scombrid

<groans> Has he indicted evolutionary theory as a causitive agent in the Holocaust yet?

Strawman cubed. :banghead:

How does he know that caring doesn't convey greater reproductive fitness than savagery?

If being in a cooperative group allows the members of the cooperative group to out-reproduce solitary badasses then the frequency of genes for caring cooperation is going to increase relative to badass genes. Of course if everybody has the caring cooperation genes and a badass mutation occurs then that lucky sombitch is going to do quite well with all the caring suckers to push around. Of course the cooperative group might be cooperative fighters, in which case the uncooperative badass is screwed and won't sire progeny.

Your anti-evilutionist aggravater obviously doesn't understand evolutionary theory well enough to understand that the one the replicate itself the most is the "fittest". The one that reproduces the most is not always the biggest bad ass. There are cases where the biggest bad ass is less fit than nice folks.

dk

This isn't a Strawman because the vast majority of atheists buy into the evolutionary model that equates people with animals, and biomechanics to mechanics. If everything real is rational, then all real things logically reduce to the same underlying reality, so equivalence rules unless it can be ruled out. I don't see any rational or empirical bases to value people over the cows or vegetables they eat, or the microbes excreted in their dung, at least not from an agnostic or atheist perspective. I find the intellectual dribble about sympathy and empathy more diuretics than dialectic. The moment an agnostic or atheist recognizes the possibility of a plural reality, then they open the floodgates to an unmoved mover. Obviously its not theists that build a Strawman, but atheists and agnostics that transform theists into a Strawman.

dk

If being in an evolutionary group of any sort decreases a person's progeny then the group in and of itself becomes an evolutionary mechanism. For example family planning groups have decreased Western Eurpope's population from 30% at the end of WW II (1945), to <15% at 2000, with respect to world population. Given the technological, economic and political superiority of the Western Eurpopean people its clear they are evolutionary inferiors incapable of sustaining their own population. Clearly people from the Nations of Islam, India and South American are the fittest people. Don't be a simplton.

scombrid

That atheists acknowledge the reality that humans are mere animals isn't the strawman. Nobody suggested this to be the case. The OP theist's assumptions regarding the atheist worldview do build a strawman. Just because we're animals doesn't mean that we're savages or that we have to give equivalent value to all things. We give a subjective value to everything. There's no plurality in that world view, man is not special for any reason other than I am a human. It's been pointed out that caring is not unique to humans. Social animals of many genera display kin selected altruism and group loyalty that could easily be interpreted as their own moral code. On the surface they appear to be helping one another out of sheer goodness. With detailed observation we see that even the most altruistic animal has the selfish reason of increasing its reproductive fitness. This is not a conscious decision on the part of the altruist but a genetic imperative inherited from his altruistic ancestors that out reproduced less altruistic folks.

I value humans more than cows and vegetables because I am human and I expect fellow humans to act likewise. I do this not for the good of man but for the good of me. If man regarded man as man regards broccolli then it's likely that no one man could prosper as cooperative groups do today. This applies to a lot of social animals. They just don’t seem to be conscious of that reality as is man.


Hmmm, that’s artificial selection (well sort of), almost like breeding dogs a certain way to get long hair but different since it doesn’t change allele frequencies (true selection, artificial or natural, changes allele frequencies). The West desires to improve its quality of life by keeping birth rates down so that there’re more resources to go around so they breed less. This is cultural evolution; it is the spread of a meme. It is not biological evolution; biological evolution is the spread of an allele. It may affect biological evolution though. But artificially altering the birth rate obviously doesn’t have any direct effect on allele frequencies and doesn’t result from the spread of some “breed less” allele.


Simpleton? Just because I wrote my post in a less than tolerant or purely academic tone doesn't make its point less valid or me simple. Yes, I did oversimplify natural selection as well. I didn't feel that inanity of the OP theist deserved serious treatment. Besides, theyeti had already treat the subject well. You obviously share the OPs simplistic view of fitness and selection. You missed the "not necessarilies" and such as well.

That the west has economic and technological superiority doesn't necessarily make us more fit. Likewise, that less developed countries are breeding like rabbits doesn't make them more fit. They could breed themselves to disaster (They'll likely take us with them if they do, but I'll ignore that possibility here). In the west, genetic traits that once rendered people unlikely to breed are now corrected with medicine. What happens when our accumulation of deleterious alleles outpaces modern medicine's capacity to treat the ailments that the alleles cause? We can't know which population of humans is more fit from an evolutionary standpoint until something happens to wipe out a group. When we introduced smallpox to the Americas it became quite apparent that Europeans were more fit than native as far as disease resistance was concerned.



Of course, other than a dose of disease resistance or extra pigmentation here and there, all humans are basically equivalent from a fitness standpoint. Variation is the human genome is limited enough that no one group is greatly advantaged or disadvantaged biologically. Cultural evolution muddles the view of biological evolution in modern humans.

Sue Sponte

And you know this how? People ARE animals, that doesn't mean all animals "equate" the same. As for evolution, by the phrase "buy into it" do you mean fail to reject scientific findings based on religious bias? If so, then of course atheists "buy into it" because your premise presumes the result.

That you believe people who do not share your religious views are incapable of making value judgments is scary, because it implies that no person has any independent sense of value or morality. Do you really believe that the Bible is what makes a person capable of distinguishing between these things?

Wiploc

The first thing to note is that it's a lie. Ask around. I don't think you'll find a single atheist who believes that. If he used to be an atheist, he knows better.
crc