[Home] [Site map] [Updates] [Projects] [Contents; 1. Introduction; 2. Philosophy (1), (2), (3), (4) & (5); 3. Religion (1) & (2); 4. History (1), (2) & (3); 5. Science; 6. Environment (1), (2) & (3); 7. Origin of life (1), (2) & (3); 8. Cell & Molecular (1), (2) & (3); 9. Mechanisms (1), (2) & (3); 10. Fossil Record; 12. Plants; 13. Animals; 14. Man (1) & (2); 16. Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography A-C, D-F, G-I, J-M, N-S, T-Z] [Book "Problems of Evolution"]
"PROBLEMS OF EVOLUTION": 15. SOCIAL 1. Social Darwinism 1. Eugenics 2. Racism 3. Nazism 4. Marxism 2. Sociobiology/Evolutionary Psychology 1. `Explains' too much 2. Altruism 3. Adoption 4. Step-parents 3. Ethics 1. Animal rights
"PROBLEMS OF EVOLUTION": 15. SOCIAL 1. Social Darwinism 1. Eugenics The following quote does not mention that "Francis Galton" was Darwin's cousin, and Darwin approved of his eugenics, "Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes" was a devout Darwinist and the "40,000 eugenic sterilization operations" was called "social Darwinism" by its practitioners:"Brave New World may be a lot closer than we had thought. Just a few years ago most scientists thought that the technical barriers to eliminating some inheritable diseases and producing designer babies through genetic engineering would keep that technology on the back burner for decades, if not centuries. But a new report ... points to recent developments that could "catapult us over what were understood to be the principal technical obstacles" to changing the genetic code so that future generations would be free from the threat of certain diseases. Or perhaps bigger and stronger. Or smarter. Or prettier. It's called "human germline genetic modification." Germline comes from the word germination, and it means the seed, or the egg, and the various processes that begin a new life. It is different from somatic genetic engineering, which seeks to alter or replace genes in a person with a disease. That alteration is not passed on to the offspring, whereas germline changes will affect all future generations of the altered embryo. It's similar to cloning, but it has received far less public scrutiny, and that has some experts worried. "The various technologies that will be required to successfully achieve human germline genetic modification are coming to the point where if somebody very skilled and very driven were to want to do this, they could potentially do it very soon," says geneticist Audrey Huang .... That's a real problem because genetics is a very incomplete science at this point, and no one really knows what's going to happen when someone starts tinkering with the genes at the germline level. In fact, no one will know until the child is born, and then, of course, it will be a bit late to say "oops." "Most safety risks would be to the resulting child," the report warns. Elsewhere, it adds: "The safety of germline genetic modification is further complicated by the fact that some problems might not be evident until well after the genetically modified child is born or reaches adulthood, when the problems already could have been passed to the next generation." ... That's one reason many countries have already banned human germline genetic modification. But not the United States. In this country it's rarely discussed except among elite groups of scientists and policy makers. ... And the irony in all of this is it isn't necessary to take such draconian measures to avoid genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis, sickle cell, or Huntington's disease. .... But you can bet your test tube that somebody's going to try it anyway. And probably pretty soon. Not because they want to treat a disease. But because some rich daddy wants a daughter with blonde hair and blue eyes. ... Scientists in various labs have produced genetically modified mice by altering the sperm used to fertilize the eggs, creating succeeding generations of modified mice. Some stronger, some bigger, some faster. ... scientists have been able to genetically modify human stem cells ... and that could be another major step toward germline modification. ... In an effort to measure public attitudes, the center surveyed 4,834 Americans and found that most (57 percent) approve of the technology if it is used to improve human health, while only 19 percent approve using it for "enhancement." ... Enhancement, or making our offspring what we wish we were like, is where the big bucks will be found, and don't expect your insurance company to pay for it. So only rich people will be able to have the kind of babies they want ... .This is, of course, not the first time that humans have dabbled with changing future generations. The most chilling section of the center's report describes "eugenics," a term coined by Sir Francis Galton in the late 19th century to refer to the "study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations." Galton believed that many of the attributes required for success were inheritable, and that led to various eugenics movements as people sought to encourage gifted parents to have more children, and discourage some from having any. "Many states enacted laws permitting the involuntary sterilization if institutionalized persons and 40,000 eugenic sterilization operations were recorded in the U.S. between 1907 and 1945" the report states. One law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and was reflected in the now infamous opinion of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "three generations