Category Archives: Darwinism

Misusing Darwin's Theory

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is entirely focused on an explanation of life's biological diversity. It is a scientific theory meant to explain observations about species. Yet some have used the theory to justify a particular view of human social, political, or economic conditions. All such ideas have one fundamental flaw: They use a purely scientific theory for a completely unscientific purpose. In doing so they misrepresent and misappropriate Darwin's original ideas.

One such distortion and misuse is the loose collection of ideologies grouped under the label of "Social Darwinism." Based largely on notions of competition and natural selection, Social Darwinist theories generally hold that the powerful in society are innately better than the weak and that success is proof of their superiority.

Darwin passionately opposed social injustice and oppression. He would have been dismayed to see the events of generations to come: his name attached to opposing ideologies from Marxism to unbridled capitalism, and to policies from ethnic cleansing to forced sterilization. Whether used to rationalize social inequality, racism, or eugenics, so-called Social Darwinist theories are a gross misreading of the ideas first described in the Origin of Species and applied in modern biology.

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Social Darwinism - American Museum of Natural History

I think it was our pal Charles Kesler who first quipped that social Darwinism was the only kind of Darwinism liberals opposeda line I have deployed to great effect many times. But it appears he may be mistaken about this. It appears that liberals are increasingly upset with evolutionary science as it reveals gender differences, and goodness, some of this science might even show up on a Google search, at least for a few more hours.

Next time you hear the nonsense to the Republican war on science, point people to this delicious Slate headline and article from today:

Science is sold to us as an almost holy, objective pursuit: a pure endeavor, a way of pursuing truth and only truth. . .But nowhere is it more evident that this perspective is flawed than when we consider the uses and abuses of evolutionary biology and its sibling, evolutionary psychology.

It is impossible to consider this field of science without grappling with the flaws of the institutionand of the deificationof science itself. For example: It was argued to me this week that the Google memo failed to constitute hostile behavior because it cited peer-reviewed articles that suggest women have different brains. The well-known scientist who made this comment to me is both a woman and someone who knows quite well that peer-reviewed and correct are not interchangeable terms. This brings us to the question that many have grappled with this week. Its 2017, and to some extent scientific literature still supports a patriarchal view that ranks a mans intellect above a womans. . .

Sciences greatest myth is that it doesnt encode bias and is always self-correcting. In fact, science has often made its living from encoding and justifying bias, and refusing to do anything about the fact that the data says somethings wrong.

Does this last paragraph apply to the climate science community I wonder? Meanwhile, down with evolutionary biology! Burn the heretics!

Grab a bag of popcorn and enjoy the whole thing, which gets worse as it goes.

More here:

Liberals Are For ScienceUntil They're Not - Power Line (blog)

Academic Nuray Mert has been fired from the Cumhuriyet daily, for which she has been writing columns since April 2015, for not complying with the pro-Atatrk and secularist line of the newspaper, t24 reported on Wednesday.

The decision was relayed Mert by Orhan Erin, chairman of the executive board of the Cumhuriyet Foundation.

Orhan Erin said the decision was made with the consent of the editors of the daily who are in Silivri Prison, Mert, told t24, adding that she was invited by Akn Atalay, Cumhuriyets chief executive officer, to expand the narrow Kemalist vision of the daily.

Mert, who writes two columns every week, has been at the center of debate over her article about Darwinism and a government decision to give the authority to officiate at civil marriages to muftis, official religious representatives.

Some columnists who write for Cumhuriyet also reacted negatively to Mert over the articles.

(Turkish Minute)

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Turkish daily fires columnist over 'ideological differences' - Turkey Purge

The old adage of evolve or dissolve has always been a part of the challenges that face businesses. This rings truer today than maybe ever before. We see daily the many changes that companies and their leaders must adapt to and prepare for. The most successful businesses must be constantly on the path of meeting their current business goals as well as have the foresight and strategy to look out further ahead to anticipate what others cannot.

