142KiB, 1135x1536, End of Charles Darwin’s walking stick [19th century]. skull.jpg
Can you fault this logic? Social darwinism vs. Maximizing cooperation, connectedness
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Quoted By: >>12970736 >>12970908 >>12973295 >>12973801 >>12975738
>Well, as science defined itself throughout the 17th and 18th century under the impetus of Descartes and Kant and all of these people, this notion of the world as a distillate apparatus was given up. But it returns in the idea of evolution. And we inherit it in the social world. Now, this is a delicate point. There is something called Social Darwinism, otherwise known as fascism. Social Darwinism uses a very vulgar understanding of evolutionary dynamics to justify class oppression by saying that it must be right that some people have their foot on other people’s necks because isn’t this what nature is about? Struggle of the fittest and survival of the longest-fanged, the swiftest claw, the sharpest tooth? Well, the answer is: no, absolutely not.
>This rests on an understanding of nature that was in vogue 150 years ago, but is not in vogue now. That’s what you see when you look at nature in the human dimension. But when you analyze nature as an integrated system of chemical reactions—gene transfer, catalytic self-regulating activities, hypercycles of energy, nutrients, and metabolism—when you analyze nature from that point of view, you see that it seeks to maximize cooperation, connectedness. Mutual interdependability is the thing which holds the whole thing together. And the species that is most successful is not the species that can dominate all others, it’s the species that can make itself indispensable to all others. Look at the evolutionary success of the bacteria. You know, they settled in for the long haul and no higher form of life can operate without them. And so the possibility of bacteria becoming extinct is laughable. I mean, they’ll be the last to go because they have made themselves indispensable.
>This rests on an understanding of nature that was in vogue 150 years ago, but is not in vogue now. That’s what you see when you look at nature in the human dimension. But when you analyze nature as an integrated system of chemical reactions—gene transfer, catalytic self-regulating activities, hypercycles of energy, nutrients, and metabolism—when you analyze nature from that point of view, you see that it seeks to maximize cooperation, connectedness. Mutual interdependability is the thing which holds the whole thing together. And the species that is most successful is not the species that can dominate all others, it’s the species that can make itself indispensable to all others. Look at the evolutionary success of the bacteria. You know, they settled in for the long haul and no higher form of life can operate without them. And so the possibility of bacteria becoming extinct is laughable. I mean, they’ll be the last to go because they have made themselves indispensable.
