One reality even a convinced Darwinian can’t deny is how vestigial all the traces of evolutionary conditioning are in humans. The implementation of Social Darwinism on various occasions in modern times has been marked by its forcedness, its artificiality.
This touches on themes that we have covered here previously, but it’s worthwhile to revisit the same territory for another look. The essay below is adapted from my email response.
One reason that Social Darwinism seems forced is that it consistently draws conclusions that are diametrically opposed to reality.
The reality is that current trends are selecting against high IQ. The most intelligent groups — Europeans and their diaspora, Jews, the Japanese, even the Chinese — are breeding (or rather, not breeding) themselves out of existence.
Natural selection knows no ideology. If intelligent people fail to reproduce themselves, then, empirically speaking, intelligence is being selected against. The evolutionary bottom line is that only the replication of one’s genome matters. From a Darwinian perspective, there is no other criterion.
For the last hundred years or so, stupidity has gained a selective advantage. I ascribe this phenomenon to the ascendance of advanced technology and the welfare states it has enabled. Intelligent people, who are more likely think carefully and plan ahead, tend to exercise prudence and have fewer children than average. Their intelligence also makes them more productive, and they are thus paying for the system that allows the rest of the population — the stupid people who fail to act with prudence — to have lots of kids.
This reverses an evolutionary trend that lasted 500,000 years or more. During the 20th century, the intelligence that was selected for over all those millennia enabled the creation of a meta-society, a “machine”, if you will. That environment allowed — encouraged — unintelligent people to survive at the expense of those with high IQ. In other words, natural selection works against the likes of us right now.
You may object that this situation is very temporary, and you may well be right. The “machine” requires good mechanics to maintain, repair, and improve it. Such people will mostly die out within two or three generations, and the complex system they created will collapse without the intelligent folks who are necessary to keep it going.
When that time comes, the old selective pressures will reassert themselves, and intelligence will once again have survival value. However, this selection will of necessity occur amidst the smoking rubble of what used to be our civilization, within a degraded and feral remnant of what was once a great and civilized people.
So I’m not looking forward to it. And I thank God I will probably not live to see it.
Unfortunately, however, I don’t see any way to avoid it.
On a related note, a dystopian SF novella from back in the 1950s, “The Marching Morons” by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, explores a similar theme.
54 comments:
One reason that Social Darwinism seems forced is that it consistently draws conclusions that are diametrically opposed to reality.
Thank You!
Well, I think that one conclusion which can be drawn from the current reality is that it's neither intelligent nor prudent to non-breed oneself, and therefore one's culture, goals and ideals, out of existence.
There is a common lament about the growth of numbers on the other side simply through birthrate. That growth would be far less important to the fight and the future if our side had the foresight to grow in like manner.
I don't put too much stock in IQ tests. People who excel in IQ tests may be those who are more used to taking tests to begin with. They can also reflect the insecurity and psychological trauma of individuals. And remember, the ancestors of the overwhelming number of those who have high IQ's today, were once considered a drooling mass of unintelligent peasants by their aristocratic overlords.
Humans, being at the top of the food chain, (or whatever it's called these days) have as their only natural predator other humans.
Civilization makes life safer for those who would normally be culled by natural selection thus after any long period of a civilized society they start to become a larger percentage of said society. Eventually this will lead to the civilizations collapse.
It's sad to say but peace and long periods of prosperity are sort of the last thing any civilizations needs.
I believe the film Idiocracy has a similar precept. And plays with it for laughs.
It's funny now, but not when we're living it. I guess the formula is:
Comedy = Tragedy +/- Time
As the title refers to Cyril Kornbluth's story "The Marching Morons", I presume there was some discussion of it, or of the novel in which Kornbluth reused it, Search the Sky. Both of these were written and published before Mike Judge (of Idiocracy was born. At least CMK had intelligent people left. Fellow SF writers Larry Niven and Isaac Asimov had a discussion of this (published in the SF magazine named after Asimov) which might be worth considering.
..it does seem intelligence is selecting itself out of existence. many other species also allow a trait to be exploited to the detriment to the species. this in time will be corrected, but corrected within the framework of natural selection. intelligence (a Harvard education is a poor indicator of intelligence so I really think that the word intelligence needs to be overhauled).
it isn't really intelligence at play here, it is the progressives and marxists stupidity that is. they claim they are the more intelligent ones. I CERTAINLY DO NOT. it is these Ivy League graduates that are making / giving an evolutionary advantage to the more brutal segment of the species.
If intelligent people fail to reproduce themselves ...
This is muddled nonsense, if the point of the survival game is to reproduce then the intelligent have lost the game - not very intelligent.
If we have a race that has a inherent propensity to commit suicide for a few dollars more and its own short term hedonistic gratification in a false construct how can we call that a form of intelligence. Like a group of masters of the universe childless economists playing monopoly in the middle of a field while the farmer ploughs and sows the seeds of the future.
Large families are not a product of the wefare state they are a survival technique as old as the hills, indeed in the U.K. the welfare state through providing abortion, contraception and sterilisation has probably done more to reduce the indiginous population than multiply.
Excellent, thank you!
Start with Richard Dawkins’ point of view from his book “The Selfish Gene”, that life forms are a genes’ way of making more genes, and apply it to his concept of memes, that is; human consciousness is a memes way of making more memes.
Darwinian evolution is still going along at a full bore pace, but for us it is no longer occurring at the gene level, but at the meme level. From the point of view of memes, individuals are expendable, as long as the meme itself continues to propagate. If you can grok this, then everything happening in the world socially, spiritually and politically these days will make perfect sense to you.
In Hoc --
This is muddled nonsense, if the point of the survival game is to reproduce then the intelligent have lost the game - not very intelligent.
Precisely! My point exactly.
The human characteristic measured by IQ does not seem to represent any real intelligence, not from the point of view of the species. Cessation of breeding is not really a viable survival strategy for one's genome.
Whatever it is that is measured by IQ, it is not "intelligence" as would be understood by someone designing a long-term survival strategy for the human race.
wildiris --
Oh yes, I take your point. Selection among humans may well have moved out of the genetic code and into meme-space.