The Darwinism of business is stronger than ever in our changing business climate. From issues related to workforce, technology, and governmental policies, times are changing at a rapid rate. This is why many area businesses choose to connect with their local economic development group and Chamber of Commerce to leverage shared knowledge and best practices.

Business as we know it today will not be the same in the next few years. Consumers will be seeing continuing changes in their shopping and dining experiences as technology continues to evolve. Businesses need to make bets on how they will adapt with the changing demographic of upcoming tech savvy generations. A couple areas where change has been happening at an extremely rapid pace is in the workplace culture and workforce development.

In my work, Ive been seeing tremendous business evolution. Here are some trends of note:

Millennials meet Generation Z The genZers have arrived! 2016 marked the first year they entered the workplace while a third of management roles were filled by millennials. What are some of the challenges? For one, there is an ever widening technology gap between younger and older workers. In addition, stereotypes abound between the groups which causes friction. Interestingly enough, both generations agree that they want businesses to transform the office environment, reward employees, embrace flexibility, and take on causes.

The three Ws Workplace wellness and well-being are the three Ws of attraction tool trends. Getting creative with wellness programs is increasingly common. Companies that are leveraging wellness programs find multiple levels of benefits that affect their bottom line including attracting talent, lower absenteeism and lower healthcare costs.

Changing employer/employee contract Believe it or not, regardless of age, the tenure for employees is currently 4.6 years in the U.S. There is no lifetime employment contract and attracting employees is an ongoing activity for all employers regardless if you have current openings. In addition, the work relationship between employers and employees continues to change with more working at home, more operating as independent contractors, and also with employers utilizing technologies to leverage employees in remote locales.

Evolving benefits All age groups, genders, and ethnicities care about fair compensation. Other important factors are healthcare and work flexibility. Studies have shown some employee groups value work flexibility above healthcare and yet only 1/3 of companies even offer it. And those that do, often dont promote it to job seekers. Other new benefits include assistance with student loans and I even heard of a local business thinking about providing car insurance.

While businesses continue to work on meeting the next challenges, especially in the area of workforce development, we have some local successes to celebrate.

Congrats to I.C. System, Reell Precision Manufacturing, and The Specialty Mfg. Company for receiving the Star Tribunes 2017 Top Workplace achievement.

Top Workplaces recognizes the most progressive companies in Minnesota through employee opinions, including employee feedback about workplace culture, the levels of employee engagement, organizational health, and overall satisfaction.

The Northeast Metro community is fortunate to have a vibrant business community continually connecting together to get ahead of the curve on what is next around the corner. Regardless of what tomorrow brings, we are all committed to shared success together.

Ling Becker is executive director of the Vadnais Heights Economic Development Corporation.

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Business times are a changin' - White Bear Press

Kevin Myers. He told Sen ORourke on RT: Men are driven by urges women dont have. Photograph: RT Radio One/PA Wire

If anything good can come from the painful results of Kevin Myerss now infamous column in last Sundays Sunday Times, it is that many people who take sexist language for granted have been forced to think about it. The column was essentially an attack on the idea that women are equal to men. But this was not in itself seen as a problem by his employers. The Sunday Times, in its two statements on the affair, made no apology for (or even acknowledgment of) this argument. Myers himself, in his subsequent radio interviews, apologised profusely (and with obvious sincerity) for his use of anti-Semitic tropes. But he stood over his broader argument in the column and strongly denied that he is any way misogynistic. This self-belief is also sincere. But it is wrong.

In the column, Myers blew himself up because he strayed off the familiar path of least resistance (insulting those who do not enjoy his own privileges) into the minefield of anti-Semitic stereotypes. This was an accident. But there was nothing accidental about his use of another far-right trope and his application of it to the notion of gender equality.

The central tenet of far-right thought has always been that equality is a degenerate illusion there is only the primal Darwinian struggle in which the weak go to the wall and the fittest survive and triumph. The core of Myerss column is a reiteration of this reality to justify the unequal treatment of women, primarily by the BBC but, by implication, in society as a whole. Women go to the wall because they are no good at the Darwinian game. Men triumph because they play it properly.

