Post World War II, scientists studying origins, sensed a moral mission to tell the story in order to encourage us to be better people. The close-knit hunter-gatherer clans that represented all humanity co-operated for survival and were chock full of moral lessons for us all. But was it true?:
Readers and reviewers lumped Morris, Ardrey and Lorenz together as promoting a powerful new vision of humans as animals. (To be fair, each author saw different moral systems and imperatives emerging from their research, but these nuances mattered less to readers than their shared zoomorphic vision.) The view of humans as specialised animals carried implications for who among the scientists could truly judge what it meant to be human. If our ecological past determined human nature, then reconstructing the biological processes that had created humanity required a retrospective view. No longer defined by the rise of agriculture or true language, the conditions that gave rise to human nature now included our ability to avoid predators, to hunt, to kill and to survive on the dangerous open plains of the savannah. Lorenz, Ardrey and Morris shared the underlying view that aggression, violence and murder helped to shape human nature. Their work thus posed a pressing existential question: how had humans ever managed to cooperate? The answer, it seemed, would be found by scientists with expertise in animal behaviour. Erika Lorraine Milam, “The hunt for human nature” at Aeon
Of course, that makes the researcher the human and the research topic not humans but animals. How does that work for equality? Author Milan thinks it’s a wash:
The political malleability of moral lessons from humanity’s deep history demonstrates that biological essentialism need not be reductionist or dehumanising, nor is there any consistent analogy between biology and ideology. Although biological theories of human nature have been used to debase some members of society as less valuable than others, they have also been used to promote egalitarian conceptions of humanity as a whole. Erika Lorraine Milam, “The hunt for human nature” at Aeon
Yes, their theories have sometimes been used to promote equality but on what grounds? That we are “evolved animals” who need coercion? The key question about equality is always “equality with what?”
This long, thoughtful essay surveys many trends in writing about early humans over the last century. The only sure thing is, those early humans can’t be brought back and interviewed.
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See also: World’s oldest known painting, 40,000 years old, found in Borneo jungle
Pleistocene human remains show many deformities
and
No one evolved faster than the Neanderthal
She refers to “human nature” frequently. But that’s a philosophical concept that is entirely at odds with evolution.
Human nature is something distinct from animal nature. It cannot be something that evolved physically from animals.
What distinguishes humans is the rational soul. Reason, imagination, desire for transcendence.
To a philosophical naturalist like myself, human nature is whatever makes human beings human and not dogs or cats, say. For example, the ability to operate a can-opener is part of what makes me human because I can do it and my cats can’t. Does that make me more “worthy” in some way than my cats? I don’t see how. It’s just a difference. My cats have a much better sense of smell and low-light vision than I do. That doesn’t make them morally better or worse than me, again, just different. That’s why, if there were such a thing, I would be drawn to the Vulcan philosophy of IDIC, glorying in Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. I am repelled by any group that implies or actually claims to be superior to the rest of humanity for some dubious reason. As Karl Popper wrote, “While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.”
Robert Wright has better books that describe hunter-gatherer groups learning to cooperate: ‘Nonzero’ (2,000) and ‘The Moral Animal’ (1994), compared to the article referenced and the folks she has quoted. Roberts describes folks who were truly human and trying to learn ways to become civilized.
as to:
The ‘moral lesson’ from World War II, as Sir Arthur Keith noted in 1947, was that “the law of Christ is incompatible with the law of evolution as far as the law of evolution has worked hitherto. Nay, the two laws are at war with each other; the law of Christ can never prevail until the law of evolution is destroyed.”
Richard Weikart has thoroughly documented how Darwinian ideology was foundational to the Nazis’ racism:
As Adolph Hitler himself stated,
Besides directly undermining Hitler’s, (and the overall German society’s), innate sense of objective morality, Darwinism also directly undermined Stalin and Mao’s innate sense of objective morality,
Karl Marx was deeply influenced by Darwin:
In fact, Lenin even kept a little statue of an ape staring at a human skull on his desk. The ape was sitting on a pile of books which included Darwin’s book, “Origin”.
