Libertarianism and Social Darwinism

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Albert Speer
no... intelligent people have a better chance of becoming rich...

If intelligent people have a better chance of becomning rich then rich people must be intelligent, right?

[Al B. Sure!]

i think you should read up a bit on logic before you ask that question to me again.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Albert Speer
i think you should read up a bit on logic before you ask that question to me again.

What tha? What's not logical about that. If intelligent people become rich then rich people are intelligent?

[Al B. Sure!]

its not necessarily true. Possessing A may be a cause of being B... from that you can't imply though that those being B possess A.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Albert Speer
its not necessarily true. Possessing A may be a cause of being B... from that you can't imply though that those being B possess A.

I'm not going here with you. What I said is logical, and I'm not going to argue about it?

What I want to know now is if you are now saying that rich people are no more intelligent than poor people. Again, we're using the term intelligent as you have defined it.

[Al B. Sure!]

being smart may cause you being rich but that doesnt mean those who are rich are necessarily smart.

[chequita guevara]

Social Darwinism was the "theory" that certain races of people were superior to others, and that the superior races therefore had a natural right to rule. Within a given population, it was suppozed that there were superior and infoerior strains, and that in order to enhance the race, the inforerior strains should be prevented from breeding. This aspect of social darwinism was known as eugenics.

So we saw the involuntary sterilization for the insane, handicapped, and homosexuals. We also saw government programs (from around the world) practice involutnary sterilization on women of "lessor" groups, such as in America, American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Black women, etc. Margret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, used such ideas to promote the legalization of abortion and birth control. (Lest anyone think this contaminates the morality of Planned Parenthood, abortion, or birth control, I would point out that Suffregists also used these same arguments to argue for the extenstion of the vote to women.)

Social darwinism continues to raise its scabby head every few years. Now days it parades under the name of biological determinism, and in books like The Bell Curve, but it's still just as much BS as it was 150 years ago.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie


Darwin himself was against social Darwinism. He said that was not what he had claimed in his books.

exactly my point

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov


This is simply not true. What was earth-shattering about Darwin's book was that he assembled, for the first time, so much evidence to support evolution AND he proposed a previously unknown mechanism--Natural Selection. THAT'S what made Darwin's theory so potent. The scientific world, which pre-Darwin had been vastly Creationist in its view, switched to be evolutionist virtually overnight because the evidence he presented was so overwhelming. The entire future of biology came to be shaped by what Darwin discovered. And that's Darwin's true legacy.

Social Darwinism has NOTHING to do with Darwin, it simply took his name to lend some sort of scientific legitimacy to its creed, a creed Darwin himself rejected.

Frankly, I'm not even convinced that there was this Social Darwinism movement you're purporting. I think it was in many ways a bogeyman used to villify opponents. The right-wing still likes to use the term today when debates take place over abortion and assisted suicide.

My statement may be controversial or debateable in scholarly circles, but it's not absolutely false until it has been unquestionably proven by an overwhelming consensus.

According to historians such as Jacques Barzun who wrote "Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage" one of the prevalent legacies of Darwin's theory is that it got out of control and revolutionized political science and overall viewpoint of human society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Albert Speer
being smart may cause you being rich but that doesnt mean those who are rich are necessarily smart.

It doesn't sound like you believe this Social Darwin crap anymore than the rest of us when you put it like that.

[Al B. Sure!]

who ever said that i did?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by MrFun
Read the history of the idea of evolution itself. By 1859, when the first edition of Darwin's book was published, people had already talked about evolution for one hundred years since the middle of the eighteenth century.

What was so Earth-shattering about Darwin's book was not because he introduced an unprecedented theory, but that Darwin's work became out of control.

IIUC, there are two factors that put Darwin's theory in its own class. First, his proposal of a mechanism (natural selection acting on mutations). Second, his view that even us humans were a result of evolution. (Actually, that was specifically not discussed in The Origin of Species but in The Descent of Man).

As for Spencer, he coined the term "survival of the fittest."

[Berzerker]

I suppose social Darwinists are even more cold-hearted and cruel than libertarians by rejecting even the option of private charity organizations.

And less cold-hearted and cruel than those who use the threat of state violence to steal from others in the name of morality....

Social Darwinists seek am overall improvement of the "fitness" of society- its not enought for the better to "succeed"- once they die, their money go off who knows how and could be very well be wasted by some lesser individual- they seek methods to improve the herd over time. It isn;t just about individual success- its about getting rid of the inferior once and for all.

Which sounds very much like liberalism...

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Berzerker
And less cold-hearted and cruel than those who use the threat of state violence to steal from others in the name of morality....

Why do you hate morality so much?

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by MrFun
My statement may be controversial or debateable in scholarly circles, but it's not absolutely false until it has been unquestionably proven by an overwhelming consensus.

No, it's false in the sense that you claimed Darwin's most significant effect was on these sociological issues. That's categorically not true--his most significant effect was on science, plain and simple. He completely revolutionized biology, and in the course of doing that made modern medicine possible. I suspect you need to read more about the history of biolgy to fully understand the huge impact of Darwin's work.

This is far more significant than anything else that came out of his work. The fact is that people had been trying to justify their racism scientifically well before Darwin, and his theory just provided more fodder for such people. But such notions would have existed with or without Darwinian theory--they were already around.

As for Barzun, I find his work uncompelling and very biased. He wasn't a scientist, and his critique of Darwin is laughably ignorant. He rejects Natural Selection in favor of a vague vitalism and doesn't present any evidence for it. Never mind that now NS is the overwhelmingly accepted theory for biological evolution. Barzun's work has been latched onto by Creationists in their assault on evolution, never mind that biologists have categorically rejected Barzun's unfounded conclusions.

Barzun's insults of Darwin have been answered many times, most recently by:

"Peter J. Bowler (of Queen's University, Belfast) in his recent book, Darwinism (Twayne, 1993), discusses the uses of the concept "Social Darwinism" and shows how such uses are often illogical extensions of the theory of evolution and natural selection."

You can also find some pat answers on talkorigins:

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA002_1.html

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/social.html

Finally, Barzun's implied slander that Darwin somehow was just "copying" the work of others and hadn't made a unique contribution is also laughably wrong. I'd suggest starting with Ernst Mayr's brilliant book, What Evolution Is to gain a real understanding of where Darwin came from and just how significant his work was to science. Of course he worked with information that was gathered before him--what scientist doesn't? By Barzun's standard, we must consider Einstein a thieving hack because he relied on the theories of others to help formulate his own...