The question is whether our existing meme-space -- which has as its substrate a highly complex electronic environment -- can survive the dumbing-down of the human brain. Can the entire system be maintained indefinitely as its human components become stupider and stupider?
This question can't be answered yet, since there is no historical precedent for it. We are in the midst of an enormous 200-year practicum which will tell us whether it can be done.
It's possible that the system, this electroniverse, is of such -- ahem -- intelligent design that it can survive and maintain itself without the continuing intelligence of its creators.
But I have my doubts. In any case, we shall soon discover the answer -- two or three more generations will tell us.
I don't think "Social Darwinism" is a particularly useful term. It has usually been used as an epithet ascribed to the beliefs of others and in a rather inconsistent fashion. In this regard, I recommend Eric Michael Johnson's series of articles on Deconstructing Social Darwinism.
B.B.
What you fail to mention/include, is that we, in the West, are doing it to ourselves:
We're aborting our unborn children...for one reason or another. Usually, it wasn;t for children of rape, but for simply babies that would have been born outside of marriage.
What are the figures of Caucasian abortions?..I dread to find out what it is now,k but a while back, it was something like, 1+ Million a year, and that was only in the U.S.
Baron --
A parasite will grow and multiply until it kills its host; then it too dies. I think that is the answer to your question. This is the way nature has been doing it for the last few hundred million years, and I don’t see why it should to turn out any different now, at the meme level, for the Western World.
The way Mother Nature has always handled this situation is that a new variety of the host species evolves that is now immune to the parasite that killed off its genetic cousins. And nature does this by a process that combines the random genetic variability, which always occurs from generation to generation, with the forces of natural selection.
Unfortunately, a whole class of parasitic memes has taken firm hold in the minds of a critical mass of individuals in our world today, and there will be no turning back for the majority of them. They are now lost souls. So, from a memes point of view, Western Civilization, as we know it, is already a dead man walking.
But on a positive note, there has never been a life form evolved on this planet that has not had to deal with parasites of one form or another. A successful species is not one that is free from parasites, but rather it is one that has the ability to keep evolving new immunities every few generations, as the parasites that affect it continually evolve new modes of attack.
If Mother Nature is any indicator, the only hope for western society now is for a new consciousness to evolve and replace the memetically infected and dying baby-boomer generation. But what will those people be like, those that will now be immune to the parasitic memes that killed off their predecessors, and what will a society made up of those individuals look like?
Be careful when using the phrase social Darwinism. Social Darwinism was a theory of morality that held that whatever wins the struggle to survive is good. Thus if the Nazis had won WWII that would mean that nazism is morally better than the ideologies it defeated. It is roundly and rightly rejected as a moral theory. That doesn't mean that Darwinian thinking doesn't have a place morality and politics. For instance, I believe that the state should be thought of as a survival strategy for ethnic groups. Those ethnic groups that form a state and protect their borders will be more likely to continue to exist than those that don't.
wildiris --
I couldn't agree with you more. This is exactly what I think is happening.
I only argue about these things because the question of IQ and genetics is the focus for a lot of people. But I think the focus would be better placed on the meme-space -- what I also call the "World Mind" -- which is where the most important, very rapid natural selection is occurring now, and where the parasites seem to be gaining.
By the way -- you left out a third outcome, which is symbiosis. Parasite and host adapt to one another, evolve a modus vivendi, and share a bio-space to their mutual advantage. Intestinal bacteria are a good example.
I've also read a theory that some sub-cellular organelles (I think the example was chloroplasts) evolved as parasites on cellular organisms, until a symbiosis eventually developed.
The relationsip between humans and domesticated animals, especially dogs, should also be considered a mutually-evolved symbiosis at the instinctive social (interspecies) level.
JS123 --
When I use "Darwin" or "Darwinian", they are descriptive terms only, and have no moral content. Darwinian theory is like mathematics applied to physics: it describes something real and observable in a systematic way so that it may be more easily understood.
Any writing that purports to be "Darwinism" but cannot be tested and borne out by observation in the real world has nothing to do with the real world. It is an artifact, a figment of the imagination of those who employ it.
"Social Darwinism" -- or any other flavor of "Darwinism" -- only develops a moral component when people use it to find the "direction of evolution" or something similar, and hope to accelerate it.
Scientifically speaking, this is nonsense. It has nothing to do with science, and I pay no attention to it.
GhostShip: It's sad to say but peace and long periods of prosperity are sort of the last thing any civilizations needs.
I think it's safe to say that Islam is busy solving that particular piece of the puzzle. It is an extra layer of irony that anti-war Leftists are so busy appeasing and otherwise forestalling the inevitable global conflict with Islam to the point where it will be far more kinetic, bloody and decisive.
Major Major: As the title refers to Cyril Kornbluth's story "The Marching Morons", I presume there was some discussion of it, or of the novel in which Kornbluth reused it, Search the Sky.
Thank you for mentioning a favorite title (plus some dynamite cover art) from my absolute favorite team of sci-fi authors. The hilariously cynical way that they take every day, accepted social modes and mores out to their logically absurd conclusions remains unmatched in the genre.
wildiris: Darwinian evolution is still going along at a full bore pace, but for us it is no longer occurring at the gene level, but at the meme level. From the point of view of memes, individuals are expendable, as long as the meme itself continues to propagate. If you can grok this, then everything happening in the world socially, spiritually and politically these days will make perfect sense to you. [emphasis added]
Bravo, excellent point. It also provides a splendid explanation for why Islam seems so successful, or at least temporarily so. Clearly, memes can have drastic effects on populations. The Islamic meme is a powerful retardant in terms of overall progress. As we are now discovering the PCMC meme is also very toxic to more advanced cultures.
Throughout mankind's evolution information has continually gained greater currency and value. The worth of it skyrocketed once people learned how to store information outside of the human mind; first, using methods like cuneiform and quipu, then books and now computers which have taken the value of information to staggering heights.
All of this has, so far, favored intelligence but, as the Baron so aptly noted, "the ascendance of advanced technology", especially large-scale agriculture and modern medicine have enable the survival of individuals who would have perished in very short order just a few short centuries ago.
