Darwin, Charles Robert (1809–82)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Bowler
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Social Darwinism ◽  
Radical Mechanism ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Natural Processes ◽  
Major Threat ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
Living Things ◽  
The Universe

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) popularized the theory that all living things have evolved by natural processes from preexisting forms. This displaced the traditional belief that species were designed by a wise and benevolent God. Darwin showed how many biological phenomena could be explained on the assumption that related species are descended from a common ancestor. Furthermore, he proposed a radical mechanism to explain how the transformations came about, namely, natural selection. This harsh and apparently purposeless mechanism was seen as a major threat to the claim that the universe has a transcendent goal. Because Darwin openly extended his evolutionism to include the human race, it was necessary to re-examine the foundations of psychology, ethics and social theory. Moral values might be merely the rationalization of instinctive behaviour patterns. Since the process which produced these patterns was driven by struggle, it could be argued that society must inevitably reflect the harshness of nature (‘social Darwinism’). Darwin’s book has been seen as the trigger for a ’scientific revolution’. It took many decades for both science and Western culture to assimilate the more radical aspects of Darwin’s theory. But since the mid-twentieth century Darwin’s selection mechanism has become the basis for a highly successful theory of evolution, the human consequences of which are still being debated.

Darwin, Charles Robert (1809–82)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Bowler
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Social Darwinism ◽  
Radical Mechanism ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Natural Processes ◽  
Major Threat ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
Living Things ◽  
The Universe

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) popularized the theory that all living things have evolved by natural processes from pre-existing forms. This displaced the traditional belief that species were designed by a wise and benevolent God. Darwin showed how many biological phenomena could be explained on the assumption that related species are descended from a common ancestor. Furthermore, he proposed a radical mechanism to explain how the transformations came about, namely, natural selection. This harsh and apparently purposeless mechanism was seen as a major threat to the claim that the universe has a transcendent goal. Because Darwin openly extended his evolutionism to include the human race, it was necessary to re-examine the foundations of psychology, ethics and social theory. Moral values might be merely the rationalization of instinctive behaviour patterns. Since the process which produced these patterns was driven by struggle, it could be argued that society must inevitably reflect the harshness of nature (’social Darwinism’). Darwin’s book has been seen as the trigger for a ’scientific revolution’. It took many decades for both science and Western culture to assimilate the more radical aspects of Darwin’s theory. But since the mid-twentieth century Darwin’s selection mechanism has become the basis for a highly successful theory of evolution, the human consequences of which are still being debated.

Imaginings

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Kelly James Clark
Keyword(s):  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Intellectual Humility ◽  
First Order ◽  
Natural Processes ◽  
Empirically Supported ◽  
Group Violence ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe

In Branden Thornhill-Miller and Peter Millican’s challenging and provocative essay, we hear a considerably longer, more scholarly and less melodic rendition of John Lennon’s catchy tune—without religion, or at least without first-order supernaturalisms (the kinds of religion we find in the world), there’d be significantly less intra-group violence. First-order supernaturalist beliefs, as defined by Thornhill-Miller and Peter Millican (hereafter M&M), are “beliefs that claim unique authority for some particular religious tradition in preference to all others” (3). According to M&M, first-order supernaturalist beliefs are exclusivist, dogmatic, empirically unsupported, and irrational. Moreover, again according to M&M, we have perfectly natural explanations of the causes that underlie such beliefs (they seem to conceive of such natural explanations as debunking explanations). They then make a case for second-order supernaturalism, “which maintains that the universe in general, and the religious sensitivities of humanity in particular, have been formed by supernatural powers working through natural processes” (3). Second-order supernaturalism is a kind of theism, more closely akin to deism than, say, Christianity or Buddhism. It is, as such, universal (according to contemporary psychology of religion), empirically supported (according to philosophy in the form of the Fine-Tuning Argument), and beneficial (and so justified pragmatically). With respect to its pragmatic value, second-order supernaturalism, according to M&M, gets the good(s) of religion (cooperation, trust, etc) without its bad(s) (conflict and violence). Second-order supernaturalism is thus rational (and possibly true) and inconducive to violence. In this paper, I will examine just one small but important part of M&M’s argument: the claim that (first-order) religion is a primary motivator of violence and that its elimination would eliminate or curtail a great deal of violence in the world. Imagine, they say, no religion, too.Janusz Salamon offers a friendly extension or clarification of M&M’s second-order theism, one that I think, with emendations, has promise. He argues that the core of first-order religions, the belief that Ultimate Reality is the Ultimate Good (agatheism), is rational (agreeing that their particular claims are not) and, if widely conceded and endorsed by adherents of first-order religions, would reduce conflict in the world.While I favor the virtue of intellectual humility endorsed in both papers, I will argue contra M&M that (a) belief in first-order religion is not a primary motivator of conflict and violence (and so eliminating first-order religion won’t reduce violence). Second, partly contra Salamon, who I think is half right (but not half wrong), I will argue that (b) the religious resources for compassion can and should come from within both the particular (often exclusivist) and the universal (agatheistic) aspects of religious beliefs. Finally, I will argue that (c) both are guilty, as I am, of the philosopher’s obsession with belief. 

