Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,...
Romans 1:22
"Almost as soon as socialist mayor Katie Wilson took office in January, the graffiti in our city seemed to bloom further, as if responding to an organic call to greater chaos and disorder. The horrid graffiti is just one index of a seeming madness that has overtaken us. The amount of human waste in the streets is another.
Asked at a community forum what she thinks about the flight of the wealthy, faced with the state’s newly passed so-called “millionaires’ tax,” Mayor Wilson waved and giggled and said, “Like, bye!” The audience, presumably not all millionaires, applauded, apparently not realizing that when the millionaires have fled, they will be the ones expected to make up the tax revenue deficit.
Darwinian evolution sees individual organisms, in competition with each other, as the focus of natural selection. In this view, individuals with favorable genetic variations outcompete other individuals, and so their genetic contribution to the population is “selected” over others.
In Darwinism, which excludes intelligent design, this is supposed to promote the gradual buildup of biological sophistication and complexity, as organisms scale the evolutionary tree. Unguided evolution alone is almost certainly not capable of such feats, but that’s not the point here.
Under group selection, as advocated by David Sloan Wilson, it’s not competing individuals but community altruism that is the focus of selection. Group survival is the winning ticket. Altruistic populations, with individuals looking out for each other, are at the crucial advantage. Dr. Weinstein noted something that’s obvious once it’s been pointed out:
"Almost as soon as socialist mayor Katie Wilson took office in January, the graffiti in our city seemed to bloom further, as if responding to an organic call to greater chaos and disorder. The horrid graffiti is just one index of a seeming madness that has overtaken us. The amount of human waste in the streets is another.
Asked at a community forum what she thinks about the flight of the wealthy, faced with the state’s newly passed so-called “millionaires’ tax,” Mayor Wilson waved and giggled and said, “Like, bye!” The audience, presumably not all millionaires, applauded, apparently not realizing that when the millionaires have fled, they will be the ones expected to make up the tax revenue deficit.
Darwinian evolution sees individual organisms, in competition with each other, as the focus of natural selection. In this view, individuals with favorable genetic variations outcompete other individuals, and so their genetic contribution to the population is “selected” over others.
In Darwinism, which excludes intelligent design, this is supposed to promote the gradual buildup of biological sophistication and complexity, as organisms scale the evolutionary tree. Unguided evolution alone is almost certainly not capable of such feats, but that’s not the point here.
Under group selection, as advocated by David Sloan Wilson, it’s not competing individuals but community altruism that is the focus of selection. Group survival is the winning ticket. Altruistic populations, with individuals looking out for each other, are at the crucial advantage. Dr. Weinstein noted something that’s obvious once it’s been pointed out:
the altruistic model is essentially socialism.
It’s also a very unrealistic way of understanding behavior. In the real world, as in the Communist experiment of the Soviet Union, tender feelings for your fellow citizens are unreliable. The cheaters, the abusers of the system, are usually the only ones to get ahead, while the hard-working, honest, and industrious are penalized. Such a system is unsustainable, leading to failed societies.
Socialism is the flip side of a faulty evolutionary theory. “It is interesting,” says Weinstein, “to watch the academic version of this misunderstanding flow down a lineage to the now mayor of Seattle.” Yes, you can chase out the businesses and the wealthy, and let the drug zombies rule the street. The result will not be a socialist utopia, but a nightmare." Science&Culture
