Darwinism Animalizes Human Values
What could be more noble than striving for peace and avoiding conflict? Well, now the Darwinians say that peacemaking evolved by natural selection, too.
Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” To scientific materialists, there are no heavens, and Jesus was just a teacher at a certain time and place. And yet something within us knows that peace is better than conflict. How do they explain it with their only tool, Darwinian evolution?
In “The Evolution of Conflict Resolution” (Phys.org), evolutionists at Northeastern University admit that animals don’t resolve conflicts the way humans do. But since animals evolved (in their thinking) to develop territoriality, battle and hierarchy, human peacemaking must have evolved differently. But it evolved nonetheless. Having come up with a model of “host-guest behavior,” the Darwinians explain human peacemaking:
“This is especially interesting in the context of human biological behavior because in the animal kingdom, territoriality or ownership norms are ubiquitous.”
And so, how and why did the host-guest norm evolve into the more socially accepted conflict resolution in human beings, and how might that affect the future? The research suggests that this is due to the dynamic nature of the social network which allows actors to choose their interaction partners. This entails that insofar ownership and territoriality are probably widespread due to the intrinsic importance of holding resources or the value of owning a territory rather than as a convention for avoiding conflict. Riedl and his fellow researchers are hard at work to unveil additional details about the evolutionary dynamics of when or where certain conventions may arise.
In recent days, we are witnessing major peacemaking efforts around the world. Jared Kushner spoke today in Jerusalem about peacemaking efforts between Israel and the Palestinians (YouTube), surrounded by eminent leaders who applauded these values. President Trump is working to avoid nuclear conflict by meeting next month with the North Korean communist dictator. To the Darwinists, these are simply biological networks that have reached a temporary equilibrium. Peacemaking efforts are mere conventions that work out for a time, but are dynamic measures of what organisms prefer under evolving circumstances. Ultimately, they have no meaning or content. They are just natural manifestations of the Stuff Happens Law (natural selection).
Of course, Darwinians of yesteryear thought that conflict was the means of evolutionary progress. Survival of the fittest required the strong to dominate the weak. We all know where that led. In today’s kinder, gentler Darwinism, cooperation is valued. This shows that evolutionary theory itself evolves. Either way, human behaviors have no ultimate meaning. Neither does reasoning about evolutionary theory. If today’s cooperative Darwinism evolves into something vastly different, such as deeper conflict or extinction, so be it.
To any Darwinians reading this who object to our characterization of natural selection as the “Stuff Happens Law,” listen to population geneticist Andrew Jones on ID the Future 25 April 2018. He affirms that many of today’s Darwinians discount the role of natural selection, favoring genetic drift instead. And what is genetic drift? Random chance! Stuff happens.