12.03.10
You call that news??
Wealthy lean toward ‘social Darwinism’ after economic crisis
After? How about before?
11.04.10
Social Darwinist propaganda
Darwin is more than survival of the fittest
Review by Morgan Witzel
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/99d59478-e797-11df-8ade-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rss
Published: November 3 2010 23:16 | Last updated: November 3 2010 23:16
Darwin’s Conjecture
The Search for General Principles of Social and Scientific Evolution
By Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen
University of Chicago Press, $45/ £29
Few thinkers have had quite the same impact as Charles Darwin. His theory of evolution was so powerful and compelling that it became the new orthodoxy, affecting how we think about many aspects of our lives. Not least of these influences has been on the way we do business. So-called social Darwinism has played an important role in shaping our understanding of economics, markets and organisations.
10.21.10
Giving thugs a dangerous theory like Darwin’s TNS
Natural Selection And The Oedipus Paradox
Giving the world’s thugs, economic or otherwise, a theory as dangerous, and bogus, as Darwin’s theory of natural selection is one of the greatest frauds in the history of science.
09.29.10
It didn’t work in 1929 and it won’t work today
Republican ‘tough love’ economics: Social Darwinism for the 21st century
Like Herbert Hoover’s treasury secretary, House Minority Leader John Boehner thinks tough-love spending cuts will end the recession. It didn’t work in 1929 and it won’t work today. What it will do is hurt the poorest even more.
09.27.10
Republican Economics as Social Darwinism
Republican Economics as Social Darwinism
By Robert Reich|Sep 26, 2010, 2:30 PM|Author’s Website
http://wallstreetpit.com/45808-republican-economics-as-social-darwinism
John Boehner, the Republican House leader who will become Speaker if Democrats lose control of the House in the upcoming midterms, recently offered his solution to the current economic crisis: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. People will work harder, lead a more moral life
08.29.10
Evilicious Darwin villains, and the Oedipus Paradox
The Oedipus Paradox
Our discussions of Hauser and his future book ‘Evilicious’ have pointed out the way that our study of the Oedipus Paradox previewed this, doing the job right, by showing the whole phase of this Social Darwinist game of theory to justifiy/legitimate evil deeds devoutly wished for.
08.16.10
The Kaiser’s Holocaust
The Kaiser’s Holocaust by David Olusoga and Casper W Erichsen: review
Ian Thomson is chilled by The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism by David Olusoga and Casper W Erichsen, an impressively researched account of the killing fields of Namibia
08.12.10
Social Darwinism, and Darwinism
Competition? Cooperation? Is There Still a Role for Government?
By Louis Hale (about the author)
We need to get our heads on straight. Read the rest of this entry »
08.02.10
Gray calls Ridley a Social Darwinist
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
John Gray
Published 02 August 2010
The ex-Northern Rock chairman Matt Ridley is an apologist for social Darwinism. His book is proof that ideas do not evolve.
07.22.10
Arhart the ideologist and Darwinian pseudoscience
Arnhart’s Darwinian liberalism is a triumph of bad science, bad economics, sociobiological pseudo-science, and conserviative idiocy.
The fake debate is between four who all accept the assumptions of Darwinism. Those assumptions are wrong, and as we can see from Arnhart’s tactics, ideological ploys in action.
06.21.10
Self-interest and private enterprise are in our DNA???
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley
Steve Jones takes issue with the argument that self-interest and private enterprise are in our DNA
06.20.10
The source of social darwinism
To understand social darwinism you might check out:
The Oedipus Paradox
Here’s what I said in the post previous to this one:
Social Darwinism arises from 1. assuming natural selection is the mechanism of evolution, and 2. failing to distinguish the neutral action of animals, and the subjective belief in natural selection used to initiate action by a confused agent.
You can’t really talk about ‘evolution’ in the present for a believer in natural selection. The result is not evolution, but quite social darwinist.
The fallacy arises in the way a conscious agent subjectively tries to carry out the ‘law of natual selection’ to advance evolution. Won’t work.
Social darwinism made political doctrine
Sharks, in the oil patch or on Wall Street, are products of what the Bartons see as natural evolution. It’s social Darwinism made political doctrine. Further complicating the picture is the fact that most of them don’t like Darwin at all. Still, his thought is very useful to their political worldview even though it challenges their nutty religious dogma. So be it. Only a little fish would demand consistency from a shark.
The toxic BP oil spill is going to kill both the sharks and the fish, of course. But Barton is undeterred by this. He wants to save what sharks there are to be saved, especially, I guess, the British hammerhead, the one the real American Founders threw out of our waters 235 years ago.
06.19.10
Ridley’s social darwinism
The Rational OptimistBy MATT RIDLEY – THE WALL STREET JOURNAL – BOOKS
Updated: Saturday, 19 June 2010 at 01:30 PM
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/481634-the-rational-optimist
Beware of Ridley’s confusion here: cultural evolution proceeds by a totally different process. Check out the eonic effect at history-and-evolution.com.
The stubborn confusion of Darwinists here simply perpetuates the social darwinist confusions of Darwinism.
