Originally posted by ngtm1r
If you wish to argue semantics, I would point out that every creature on the planet makes some attempt to carry forward its line. How you wish to state that is also irrevalent.
Is evolution a die roll? Something guides it. Somehow certain things live and certain things die. Some are favored over others.
No, evolution is not predictable, but it is not a game of dice. The end results are not totally random.
While you point out how evolution does in fact discriminate, you don't explain how this means that there is 'correct evolution' that produces 'natural creatures' and 'incorrect evolution' that produces 'unnatural creatures'.
And evolution is a game of dice. If mutation is a die roll, then evolution is what happens when you get to roll the die again if you roll the right number beforehand and write down all the numbers. Oversimplified, yes, but the point is that evolution isn't led along the 'correct' path, 'pulled' into rolling sixes first time around, but pushed into paths that eventually turn out to be good ones - rolling and rerolling until you get a six, or a five, or maybe a four.
I spoke of what happens in the natural world. And yes, I know what you're going to cite, and I can cite huge numbers of counterexamples.
If we are indeed talking about what happens in the natural world, then how can gays be unnatural? They are products of the natural world just as much as straight people are.
Unless you start off with the idea that homosexuality is unnatural, in which case you aren't basing stuff off the real world but what you think ought to be happening instead.
To make this post slightly more on-topic: I found myself agreeing with Phillip Pullman when, in an article he wrote for one of the newspaper supplements, he pointed out that literalist interpretations of holy books like the Bible and the Qu'ran were a cancerous blight on our fair society because they failed to realise that the books were written in a time of
mythos, where what was important was the
meaning of things. Nowadays, we're all into
logos - what stuff actually is - which is ideal for science, but not quite so awesome when it comes to a fundamentally parable- and story-based piece of writing.
