Williams' Lament: "Natural selection maximizes shortsighted selfishness no matter how much pain or loss it produces and, from a human point of view, is grossly immoral."
"Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put on this earth to rise above." - Katherine Hepburn's character in The African Queen
For any of you who are interested in my writings on Judiasm, I just now searched my "archives". I was particularly looking for the follow up to Paradox. I finally found it! The post is entitled God is Not So Great. I wrote about a month after Paradox. In the follow-up, my tone is admittedly glib, but I think there are points in there that needed to get made, and that you might find interesting...
posted by Lizzie @ 11:55 AM
With what other than condemnation is a person with any moral sense supposed to respond to a system in which the ultimate purpose in life is to be better than your neighbor at getting genes into the future generations, in which those successful genes provide the message that instructs the development of the next generation, in which that message is always "exploit your environment, including your friends and relatives, so as to maximize our (genes') success," in which the closest thing to a golden rule is "don't cheat, unless it is likely to provide a net benefit"? - G.C. Williams The system he describes is natural selection, and most living, feeling beings are its victims. The impact of natural selection on our lives should be thought about, and combatted. I am interested in integrating insights from biology into how we think about life, and civilization. Love and education are our tools to resist the tragic impact of natural selection on the world (and traditional cultures and religions everywhere).
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