of imbeciles are enough." That philosophy was carried even further in Germany, where 400,000 Germans were forcibly sterilized and 200,000 others were killed, including babies with Down syndrome and elderly psychiatric patients. All in the effort to produce a super race. Hopefully, that kind of thinking is gone forever. But maybe not. ..." (Dye L., " Geneticists Getting Close to Engineering Good Looks: Underregulated Attempts to Tinker With Human Germline Genetics Could Change Generations to Come," ABCNEWS, June 1, 2005)2. Racism Evolution gave scientific support to racism. The subtitle of Darwin's Origin of Species was "The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" (Darwin, 1859, p.3). Darwin placed the African negro and the Australian aborigine below the Caucasian and next to the gorilla in the hierarchy of nature (Darwin, 1871, pp.242). Darwin also predicted in his Descent of Man "the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world" (Darwin, 1871, pp.241- 242). Darwin saw "the accumulation of capital" as being a means by which "the civilised races" would "take the place of the lower races" (Darwin, 1871, p.207). In a private letter, which soon became public, Darwin predicted that "at no very distant date ... an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races through out the world" (Darwin, 1898, pp.285-286). It should be remembered that Darwin by 1871 was one of the world's most respected scientists and his prediction, in a serious scientific work, that the Australian aborigines would be "exterminated," was no doubt an important justification for Australian governments' policies of assimilation in the late 1800's to early-1900s in which many Australian aborigines were killed and their children removed from them on the grounds that it would be more humane to hasten what was inevitable anyway, namely their demise as a race. Gould points out that while biological arguments in support of racism existed before Darwin's time, "they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory" (Gould., 1977, p.127), as modern "lower" races were equated with ancestral stages of "higher" races (Gould, 1977, p.126), in order to provide the links between apes and man that Darwin's gradualistic theory of evolution needed to be there. [top] 3. Nazism "Through eugenics, Darwinism was a bad influence on Nazism, one of the greatest killers in world history" (Rose, 1998, p.210). "A direct line runs from Darwin...to the extermination camps of Nazi Europe" (Brookes, 1999, p.41). "Haeckel was the chief apostle of evolution in Germany. ... His evolutionary racism ... contributed to the rise of Nazism" (Gould, 1977b, pp.77-78). Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, "envisaged the development of a strong `caste sense' among the naturally gifted members of each social class. These, the genetic elite, would have the biggest say in legislation and, where called for, the first claim upon charity. ... Galton's is the morality of the gas chamber" (Medawar & Medawar, 1983, p.87). It was only a short step from being a devout eugenicist to endorsing the philosophy behind Nazi racial politics" (Caudill, 1997, pp.62-63). The ultimate consequence of eugenics - Nazi Germany's attempt to purify the `Aryan' race in the 1930s gave social Darwinism an especially evil cast and destroyed whatever intellectual integrity it may have had" (Caudill, 1997, p.65). "Adolf Hitler's mind was captivated by evolutionary teaching ... Evolutionary ideas-quite undisguised-lie at the basis of all that is worst in Mein Kampf and in his public speeches" (Clark, 1948, pp.115-116). In 1942, during World War II, leading Darwinist anthropologist, Sir Arthur Keith, candidly admitted that Hitler was "an evolutionist not only in theory, but, as millions know to their cost, in the rigour of its practice" (Keith, 1946, p.8), and Hitler was "also a eugenist," so "Germans who suffer from hereditable imperfections of mind or of body must be rendered infertile, so that as the strong may not be plagued by the weak ... In all these matters the Nazi doctrine is evolutionist" (Keith, 1946, p.9); "Hitler has sought on every occasion and in every way to heighten the national consciousness of the German people-or, what is the same thing, to make them racially conscious ... `The most cruel methods are humane if they give a speedy victory' is Hitler's ... maxim .... Such are the ways of evolution when applied to human affairs" (Keith, 1947, pp.9-10); "the methods employed by the Nazi leaders to secure tribal unity in Germany-methods of brutal compulsion, bloody force, and the concentration camp. ,.. may be justified by their evolutionary result" (Keith, 1946, p.10). It is not claimed that all (or even most) evolutionists are closet Nazi's, just that when "the ways of evolution [are] applied to human affairs," as even today some evolutionists (e.g. advocates of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, genetic engineering), cannot seem to resist doing, if history is any guide, the result will be reminiscent (if not worse given modern genetic engineering technology) of Hitler's policies in Nazi Germany, with the forced elimination of what evolutionists judge to be the unfit, not just physically but mentally, and even ideologically. Evolutionist zealot Richard Dawkins, has declared that those who don't "believe in evolution" are "stupid or insane ... or wicked ..." (Dawkins, 1989a). Likewise, another evolutionist zealot Daniel Dennett has publicly advocated placing in a "zoo cage" as a "quarantine" measure, those who "insist on teaching" what Dennett considers "falsehoods," for example "that `Man' is not a product of evolution by natural selection" (Dennett, 1995, pp.515-519; Numbers, 1998, p.13). wouldn't fancy my chances as a Christian creationist living in a world where Darwinian zealots like Dawkins or Dennett could implement their views! Those of Jewish descent like Medawar, have good reason to describe Galton's eugenics as "the morality of the gas chamber" (Medawar & Medawar, 1983, p.87), and to point out that it was "a body of aspirations having ostensibly to do with the genetic welfare of mankind and resting upon the authority of a science (genetics)" and "to appraise it ... is imperative if we are not to continue at the mercy of ambitious politicians who might once again abuse the authority of genetics to promote their mischievous and illiberal ambitions" (Medawar & Medawar, 1983, p.86) "In all our contemporary conflicts over the teaching of evolution in schools, there's one question that nobody asks: To what does the embrace of Darwinism lead? Historian Richard Weikart explores that topic in a book called From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. Despite that provocative title, Weikart is no sensationalist. He's not out to prove that Hitler and the Nazi party were directly inspired by Charles Darwin's theories. But what Weikart does demonstrate, through exhaustive research, is that Darwin's ideas about the origin of species helped create a culture that devalued human life. And in that culture, Nazism was able to thrive." ... "Darwin wasn't the first person to claim that the strong and healthy have higher value than the weak and sick, or that some races are inferior to others. Those ideas, Weikart says, were around long before Darwin. What Darwin provided was a scientific foundation for these beliefs." ... "Darwinism also strengthened what Weikart calls "scientific racism," the theory that some races were less fully evolved than others. Because of Darwin's theories, leading scientists in the early part of the twentieth century felt emboldened to propose radical ideas about how the sick or members of other races should be treated. .... Several scientists, for example, compared the mentally ill to apes. Textbooks were written that allegedly demonstrated scientifically that Africans, Native Americans, and Australian aborigines were subhuman. The eugenics movement advocated in America as well as Europe was able to bring about the sterilization of thousands of supposedly "inferior" people." (Colson C., "A Matter of Life and Death: From Darwin to Hitler." Review of "From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany," by Richard Weikart, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Breakpoint, April 7, 2005. http://makeashorterlink.com/?N26322ADA) [top] 4. Marxism [To be completed] [top] 2. Sociobiology/Evolutionary Psychology 1. `Explains' too much Darwinism in the social sciences suffers from the same problem of Darwinism in biology, that it `explains' too much (Leith, 1982, p.27). The problem is that if a theory explains all observations, then it is unfalsifiable (Leith, 1982, p.27). "The difficulty ... is that if it explains too much, it also explains too little, and ... Posing as a massive deduction from the evidence, it ends up as an ingenious argument from ignorance." (Himmelfarb 1959, p.336). This is particulary so in the social sciences where "any state of affairs known to exist or to have existed can be explained by the operation of natural selection" (MacRae, 1958, p.304; Burrow, 1966, p.115). Therefore Evolutionary Psychology (like its near-relative Sociobiology), "proves to be so elastic that it can explain just about anything," why "mothers ... kill their newborn babies," and "why most mothers do not kill their babies," but "a theory that explains any phenomenon and its opposite, too, in reality explains nothing," because "it is so flexible that it can be twisted to say whatever proponents want it to say" (Pearcey, 2004, pp.57-58. Emphasis in original)."Chomsky called evolutionary psychology a `philosophy of mind with a little bit of science thrown in' If anything, evolutionary theory can explain not too little but too much. `You find that people cooperate, you say, 'Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.' You find that they fight, you say 'Sure that's obvious because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's' In fact, just about anything you find, you can make some story for it." (Horgan J., "The Undiscovered Mind: How the Brain Defies Explanation," [1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, p.179) [top]2. Altruism Evolution cannot explain human altruism. This is clear in dictionary definitions that show there are two types of altruism: "1 : unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others," and "2 : behavior by an animal that is not beneficial to or may be harmful to itself but that benefits others of its species" (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2004). The first is the original definition of altruism and the second is the definition of sociobiology/evolutionary psychology, which denies that the above mentioned first definition can even exist! For example, sociobiologist Matt Ridley cites approvingly another sociobiologist, Michael Ghiselin's, "Scratch an 'altruist' and watch a 'hypocrite' bleed" (Ridley, 1996b, p.68; Ghiselin, 1974, p.247; Brown, 1999, pp.49-50). That is, according to sociobiology/evolutionary psychology, in