No, I didn’t claim Darwinism is sexy, only that Darwinism is sexual. And it’s more accurate to say evolutionary theory is more sexual than natural, since Darwinism is at least arguably an ideology only accidentally connected to a valid field of study.
Good evolutionary thinkers will let their readers know that natural selection, as people usually think of it, is not the dominant type of selection even in the original, pre-genetic, form of Darwinist thought. Darwin himself was a good naturalist if not so good an abstract thinker, and he knew the arguments for some form of inheritance mechanism in the body, from his own perspective and that of the breeders he dealt with. The so-called ‘modern synthesis’ was the effort to integrate modern knowledge of genetics with Darwin’s theory of evolution, which really wasn’t so well-formed. Again, Darwin was not a competent abstract thinker, as he himself realized, but he was a good naturalist and assembled arguments for some form of evolution.
But what was the main ‘driving force’ of that Darwinian theory of evolution? It wasn’t natural selection but rather sexual selection. Nature, in an analogical manner of speaking, doesn’t really care if you survive past the age of optimal reproductive activity. It is the ability to reproduce and not the ability to survive which is at issue. Moreover, in that same analogical manner of speaking, nature doesn’t care about the individual and evolution works with groups, with breeding populations.
At this point, a social and moral conservative of Catholic beliefs, and I am one of those, would be inclined to point towards the traditional Catholic family. That family had lots of children and a few would become priests or monks or nuns. Despite having some members who took on vows of celibacy, those families tended to grow over time, to produce many children from one generation to the next. That traditional family was certainly more successful in the most brutal Darwinist terms than the modern sorts of families advocated in liberalism. It is a sign of a deep, deep dishonesty on the part of so many modern evolutionary thinkers, such as Stephen Jay Gould, that they could advocate a death-culture liberalism while being profesional advocates of a theory which defines success in terms of successful reproduction.
In any case, I wish to expand the viewpoint a little. It is not just the traditional family in modern terms, the so-called nuclear family, that is central to this issue. The breeding population in which that nuclear family was embedded is the true subject of a rational, non-ideological theory of evolution explained in terms of the human race as an example. That true breeding population is not defined in the same way throughout history, not even throughout modern Christian history. One of the problems which has led to the short-term attractiveness and very short-term viability of our culture of death is the loss of any well-structured breeding population, extended family or religious community or tribe. Even the potentially jingoistic or bigoted understandings of breeding populations, no intermarriages between Blacks and Whites as one example, at least allowed the development of coherent social relationships of the sort which lead to children. However morally undesireable bigotry might be, it doesn’t seem much of an improvement, if any at all, to move towards a breakdown in all the relationships which define true breeding populations.
A nation or ethnic group or any other well-defined human population most certainly is not acting morally, by any rational standard, if they don’t produce children. Moreover, they are acting in an irrational manner by pure biological standards, assuming that at least some of the standards implied by evolutionary theory are part of the moral norms for the human race. And it is hard to understand how it could be otherwise.
I should make one additional point. In this context, I’m not arguing for a return to a traditional Christian moral viewpoint. I’m simply making an appeal for evolutionary thinkers to try to purge themselves of their ideological delusions. After all, any way of thought which produces biologically implausible views of human social life is clearly an ideology with delusionary components, even if that view also contains some great truths from empirical science.
Many evolutionary thinkers have adopted an overly harsh view of the origin of species while ignoring the reality of the evolution of morality itself; morality develops naturally as creatures develop into social groups. And those groups seem to have been organized for the purpose of successful reproduction. The bonds forming those groups seem to grow stronger for the human race with females are crippled by pregnancy and child-rearing and with children who mature so slowly and need to learn so many complex and non-instinctual skills. I wouldn’t claim that morality is a necessary result of biological evolution, but I am claiming it to be, by definition, a necessary component of social living whether we are speaking of rats or wolves or human beings. Many evolutionary thinkers hold both that harsh, and supposedly realistic view of life alongside a liberal, individualistic view of human life that ignores the need for viable breeding populations in human society.
It’s almost as if evolutionary thinking is being used for the purpose of helping the literate peoples of the human race to stop producing children.