Thursday, October 04, 2007

Darwinism and Marxism

This genetic screen doesn’t exist. Babies with genetic defects die because the defect doesn’t work well enough to sustain life. It is simple ad hoc biology.

You may be right but it's ironic that you disagree with the way that they include theological claims in their textbook when writing on a blog named after a theological argument.

All False. Lies. Evolution is a scientific theory about life changing through time.

Wrong. If evolution explains the complexity of higher life forms then it is generally a theory about progression. It seems that progressives and socialists need a creation myth of progress which Darwinism fits.

Also, as the philosopher David Stove notes:
What deserves to be well known, but has in fact been virtually forgotten, is this: that if Darwinism once furnished a justification, retrospective or prospective, for the crimes of capitalists or National Socialists, it performed the same office to an even greater extent, between about 1880 and 1920, for the crimes, already committed or still to be committed, of Marxists. It is in fact scarcely possible to exaggerate the extent to which Marxist thought in the period incorporated Darwinism as an essential component. Marxists do not believe, of course, that there will be any struggle for life among human beings in the future classless society. But it was that Darwinian conception which Marxists at this time adopted as their description of human life under capitalism.
The reader can easily verify this statement, by opening any Marxist book, pamphlet, or newspaper of that period...(Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove: 106-107)


I would note that one shouldn't be surprised that Marxists would include Darwinism in their economic theories given that that the notion of a Darwinian struggle seems to have more to do with Victorian era economics than the empirical facts of biology.

Stove also notes:
It will perhaps be said, in defense of Darwinism, that many and enormous crimes have been committed in the name of every large and influential body of ideas bearing on human life. Whether that is true or not, I do not know. But even if it is, there are great and obvious differences, among such bodies of ideas, in how easily and naturally they amount to incitement to the commission of crimes. Confucianism, for example, or Buddhism does not appear to incite their adherents to crime easily or often. National Socialism, by contrast, and likewise Marxism, do easily and naturally hold out such incitements to their adherents...
It is impossible to deny that, in this respect, Darwinism has a closer affinity to National Socialism or Marxism than with Confucianism or Buddhism. Darwin told the world that a "struggle for life," a "struggle for existence," a "battle for life" is always going on among the members of every species. Although this proposition was at the time novel and surprising, an immense number of people accepted it. Now, will any rational person believe that accepting this proposition would have no effect, or only randomly varying effects, on people's attitudes towards their own conspecifics? No. Will any rational person believe that accepting this novel proposition would tend to improve people's attitudes towards their conspecifics--for example, would tend to make them less selfish, or less inclined to domineering behavrio, than they had been before they accepted it? No.(Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove :108-109)