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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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Your interpretation is not wholly off the mark, but more specifically I wanted @Tretiak to be explicit about the assumptions he is smuggling in. Evolution did not meaningfully intend for us to do anything, unless you believe in some flavour of supernatural will driving it; but without that you are really left with some statement along the lines of your ancestors reproducing having been causal to your existence (indisputable) + evolution probably having optimised you to pursue it (but this latter statement has a lot of obligatory footnotes that seem highly relevant to this question). So does he believe that there is some moral obligation to engage in the things that some process in the past optimised you for? Does he believe that not doing so locally, or globally, leads to unhappiness? Does he believe in some sort of duty to replicate the actions of your ancestors, along the lines of Tanner Greer's "procession of the centuries" (I can never shill this essay enough)? Each of those unpacked statements can be defended, as well as argued against, in a way that produces interesting discussion. On the other hand, just slapping a fancy label like "biological purpose" on it and refusing to elaborate seems to be a rhetorical trick that is designed to make that discussion impossible, instead just bamboozling people by keeping the different interpretations in convenient superposition.

(On the meta level, I do stand by the appropriateness of some degree of playing dumb as a response to obscurantism. If someone doesn't want me to get the true essence of their point, why should I be obliged to try and guess and walk into some rhetorical trap they have prepared?)