashing these Lamarckian elements–which increased rather than decreased as time went on. I read about this matter in a bio of Butler some years back but I’d forgotten the details.
Here’s Butler from early pages in his _Luck or Cunning?_
I ought to say that the late Mr. Darwin appears himself eventually to have admitted the soundness of the theory connecting heredity and memory. Mr. Romanes quotes a letter written by Mr. Darwin in the last year of his life, in which he speaks of an intelligent action gradually becoming “instinctive, i.e., memory transmitted from one generation to another.” {62a}
Briefly, the stages of Mr. Darwin’s opinion upon the subject of hereditary memory are as follows:-
1859. “It would be the most serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation and transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations.” {62b} And this more especially applies to the instincts of many ants.
1876. “It would be a serious error to suppose,” &c., as before. {62c}
1881. “We should remember what a mass of inherited knowledge is crowded into the minute brain of a worker ant.” {62d}
1881 or 1882. Speaking of a given habitual action Mr. Darwin writes: “It does not seem to me at all incredible that this action [and why this more than any other habitual action?] should then become instinctive:” i.e., memory transmitted from one generation to another. {62e}
And yet in 1839, or thereabouts, Mr. Darwin had pretty nearly grasped the conception from which until the last year or two of his life he so fatally strayed; for in his contribution to the volumes giving an account of the voyages of the Adventure and Beagle, he wrote: “Nature by making habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian for the climate and productions of his country” (p. 237).
What is the secret of the long departure from the simple common-sense view of the matter which he took when he was a young man? I imagine simply what I have referred to in the preceding chapter, over-anxiety to appear to be differing from his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck.
I believe I may say that Mr. Darwin before he died not only admitted the connection between memory and heredity, but came also to see that he must readmit that design in organism which he had so many years opposed. For in the preface to Hermann Muller’s “Fertilisation of Flowers,” {63a} which bears a date only a very few weeks prior to Mr. Darwin’s death, I find him saying:- “Design in nature has for a long time deeply interested many men, and though the subject must now be looked at from a somewhat different point of view from what was formerly the case, it is not on that account rendered less interesting.” This is mused forth as a general gnome, and may mean anything or nothing: the writer of the letterpress under the hieroglyph in Old Moore’s Almanac could not be more guarded; but I think I know what it does mean.
I cannot, of course, be sure; Mr. Darwin did not probably intend that I should; but I assume with confidence that whether there is design in organism or no, there is at any rate design in this passage of Mr. Darwin’s. This, we may be sure, is not a fortuitous variation; and, moreover, it is introduced for some reason which made Mr. Darwin think it worth while to go out of his way to introduce it. It has no fitness in its connection with Hermann Muller’s book, for what little Hermann Müller says about teleology at all is to condemn it; why, then, should Mr. Darwin muse here of all places in the world about the interest attaching to design in organism? Neither has the passage any connection with the rest of the preface. There is not another word about design, and even here Mr. Darwin seems mainly anxious to face both ways, and pat design as it were on the head while not committing himself to any proposition which could be disputed.
The explanation is sufficiently obvious. Mr Darwin wanted to hedge. He saw that the design which his works had been mainly instrumental in pitchforking out of organisms no less manifestly designed than a burglar’s jemmy is designed, had nevertheless found its way back again, and that though, as I insisted in “Evolution Old and New,” and “Unconscious Memory,” it must now be placed within the organism instead of outside it, as “was formerly the case,” it was not on that account any the less – design, as well as interesting.
I should like to have seen Mr. Darwin say this more explicitly. Indeed I should have liked to have seen Mr. Darwin say anything at all about the meaning of which there could be no mistake, and without contradicting himself elsewhere; but this was not Mr. Darwin’s manner.
In passing I will give another example of Mr Darwin’s manner when he did not quite dare even to hedge. It is to be found in the preface which he wrote to Professor Weismann’s “Studies in the Theory of Descent,” published in 1881.
“Several distinguished naturalists,” says Mr. Darwin, “maintain with much confidence that organic beings tend to vary and to rise in the scale, independently of the conditions to which they and their progenitors have been exposed; whilst others maintain that all variation is due to such exposure, though the manner in which the environment acts is as yet quite unknown. At the present time there is hardly any question in biology of more importance than this of the nature and causes of variability; and the reader will find in the present work an able discussion on the whole subject, which will probably lead him to pause before he admits the existence of an innate tendency to perfectibility” – or towards being able to be perfected.
