[Donald Rumsfeld Fan]

People keep saying this, but it's just plain nonsense. For example, the transition from slavery to Jim Crowism to petty discrimination to near-equality is evolution, not "degeneration"

It depends on the time frame you are looking at. Some times we evolve ....some times we devolve.....depends on the era. In good economic times we tend to morally devolve.....bad times tend to reverse the process.

[falkayn]

Actually, it's more often the other way around -- in bad economic times, people start climbing over the backs of others (e.g. much of the motivation for Jim Crow was to try to restore something of the destroyed Southern economy by re-establishing de facto slavery).