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sam0345 comments on Open Thread: September 2011 - Less Wrong
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Anthropomorphic terminology for natural selection is standard and well understood. Darwin used it, explicitly making the analogy between conscious breeding and natural. Those who use it correctly demonstrate that they read Darwin. Those who fuss about it inappropriately demonstrate that they did not read Darwin.
I fussed over it appropriately, as Constant seemed to have kept forgetting that natural selection, being blind deaf and stupid, isn't obliged to result in our intuitions of harm coincide with direct influence on reproductive capacity.
And also, indeed I've not read Darwin (Other significant scientists I've not read: Galileo, Copernicus, Newton). Why does it matter for the purposes of this argument whether I've read Darwin or not? You seem to be playing status games (i.e. "haha, I've read Darwin and you have not") instead of focusing on the merits or demerits of the argument itself.
But it will make our intuitions about harm correspond to diminished capability to survive and reproduce well enough. Our intuitions about harm were formed as if for the purpose of ensuring we would avoid impairment to our capability to survive and reproduce, in the sense that our eyes were formed as if for the purpose of seeing.
Darwin then, after explicitly explaining the "as if", made the analogy with a human breeder consciously breeding to a purpose, and then proceeded with anthropomorphic language.