{"id":55,"date":"2007-12-08T22:01:07","date_gmt":"2007-12-09T03:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/?p=55"},"modified":"2007-12-08T22:01:07","modified_gmt":"2007-12-09T03:01:07","slug":"evolution-and-political-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/2007\/12\/08\/evolution-and-political-theory\/","title":{"rendered":"Evolution and Political Theory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today my dad showed me <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/12\/09\/books\/review\/Friedman-t.html?_r=1&amp;ref=books&amp;oref=slogin\" title=\"NYTimes Book Review: A Farewell to Alms\" target=\"_blank\">a review of a book in the New York Times<\/a>.  The book is something about natural selection and how it supports\/underpins capitalism and those who were capitalist first.    This reminded me about an old objection to evolution: at the time Darwin wrote the &#8220;On the Origin of Species&#8221; the idea of capitalism was en vogue and therefore &#8216;struggle for survival&#8217; was taken to be just a metaphor for capitalist society. Darwin&#8217;s theory of evolution was supposedly reduced to capitalism with window dressing.  (ah how fortunes are reversed)<\/p>\n<p>Thankfully I remembered my old response to this objection: evolution works just as well under socialism.  The &#8216;metaphor&#8217; that you use to describe the process of evolution is independent of evolution itself: we can use both a capitalistic &#8216;survival of the fittest&#8217; and\/or a socialistic &#8216;survival of communal&#8217; to describe the process of evolution.  This means that instead of focusing upon the struggle for survival, we focus upon organisms ability to best work within their community\/environment.  The organisms that work best within their respective environment will be the fittest.<\/p>\n<p>Since evolution works with socialist metaphors, it is not dependent upon capitalism and I can&#8217;t see any reason for using evolution as support for capitalism, or vice versa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today my dad showed me a review of a book in the New York Times. The book is something about natural selection and how it supports\/underpins capitalism and those who were capitalist first. This reminded me about an old objection to evolution: at the time Darwin wrote the &#8220;On the Origin of Species&#8221; the idea of capitalism was en vogue and therefore &#8216;struggle for survival&#8217; was taken to be just a metaphor for capitalist society. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,23,28,34],"tags":[295,245,271,134],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-evolution","category-news","category-politics","category-science","tag-capitalism","tag-evolution","tag-politics","tag-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}