Shape of Life - Phoney Peace
Response
to "Ultimate Shape" on PBS's "The Shape of Life"
and to
Geoffrey Millar on the Edge.com.
Political corectness may be the only thing making evolutionists
see all life as equal.
Geoffrey Hamilton
April 12, 2002
There is a realization arriving in those who purport to
follow evolutionary theory that the concept of progress is a problem. It may
just be just some fall-out from politically correct ideas or against eugenics,
which are all the irrelevant concerns of ethics, but there is, perhaps, also a new
understanding that the forms of life in themselves are not the result of 'progress'.
In the case of the PBS series "The Shape of Life", there may still be
progress - although all
species are all considered the most adapted to their environment (
as though all the species, win or lose, will get a trophy to take home at the
end of the pee wee tournament.
)
In the case of
Geoffrey Miller's interview in the edge.com,
Miller contends that species diversity is caused by sexual
selection, meaning that, as Darwin proposed, the strange dances and extra feathering
of nests performed by species are all just roundabout ways for individual
members of many species to prove they are the best adapted and so the most desirable
partners to pass on traits. Miller says these traits themselves take
on the sporty or artistic components because of the effect of sexual selection. As
these traits are arbitrary to everything but courtship they eventually cause
seemingly purposeless differentiation -- purposeless for survival.
These two "progressive" views work together to try
to excuse evolutionary theory of some of its flaws while trying to save the
phony war between creationism and evolution, which in turn is the prime crutch
of evolutionary theory.
GRH