Butler was so annoyed by the silence he received from the Darwin camp, that his books on this matter exhibited more and more frustration as time went on.
I don’t see the least bit of irony to that. Darwin lied about when he received the letter from Wallace regarding natural selection, then waited two weeks to include Wallace’s works into his own writings, then said, oh, this is exactly what I was working on. Wallace did not have the powerful connections Darwin had, so he was never in a position to get his work published on his own. he also had no way of knowing at the time that Darwin was lying about when he received Wallace’s letter. It is only looking through marine logs and old newspapers that we know the truth about when Darwin received it. This also apparently wasn’t the first time Darwin took credit for other people’s work.
Saying he was a dishonest plagiarizer has nothing at all to do with the validity of his work. They are two totally separate issues. There is no irony there.
Then why even bring it up, if not to poison the well?
Darwin also apparently intentionally destroyed letters (a very unusual occurrence for a scientist in those days) which would have shown more evidence that he stole other people’s ideas.
Richardthughes,
Because its an important and interesting part of history?
Some people value knowledge and truth. Here not as much I realize.
phoodoo,
Gotcha. That’s why you bring it up. Now tell us about Darwin > Hitler.
Joe Felsenstein,
No point. Just something to wonder about. You’re right, I have lots to learn here.
walto,
Very interesting stuff.
Richard, to phoodoo:
I don’t think phoodoo wants to answer that question.
It’s interesting that so many IDers and creationists think that they can undermine evolutionary theory by bashing Darwin. As believers, they are used to taking the statements of authority figures (or scriptures) on faith, and they don’t seem to realize that science doesn’t do that. Suppose we find out tomorrow that Darwin wasn’t on the Beagle and that all of his evidence was fabricated. That would be huge news to historians of science, but it would barely affect evolutionary theory at all.
We’ve moved on since then. Darwin’s theory has been tested again and again. The parts that work (such as natural selection) have been retained, and the parts that don’t work (such as pangenesis and gemmules) have been jettisoned. The science no longer depends on Darwin’s personal credibility.
The historical question is still interesting, however. I tracked down a post that Jerry Coyne did on this in 2011:
Did Darwin plagiarize Wallace?
Coyne quotes a paper that concludes:
Well, phoodoo?
ETA: Here’s a video in which one of the authors explains the paper.
phoodoo,
Nice try phoodoo. You post a bunch of stuff on epigenetics, say it’s a big problem for [something], then want me to define what that something is. OK, evolution is descent with modification, and it’s change in allele frequency in gene pools. The ‘standard’ mechanism is that those changes occur simply through cumulative reproduction, survival and death.
Why are those quotes a problem for evolution, as defined?
phoodoo – here, as an aide-memoire, is how you introduced epigenetics – your sole commentary on the matter:
I don’t know what you mean by cumulative reproduction as the standard mechanism?
And this change in allele frequency, I understand this, but where did the alleles come from to begin with?
“I never had sex with that girl. What evidence do you have to prove it? That could be anyone in those photos. And besides it was only a few times. And it was consensual, so it doesn’t matter. You have affairs too. And she made me do it. ”
‘Allan Miller’ -paraphrased.
Jesus made them.
If you like, but I’ll take that as a “no” then.
keiths,
keiths,
I suppose I could go on and on about how the guy on the internet’s story is full of holes, and how they used to announce the arrival of the mail every month in the newspapers because it was a big event in those days, and they never delivered in the middle of the month, always the beginning, about how the letter couldn’t have been mailed in March as he is claiming, and all of Darwins other important letters never disappeared mysteriously, and how people never threw away documents in those days, because they were important records, and about how full of shit Jerry Coyne is, and how there was never any mention from Darwin in any of his letters before June 2 about natural selection and and ..well,
Even if I did all that, I suppose guys like Allan would just say,
“-That’s still not enough evidence for me. ,
-And why should we believe all your evidence.
-And maybe Darwin just made a mistake.
-And besides even if it did arrive on June 2 what does that prove.
-We have know about it arriving on June 2 for years.
-It changes nothing
-Darwin is the greatest…”
Why don’t you create an OP and this can be discussed specifically?
phoodoo,
phoodoo,
You are bordering on the incoherent. I have tried to be concise, and each time you construct some silly “Allan Miller said yadda yadda yadda” response – clearly an attempt to dodge the issue, I don’t really need to point this out to the disinterested ‘onlooker’.
