Is Evolution a Dangerous Idea? If so, why?

Progenitors is a nice way of saying that he shamelessly ripped things off from them, laughed about it, and used it to become famous and set himself for life.

Reading about Erasmus, he seems like an agreeable if portly chap. In alot of garden clubs , an abolitionist, a poet. Nice guy.
Charles on the other hand, I wouldn't want to meet in a back alley. The problem I have with Darwin is not so much his work (which again, is largely plagiarized) but his general demeanor. This is a man that is lionized for continuing to continuing his grandfather's abolition work. Frankly, I don't believe it. Charles is like one of those men who managed every advantage (wouldn't I like to travel the world by boat under pretext of research), yet remains ungrateful, spiteful, and cruel. Here's what he says about blacks and women.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672903/
Again, I don't believe he was that big an abolitionist, and his writings paved the way for actually more inequality. Basically, I've met people like Charles Darwin before, and I want to hurt them. Every advantage, every reason for building humanity up, and instead they want other people to live on the fringes.

The articles that I read about the Irish elk said that it had the misfortune of being trapped on an island. In other words, had been able to flee, it might have found an area better suited for it, but the combination of its huge rack getting tangled in trees, and a relative scarcity of food on the island meant they were stuck in an area where they couldn't move around easily and couldn't get enough to eat.

Actually, what happens in nature is we see the original dance steps of the alpha male getting the blond and three other males getting no gal. We write papers about this sort of thing. How it's always the alpha who gets laid, because they have the brightest colors or biggest muscles or ummmm biggest rack.
But we have hummingbirds outside our door. When two males are there, they often do the sort of flying at each other to ward off. But the older males and the females don't do this. They get that everytime they fight with another male, that's nectar they aren't drinking, and the females are fine drinking nectar together. Likewise, while the people writing papers see the big dramatic alpha get the female, the beta of the wolf pack do in fact mate at least once. The blond gets her alpha, but the brunettes all hook up with someone off camera. Typically, only the omega gets left out of the whole picture, to howl mournfully at the moon. And once in a great while, and omega male meets an omega female, and they howl at the moon alone together. :heart_eyes: And yes, I'm talking about hummingbirds, wolves, and humans all in the same paragraph.

Darwin is the type A asshole, who only concerns himself with the big fight that the alpha wins. But if that were the whole story, in a group of four males and four females, only one of those gets to mate. Each generation, by that logic, diminishes by 1/4. Because the fittest survive, the others compete and fail, and there's no plan B. This is not what happens.

There is nothing that a Darwinian can't explain in terms of Natural Selection, even when it makes no sense at all.

Homosexuality should have been genetically bred away long ago if Darwin really explained things.

Here is a snippet (from phys.org iirc) that is a hilarious attempt at why it still exists while Darwin is still right.



That being of course, that the horniest survive.

Hard to believe you just posted that.

Mysterious ways, you know..

But why do you think it so?

Billions of animals. Some of them are homosexual. Are you saying this derails the theory?

I'm saying it is an obvious contradiction to Darwin's Theory that requires an explanation. I found that one ludicrous.

But at least the author recognized that it needed explanation.
You apparently did not think that far into the question.

I didn't see it as a necessity to offer an explanation. If we all practiced homosexuality exclusively you might have a point. My partners and I reproduced. I don't know about you. I don't know what kind of straight jacket you are trying to put us in. All species are likely bound to ultimate failure, because the planet is eventually going to lose any life sustaining characteristics. How does any of it argue for divinity?

it is?why so? A God who so loves us and then smokes half a million people for no apparent reason than "Its his plan" leaves us with a reeaallly unlivable conundrum.

You have somehow assumed i meant that post personally. It was addressed to 'all' meaning anyone interested in the OP topic.

I do not do personal attacks.
But i may attack to the death any idea i think deserves it.

The idea attacked was 'Darwinism' because it is worse than dangerous to understanding reality.

Why do you assume I take it as a personal attack? Didn't I say "us" instead of "me?" I thought we had moved beyond that sort of thing. Sure, on atheism thread it was on a personal level because we were I assumed kidding around. Here we were not.