Incredibly, even our justice system aids in keeping alive criminal predators that villagers of old would simply have beaten to death or burnt in wicker cages and been done with. The net result is the survival of exceptionally counterproductive segments of human society.
In disastrous counterpoint to this is what Michael Crichton, in his non-fiction book, “Five Patients”, refers to (per Gerard Piel) as “disemployment of the nervous system”. While his context is in that of allowing computers to make decisions which doctors might better leave to personal observation, this concept also applies quite readily to how modern man is increasingly dependent on high technology which a decreasing portion of society is able to fabricate or repair.
Islam is a sterling example of this corrosive dependence in how Muslim countries are almost totally incapable of operating the petroleum extraction technology without which they would starve en masse. This also pertains in how Muslim nations can purchase highly advanced military hardware but neither field it effectively nor repair it with much skill.
One significant problem with intelligence is that it does not necessarily confer either skill or, more importantly, wisdom. Intelligence detached from wisdom is very susceptible to corruption. Hitler, Stalin and Mao are prime examples of what happens when even slightly advanced technology is left in the hands of cunning but unprincipled individuals.
[My next comment will be directed at prospective antidotes to this problem.]
Baron, Zenster -– Thanks for the very validating replies.
Baron -– Judging from your reply to me, I need to work on my definition of terms. I am not basing my use of the term parasitic on a biological model, but I’m using the terms creative and parasitic in a more abstract, Second Law of Thermodynamics sense. I had a physics professor years ago that characterized the Second Law as “it takes energy to create order, and it takes energy to maintain order”. Cast in this form, The Second law becomes applicable to everything from recycling to economics to social and political systems. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not just a law of physics but also a universal law.
So a creative meme is one that motivates an individual to work toward creating new order or to work toward maintaining or extending the order they already find around themselves. But order is energy. So by a parasitic meme, I mean one that sustains itself by feeding off of the free energy contained in the created order around it.
By these definitions, the Greatest Generation, yours and my parents, will be ranked by history among the most creative this nation has seen, while our generation, the baby-boomer, will probably be remembered as the most parasitic. I don’t think that IQ’s have changed any from their generation to ours, so it would appear that IQ by itself is not an explanation to what’s going on. But I do agree, whatever IQ is, it clearly is not a protection against ‘going multiculturally stupid”
One factor, no-doubt among many others, that could explain what you see is that smart people tend to be more educated than average. And given that our nation’s institutes of learning, from K-12 and on into college and university are regular incubators and festering sores of political correctness. It is no wonder that our best and brightest, after 12 to 20 years of exposure to these environments, come out completely compromised by the PCMC memes.
Allat -- Parasitic memes want to be the baby, not have them. So the only way for them to propagate is by indoctrination and recruitment. Its no wonder then, that such memes will gravitate to seats of learning, where they have access to young minds, or to channels of communication, where they can control the information and narrative that the rest of society depends on to make its political decisions by.
Baron,
You write that Darwinism where it can't be tested (such as social Darwinism), is bunk. I think the whole THING is pure bunk.
Darwinism was never more than a viable hypothesis that was greatly blown out of proportion because of its secularizing tendencies. After the discovery of the genetic code and the complexity of the cell, it became obsolete. It still walks the earth like a gigantic zombie for the same old ideological reasons. Just as Global Warming was a great hoax, so is Darwinism. (I used to believe in Darwinism, by the way).
Bill Gates said that the genetic code is like a computer code, but infinitely more complicated than anything we have devised. It is less preposterous for a laptop to have crawled out of the primordial ooze, than it is to suppose the accidental origin of the first cell. This is NOT hyperbole. Scientists tell us that biogenesis is a false notion EXEPT for the formation of the first cell. Why? Francis Collins was at least helpful enough to postulate that early life was "seeded" onto earth from outer space. Nice.
As far as "testing" Darwinism, what have we really found? Nothing, thats what. People knew that species change over time (like breeders) BEFORE Darwin. What Charlie did was to suppose that these changes produce new species through natural selection. This has NEVER been proven.
Virus' and bacteria reproduce infinitely faster than anything else, and after more generations that are possible for the whole of the human race, they remain what they are. Granted, bacteria have been seen to grow resistant to medicine through a mutation, but when these new "super" bugs have to compete with their ancestors, without the presence of medicine, they end up losing out. No net evolution occurs. Apparently, they lose the ability to reproduce as quickly. Nevertheless, despite more generations than are possible with humans....no new animals. Similarly, humans have artificially tested the limits of the canine code with spectacular results, but what we always get are dogs. This is true for every species humans mess around with, plant or animal. There seems to be a limit to what a given code can produce. Moreover, the closer a species gets to its limits, the sicker the resulting offspring becomes.
Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, has shown that the complicated inter-related machinery of the cell cannot have been arrived at in a step-by-step fashion, as all the parts are necessary at ONCE in order for the systems in question to function. What is the point of the cell mutating to form one piece of a given system, when it does nothing until all the pieces are in place? Chances are natural selection will eliminate it, since it is cumbersome baggage. William Dembski went on to show that inferences to design are licit in biology, just as they are in other sciences and in the world at large. Guys at SETI looking for signs of intelligent life in the galaxy are using desing inferences, after all. So do cryptologists and archaeologists. A forensic examiner claiming murder as opposed to accidental death is also using a design inference. ID is also seen in the universe as a whole by cosmologists. There is good reason to believe that the universe bears the marks of intelligent causation. For a good overview of the material, I suggest watching the videos Unlocking the Mystery of Life and Privileged Planet, both available on YouTube. To see why the fossil record is a problem for Darwinism, watch the video Darwin's Dilemma, also available on YouTube. (In order to reconcile Darwinism with the fossil record, the famous paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed "punctuated equilibrium", the idea that evolution conveniently speeds up or slows down.) To see why Evolution functions much like Global Warming in the acaemic community, the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is a great resource. You'll have to rent it though.
Nevertheless, it is still possible for your idea to be correct: namely, that "dumber" versions of our limited genetic code were allowed to propogate disproportionately in post-Industrial Revolution socialist societies. I am still highly skeptical. Couldn't have post Agricultural Revolution societies have allowed dumber folk to propogate more as well? It certainly would have meant more drooling dumb-asses toiling in the fields, and more arrow-fodder in war for the aristocrats? Aren't most of today's educated classes the direct descendants of these unintelligent masses?
