The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
Jeremiah 17:9
"A deadly doctrine lies at the heart of modern evolutionary social theory. The next Hitler will love this creed.
The old Social Darwinism—largely frowned on today, even by evolutionists—produced some of the most hideous evils the world has ever seen: eugenics, genocides, and world wars.
Tyrants marched their armies into neighboring countries, imprisoned and tortured millions, and wiped out less-evolved “primitives” all in the name of “survival of the fittest.” Darwin had taught them, these tyrants said, that nature was a struggle to gain the top of the hill, no matter how ruthless or cruel the means.
Nice Darwin?
Today’s evolutionists respond that the old Social Darwinists “misunderstood” Darwin. Now we have New Coke. A kinder, gentler Darwinism is trendy today. A recent book by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity sounds like the polar opposite of the old Social Darwinism.
The term “fittest” is often associated with animals who are physically stronger or of more value than others, but being “fit” can also include an organism’s ability to communicate well with others in its group, which can provide an evolutionary advantage. For example, more social animals can form alliances with each other and protect each others’ young, so the whole population stays stronger in terms of number.
Too bad for all those 100-million-plus victims of experts who “misunderstood” Darwin. Such a shame. Actually, the statement only says that fitness “can” include kindness, not that it “does.” And when it does not, as in the cases of Hitler and Stalin, it is just as much an evolutionary strategy as friendliness. Today’s Darwinists talk like they have everything figured out, including the emergence of altruism (sacrificing oneself for the good of the group). They can write equations for this in their models, and make it sound very scientific. But Darwinian altruism, friendliness, and cooperation, as flowery as they look for the press, have a poisonous root: they are inherently amoral.
Revealing the Root
Darwinians have become very adept at burying the root. They may not even be aware of it much. They focus their attention on the outgrowths of their models, as various “selection pressures” affect populations of bacteria, rabbits or cichlid fish in an African lake. They believe that their models help understand various outcomes of populations that either thrive, fight, cooperate, or go extinct. To them, it’s all a game. They call it “game theory.”
But here’s the rub: human organisms (in their thinking) follow the same models, which are completely amoral. The modern Social Darwinism, just like the old Social Darwinism, shares this common poison: the pursuit of fitness by natural selection. NS is equivalent to the Stuff Happens Law because whatever happens is an acceptable outcome of Darwin’s mechanism. Que sera, sera. Whatever will be will be.
If it is a thriving ecosystem, fine. If it is genocide, fine. There may be a dark side of this farce, but it is equivalent to the light side. It’s all subjective. Those who fight for the “dark” side believe the other side is evil. The endless struggle for the golden apple of “fitness” drives a war of all against all, offering only pockets of safety until the next aggressor shows up."
CEH