The alleles come from mutation and recombination, in the ‘standard’ version of evolution.
Now focus: why is epigenetics a problem for the ‘standard’ viewpoint***?
*** To summarise it again: variation arising from various mechanisms, if inherited, has the potential to experience differential rates of increase/decrease in a population, and iterative instances of such change result in cumulative change in a lineage – descent with modification. You may not agree that this happens, or is up to the task of generating modern diversity, but why is epigenetics a problem for this viewpoint?
keiths,
I agree – this is a very interesting tendency, which I think goes way beyond a simple, if childish, “scientists revere Darwin; if we trash him, it makes them uncomfortable” to the much more revealing “Darwin lied about X, and beat puppies, therefore his theory is worthless”.
I revere Fred Sanger. He was a truly wonderful human being. But if he was an a–hole, would dideoxy sequencing suddenly stop working? Would people just stop using it? The IDists reveal a massive misunderstanding about how science works.
Everyone still uses PCR…
😮
One other question for Joe about Lamarck. I remember reading in one of Gould’s popular books a remark to the effect that Lamarck’s position, though wrong, was simpler than Wallace’s, because it required only habitual striving to produce what we have today. That seemed wrong to me, because Lamarck’s view, as I understood it, also required nature to select the fittest specimens to continue. The difference was that it didn’t allow that the addition of random variation to natural selection was sufficient to explain current species. However, I’ve never read a word of Lamarck: what I know about him I learned entirely from Butler (whom I’ve read pretty much all of). So I’m curious whether I’ve been fair to Gould.
Allan, I had never heard of epigenetics until now. It does seem kind of important to me, because I’d thought it was unquestioned that no environmental effects could be passed along to future generations. But its truth or falsity also seems to me orthogonal to any claims about “design.” I’m not sure why it’s relevant to ID at all except in the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” way.
I do think, though, that it’d be a pretty big deal for those two or three Larmarckians left in the world and that they’ve probably been partying pretty hard. Bring back the midwife toad!
DNA_Jock,
It’s my understanding (though I really don’t remember where I got it) that Darwin was indeed a lovely and gentle man. The thing is, he had a posse, and some of those guys were not only single-minded, but pretty cutthroat. I take it that Darwin’s gentility made him fairly malleable in their hands.
walto,
I think it’s been known for a while that there are non-genetic factors that can be passed on to offspring. Stuff that’s present in the cell-plasma of the egg-cell is likely to be present (although possibly diluted) in the developing embryo.
What’s relatively new (since, what, 2005 or so?) is the realization that non-genetic factors can affect genetic expression in offspring as well.
Not providing this as an answer to your question – you’re better of with Joe for informative answers – but simply to indicate that some knowledge of this, however distorted, is present in the general public.
Thanks, Gral. I’m obviously not up on this stuff.
walto,
It rather depends what one means by ‘environmental effects’. If we take the raw DNA sequence as ‘genetic’, and everything else as ‘epigenetic’, the latter includes things that modify DNA bases or their accessibility in a reversible way, or provide cytoplasmic factors that inevitably last at least one additional generation. This can be ‘environmental’ – DNA methylation, for example, can conceivably vary for circumstantial reasons and be passed on. But ultimately, methylation patterns are under the control of genes. They form a wipeable mark that controls gene expression.
This is a long way from ‘Lamarckian’ – the idea that doing something to part of an organism in its life will affect that part of its descendants.
A frequently cited case is the Dutch ‘hunger winter’. I don’t think conditions were sufficiently controlled to permit any conclusion. It should be a simple matter to replicate those conditions in mice and see the effect in controlled lab conditions (though I am not a fan of being mean to mice for research purposes!). If you have an effect, you can investigate mechanism.
But for my money, ‘epigenetics’ is largely genetics, with DNA as the gene’s substrate.
There is lots of irony. First of all, I mentioned that Lamarck did not invent “Lamarckian inheritance”. Lamarck did not claim to have invented it, and both he and everyone in his era knew it as a very common belief that was already out there. It is only people in recent years who mistakenly attribute the invention of “Lamarckian” inheritance to Lamarck. So there is no charge of plagiarism to be made against Lamarck.
