Is not though the genius of Bushism that it represents retrograde progress? From putting limitations on abortion to reversing Islamicism to re-privatizing the Social Safety Net to reinvolving religious institutions in the delivery of social services to deunionizing the civil service and on and on, all of these things aim at making progress in social terms, but do so by using tradityional methods and ideas to get back to where we were 70 or a hundred years ago, though now with certain built in safety settings.

The idea of progress is a relatively recent invention of the enlightenment. Most societies in the past either believed history was static or cyclical.

Y'all should become materialist darwinians. We don't believe in progress, only change.

For every "advance," there's more than one new parasite. Each is equally the product of natural selection acting on a dynamic system.

This is the hardest thing in the philosophy of darwinism for people to get. My wife is a rescuer of baby birds when they fall out of the nest. I say, leave 'em be, rescuing them is prejudicial to the rats.

All are equally God's (or something's) creation.

Well, I believe in intervention on some topics, just not all. I conceive David's lament to be about people who equate any and all change with progress.

I also get the overall sense that the general belief in inevitable progress is becoming more desperate and defiant. As with religion and smoking, the more tradition recedes from public or even private life, the more hostility to it grows. It is very hard to get anyone today to agree that anything about the past was superior.

Harry:

But aren't you saying here that humans are outside the evolutionary system? If baby birds can increase their survival rate by being cuter than rats, more power to them, I say, and we'll get cuter birds into the bargain.

Actually, though, I think a lot of people *do* take evolutionary theory as a sort of scientific proof of progress, or, rather, read evolutionary theory though their faith in natural progress. Pessimists will look, instead, to thermodynamics...

'Progress' is a tricky notion. It means one thing to the Marxist/materialist, and another to the religious believer. Marxist/materialist conceptions of Progress are based on refuting the notion of a religious finality or destination. Here is what J. Bury (a Marxist historian) had to say about it in Ideas in Progress:

"If we accept the reasonings upon which Progress is based, must we not carry them to their full conclusion? In escaping from the illusion of finality, is it legitimate to exempt that dogma itself?"

David is right, the religious folk have more than just change in mind. They have an actual yardstick upon which to measure changes and see if the changes are good.

I am not as philosophically as deep as many of the posters here, so I don't post much but read about everything written. Sometimes I think progress is confused with difference. There is a certain attractiveness to change. Especially in the arts, modern works are certainly different than those of 150 years ago. It's likely impossible to improve on Beethoven and Mozart, so we get Ives and Glass and Pollack instead of a new Renoir. There's really no way forward but "progress" there must be.

As far as the Jefferson quote, I think part of our problem is now that institutions, infested by those who worship "progress," are changing and trying to drag us along instead of evolving with us.

Yes, Mike, humans can go outside the evolutionary system, for example, by inventing agriculture.

Their output, however, becomes a parameter of the system in which natural selection operates.

Although humans can, to a degree, punch through and interfere with evolution as it would be without our conscious behavior, we cannot exempt ourselves from evolution and selection.

If we should manage to use thermonuclear bombs to kill all of ourselves, that would be unnatural selection.

It works the other way, too. If we attain the capability to intercept and destroy or redirect a huge comet heading for Earth, and it hits Earth and kills all of us, that would be a sort of negative unnatural selection.

Harry: I'd argue that nuclear self-annihilation is just natural selection writ large. Just as bacteria will consume their way into non-existence on a petri dish, leaving behind only those of their fellows (if any) capable of surviving in that environment, so we'd be carrying our natural tendencies to their logical conclusion.

I can see the thrust of that, but it isn't obvious that learning to split the atom started us on a deadend evolutionary path.

There is a native crow in Hawaii which, unlike other crows, nests on the ground. It did fine until the rats and cats were brought in. Now it is nearly extinct, and, evolution being what it is, the chance that the remaining crows will start nesting in trees is slight.

So we might, or we might not. Consciousness does change things. Jim Jones is one model of human evolution but not the only one.

Harry -- You accept that consciousness exists? Isn't that heresy in your Church?

No, why would you think so? My friend Professor Lou Herman thinks he can prove consciousness exists in dolphins.

I'm not totally sold on that, but there seem to be glimmerings of consciousness in other primates, which would be compatible, darwinically, with an emerging brain function.

Frankly, Harry, no one has yet proved to my satisfaction that anyone has consciousness besides me. Certainly Occam's Razor would argue against it, if I accept for the sake of argument that there was an Occam and he had a razor.

Anyway, it seems to me that a materialist has to believe that consciousness can be nothing but a chimera arising out of chemical reactions within our body.

A chimaera you can use. That's as much as a materialist asks it to be.

A chimaera you can use.

If it's a chimaera, there's no "you".

I eat, therefore I am.

Well, dolphins can certainly say that. I worship, therefore I am unique.