anti-darwin?

Addictions and vice have nothing to do with Darwin. I suggest you go and learn exactly what evolution is and then examine your own question. However, if you believe that God made world, you must wonder why he didn't do a better job of it. All the physical imperfections and natural disasters make him look not very godlike.

When Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands in 1835 he captured three tortoise and took them with him. The one which would eventually become known as Harriet, was just five years old at the time. The story (which is disputed by some) goes that Darwin took Harriet back to England with him and gave her to the Bishop of Llandaff in Wales, from here she found her way to the Botanic Gardens in Brisbane, Australia, and then spent her last years living at Steve Irwin’s zoo in Beerwah, Queensland, Australia. She died at the age of 176 of a heart attack on June 23rd 2006, weighed 150 kg, and was the oldest living animal in captivity.

Correct. Evolution will never create perfection, but it will try. Natural selection doesn't rule out mistakes, especially with our modern polluted world.
Genetics backs up evolution 100%. However, there is no higher power directing what happens in or too our bodies, and especially not to our genes. It's the human egotism born when we obtained some control over our fear of nature (that's certainly not 100% --there may be a volcano brewing right under your feet at this moment). Too many of us still believe humankind are the center of the Universe and we are getting special treatment, paying specific attention to individuals. With The Great Mover, Aristotle's concept of a God, the higher power just keeps the galaxies and planets moving through space. It's already had it's Big Bang and one can think the Chaos Theory is valid or not. It's also thinking that Natural Selection is the mechanism or not of evolution. As far as any entity designing everything, it would have to be a designer on acid.

You don't know very much about humans, do you?

Most of us (including your parents I presume) raise decent children. We build friendships. We invented the internet, sent robots to Mars, found cures for diseases, and often act with heroism and self-sacrifice... In fact, we humans do pretty well for ourselves.

Vice and addictions? Feh.

We're born with basically a desire for pure morals and ethics but as outside environmental influences beginning to mold our lives, vices and addictions on the negative side can take over. A lot of it is parental and peer pressure. For example, if your parents drink heavily, it's hard to shake that off. It's not completely understood why a single gene or arrangement of genes causes us to reject addiction and vices, and there is also the danger of sociopathy which seems to be determined by genes. It's someone born without the integral moral and ethics judgement.

I assume Harriet lived to such a nice old age because she did not have any addictions or vices. I guess that proves evolution in the case of tortoises.

of course.

One reason is that addiction and vice rarely interfere with reproduction at a young age. Evolution selects for reproductive success, not personal happiness.

Another reason might be that modern addictions and cultural vices have not been around very long in an evolutionary sense. The bulk of human evolutionary development occurred while scavenging savannas for nuts and tubers and carcases. There probably wasn't a whole lot of drug addiction going on back then.

Since the word "Vice" is being thrown around as if it belonged in a scientific discussion, it seems fair to ask for a definition.

Could someone provide a clear definition of "Vice"?

a device for clamping items which for one reason or another need to be held motionless.

ros, you are a silly goose. we don't need no reasoned answers to inane questions.

Sorry. Lost my head there for a second.

Evolutionary biologists, though, have isolated some human behaviors which survive as relics of our hunter-gatherer past. Almost all humans, from all over the globe, have an innate desire (that's right, we're born with it) to eat sweet food, and fatty food. Why would natural selection produce such a result? Well, to live through the winter, or the rainy season, or the dry season (circumstances of local climate and ecology, of course, vary) you need stored fat, and to get moving when you need energy now, nothing is better than teeth rotting, diabetes-causing, bad-fat storing sugars. When the human race couldn't rely on its food supply from one week to the next, never mind month after month, the ones who survived to breed were the ones who packed carbs and stored fat. Since humans become reproductive by fifteen years, at the outside, the deleterious effects of eating too much sugar and fat didn't kick in until long after the individual begins reproducing. And, in fact, for most of human history, people just didn't live long enough to pay the price of their foolish addictions to food, drugs, sex, bad literature, low humor, etc.

We do have the remnants of the reptilian part of our evolution -- it's at the base of the brain and it is why we can be territorial and aggressive. I do read a lot about genes having to do with addictive personalities, and I would guess that temptations to vices would also go along with that. Otherwise, we'd have no carpenters.

Setanta's and Lightwizard's posts remind me of a theory that Carl Sagan wrote about. Have you ever experienced a "falling sensation" at the beginning of sleep and then wake up with a start? Sagan claims that this reflex helped our ancestors who slept in trees. Those who had this reflex were more likely to survive and reproduce.

I feel like that all the time.

Our "addiction" to sex has no "price", evolutionarily speaking. In fact (to state the obvious) sex is evolutionarily necessary-- and (at least for males) reproduction with multiple people is the best way to ensure that one's genes are passed on.

Of course, I am talking about unprotected sex. Use of condoms, evolutionarily speaking, is one of the worst of vices.

I am a bit curious on what the price of bad literature or low humor would be.

Feb 12th (today) - Happy Birthday Darwin!

T
K
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If you've got a few spare bucks in your pocket this weekend, go out and buy yourself a sense of humor . . .