= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Tesseract comments on Book trades with open-minded theists - recommendations? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (70)
Evolution is no threat to religion. Natural selection, explaining and predicting evolution is a threat to religion.
Indeed, one can usefully define any belief system as quasi religious if it finds natural selection threatening. If that belief system piously proclaims its admiration for Darwin while evasively burying his ideas, attributing to him common descent, rather than the explanation of common descent, then that belief system is religious, or serves the same functions and has the same problems as religion.
The trouble is that natural selection implies not the lovely harmonious nature of the environmentalists and Gaea worshipers, but a ruthless and bloody nature, red in tooth and claw, that is apt to be markedly improved by a bit of clear cutting, a few extinctions, and a couple of genocides, and of course converting the swamps into sharply differentiated dry land with few trees, and lakes with decent fishing, by massive bulldozing. And a few more genocides. Recall Darwin's cheerful comments about extinction and genocide. It is all progress. Well, if not all progress, on average it will be progress.
The idea that destroying the environment will make the remaining species "better" by making sure that only the "fittest" survive betrays a near-total misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution is just the name we give to the fact that organisms (or, more precisely, genes) which survive and reproduce effectively in a given set of conditions become more frequent over time. If you clear-cut the forest, you're not eliminating "weak" species and making room for the "strong" — you're getting rid of species that were well-adapted to the forest and increasing the numbers of whatever organisms can survive in the resulting waste.
And if you massacre coyotes and deport grey wolves so that the alleged red wolf "species" will not have sex with other canids, what are you doing?
If you slaughter barred owls so that they will not compete with or have sex with spotted owls what are you doing?
We are preserving dead wood so that spotted owls will have suitable nests, but due to fire prevention, there is a lot more dead wood in forests than would ever happen naturally, a lot more dead wood than there ever has been in the history of the earth. The spotted owl really is an inferior species to the barred owl - and female spotted owls don't seem to think it is a species at all.
Even if ignore all problems ofderiving ought from is, there is problem which parts of nature we are supposed to follow.
If Darwin says "kill them all, the strongest will survive", then Kelvin would say "kill yourself, why bother waiting to heat death of the universe?"