Getting to be Thursday. Dragging a little at this point. Youngest is in his own apartment, Eldest has a new electric bicycle. Seems as though my immediate world contains no crisis. Sounds like a win to me
SCIENCE ACCORDING TO A SPENCER
Darwin: "This preservation, during the battle for life, of varieties which possess any advantage in structure, constitution, or instinct, I have called Natural Selection."
A scientist remains within the realm of science by commenting on the data itself, or by explaining what the data means using a tautology. So Darwin did fine, if the presupposition of advantage is accepted.
If survival in the future is forced by human imagination to be dependent on having an advantage of some sort, then advantage must be defined in abstraction as whatever it is that supports survival at that point in the future. Science is not allowed to guess about the future.
On the other hand, a douchebag like Herbert Spencer was allowed to guess that a variety of human represented by himself, would be the fittest variety for all time. England today shows how correct Spencer was, and the body count of dead and enslaved indigenous humans is proof that he deserves to be considered a douchebag of note.
Spencer wrote and spoke from two false presuppositions that he did not mention – that Nature provides unlimited resources, and that advantage (what is not eliminated) does not change.
As smart as humans are, it is surprising that they have never been capable of imagining that mankind is missing more than the final one or two critical discoveries. This is why people today think that Spencer was undoubtedly wrong, but a new version of Spencer is undoubtedly correct.
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