Phoodoo however took my comment on Lamarck not having invented “Lamarckian” inheritance and immediately used it to dismiss Darwin as a simple plagiarizer, saying that he was in this way like Lamarck. Oops.
Was this done to discredit natural selection and common descent?
Why do so many creationists and ID advocates hasten to conclude that Darwin’s thought leads inevitably to racism, or leads to Naziism? Or that it leads inevitably to immorality? I am pleased to hear that phoodoo thinks that this “has nothing at all to do with the validity of [Darwin’s] work”. But the chorus of calumny by creationists and ID advocates has one and only one object: to scare their readers away from being tempted by the arguments of evolutionary biology. There must be something wrong with these arguments, they want their readers to conclude, because if we accept them then we must accept Naziism, or racism, or immorality, or we are listening to people who are nothing but simple plagiarists.
It is simple scare tactics, dishonestly intended and based on bad history:
Was Darwin a racist? Actually yes, because nearly every major figure in the 19th century was, including Abraham Lincoln (and there are whole symposium volumes grappling with racist statements that can be found in Lincoln’s speeches). Darwin and Lincoln in fact had rather similar views on race — and both had rather similar revulsion to slavery. So does the Discovery Institute accuse Lincoln of being a major leader in racism? Of course not — we all know that there were many far worse voices than Lincolns’s. But with a straight face they bring the accusation against Darwin. The discrepancy in the way they treat Lincoln and Darwin shows that their propaganda is not an honest assessment of history.
Was Darwin the chief source of Naziism? Leave aside the pre-Darwin writings of Houston Chamberlain and other 19-century proto-Nazis. Is it possible that the Holocaust had something to do with 1000 years of European antisemitism? No, cry Darwin’s critics. Is it possible that it had something to do with the militaristic nationalism that swept across Europe in the 19th century, opposing the ideals of human rights and the internationalism of the Age of Reason, and leading on to World War I? Could this militaristic hypernationalism have something to do with Naziism? No, cry the critics of Darwin. It is all the fault of poor Charlie, scribbling away in Down House!
And as for charges of plagiarism, why are creationists and the Discovery Institute so eager to make them? Why are they insisting that Wallace has been denied the great credit due him … and then turning around to say that no credit is due for anyone for these wrong ideas?
I’m glad to hear that phoodoo did not intend to do any of this dishonest scaremongering, that phoodoo pushed this particular button with no base intent. What a relief.
Allan Miller,
Thanks, Allan. That’s helpful.
In regard to epigenetics, let me make a couple of points that may help. Jerry Coyne has already made these very well in his blog, but they need repeating here.
1. Epigenetic modifications tend to revert within one or a few generations. If we want to explain changes in, say, the human lineage, we can’t explain them by long-term retention of epigenetic changes — unless we also imagine Mendelian genetic changes that stabilize the epigenetic changes. Over at Uncommon Descent they are always going on about how us dim “Darwinists” are ignoring the new science of epigenetics. In fact it is they who don’t understand the implications of the rate of reversion of epigenetic changes.
2. There is no known tendency for the epigenetic changes which result from an environmental stress to be adaptive. The effects of dietary deprivation (say in the famous study in Sweden) led to decreased cardiovascular disease and increased diabetes incidence in grandchildren. It did not specifically make the grandchildren more able to resist dietary deprivation. It is like mutation, in that it causes random phenotypic changes that have no specific tendency to be adaptive changes.
3. In Lamarck’s theory, the effects of use and disuse lead to the development of organs in ways that are adaptive. The analogy is with the growth of muscles after exercise. Lamarck based much of his evolutionary theory on this supposed adaptiveness, combined with the supposed inheritance of these changes. So I don’t think it is right to equate Lamarck’s theory with epigenetic changes.
Here is a very good screed on the evolutionary implications of epigenetics by Jerry Coyne at his blog.
Joe Felsenstein,
Joe, you comments are so scattered all over the board, I have no idea what you are talking about. Why are you conflating other people crediting environmentally inherited traits to Lamarck as having anything at all to do with the INTENTIONAL plagiarizing of Darwin. Are subtle differences like someone taking the credit themselves, and others giving one credit such hard concepts for you to differentiate. When you use such utterly ridiculous comparisons, I really I really wonder if you use this same sloppiness of precision in all of your thinking.
I can also keep quite clear in my mind the difference between talking about Darwin the man (as being dishonest and suspect in his actions to others) and Darwins theory being full of gaping holes. There is no irony at all with both being true, and yet separate issues.
Why did I bring it up-well, I stated exactly why, why was it so hard for you to miss that? I said it was an interesting part of history and some people like to know the truth in life. Maybe you can answer why so many evolutionists are so eager to defend him, as if that is equal to defending his theory.
And now you are saying its a scare tactic to equate Darwinism to Nazism. Scare tactic, reality, I guess if you are going to conflate words, why not. The ideas of Nazism were based on Darwin! Its not a scare tactic when people point out the truth! The idea of the Aryan race being superior was about Darwinism. That there were other factors to what lead to the build up of German aggression is irrelevant. No one I know of ever said it was the only motivation for Germany’s war. But without Darwin’s ideas, Hitlers would never have gained such popularity.
And to say that many people’s belief in superior and inferior races today hasn’t been bolstered by the ideas from Darwin, well that’s just foolish to the extreme. You don’t need to judge the theory to see the obvious truth in this. If people are nothing but random, accidental collections of dust, some dust simply being hardier than others, what is so wrong about believing the weaker dust takes up space the better dust should be using.
Now, this may not be what Darwin first imagined his theory to mean, but over time, modern Darwinists like Dawkins, and Coyne and Myers and you (even though people like you want to distance themselves from this reality, with no logical excuse for why) and all the atheist online have confirmed that yes, indeed this is what the theory says life is-meaningless dust, that we accidentally become nostalgic about. But since that sounds terrible they try to find some contrived justification for why it isn’t (emergent properties, yea that’s it!)
phoodoo,
Completely untrue. But if you want to go down that rabbit-hole, please start another thread. If you don’t have author privileges, I’m sure it can be arranged.
phoodoo,
So Darwin plagiarized people? Fine.
Accepting evolutionary theory causes nazism/teen pregnancy/abortion (of teen pregnancy – hey, problem solved!)/satan worship/racism/slavery? Fine.
Darwin ate babies and was into autoerotic asphyxiation? Well, at least he had a hobby.
But we’re not here to discuss history, or provide social commentaries, are we? This topic is about “counterintuitive evolutionary truths”, isn’t it?
phoodoo, it’s my impression that there were theistic–in particular Christian–defenses of Naziism too. What if Nazis “used” Darwinism (as well as Nietzsche and Nordic myths and personal prejudice and who knows what all else) and slopped it into a grotesque mess so they could try to take over the world and commit genocide? What the hell is that supposed to prove? . Do you want to take credit for any such (presumable) misuse of stuff you take to be true by evil crazy people?
Are you saying that Nazism “requires a Darwinistic explanation” the way altruism in ants is claimed by some to “require a genetic explanation”?
Allan Miller,
When you said you didn’t sleep with that girl, and what does it matter if you did anyway, and everyone already knew I slept with her so its not a problem , and whats so bad about me doing that anyway, was that you being concise (just replace “girl” with Lamarckism I mean, same thing)?
Secondly, there is an elephant in the room, and it seems to be sitting on a lot of your heads (Lamarkism is another problem altogether.) We now know that you can’t have development of an organism, without a bunch of chemical switches, telling which genes to turn off and which genes to turn on, in exactly the right order, in exactly the right time. But what developed this system of switches? You can’t have an organism without all these switches first, but you can’t get a system of switches from an existing organism. “Oh well, that’s not a problem, we will figure it out one day…”
Dawkins simplified selfish gene made it sound easy, just start off with something dumb, like silicon clumping together, and let each successive replicator grab a protein here or there that lucks out. Voila. But now, you not only need DNA (right right, piece of cake) you need something else to tell DNA what to do. Holy shit. From accidents?
That is so far from a theory, its like calling a mushroom a comedian. No its worse, its like you saying you were being concise when you were throwing every rationale you could think of to dismiss Lamarck, even when the rationales completely contradicted each other.
And now you throw out this gem:
“This is a long way from ‘Lamarckian’ – the idea that doing something to part of an organism in its life will affect that part of its descendants.”
Oh yea, right, NONE of the ten articles from the science journals I included is suggesting that could happen!! That you could affect an organism descendants by doing something to that ancestor. Oh heavens no, they are not saying that, except that is exactly what they are saying!! Is that you being precise? Than try being imprecise so we can see the difference!!!