And like I said before, IQ tests, while useful, should be taken with a HUGE grain of salt.
One thing I forgot to mention: for a thorough study of what mutations can ACTUALLY produce, Michael Behe's book The Edge of Evolution is a winner.
cumpa_29: Couldn't have post Agricultural Revolution societies have allowed dumber folk to propogate more as well?
Yes, but to nowhere near the same extent that agri-business and modern medicine have done so. Toss in bulk water purification, irrigation, pesticides, septic systems, fertilizers, law enforcement (which protects people from predatory criminals), advanced military hardware (that helps defeat genocidal tyrants) and the net result is far more people of marginal intelligence are surviving than really ought to when compared with most of previous history.
@Zenster
Perhaps. But those same genocidal tyrants were responsible for the slaughter of countless millions using that same military hardware.
And besides, 150 years or in the larger scheme of things isn't that much time. Not to mention that stupidity was never selected FOR in that same time period.
But again, Zenster, perhaps. The idea is on very shaky foundation, that much is certain.
One more point on evolution.
In the global warming scam, everything was understood in light of the bogus paradigm. If things got hot, it was global warming. If things got cold, the same. Info that contradicted the paradigm was omitted.
We are told that we are descenants of apes. Yet here is a HUGE gap in the fossil record between small monkey-like creatures, and the arrival of apes. This info is omitted when the evolutionary narrative is presented to the public. Dead species of apes which DO show up (later on) are automatically presented as our ancestors. If pygmies were unknown to us, and a pygmy skeleton was found from eons ago, it would no doubt be interpreted as an even closer relative --and yet pygmies are HUMAN. Likewise, long dead races of humans are presented in the same way. Rather than be taken as possible versions of human beings, they are taken as "proto" human.
Just as with Global Warming, facts are omitted, and evidence twisted to present a picture which may not actually be there.
wildiris --
I don't limit myself to biology when discussing natural selection. Natural selection occurs in all information systems which are complex enough, and in which enough stochastic factors are at work.
Biological evolution is just one narrow aspect of information evolution. Humans created a complex information environment in which evolution could occur, as happened, for example, with language.
The development of electronics and the spread of mass communications enhanced and accelerated this process, leading to the evolution of memes as you described.
I don't see why the concept of symbiosis can't be applied in meme-space, with a relationship between the creative and non-creative (anti-entropic and entropic) processes mixing to their mutual advantage. From a systems analysis point of view, I think it makes sense.
But I suppose I should leave this sort of speculation to the experts.
cumpa_29: And besides, 150 years or in the larger scheme of things isn't that much time. Not to mention that stupidity was never selected FOR in that same time period.
Hitler, Stalin and Mao are barely able to compete with the black plague all by itself, let alone the Spanish flu pandemic. Just those two epidemics claimed upwards of 200 million lives.
Rest assured that stupidity continues to be selected for, witness the "Jackass" series of movies if you need proof.
Still there is no way to compete with Mother Nature's methods of population control. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were raw beginners compared to Ebola, malaria and other carefully refined killers that have confronted mankind from time immemorial.
Only in this last century have we truly "wrapped the world in soft leather" so that everyone may go barefoot. Even then, events like the Fukushima tsunami come along to remind us of who's really in charge. One local GPS station was moved eight feet by the seismic event. The entire island of Japan was shifted nearly as much and the earth's axis was shifted by four inches (ten centimeters). Imagine how many H-bombs would be required to achieve that.
What remains to be seen is how close we will come to breaking some of Mother Nature's records should the Muslim Holocaust occur.
In this age of nuclear weapons, we now have the capability to erase entire civilizations. Not that Islam doesn't aim to do the same, it just doesn't have the requisite firepower. However, the West does and Muslims are just idiotic enough to continue poking at the Western dragon with their pointed sticks.
Be sure not to hold out very much hope for anything remotely approaching a happy ending with jihad. Islam is the "stupid" meme on steroids.
Baron Bodissey: I don't see why the concept of symbiosis can't be applied in meme-space, with a relationship between the creative and non-creative (anti-entropic and entropic) processes mixing to their mutual advantage.
It already is. Witness how useful random white noise is in the synthesis of specific harmonious musical sounds. I'm confident that similar mergers have already occurred in meme-space.
What should be feared far more is the malicious cousin of entropy known as chaos. If anything, Islam is applied chaos theory and this is demonstrated by the intensely damaging effects it has on all other more developed civilizations.
I have already posted on why IQ based tribalism is on shaky scientific ground. But as a person of Spanish (not Hispano-Indian) background, I get INTENSELY uneasy with the idea. What is to stop people of supposedly higher nordic IQ's from no longer intermingling with their ex-fellow man? I have many friends on all sides of the racial spectrum, and the thought of losing all of them due to a B.S. idea is not only offensive insofar as it affects me, but deeply saddening insofar as it affects what was once something good. Once people base their political organizations on "high IQ's", you can bet that associating with dummies will be seen as dangerous to the body politic.
Our common problem isn't IQ, but culture, social impoverishment, and the Secular Progressive culture which has thrown out the baby of the West along with the bathwater.
I am not calling anyone a racist, but cetain ideas expressed here (and by Fjordman) definitely are. Good people can be capable of amazing feats of cognitive dissonance.
Granted, believing different races taller or shorter is technically a racist notion, but things change when we focus on intelligence. We are Homo Sapiens Sapiens, after all. And while I am not so dishonest as to suppose that intellectual racial inequality is an automatic impossibility, I think it behooves us all to think honestly about the actual evidence, and the moral implications of certain ideas.
As far as why I don't believe in the intellectual inequality of man even from an Intelligent Design perspective (certain breeds of dogs are smarter, even within the limited canine code), its because the social environment is the most unforgiving of all, and that occurs regardless of location. Unlike dogs, human beings had to live in the wild for eons. Natural selection could never breed for dumb people, as we inadvertantly do with dogs.
Natural selection could never operate in favor of stupidity. And since we all share a common genetic code that will never be anything but human, and ALSO operates REGARDLESS of location, my position stands: human intelligence is a well-functioning average of our code, expressed across all races.
And again, I'm not calling anyone here of being a racist. Cognitive dissonance does exist. Does the West need more of it?
But if any actual racist happens to be out there, screw you. It is my country, and my civilization too.
Long live the Sacred West!
@Zenster.
Jackass represents socially accepted immaturity, not stupidity. (Although this is hard to believe,sometimes).
I think the greatest selective pressures acting on our genetic code (which will never be anything but human), is the pressure of the human race itself. Mother nature may be brutal, but it isn't constantly trying to outwit you in order to take your life, wife, and cash.
Since our common code exists regardless of location, and since the selective pressure of the social environment also exists regardless of location, and since we will never be anything but human, I think that human intelligence is a basic well functioning average of our common code expressed across all races.
cumpa_29: Jackass represents socially accepted immaturity, not stupidity.
If that isn't an active form of stupidity, I don't know what is. Socially accepted immaturity also manifests in women being expected to have the figure of a teenager at age 40; resulting in bulimia and anorexia which sees grown women starve themselves to death.
It takes a distinct lack of intelligence to not be able to overcome social programming that is, literally, killing you. Gangs exhibit similarly self-destructive behavioral traits. We're seeing the same thing with PCMC mentality and it is already killing people as well.
stu·pid: adj. stu·pid·er, stu·pid·est
1. Slow to learn or understand; obtuse.
2. Tending to make poor decisions or careless mistakes.
3. Marked by a lack of intelligence or care; foolish or careless: a stupid mistake.
4. Dazed, stunned, or stupefied.
5. Pointless; worthless: a stupid job.
[emphasis added]
@Zenster
Drop the word "stupid", which is used in many ways, and focus on the term "unintelligent".
If your view is correct, Western elites are unintelligent for making "stupid" decisions. And yet we know that they are NOT unintelligent. Foolish, yes. Ideologically driven, yes. Fearful, yes. "Stupid", yes. But NOT unintelligent.
Bozos making asses of themselves for attention are immature insofar as they have not grown enough to realize that their actions are seem "stupid". This doesn't mean our society is celebrating unintelligence, just immaturity.
If grown men and women do the same (for attention in Hollywood), it is a reflection of superficiality, not technical idiocy.
Natural selection does NOT work in favor of unintelligence, not even in the last 150 or so years.
If our society was actually celebrating UNINTELLIGENCE, we'd be seeing rich retarded guys surrounded by babes on T.V..
What we see is superficiality, foolishness, immaturity, and outright greediness, all on display 24/7 on the boob tube.
@Zenster.
I think you are confusing something. I said that Natural Selection was never selecting FOR idiocy in the recent past. This is NOT to say that the forces of selection pushing in FAVOR of intelligence haven't been weakened. They may have. But the two ideas are distinct.
I think the discussion here has gotten some definitions wrong. An organism which benefits its host is not a parasite, it is a symbiont. Islam has never had a symbiotic relationship in its existence. For that matter, neither has PC/MC (which was actually a weaponized meme created by the KGB to subvert and destroy the opposition to the Soviet Union. It may yet do that, it just didn't work fast enough to win).
"Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, has shown that the complicated inter-related machinery of the cell cannot have been arrived at in a step-by-step fashion"
"Intelligent design" in general and Darwin's Black Box in particular have been comprehensively debunked. Michael Behe is a joke; his testimony in the Kitzmiller trial shows the intellectual bankruptcy of the entire "theory", coming from its top "mind". If you take it seriously, you're not just wasting your effort; you are contributing to the decline of the West by being on the same side of the issue as Islamists.
"What is to stop people of supposedly higher nordic IQ's from no longer intermingling with their ex-fellow man?"
This is happening already. How many graduates of the Ivies are married to other Ivy-league alumni? This is forming what's been dubbed "the cognitive elite".
"Our common problem isn't IQ, but culture, social impoverishment, and the Secular Progressive culture which has thrown out the baby of the West along with the bathwater."
Culture and societies are products of intelligence.
"If your view is correct, Western elites are unintelligent for making "stupid" decisions. And yet we know that they are NOT unintelligent."
Their strategies are not stupid, they're hostile. They burden the upper-middle class, widening the gap and preventing the next-lower group from competing with the elite (the lower classes don't have the brains to get into the game). It's class warfare and they're winning.
The problems in Western nations have arisen not because Western people, leaders included, lack intelligence but that most lack wisdom.
Sin in all its forms and its concomitant, a rejection of Christ, is what has brought Western society to the state that it's in now. 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom'. Proverbs 9v10.
John Calvin, who many think is the true founding father of the USA, in his commentary on Psalm 2, wrote,
'The beginning of true wisdom is when a man lays aside his pride, and submits himself to the authority of Christ.'
@engineer-poet
Just because the Dover case went against ID and Behe was a witness to it, it does NOT mean that he, or ID in general, have been refuted. Science is not decided by judges. If it was, Evolution would be false, since the judge at the old Scopes trial in Tennessee ruled in FAFOR of barring evolution in public schools. Don't post a link to a transcipt of Behe's testimony telling me "he's been refuted." You have to articulate WHY and HOW he has been refuted. You are letting other people's opinons do your work for you while pretending you understand the so-called objections. Behe's problem wasn't that he had been refuted, but that he was attacking the sacred cow of the modern secular West. Judge Jone's ruling in Dover was merely in favor of an ideologically-driven bogus scientific consensus. Global Warming, anyone?
So any scientific evidence which is friendly to theistic notions (such as ID) is in your world "siding with the Islamists" because Muslims believe in God? So the Big Bang must be dangerous to the West too, I suppose. How about Isaac Newton when he claimed to have discovered God's thoughts after him? Daaaangerous.
Your whole premise is utterly laughable. It wasn't the Christian West that dropped the ball with the Islamists, it was the post-Enlightenment West. Spain, for all her faults, kicked them (along with the Jews) OUT, remember? What belief system did Spain have again?
