Darwin's Natural Selection Still at Work in Humans

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Even society IS survival of the fittest, robert. Only now its those fittest to use the social environment.....

If you can actually back that up without spouting dogma at me, I will be impressed. I am using original and unique arguements to back up my case. You are just using old stuff that loads of people (namely right-wingers and cynics) have said before.

I severely question whether you are left-wing, BlackLiger, if you oppose the Welfare system. Even my Conservative stepfather strongly supports the Welfare State in this country.

no, I support welfare. However, I oppose people who don't want to try and get off of welfare if they can.

Basicly, okay, someone who's down on their luck, in modern society, SHOULD be given a helping hand back on their feet. But thats it. If they abuse that, and don't even TRY to help themselves, they are wasting mine, yours and anyone elses time helping them when we could be helping people who want help.

And it depends on what you call dogma. History has produced MANY inteligent people, who have written good ideas down. And I don't count it as dogma IF you can understand it (that is, the person quoting it)... After all, otherwise, Pythagoras' Theorum is Dogma, and therefore, no mathamatician should use it when debating mathmatics, by your rules....

OK, I didn't want to get into an arguement about social security/welfare, of which I don't agree with all the points you made there. We are specifically talking about Darwinism. If you support Welfare, how can you say you support Social Darwinism. This is a contradiction in terms. Explain...

I don't support SOCIAL DARWINISM, but I do accept its a fact of the society we live in, even with welfare and all that. People who interact better are still better off in society.

After all, to get welfare, you have to interact with people...

Therefore, it exists, and I have to accept it. I don't have to like it, and I can work to change it, if I so wish, but I have to accept that, here and now, it exists.

My Mum gets welfare on my behalf, so I don't have to interact with people. Yes my communication skills are that bad....

Ah, now we get onto the cynicism dynamic. Sure, it is OK to accept things that are happening at the moment and if in many societies it is "Survival of the Fittest" then OK. However, part of being left-wing is that one has to oppose policies that advocate Darwinism. It is a political choice that one must make. Apes and fish don't have that choice because they are not that intelligent and can't think abstractly. However, we are intelligent (at least the Liberals are) and can think in terms of principles and consequences of applying those principles. So guys, lets use our intelligence for the better.

Yes Robert, but we also have to accept that change takes time. And to be practical about our goals.

I see examples of Natural Selection daily. The most obvious to me because I ride a sportbike would be those who opt not to wear a helmet and or protective gear because the law in this state(AZ.) makes it a choice. I also feel those who dont buckle up in a car are tempting natural selection to select them.lol When you are made aware and given information and still ignore said information/facts-odds are natural selection will come calling on you. Thats not to say it doesnt take its fair share of the totally oblivious who should have made themselves aware.

Imagen, someday we will be able to create a new organ for our selves that will create and feed into our systems a type of stem cells that will virtually expand our life spans 1000's of years, these new cells replace old and dieing and sick cells, keeping the body young, its up to you to keep it safe and healthy, this I predict will come true in 20-35 years time from now, if not sooner.

that is a part of our evolution, its like taking control of your own life and destiny.

we are ever evolving, thats why there was so many types of our race and ancestry, just we have become so many and can now cross all the boundary's of space and time with our planes and automobiles that our basic racial quality's are intermixing until we are your basic every day modern human.

Darwin's theory of Natural Selection, the reason why so many people are depressed and are on Prozac -- you are all inferior!

Why do old people get mugged? Survival of the fittest!

Happy-slapping? Survival of the fittest!

Raping females and infidelity? Natural selection!

Bullying? Survival of the fittest!

I don't see the point in having morals and values in society and people working hard to be happy if people are going to absorb what one guy says about the structure of life; you might as well not even try and accept your place in the natural hierarchy -- the bottom.

Darwin: as*hole.

I agree with your sentiments, thepeaguy. I've done some more research on Darwin, and in fact, he was against Social Darwinism, but it was the right-wing economists of the time that lapped up his theory and turned it into something that suited them - that is, justifying killing off the poor and sick, and treating blacks as inferior.

However, I feel it is important to free one's mind from all dogma or accepted "truth" and to question everything, be it what the Church taught in the 1800's to what the scientists teach today. Some of it might be true, but you must still question it, and not be afraid to put forward your own principles and moral beliefs.

Can anybody tell me if we do use technology one day to create a new species of humans what would happen in the end.

Darwin wasn't saying anything about old people getting mugged or big kids bullying little kids. Darwinism can only loosely be applied to such situations.
One feature of Darwin's theory is the indifference of nature. It hardly takes a scientist to point out that a bigger, stronger person will usually win in a fight against a smaller, weaker person, and Darwin's theory does not at all imply that we should accept such things as being in nature's best interests.
When Darwin talked about survival of the fittest he was talking about reproduction and heredity.

(Ironically, Darwin didn't know what the unit of heredity was: the gene. This was discovered by Mendel. Darwin thought that children inherited an averaging of their parents' traits. If this were the case, natural selection wouldn't happen.)

I actually find some aspects of Darwin's theory both bleak and comforting at the same time. For example, Darwin's theory implies that "social understanding" has evolved for its own sake. To use an oversimplification to illustrate the point: genes for social understanding have become widespread in the gene pool because they help their carriers to find mates, and they do not make a person any more or less "human".

This doesn't mean that people with AS can't find "mates" (although I've never found one).
What it does mean is that a socially skilled person can still be a complete a***hole.
And it doesn't mean that anyone should take any s**t from such an a***hole for the sake of "the natural hierarchy".
Humans have been given brains to enable us to rise above nature! To quote the title of Daniel Dennett's book, Freedom Evolves.

That's a book I fully intend to start some time when there's no football on TV.