As permanent draught takes hold of the American Midwest, it will affect agricultural output there, and the Ukraine war will also affect food production. So, Canada might produce more food, if temperatures rise? Isn’t it natural to assume that what is now grown farther south, in a future of elevated temperatures, might grow well in the north?

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No, it is not Darwinism, for in his The Dsecent of Man from the 1870s Darwin extended natural selection to include emotions; it is the individuals who are to reproduce that transmit their genes to the next generation. And the process of dating does not proceed by rape. Then there is a debate concerning “group selection”, and whether there is a selective mechanism at that level. Then it shifts a little back and forth, with inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism) making an occasional comeback until the modern synthesis between Darwin and Mendel in the 1930. But these days, horizontal gene transfer and several other mechanisms continue to blur the image a little. And Gould’s old calculations that made directed evolution improbable have also been challenged in computer models, and where they have landed, I do not actually know, since it has been some years since I even thought about this subject. What you are talking about is probably Herbert Spencer, who by some weird coincidence (or perhaps it was intended?), is buried next to his ideological opposite, Karl Marx, in a London cemetery. It is from Spencer that many such things have emerged. His influence upon the robber barons and the shaping of the American right was considerable.

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What was she doing there?

If you live your life waiting for confirmation from others you always be disappointed. However, if you live to annoy others…

That people start open newssites is good, but if it is not commercially run, the issue of the backer’s influence will always be there. I still hope they make it work, but that they make clear these things.