[Buddha-l] Fighting creationism

[Richard Hayes]

On Saturday 31 March 2007 18:38, jkirk wrote:

> Please all: what the hell is the "neo-Darwinist theory of creation"?

All theories undergo change over time. The classical form of evolutionary 
theory as found in Origins of Species in 1859 is Darwinism. Various modified 
versions are called neo-Darwinism. 

Highly evolved beings use Google. If you plug "neo-darwinism: into Google 
you'll get lots of information, including the following from 
http://www.allwords.com/word-neo-Darwinist.html :

"A later development of Darwinism, laying greater stress on natural selection 
and denying the inheritance of acquired characteristics."

I gather some of this stems from an attempt to take evolutionary biology back 
from neo-conservative  followers of Sir Hebert Spenser, who foisted social 
Darwinism---and Spenser's famous mantra "survival of the fittest"---off onto 
a public eager to believe the neo-Republican dogma that billionaires succeed 
in life because they are better than us paupers.

Creatures much lower than Googoolians on the evolutionary chain (troglodytes 
like me) still read books by people like Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker and 
Richard Dawkins. They can tell readers quite a bit about current evolutionary 
theory.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico