"Are you
selfish?
Obese?
Addicted?
Lazy?
Impetuous?
Scatterbrained?
Lustful?
Never fear; a Darwinist will grant you absolution.
*Natural selection or sexual selection, or a combination of the two,
made you this way.
*There’s no need to repent, make new year’s resolutions, or seek counseling.
Just read the Darwinist science media, and you will find relief from guilt feelings. Your local Darwin Party propagandist will make up a story about how your vice evolved; they might even allege that the bad habit increases your fitness! It must have been selected in some ape ancestor to help you in the struggle for existence.
Let’s continue the thread with more examples of Darwinian doctrine excusing bad habits.
Explaining the evolution of gossip (PNAS, 2o Feb 2024). The four scientists who wrote this paper hail from the University of Maryland, Stanford and Hong Kong, so they must be experts. Let them summarize their admittedly speculative just-so story about how gossip evolved:
Let’s continue the thread with more examples of Darwinian doctrine excusing bad habits.
Explaining the evolution of gossip (PNAS, 2o Feb 2024). The four scientists who wrote this paper hail from the University of Maryland, Stanford and Hong Kong, so they must be experts. Let them summarize their admittedly speculative just-so story about how gossip evolved:
"Gossip, the exchange of personal information about absent third parties, is ubiquitous in human societies. However, the evolution of gossip remains a puzzle. The current article proposes an evolutionary cycle of gossip and uses an agent-based evolutionary game-theoretic model to assess it. We argue that the evolution of gossip is the joint consequence of its reputation dissemination and selfishness deterrence functions. Specifically, the dissemination of information about individuals’ reputations leads more individuals to condition their behavior on others’ reputations. This induces individuals to behave more cooperatively toward gossipers in order to improve their reputations. As a result, gossiping has an evolutionary advantage that leads to its proliferation."
CEH