This has been a great read - appreciation to those of you typing/talking. I diasgree that it isn't covering new ground (rhetorical tautology). .. but it has certainly drifted far from elevator passes and Dawkins response.

From Wikipedia:
Milton Friedman (1912–2006) stands as one of the most influential economists of the late twentieth century. He was a student of Frank Knight and he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976 for, among other things, A Monetary History of the United States (1963). Friedman argued that the Great Depression had been caused by the Federal Reserve's policies through the 1920s, and worsened in the 1930s. Friedman argued that laissez-faire government policy is more desirable than government intervention in the economy.

I was unaware that the Chicago School of economics had been termed Darwinian Economics.

However it was more John Nash (A Beautiful Mind) that merged Evolutionary theory with economics (behavioral economics) and ultimately Jon von Neumann along with Robert Axelrod's work in game theory on a series of Prisoner's Dilemma competition simulations that sparked much of the field of evolutionary psychology and a discussion of how human ethics developed. For example: altruism among humans with virtually no example of altruism in the animal world. How did that happen? Assuming the answer is not to simply be - God . . .which ends the debate. So I think the answer to Fulhamish mechanism question is game theory and social selection . . . not natural selection.

Perhaps a key distinction among these pressures and responses is time. Natural selection typically operates on a time scale in tens of thousands of years or longer. Human social/sexual selection, which is driven by social constructions (memes) operates much, much faster. Genetically there is virtually no difference between me and the humans that watched Mount Toba erupt 75,000 years ago. Socially however - we're constructed very different. They didn't know calculus or Mozart and I would never attempt to pick and eat wild mushrooms which they would have done casually. This is not a valuation statement; sadly it is too often interpreted as such.

As for the criticism that right wing political agendas lie hidden within evolution theory and somehow there is an undercurrent of Nazi/Eugenic support. Just no. Also, Social Darwinism is just bunk. Simply put; bullies are not justified by the argument that they are somehow toughening up the weak. No one deserves to be bullied.

Lol Carpsymind you may be right about an expanding definition of rape.

But there is another side to every story.

I think that even in the 70s and 80s, though I wasn't around for them, having sex with an extremely wasted girl would be frowned upon because, well, you're taking advantage of her. We have a rape culture so we tend to blame the victim for drinking too much, wearing too little etc but at the end of the day - the dude knew she was drunk and fucked her.

Unless you can be pretty sure she'd have done it without the booze I really don't think you should be having drunk sex. That's my opinion I don't know what the feminist establishment thinks.

I'd like to see a single solitary piece of evidence that Friedman ever called his economic theories "Darwinian economics". Darwinians of the 19th century were overwhelmingly reformists and not conservatives, and that is obviously carried on into the present era. Fulham just concocts strawman after strawman.

Every girl regrets it when she loses her virginity. Does that mean every guy who gets to fuck a virgin is comitting rape?

Draug, I am not sure how you could possibly know "every girl" as you seem to claim, but maybe your sample is based upon data indicating that every girl with whom you have had sex has regretted it. In my limited experience, not every girl regrets losing her virginity nor is regret or lack thereof an indication of rape. This may ease you mind with regard to possible charges.

BESM +1

Don't know what kind of sexually repressed girls you're meeting, Draugnar, but tell them to get out of the 1920's. They don't have to be housewives and cater to their husbands every whim anymore.

BESM +2
Or is it BDSM?

@Thucydides; yeah, don't cloud my statemnt by inserting what guys would an/or wouldn't do. If you think my comment was lacking the males role or perspective I think that from the 70’s through to the present it appears as though, talking to the same demographic and numbers of men this is what I have concluded; an almost equal percentages of guys are predators (“pigs”) under the scenario regardless of decade. That is why I didn’t really bring it up as the males role and perception hasn’t apparently changed about 5 out of 100 will attempt to take advantage for a vulnerable girl in the circumstance that I previously outlined. (this position/opinion was derived by talking to both guys and girls that graduated from the same private college preparatory school that graduated in ’79-’82 and ’08-’11)

I think that MAY BE that is why the woman's perspective has changed/evolved. 5 of the girls, in talking with them today, said that the additional ‘remorse/regret’ factor, as I understood them, had a two prong purpose; (1) it may make guys think twice and (2) allows some girls a more comfortable position/opportunity to talk about a possible ‘bad’ situation that had occurred.

5 in 100? you're an optimist

judging by how frequently i hear about that kind of shit and the number of times i've actually had to prevent it myself i'd say a lot more than 5 in 100 are capable of such an act.

maybe 5 in 100 will ever actually DO it, but more than 5% WOULD do it. a shame

the key words being capable~would~did. I have to say that my ‘test group’ is not the norm in that, as I said, "graduated from the same private college preparatory school" (meaning predominately white upper middle class and from an educated household).

I was referring to an earlier post which declared that if the girl regretted having sex then she wasn't 100% wanting it to begin with therefore she was raped. I can't speak for certainty to every girl regretting losing her virginity the next morning, true. That was possibly an incorrect assertion.

And in case you were wondering, I've been married 22 years, so I don't have a clue about first encounters and what is acceptable since I haven't been in the hunt since the late 80s.

