Wednesday, April 1, 2015

This Isn't Wittgenstein It's Not Hard To Get: A Response

Domesticated dogs, especially those bred by human beings are TAME ANIMALS.  Animal breeds were developed by HUMAN BEINGS IN THE PERIOD AFTER HUMAN CULTURES AROSE.   They are a product of human culture, no wild animal breeds dogs, selecting them for traits.  Not even our nearest cousins among the apes, not in the evidence left by our nearest hominid ancestors and their cousins.   Charles Galton Darwin's contention is nonsense of a kind that so often accompanies his kind of speculation about such things.

You can't cite an artificial product of modern human culture - different breeds of dogs -  to support your contention that people are "wild animals" using that evidence of decidedly "unwild" human behavior,  much of it within the period of modern history dependent on intellectual practices and cultures, transportation, communications,  heck, language, etc.  which don't appear anywhere in the wild.

Especially as the breeding of dog varieties is often motivated by the necessities brought about by human domestication - taming - of  other species, sheep, cows, etc. chosen with the goal of having dogs more suited to herding those animals - OFTEN IN THE LARGER BREEDS TO PROTECT THEM FROM WILD ANIMALS, INCLUDING THE ANCESTORS OF THOSE DOGS. 

If that flower of the Darwin family had wanted to come up with a worse argument for his contention that people are wild animals, I doubt he could have found one.  This is especially incompetent and hypocritical considering his family heritage from Charles Darwin all of them up to their crowns in the desire of their "meddlesome scientific priestcraft (A.R. Wallace's beautiful description of eugenics) to manage the human population as if it were a herd in a breeding operation based on their entirely not-natural educations and acculturation in modern science.  No wild animal practices science, either.

Update:   Like mind-body dualism, idealism, etc, the contention that human beings are, by any definition, not wild animals, though animals they certainly are, is merely unfashionable, its rejection for the same reasons that those other two are rejected, they are not compatible with materialism.   The necessities of upholding materialism were never a good reason for rejecting any idea, and as these articles concerning eugenics prove, no sound basis for accepting ideas, either.

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