Sublime

desiccation

In the early twentieth century, the most progressive minds in the American establishment embraced eugenics—the pseudoscience of improving the race through controlled breeding. Leading churchmen endorsed the idea, saying it would improve society through applied science. It fell to Catholics and Protestant fundamentalists to object to eugenics on

“Is the immune system at the heart of a new incarnation of social Darwinism that allows people of different ‘quality’ to be distinguished from each other?” asks the anthropologist Emily Martin.

“It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.” Richard Feynman

even at one of the world’s great academic medical centers you can easily declare yourself an expert in a condition that no one else wants to deal with.

Similarly, the objection is that if our moral beliefs have been shaped by evolution, then we can’t have any confidence in them because evolution aims, not at truth, but at survival. Our moral beliefs will be selected for their survival value, not for their truth. So we can’t trust our moral experience and therefore don’t know if premise 2 is true.