To argue that human nature has not changed, but human culture has, does not mean rejecting evolution – quite the reverse. Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes. The habitat in which these ideas reside consists of human brains. This notion has been trying to surface in the social sciences for a long time. The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde wrote in 1888: ‘We may call it social evolution when an invention quietly spreads through imitation.’ The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in the 1960s that in social evolution the decisive factor is ‘selection by imitation of successful institutions and habits’. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation. The economist Richard Nelson in the 1980s proposed that whole economies evolve by natural selection.
06.17.10
Charity vs social darwinism
Rich people, give back!
Noblesse oblige has been out of fashion for a long time, suppressed by notions of social Darwinism, by worries about generosity being perceived as paternalism and by simple selfishness. Gates and Buffett are trying to make it popular again. It could, as Stacy Palmer, editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy noted, be a tough job:
“It’s a stretch to see how they’re going to get to the $600 billion figure,” she said, noting that only 17 people on the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest people in America are also on the Chronicle’s list of the most generous American donors.
05.28.10
TR’s social darwinism
Where racism and naturalism meet
Douglas Brinkley’s new biography of Theodore Roosevelt tries to reconcile the controversial U.S. president’s interest in nature conservation with his condescending social Darwinism
05.15.10
The left and postdarwinism
Notes Toward a Darwinian Left
This article is sad to read, because it is proof the left no longer has any discrimination or any ability to stand beyond scientism, or Darwinism with a critique of bad theories, or reductionist science.
Peter Singer’s book on this, which I reviewed at Amazon when it came out, is a puzzle. What is Singer’s fetishic attachment to Darwinism, after so much free play with theories of ethics?
His thesis is wrongheaded, and he is hardly a leftist at all in any case. He did great harm, because he is often convincing to idiots, when they should instead show some discrimination.
The start of the essay, which is a complete compendium of all the talk.origins baloney on which everyone is now raised, like parrots:
To what extent is the Darwinian vision of human nature compatible with progressive philosophies of social change, or more generally, with contemporary “left-of-center” ideals of social equality and justice? Is it possible to acknowledge our animal qualities while simultaneously advocating the ideals of a progressive and secular humanism?
The Darwinian view of human nature is one of the most incomplete bits and pieces of pseudo-science in the whole history of science. It admits only what is compatible with its theory of natural selection and completely misses everything else. In that sense it is completely alienated from man’s true human nature, replacing it with a propaganda scheme for capitalist economics, the hidden scandal of Darwinism that leftists in their idiocy cannot seem to fathom.
I recomment the view of historical evolution as seen in the eonic effect,history and evolution ‘.com’, so that the ideals of justice and equality, which are foreign to the hidden class theory of Darwin, have an instrinsic historical dynamic behind their action.
It is remarkable that Marx has been criticized as a closet design argument thinker because of the latent teleology in his historical materialism, an ism that fails because it is really a form of universal history.
It is time for a new left that leaves these Darwin leftists behind to sing the praises of Singerian psychopathy.
The class theory of Darwin is apparently beyond the grasp of the current left, trained to stop thinking, and to embrace forever the false positivism that emerged in the generation of Feuerbach and Marx.
Time to move on. Starting with a postdarwinian left.
05.12.10
Richard Dawkins: apostle of social darwinism
http://darwiniana.com/2010/05/11/bringing-richard-dawkins-to-justice/comment-page-1/#comment-349679
Jim Buck said,
May 12, 2010 at 3:18 am ·
Dawkins has no power to arrest the Pope. English law provides a power of citizen’s arrest; but that power is nullified if there are are police present—as there certainly will be in this case. It is then up to Dawkins to attempt to persuade a police officer that the Pope has commited an arrestable offence. It is not likely that bone-head Dawkins will have any success with this.
It is just a publicity stunt. Meanwhile, the harm done by Dawkins is almost worse than pedophilia. The nemesis of his life long profit making book propaganda will be the victims of Darwinian indoctrination, and the veiled Social Darwinism of his oversimplifications, and outright lies.
His mistakes, for example, in Climbing Mt. Improbable are blatant, pointed to many times, yet he has never budged an inch, and knows he can make a bundle simpling repeating his same old message over and over.
Not the least of the problem is the complete wreckage of statistical understanding in students of the subject.
05.08.10
Social darwinist metaphors
Answer: For the same reason any species goes extinct. The environment changed and it couldn’t adapt. Darwinism in action
This kind of social darwinist metaphor shows how Darwinism emerged, and why its fallacies are so tenacious. The depiction is not of evolution.
05.02.10
Social darwinists, warmongers
Book review of “The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, the Rush to Empire, 1898″ by Evan Thomas
04.25.10
Survival of the Fuzziest
Survival of the Fuzziest
Social Darwinism, or destructive competition as a means of maintaining society, is an ethically bankrupt ideology and one the U.S. must abandon to remain competitive. “Too often in the United States, co-opetition is conflated with destructive, lowest-common-denominator competition, which has led to predatory lending, underregulated capital markets, and our costly and ineffective health care system. Our counterparts abroad, however, have more prudently (and prosperously) distinguished them.”
04.21.10
Social darwinism and inequality
New social Darwinism behind inequality, says studyA major new study into the hidden causes of inequality has identified five new ‘unjust beliefs’ it says are to blame.