Early in the first volume of his collected papers, the evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton retells a Victorian joke.
Two ladies are conversing, and one says:
‘Have you heard that Mr Darwin says we are all descended from an ape?’
The other replies: ‘Oh, my dear – that surely cannot be true! … But, if it should be true, let us pray that at least it will not become generally known!’
Hamilton sees this response as being as relevant today as it was then: people have ‘an instant, automatic wish for both the evidence and the idea to go away’ because evolutionary notions ‘have the unfortunate property of being solvents of a vital societal glue’.
Whereas the Victorian ladies were concerned about evolution’s challenge to conventional religion, their equivalents today are worried about its impact on the egalitarian premise on which democracy is based. What this implies is that the left leaning liberal, look to the media/Universities/Entertainment business and Post industrialists like Google, Facebook (Fast Buck) et al, indeed all those who funded Obama,would find some evolutionary facts challenging to their egalitarian premise that '...all men are equal'.
Darwin’s lesson, put simply, is that all men are not born equal. And the current academic enthusiasm for political correctness, some would argue, is an ‘escape route for less able minds’ which has become Political Correctynes - an institutionalised form of denial.
Source London Review of Books
Two ladies are conversing, and one says:
‘Have you heard that Mr Darwin says we are all descended from an ape?’
The other replies: ‘Oh, my dear – that surely cannot be true! … But, if it should be true, let us pray that at least it will not become generally known!’
Hamilton sees this response as being as relevant today as it was then: people have ‘an instant, automatic wish for both the evidence and the idea to go away’ because evolutionary notions ‘have the unfortunate property of being solvents of a vital societal glue’.
Whereas the Victorian ladies were concerned about evolution’s challenge to conventional religion, their equivalents today are worried about its impact on the egalitarian premise on which democracy is based. What this implies is that the left leaning liberal, look to the media/Universities/Entertainment business and Post industrialists like Google, Facebook (Fast Buck) et al, indeed all those who funded Obama,would find some evolutionary facts challenging to their egalitarian premise that '...all men are equal'.
Darwin’s lesson, put simply, is that all men are not born equal. And the current academic enthusiasm for political correctness, some would argue, is an ‘escape route for less able minds’ which has become Political Correctynes - an institutionalised form of denial.
Source London Review of Books
No comments:
Post a Comment