All of this is quite explicit. Equality is a unicorn in other words, it does not exist. Inequality in this case the unequal treatment of women is therefore natural and inevitable. Women, instead of wailing and shrieking, should accept the law of the survival of the fittest: Get what you can with whatever talents you have. And, if what you get is the shitty end of the stick, shut up about it.

To understand how misogynistic this is, we have to take it in its own terms. Lets accept, even though it is nonsense, that there is only an endless evolutionary struggle for dominance. How, in Myerss terms, could women ever win it? They couldnt because those terms are nothing but a series of traps designed to catch female ambition while letting the male version pass on to its well-deserved triumph.

The bogus nature of the argument is immediately obvious from its treatment of childbearing. If blind evolutionary drives are to be the main organising principle of society, basic logic would suggest that the primary instinct is the survival of the species. This being so, giving birth to children would be understood as an activity to be rewarded, supported and encouraged. But because it is women who do this, this logic has to be inverted. When it doesnt suit male dominance, the cod-Darwinism that supports the whole thesis goes out the window. Or rather, it is turned back on women: women have only themselves to blame when they are paid less than the men because the men seldom get pregnant. What should we call it when someone upends his own argument purely to justify female biological inferiority? Misogyny seems a good word.

Ploughing on, we encounter the evolutionary characteristics that, according to Myers, fit men better for the eternal struggle. One, that they work harder, is so ludicrous that it need not detain us, except to note the irony of the claim appearing in a column whose author now admits to not thinking very hard about even as he was writing it. The second is that they are more charismatic. But charisma isnt a natural trait it is a matter of perception. And you have to be wilfully blind not to know that charisma in the workplace is a matter of gender. A domineering, self-centred, demanding, entitled man is charismatic. A woman with the same traits is a monstrous harridan.

Which brings us to the most Darwinian term of all: men succeed because they are more driven than women. Can there be a more loaded word? A man who elbows his way to the top and walks over the fallen bodies of his rivals is showing that he has drive. There is a different word for a woman who does the same. She is a bitch. But then this is what this whole linguistic game is about. Myers argues that women can succeed only when they act like men or at least a caricatured version of manhood favoured by a particular variety of creep. But of course he doesnt really believe they can: as he told Sen ORourke on RT: Men are driven by urges women dont have. Hence the trap: the girls can succeed only if they are as driven as the boys, but since they dont have those drives at all, the real message is that they can never succeed at all and should stop whining about it. Men are always going to be better at manning up than women. Its only natural.

The column itself embodies these double standards. It is hysterical to and beyond the point of incoherence . It might fairly be called an extended exercise in wailing and shrieking. But of course those are female characteristics: one of the things Myers wails and shrieks about at the height of his indignation is female columnists indignant words of smouldering mediocrity. When Myers does it, its heroically male truth-telling. If a woman did it (and in fact I cannot think of a female columnist in Ireland who has ever been granted such well-paid licence to rehearse prejudice), it would be proof of female emotional instability.

And if women do succeed in spite of all these traps? There are too bloody many of them. Myers tells women to forget equality and man up but then complains in the column about the ubiquity of Miriam OCallaghan and Claire Byrne on the airwaves, including the weather, the ploughing championships and the Angelus. Presumably they succeeded by being more driven than men and, um, not having babies (or at least keeping it to eight). But in the misogynistic mindset, a woman can never be right even when she does what men like Myers tell her to do.

Prejudice depends on such ludicrous inconsistencies. But it always has a purpose: to make inequalities rooted in centuries of oppression seem entirely natural and to blame the victims for their inferior situation. Those who benefit from these inequalities love nothing better than to be told that they deserve everything they have because the world is a jungle and they are the key predators. Myers may be gone, but so long as this is the case, there will always be a market for misogyny.

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Fintan O'Toole: There will always be a market for misogyny - Irish Times

Charles Darwin, whose bearded face looks out at us from the 10 note, is about to be replaced by Jane Austen. Ive spent the past five years of my life writing his biography and mastering his ideas. Which do you throw out of the balloon? Pride and Prejudice or The Origin of Species?

Funnily enough, in the course of my researches, I found both pride and prejudice in bucketloads among the ardent Darwinians, who would like us to believe that if you do not worship Darwin, you are some kind of nutter. He has become an object of veneration comparable to the old heroes of the Soviet Union, such as Lenin and Stalin, whose statues came tumbling down all over Eastern Europe 20 and more years ago.

We had our own version of a Soviet statue war in London some years ago when the statue of Darwin was moved in the Natural History Museum. It now looms over the stairs brooding over the visitors. It did originally sit there, but it was replaced by a statue of Richard Owen, who was, after all, the man who had started the Natural History Museum, and who was one of the great scientists of the 19th century. Then in 2009, the bicentenary of Darwins birth, Owen was booted out, and Darwin was put back, in very much the way that statues of Lenin replaced religious or monarchist icons in old Russia.

By the time Owen died (1892), Darwins reputation was fading, and by the beginning of the 20th century it had all but been eclipsed. Then, in the early to mid 20th century, the science of genetics got going. Science rediscovered the findings of Gregor Mendel (Darwins contemporary) and the most stupendous changes in life sciences became possible. Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, and thereafter the complexity and wonder of genetics, all demonstrable by scientific means, were laid bare. Only this week we have learned of medicines stupendous ability to zap embryonic, genetically transmuted disorders.

Darwinism is not science as Mendelian genetics are. It is a theory whose truth is NOT universally acknowledged. But when genetics got going there was also a revival, especially in Britain, of what came to be known as neo-Darwinism, a synthesis of old Darwinian ideas with the new genetics. Why look to Darwin, who made so many mistakes, rather than to Mendel? There was a simple answer to that. Neo-Darwinism was part scientific and in part a religion, or anti-religion. Its most famous exponent alive, Richard Dawkins, said that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist. You could say that the apparently impersonal processes of genetics did the same. But the neo-Darwinians could hardly, without absurdity, make Mendel their hero since he was a Roman Catholic monk. So Darwin became the figurehead for a system of thought that (childishly) thought there was one catch-all explanation for How Things Are in nature.

The great fact of evolution was an idea that had been current for at least 50 years before Darwin began his work. His own grandfather pioneered it in England, but on the continent, Goethe, Cuvier, Lamarck and many others realised that life forms evolve through myriad mutations. Darwin wanted to be the Man Who Invented Evolution, so he tried to airbrush all the predecessors out of the story. He even pretended that Erasmus Darwin, his grandfather, had had almost no influence on him. He then brought two new ideas to the evolutionary debate, both of which are false.

One is that evolution only proceeds little by little, that nature never makes leaps. The two most distinguished American palaeontologists of modern times, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, both demonstrated 30 years ago that this is not true. Palaeontology has come up with almost no missing links of the kind Darwinians believe in. The absence of such transitional forms is, Gould once said, the trade secret of palaeontology. Instead, the study of fossils and bones shows a series of jumps and leaps.

Hard-core Darwinians try to dispute this, and there are in fact some missing links the Thrinaxodon, which is a mammal-like reptile, and the Panderichthys, a sort of fish-amphibian. But if the Darwinian theory of natural selection were true, fossils would by now have revealed hundreds of thousands of such examples. Species adapt themselves to their environment, but there are very few transmutations.

Darwins second big idea was that Nature is always ruthless: that the strong push out the weak, that compassion and compromise are for cissies whom Nature throws to the wall. Darwin borrowed the phrase survival of the fittest from the now forgotten and much discredited philosopher Herbert Spencer. He invented a consolation myth for the selfish class to which he belonged, to persuade them that their neglect of the poor, and the colossal gulf between them and the poor, was the way Nature intended things. He thought his class would outbreed the savages (ie the brown peoples of the globe) and the feckless, drunken Irish. Stubbornly, the unfittest survived. Brown, Jewish and Irish people had more babies than the Darwin class. The Darwinians then had to devise the hateful pseudo-science of eugenics, which was a scheme to prevent the poor from breeding.

