The opening paragraph made it clear that the writer, Matt Higgins, doesn't understand evolutionary theory. He writes:
Charles Darwin’s natural selection theory is being put to the test. Darwin’s theory expounded that organisms which can better adapt to their environment are more likely to survive and produce more offspring. However, a new study by British researchers reveals natural selection may be making society more unequal.Mr. Higgins implies that Darwin's theory states that evolution should produce greater social equality, but the theory suggests no such thing. In fact, it arguably suggests the opposite.
Mr. Higgins nevertheless cites research that has produced the almost banal finding that the lower socio-economic classes are, in evolutionary terms, outcompeting the upper classes:
Researchers from the University of East Anglia find that natural selection is favoring poorer people with little education. The study “shows how natural selection effects are stronger in groups with lower income and less education, among younger parents, people not living with a partner, and people with more lifetime sexual partners.”In short, the study found that the poorer, less educated demographic have more children than those who are wealthier and better educated and concludes that natural selection is making society more unequal. This doesn't seem at all surprising, but there's nothing in the research that contradicts evolutionary theory, nor, as far as I could tell from Mr. Higgins article, do the researchers make such a claim.
On the flip side, natural selection “is pushing against genes” associated with highly educated individuals, people who have more lifetime earnings, those who have a low risk of ADHD or major depressive disorders, and those with a lower risk of coronary artery disease.
In fact, Mr. Higgins seems to be under the misconception that natural selection should always lead to societies that enjoy greater degrees of social equality, but nothing in the theory suggests that that should be the case.
Evolutionary theorists maintain that natural selection, by a process called differential reproduction, leads to populations that are better suited for survival in their environment than were their predecessors.
If the poor are more reproductively successful than the wealthy it hardly follows that Darwin is being overturned. Nothing in the theory says that evolution should lead to greater social equality. Indeed, that notion smacks more of Marx than of Darwin.
If Darwinism is overturned it won't be by citing sociological examples of how it's actually being confirmed. It'll be by way of a paradigm shift triggered among younger theorists who've become disenchanted with the inability of the theory to explain the origin of life and the enormous evidence for purpose and intentional design in the biological world.