the final analysis there is no such thing as real altruism, and the belief that there is, is self-deception (ReMine, 1993, p.158). But if there really is altruism, then it is the evolutionists who are deceiving themselves! And of course there is such a thing as "altruism... in which ... I do something for someone else, without regard for any actual or possible advantage to me" (O'Hear, 1989, p.103), and indeed where someone gives his life for complete strangers:"A number of years ago, a terrible mid-winter air disaster occurred in which a plane leaving the Washington, D.C. airport smashed into a bridge spanning the Potomac River, plunging its passengers into the icy waters. As the rescue helicopters came, attention was focused on one man who again and again pushed the dangling rope ladder to other passengers rather than be pulled to safety himself. Six times he passed the ladder by. When they came again, he was gone He had freely given his life that others might live. The whole nation turned its eyes to this man in respect and admiration for the selfless and good act he had performed. And yet, if the atheist is right, that man was not noble - he did the stupidest thing possible. He should have gone for the ladder first, pushed others away if necessary in order to survive. But to die for others he did not even know, to give up all the brief existence he would ever have - what for? For the atheist there can be no reason. And yet the atheist, like the rest of us, instinctively reacts with praise for this man's selfless action." (Craig, 1994, p.68)The existence of altruism is a major problem for evolution (Cronin, 1991, p.253). The problem is that, "Darwinism ... cannot countenance ... variations which are harmful," as "the fundamental axiom of the theory," contained in "every edition of The Origin of Species, states: `If variations which are useful to their possessors in the struggle for life do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive), that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and reproducing their, kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed (Darwin, 1872, p.81, in O'Hear, 1989, p.142. Emphasis O'Hear). Yet, "any educated person can easily think of a hundred characteristics, commonly occurring in our species, which are not only ‘in the least degree’ injurious to their possessors, but seriously or even extremely injurious to them, which have not been ‘rigidly destroyed’, and concerning which there is not the smallest evidence that they are in the process of being destroyed." (Stove, 1994; O'Hear, 1989, pp.142-143). For example, "some widely acclaimed virtues which have little to do with Darwinian success (survival and reproduction) and which are frequently injurious to their possessors in more than the least degree Darwin argued would lead to their being rigidly destroyed: feeding the poor, tending the sick, visiting the imprisoned, modesty, chastity, honesty, promise-keeping, integrity, respect for the rights of others, self-sacrifice, honour, and this is without even mentioning the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity." (O'Hear, 1989, p.143). [to be continued] [top] 3. Adoption"Mistakes of this sort may, however, occasionally happen in nature. In species that live in herds or troops, an orphaned youngster may be adopted by a strange female, most probably one who has lost her own child. Monkeywatchers sometimes use the word `aunt' for an adopting female. In most cases there is no evidence that she really is an aunt, or indeed any kind of relative: if monkey-watchers were as gene-conscious as they might be, they would not use an important word like `aunt' so uncritically. In most cases we should probably regard adoption, however touching it may seem, as a misfiring of a built- in rule. This is because the generous female is doing her own genes no good by caring for the orphan. She is wasting time and energy which she could be investing in the lives of her own kin, particularly future children of her own. It is presumably a mistake that happens too seldom for natural selection to have `bothered' to change the rule by making the maternal instinct more selective. ... There is one example of a mistake which is so extreme that you may prefer to regard it not as a mistake at all, but as evidence against the selfish gene theory. This is the case of bereaved monkey mothers who have been seen to steal a baby from another female, and look after it. I see this as a double mistake, since the adopter not only wastes her own time; she also releases a rival female from the burden of child-rearing, and frees her to have another child more quickly. It seems to me a critical example which deserves some thorough research. We need to know how often it happens; what the average relatedness between adopter and child is likely to be; and what the attitude of the real mother of the child is-it is, after all, to her advantage that her child should be adopted; do mothers deliberately try to deceive naive young females into adopting their children? (It has also been suggested that adopters and baby-snatchers might benefit by gaining valuable practice in the art of child-rearing.)" (Dawkins R., "The Selfish Gene," [1976], Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1989, New edition, p.101-102. Emphasis original)"The Adoption Paradox. Raising someone else's child seems to make no sense from an evolutionary standpoint. So why is everyone doing it? ... From a Darwinian standpoint, going childless by choice is hard enough to