What observations did Darwin misread?
Killing a member of another species is not conflict? Then what is?
It’s much, much more prevalent than you claim.
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Did God create creatures who live in constant conflict with each other? Do we live in constant conflict with other people? The answer is No. We live in a cosmos, not a chaos! And nothing Richard Dawkins can say or do will change that.
One time on BioLogos I criticized Dawkins’ conflict view of nature, when someone out of the blue began to attack me. After he failed to intimidate me, told him that 1) One cannot really prove some great generality is true in science,2) The evidence indicates to me that nature is not based on conflict, so it is good.
His response was first positive. He agreed that science could not prove nature is evil, but disagreed with my evaluation of the evidence. He said that Dawkins says that nature is based on conflict and therefore his opinion was that nature is evil. Dawkins is a scientist, so his opinion is more authorative than a layman, Indeed I had no standing as a non-scientist, so I was wrong.
If nature is based on conflict, if it is destructive and evil, the best attitude toward it is fear, not awe, but nature is good. Usually a new adaptation does not cause others to die out, but results in them being absorbed over time. make
Wolves can only eat meat. In order to survive, they must kill individuals from other species. How is this not conflict?
Dawkins is an expert on the science within his field. That doesn’t make him an expert on moral philosophy.
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T_Aquaticus, if nothing else, your precise, cogent explanation here has been helpful to me.
Any lay person following your replies would have a better understanding. Thanks for taking all the time and putting in so much effort,
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I live in rural Michigan. A lot of wildlife traverses or hangs out on my property and on our paved, 55mph road. Admittedly, we are not deeply rural; otherwise I would see more. I’m 30 minutes from our second-largest university.
I find dismembered critters frequently. I hear more, though. In warm weather, when we leave the windows open. I hear cayotes attacking other animals; the whimpering is pretty awful. I’ve seen a jumping spider take down a grasshopper 10 times its size, and then start to eat it after a while. I’ve stepped or sat too close to ants’ hills and been part of their supper. I’ve heard two racoons in a tree tearing each other apart; found them from the noise, and then from seeing the branch of the tree on a still evening like it was caught in a storm. I see deer, racoons, possums and rabbits regularly dead by the side of the road, because they and a car were attempting to use the same point in time and space at the same time. I occassionally find parts of rabbits in the far back of the property, when I walk it in the winter — once the head with guts still attached; not sure where the rest went. But the hawk who had hunted the rabbit was distraught and angry on my porch rail, because a small murder of crows stole her prey and ate it. The song birds at my feeders attack each other constantly in order to get to the food. The smaller birds just let the bigger ones have the feeder and stick to digging seeds out of the snow and dirt under the feeer. When I had a humming bird feeder, I learned that they cheep, and also that they attack one another with their needle beaks. I quit putting out the feeder, though, because it drew the yellow jackets, who drove off the humming birds. Until the summer when we had Edward the bat living behind the living room window shutter. It took a long time to figure out why we had no yellow jackets under our porch floor that year, until I noticed the guano dripping down the siding. Living where rabies is rampant, because animals attack each other and pass it along, we drove Edward off, sorely missing his extermination services, which fed him very well. Oh, and the summer that the MENSA-intellect grey tree frog stuck itself every evening to our front window, when we had the lamp on, eating all the bugs it could gorge itself on which were attracted to the lamp light.
I’m not sure what terms are the right ones. The animals seem to be in competition for relatively scare resources of food and space. Some of them are only able to exist on the flesh of other animals.
This appears as conflict over resources to me. But certainly not evil. Are animals capable of evil, able to make moral decisions? In the OT we even read observations of the way God provides food for carnevours:
Psalm 104
20 You bring darkness, it becomes night,
and all the beasts of the forest prowl.
21 The lions roar for their prey
and seek their food from God.
22 The sun rises, and they steal away;
they return and lie down in their dens.
and
27 All creatures look to you
to give them their food at the proper time.
28 When you give it to them,
they gather it up;
when you open your hand,
they are satisfied with good things.
The psalmist describes animal predation as seeking food from God. He doesn’t sanitize the greusomness of what the lions and other animals are doing; this is from God. Additionally, the psalmist does not apply a moral judgement to the animals’ behavior. They are simply taking from the food (other animals) that God has provided for them.
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This was the basic concept that Darwin had as his starting point. It was similar to Malthus’ conclusion in economics that there wasn’t enough money for everyone, so there would be winners and losers.
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I appreciate your reply. I do agree that nature itself is “good,” though I’ll explain why I use a slightly different word for it. When an animal kills another animal because it needs to eat, I would not call this “evil.” It does it out of necessity.
However when a human kills another human out of anger and not self defense, I call this “evil.” It is not out of necessity, rather I believe we as humans know better. We have the capacity for knowledge of good and evil, and thus are held accountable for it. I believe that “knowledge of good and evil” include knowledge of the effects of our choices and the ability to use reason to make a decision. Only an agent with the capacity for such knowledge will be held accountable and can willingly make a “good” or “evil” choice.
Since something like a natural disaster does not have a mind and the capacity to understand it’s effects (nor can control what it does), I personally don’t use the word “evil” to describe it.