scholarly journals GENERATIVE CREATING OF SACRAL SPACE: MYTHOLOGY, COSMOLOGY AND PLACES FOR CULT RITUALS

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 626-652
Author(s):  
Silvija Ozola
Keyword(s):  
Research Problem ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Special Relation ◽  
Creative Thought ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
Strong Energy ◽  
Sign System ◽  
The World ◽  
Research Goal ◽  
The Universe

Signs are an integral part of the existence of humanity. The Latvians have one of the most complicated symbolic sign system in the world—the Lielvārde belt which includes symbols of strong energy and encodes ancient information that characterizes the special relation to nature and the Universe. God is the basis of moral values and the origin of all events. The understanding of Latvian deities is based on creative thought, and each sign of the deity image is a structural whole with a certain informative value. The Balts’ tribes for cult rituals chose energetically powerful places. Generative creating of sacral space and religious ritual is connected by concepts the Place, the Way and the Symbol. Research object: Latvian wisdom and spiritual traditions, sacral space for the worship of God. Research goal: analysis of the influence of the Latvian wisdom on traditions of the establishment of early places of worship. Research problem: common and different features of the sacral space of the Latvians and other nations have been little studied. Research novelty: detailed studies of generative creating of early places of worship based on Latvian mythology and cult ritual traditions of other nations. Research methods: analysis of archive documents and cartographic materials, study of published literature and inspection of sacral places in nature.

Empedocles (c.495–c.435 BC)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Schofield
Keyword(s):  
Good Deal ◽  
Comparative Morphology ◽  
Basic Structure ◽  
Sense Perception ◽  
Animal Sacrifice ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Clear Relation

Empedocles, born in the Sicilian city of Acragas (modern Agrigento), was a major Greek philosopher of the Presocratic period. Numerous fragments survive from his two major works, poems in epic verse known later in antiquity as On Nature and Purifications. On Nature sets out a vision of reality as a theatre of ceaseless change, whose invariable pattern consists in the repetition of the two processes of harmonization into unity followed by dissolution into plurality. The force unifying the four elements from which all else is created – earth, air, fire and water – is called Love, and Strife is the force dissolving them once again into plurality. The cycle is most apparent in the rhythms of plant and animal life, but Empedocles’ main objective is to tell the history of the universe itself as an exemplification of the pattern. The basic structure of the world is the outcome of disruption of a total blending of the elements into main masses which eventually develop into the earth, the sea, the air and the fiery heaven. Life, however, emerged not from separation but by mixture of elements, and Empedocles elaborates an account of the evolution of living forms of increasing complexity and capacity for survival, culminating in the creation of species as they are at present. There followed a detailed treatment of a whole range of biological phenomena, from reproduction to the comparative morphology of the parts of animals and the physiology of sense perception and thinking. The idea of a cycle involving the fracture and restoration of harmony bears a clear relation to the Pythagorean belief in the cycle of reincarnations which the guilty soul must undergo before it can recover heavenly bliss. Empedocles avows his allegiance to this belief, and identifies the primal sin requiring the punishment of reincarnation as an act of bloodshed committed through ‘trust in raving strife’. Purifications accordingly attacked the practice of animal sacrifice, and proclaimed prohibition against killing animals to be a law of nature. Empedocles’ four elements survived as the basis of physics for 2,000 years. Aristotle was fascinated by On Nature; his biology probably owes a good deal to its comparative morphology. Empedocles’ cosmic cycle attracted the interest of the early Stoics. Lucretius found in him the model of a philosophical poet. Philosophical attacks on animal sacrifice made later in antiquity appealed to him as an authority.

Bloch, Ernst Simon (1885–1977)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Geoghegan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Open System ◽  
Its Analysis ◽  
New Material ◽  
Closed Systems ◽  
The Many ◽  
Fundamental Categories ◽  
Western Marxism ◽  
The Universe

Bloch was one of the most innovative Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century. His metaphysical and ontological concerns, combined with a self-conscious utopianism, distanced him from much mainstream Marxist thought. He was sympathetic to the classical philosophical search for fundamental categories, but distinguished earlier static, fixed and closed systems from his own open system, in which he characterized the universe as a changing and unfinished process. Furthermore, his distinctive materialism entailed the rejection of a radical separation of the human and the natural, unlike much twentieth-century Western Marxism. His validation of utopianism was grounded in a distinctive epistemology centred on the processes whereby ‘new’ material emerges in consciousness. The resulting social theory was sensitive to the many and varied ways in which the utopian impulse emerges, as, for example, in its analysis of the utopian dimension in religion.

