By this means males who commit infanticide make their genes more frequent in the population.

I call: BS.

To be fair, many evolutionary explanations are just as manufactured–only the mechanism is different. If I tell you animal X has a certain trait, you can come up with an explanation of why that trait is adaptive, but that doesn’t mean you’re right. Evolutionists do themselves a disservice with this practice sometimes, and should stick to the data/evidence.

For those of you who still doubt ID, I urge you to watch this 1 min video that PROVES beyond doubt that the Christian God is the designer. It also has Kirk Cameron from growing pains (I love him! But not his “Boner” friend).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-OLG0KyR4

On the other hand, if something is found that contradicts ‘biblical theory’ (snigger) it is brushed under the carpet and ignored by those religious types. In their head, it just goes in that big overflowing box marked, ‘I’m sure God will explain this later’.

In your article, talking about attempting to understand infanticide without the insight of evolutionary theory, you say “we wouldn’t have any knowledge about why such a thing is wrong”. I think really it tells us why such a thing is ~right~, it’s a subtle difference but my point is that the world is not founded on human values as the bible assumes.

Incidentally, the theory of evolution doesn’t just apply to genetic traits, it also is relevant to socially inherited behavioural traits. Consider a social grouping that teaches violence and killing of outsiders eg through the vehicle of religion, you can imagine how that grouping might be more likely to prevail over any peaceful neighbouring clans. So it is not necessary for infanticide to have purely genetic origins for it to be subject to evolutionary theory.

Another possible hot potato similar to infanticide is the crime of rape. How is it intelligent to design females which are not better able to defend themselves against such vile aggression? It is not intelligent, except from the ’survival is the only judge’ perspective (ie evolution), where it makes perfect sense. It’s another example of how nature is clearly not subject to human concepts of morality.

I’m in agreement with you, and think that even if we do turn out to have genes that influence behavior we find objectionable, we still can’t blame them for what we do. Too many people overcome their genes and/or their socialization through the awesome power of their cognition, will, force of personality, or whatever you want to call it, to believe that we are all slaves to our genotype or phenotype.

If the city of Ai existed, and if that massacre did take place (the Old Testament is a crap historical source), then this was because of decisions by a military commander at the time. He would not even have seen most of the children of Ai. There’s no mechanism to to transfer a visceral realisation that he was killing children from the town to his brain, where any genetic predisposition for infanticide could have come into play, like in the head of a male bear.

Human brains are Turing machines. They will run almost any program you plug into them by socialisation. We can’t blame our genes for our crimes.

Kudos ^_^