All I'm going to say is that I feel that it is rape if a frat boy intentionally gets a girl many drinks with the objective of getting something sexual from her when she is drunk enough - this is no better than roofie-ing her, which is rape.

Not to mention the number of guys who come up to me at parties while I am taking care of a particularly intoxicated girl to inquire if I was going to "hit that" or if they could "share her" with me. Happens just about every single time. So yeah. I'm not super optimistic about inherent human nature lol.

@neverhurtstohelp, Thank you for an interesting post. I am not sure at all about the validity of the whole meme concept. I have great sympathy with Frachia and Lewontin where they write in the abstract to The Price of Metaphor:

.''The selectionist paradigm requires the reduction of society and culture to inheritance systems that consist of randomly varying, individual units, some of which are selected, and some not; and with society and culture thus reduced to inheritance systems, history can be reduced to "evolution." But these reductions, which are required by the selectionist paradigm, exclude much that is essential to a satisfactory historical explanation-particularly the systemic properties of society and culture and the combination of systemic logic and contingency. Now as before, therefore, we conclude that while historical phenomena can always be modeled selectionistically, selectionist explanations do no work, nor do they contribute anything new except a misleading vocabulary that anesthetizes history. ''

I actually agree with this initial hypothesis. It says to me; while evolution may describe the process by which we have five senses, forward eyes, superstitions, phobias, altruism, jaw bones and aggression . . .it really can't describe Hitler, Ghandi or even Bruce Campbell. To then reduce culture to analytical units (memes) for analysis is always "unsatisfying" . . . I agree. It doesn't refute the theory - it merely says the complexity is always out of reach. Science historically readily agrees with this stance as analogous to particle physics and astronomy - there is always more smaller and more bigger. Turtles all the way down so to speak.

The one ponderable that I find after reading the abstract was "systemic logic" and Kurt Goedel. Goedel proved (the word "proved" is not used here lightly or casually) that no closed system of logic based on axioms (simple truths) will ever be complete. Coming out of reductionism this holds. Metaphor, being essential to culture, is a faster way to process large chunks of shared emperical experience. To say we will never winnow our shared metaphors back down into basic components and lay them out for cold analysis is not just likely true, it is proven true. Yet I am uncertain how this implies culture does or does not evolve (change slowly over time) just because it defies complete analysis. It is like the US senate attempting to define pornography . . . "I'll know it when I see it" was all they could come up with as formal definition.

One interesting place that psychology is exploring in increasing earnest is Fairy Tales. There seems to be some very good thinking about how Fairy Tales may come as close as possible as windows into ancient archetypes for the human psyche. In terms of metaphors for analytic reduction to see culture, Fairy Tales have passed through time and conserved cultural metaphorical elements.

So the consensus appears to be that natural selection is completely lacking as an explanatory tool/model of human behaviour. This is both in the strict sense appertaining to genetic inheritance via genetic mutation and the resulting phenotype modification (plus interaction with a RANDOM environment), and also as a metaphor for cultural (etc.) transmission (memes for short).

I am sorry if I have laboured this point somewhat, but as a start in discussing the evolutionary paradigm it is a good idea if we can constrain the areas to which it may or may not apply. Human behaviour and relationships is not one of them. This is of relevance when discussing Dawkins' appallingly crass reaction to the incident discussed in this thread.

On the link between Friedman and social darwinism this is very clear, no doubt there is much else in the literature

Elegant Tombstones: A Note on Friedman's Freedom quick view
C. B. MacPherson Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Mar., 1968), pp. 95-106

''The first thing that strikes the political scientist about Capitalism and Free- dom is the uncanny resemblance between Friedman's approach and Herbert Spencer's. Eighty years ago Spencer opened his The Man versus the State by drawing attention to a reversal which he believed had taken place recently in the meaning of liberalism: it had, he said, originally meant individual market freedom as opposed to state coercion, but it had come to mean more state coercion in the supposed interest of individual welfare. Spencer assigned a reason: earlier liberalism had in fact abolished grievances or mitigated evils suffered by the many, and so had contributed to their welfare; the welfare of the many then easily came to be taken by liberals not as a by-product of the real end, the relaxation of restraints, but as the end itself. Spencer regretted this, without offering any evidence that market freedom ever was more basic, or more desired, than the maximization of wealth or of individual welfare. Professor Friedman does the same.''

fullhamish I take it you don't have much respect for the field of sociobiology or evolutionary pyschology?
I read a book last year called "why sex is fun" by Jared Diamond, which was about some aspects of human behavior and their evolutionary roots. While I can see that not all human behavior currently has an explanation rooted in natural selection, certainly there are some very plausible theories, so I don't agree that there is a consensus that natural selection has nothing to contribute on the subject.

All that book summary is is a comparison of the liberalism of two people, one who happens to be a Darwinian. Where does *Friedman* say anything about Darwin or Darwinism? Where does he call his brand of economics 'Darwinian economics'? Anyway these liberal market ideologies preceded Darwinism. If anything they can be attributed to the Manchester school.

And you hatchet men really have to get together and decide how you're going to brand Darwinism. Half the time you people are trying to attach it to socialism (after all, Marx had very positive things to say about Darwinism, as did Lenin), and the other half you're trying to affix Darwinism to the head of laissez faire economics. Make up your minds.