07-07-2021, 01:29 PM
(07-06-2021, 10:39 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: "This means that the organism shapes the environment as the environment shapes the organism." Sounds like our generations and turning theory. Good for Lewontin. "Lewontin argued that while traditional Darwinism has portrayed the organism as a passive recipient of environmental influences, a correct understanding should emphasize the organism as an active constructor of its own environment"
Also... Lewontin debunked the elitist theories behind eugenics and social Darwinism.
It is often believed that science can operate in a political vacuum, but history has shown this tragically wrong. Ideally the politicians leave science alone except to provide generous funding with few strings attached other than those that good science always has at disposal. The Hard Right may act as if eugenics and social Darwinism are the optimal ways of organizing economic and political life... but we are seeing that assumption implode.
Prime examples of living things shaping their environments include the Gaia hypothesis in which living things create a safe haven for Life itself. One astronomic calculation has shown that the Earth would go rapidly into Venus-like conditions, or even more severe, were it not for plants taking in carbon dioxide and using solar energy in breaking up water molecules in photosynthesis. (More severe? Water vapor is an even-stronger greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide). Beavers do their own sort of management of water basins, and elephants are the difference between jungles and savannas. (Savannas are actually more productive of animal life than are rainforests). During the ice age, mammoths turned what might have been marginal forest without them into a rich biome for the megafauna that flourished in a steppe-tundra.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.