Do we have to go back to Spencerianism for all the answers? Charity functions as a form of insurance--a "safety net," if you will, serving to facilitate innovation and mobility without the stifling hand of state power. It is just one one the many ways in which custom and religion contribute to progress.

The Libertine ideal of the economic war of all against all is actually counter-progressive, as the need for security against failure inhibits advancement.

Lou:

So Sri Lankans will send us medicine if we have a crisis?

There has to be a materialistic explanation. There just has to.

why is it so hard to believe/accept that some people are just good/nice ?

think about it this way: we have a pleasure center in our brains; doing things that stimulate that center reinforces certain behaviors; being nice feels good to some people. just that simple.

Begs the Q, cjm.

Dear Sri Lankans,

I would be happy to contribute to your relief efforts if you can demonstrate that my charity would directly benefit two of my sibling, or four aunts and uncles, or eight cousins. I am a magnanimous sort and thus will be happy to accept any combination thereof.

Yours, etc.

But their largesse tends to be reserved for their genetic relatives; this makes sense in evolutionary terms

News Flash. Sri lankans are our genetic relatives.

And I'd be willing to bet that no one's charitable giving in this case is coming at even the tiniest risk to their continued survival.

(Michael Schumacher, one of those awful, secular, Germans, gave $10,000,000 to tsunami relief efforts last month. Wonderful? Yes. A true sacrifice? Perhaps not, since he has made roughly $60,000,000 per year for the last 10 years...)

But obviously not ones much like us. Darwinism assumes competition within the species.If "evolutionary change comes about throught the abundant production of genetic variation in every generation. The relatively few individuals who survive, owing to a particularly well-adapted combination of inheritable characters, give rise to the next generation." Then is is obviously anti-Darwinian to help those who are differently adapted than you.

ghostc: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar :) doing good for its own sake doesn't necessarily have any deeper meaning or cause; it just is.

Mr. Judd;

It is only in very recent times that one could help non-kin {i.e. people not in the local tribe) this way. Social animals evolve at the deme level as well as the individual.

AOG:

Ah, the trusty old "Darwinism was true until us" meme.

Kin are who you think they are. Globalization of trade, culture, travel, and immigration has helped to redefine the psychological categories of "us" and "them". You don't try very hard to find explanations, do you?

Robert:

The Just-So story is a Darwinian specialty. Of course racism is a survival response against those different than us, right? Hard to square all your little circles...

How much did you guys give to the Filipinos, who were wiped out by the tens of thousands by weather at just the same time?

Nil, nada, nothing, not any, right?

If feeling better about yourself contributes positively to your survival (a position often advocated by Orrin), then dumping a few shekels on the Sri Lankans is easy enough to explain in darwinian terms, although not everything that is done has to have a darwinian explanation.

It's a whole lot easier to explain, though, how caring, altruistic Americans dumped their unsalable merchandise (like 20 crates of Maui Monkey dolls) on the long-suffering Sri Lankans and claimed a tax deduction from me.

Charity, indeed, begins at home.

Harry:

Darwinism is the force that shapes all life in the universe but it's intermittent?

Philippinos did, BTW, donate quite a bit to Tsunami victims.

"Darwinism is the force that shapes all life in the universe but it's intermittent?"

Perhaps you're thinking of the modern evolutionary synthesis, but yes, evolutionary change is sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

You mean it doesn't have to be gradual, with no major breaks or discontinuities? And there isn't abundant production of genetic variation in every generation?

Yes it does, and yes there is, but the change resulting from it in terms of the living organisms changing over successive generations will proceed at varying speeds, sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

Incidentally, wouldn't a potential falsification of the theory of evolution be if a new species had showed up without any clear precedent? Something that had no anatomical similarity to a predecessor?

Like life itself?

Not intermittent. Opportunistic.

I know you know this, because I've told you before.

Just reminding the lurkers to be aware how you distort the discussion.

So there are only certain "opportunities" where Darwinism functions? I don't need to distort--you guys are self-parodistic.

"Like life itself?"

You're welcome to read up on the various speculations concerning abiogenesis at your leisure. I'm sure you're aware that the theory of evolution deals with evolution.

So: wouldn't a potential falsification of the theory of evolution be if a new species had showed up without any clear precedent? Something that had no anatomical similarity to a predecessor?

"So there are only certain "opportunities" where Darwinism functions? I don't need to distort"

You already did.

creeper:

No, not unless you think the only way life can arise at all is the precise way it did here. That's a tad teleological for Darwinsm, but it's exactly the kind of athropomorphism we expect of Darwinists.

The theory of evolution does not state that the way things went is the only way they could have gone, and I'm not sure how you draw that inference from what I said.

What the theory of evolution does say is that organisms evolve gradually; a potential falsification would be to have something appear in the fossil record that is completely out of step - for example a centaur, without intermediate steps from either horse or man preceding it.

So it would be unsurprising to find that not all life descends from just one organism. Indeed, it's inexplicable under Darwinism that it is so descended.

I'll read up on that, Orrin; for the moment I have no response pro or con.

Can I take it that you take the potential falsification on board?

That if all life on Earth--which is all advanced life in the Universe--comes from one just template then Darwinism is likely false? Yes.

That is hardly what I posited. I was talking about inexplicable leaps in the fossil record.

As for us being the only advanced life form in the universe, that's an entirely different subject, which you introduced out of the blue, and which has nothing to do with this potential falsification.

Re. 'just one template', I'll get back to you on that.

If we found a fossil of a centaur, and there was no evidence in the fossil record preceding that particular fossil of any intermediary organisms between horse and centaur or man and centaur (or really anything preceding the centaur that resembles it), would you say that that disproved the modern theory of evolution?

Why would a centaur be anymore revealing than the eyeball the hand etc.

You raise some rather interesting implications that have as a consequence that the claim one hears occasionally (even on this blog) that evolution is not falsifiable and hence not science is actually null and void.

I take it for now, based on what you just said, that you agree that finding fossils of a centaur under the aforementioned conditions would in fact disprove evolution.

Do you disagree?

No. Darwinists can make them fit the theory.

If we found a fossil of a centaur, and there was no evidence in the fossil record preceding that particular fossil of any intermediary organisms between horse and centaur or man and centaur (or really anything preceding the centaur that resembles it), would YOU say that that disproved the modern theory of evolution?

The current fossil record disproves it. What would the centaur fossil add?

I didn't say anything about the Filipinos did. I said you did not behave altruistically toward the suffering Filipinos.

Balances out, I guess, in your crazy version of evolution.

Selection is not like sin, where one slip settles everything. It is opportunistic.

You can cross a busy street against the light, and you might not be selected against the first time. But if you keep at it, the chances you will be selected against rise quickly.

Jesus didn't get variation, but he did get that. Even he.

The "suffering Filipinos" were sending vast amounts of money to tsunami victims.

Orrin,

So I take it for now, based on what you just said, that you agree that finding fossils of a centaur under the aforementioned conditions would in fact disprove evolution.

What in the fossil record disproves the modern evolutionary synthesis?

And please try to be coherent: either evolution is unfalsifiable or it has been disproven. You can't claim both.

Why not?

It's unfalsifiable from within, obvious nonsense frrom without.

What in the fossil record disproves the modern evolutionary synthesis?

"Why would a centaur be anymore revealing than the eyeball the hand etc."

Because in the example I named, the centaur would have no anatomic precedents.

No anatomic feature has precedents.

I've noticed when you make claims like this -

"The current fossil record disproves [the modern theory of evolution]."

- you avoid the inevitable question to back that up with facts or specifics with remarkable consistency.

i just ex0plained it: there is no precedent in a one-celled organism for anything that followed.

My apologies, I had not seen your post from 3:40 when I hit 'post' on mine.

A one-celled organism is a precedent for a multi-celled organism, which in turn, by many small degrees in different directions, became the precedent for everything that followed.

Even you must recognize how inane that is. But accepting it has some validity for the sake of argument then the centaur is implicit in the one-celled organism.

Evolution from single-celled to multi-celled organisms and from there to the variety of life around us is hardly inane, and can be followed gradually throughout the fossil record.

Be that as it may, if a centaur showed up in the fossil record, with no intermediate stages preceding it that connect it to either horse or man, that would be a pretty powerful refutation of the theory of evolution. Much as you like to beat around the bush, I take it based on your previous statements that you're inclined to agree with that.

No, it can be folowed in some instances by leaps. Mostly it's just hypothezied about. The two-celled organism is more different than the single than a centaur differs from a horse.

I don't know if this is part of the theory of evolution, but there are theories that plausibly explain the transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes.

A centaur found without predecessors in the fossil record, however, would have evolutionary biologists stumped.

It has predecessors.

My point was that if something occurred that did not have any predecessors in the fossil record, so how about we posit a centaur showing up in the fossil record before either man or horse showed up - that would be a falsification of the theory of evolution.

Why? If man and the horse are implicit in the single cell so is the horse/man.

The point is that if, say, the centaur shows up in the fossil record without any predecessors (ie. if horse and man show up after it in the fossil record), then that would be a refutation of the claim contained in the theory of evolution that organisms evolve gradually.

creeper:

Y'all would just claim that man and horse had diverged from the man-horse.

Most likely, and given those hypothetical circumstances, that might then well be true - but the point is not what the man-horse subsequently turned into.

The point is if there were a centaur in the fossil record with, for example, either nothing or just some simple eukaryote structures preceding it, it would be a powerful refutation of the theory of evolution, and a strong argument in favor of some kind of Creationism or Intelligent Design.

Yes, except that there's no precedent for anything in the fossil record and that doesn't phase you guys. Faith isn't rational.

Ah, there's no precedent for anything in the fossil record, I seeeee...

Yes, the one-celled organism was complete and perfect.

Then why didn't the Designer stop there?

One-celled organisms don't have souls or free wills.

"there's no precedent for anything in the fossil record"

You really should read this sometime.