Dawkins, Downs, Domenica and Darwin

Dominic Lawson wrote in the Sunday Times about his beloved daughter Domenica, who has Down's syndrome and like some 97% of others with the mutation is glad to be alive. According to some research which her father cited. He is disgusted by Richard Dawkins recent pronouncement about the immorality of allowing children with Down's to be born.

Interesting to note that Mr Lawson says he is an atheist who has collaborated with Dawkins on a book.

Read the item in full if you can, can't link. Lawson lambasts Dawkins for his inhumanity and skewers him for his weaselly 'non apology' (after many of his followers protested on behalf of Down's people they knew and loved). He also rightly draws attention to the German philosophers of the last century whose writings fed into Nazi politics. Fair play, but it seems to me that Dominic Lawson wants to have his cake and eat it.

Morality, including human rights, is either God given and therefore immutable, or else it is whatever we say it is, 'we' being the strong. In the Darwinian ethic which despite Lawson's contortions does in fact arrive in the train of his biological determinism, the fit survive by displacing-i.e. killing, the weak.

In the end it is Christ or Darwin. Dawkins, in his original assertion that Downs'  children should be killed, knew this. The philosophers who inspired Hitler's eugenics were themselves inspired by Darwin. Richard Weikart had written this up in meticulous detail in his massively ignored book 'From Darwin to Hitler'. You won't easily find a copy but try Googling it if you dare.

It gets even sillier when you think about fellow evolutionist Steve Jones comments a few years back about human evolution stopping due to fewer older men having children. Not enough mutations you see. Because mutations take evolution forward.

Except that they don't. Downs' syndrome is a mutation. Why don't evolutionists welcome it?

Morality of survival of the fittest

..of course, if you actually read Darwin, it has really always been about 'non survival of the least fit'. Like kids with Down's Syndrome, which is of course a mutation.

The amateur philosopher Richard Dawkins is in the news again after stating that it is 'immoral' to allow a child with Down's Syndrome to be born, i.e. immoral NOT to kill them in the womb by abortion. His fellow atheist philosopher Stephen Pinker would go further, Google his views on infanticide.

The most interesting aspect of this conversation is Dawkins' use of the term 'immoral'.  Just what does he mean by morality? By what standard? Answerable to whom? Why? How is there any morality in his godless, accidental universe as we while away our pointless lives in the interval between the big bang and the heat death of the pointless universe?

Just what does Dawkins, or any of us, mean by appealing to 'morality'?

I know. But do you?
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