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cf9a2d2
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The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
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evolution
suffering
fear
science
indifference
design
starvation
disease
purpose
natural-selection
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Richard Dawkins |
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50d9dc8
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One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
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evolution
science
natural-selection
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Charles Darwin |
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aafdaed
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With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.
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planned-parenthood
sterilisation
sterilization
population-control
eugenics
social-darwinism
survival-of-the-fittest
darwinism
natural-selection
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Charles Darwin |
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a02a6c1
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It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.
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mutation
natural-selection
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Ian McEwan |
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d1cb083
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Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.
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evolution
existence
natural-selection
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Richard Dawkins |
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9234975
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Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!
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species
natural-selection
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Charles Darwin |
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da14a0e
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The Christians who engaged in infamous persecutions and shameful inquisitions were not evil men but misguided men. The churchmen who felt they had an edict from God to withstand the progress of science, whether in the form of a revolution or a theory of natural selection, were not mischievous men but misinformed men.
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evolution
science
misguided
science-vs-religion
darwin
natural-selection
science-and-religion
copernicus
nicolaus-copernicus
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Martin Luther King Jr. |
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6712e49
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If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught?
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evolution
morality
infidelity
macro-evolution
macroevolution
social-darwinism
survival-of-the-fittest
theft
darwinism
natural-selection
stealing
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Robert J. Sawyer |
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1880c97
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Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.
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natural-selection
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Michael Pollan |
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bd0058d
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Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.
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evolution
teleology
natural-selection
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Richard Dawkins |
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0a98969
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What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.
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evolution
science
inheritance
natural-selection
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Sam Harris |
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cb0e3f8
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Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower's point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring.
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plants
natural-selection
humans
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Michael Pollan |
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435d7f5
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Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it.
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life
oxygen
natural-selection
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Richard Dawkins |
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596d3e9
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That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another -- that, in fact, has never been observed.
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evolution
science
darwinism
darwin
natural-selection
neo-darwinism
speciation
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Robert J. Sawyer |
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bab9581
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"George Williams, the revered evolutionary biologist, describes the natural world as "grossly immoral." Having no foresight or compassion, natural selection "can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness." On top of all the miseries inflicted by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own kind. Infanticide, siblicide, and rape can be observed in many kinds of animals; infidelity is common even in so-called pair-bonded species; cannibalism can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarians; death from fighting is more common in most animal species than it is in the most violent American cities. Commenting on how biologists used to describe the killing of starving deer by mountain lions as an act of mercy, Williams wrote: "The simple facts are that both predation and starvation are painful prospects for deer, and that the lion's lot is no more enviable. Perhaps biology would have been able to mature more rapidly in a culture not dominated by Judeo-Christian theology and the Romantic tradition. It might have been well served by the First Holy Truth from [Buddha's] Sermon at Benares: "Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful..."" As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a "natural" trait is the same as condoning it. As Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above."
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idyllic-view
predation
wild-animal-suffering
natural-selection
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Steven Pinker |
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59c9350
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"[T]he idea of treating Mind as an effect rather than as a First Cause is too revolutionary for some-an "awful stretcher" that their own minds cannot acommodate comfortably. This is as true today as it was in 1860, and it has always been as true of some of evolution's best friends as of its foes. For instance, the physicist Paul Davies, in his recent book , proclaims that the reflective power of human minds can be "no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless purposeless forces" (Davies 1992, p. 232). This is a most revealing way of expressing a familiar denial, for it betrays an ill-examined prejudice. Why, we might ask Davies, would its being a by-product of mindless, purposeless forces make it trivial? Why couldn't the most important thing of all be something that arose from unimportant things? Why should the importance or excellence of have to rain down on it from on high, from something more important, a gift from God? Darwin's inversion suggests that we abandon that presumption and look for sorts of excellence, of worth and purpose, that can emerge, bubbling up out of "mindless, purposeless forces."
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evolution
purpose
natural-selection
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Daniel C. Dennett |