09.27.09
Darwin’s botched theory
Dawkins complains so haughtily of those who reject evolution, but if evolution and Darwinism are confused, and if Darwinism is a bungled theory, then we should be glad for the resistance.
1.2.4 Botched Theories And The Coefficient Of Murder
Let us look at this implication of the Oedipus paradox, and consider the ethics involved in the assertion of evolutionary, and indeed, ethical theories, seen in a definable ‘coefficient of murder’ associated with the theory. The option to ‘act according to the law of evolution’, survival of the fittest, natural selection (death of the competitor) informs the agent, who proceeds to violent means, sure in his rejection of ethics of the grounding in science of biological law. Unscrupulous warmongers are handed a gift of legitimation by Darwin’s shortsighted theory. To inject the theory of natural selection into the culture of his time without any specification of the domains of its application was the source of the hopeless confusion that arose in Darwin’s wake, leading to the entanglements of Social Darwinism. Herbert Spencer is partly to blame here, but he never proposed the facts of social competition as a universal explanation for evolution.