[Buddha-l] Darwin's 200th centennial

[jkirk]

s.
I wonder if Darwinism can be applied to karma, i.e. if good karma
makes life last longer you have  more opportunity to generate
good karma than bad karma and everyone should have more good
karma in the long run. The amount of people with good karma
should grow as well.

-- 
Erik
=============

Intriguing question. These days I seem to be having two rather
different but maybe related musings about karma. One is that the
perception or awareness of it and its effects varies with one's
age. The other is that, as one grows older and sees as well as
experiences ever more, karma seems more like a cup under a
variably moving water source, that fills and empties, or steadies
on at varying degrees of full or empty. 
So it doesn't seem, to me anyway, that good karma or bad karma
(assuming one understands what they are, which I'm not sure of)
can be anything that grows or wanes exponentially, or even
steadily, fractally, or directionally. 
So I wonder how the evolution idea could be applied here......? 
Perhaps it could if one dumps the idea of evolution having a
telos, as it seems to have Darwinially (ever more successful
surviving and reproducing). And then, he didn't include in his
ideas the facts of geophysical changes and effects, did he?  So
any super-surviving entity's "success" could be wiped out like
the dinosaurs-- suggesting that smaller, even infinitesimal,
might be better under certain circumstances--or us if we aren't
careful.

Joanna