Elitism and Nazism

Because natural selection - the survival of the fittest - isn't a goal or a moral, but an explanation. Darwin didn't say "the fittest - aka the strongest or best - should be made to survive while the weak should be swept away", he said "those that survive are, by definition, fit."You can't use natural selection as a justification for action. Darwin knew this. Any attempt to use NS to justify war or slaughter is perverting the original observation to one's own end, as much as the Crucades or the Inquisition were perversions of Christian doctrine.

I guess I give ideology the benefit of the doubt. After all ideology doesn't kill people. People kill people.Honestly as many people were killed by polytheists as monotheists. How many gods you believe in - if any - is no indication you're about to go kill some other people. You're making the same mistake the General is, and anyone else who misunderstands Darwinism - equivocating on the word "fittest". Darwin's intent was not to say that the fittest should survive. It was his intent to define fitness as those who survive and reproduce.So, the only answer to "who's the fittest human?" is "the one with the most kids." It's true - the fat guy in the trailer park with no job or education, but who's the father of 20, is far more fit than the childless bodybuilder with the Ph.D. If you want to compare these two people in other ways, that's fine, but there won't be anything Darwinistic about any other comparisons beyond their respective survivng children.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 09-05-2003]

Well, I guess you could think this way, but just so we're clear, it's not Darwinism you're talking about.Plus how could there come to be a biological basis for an instinct for meme propagation? Although I guess there wouldn't have to be.

I guess I see this as a meaningless question. Feminism is a political ideology. Darwinism is a physical mechanism. It's like asking if Marxism is pro- or anti-Steady State Universe. At best there's only a tenuous connection that could be made between those two ideas. Yeah, I started arguing against something you weren't saying. Sorry. Memes are a useful metaphor for why some ideas seem to spread better than others, but could it even be considered a scientific model? At best I see it as a way to loosely apply ideas from evolution to explain the spread of human behaviors.If there's a full-fledged Meme Theory of Ideas, I'll stand corrected, of course. But I've never heard of such a thing.

So? Darwinism doesn't claim to explain the entire scope of human behavior. Even evolutionary psychology doesn't attempt to apply Darwinism to every convievable human problem. Like I said, it's as meaningless as saying "Marxism is an example of a political structure that Steady-State cosmology can't explain." Actually it's a pretty simple ideology - "it's bad when women get the short end of the stick." But that's a topic for another thread. Only when it comes to talking about what we actually know exists. If memes explain certain behaviors better than others, then I guess it's ok to talk about them. As such, though, I think it's a mistake to go talking about things like ideas as though they really exist.I mean, can you test a meme? Are all ideas memes? If not, which ones are? These are just a few questions that come up if you start to think about memes as though they're a real thing.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to pick on you. And your english is excellent, I would not have known that you weren't a native speaker.Like I said, I'm not trying to pick on you. It's just that this isn't the first time I've encountered the idea of memes, and it's become apparent to me over the years that there's just not much value to the theory. So my questions to you aren't for the purpose of putting you on the spot, but rather, to see if I'm wrong about the theory, to see if it's considerably better-developed than I think. Well, maybe. Not all animals get "programmed" correctly. Some individuals have behaviors that run counter to their survival, and so they don't survive. On the other hand, sometimes it happens that behaviors that appear to confer a survival disadvantage on the individual do persist in the population. This is interesting, and a model of "kin selection" or "selfish genes" has been advanced to help explain how behaviors that lead to the individual's death can actually increase the number of that individual's genes that survive. Someody mentioned "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins, that's the book to pick up. It explains in more detail what we're talking about, here. (Dawkins also has a book on memes that you might already be familiar with...)

Oh. I knew Dawkins was big into the memes, but I hadn't realized it was that book. (Guess I should read it, sometime?)