It was the secular belief systems shat into the world after the Enlightenment that destroyed us. Communism and Nazism were violent secular religions that did much to weaken the West's will to live. Secular-Progressive Socialism went constantly out of its way to undermine everything viable and healthy that stood the path of creating a universal citizenry singing kumbaya at the U.N. And now we have Multiculturalism, which in essence believes that we will all end up singing kumbaya, if only the West is self-deprecating enough to move other cultures to tears, and sweet end-of-history embrace at the U.N.
Still, if you are a well-meaning atheist tired of Islam, you are an ally.
Long live the Sacred West!
[This is the second part of my original comment]
One of the only antidotes to this current trend requires that a lot of unintelligent people need to be made much less successful. Most methods of achieving this would quickly be labeled as "inhumane" or placed under some subset of eugenics. Unfortunately, few people seem to realize that the alternative still reaches the same end effect, only without much of intelligent civilization emerging intact.
Consider how the Gate’s Foundation is directing untold millions of dollars towards finding a cure for malaria. Such traditionally Liberal causes frequently suffer quite harshly from The Law of Unintended Consequences™. All of the individuals who are miraculously immunized to malaria will now have the opportunity to starve to death because curing malaria does absolutely nothing to address the much more serious Root Causes of suffering in Africa.
Furnishing the Third World with these “miracles” is proving to be a very dangerous proposition. It permits the premature advancement of cultures which have yet to evolve out of destructive juvenile behavior. Islam is a prime example of how an insufficiently cultivated group can, nonetheless, utilize otherwise inaccessible technologies and weaponize them. Online jihadist recruiting and indoctrination websites, encrypted cell phones plus many other basic technologies are facilitating jihad, much to our own detriment. There is a very good reason why Islam and other such unrefined cultures are centuries away from fabricating microprocessors and inventing MRI scanners.
By throwing money, medicine or technology at these Third World problems we are also dangerously enabling their thoroughly corrupt upper tiers. Salving Western consciences by showering riches upon these despots is only pouring gasoline onto the fire of jihad and other treacherous forces.
Similar to how the counterjihad should be dealt with, a program of targeted assassinations directed at the Third World’s most corrupt elite would do a thousand times more good at far less cost than all of the foreign aid currently being sent; which is just as frequently appropriated by these same corrupt elite. They are parasites on the global host that inhibit regional progress that might help slow the population growth of those cultures which currently present the greatest danger in terms of demographically displacing intelligent civilization.
As the Baron so tersely noted:
You may object that this situation is very temporary, and you may well be right. The “machine” requires good mechanics to maintain, repair, and improve it. Such people will mostly die out within two or three generations, and the complex system they created will collapse without the intelligent folks who are necessary to keep it going.
When that time comes, the old selective pressures will reassert themselves, and intelligence will once again have survival value. However, this selection will of necessity occur amidst the smoking rubble of what used to be our civilization, within a degraded and feral remnant of what was once a great and civilized people.
If intelligent people cannot manage to summon up a more generous sense of self worth ― the opposite number to modern Liberal self-loathing ― then they will just as likely never acquire the moral certitude needed to implement vital antidotes like halting any immigration from Third World countries, crushing political Islam and eliminating all foreign aid, including disaster relief.
Drastic as these measures might sound, they would oblige laggard nations to “bootstrap” themselves with far more productive results in terms of self-sufficiency. Again, this rising tide of genuine progress would enjoy greater success at floating all boats in a manner which could promote reduced birth rates in the Third World. Especially in comparison to the totally ineffectual model of foreign aid currently being employed which only serves to enfeeble indigent populations and enrich their parasitic elite.
To date, out of a wholly misplaced sense of guilt ― a guilt that is largely the product of Marxism falsely attributing First World success to the Zero Sum Equation ― advanced Western countries are allowing far less successful Third World cultures to elude their normal Darwinian constraints and, literally, encouraging them to become parasites on the body of more productive societies.
In the process of this, these arriving Second and Third World immigrants are importing their own dysfunctional practices. Islam is just the iceberg’s tip when compared to the criminal gangs, graft, bribery and institutionalized fraud being imported into the West through mass immigration. All of this, along with even more complex influences related to the “dumbing-down” of modern society; innumeracy (the mathematical equivalent of illiteracy), a diminishing of interpersonal skills related to reduced direct interaction due to increasing online and telecom activity (e.g., texting, chat, computer-based social networking), are serving to make intelligent civilization far more vulnerable with respect to invasive cultures and their destructive memes.
Clearly, pulling the plug on the PCMC mentality ― along with its cultural relativism and moral equivalency that drives much of this indiscriminate immigration and simultaneously disinhibits normal social resistance to such erosive influences ― will be no simple matter. Still, it is something which has to be addressed if there is to be any chance of Western civilization surviving even relatively intact.
The gargantuan efforts of Asimov’s character, Hari Seldon, spring to mind.
Hi all: I lacked time this weekend to read this comment thread or even leave a comment, BUT you all need to read the following article:
Bill Gates funds covert vaccine nanotechnology
Here's a tasty tidbit:
"The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is gaining a reputation for funding technologies designed to roll out mass sterilization and vaccination programs around the world."
Then, you really should google Bill Gates vaccines depopulation and see what the New World Order (NWO) has planned for us. :(
cumpa_29, you don't understand the trial or its significance. You need to look at Behe's testimony where he admits UNDER OATH that "intelligent design" is not about science but about "defending the faith against attacks" and promoting a (certain) Christian world-view ahead of what he calls "materialism". Read on a few screens from that bookmark.
How do you perform scientific testing of a non-materialist hypothesis? How can you falsify a supernatural hypothesis on the basis of evidence? Such things are not science, and Behe is a laughingstock among scientists for exactly that. There is also the uncomfortable fact that Behe lies about his justifications when not speaking to other believers. How can Behe be doing good work when he's lying all the time? That's taqiyya.
But the real gem starts with the question about the paper Behe wrote with David Snoke (I just found that every line has a unique bookmark). It gets into figures with this question:
Q. In that first paragraph, he says, There are more than 10 to the 16 prokaryotes in a ton of soil. Is that correct, in that first paragraph?
This question goes down to the end of the page. The conclusion that any mathematically-literate person would draw is that Behe's "impossible" two-point mutation would occur once about every ten bacterial generations per ton of soil... assuming that recombination, insertion, deletion or transposition didn't get there sooner.
