mass production. and interchangeable parts and workers. is Reform Darwinism. a kind of half-hearted Darwinism. just strong enough to displace whatever wisdom in Christianity stood the test of time. but insufficient to move all the way into a new Darwinian age.
There’s hope for a new understanding of man and society. which is now getting under way in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. It is being fiercely resisted by latter-day. entrenched Reform Darwinists. as the following quotation shows:
It is a sacrosanct shibboleth of twentieth-century
Which must not be allowed to be disturbed by evidence or argument. That human behaviour is derived from culture and not from instinct. Those of us who have written books in recent years arguing otherwise. as part of the emerging field of evolutionary psychology. Are firmly patronized and told to close our minds again. It is a pure coincidence. We are told. That human females. Like other female mammals.
Find babies more interesting than males do;
A pure coincidence that human males. like other male mammals. are more aggressive than females; a pure coincidence that human beings. like other gregarious primates. divide easily and arbitrarily into groups which then behave job function email list antagonistically towards each other. That we have the same number of teeth in our mouths as a chimpanzee is common descent. But that we have the same differentiation of behaviour between the sexes is an amazing coincidence. Our behaviour. we are told. was a separate act of cultural creation. entirely different from that of chimpanzees. Human hardware may now be recognized as a continuation of animal hardware; but the software is newly invented by ‘culture.’
This is of course modern Darwinism’s
Fiercest battleground. The defenders of human exceptionalism no longer derive their arguments from the Bible but from Marx. Freud. Margaret lead generation for business Mead or some unfathomable French deconstructionist. They usually try to brand the evolutionary psychologists as reactionaries—it was a common twentieth-century trick to accuse your intellectual opponent of your own faults.—Matt Ridley. “From the Bottom Up.” Times Literary Supplement. 2000.1.28.
When the old code of chivalry was bahrain lists replaced with a newer code that represented the capitalist virtues. and when the old aristocratic code of honor was replaced. much to the Sage’s lament. with the new code of democracy. Our day has witnessed the replacement of the productive. capitalist virtues with the bureaucratic virtues. such as “cover your ass.” if I may be pardoned the expression. These virtues worked not too badly during the Machine Age of large organizations.