We all know where that led, and the uses to which the National Socialists put Darwins dangerous ideas.

Now that we have replaced Darwin on the tenner with the more benign figure of Miss Austen, is this not the moment to reconsider taking down his statue from the Natural History Museum, and replacing him with the man who was sitting on the staircase until 2009 the museums founder, Richard Owen?

A.N. Wilsons Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker (John Murray, 25) is out next month

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AN Wilson: It's time Charles Darwin was exposed for the fraud he was - Evening Standard

QUESTION: Creationism vs. Darwinism Are they compatible?

ANSWER:

Definitions in Creationism vs. Darwinism, as described by the by the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary states that creationism is: A doctrine or theory holding that matter, the various forms of life, and the world were created by God out of nothing and usually in the way described in Genesis.

The definition for Darwinism is, A theory of the original perpetuation of new species of animals and plants that offspring of a given organism vary, that natural selection favors the survival of some of these variations over others, that new species have arisen and may continue to rise by these processes, and that widely divergent groups of plants and animals have arisen from the same ancestors; biological evolution.

Are the two theories of Creationism vs. Darwinism capable of existing together in harmony? In order to be compatible, there needs to be a number of similarities between the two theories. Do similarities exist?

Creationism states that God created matter and life forms out of nothing. Theistic evolutionists believe that God or gods created matter originally then left it to evolve on its own. Darwinism does not allow for the presence of God or gods in the origin of life. Darwinism states that various types of animals and plants have their origin in other preexisting types. This means that in evolutionism, a form of matter existed from which all life came.

The compatibility of creationism vs. Darwinism is faint, although some agreements between the two do occur. Both agree that DNA strands cause the varieties we see within a genus, like some people are short, while others are tall. There are color variations in people, plants, and animals. Aside from these points, there seems to be good evidence to suggest that Creationism vs. Darwinism have too little in common to call them compatible with each other.

What is your response?

Yes, today I am deciding to follow Jesus

Yes, I am already a follower of Jesus

I still have questions

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Creationism vs. Darwinism - Creation - AllAboutCreation.org

Several documentaries have just been released on DVD or Blu-ray, including Kansas vs. Darwin, Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary, I Am the Blues and Alive and Kicking.

Alive and Kicking glances back at swing dancings roots in 1920s Harlem and its ancestral ties to hip-hop. But the documentary focuses on the present, showcasing comments from young dance partners for whom swing is a way to dress up, have fun, improvise within set boundaries and develop personal skills. For some, its a finger in the eye of contemporary digitalized existence, a way to feel alive. Many scenes were shot at high-stepping ballroom contests.

The great postwar blues artiststhe Muddy Waters and the John Lee Hookersare gone, but their musical children continue. I Am the Blues is a journey through the muggy backcountry of the American South with Grammy-winner Bobby Rush and less-known 70-something-year-old survivors of an earlier era. All are filled with memories, are still musically proficient and often capable of moving performances. Tin-roofed juke joints and dusty rural roads are among the settings.

As astronauts first ventured into outer space, Harvard psychology professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass) began exploring inner space through psychedelics. Narrated by Robert Redford, Dying to Know crisscrosses around the lives of those two academic adventurers with emphasis on a conversation between them shortly before Learys death (1996). They werent playing around for kicks but used science to transcend science in an exploration of the human psycheand perhaps the divine.

The 2005 hearing by the Kansas Board of Education on the validity of Darwinism drew international attention and is the subject of this documentary. What emerges is the self-perception of many creationists as rebels, kicking against elitists trying to impose an alien worldview. Their fundamentalism is aided, ironically, by the pervasive relativism of our time in which sincerity trumps factuality. Several Kansans interviewed by director Jeff Tamblyn intelligently blend science with philosophy and faith.