explain, but adoption, as the arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins notes, is a double whammy. Not only do you reduce, or at least fail to increase, your own reproductive success, but you improve someone else's. Since the birth parent is your rival in the great genetic steeplechase, a gene that encourages adoption should be knocked out of the running in fairly short order. It hasn't been. ... Of course, Americans at the turn of the millennium do all sorts of strange things. We have strayed so far from the `ancestral environment,' as the evolutionary psychologists say, that one has to poke through layers of cultural and technological debris to find the logic of the genes. But a survey of human time and space finds many other cultures in which adoption has been common. In some of them, it has been far more common than it is with us. And extending the survey to the rest of the animal kingdom finds adoption, or something like it, practiced by an astonishing array of creatures, from orangutans to hermaphroditic worms." (Eisenberg E., "The Adoption Paradox," Discover, Vol. 22 No. 1, January 2001)"Adoption. Although allomaternal care is widespread in the primates, only under special circumstances does it lead to the full adoption of strange infants. In particular, mothers who are nursing young of their own (and are therefore best able to rear orphans) are typically hostile to strange infants who try to approach them. A possible exception is provided by the langur Presbytis johnii. Lactating females were seen by Poirier (1968) to respond permissively toward other infants. When more than one infant struggled to gain access to a nipple, mothers showed no preference for their own young. Even in species with aggressive females, orphans are probably rarely left to starve. Female macaques who have lost their own babies readily accept other infants, and they may even go so far as to kidnap them (Itani, 1959; Rowell, 1963). Since mothers are more likely to lose their infants than the reverse, it is probable that orphans will find a willing foster mother. Even if none is available, other females might be able to assume the role fully. When caged rhesus females were induced to adopt infants under experimental conditions, they began to produce apparently normal milk (Hansen, 1966). The foster mothers observed in captive groups of rhesus monkeys usually served first as helpers. This circumstance makes it more likely that in nature a relative will adopt an orphaned infant. Van Lawick-Goodall (1968a) recorded three instances of adoption in wild chimpanzees of the Gombe Stream National Park, two by older juvenile sisters and one by an older brother. Similarly, foster mothers observed by Sade (1965) in the feral rhesus population of Cayo Santiago were older sisters." (Wilson E.O., "Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition," [1975], The Belknap Press: Cambridge MA, 1980, p.175)"10. If variations which are useful to their possessors in the struggle for life `do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive), that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed.' This is from The Origin of Species, pp. 80-81. Exactly the same words occur in all the editions. Since this passage expresses the essential idea of natural selection, no further evidence is needed to show that proposition 10 is a Darwinian one. But is it true? In particular, may we really feel sure that every attribute in the least degree injurious to its possessors would be rigidly destroyed by natural selection? On the contrary, the proposition is (saving Darwin's reverence) ridiculous. Any educated person can easily think of a hundred characteristics, commonly occurring in our species, which are not only `in the least degree' injurious to their possessors, but seriously or even extremely injurious to them, which have not been `rigidly destroyed', and concerning which there is not the smallest evidence that they are in the process of being destroyed. Here are ten such characteristics, without even going past the first letter of the alphabet. Abortion; adoption; fondness for alcohol; altruism; anal intercourse; respect for ancestors; susceptibility to aneurism; the love of animals; the importance attached to art; asceticism, whether sexual, dietary, or whatever. Each of these characteristics tends, more or less strongly, to shorten our lives, or to lessen the number of children we have, or both. All of them are of extreme antiquity. Some of them are probably older than our species itself. Adoption, for example is practised by some species of chimpanzees: another adult female taking over the care of a baby whose mother has died. Why has not this ancient and gross `biological error' been rigidly destroyed? `There has not been enough time', replies the Darwinian. Well, that could be so: perhaps there has not been enough time. And then again, perhaps there has been enough time: perhaps even twenty times over. How long does it take for natural selection to destroy an injurious attribute, such as adoption or fondness for alcohol? ... So how come the Darwinian is so confident that there has not been enough time? What evidence can he point to, for thinking that there has not? Why, nothing but this, that adoption has not been destroyed, despite its being an injurious attribute! But this is palpably arguing in a circle, and taking for granted the very point which is in dispute. The Darwinian has no positive evidence whatever, that there has not been enough time. ... The cream of the jest, concerning