I get that methodological dualism was useful for social understanding, and that often human faith in Reason is itself unreasonable, but when did LRC go to the point of Darwin bashing?
Anybody?
See, on one extreme, you have Samuelsonian thinkers who study human social behaviour like hard sciences, who’d use mathematical calculation to conclude that a man is better off severing his eyes because he doesn’t need them when he sleeps. On the other extreme, you have rigid science haters who bash Darwin, which now unfortunately includes LRC.
Why can’t we be people who believe in the scientific method for physics and chemistry, and human casuitry for moral life and philosophy? It’s a contradiction we all can happily accept, no?
Sorry, LRC, but when it comes to evolution, I think Dawkins > Sobran.
Ironically enough, evolution – specifically, human evolution – is one of the greatest tools in understanding how the human “state of nature” is decidedly un-Hobbesian.
To put it simply, animals have brains, but man also has a mind, a very distinct kind of soul. Man can calculate, imagine, moralize, form abstract concepts, and perform many other mental operations of which no animal is capable. Animals have sensation and memory – the power of association – and not much else. They may be very beautiful, but they lack the sense of beauty.
Like its contemporary fallacy, Marxism, Darwinism had a mighty impact on history, except that Marxism has all but expired and its Darwinist twin is still going strong. The Marxists made the fatal error of predicting events in the (historically) short term; whereas most of Darwin’s avatars wisely confine themselves to making prophecies over such long periods as to be virtually unfalsifiable.
Complete bullshit. Evolutionary theory makes possible predictions such as where you would find a particular transitional fossil and how far down you should dig.
Like mentioned previously, Darwinian natural selection is not only true, but a truth that builds a firmer foundation for libertarianism: humans are adaptively cooperative and markets exhibit an analogous selection process.
This anti-science sentiment is not reserved for Darwinism; if you haven’t noticed before, LRC houses some of the wackiest AIDS-HIV denialists I’ve ever seen.
Everybody is human. I guess every person has his breaking point where the areas of the brain responsible for logical deductive thinking is simply too overwhelmed by emotions.
I was actually gonna make a thread on LRC’s latest podcast with Dr. Tim Ball, but I couldn’t post from my phone or iPod.
Ball started to talk about Richard Dawkins and Charles Darwin early on in the podcast, and he said Darwin was an Atheist! I continued to listen for about five minutes until Lew and Ball started talking about the politics of Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and ended up turning it off shortly after.
I guess every person has his breaking point where the areas of the brain responsible for logical deductive thinking is simply too overwhelmed by emotions.
Hitchens is practically a neocon now and Dawkins is an ultra-liberal, but I don’t see how atheism is a culprit of either of those. I haven’t listened to the podcast, but I assume that’s where it leads into: “Man tries to replace Gawd with the State!” As if religious fundies don’t have an affinity for the State to start with. It seems to me that most former conservatives who become disenchanted with faith tend to become libertarian than liberal.
I first encountered this ignorance via a Fred Reed article where he offhandedly mentioned Darwin and I was just thinking, “uhh…Okay, how is this relevant to the piece?” After a wiki search and a visit to his Web site, his anti-evolution stance is very populist and typical of what you’d hear from a Creationist (although I believe he isn’t a creationist). He was saying how “evolutionist’s” theory about female eye color and hair color was fallacious because most people want a at-least decent looking women with some common ground. Um, that’s not the point; the point is how evolution works on a subconscious and mass scale. As in how humans lose body hair, it was evolutionarily advantageous to have fewer hair since the advent of clothes took care of what hair was supposed to solve, minus the pestilence. Simple explanations like this are lost on ultra-religious types like Rockwell.
The point is that evolutionary hypothesizing can kind of work like praxeology can: We know evolution is fact (99.9% sure anyway, gotta accomodate the problem of induction people ). Since we have this bit of starting information, we can make hypotheses about why certain traits in organisms came about, since we have the “end-result” of evolution (at least in its current state).
The phony question centers around, “who is in control: God or the State?” The answer, for me, is neither; I would prefer to be in control, thank you. Swapping one dictator for another who puts you in an eternal frying pan that would put Adolf Hitler to shame if you don’t grovel and tell him how great he is is not something I would want to be a part of. The difference being Christians and other religious folk think you deserve to be annihilated by God because you deserve it, without being able to prove this claim. It is assumed from the get-go that God is all-good when, if Goodness is a part of God and not separate from him, there is no way to evaluate this claim and you’re basically taking God’s word for it that we deserve to be eternally tortured. He could be an evil mastermind and there would be no way to tell the difference, if the concept of Hell disagrees with your intuitions.
/rant of my opinion of how religious libertarians are hypocritical in their promotion of liberty.
