• ksynwa@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    Very well written. I feel the people who use biological arguments as.justification for an unjust world order are usually the ones who have a skewed, one-sided at best and completely wrong at worst understanding of the specific phenomena they are referring to. It doesn’t help that because of the way academia works under a capitalist system, academics who parrot the ideas that benefit the ruling class are the ones who live a comfortable, secure lifestyle and mistake their success for correctness. An example for this is Nazis using eugenics as a post hoc justification for their atrocities.

    Evolution is as you mention also not very well understood by most. The description of “seeing what sticks” is very good because in most cases it is random mutations not produced by selection pressure but sustained as a result of it. Comparison of our current political economy with evolution is not really apt as well as you said. I can’t think of a species other than ours which exhibit the phenomenon of a small section of the population hoarding resources like a Tolkienesque dragon while the ecosystem is edging towards collapse. But as usual the ones who have a weak understanding of biological phenomenon are the ones making claims like this.

    I also have doubts about how “ruthless” competition is a driver of evolution. I see evolution as an attritional process. The implication is that if the competition becomes too ruthless too fast, there is the possibility that a helpful adaptation simply won’t occer and the result is the extinction of species in question.


    As an aside, write.as uses markdown format. So if you want the first line of the article to be a heading, you can write it as:

    # Is aggressiveness inherent to humans?
    

    The # means it’s a heading. Subheading can be denoted by ##, ### and so on. If you google “markdown guide”, you can see more examples of formatting options that are available, such as making text bold or italic.