Darwinism

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ruse
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
General Term ◽  
Evolutionary Change ◽  
Social Darwinism ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Mendelian Genetics ◽  
Thomas Henry Huxley ◽  
Foundational Work

The modern usage of the term Darwinism dates from the publication of On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, in which he argued for evolution through natural selection. Very soon after the appearance of the Origin (in 1859), Darwin’s great supporter Thomas Henry Huxley introduced the term Darwinism. The term—together with the related terms Darwinian and Darwinist—took root. The codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, used the term as the title of a book expounding evolution: Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection, with Some of Its Applications. Note that there seems to be a fuzziness about the term. Some identify Darwinism with evolution through natural selection. Others suggest that the essence of Darwinism is not selection per se but change or variation. Late in the 19th century, George Romanes coined the term neo-Darwinism to cover those for whom natural selection is basically the only significant cause of change. In 1930 Ronald A. Fisher, in his Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, argued that the newly developed theory of Mendelian genetics offered the required foundation for a perspective that made natural selection the central force of evolutionary change. Although the British were happy to call the Darwin-Mendel synthesis neo-Darwinism, in America the synthesis was known as the synthetic theory of evolution. This reflects that in the New World it was Sewall Wright who did the foundational work in bringing Mendelian genetics into the evolutionary picture and that he never thought of natural selection as being the force that Fisher took it to be. For Wright and his followers, especially Theodosius Dobzhansky, genetic drift was always a major component of the evolutionary picture, and as Fisher pointed out nonstop, this is about as non-Darwinian a notion as it is possible to have. By 1959 professional evolutionists (on both sides of the Atlantic) agreed that Darwin had been right about natural selection: it is the major cause of evolutionary change. Neo-Darwinism fell into disuse, as everyone now used the term Darwinism for evolution through natural selection. Mention should also be made of so-called social Darwinism, the application of Darwinism to persons and groups within society. The earliest use apparently was during Darwin’s own lifetime, by a historian discussing land tenure in Ireland. However, it was not a popular or general term, coming into widespread use only in the 1940s, with the publication of the American historian Richard Hofstadter’s book Social Darwinism in American Thought.

The fine details of evolution

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 723-726 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roman A. Laskowski ◽  
Janet M. Thornton ◽  
Michael J.E. Sternberg
Keyword(s):  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Protein Sequences ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Death Studies ◽  
Living Things ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Molecular Machinery ◽  
Conference Centre ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Oral Presentations

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was based on studies of biology at the species level. In the time since his death, studies at the molecular level have confirmed his ideas about the kinship of all life on Earth and have provided a wealth of detail about the evolutionary relationships between different species and a deeper understanding of the finer workings of natural selection. We now have a wealth of data, including the genome sequences of a wide range of organisms, an even larger number of protein sequences, a significant knowledge of the three-dimensional structures of proteins, DNA and other biological molecules, and a huge body of information about the operation of these molecules as systems in the molecular machinery of all living things. This issue of Biochemical Society Transactions contains papers from oral presentations given at a Biochemical Society Focused Meeting to commemorate the 200th Anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, held on 26–27 January 2009 at the Wellcome Trust Conference Centre, Cambridge. The talks reported on some of the insights into evolution which have been obtained from the study of protein sequences, structures and systems.

Dynamics of membrane processes

1968 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Katchalsky ◽  
R. Spangler
Keyword(s):  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Second Law Of Thermodynamics ◽  
Second Law ◽  
Membrane Processes ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Intrinsic Contradiction

I. I. In his illuminating book onThe Nature of Thermodynamics, Bridgeman (1941) points out an intrinsic contradiction between the concepts of physical and biological evolution. In his words: ‘The view that the universe is running down into a condition where its entropy and the amount of disorder are as great as possible has had a profound effect on the views of many biologists on the nature of biological phenomena. It springs to the eye, however, that the tendency of living organisms is to organize their surroundings—that is to “produce” order where formerly there was disorder. Life then appears in some way to oppose the otherwise universal drive to disorder. Does it mean that living organisms do, or may violate the second law of thermodynamics?…’

scholarly journals MORAL VALUES ANALYSIS IN THE FAULT IN OUR STARS NOVEL BY JOHN GREEN

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-61
Author(s):  
Muhammad Yusril Ihza Mahendra ◽  
Dina Amelia
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
A Value ◽  
Living Things

Moral Value is a value that affects individual and social behavior in behaving. The current study aimedto find the categories of moral values that John Green tries to convey in The Fault in Our Stars noveland to interpret its meaning by using the theory of Universal Moral Values by Kinnier et. al with fourmajor moral values. To be able to understand moral values in the story without misinterpretation andthe lessons can be applied in real life. This study used the qualitative method because it focuses ondescribing and interpreting the moral values in descriptive. The primary source of data is taken fromthe novel The Fault in Our Stars in the form of narrations and the secondary data is from previousstudies in the form of statements that comes from the study findings. The results of the current studyshow that the categories of moral values found in the novel are (1) Commitment to something greaterthan oneself, (2) Self-respect, but with humility, self-discipline, and acceptance of personalresponsibility, and (3) Respect and caring for others, while the moral value that is not found is (4)Caring for other living things and environment which indicates that John Green inserted moral valuesin the novel more about the personal lives of the characters and the relationships between them, whichto civilize it, readers, to have the moral as an individual, being good to other people and to believe tosomething greater.

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