Here is a picture of what the little statue on Lenin’s desk looked like:
Stalin likewise, while at ecclesiastical school of all places, was also heavily influenced by Darwinism,
Even Chairman Mao was deeply influenced by Darwinian ‘morality’:
The unmitigated horror unleashed on the world by Darwinian ‘morality’, i.e. by the direct undermining of the Judeo-Christian worldview, is almost beyond comprehension. Here’s what happens when Atheists/evolutionists/non-Christians take control of Government:
Even today in America, with its strong Christian heritage, and even though America overcame the Nazi and Communist scourges in Europe, has not escaped unscathed from the devastating effects of “Darwinian morality”.
Moreover, the sad irony is is that this undermining of Judeo-Christian morality by such devastating “Darwinian morality” is based on misleading, eve fraudulent, ‘science’.
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/materialist-perhaps-reaches-new-low/#comment-668011
Verse:
Sev
Well, you’re free to invent meanings to well-known terms, but that will make it difficult for people to understand you.
I would guess that you think your cat has a “cat nature”, and the dog a “dog nature”. Or perhaps, a brown dog has a “brown dog nature” and a cat with one eye has a “one-eyed cat nature”. I don’t know – perhaps you take it farther. One dog runs faster than another – that one has “a little faster dog nature”? Each organism is unique – that’s quite a lot of “natures”.
Evolution proposes a continuum. Human beings are slightly modified apes. Where do you get a “human nature” from that?
In materialism, everything is reducible to molecules, obviously. They all have one nature.
Human nature in classical philosophy is the essence of the human soul – the rational component. It’s also the moral nature of humanity. Is man basically good or evil? That’s a question about human nature.
Seversky @ 2
Please read Bornagain77 @ 5 and the list of 17. Tell us again how you are “repelled by any group that implies or actually claims to be superior to the rest of humanity for some dubious reason.”
Seversky is the sort of guy or gal that the liberating soldiers encountered as camp guards in places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau and other death camps throughout Nazi occupied Europe and in the Gulags of the Soviet Union.
Yes Seversky, those soldiers were immensely superior to those guards, and superior to you as well.
Silver Asiatic at 6, you make an excellent point.,,, If I may expand on it bit.
As to this claim from Seversky:
Immaterial abstract concepts, such as ‘philosophical naturalist’, ‘human nature’, ‘dog nature’, ‘cat nature’ simply cannot be grounded within the Darwinian worldview:
Even the concept of personhood itself is an immaterial abstract concept. That is to say, if Darwinian evolution were actually true, then Seversky himself does not actually exist as a real person but is merely a neuronal illusion that is generated by his brain.
Simply put, in Seversky’s worldview, Seversky’s brain is real whereas Seversky himself is a illusion. There simply is no “me”, “myself”, or “I” within Seversky’s Darwinian worldview for Seversky to refer to.
Needless to say, if the immaterial abstract concept of Seversky himself does not really exist as a real person, then any immaterial abstract thoughts that the ‘illusion’ of Seversky may have, (of say human nature, dog nature, cat nature), must necessarily be illusory as well.
And if human nature, dog nature, and cat nature cannot be grounded within the Darwinian worldview, then it is hardly fair for Charles Darwin to have entitled his book “Origin of Species”. The entire idea of there being a distinct classes of species, much like the concept of personhood, is a abstract, immaterial, concept that simply cannot be grounded within the Darwinian worldview:
Moreover, as bad as it is for Darwin’s theory to not be able to account for the concept of species, it gets much worse for the Darwinist.
Not only does Darwin’s theory fail to account for what a species is, the ‘bottom up’ reductive materialistic framework of Darwinian evolution is also found to be grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic “form” and/or shape.
Moreover, the failure of the reductive materialism to be able to explain the basic form of any particular organism occurs at a very low level. Much lower than mutations to DNA itself.
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
Thus, since neo-Darwinian explanations are grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form, then neo-Darwinian speculations for how one type of organism might transform into another type of organism are based on pure fantasy and have no discernible experimental basis in reality.
As if the preceding were not more than enough to render Darwin’s theory void of any explanatory power within biological science, it gets even worse for the Darwinist.
Although every rigorous theory of science requires verification from mathematics, and experimentation, in order to be considered scientific in the first place,,,
,,, there simply is no place for the abstract immaterial, beyond space and time, realm of mathematics to find grounding for its reality in the reductive materialism that undergirds Darwinian thought.