This is why "intelligent design" is ridiculous. It's not just pure Christian apologetics, it's flat wrong.
But it's worse than that. The foundation stones of Western civilization include our will to search for the truth and discard error when we find it. (Islam is founded on the exact opposite; "the gates of ijtihad are closed".) If you wanted to hand the West over to Islam, you could find many worse ways than by shackling science to false dogma. (I include PC/MC as another false dogma, so you can't tar me with that brush.)
Engineer-Poet: If you wanted to hand the West over to Islam, you could find many worse ways than by shackling science to false dogma.
I presume that you meant:
If you wanted to hand the West over to Islam, you could NOT find many worse ways than by shackling science to false dogma.
Other than that slight lapse, your comparison to Islam's having shut the door to ijtihad is simply outstanding. It is a perfect example of what happens to a culture when critical analysis and independent thought are strangled in the cradle.
If Islam has any worthwhile purpose on this earth ― an eminently debatable proposition ― it is as an example to other cultures about what happens when innovation and free thought are actively discouraged.
Egghead: Bill Gates funds covert vaccine nanotechnology
From the linked article: Now, the foundation has funded a new "sweat-triggered vaccine delivery" program based on nanoparticles penetrating human skin. The technology is describes as a way to "...develop nanoparticles that penetrate the skin through hair follicles and burst upon contact with human sweat to release vaccines."
I am a huge proponent of nanotechnology. Imagine a fully operational multi-speed mechanical transmission (gearbox) the size of a grain of sand.
That said, there is no way in Hell you can get me to use nano-based lotions or medicine delivery systems.
It is an accepted historical fact that when a new technology emerges, it is usually the workers in that industry who first manifest whatever health-related hazards exist due to that technology.
Another frequent recipient who shares in that risk are indigent Third World populations who, intentionally or not, often end up serving as Guinea pigs due to charitable causes (see Gates), or the existence of lax testing standards in those countries.
Even as nanotechnology continues to show great promise, there are lingering questions as to the wisdom of applying or consuming particles that are small enough to where they are, literally, osmotic.
Nagging doubts remain about issues surrounding nano-particles and the permeability of the brain's blood barrier. These exact same concerns apply to conductance across the placenta. These alveolar-capillary barriers are notoriously "leaky" and such Pleistocene era biology certainly is no match for the vast array of man made compounds that litter our modern world.
Both of these fundamental risks are so profound that it is insanely irresponsible of modern corporations to already be releasing nano-particle based analgesics, lotions and moisturizers for public mass consumption.
My own personal advice to GoV readers is to avoid these products like the plague.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.
@engineerpoet
You must not know how to read.
1) What Behe said under oath was NOT that ID really wasn't science because he uses it in Christian apologetics, but that it IS science and has theistic-friendly implications. He then speaks of these implications as a Christian layman, NOT as a scientist. He mentions the Big Bang (if you bothered to actually READ) for a REASON. The Big Bang, after all, has religious implications. If a scientists spoke at church, for example, and used the Big Bang as evidence pointing towards God, it would NOT make the Big Bang invalid. Dawkins has openly stated that Darwinism helped make him an atheist. Does the fact that Darwinism has anti-theistic implications make it unscientific? NO. And if Dawkins spoke of Darwinism as evidence for Atheism at one of his atheist pow-wows, it would NOT disqualify Dawkins as a scientist.
2)AGAIN, you must not know how to read. Your "real gem" is pure myopia. Pull out your GLASSES, for Dawkin's sake!
His point was never that the 2-point mutation was "impossible" (as you mistakenly put it), but rather that the mutations needed to form complex new machinery like the bacterial flagellum are so much higher than two points, as to make the chances of their formation next to nil. After, all, these mutations have to show up at ONCE, otherwise the organism will be stuck with a fraction of a flagellum that does not work, and is crippling baggage in the merciless world of natural selection. Behe takes the lab work which HAS been done and shows that it would take about 10 to the 8th to produce a two-point mutation, compares that to the 10 to the 30th of all the bacteria produced in a year (10 to the 40th is all the bacteria in history), compares THAT to the number of mutations needed at once to ACTUALLY form a complex organ like the flagellum, and THEN says "no way".
3) People claiming that ID is not falsifiable, and it actually not being falsifiable, are two very different things. To disprove Behe, all you have to do is show either that a) multiple mutations happening at once that just HAPPEN to produce the flagellum are perfectly plausible (not on your life), or b) that step-by-step mutations will produce a flagellum because all the intermediary stages are functional and therefore preserved by natural selection. Behe's point is that these stages are NOT functional. A quarter of a flagellum is not only worthless, but an actual HINDRANCE to an organism since it constitutes crippling baggage.
Behe has NOT been falsified.
4) Behe's objection to other forms of genetic changes, such as recombination, would in the end be the same. The multiple changes needed to form a complex organ like the flagellum have to happen at ONCE. So if we are imagining recombination, then what you are looking at is a code recombining in a way so as to just "accidentally" form the genetic info needed to produce a machine which modern engineers can only drool at.
@engineerpoet (cont'd)
5) ID is not "God did it", but the scientific study of patterns in nature which are best explained by intelligent causation. God, Krishna, Yoda, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster are theistic/philosophical conclusions one may draw from the science of ID. This is similar to the religious conclusions one can draw from the Big Bang.
5) Comparing Islam's hostility to reform and critical thought with Christianity is ludicrous. While Christianity was capable of the Reformation, and is capable of modern-day liberal interpretations, Islam is NOT. And whereas Muslim orthodoxy destroyed any hope of science in that part of the world (Allah can turn 2 and 2 into pumpkin pie tommorow, if he wills it),all the founders of modern-day science were christian. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, and Newton were all "discovering God's handiwork". If Newton was on the stand today, I suppose Newtonian Physics would be rejected, as he claimed to have discovered "God's thoughts after him". Shame shame.
6)You are batting ZERO here, pal. I'm DONE wasting time with your patently false assertions, and limp-membered "objections".
If the thought of God makes you soil your drawers, that's your OWN problem.
