Nick Wade's Darwin, Ahead of His Time, Is Still Influential is a good complement to the strained Darwin-skepticism I pointed to earlier. From the perspective of this weblog this comment was interesting:
Darwin is still far from being fully accepted in sciences outside biology. "People say natural selection is O.K. for human bodies but not for brain or behavior," Dr. Cronin says. "But making an exception for one species is to deny Darwin's tenet of understanding all living things. This includes almost the whole of social studies -- that's quite an influential body that's still rejecting Darwinism."
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Wade mentions sexual selection, group selection, evolution of morality, and selection-driven speciation as topics on which Darwin is cutting edge even today. This is in sharp contrast to Safina's assertion that "What Darwin had to say about evolution basically begins and end" with individual selection.
Other things that Darwin had insight about were 1) growth competition between organs within a developing organism and 2) species selection.
What made Darwin so ahead of his time is that biology has been slow to realize the great applicability of the selection algorithim (or at least the principle of competition for limited resources). If particulate inheritance were understood in his lifetime Darwin surely would have theorized about something like intragenomic conflict.
Surely people in social studies reject natural selection in human brains and behaviour because it makes life so much more convenient from their point of view. The same is true of politicians and lawmakers. It is far more comforting to believe that you can change society through mission statements policy documents and education education education, than it would ever be to admit your impotence in the face of natural biological processes. Blank slate believers may be arrogant and unscientific but they also represent the dominant ideology of the day. It will all end in tears.
This also points a finger at how little progress has been made on those topics, and by extension, and how useless the social studies are at producing actual results.
It's been quite the wild ride for me to observe all of the blogging HBDers assume the moral tone of the Left. My guess is that at first the theft was meant as a cutesy game in appropriating the catchphrases of the enemy mainly for semantic kicks but the good/evil terminology appears to have settled firmly into the mainstream of the (supposedly scientifically-minded) HBD community such as above me in this thread where John Harvey says, apropos of nothing, "It will all end in tears."
Yes, folk who cling to nonsensical notions that they believe (with some rational and historical justification) will save humanity from entering a Brave New World are "evil" (Mencius' favorite word for them) and they're leading a policy that obviously "will all end in tears".
Look, can we leave the religious - AND BLATANTLY DISHONEST - verbiage to the priests and the deniers and get on with quantifying and qualifying shit? thanx