hahaha3hahaha wrote:chang50 wrote:Btw charity can often be self-interested anyway.
Yes this is a good point. But I'd argue that'd mainly be emotional benefit, which wouldn't apply to a furthering of the species type premise.mrswdk wrote:Darwin wrote:Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature... if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil
Interesting find. When was this dated? There are reports that he moved from natural selection, to lamarckism, to Christianity, so I'd be curious to see when this was dated so we know where his head was at when he wrote the above passage. (By the way, the lamarckism and Christianity labels aren't concrete, can anyone comment on the accuracy of this?)
Oh boy! You certainly don't know much about Darwin!!
Darwin was raised a Christian, married a devout Christian and, debatably, might well have always been Christian, though only God knows the truth of that. He did absolutely question God, religion. In part, he questioned because of the death of his daughter. He blamed himself because his wife was a cousin and he knew enough of genetics/breeding (as did most farmers for that matter) to know that this might yield some inherent weakness in his progeny. He did not understand the fully mechanism the way we do today. HIs question was that of many who have lost children, basically "how could God allow this?".
On top of that, he did publish both Origin of a species AND Descent of man. He, by all accounts, hesitated to publish the last book because he knew full well that well-intentioned "idiots" and plain evil people alike would use it to justify henous things against humanity. Some people decided, for example that competition of the fittest means that people who are poor are inferior. They miss the fact that poverty is a very temporal and limited concept that really has little to do with biology at all. Also, the idea that "fitness" somehow means something automatically better overall is just plain wrong. We see that around us today. Many people who are very wealthy are not either more healthy or better people by any real measure than others. They merely have more power. Once folks worshipped kings and queens, holding them up as being "above" the "common" people. Today, its wealth that does essentially the same thing. Yet, in all this, the basics of humanity have not changed. We have gone through magnitudes of change in our thinking, our ways of living and yet our basic biology remains essentially the same.
