From: Howard J. Van Till (hvantill@chartermi.net)
Date: Wed Mar 12 2003 - 09:03:44 EST
Karl, quoting from Orr's review of Wilson's book "Darwin's Cathedral":
> "In the end, you are, I suppose, free to believe that religion is a mere
> byproduct of multilevel selection. But intellectual honesty demands that you
> ask why science isn't too."
I don't know the full context of this quotation, so my concerns might well
be inappropriate, but....
To say that belief in X is functional in the dynamic of group selection does
not, of course, by itself, lead inevitably to the conclusion, "therefore the
concept X can be dismissed as nothing more than an adaptively successful
(via multilevel selection) figment of the human imagination." To illustrate
this, let X be the concept of cause/effect.
Howard Van Till
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