When you say 'us' that includes yourself.
But I was not addressing anyone, it was an idea -Darwinism.

And I assure you that I take it as seriously as you do.
I no longer bother to address those who do not.

Oh yes, I was having fun on 'Atheists', no offense taken.

The us means the human race in my parley Vous.

I do find it interesting that both sides think it is the other that sells 'us' short.

And the more we learn the more 'miraculous' it appears.

or else it spurs us to learn more.

you seem to dwell on points re Darwin that are not even part of his theory but miss the huuuge holes where he really fucked up. all in all however, his theory only gets stronger in its conclusions.

you seem to dwell on points re Darwin that are not even part of his theory but miss the huuuge holes where he really fucked up. all in all, through time, his theory only gets stronger in its conclusions.

I dunno about that.

As for homosexuality, it is literally impossible to "pass on" homosexuality, since no fertile offspring comes out of it. Which leads to another issue that I have with Darwinism. This led to a sort of "genetic fatalism." We know what each chromosome does.
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/chromosome/
Yet none of them create personality dispositions. That is, your genes determine hair color, eye color, etc. They do not however mean that you will love cats, that you will put up the toilet seat, that you will like bossy women, or that you are into BDSM. These are called CHOICES. But the genetic fatalism is a sort of copout. Look, I don't care whether you want to scissor or anally penetrate someone, but I do like honesty. So why can't anyone be honest about their desire?

Instead, we say that people have genetic predisposition. We humans, if we are anything at all, are bisexual. We're able to have gay sex, but none of us are so strictly homosexual that we can't reproduce. This is the only conceivable way that the "gay gene" would get passed on, if someone has such disposition, but nonetheless carries on a family. But I don't believe in gay genes. We make a choice and we accept it. I love women's clothes. I know for a fact there is nothing genetic about this, as I can trace this back to the first time I dressed in them (about age 6).



Amen to that.

You should understand what "Quote mining" is all about. Francis Crick was not friendly to Creationists/IDers. (Despite the "Pl" sounding quotes of what Creationits preent as "doubts" h had). He thought the Creationits silly and naive with no means in whih to investigate their beliefs or evidence them. Therefore no falsifiiability is even possible with creationist/id thinking.
Crick was a fan of "focused panspermia" where the chemicals of life in their probiotic stages, had been "ferried: to our planet primarily on carbonaceous chondritic bolides. he was also a good debater in that the special class of organics, namely purines and pyrimidines, self assembling in the vacuum of space would provide, along with fatty acid and esterified polymers, were the sources of life,

Ive read in a pre-pub news flasht in one of my geo journals that the NASA crew has apparently found what appear to be traces of "fossil=like" structures on Mars. I ont know whether this is a fact rport or somwthing the falsh pub jut anted to print ahead of the peer review process.

His hypothesis of this kind of panspermia has been studied by his staff at the Salk Institute before he died and to date, no inroads hve been made

Wadaya mean no fertile offspring, its no offspring at all.

The lack of offspring is such an obvious evolutionary dead end that it is a legitimate question to ask, even though i was not the one that raised it. It was the article cited that did.

There were so many funny errors in the article that it would take me days to properly address. The publisher is obviously a materialist who currently buys the idea that homosexuality is in fact genetically determined. That has not been determined scientifically but it is forbidden to think otherwise in 2021.

Personally i don't know, but am skeptical of genetic causes. But i have no bias against anyone that identifies as LGBTQIA+ ...

Yes, i wonder if Crick sees all the irony/hedging he's doing in that statement. He gives his honest astonishment at the incredible thing he just discovered. He cannot afford to risk appearing to 'stray' from the 'science' position' on the 'supernatural' so he peppers his statement with qualifiers that assure the establishment that it only 'appears' to look miraculous, and we'll figure it out later.

Or maybe he's a closet Bible thumper and his 'honest man' was a wink to the flock. Or maybe it's his confession that he's not been an honest man.

But i think that internal battle confronts everyone at some point.