Saturday, November 5, 2011

Concept for a Reactionary Cartoon: The Last Judgment of Darwin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Judgment_(Michelangelo)

Take the original work, place the standard image for Darwin in the Throne of Judgment.
On Darwin's right, place representative examples of groups with high total fertility---Mormons, Amish, traditionalist Catholics, partriarchal extreme natalist Protestants and the like

On Darwin's left, place various examples of the converse--SWPL's with single or no children, reform Jews, and various winners of Darwin awards.  Those who infamously lobby their own ethnicity to control its fertility while leaving other groups alone would figure prominently among the wicked.  Those who worked against the relative fertility of OTHER groups and NOT their own would instead be on the right.

And above all, the figure of Darwin:  Depart from me ye barren, ye never knew me.

Feel free to steal this concept if you like it.  I've also been contemplating a 'Darwin's Inferno'.  This of course is all satirizing the replacement of God with Darwin and the irony that Darwin, like the several versions of Baal in the Old Testament, loathes his followers far more than his nominal opponents.



8 comments:

Anonymous said...

No one knows the values of his genes more than the willfully childless. And I am desperately waiting for any Darwinist to explain the evolutionary benefit of "gay"

Jehu said...

Homosexuals are hard to explain in a Darwinist frame, especially if one assumes humans are a pretty old species. The two least bad explanations I've seen from that frame are
a) they have sisters that have outsized fertility levels--this explanation being that homosexuality (for men) is the result of genes making children of both sexes more feminine. I don't think that the evidence supports this theory that well though
b) the contagion theory---homosexuality isn't genetic, but is the result of a virus or similar agent. Again, I don't think that the evidence for this is very strong either.
What we do know:
Homosexuals have much lower TFR than heterosexuals, especially uncloseted homosexuals and
The tendencies do seem to run in families but not be deterministic (for instance, if you know one identical twin is gay, the probability that the other is too is high but nowhere near 100%). Lots of other tendencies, like alchoholism work this way too.

So on the face of it, to explain homosexuality in a Darwinist frame one would need some damned strong evidence because the fertility reduction is so damned large. Even a TFR difference of .1 or so will become fixed in a population in a few hundreds of years, and even the youngest of young earth creationists think we've been around longer than that, and they DO believe in animal husbandry (what they call natural and artificial selection).

Erik said...

Contagion theory II - homosexuality is microchimerism/intersex in whatever region governs attraction/mother's womb putting out a hormone balance targeted at the wrong sex/etc.

No virus or external agent required, only construction errors.

Tim said...

Variation is vital to evolution. Most variations are not adaptive. Q.E.D.

Jehu said...

Tim,
We'd expect highly nonadaptive variations to be extinguished fairly fast in the population. With the tendency towards homosexuality thus far we haven't. That requires explanation.

Anonymous said...

There is a book called "Sperm Wars" that theorizes about how bisexuality promotes human reproduction and thus is not a dead-end gene. This book is speculative.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sperm-Wars-Robin-Baker/dp/0330390775

Jehu said...

Postgygaxian,
Anyone happen to know the TFR of bisexuals--presumably broken down into male and female?

Anonymous said...

@Jehu:
It would be great if someone could manage to collect that information, but I think it would be hard to do.

Most bisexuals who manage to reproduce in stable families will try to avoid admitting that they are bisexual.

Most bisexuals outside of stable families will probably not answer questions about their children - they may not know how many children they have!

Good questions are sometimes tough to research.