| | Without first addressing the substance of my remarks on Rand and biology, I would first like to address my Jesus analogy.
I said:
"Just as Jesus preached that there were many mansions in his father's house, because he was an urbanized man living in a patriarchical society, Rand's view of man is that of a sophisticated urbanized creature, anything below which is a savage or a witch-doctor whose failure is due to a lack of focus. Biology to Rand seems to have meant birth control."
Consider only what I said about Jesus for the moment. Jesus was a Jew who believed nominally in an all-powerful supreme creator deity. Humans are fragile and parochial beings we live in homes, and for the most part in cities or other settlements. At the time of Jesus, most cities were in some way fortified if not otherwise isolated from harm. Jerusalem, in addition to being a walled city, the ofttimes political and post-Babylonian cultic capital of the Judean state, was also built on a hill.
The residence of a king might therefore naturally be seen as a mansion within this city, and given that it was the residence of a king, that mansion would be expected to showcase extravagant wealth appropriate to the status of a king.
Now, the creator of the universe, which at the time of Jesus was believed by most to be the earth, surrounded by a world ocean, and nestled under the dome of heaven across which the planets - which included the Sun and Moon transited, and outside of which shell perhaps existed some flame or light that shone through to us as the fixed stars, would, if he were just a man writ large, perhaps choose to live in some great mansion in some great city somewhere befitting his status.
This may seem naive to us who see God as an immanent or transcendent being as taught by believers nowadays. Why should a being who created the andromeda galaxy need a roof and four walls around him, or indeed a throne or a home at all? Was he afraid of barbarian invaders or inclement weather? But the church teaches that God is revealed to man in a way that man can understand him. We forgive this naive notion, even though, if he were divine and omniscient, one would think that at least Jesus would know better. Perhaps he was God incarnate talking down to mere mortals. Or perhaps he was a theologically unsophisticated charismatic ethical teacher who either did not know better, or did not trouble himself with the details in the way that a scholastic might, since he believed that the day of judgment was immanent, and it was more important to save souls than to study cosmology and theology.
Now, let us look at Rand and her view of ethics. Rand teaches that man's life is, and only life indeed could be the source of an objective ethics, since indestructible, nonvolitional and nonliving beings do not need values. She would have seen the problem with saying that God lives in a mansion with many rooms immediately.
Yet Rand's idea of life was not a biological idea based on an understanding of evolution, development, ecology, phylogeny, genetic variation, or the nature of species not as types with essences, but as populations that are reproductively isolated from other populations. Her concept of life was that of a philosopher who understands enough to define and differentiate the living from the non-living, but not as an expert on the nature of animal species qua animal species. Rand herself, when questioned about evolution, said that it seemed plausible, but that she did not know enough about it to make a pronouncement.
The only problem with this is that if one is going to make life the basis for one's ethics and is going to thus implicitly rely upon a biological theory of human nature for one's ethical system, one is going to have to understand at least the fundamentals of evolution in order to make any meaningful and rigorous statements about what life is or what man's animal nature is. This claim that life cannot be understood in any way beyond that of the pre-scientific is the central complaint of those (correct) scientists who claim that biology cannot be taught without reference to evolution. Indeed, nothing in biology can be integrated beyond a pre-scientific level without an evolutionary perspective.
And an evolutionary perspective requires that one understand that species are populations, which, if sufficiently isolated from their closest relatives, may be "defined" by specific traits, but that species themselves are not concepts. Specie in the biological sense is a concept, but a species itself is not a concept, but is a population. Taxonomic groups have phylogenies - family trees. But they do not have essences per se. This statement may seem wrongheaded to Aristotelians. But it is established biological science, an unquestioned consensus view since Ernst Mayr and other such as Julian Huxley elucidated what is called the Grand Synthesis of Darwinian evolution, Mendelian genetics and population ecology in the middle of the 20th century.
Thus, when Rand speaks of man's "essential" trait, she may be making a valid observation which holds in so far as Homo sapiens is a very well defined group far removed from its closest relatives, and it shares many innovative traits such as bipedality and relative hairlessness and a conceptual linguistic faculty that differentiate it radically from its closest relatives who are languageless quadrupeds covered in fur. But Homo sapiens is a species, not a concept. Triangle is a concept. If you have more or less than three sides and three angles, you are not a triangle. But if you can breed with or are the product of the breeding of other members of the population Homo sapiens, then whether you are an ancephalic pinhead or a dolicholcephalic genius, whether you are a trader, or a rapist, or a murderer, or a lunatic; whether you have no limbs, or six digits on each, you are a human. If you wish to differentiate between being a Man and being a human, one can do that as a philosophical position. But one cannot deny the humanity of Adolph Hitler, or Terri Schiavo, or Osama Bin Laden, or Ayn Rand on a biological basis.
Just as Jesus anthropomorphized God, Rand made humanity not a biological species, but a philosophical concept. Not recognizing this fact opens up her theory to criticisms from scientists as being abiological and from hostile philosophers as being naively equivocal. I agree in essence with her arguments as they apply to adult human persons of the eusocial type - a concept which I have alluded to, and which I shall address later. My criticisms are meant not to tear down what Rand wishes to build, but to fix the flaws in its foundations.
Ted Keer, 14 December, NYC
This post is written without editing except for spell check.
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My answer in post 12 was addressed directly to Pete's original question as was Ed's in post #13. Yet even if what I said there makes us uncomfortable, the truth is that if people do indeed exist whose constitutions make them so incapable of happiness through the normal means that they are driven to kill then it is stil "right" for these serial killers and such to act on their natures. To some extent how they act is still open to them, as is our response up to us. While the effect is different, since ideally homosexuality is consensual, many homosexuals will resist their urges until late in life (after they have hurt themselves and perhaps many others) or will let their repressed natures drive them mad or to other perversions in societies where homosexual expression is forbidden, as in the tragic case of Alan Turing. The homosexual and the natural born killer are politically two different things altogether. But as variants on the heterosexual and eusocial norm, they are presumably analogous in many ways.
(1) I said that they appear as if they belonged almost to different genera, not that they did.