And just to add to my point on recombination:
It is outlandish to suppose that genes recombine to just "accidentally" form the large gene-sequences needed for the flagellum. But the ealier objection to GRADUAL point-by point (or double point) mutations also applies here. The stages leading up to a fully-formed bacterial flagellum HAVE to be functional, otherwise, natural selection will elminate cells with cumbersome non-functional flagellar parts. Gradualness is incapable of producing a flagellum, no matter WHAT evolutionary mechanism you use. A quarter of a flagellum is a PROBLEM, not a selective advantage.
If you and many others don't like this, thats just too bad.
One last thing:
The ACLU's attorney mentioned that there are infinitely more bacteria than have been studied in the lab. Therefore, no matter HOW many generations people study (and it is certainly a LOT), Darwinian mechanisms haven't been disproven. This touches on Behe's earlier assertion that Darwinism largely rests on not being able to prove a negative. People can always say that the studies haven't been long enough, or that the selective pressures used in the studies were wrong, etc., etc.. But this is akin to challenging someone to prove vampires DON'T exist. You can't prove a negative.
Behe was using actual SCIENCE, and the attorney was using thinking that could just as easily be used to "prove" vampires.
Interesting discussion. I finally had time to read it all.
I will be honest here: I barely have patience for people who deny the existence of a beneficent God.
All you have to do is open your eyes to see God's goodness everywhere....
You're expecting me to use the name Dawkins as you use (Saint) Peter? Oh, the projection... and the irony.
"What Behe said under oath was ... that it [ID] IS science"
And because he says it, it's so... despite all the explanations of real biologists detailing the reasons why it is not?
You really are the poster child for the failings of belief. If you believe Behe, why not Joseph Smith? His theological claim that Native Americans are descended from the lost tribes of Israel has been debunked by modern genetics, yet Mormons still stick to his nonsense. I suppose they'd change if it disabled them legally, like their "reconsideration" of polygyny and the inferiority of blacks.
"He mentions the Big Bang (if you bothered to actually READ) for a REASON. The Big Bang, after all, has religious implications."
But the Big Bang only formed protium, deuterium and traces of things like lithium; it is utterly irrelevant to biology, which requires mostly carbon, oxygen and nitrogen (by weight) plus protium. Behe is supposedly speaking and writing as a biologist, not a cosmologist or astrophysicist (which he is unqualified to do). His insertion of religion where it doesn't belong is part of a campaign of deception. He should have been prosecuted for perjury.
"If a scientists spoke at church, for example, and used the Big Bang as evidence pointing towards God, it would NOT make the Big Bang invalid."
In logical terms, we call that a "non-sequitur". A scientist, or anyone, can say that, but it doesn't make it logically consistent and (more importantly) making such leaps is not doing science. It certainly doesn't belong in textbooks for public schools.
"Dawkins has openly stated that Darwinism helped make him an atheist."
Let me get this straight. Dawkins finds that the evidence is more consistent with atheism than any form of religiosity he's had time to examine, so he adopts atheism as a philosophy. What's wrong with this?
More to the point, when the lies of people like Behe come out, do you think it's less likely to point them toward atheism... or more likely? Frankly, I'm so sick of the hypocrisy of "holy people" that I couldn't see myself believing any religion ever again.
"His point was never that the 2-point mutation was "impossible" (as you mistakenly put it), but rather that the mutations needed to form complex new machinery like the bacterial flagellum are so much higher than two points, as to make the chances of their formation next to nil."
Except we know what the bacterial flagellum evolved from. The hub came from the bacterial Type III secretory system. The origins of many of the proteins of the flagellum itself are known also. And all of the known origins show the lie Behe got you to swallow: they developed for other purposes, and were co-opted. (Behe admits that "irreducibly complex" systems can evolve... when he's cornered by people with the facts.) The entire idea of the pieces being useless until they can form a fully-developed structure performing a specific function is wrong, a deliberate attempt to mislead.
You've certainly been misled. You should be angry with Behe for deceiving you.
I don't have time to go further at the moment. I'll try to come back later.
@engineerpoet
I already TOLD you. I am NOT wasting any more time with this discussion. Challenging me to change your mind and actually having something to say are two very different things.
If you find the idea of God so fundamentally disconcerting, it is NOT my problem.
Bye
"Challenging me to change your mind and actually having something to say are two very different things."
You were reciting the same old debunked claims of Behe and his ilk. You never had a chance of changing my mind with that dreck. The pity is that you are not yet able to recognize that it IS dreck.
The really important things are a few steps beyond that basic recognition. Evolutionary science lets us predict what kinds of changes are likely to occur via natural processes. In the cases of crop pests and pathogens and their vectors, these can be literally matters of life and death. If you don't believe it, see what happened to agricultural science when Lysenko's followers purged "Darwinists" in the Soviet Union; disastrous famines followed. Nature trumps ideology every time.
"If you find the idea of God so fundamentally disconcerting, it is NOT my problem."
dis·con·cert v.
1. to disturb the self-possession of; perturb; ruffle: Her angry reply disconcerted me completely.
2. to throw into disorder or confusion; disarrange: He changed his mind and disconcerted everybody's plans.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
I don't find the idea of God disconcerting, I find it alternately useless and pernicious. It explains nothing; it is used to evade explanations, and then assert authority on the part of those who claim to speak for God. I told you, I'm done with hypocrisy. "Family-values" preachers consorting with hookers, or the head of the wealthiest church on Earth covering for priests who buggered little boys: they're all claiming authority from God, and they're all equally despicable in my book (their apologists aren't far behind).
cumpa_29: Jackass represents socially accepted immaturity, not stupidity. (Although this is hard to believe,sometimes).
Ryan Dunn Dead: 'Jackass' Star Dies In Car Crash
From the link: Dunn posted to Twitter a photo of himself drinking with friends just hours before the crash.
A police report indicated that Dunn was most likely speeding in his 2007 Porsche 911 GT3, which was destroyed in the wreck. [emphasis added]
I rest my case.
More like an unwise decision by someone who didn't spend much time thinking about the meaning of the word MORTALITY.
But your post was more tongue in cheek than anything else, I gather.
If it wan't, you're wrong. Dunn was not an idiot, just a fool.
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