It is quite pointless

To discuss evolution

With "creationists"

Shintaro.

"It is quite pointless

To discuss evolution

With "creationists"

Yes its is, when the world according to their book of fact, it started with Adam and Eve, and then Cane and Abel continued to populate the entire human race.

And some people have a problem with the GAY community.......:)

The ethical behavior of religious cults can never be justified, considering the blood that saturates every page of a man made belief. Its no doubt that Darwin will go down as the bringer of truth.......and will be honored for all time.

BLUE

When Adolf Hitler adopted evolution it logically followed he saw ethical reasons why lesser humans should be eradicated from his superior Arian society and ultimately the earth.

Principle {1} in ethics how does one sees man and their place in the world. All ethics hinges on that principle, as ethics is about the behaviour of man.

For those that do not believe evolution has influenced ETHICS should read Encyclopedia Britannica on Ethics.

I'll be in Brisbane for a couple of days so will not be posting.

Al
“The sons of Ham:”

You forgot “Aneggs” ☺

“Peter..and others, can you accept that … it is more probable that the various branches of humanity have developed at different rates and advancement both physically and intellectually?”

Yes.

I also don’t think it’s unethical to prefer one inherited characteristic over another, as long as one is not *initiating aggression* on the basis of it.

I do kind of base my ethics on evolutionary theory, as follows. I think one has an obligation, in constructing an ethics, to base it on fact as well as one is able to. The original *moral* sins of theists down the ages, such as the persecution of other faiths or even their co-religionists, stem from an original *intellectual* sin, which was embracing propositions that were palpably or probably false. There was some excuse for the wandering goatherds who wrote the early scriptures, who knew nothing of geology, embryology, taxonomy genetics. But that excuse is gone.

I take evolutionary theory to explain the facts of biology, including human origins, better than any supernatural explanation. On that basis, I construct my ethics. For example, I do not accept the sexual proscriptions of the Christian religion. If we look in Genesis to discover their reason, we find there isn’t one – they start and endure as irrational prejudices, that is all. So long as one’s sexuality does not involve initiating aggression, or abuse of a child, I don’t think it is immoral – whereas Christians think pretty much every kind of sexuality is deep and double-damned, except monogamous sex.

I prefer the Taoist ethic which sees sexuality as part of the arts of health, aesthetics and sympathy, than the Christian ethic which attaches so much shame and guilt to sex with so little reason. A more sensible nature-worship ethic should view delightful and life-affirming sex as a kind of sacrament.

Philo
Hitler’s mass murders do not follow logically from evolutionary theory, because it does not provide values justifying such action.

Hi Peter...that was a helpful response (all others noted also)

Now.. you are now at the point I've been trying to establish.

"Assertion....implications"

If we assert "evolution/natural selection" the implication is exactly as you and Hitler understood it. Not connecting you with him of course.

Now... GENETICS.. does that have something to say about all this?

Indeed it does.. and this is where I've been heading

Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam. So says the current theory of the human Genome project.

//analysis of variation in the human mitochondrial genome has led to the postulation of a recent common ancestor for all humans on the maternal line of descent.//

Now.. from an ethical point of view, the concept of all humans originating from ONE ancestor is the only scientific foundation for the 'Equality of Man'

I rejoice that science and genetics have finally validated and caught up with :)

"In the beginning, God created" and

Gen 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image"

So, we have a convergence of theology and science (theological position was first of course) which can both be used to establish the fundamental equality of mankind.

There is in fact no other basis for claiming 'Equality'

Next stop... SINGER'S ETHICS

Assuming God created man in His own image, it wouldn't and doesn’t follow from that, that he made man equal. Obviously, however humans originated, they are diverse and individuated, in other words, not equal as a matter of fact.

The question is, how we get from that self-evident proposition of fact, to justifying an ethic in which man can and should be treated as equal.

Evolutionary theory, of itself, does not help because there's no reason why we couldn't all be descended from a common ancestor, and yet not equal. The siblings of common parents are individuated and factually unequal, and so a fortiori for farther-flung members of the human family.

No sir, what we need is an ethic that, starting from the factual *inequality* of man, justifies, and requires *equal rights for all*, based on
a) the nature of man as discoverable by reason
b) internally consistent logic
and that avoids the need to rely on theistic or evolutionary explanations of how man got here.

This has been done by Murray Rothbard in “The Ethics of Liberty”. He has done all the spadework for us. I commend his easy readability and common sense to your readership:
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/ethics.asp , particularly the Introduction.

It is enough to dismiss Singer outright as a dangerous creep to know that he thinks the United Nations - of all people - should be administering the ethical standards of the world!