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Wolves are indeed carnivores, but tbat is at our end of the evolution process. The real question is, Why are there carnivores? The reason seems to be that God is the Original Ecologist, Who recycles and reuses resources. Also, it seems that humans could not be humans if we did not eat meat and since part of the objective purpose of evolution was to create humans, this is important.
There are many problems with Survival of the Fittest as Darwin and you understand it, but the biggest one is that the conflict between predator and prey has little to do with evolution. If the wolves kill all the deer, if they win the struggle, how does it benefit them? On the contrary it harms them. If the deer escape being eaten, they lose because of overgrazing. Both sides gain through the Balance of Nature…
Of course, the relationships between predators and prey play a role in evolution as do all relationships, but history shows that climate change, diseases, migration/invasion, and changes in topology are more important.
Humans kill in order to eat, and yet we are not in conflict with farm animals and plants. This is how nature works together to provide harmony within the Creation.
No it isn’t. The question is how is one species killing and eating another species not conflict?
That is conflict, by every definition. You claim there is no conflict in nature, but it is all over the place.
That’s not what winning the struggle is. Winning the struggle is reproducing. You don’t even understand what the term means.
The link above is to the chapter entitled “Struggle for Existence” from Origin of Species. Have you ever read it? I highly doubt it, otherwise you wouldn’t be so wrong about what Darwin’s actual position is.
Wolves are going to eat some of the deer. Which deer get eaten will partially be determined by their heritable characteristics. The heritable characteristics that allow deer to better escape from wolves will be passed on at a higher rate. That is how the struggle for existence causes adaptation. You would know this if you studied the theory at all.
That is also a struggle for existence.
How are we not in confict?
How do you measure harmony?
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This is simply contrary to fact. Countries like Mexico and India have large vegetarian segments of their human population. Humans are adapted to eat from a wide variety of food sources, which allows us to survive where some food sources are rare and others less so. It also allows us to take in a wider variety of types of nutrients.
Our human-ness is not brought into us by what we eat.
Again, this just doesn’t line up with reality. Humans kill in order to:
- reduce competition for space and resources (war)
- for sport
- for spite or hate
- for revenge
- for business
- by accident
- in derangement
- out of despair
- to protect food crops
- for trophies
to name a few.
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The issue you are referring to is relationship between the One and the Many. This is a basic philosophical question, which has yet to be resolved, but most people think that reality is One rather than Many. You and Darwin say that Reality is not basically One, but it is Many.
If Reality is basically Many, then scientific thinking does not apply to it, because science assumes that Reality is basically One and has a rational order.
The question of evolution is evolution. How does it work? Survival of the Fittest as conflict between species has little explanatory power. Evolution takes place when climate and other ecological factors change, and plants and animals have to adapt to a new environment. Darwin probably was not aware of this, but we are.
The question of the One and the Many is an important one that needs to be understood and resolved. I have published some essays on academia.edu on this topic and would be glad to discuss it with you.
No. It is the relationship between predator and prey. How is that not conflict?
Neither of us say anything of the like.
How so?
That’s Survival of the Fittest and the Struggle for Existence!!
Let’s look at these rock pocket mice:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0431157100
Why is it that they only found the black mice in areas that had black rocks from local volcanic eruptions? Why do the color of the mice correlate with the color of the environment they live in even though there is free interbreeding between the populations?
The answer is simple: camouflage from predators.
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The reason is because evolution is based on adaptation to the environment, in this case the color of the rock, not some hypothetical struggle for existence. The mice have no control over the color of the rock or the color of their fur, but predators “weed out” the different colored mice, leaving the same colored mice to flourish.
Ecology- Survival of the better adapted, that is those who work with the laws of nature, not who struggle against nature.
Darwin is using his logic to insist that life is a life and death struggle
for existence, when it is not. Life is a gift which can be used for evil or for good. Even most creatures are social, not individualistic entities.
I am sorry, but there is little evidence that the conflict theory of history taught by capitalism, Marxism, survival of the fittest, and MAGA
works.
Then it is an adaptation to predation.
If a species is being preyed on then they are struggling against nature.
Is an owl being social when it kills and eats a mouse? Does every mouse that is born live to have offspring of its own? Do all species multiply exponentially until they fill the entire universe?
The proof of this is in our dentition. I don’t eat meat and I’m surprised to learn that I’m not human.
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I guess I am sort of like alternating current. Sometimes postively human, sometimes negatively not so.
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The issue of humans who aren’t human has been studied before:
(Okay, that’s not the same thing at all, but I happened to be listening to it today.)
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Thanks, glipsnort! I love it, when people share music they like. That’s three gift songs I got today. I didn’t know any of the singers.
Yeah. I like the question Prine forces on us. Am I the kind of person who isn’t human? What makes a human a human, (besides, or course, eating meat)?
FYI guys, you will never, ever, ever, ever get through. Not gonna happen. So just keep that in mind. This has been going on for YEARS.
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Prine is (or was, rather, thanks to covid) one of the best American songwriters and a great teacher on what being a human is all about.
(Yes, this is off-topic, but as @beaglelady says, the other discussion isn’t going to go anywhere.)
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