.

This is where the seeming polarities in the heated debate over creationism and evolution find common ground.
The insistent denial that our social constructs shape the race.

This seemed to me to say what you’re saying. If social constructs only shape the race by natural selection on genes, we’ll be hard put to continue a given social construct long enough to matter much.

But when I look closer it looks like he might be arguing only for genetic evolution.

People do tend to learn how to optimise their results within whatever flexibility their genes allow. And that can be a quick process—but it doesn’t produce immutable changes, either. Change the environment and people will move to some other optimum.

Like, russia has a long tradition of bureaucracy. They say that Czar Alexander said on his deathbed, “I never ruled Russia. Ten thousand clerks ruled Russia.” And russians have a long tradition about how to deal with bureaucracy. Bureaucrats lie, they develop an “official truth” which is convenient to the organisation. And over time “convenience to the organisation” becomes the primary virtue.

Americans don’t have a long tradition of bureaucracy. Lincoln ran the Civil War with 30 clerks. We started our big government expansion under Rooseveldt—during the ‘30’s and ‘40’s the population of Washington, DC consistently grew faster than planned, so that the sewage treatment plants never kept up. It was only when the ‘70’s environmentalists got excited about water quality that they bothered to predict the growth well enough to clean up the Potomac.

But in less than 75 years we’ve caught up with russian expertise about bureaucracies. People who join them know how to behave in them, people who have to deal with them know what to expect.

It’s human nature to respond to our surroundings as best we can. So people who get to set up those surroundings have a lot of responsibility, to the extent they actually do get to set up the surroundings.

Sorry for my lack of clarity. I was suggesting that what is loosely called “human nature” may be subject to a confusion of levels. At one level (the genetic) it may be regarded as fixed for practical purposes due to the long timescale. At another level (the cultural) it is more fluid. Confusion between the two levels can lead to people talking past each other. If by Darwinian evolution Rollo meant genetic evolution, then that is a point of disagreement between us, but, even if that was the case, then I believe that Rollo’s point can be resurrected at the memetic level. Regardless of whether you accept the fine detail of the more extravagant claims for memes, the unarguable progress of material science through a memetic process is highly persuasive that human nature as expressed through socialisation within an evolving tradition of polictical philosophy can be evolutionary.

I suspect that the essence of your point is correct, but feel that you would be on firmer ground if you identified the Darwinian evolution that is inconsistent with immutable human nature as being memetic rather than genetic. The difference in timescale must be crucial. To invoke genetic evolution in this context is to ape the style of those who say that global warming is nothing to worry about because we are due for another ice age.

Peter Unger, by the way, has taken Peter Singer’s ideas to a new extreme in his (possibly not entirely serious) book Living High and Letting Die, but his work is very flawed. For one thing it doesn’t take into account all the other things you could be doing apart from giving money to charity, and what effect they would have on the world, a rather elementary mistake.

He might claim that that doesn’t matter, but of course he’d be wrong on that – it’s fine to have a philosophical argument about charitable giving but once you start making substantive moral claims – which he does – you have to back them up.

“I agree with all that, Jonah. The thing that troubles me is, that while liberalism is a terrific aspiration, it may, like most of Christ’s injunctions, be asking too much of human nature. Which DOES exist. And in our understanding of which, we are just beginning to pass from the realm of tradition, opinion, and prejudice, into the realm of cold scientific fact.”

A valid position, but one that, I think, is actually open to argument. I’ve seen a lot of writing, for instance, by both left-wing Christians and hardcore utilitarians like Peter Singer that promote ideals of generosity that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for most human beings to follow: that we should literally think of suffering strangers on the other side of the world as being as personally important to us as our families, and give of ourselves not until we’ve hit some magic percentage, but until it almost destroys us. They acknowledge the impossibility or near-impossibility of actually living this way, but argue that it’s important to keep impossibly uncompromising ideals in mind so that we always try to do better and never, ever become satisfied that we’ve done enough.

Personally, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Followed more widely, it may well increase the amount of generosity in an ungenerous world, but it verges on a kind of masochism. If everyone seriously tried to live this way, the world would grind to a halt, but on the other hand everyone doesn’t seriously try to live this way, so the impossible ideal might be useful as a way of nagging our insensitive minds into doing better.

Here’s the thing: At times I have a go at thinking this way, but become so distressed and self-critical that I become irritating for other people to be around. That makes me think that there’s something wrong with this point of view if taken really seriously, but it could just be my own failing.

(1a) I care less about Egyptians than Americans.
(1b) I don´t care about Egyptians.

(2a) I didn´t cry after reading the article.
(2b) I lost interest at once and stopped reading.

Then try to defend the ones which Derbyshire actually made, rather than the other ones. Ok?