Yeah, I’ve noticed this before, too. Fortunately, actual Austrians don’t seem to have this hang-up (Hoppe and Mises accept evolutionary theory, not sure about Rothbard, Walter Block has used evolutionary reasoning, etc.) On LRC, it doesn’t bother me too much because LRC is kind of a smorgasbord. But I’ve seen a few Mises dailies that had this anti-evolution bent to them some time back and that bothers me quite a bit. If LvMI is supposed to be the scholarly weapon of classical liberalism in the modern world, then it had better be scholarly. While considering alternatives to evolutionary theory is not necessarily anti-scholarly, because of the motivated nature of most such discussion, it happens that it usually is. And a scholarly association such as LvMI built around the Austrian tradition of social science is not the proper forum to raise questions about biology. If you want to raise alternatives to Common Descent because you think it doesn’t work with your social theories, you need to work with philosophers of science and the leading figures of biology to air out your concerns, not “preach to a choir” in Auburn, AL. If it sounds like I’m being harsh, it’s only because I would like to see LvMI succeed in its mission and it can’t do that through shoddy scholarship or through parroting political or religious stances dressed up in the language of an alternative social scientific method.
And anti-vaccine lobbyists. And David Koresh sympathisers. And 9/11 truthers.
Okay, I love LRC for the great articles to which it links. But Lew Rockwell loves fringe characters and loves bringing their views on board. Why do we think Pete Boettke distanced himself from those who used to be his good friends, colleagues, and intellectual allies?
I think some brakes need to be put. Even I got too angry about the whole global warming thing, with some friends telling me it is better I just go by scientific consensus. But even there, I respected work of scientists on one level. What I did oppose was sweeping political legislations that would somehow solve the problem. Where science sells uncertainty, politics sells certainty. I disliked the politics of global warming far more than the science of it. So did many scientists, including those involved in climate research that indicated global warming. Annie Leonard, environmentalist, said cap-and-trade was a scam.
Same for Ron Paul. He didn’t mind endorsing the writer of Creature of Jekyll Island, a man of dubious character. The problem with Rockwell and Paul is that they are “movementarian”, and like making allies in the movement, down to Gerald Celente and Paul Craig Roberts. Conservatives and American Republicans already made that mistake and the result was the rise of neoconservatives. And a huge damage to conservative credibility forever. The New Left also made that mistake, even allying with Black Panther style characters, some of whom treated white leftists very badly.
A great man who destroyed whatever was left of his journalistic and literary career by going to Mark Weber’s Institute for Historical Review. Joe Sobran was a brilliant man who showed dubious judgment.
Those who actually read this piece will know that Sobran was no anti-Semite or Holocaust denier. But who would actually read it? Once Sobran did this, Patrick Buchanan’s financially strained magazine, TAC, refused to run Sobran’s pieces. Sobran is correct here when he says that he is no more a leftist for having been a friend with leftists, but it’s never the same when you join with a controversial man like Weber, who is “threatened with death”, as it says.
Not to derail this thread or anything, but are you claiming that the work of e.g. Peter Duesberg is without any scientific merit whatsoever?
I see, so any and all “fringe” opinions (as determined by “social consensus”) should not be discussed – indeed, should be actively suppressed.
Is that really what you’re saying?
The notion of “consensus science” is a problem when the emphasis is placed on “consensus” instead of “science”. When that happens, the standard yardsticks of science (valid reasoning and evidence) can go out the window when people agree on something for whatever reason. It turns science into something akin to religious dogma. I, for one, will not stand for it.
All testable hypotheses, no matter how heterodox, have scientific merit. Of course, endorsing disproven hypotheses even while thousands die is inexcusable. Dissent can be productive, hence one should always apply skepticism to one’s own views, as well; the HIV-AIDS denialists have shirked this scientific responsibility.
Since we libertarians (and especially we anarcho-capitalists) harbor radically nonconformist beliefs, I’m not sure we’re the audience that would suppress dissent; but, fairly, if articles from David Icke or other world-is-run-by-reptiles conspiracy theorists appeared on LRC, then I think we would be right to question the judgment of its editors. Furthermore, if LRC hosted articles by promiment Darwinists (e.g., evolutionary psychologists), then I think we would all be much more tolerant of the psuedoscientific fringers. Fundamentally, I believe the problem to be that such fallacious arguments (e.g., humans have “minds” thus we are distinct from the animal world) throws large doubt on what else LRC hosts, so we don’t want libertarianism to be weakened by ties to poor philosophy.
P.S. LvMI seems to have a large amount of Christian (particularly Catholic) believers, so don’t expect them to care about our scientific criticisms. (And that’s not necessarily a problem–I was raised Catholic and plan to raise my own children in that same tradition.)
Some chimps can be perform more complicated calculations and can communicate more effectively than severely mentally-retarded humans; I wonder if these humans lack “soul,” according to Sobran?
With the LRC’s obvious cultural biases aside, I don’t see it as “anti-darwinist” as much as I see it as a “machine gun” approach to “anti-statism”. If government funded schools are adamant about evolution vs private sectors that are not than it becomes an issue to LRC. If the government is using tax money in the education system to say lizard men don’t run the NWO, LRC would probably publish articles as to how lizardmen run the NWO, etc.
I think concerning oneself with “darwinism” on LRC is probably missing the “gist” of things. People love to get all puffed up every time the issue is sprung it seems, which is kind of amusing I guess to see “secular humanists”(for lack of a better term) get all bent out of shape at the drop of a hat.
