Reply: Jerome H. Barkow authored “Evolved Constraints on Cultural Evolution” as part of ‘Ethology and Sociobiology 10’ in 1989; in 1985, Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson published “Culture and the Evolutionary Process” in Chicago; and Harvard biologist Richard C. Lewontin authored “Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA” (1991)…these exemplify the scope of relevant social Darwinism I’ve been exposed to during my life.

Between them, they represent in cited works: the genes, in making possible the development of human consciousness, have surrendered their power both to determine the individual and its uniquely self-influenced environment…they’ve been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction; humans live under a “dual inheritance system” where all behavior is push-pull between genetics and cultural education; and that all humans are teachable but just develop subroutine reactions to cultural fads, trends, or media suggestions as needed for the sole purpose of maximizing their offspring.

In other words, the basic “epigenetic mind” gambit: where mere haphazard evolution of the brain, not any nature of Absolute over mankind, gives humans a predisposition to avoid everything from incest to murder to strangers, obviously all spirituality referencing such reactions are self-delusions/projections or mind controls. Actually, social Darwinism seems just another name for logical positivism or negative atheism.

This is why I say for clergy to describe a fetus as the complete causation of human genetics and culture sure sounds like demurer to their sociobiology colleagues…no matter what such clergy believe about souls or anything else.

Rather than conclude the thirst for religion is a mere ineradicable compulsive part of human nature, any tradition able to be abandoned if a replacement exists (why some say Absolute concepts or “mysteries” are irrelevant to continuing, starting, or joining any religion or spirituality all being variable psychologies across cultures produced by common underlying evolved psychologies), I agree with the philosophy of the likes of Kenneth Bock; he authored “Human Nature and History: A Response To Sociobiology” (1980).

Some say human culture histories are fortuitous meanderings of people within bounds set by a human nature produced by organic evolution. How then the following?

African-Americans were Southern slaves, freed in 1863, thereafter long segregated, and in the latter half of the 20^th century became quite socially integrated as lawyers, mayors, generals, actors, and much more.

A genetic theory common to all H. sapiens can’t explain the struggle from slavery to freedom via applying a universal theory to variant initial cultural conditions. The critical difference is in the historically emergent ethical conviction that slavery is wrong, freedom is right, and that in moral respects non-whites are to have equal opportunities and responsibilities with whites.

Such convictions have little to do with selfish genes or instinctive adaptive mechanisms. People with essentially the same genetic makeup convert from one ethic to the other. For me theoretical biology does not explain such cultural development, thereby failing to dismiss an Absolute no matter how many would like to get behind such theory for their own expediency.

Soteriology is not quashed by nor conclusively proven to be intruding upon psychology just because social Darwinism has evolved from earlier versions.