It might bear mentioning that the subject of eugenics, which so inspired the Third Reich, was borrowed by them from early nineteenth century America. A sad perversion of Darwinism.

Paul's argument is a powerful one that raises an important point about the simplistic prescriptive tautologies offered by GfS and ilk. Systems which are complex--and we know of none more complex than human evolution--turn at many different points of inflection in response to a wide range of sometimes disproportionately small initial stimuli. Paul has sketched briefly how, for example, the choice of homosexuality might strengthen the path of human evolution by (a) creating a fecund field of ideation for the next generation which might otherwise not have occurred and (b) subtracting elements from the first-generation gene pool which changes the composite picture of that gene pool and those of the second and onward iterations in unpredictable ways.

LEaping to two-valued conclusions may work well for two-valued problem such as "eat or be eaten", but the impulse to do so is ancient and undiscriminating, and has almost no value in addressing complex problems like "optimizing the mating dynamics of the dominant species on a planet".

This is even more the case when adjudications of "goodness and badness" are added into the equation which makes it a polynomial of a highly complex order indeed. So complex that it seems to me that anyone who thinks they have a complete grasp of it is deluded or pretending, one or the other.


A