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Beyond the Last Week: Further Evolutions?
I'm opening this last forum as a place for post-class commentary; come back to it in the weeks and months ahead, as you come across extensions and revisions of the story of evolution and the evolution of stories, and tell us about them. I found the first one (no surprise) in this morning's NYTimes: "A Split Emerges as Conservatives discuss Darwin." It looks as though, in their search for a wider view, Mariel, Katherine, Anne and Megan might have aimed their questions and camera at the 10 Republican Presidential candidates, who were asked during their first debate this week whether they believed in evolution. Three didn't. But many other conservatives see Darwinism as providing support for bedrock conservative ideas (traditional gender roles, free-market capitalism, governmental checks and balances...). "Political interpretations of Darwinism have been quite pliable"; it's been used by Herbert Spenser to argue for social darwinism, by Francis Galton in support of his "science" of eugenics, by Pyotr Kropotkin to argue for anarchism, by Karl Marx as a basis for the historical class struggle, by Woodrow Wilson as a model for living political constitutions, by Peter Singer to argue for the fundamental similarities between humans and nonhuman animals...