: :I know what Social darwinism is, it is the mistaken belief that since natural selection occurrs in Nature, we should apply it to our own species. : Not exactly. "Social Darwinism" (which SHOULD be called "Spencerism" because it has nothing to do with Darwinian theory) is the mistaken belief that evolution is the same thing as "progress" or "improvement," and the application of this mistaken belief to human social groups.
: Darwinian theory does apply to humans, just as much as it applies to every other biological phenomenon, but it has nothing to say about "ranking" or which species is "better" than which others.
Yes, our phylogeny is an inescapeable aspect of human biology, and we can learn much by understanding the phenomina involved; when I did a report on eugenics I had the 'pleasure' of reading a couple issues from 1939 of the journal from the "eugenical society of America." Many of the hideous articles in these journals were devoted to identifying triats should be selected for or against in the view of the authors. (for example, being black was a trait to be selected against, and being blond and blue-eyed was to be selected for. Many of the authors were from Germany, and many more were from the U.S.)
: People who've studied the history of Darwinian thought (who often are "confused souls" of a sort! ;-) are the only people to whom the distinction is meaningful. Stephen Jay Gould writes about it quite often, in many of his brilliant essays from Natural History magazine (most of which are now collected in soft-cover books and should be available at your school's library).
I have read some of those books, although not since I got to college.
: Don't make the mistake of assuming that all christians are anti-Darwinian, however. Many agree with Darwinian theory, and only see it as a directed process, with God using random mutation and selective pressure to further some inscrutible plan. Science has no way of addressing that assertion, so it is not a major issue in the debate. There really isn't a conflict between faith and science; those few, misguided, individuals who think that there is are simply trying to use faith to answer scientific questions, and assuming (projecting) that scientists are trying to answer religious questions. The two approaches look at different phenomena, and are therefore no more contradictory than mathematics contradicts football. The two approaches may sometimes even be potentially complimentary, as Lark and Pope John-Paul II have suggested.
Hah! Preaching to the choir! I'm a practicing Roman Catholic. Anyway, Floyd, thanks for replying! It's interesting how inaccurately the term was used on most of the pages I found when I did a search for it. Of course, most of those were also pages dedicated to denying the plausibility of something that is only a "theory". =-)
-Sap Sucker
