Apparently, when the ravens are released from the tower of London, the British Empire will fall.

From the fact that they have not been released, we can deduce, the British Empire has never fallen.

Musings on evolution I was doing today

I’m kinda working through a vague idea about evolutionary theory – not something I know much about. But I’ve got a hunch that what people take from it as the ‘moral of the story’ probably varies enormously on how the story is told. The version that we all get fed was filtered through right wing economic theory and is dressed in its metaphors. Darwin read Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus before writing the Origin of the Species. And he was good friends with Herbert Spencer, the author of the phrase “survival of the fittest” who was the editor of the Economist and a right wing lunatic. Hence evolution is generally pictured as being something like laissez faire capitalism, which is thus obviously vindicated as natural, proper and correct.

Yet here is an implication of evolution theory I just thought of, which is far more left-wing than right-wing friendly. In the story in which God created everything, he created us - or at least Adam and Eve - as separate individuals, with individual desires and natures. It would be legitimate to see society as just a collection of separate individuals, with a fixed human nature: Adam and Eve nature. But in the version in which we evolved, there was never a time when we were separate human beings with individual natures who got together and created society. No asocial member of the species homo sapiens has ever existed, because we were social before we were human. We evolved together, as a social whole - we became human together.

And that is a major difference with huge implications. In the first version, you can ultimately trace everything that happens in society back to human nature (Adam and Eve nature). In the second version, you cannot. You'd have to work back through the social institutions of Homo erectus, and on through all of them different homos and ape beings, to get back to the origins of things. And by the time you got back to an non-social being - if you ever did- it would be so unlike humans today that it wouldn't mean anything.

It’s something that I’ve been thinking on.