A quote 31 Oct 2007 From J. B. S. Haldane’s 1932 The Causes of Evolution: … I must … discuss a fallacy which is, I think, latent in most Darwinian arguments, and which has been responsible for a good deal of poisonous nonsense which has been written on ethics in Darwin’s name, especially in Germany before the [first world] war and in America and England since. The fallacy is that natural selection will always make an organism fitter in its struggle for the environment. This is clearly true when we consider members of a rare and scattered species. It is only engaged in competing with other species, and in defending itself against inorganic nature. But as soon as a species becomes fairly dense matters are entirely different. Its members inevitably begin to compete with one another. I am not thinking only of the active and often conscious competition between higher animals, but also of the struggle for mere space which goes on between neighbouring plants of closely packed associations. … [p119] Evolution Race and politics Social evolution
Biology Around the internets 23 Jul 2009 Razib has a post on a paper in BMC Evolutionary Biology that shows, fairly well, I thought, that Australian aborigines are most closely related to relict populations of indigenous Indian tribes. They are touting this as evidence that the “southern route” from Africa was the one taken by the Australians… Read More
Ethics and Moral Philosophy Morality and Evolution 3: Apes and populations 4 May 201422 May 2014 [Morality and Evolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7] Humans are apes, evolutionarily speaking. That is, while we are named distinctly in the vernacular usage from the rest of the apes (chimp, bonobo, gorilla, orang-utan, gibbons x 2), we fall squarely within the great ape clade. As such, we might expect that we share with… Read More
Evolution Rethinking the Cambrian 17 Mar 200818 Sep 2017 Ever since Gould’s Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, the popular view has been that the Cambrian was an “explosion” of living forms, and for some, usually but not always creationists, this has been touted as contrary to “Darwinism” (whateverthehell that is) or even evolutionary theory…. Read More
Several points. One is that leading evolutionary theorists were attacking eugenics before the second world war. Another is that so-called adaptationists were not always keen to draw moral conclusions about superiority of variants and took into account the role of non-ecological selection. Later in the same book, Haldane allows that Kropotkin’s “mutual cooperation” is also a factor in evolution. Given the myth of some that neo-Darwinism, so-called, was always a moral claim, that only survival matters, and so on. Think of it as a signpost along the way…