Fred Liken wrote:

Interesting read.

"Sound of Trumpet" <sound_of_trumpet@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:1153344935.911934.20990@s13g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/006019.html

<snipped>

An ignorant article written by someone who doesn't understand or
believes in evolution. Come on Fred, you can do better than this.

Previously, on alt.atheism, Sound of Trumpet in episode
<1153344935.911934.20990@s13g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>...

In a long comment on evolution, reader Tim W. makes a couple of
fascinating points. First, he shows that natural selection within existing
species would occur regardless of how evolution, meaning the appearance of
entirely new species, occurred.

No that's not what evolution "means."

Previously, on alt.atheism, Sound of Trumpet in episode
<1153344935.911934.20990@s13g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>...

In a long comment on evolution, reader Tim W. makes a couple of
fascinating points. First, he shows that natural selection within existing
species would occur regardless of how evolution, meaning the appearance of
entirely new species, occurred.

No that's not what evolution "means."

Second, he provides an answer to the
question I raised in a recent post: how do liberals reconcile Darwinian
evolution with liberal equality, particularly the equality of abilities
between races?

Between races?

Gee, wonder where you'd be leading with *that?

He argues that liberals make Darwinism compatible with
equality by downplaying natural selection, since natural selection leads
to considerations of inequality, and instead emphasizing the idea of
evolution without natural selection-that is, evolution as some automatic
process that simply makes everything and everyone better and more equal,
just like liberal progress itself. Liberals have thus "tamed" Darwinian
evolution, with its nasty struggle for the survival of the fittest, and
turned it into a liberal myth.

In short, you haven't a single fucking clue what you're talking about.

Evolution has nothing to do with "better" or "worse" or any such thing.
Never has. Never will. It has to do with fit to an environment.

Why do you people lie so much?

Sound of Trumpet wrote:

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/006019.html



How liberals make Darwinism seem compatible with liberal equality



In a long comment on evolution, reader Tim W. makes a couple of
fascinating points. First, he shows that natural selection within
existing species would occur regardless of how evolution, meaning the
appearance of entirely new species, occurred. Second, he provides an
answer to the question I raised in a recent post: how do liberals
reconcile Darwinian evolution with liberal equality, particularly the
equality of abilities between races? He argues that liberals make
Darwinism compatible with equality by downplaying natural selection,
since natural selection leads to considerations of inequality, and
instead emphasizing the idea of evolution without natural
selection-that is, evolution as some automatic process that simply
makes everything and everyone better and more equal, just like liberal
progress itself. Liberals have thus "tamed" Darwinian evolution,
with its nasty struggle for the survival of the fittest, and turned it
into a liberal myth.

A really confused argument should start out with confusion, and this
one does. "Liberals" (there are a lot of positions that have called
themselves "liberal" over the last century and a half, but I think
these views are common to all these positions) generally do not think
that equality of rights is predicated upon equality of abilities. You
do not have the right to rule others without their consent, or exploit
or destroy them, merely because you are smarter, or stronger, or can
run faster or are, in the opinion of a panel of qualified judges,
better-looking than they are. Now, some liberals have argued that, in
fact, humans differ much less in native ability than is widely
supposed, but this conclusion is not necessary to the belief that
humans ought to have equal rights.

By the way, the author cannot seem to decide whether he is against
evolutionary theory as an explanation for the data in biology, or as a
vulgarized, dumbed-down set of concepts in popular ideology. Even if
he could demonstrate that "liberals" think badly about evolution, the
author would not have shown that common descent with modification, or
natural selection as a mechanism for adaption, is mistaken.

He writes:

Your recent postings on evolution have been very interesting. I've
often wondered myself how liberals could simultaneously maintain a
belief in both evolution and egalitarianism. As I'm sure you know,
leftist groups such as the ACLU and People for the American Way are
very active in lawsuits aimed at blocking any alternative to the theory
of evolution from being considered in public education, the recent case
in Dover, PA being an example. These same leftist groups are militantly
egalitarian.

Perhaps the author has read _National Review_ columnist John
Derbyshire, who is strongly against teaching ID and nearly as strongly
against egalitarianism. But, as noted, these are separate issues:
whether people are "equal" in the senses relevant to their political
and civil rights has very little to do with whether they are "equal" in
the senses that are susceptible to scientific measurement.

Note that ID is not an alternative to the theory of evolution; it is
not a theory, it is a god-of-the-gaps argument in search of gaps with
big names. Lying to students about the evidence for evolution
("teaching the controversy") is an alternative to proper teaching, not
an alternative to evolutionary theory.

The basic way that liberals get around this contradiction is by simply
evading it, and they do this by confusing evolution and natural
selection. Evolution and natural selection are not the same thing.
There is a lot more scientific evidence for natural selection than
there is for evolution. Furthermore, natural selection can occur
without evolution occurring, but not vice-versa.

I assume that here the author means "common descent" when he says
"evolution," and "microevolution due to natural selection" (evolution
within species) when he says "natural selection." There is a great
deal of evidence, as it happens, for common descent, although it is
difficult to see the relevance of such large-scale evolution to the
question of human equality. That you share ancestry with sea bass has
no obvious implications as to whether humans come in distinct "races"
or whether there are significant gene-based differences in abilities or
temperment among humans.
-- [snip of explanation of natural selection]

Most of the examples evolutionists provide to demonstrate their theory
are in fact examples of natural selection, not evolution. The peppered
moth. The Galapagos finches. These are examples of natural selection.

The Grants discussed microevolution of the some finch species in the
Galapagos due to natural selection. But Darwin's use of the finches
was somewhat different. He did not observe them change. Rather, he
observed that ecological niches that, in other parts of the world, were
filled by other sorts of birds (e.g. leaf-eating) were occupied in the
Galapagos by different sorts of finches (some of which did not look
very much like typical finches, but more like, e.g. blackbirds). These
finches seemed to be related to the finches on the South American
mainland, but were not the same species; Darwin took this to indicate
that a single species of finch had colonized the Galapagos from South
America and diverged into over a dozen different species, some of them
no longer particularly finch-like in appearance and behavior. This is
an example of biogeography as evidence for common descent, not of
natural selection per se, although of course Darwin credited natural
selection with altering the finches to fit their new niches.

Evolution is something different. Evolutionary theory maintains that
countless billions of positive mutations have occurred, been preserved,
and then expanded via natural selection. Starting with a single living
cell which somehow came into being millions of years ago, everything on
earth descended. How? Via mutations. Those mutations were supposedly
beneficial on occasion, and the new mutant, being better than its
parents, did a better job of reproducing. It passed its mutant form on
to its own offspring, while the inferior non-mutant earlier variety
died off in competition (natural selection). We're expected to
believe that an incredible number of these positive mutations led the
original single celled thing to become, over time, elephants, humans,
giraffes, cattle, ants, bees, birds, snakes, fish, etc.

How does the author justify the claim that the number of beneficial
mutations was "incredible?" After all, you have three or four billion
years in which to work, populations ranging from the thousands to the
trillions (all of them producing offspring with mutations in some gene
or other, every generation), over an entire planet. Note that the
author overlooks his own earlier point: populations spread out into
different environments, so that a mutation that makes it fitter in one
might make it less fit in another, and have no effect on fitness in a
third.

Needless to say, there's a lot of wishful thinking in that. I doubt
that it's true. But it's important to remember that evolution
relies on natural selection, whereas natural selection doesn't rely
on evolution. Natural selection would occur no matter where life on
earth came from. But evolution would go nowhere without natural
selection there to favor the mutant newcomer over its predecessor.

Actually, there have been a number of mechanisms suggested for
evolution. A great deal of evolution seems to be driven by random
genetic drift: neutral mutations (neither more or less "fit" than other
forms of a gene) spread or die off by sheer chance, so that species
evolve even when they are not adapting to new conditions. Some
biologists posit that genetic "drive" (a tendency of some genes to
actively get themselves into more germ cells, whether or not this
benefits the organism as a whole), and physical laws governing the
development of anatomical features, play a larger role than has been
appreciated in traditional evolutionary theory. Even after "Darwinism"
replaced Lamarckianism, some theorists have speculated about mechanisms
that might impart a preferred long-range direction to evolution.
Darwin originally had no mechanism at all for evolution; he started by
noting that common descent with modification could explain the
consistent nested hierarchy of life and biogeography, and later went on
to propose natural selection as a possible mechanism. If we had to
abandon natural selection as the principle mechanism for adaption,
something else would have to be found to explain evolution, since the
evidence for it is overwhelming.

This is the liberal evolutionist quagmire. They love the theory of
evolution because it removes God from the equation. We're just
animals with no souls who crawled up out of the primordial muck. In
addition, evolution proposes an idea of progress, which fits in well
with Marxist theory. We're evolving toward some presumably higher
plane, which invariably means some socialist utopia. Liberals no doubt
regard themselves as more highly evolved than the rest of us. But
liberals then hit a brick wall. How would all those mutations flourish
and be preserved if not for natural selection? So they need natural
selection, but they don't like it because it clearly leads to
inequality. They also need it because they lack examples of actual
evolution. So they give school kids examples of natural selection and
call it evolution.

First, there are theistic evolutionists who presumably, if they wished
to remove God from the equation, would be atheistic evolutionists. For
that matter, one could posit that life in its present forms and
diversity had always existed (Aristotle's suggestion), or simply that
there was no known explanation for the complexity and diversity of
life, but that God certainly wasn't that explanation, and reject God
that way. For that matter, there are plenty of theistic liberals
(google on the phrase "religious left").

Second, evolutionary theory does not imply inevitable or general
progress. Evolution implies adaption to local environments, which may
involve the development of greater complexity and intelligence, or
lesser complexity and intelligence. Traits which do not contribute to
success in a particular environment are commonly lost in the course of
evolution, from blind cave fish to the simplified internal organs of
many parasites. In any case, evolutionary theory deals with biological
change, not with social change; none of the social changes to humans
since the neolithic have involved significant evolutionary change in
the human species.

Third, why does the author assume that natural selection necessarily
leads to inequality? What is his evidence that different populations
adapted to environments that put signficantly different demands on
mental and physical traits? Could one not with equal plausibility
argue that natural selection will tend to make populations more
genetically uniform, with respect to genes that affect intelligence,
physical prowess, or whatever other traits of interest to one?

Fourth, to repeat myself, the case for equality of human beings
(regardless of whether you think it ought to be equality of political
rights, or opportunities, or outcomes, or some combination of the
above) does not depend on equality of abilities or traits.

Fifth, there are plenty of examples of evolution which can be presented
in textbooks: observed instances of speciation, the nested hierarchy of
life (the way species fall into groups of species linked by many shared
traits found only in those species, with these groups falling into
larger groups, which uniquely fall into larger groups, no matter which
sets of traits, anatomical or molecular, one wishes to compare), faunal
succession in the fossil record, transitional fossils (from feathered
dinosaurs to fossils that straddle any division between "man" and "ape"
one might wish to draw), to biogeography.

The author simply does not know what he is talking about.

Natural selection itself gets downplayed. It's mentioned a little, as
the mechanism that preserves evolutionary changes, but its effects
aren't dwelled upon, and they're never discussed as they relate to
humans. Instead, evolution is given credit for most everything. And
since evolution is merely a somewhat ideological theory that can easily
be melded with liberalism, it's a welcome addition to the leftist
arsenal. We're the result of millions of years of "evolutionary
progress," mutations which occurred without the guidance of any
deity. We're related to all other creatures. Our goal is to become
more "evolved," which easily becomes translated into ideological
desires. Equality, feminism, secularism, socialism, open borders, you
name it. Any and all of those things can be put forth as conditions we
are "evolving" toward. It fits the progressive-reactionary liberal
worldview perfectly. Support gay "marriage" and you're more
evolved. Oppose it? You're an unevolved neanderthal. Why? Because
liberals say so, and we all know evolution is true because scientists
say so.

Evolution itself does not have a goal, as far as anyone can determine.
As for "more evolved," that simply means "more changed from the last
common ancestor of the two groups being compared," so it's pretty
consistent with any sort of change one might go through. I don't know
of anyone who supports gay marriage or greater immigration because it
is "more evolved." More egalitarian, or more "socially just," or just
nicer, yes, but more evolved? No evolutionist (biologist who studies
evolutionary processes) proposes that evolution ought to be our source
for moral or political values, and political pundits use "more evolved"
to mean "agreeing with me" as a joke rather than as an actual basis for
policy.

The author pontificates quite a bit about evolutionary theory, with
very little apparent knowledge of it. That is not uncommon among
creationists.

This all requires them to downplay natural selection, even though
it's infinitely better documented than evolution, and is actually
observable. Imagine what would happen to a public school teacher who
discussed sex differences in class, in terms of math ability, for
example. No doubt natural selection has had enormous effects on human
populations, making men more different from woman, races more different
from one another, and so on. But a teacher would be fired for
discussing that, with the ACLU leading the charge for dismissal. They
simply don't allow discussion of these issues, as Harvard's
president learned.

Actually, among biologists (who presumably are more qualified to
discuss evolution than political activists of any stripe) there is
considerable question as to the role of natural selection in the
evolution of racial traits. Skin color is probably the result of
selection (dark skin is more resistant to ultraviolet light, and hence
to skin cancer, but light skin is better for making vitamin D in
limited sunlight at high latitudes), but other "racial" traits were
posited by Darwin to be due to sexual rather than natural selection
(that is, they survived and spread because women thought they were
sexy, not because they *directly* contributed to survival like skin
color). It is neither clear why natural selection ought to favor
differences between the intellectual or other abilities of populations
in different parts of the world, or the extent to which such
differences are genetically based. Likewise, both the genetic basis
of differences in math skills between men and women, and the possible
selective forces that might explain such differences, are matters of
considerable controversy. One surely ought not say that "no doubt"
natural selection has made races or sexes different from one another in
these regards.

The ACLU had nothing to do with the firing of Larry Summers, who did
not, so far as I have been informed, link his suspicions that fewer
women than men were qualified to be scientists to natural selection.
-- [snip of reiteration of author's confusion]

- end of initial entry -

-- [snip of reply]
-- Steven J.