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to get past the moderator, Our culture of wasting food will one day leave us hungry
by Alex Renton, 08/02/09
An interesting and worrying article, adding to the sense of doom
that is looming ever larger . . .
Could there be a common cause for this plethora of mounting
existential problems that we are some how failing to recognise . .
. . ?
I believe there is, and that the reason we fail to recognise it is
the taboo against applying Darwin's BIG idea, not to rationalising
and justifying the political and socioeconomic status quo (as
earlier social Darwinists tended to do), but to <i>understanding</i>
it.
Just as many Christians were once loath (as some still are) to
accept Darwin's ideas, because they undermined the authority of
sacred scripture and the belief system based on it, so too today
political and social scientists (along with the political and
business elites who self-interestedly believe in them) are loath
to accept (or even continence) the relevance of Darwin's ideas for
understanding their own society and civilisation, because it would
undermine the theories (belief system) on which the current
socioeconomic status quo is based, along with their own authority.
The trouble that if we fail (or refuse) to understand our society
and civilisation from an evolutionary, i.e. Darwinian,
perspective, we cannot understand it at all, anymore than
Ptolemaic astronomers were able to understand the universe. And if
we don't understand it, we cannot solve the existential problems
now coming to a head. Instead, it will be left to a ruthless
Mother Nature to solve them for (or rather, against) us.
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