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Home Movies/Out on Digital: Aug. 3, 2017 - Shepherd Express

WAMU 88.5

New Florida Law Lets Residents Challenge School Textbooks WAMU 88.5 There will be people out there that argue that creationism versus Darwinism are facts. They're both theories, he says. Science educators say that's a familiar argument and one that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of a scientific theory. In ... and more »

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New Florida Law Lets Residents Challenge School Textbooks - WAMU 88.5

The Republican controlled US Senate just voted to proceed to debate Trumpcarea major step in the repeal and/or replacement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Following like docile sheep, most of the Republican Senators, who indisputably place party before country, voted yes not even knowing whats in the bill!

There are no profiles in courage among Republican Senators who voted to debate a bill that would, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), take health care away from upwards of 20 million Americans, obliterate protections for pre-existing conditions, and raise healthcare premiums across the board. Put more bluntly, if you get horribly sick, good luck finding insurance coverage. If you dont have the funds to pay for expensive cancer treatments or for assisted living, or for a nursing home, well just let these lesser people wither away. The strong survive. The weak sicken and die, which enables the fit to pad their already overflowing bank accounts..

If you think Im being harsh, consider the position of US Congressman Tom Reed (R-NY). In a June 24 Politicususa article Sean Colarossi reports that Reed

said on Saturday it doesnt bother him too much that 20,000 more Americans will die under the Republican health care plan as long as less money is going into Medicaid.

Mr. Reeds comments bring to mind a scene from Stanley Kubricks monumental film Dr. Strangelove. In the film, the President has called an emergency situation room meeting to discuss how to deal with a renegade nuclear attack ordered by an insane Air Force General, Jack D. Ripper. General Ripper illegally sent B-52s to obliterate the Russians with 40 megatons of nuclear bombs. Enter Air Force Chief of Staff General Buck Turgidson, played by the legendary George C Scott.

[Turgidson advocates a further nuclear attack to prevent a Soviet response to Ripper's attack]

General "Buck" Turgidson: Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.

President Merkin Mufley: You're talking about mass murder, General, not war!

General "Buck" Turgidson: Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.

If it is passed by the Republican controlled congress, Trumpcare may well result in a massive uptick of thousands if not millions of unnecessary deaths. Considering its unpopularity, why would any sane politician vote for such a politically and socially destructive bill? Why is it more important for Republican legislators to extend tax breaks to the wealthy than to save human lives?

What difference does it make if 20,000 people die if we are able to cut Medicaid?

What difference does it make if three million people die if we are able to extend tax breaks to the wealthy?

You might think that such poisonous thinking is social insanity, but the notion of social winners (who have earned health care) and social losers (who dont deserve heath care) has a long history in the United States.

Its not a pretty story, but its a tale well known to anthropologists.

Around the turn of the 20th century, the United States was a fundamentally racist society in which the rich (white people of means) led lives very different from the poor (immigrants and African Americans). Back then many of our elites followed the dictates of Social Darwinism in which British philosopher Herbert Spencer mangled the findings of Charles Darwin to suggest that natural selection applied to human beings and that the fittest, in this case, White Europeans, were better ablephysically, intellectually and emotionallyto adapt to the world. The strong and the fit would survive. Those who lacked fitness would sicken and dieridding the world of inferior traits. Spencers ideas gave rise to a scientific racism that posited that race was the determining factor in social fitness. Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology used science to publicly refute these socially destabilizing ideas. Although these toxins never disappear, they have reemerged strongly in the alternative realities that motivate the me-first attitudes of President Trump and the Republicans who rule congress. From an anthropological perspective, Trumpcare is a path back to the gilded age in which income inequality, reinforced through financial and immigration policies, created a stark society that juxtaposed a slim minority that enjoyed unimaginable luxury to an ever-increasing majority that confronted misery and death each and every day. In that time, the wealthy used the ideology of Social Darwinism to reinforce their social, economic and political power.

From an anthropological perspective, Trumpcare is a back to the future move to socially engineer a society of winners, the fit, who are strong, and losers, the unfit who are weak. In this sophomoric mix, our cherished social contract will be lost, millions of our citizens will suffer and our society will be ripped to shreds.

Is this the legacy we want to bequeath to our grandchildren?

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An RX for Social Darwinism - HuffPost