proposition 10, is that Darwinians themselves do not really believe it. Ask a Darwinian whether he actually believes that the fondness for alcoholic drinks is being destroyed now, or that abortion is, or adoption - and watch his face. Well, of course he does not believe it! Why would he? There is not a particle of evidence in its favour, and there is a great mountain of evidence against it. Absolutely the only thing it has in its favour is that Darwinism says it must be so. But (as Descartes said in another connection) `this reasoning cannot be presented to infidels, who might consider that it proceeded in a circle'" (Stove D.C., "So You Think You Are a Darwinian?," The Royal Institute of Philosophy, Philosophy 69, 1994, pp.267-277. Emphasis original)top] 4. Step-parents"There is one other kind of fallout from current marital norms that comes into focus through the new paradigm: the toll taken on children. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have written, `Perhaps the most obvious prediction from a Darwinian view of parental motives is this: Substitute parents will generally tend to care less profoundly for children than natural parents.' Thus, `children reared by people other than their natural parents will be more often exploited and otherwise at risk. Parental investment is a precious resource, and selection must favor those parental psyches that do not squander it on nonrelatives.' [Daly M. & Wilson M., "Homicide," Aldine de Gruyter: Hawthorne NY, 1988, p.83] To some Darwinians, this expectation might seem so strong as to render its verification a waste of time. But Daly and Wilson took the trouble. What they found surprised even them. In America in 1976, a child living with one or more substitute parents was about one hundred times more likely to be fatally abused than a child living with natural parents. In a Canadian city in the 1980s, a child two years of age or younger was seventy times more likely to be killed by a parent if living with a stepparent and natural parent than if living with two natural parents. Of course, murdered children are a tiny fraction of the children living with stepparents; the divorce and re marriage of a mother is hardly a child's death warrant. But consider the more common problem of nonfatal abuse. Children under ten were, depending on their age and the particular study in question, between three and forty times more likely to suffer parental abuse if living with a stepparent and a natural parent than if living with two natural parents. [Daly & Wilson, 1988, pp.89-91] It is fair to infer that many less dramatic, undocumented forms Of parental indifference follow this rough pattern. After all, the whole reason natural selection invented paternal love was to bestow benefits on offspring. Though biologists call these benefits `investment,' that doesn't mean they're strictly material, wholly sustainable through monthly checks. Fathers give their children all kinds of tutelage and guidance (more, often, than either father or child realizes) and guard them against all kinds of threats. A mother alone simply can't pick tip the slack. A stepfather almost surely won't pick up much, if any of it. In Darwinian terms, a young stepchild is an obstacle to fitness, a drain on resources." (Wright R., "The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life," [1994], Vintage Books: New York NY, 1995, reprint, pp.103-104)"Stepfathers Worse Than No Father. Westerners appalled by such barbaric treatment of the fatherless should take a look at their local newspapers. Child homicide in civilized societies is nowhere tolerated, very much against the law, and uncommon. Nevertheless, in North America when the father of offspring under two years of age no longer lives in the home and an unrelated man or stepfather lives there instead, this rare event is seventy times more likely to occur. [Daly M. & Wilson M.I., "Homicide," Aldine de Gruyter: Hawthorne NY, 1988; Daly M & Wilson M.I., "Discriminative parental solicitude and the relevance of evolutionary models to the analysis of motivational systems." in Gazzaniga M., ed., `The Cognitive Neurosciences,' MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 1995, pp.1269-1286] The murder of infants by stepfathers or mothers' boyfriends resembles the circumstances under which sexually selected infanticide evolved in other primates: males from outside the breeding system increase their own chances to breed by eliminating offspring sired by rivals. The superficial similarities have sometimes led to the erroneous conclusion that child abuse as we know it today is or once was adaptive. [Wray H., "The evolution of child abuse," Science News, Vol. 122, 1982, pp.24-26] Some clarification is in order. Canadian psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson were the first to demonstrate increased risk to infants from having unrelated men in the house. They were careful to stress that in postindustrial human societies, neither child abuse nor infanticide is adaptive. More likely than not, the boyfriend goes to jail and the mother is prosecuted for neglect. More important, the attacker is not some invader entering the breeding system from out side it: he already has keys to the apartment and access to the mother's bed. Imagine: the mother goes off on an errand, leaving her baby in the boy friend's care. She may or may not have an inkling of the risk. Perhaps she senses that her boyfriend resents diversion of household resources, including her attention, to some other man's