Therefore, besides Darwinian evolution already being shown to be mathematically impossible (by Sanford, Dembski, Marks, Axe, Behe, Durston etc.. etc..), Darwinian evolution is further falsified by mathematics as being a scientific theory since Darwinism denies the very reality of one the thing it most needs, i.e. mathematics, in order to be considered scientific in the first place.
Besides the abstract concepts of personhood, of species, of biological form, and of mathematics, there are many other abstract things, things that everybody, included Darwinists, take for grated as being real, that become illusory and therefore ‘non-real’ within the Darwinian worldview. As Dr. Egnor states in the following article, “Human beings think about mathematics, literature, art, language, justice, mercy, and an endless library of abstract concepts.”
As far as the battle between Intelligent Design and Darwinism is concerned, the denial of the physical reality of abstract, immaterial, information is what lies at the heart of the battle between the two camps.
Basically, Darwinists claim that immaterial information, in so far that they grudgingly admit that it is even real in the first place, hold that immaterial information is merely ’emergent’ from some material basis.
Yet, despite the fact that Darwinists deny the independent physical reality of immaterial information, it is now found that immaterial information, though being immaterial, is its own distinct physical entity that, although being separate from matter and energy, is able to interact with matter and energy.
And thus, with the now empirically demonstrated physical reality of immaterial information, Darwinism is now empirically falsified in its claim that the ‘abstract’ immaterial realm of information does not really exist.
Verse:
ayearningforpublius @ 7
I am as repelled by a political ideology that allows its adherents to believe they are superior to the rest of humanity as I am to any religion which does the same thing.
As for BA77, as usual he, apparently like Weikart, is only giving you one side of the story, which is probably the only side you want to hear.
Weikart apparently is pursuing an anti-Darwinian agenda which argues that the theory of evolution was a – if not the – primary inspiration for the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. Except that virulent anti-Semitism had been endemic in Christian Europe for centuries before the Nazis took control of the German state. Read On The Jews And Their Lies by one of the founders of the Reformation, Martin Luther, if you want a taste of the fine Christian sentiment of that period. And he was far from alone.
As for BA77’s list of 17, try balancing it against this one:
Seversky at 11, talk about judging with an unfair balance, your post is it.
In order to try to counterbalance the unmitigated horror committed by the atheistic/Darwinian regimes of the Nazis and Communists over the last century, Seversky reaches over the entire span of Christianity’s 2000 years of existence and cherry picks atrocities to try to claim that Christianity is as murderous as the atheistic/Darwinian regimes have been over the last century.
In rebuttal to that preposterous claim let me first point out that Christ himself, rather than call down 12 legions of angels to slay his enemies submitted himself instead to death on a Cross by the hands of his enemies:
Moreover, Christ himself commanded his followers to not return evil for evil but to return good for evil:
In fact, Jesus instead of commanding his followers to kill those who did not believe, (as Mohammad told his followers to do), instead told his followers to endure persecution.
In fact, all the disciples, save for John, suffered martyrs deaths.
Martyrdom has been a staple of Christianity throughout Christian history:
Modern Atheists, starting with the French revolution, to Communist Russia to present day China have been particularly brutal and murderous of professing Christians. The murderous brutality of present day Muslims against Christians in the middle east hardly needs to be mentioned since they often behead their Christian victims on TV.
In fact, Christianity easily qualifies for the most persecuted religion in the world today:
That hardly sounds like Christianity is the murderous religion that Seversky is falsely trying to portray Christianity as being.
And even if you add up all the murderous atrocities that were listed by Seversky in post 11, (that were committed by those who falsely claimed that they were following the teachings of Christ by killing people who did not believe in Christ), the number of murders is still only a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions of murders committed by those who followed the morality enshrined in Darwin’s maxim ‘survival of the fittest’, (as well as those murders committed by Muslims following the murderous teachings of Mohammad):
Thus in conclusion, for Seversky to cherry pick atrocities throughout Christian history that were done by people in direct contradiction to the teachings of Christ, is to be severely biased against Christianity and is to blatantly ignore the true ‘persecuted’ history of Christianity. In fact, Christianity, and Christianity alone, far from being a extremely murderous religion as Atheism and Islam are, has instead been the foundation from which the world has been blessed with much goodness time and time again:
Verse and Video: