Not at all; 'darwinism' merely says that if they won't breed, they'll be replaced by somebody who will.

So there are no natural survival pressures; it's all volitional?

OJ,Bangledeshi's have large families because children are their safety net and retirement plan.
Both are provided to the euros by the state,so children,as in Hollywood,become staus symbols to satisfy a vague biological need and to follow fads.

M:

So Darwinism is nothing more than a "vague biological need", yet it created life on Earth and gave it all its current form?

Men and women are programed to procreate.We aren't programed for a specific number of procreations.The career minded western woman,who believes the state has secured her future,will be satisfied with 1 or 2 children to fulfill the biological urge.Men aren't that different in the urge department.Of course,there is a trend of career women now choosing to be stay at home moms.Among the very upscale,ironicly,a husband whose income allows the wife to stay at home while still affording an upper class life style is now a hotly sought after commodity.

We're supposed to be programmed to strive for survival of our genes/species/whatever. A Europe reproducing at 1.2 per woman as a rival race takes over can hardly be said to be surviving.

More than 99.9% of all species that ever lived are extinct.

Nothing about our following them will contradict Darwinism in any way.

'We're supposed to be programmed to strive for survival of our genes/species/whatever.'

And at the moment 1.2 children seem to satisfy that need.If a woman has nore children,she must spend more resources on them and less on herself,not popular in a hedonistic culture.

Humans are short term thinkers,Europeans aren't feeling reproductive pressure,but there has been an uptick in euro birth rates,France in particular.Not huge but there.And let me point out,no one predicted the post WW2 baby boom here.
Demographic (or really any other)projections aren't really of much use as they are based on current trends and linear projections.

OJ
Our behaviors have been programmed for survival in a certain environment. When you alter that environment, the behaviors don't always work the same way. Look at moths. They evolved to navigate by moonlight, in an environment with no artificial light. Add streetlights, and they circle around aimlessly.

We are not programmed to strive for survival as a species, we are programmed to desire sex.

Robert:

Explain then the rise of sexless marriages, reductions in teen sex, homosexuality, etc.?

Jeff:

None were voluntary, until now.

"Explain then the rise of sexless marriages, reductions in teen sex, homosexuality, etc.?"

Exceptions that prove the rule?

Which exceptions prove other scientific laws?

Orrin, you are far too intelligent to continue to misunderstand that Darwinism does not require you to do anything, now that that has been explained to you.

If you are teasing that's one thing. If attempting to score debating points, you're not on the right track.

Fertility varied greatly during the period in Europe that you want us to return to. Sometimes the reasons seem obvious in retrospect -- people in England put off marriages in dearth years, as we can determine from parish registers -- but sometimes the reasons remain obscure.

Anyhow, Darwinism is like the camera at the finish line at the race track. It doesn't tell the jockey how to ride, it just determines who got to the finish first.

So like that camera it can make no claim about why someone won, only that they did? So we can toss fitness altogether, right? The things that survived simply survived. Happenstance is as good a reason as any for that and so Darwinism explains nothing, merely noting that some things survive and some don't.

Uh huh. That would be the neo-platonist's interpretation. There are other ways to understand the world, though; and they work a lot better.

Inclusive fitness is not entirely predictable, because future conditions are not predictable. (It is, if not predictable, assessable. We don't disbelieve in real estate appraisers because values change over time.)

I understand why that gives you fits, but you should blame God, not Darwin. Darwin didn't set up the Universe.

Harry:

No, that vision of the way things work is fine. Nothing in Nature explains why things survive, but the intervention of Intelligence can be determinative.

Rather, nothing in nature predicts why things survive.

Explanation is more or less easy, once you've made enough observations.

Once it survives the explanation is that it was better adapted to survive--that's wholly circular and meaningless.

"None were voluntary, until now."

Nor will this one be, should it happen. The choice of how many children to have is at the personal level, extinction at the population level.

For an individual woman to choose to have three children does not mean she has chosen humans to crowd the earth so thoroughly as to have to stack the bodies in the Mariannas Trench. Which is precisely the outcome if that series, population wide, goes on long enough.

Similarly, for an individual woman to choose two, or one, or no children does not mean she has chosen extinction.

Perhaps you need to spend some time studying statistical principles.

"The intervention of Intelligence can be determinative." That would be circular, except circularity requires at least two points.

Survival, as Harry says, is either random or determined by intelligence.

Re: Our safety net.

Our statements of Social Security status show our personal quarters worked, but the system is an obligation on our descentants. Shouldn't we qualify for benefits based on the earnings history of our family, so that the personal rewards align with social need to repoduce, as the old system did.

Would it be meaningless to say that if the ice melted to water, it was because it got hot?

Of course not.

And I did not say the choice is between randomness and intelligence. It's between intelligence and selection. The randomness is in the environment. There's nothing random about selection.

If there is no standard for what is selected only the observation that some are and some aren't then selection is inherently random (or effected by intelligence) and Darwinism is robbed of the basis for propagating mutated forms. As fitness goes so goes Darwin.

Oh, I can tell you what will be selected, once you tell me what the world will be like at any precise date in the future.

"...selection is inherently random...

I doubt you completely understand the concept of randomness.

Brownian motion is random.

Natural selection works even if there is only a small non-random component. And you most certainly cannot exclude non-random results based on the cross product of variation and environment.