child. ... Perhaps boyfriend and baby are already off to a bad start all the more reason why the baby may reject such tentative comfort as this man offers. The baby cries, makes demands not willingly met by a man in no way sensitized for this task. Mother Nature has set high his threshold against altruism toward this insatiable stranger. Because of the low degree of relatedness between the man and the child, the benefits don't come close to out weighing the costs of care. [Daly & Wilson, 1980, 1988 & 1995] But beyond his lack of solicitude for an unrelated, very vulnerable but demanding dependent, the abusive boyfriend may have little more in common with an infanticidal monkey than a certain nonspecific impatience, a general predisposition to respond violently to repeated annoyance. ... A more appropriate animal analogue for a brutal stepfather would be an alloparent of either sex compelled to invest in an infant he or she has lost interest in. The motive is not to kill the infant in order to increase reproductive access to the mother, but to rid oneself of an encumbrance. What evolved is not the bizarre and maladaptive alternation of solicitude with torture that we know as `child abuse. `What evolved was a high threshold for responding in a solicitous way toward an offspring not likely to be genetically related the equivalent of emotional earplugs. [Daly M. & Wilson M.I., "Discriminative Parental Solicitude: A Biological Perspective," Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 42, No. 2, May, 1980, pp. 277-288]" (Hrdy S.B., "Mother Nature: Natural Selection and the Female of the Species," Chatto & Windus: London, 1999, pp.236-237)"The Evil-Father Syndrome. Evolutionary psychology is weakest when it attempts to explain unusual human behavior, such as the murder of children by their parents. To Darwinians, who view procreation as the sine qua non of life, these are the most perverse of all acts. The problem was taken up in the 1980s by Margo Wilson and her husband, Martin Daly of McMaster University in Canada, among the most respected of all evolutionary psychologists. After analyzing murder records from the United States and Canada, Wilson and Daly determined that children were roughly sixty times more likely to be killed by a stepparent-and usually a stepfather-than by a natural parent. They pointed out that this type of non-kin infanticide is common in nature; males of many species, from mice to monkeys, kill offspring that their mates conceived with another male. The selfish-gene perspective was upheld after all. Or was it? Even Wilson and Daly have warned that their results should be interpreted with caution-and with good reason. Clearly one cannot say that men have an innate propensity to kill their mate's children if the children were fathered by other men, because the vast majority of stepfathers never abuse or kill their children. Moreover, fathers who adopt children are even less likely than biological fathers to kill or abuse their children. Of course, men who adopt children are atypical, because they are screened for emotional and financial stability-but that is exactly the point. Men who abuse stepchildren are obviously atypical too. They may have assumed responsibility for a spouse's children reluctantly. They may be subject to unusual financial and emotional stresses. These are the factors that lead certain men to kill or harm a mate's children-not some instinctual urge that they share with mice or monkeys. Wilson and Daly's research is nonetheless often cited as a model of Darwinian social science, since it addresses an important issue and rests on a large empirical foundation. When the New York Times in 1997 asked leading intellectuals to name the last book they had read twice, Steven Pinker singled out Homicide, a book in which Wilson and Daly presented an evolutionary view of human violence. Ironically, Pinker later wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine that inadvertently undermined the Daly and Wilson research- and, indeed, the entire enterprise of Darwinian psychology. Pinker's article addressed a spate of incidents in which biological mothers had killed their newborn children. (In one case, a girl at a high school dance gave birth in a bathroom stall, killed the infant, and then returned to the dance floor.) Although maternal infanticide seems at first glance to be the ultimate violation of Darwinian precepts, Pinker said, it might result from natural selection. He noted that in certain stressful circumstances, our maternal ancestors would have been well advised to kill a newborn baby rather than devoting scarce resources to it, resources needed to sustain the mother and her older offspring. This innate psychological module might be switched on in modern mothers by severe stress. A few weeks after Pinker's article was published, the New York Times Magazine printed a letter from Claude Fischer, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley. Pinker's article, Fischer complained, `illustrates how silly evolutionary explanations of human behavior have become. When mothers protect their newborns (which almost all do), it's because that behavior is evolutionarily adaptive. And now, when a few mothers kill their newborns, that's evolutionarily adaptive too. Any behavior and its opposite is `explained' by evolutionary selection.... Thus, nothing is explained.'" (Horgan J., "The Undiscovered Mind: How the Brain Defies Explanation," [1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, pp.183-185)"But a controversial new theory would have us believe that the stereotypes of cruel or heartless step- parents that run through folklore have a biological basis. A pair of Canadian psychologists, Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, claim that children are up to 100 times more likely to be abused or killed by a step-parent than by a genetic parent. The[y] ... believe the heightened level of violence suffered by stepchildren is a product of evolutionary programming. Daly and Wilson are in the vanguard of the self-proclaimed `new science' of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists believe that all human behavior has been shaped by a ruthless Darwinian calculus of reproductive self-interest. ... In evolutionary terms, then, stepchildren will always be behind the eight ball. There is simply no good Darwinian reason for an adult to `invest' in a child who doesn't share their genes. ... Daly and Wilson have put together an impressive array of statistics from a number of countries, all of which point, in their view, to one conclusion: that step-parents are, in fact, `hugely over-represented' as perpetrators of child abuse, and `even more hugely as child murderers'. ... However, there is a paradox about these grisly statistics, one that seems to upset the whole Darwinian applecart. In all these countries, the total number of children killed by their natural parents is still higher than that killed by step-parents. Evolutionary psychologists have developed some ingenious theories to explain why it is that anyone should commit what amounts to genetic suicide by murdering their own offspring. ... Within the scientific community are many who believe Daly and Wilson's Darwinian view of parental love is flawed, and question their statistical evidence and scientific reasoning. A major study published in 1991 by R.J. Gelles and J.W. Harrop [Gelles, R. & Harrop, J. (1991). The risk of abusive violence among children with nongenetic caretakers. Family Relations, 40, 78-83], veteran American researchers on family violence, found that there was no significant difference between the rates of severe violence perpetrated by natural parents and step-parents. And Steven Rose, a professor of biology at the Open University in Britain, and a leading critic of evolutionary psychology, argues that Daly and Wilson have tailored the facts to fit their hypothesis. `There's a huge difference in murder rates between, say, the UK and the US,' says Rose. `For their hypothesis to have any scientific validity, you would expect the rate to be reasonably constant across populations. And even more importantly, the actual percentage of step- parents who kill or abuse a child is tiny. The vast majority are no different from genetic parents: if there really were some deep Darwinian antipathy between step-parents and stepchildren, you would expect a lot more step- parents to be killers, and that simply isn't the case.' Leslie Margolin, a child-abuse researcher at the University of Iowa, is less circumspect, calling Daly and Wilson's theory `patent nonsense'. `Step-parents don't have the same social supports and incentives to care for children as biological parents,' argues Margolin. `They don't have a long shared history with the kids.'. ... in a significant number of instances, stepfathers were encouraged to assault a child by the child's mother. ... This scenario, repeated consistently in the cases Margolin studied, seems to strike at the roots of Daly and Wilson's work. So, why then would a mother jeopardise her `precious Darwinian investments' ... by encouraging a genetic interloper to do them harm? Daly and Wilson shrug off these criticisms. ... In Daly and Wilson's world view, the truth is much simpler: stepparents feel a kind of visceral resentment at `pseudo-parental obligation' that is, in Darwinian terms, against nature. ... Like many of the comparisons evolutionary psychology makes between human and animal behavior, this has a seductive surface appeal. Rose, however, calls it a `crappy just-so story', no more deserving of scientific credibility than Kipling's fables. `If it's natural, and lions do it all the time, then why don't humans?' says Rose ... Rose argues that Daly and Wilson ignore counter-examples from animal and human behavior that might make their theory look shaky. `The real clincher is adoption. Adoptive parents have no genetic relationship to their children, but there's no evidence at all that they are any more violent or abusive towards their children than "natural" parents.'" (Morton T., "Child-killers: is it in the genes?," The Age, 6 May 2000)3. Ethics 1. Animal rights It is ironic that science based on materialistic/naturalistic premises, having rejected its original foundations on Judeo-Christian premises, that man is uniquely created in the image of God (Gn 1:26-27; 5:1; 9:6; Col 3:10), is left with no principled justification of why it should carry out experiments on animals, especially primates, which may cause their suffering and death, in order to find treatments that may save or improve the lives of humans. For example, Cambridge University (Darwin's almer mater is encountering resistance from animal rights activists to its plans to build a new primate research laboratory (Matfield, 2003). The Darwinists can hardly complain if, after telling us that we humans are just animals, with no special status on the tree of life, they are taken literally by some! [top]
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Created: 3 November, 2003. Updated: 12 March, 2006.