|
Please, can we not have another half-baked "survival of the fittest" speech? There are so many things wrong with this it's hard to know where to start.
1. Evolutionary fitness is not strength of body, mind or personality.
If there is a government with a policy of favoring a particular racial group, and the government itself and its policies are sufficiently enduring that they indeed have the effect of increasing the prevalence in the gene pool of genes associated with that racial group, then those genes are by definition more fit.
This is true even if the phenotypes of those genes are things we would traditionally consider weaknesses, such as say poor stature or low intelligence.
2. Darwin's natural selection is not Hobbes's "warre of every man against every man".
Evolution is not a testosterone-poisoned fantasy in which the big tough guy gives the weak guy a trouncing and then rapes all the women to spread his manly seed to the four corners of the Earth. Perhaps you have noticed that there are butterflies, mice, and plenty of other critters and humans running around that appear "weak". How have their genes survived for so long, I wonder? There is more to evolution than that, including, for example, altruism... which brings us to...
3. Natural selection happens at the level of the gene, not the individual.
Perhaps this will come as news to you, but children are not identical copies of their parents. What survives or dies in the evolutionary process is not individuals, but genes. Evolution happens to duplicating representations of chemicals bouncing around in your body. It could not care less about who you are or whether you are a bad-ass. Or perhaps you hadn't noticed that...
4. The strong (in your sense of the word) do not survive.
Maybe I am suffering from a lack of data, here, but I can't recall meeting or hearing about any people who were 792 years old and survived that long because they were big and tough or went to the gym more often than the rest of us. No matter how "strong" you are, you are not going to survive life, which has a 100% casualty rate.
5. Evolution takes a different color among humans in the modern world.
As far as evolution is concerned, your genes have had their say once you have finished having kids. For women this means they finish being a part of your imaginary natural meet-grinder sometime in their 30s or 40s, and for men the age is usually not much later. I must have missed the broad social trend in which people who are not cock-blocking raw egg swallowers all die off in their 20s.
Possibly more importantly, our modern surroundings change the rules of the game dramatically. Have you noticed that poor people tend to have more kids than rich people? It is entirely likely that the deeply ironic result of modern society is that being poor, uneducated, and/or downright stupid is an evolutionary advantage.
6. The theory of evolution is descriptive, not normative.
Natural selection is a natural process, not a moral imperative. It has effects, not values. There is no telos to it and you cannot serve it or thwart it. Complaining that a government policy thwarts evolution is like whining that solid fuel rockets are harming gravity.
So please, leave the evolutionary theory to scientists and those of us laymen who have bothered to read about it. Go paint some nice flames on the side of your raised truck, or something.
Drake
|