Acartia_Bogart
Posts: 2927
Joined: Sep. 2014
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| Quote (Occam's Aftershave @ Dec. 17 2019,10:02) | | Quote (clamboy @ Dec. 17 2019,01:19) | | Quote (Joe G @ Dec. 16 2019,19:50) | Sexuality has brought joy to the world, to the world of the wild beasts, and to the world of flowers, but it has brought an end to evolution. In the lineages of living beings, whenever absent-minded Venus has taken the upper hand, forms have forgotten to make progress. It is only the husbandman that has improved strains, and he has done so by bullying, enslaving, and segregating. All these methods, of course, have made for sad, alienated animals, but they have not resulted in new species. Left to themselves, domesticated breeds would either die out or revert to the wild state—scarcely a commendable model for nature’s progress.
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Natural Selection, which indeed occurs in nature (as Bishop Wilberforce, too, was perfectly aware), mainly has the effect of maintaining equilibrium and stability. It eliminates all those that dare depart from the type—the eccentrics and the adventurers and the marginal sort. It is ever adjusting populations, but it does so in each case by bringing them back to the norm. We read in the textbooks that, when environmental conditions change, the selection process may produce a shift in a population’s mean values, by a process known as adaptation. If the climate turns very cold, the cold-adapted beings are favored relative to others.; if it becomes windy, the wind blows away those that are most exposed; if an illness breaks out, those in questionable health will be lost. But all these artful guiles serve their purpose only until the clouds blow away. The species, in fact, is an organic entity, a typical form, which may deviate only to return to the furrow of its destiny; it may wander from the band only to find its proper place by returning to the gang.
Everything that disassembles, upsets proportions or becomes distorted in any way is sooner or later brought back to the type. There has been a tendency to confuse fleeting adjustments with grand destinies, minor shrewdness with signs of the times.
It is true that species may lose something on the way—the mole its eyes, say, and the succulent plant its leaves, never to recover them again. But here we are dealing with unhappy, mutilated species, at the margins of their area of distribution—the extreme and the specialized. These are species with no future; they are not pioneers, but prisoners in nature’s penitentiary.
Only magic gets you beyond that. |
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Right, you posted those same quotes on your blog on "TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 2012", without a link to the original texts, or a link to where one could find and read the original texts. Your post received 0 comments.
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Extracting quotes to make a point is understandable, expected, and not inappropriate, but using the same quotes without attribution, and after so many years, tends to weaken that point, whatever it might have been in the first place.
ETA: Joe's post from 2012 is here. |
The quotes are from Giuseppe Sermonti’s book Why is a Fly Not a Horse?. Joke has been pimping the work since at least 2006.
You can read the NCSE's review of this junk science here
Review: Why is a Fly not a Horse? |
Makes me want to go right out and buy that book. I will put it on my science reading list right after <i>Chariots of the Gods</i> and before <i>Pyramid Power</i>.
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