It seems obvious to me that under an atheist scientific dispensation the reproductive arrangements would be somewhat different than they are now. The science of the stud farm would inevitably come to the fore. Risky mating would be avoided in the interest of breeding a better quality population.
Applications and requisitions, scrutiny, testing and permissions would be necessary. Obviously overseen by scientists. And with cheques attached.
We might, I think, return, with some profit to a few viewers, to Oswald Spengler.
Quote:Materialism, Socialism and Darwinism are only artificially on on the surface separable.
The surface being all there is to see in wande's quotes and the contributions of anti-IDers to this thread.
Quote: It was this that made it possible for Shaw in the third act of "Man and Superman" (one of the most important and significant of the works that issued from the transition) to obtain, by giving just a small and indeed perfectly logical turn to the tendencies of "master-morale" and the production of the Superman, the specific maxims of his own Socialism. Here Shaw was only expressing with remorseless clarity and full consciousness of the commonplace, what the uncompleted portion of the Zarathustra would have said with Wagnerian theatricality and woolly romanticism. All that we are concerned to discover in Nietzsche's reasoning is its practical bases and consequences, which proceed of necessity from the structure of modern public life. He moves amongst vague ideas like "new values," "Superman," "Sinn der Erde," and declines or fears to shape them more precisely. Shaw does it. Nietzsche observes that the Darwinian idea of the Superman evokes the notion of breeding, and stops there, leaves it at a sounding phrase. Shaw pursues the question--for there is no object in talking about it if nothing is going to be done about it -- asks how it is to be achieved, and from that comes to demand the transformation of mankind into a stud farm. But this is merely the conclusion implicit in the Zarathrustra, which Nietzsche was not bold enough, or was too fastidious, to draw. If we do talk of systematic breeding--a completely materialistic and utilitarian notion--we must be prepared to answer the questions, who shall breed what, where and how? But Nietzsche, too romantic to face the very prosaic social consequences* and to expose poetic ideas to the test of facts, omits to say that his whole doctrine, as a derivative of Darwinism, presupposes Socialism and, moreover, socialistic compulsion as the
means; that any systematic breeding of a class of higher men requires as condition precedent a strictly socialistic ordering of society; and that this "Dionysiac" idea, as it involves a common action and is not simply the private affair of detached thinkers, is democratic, turn it how you may. It is the climax of the ethical force of "Thou shalt"; to impose upon the world the form of his will, Faustian man sacrifices even himself.
The breeding of the Superman follows from the notion of "selection." Nietzsche was an unconscious pupil of Darwin from the time that he wrote aphorisms, but Darwin himself had remoulded the evolution-ideas of the 18th Century according to the Malthusian tendencies of political economy, which he projected on the higher animal world. Malthus had studied the cotton industry in Lancashire, and already in 1857 we have the whole system, only applied to men instead of to beasts, in Buckle's History of English Civilization.
In other words, the "master-morale" of this last of the Romantics is derived--strangely perhaps but very significantly--from that source of all intellectual modernity, the atmosphere of the English factory.
And the sweat shop factories of the 19th Century I might add.
Perhaps these ladies of the school boards who support evolution theory are seeking a frisson of the life of the lady of leisure in the industrial ownership classes of 19th Century England as depicted in many a "costume drama" and are using the notion that it is a "pillar of biology" as an excuse in the hope that they are addressing a stupified and cowed audience. For sure, any of them who don't understand the above quote, and all responsible people in European education establishments know it backwards, perhaps are unfitted to be determining the lives of kids.
Do you anti-IDers understand "Entryism"? Are anti-IDers dupes of their own egos or are they part of a more sinister conspiracy.
The way they jump all over rl and Foxy whilst leaving the difficult questions to one side suggests the latter to me but I'm just a silly IDjit so that's me put in my place.
* Dread words eh? And no wonder. Stick with the seashells up mountains
fm-- you know it makes sense don't you?
. If ya cant laugh youd go blind.
