This is a sort of interesting discussion, but it's tangential. You're reading too much into the image. It's just a slogan, and its intended meaning is pretty clear. In common discourse, "natural selection" is very loosely interchangeable with "evolution", and the word "evolved" is used synonymously with "intelligent", "sophisticated", and so on.
Yeah... considering how dead these forums tend to get, though, I'm inclined to indulge in any interesting conversation.
After 4.5 billions years, you'd think whatever we have to show is pretty great, but we're mostly scumbag idiots. Hitchens makes me feel better about being an h. sapien.
Here's the thing: this statement is ambiguous at best and self-contradictory at worst.
I guess what I'm trying to figure out is:
* Do you think people shouldn't behave like "scumbag idiots"?
* Do you think that 4.5 billion years of evolution should or shouldn't cause people to behave like scumbag idiots?
* Do you think that Hitchens, then, was or was not an outlier?
Yes, it's ambiguous, but I'm inclined to agree with Rule.
No, I don't think that people should behave like scumbag idiots. I think the world would be a better place if we had fewer scumbag idiots.
No, I don't think that 4.5 billion years will necessarily select for or against scumbag idiots. I'd just rather like it if we had fewer of them.
An outlier by what measure? Scumbag idiotude? I don't really know much about Hitchens' personal life. He may or may not have been a scumbag. He was certainly an outlier on the intelligence scale.
He was not afraid to slaughter sacred cows. One of his books is devoted to attacking Mother Teresa. Another one is entitled "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything".