Here are the main points—but you should read the whole thing.
- Primordial catalysts were probably not proteins nor RNA
- First Energy Source Likely Involved Proton Gradients
- Knowledge of New Bacterial Kingdoms Downplays Role of Fermentation In First Cells
While Miller and his fellow “soupists” blazed the initial paths in origins of life research, a startling new era dawned in the 80s with the discovery of potential life-sustaining factories in the most unlikely environments. The finding that life thrives in deep hydrothermal vents opened a whole new chapter in the field, again avowedly chemical. Black smoker chimneys located miles beneath the ocean have for millions of years been orchestrating a tumultuous union of hot, metal-rich, acidic chemicals arising from volcanic vents with cool alkaline waters. The unholy meeting of these two chemical opposites leads to a violent precipitation of minerals including the silicate mineral olivine, one of the most ubiquitous components of our planet’s rocky landscape. The precipitation of these minerals results in chimney like structures that can be miles high. The convecting thermal currents in these chimneys provide an abundant source of life’s sine qua non – energy. The metals can act as catalysts for simple reactions which involve sulfur, carbon monoxide and water. In recent years, because of the sheer energy hidden inside them, their capacity to catalyze key reactions like the Krebs cycle and concentrate reactants and products in microscopic pores and the uncanny resemblance of some of the iron and sulfur compounds to crucial iron-sulfur cores found in proteins, these mighty smokers have been considered by many scientists to precede or at least accompany the origin of life on the surface. Prominent among the “smokers” are scientists like Nick Lane and the patent attorney Günter Wächterhäuser who moonlights in the field as a “hobby”. These theories provide the “metabolism first” counterpart to the “replication first” camp. Together they may account for both genetic inheritance and chemical metabolism.It doesn't matter whether you're a soupist or a smoker but you'd better be aware of the controversy. Too many scientists think that the primordial soup is still the best, and only, game in town in spite of its severe problems.
359 comments :
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 359 of 359Correction: It should read "... this point has been apparent to me from the beginning."
My purpose for making that point is that it is true. If I'd found out that the case absolving Charles Darwin from being the inspiration of eugenics was true, I'd make that case. I said that A.R. Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection was a vigorous opponent of eugenics so my motive wasn't to indict natural selection, itself.
I suppose, as I said above, I think maintaining Darwin as the mascot of evolutionary science is a big mistake that will do science no good, I'm trying to show just how hard it will be to sell him to an already skeptical public. Though I suspect that's fairly hopeless as so many have bought the phony myth of the man.
I wonder who else is noticing that this thread shows that eugenics is clearly not dead among the new atheists.
[...] the originator of German eugenics, Schallmayer, was also inspired, independently by his reading of On the Origin of Species,[...]
Nope, definitely no linkage between Darwin and Hitler going on here! What was I thinking?
I think the main reason for Darwin's iconic status is the beard. Huxley had a stab with his mutton-chop whiskers, and Wallace did a fair job on the face furniture front, but Darwin nailed it. I wonder when he first got the idea? I like to think of him shaving, at anchor off the Galapagos, rubbing his chin in the mirror ... "I wonder how I'd look if ... Crikey, look at all those finches!".
Rumracket, I am led to conclude that you might need remedial reading lessons as well as help with logic and basic scholarship. J Thomas would seem to need those at least as much, which is peculiar considering what he gets paid for doing.
There isn't any reason for me to state my purpose again as I've plainly done so when asked, several times already.
Well, you can blame Schallmayer for citing Charles Darwin in his writing and Leonard Darwin for explicitly saying that it was On the Origin of Species that inspired German eugenics.
As I pointed out, Charles Darwin died April 19,1882, Hitler was born, April 20, 1889. Darwin had been dead seven years and a day when Hitler was born. I doubt Charles Darwin anticipated the event, his dumbbell of a son and the rest of genteel eugenics didn't seem to see it coming during the 1930s. His grandson Charles Galton Darwin was still promoting eugenics in the 1950s.
What I said here is a matter of the historical record. You haven't refuted any of what I said. I'm not required to lie about the written and historical records to make you happy. There isn't any reason not to mention it.
As I also said, you're the one who opened the door on the topic of German eugenics by lying about what I'd said about Hitler. Haeckel is only one of several links between Darwin and German eugenics, and German eugenics was what fueled the Nazis, encouraged by the success of eugenicists in the United States. That is also part of the historical record that is there for anyone to read.
TTC, there may be a 200-message limit on posts. Maybe you are wasting your efforts even more than usual. I have started getting short blurbs in the Recent Comments section and then I don't find the actual posts. Like:
The Thought Criminal wrote...
Rumracket, I am led to conclude that you might need remedial reading lessons as well as help with logic and basic scholarship. J Thomas would seem to need those at least as much, which is peculiar...
Whoops! It just showed up. There's a "more" button at the bottom. Never mind.
My purpose for making that point is that it is true.
OK, Darwin grew hedge-parsley in his garden. This is also documented to be true. Why don't you tell us repeatedly about that one instead? I think you have some deeper motive than simply that you think it is true.
If I'd found out that the case absolving Charles Darwin from being the inspiration of eugenics was true, I'd make that case.
You use that word "absolve". As if there's some moral issue involved. Isn't it possible that your sense of morality has something to do with all this?
J Thomas, I don't get the point that you, not TTC, is trying to make. Or rather, I don't get why you are trying to make it. You don't see a 'moral issue' regarding the topic of eugenics? Moreover, why is it so important to you to rehabilitate the word? You keep writing that it is 'good' except when it is 'done wrong'. I wonder if you have any appreciation for how insensitive that sounds to, probably, 90% of the world's population. It's almost as if you want to say, "Wanton and merciless destruction is good", and then, when called on it, point out that you were merely referring to mosquitoes and dangerous microbes.
People tend to be very, very sensitive to certain words, usually with very good reasons, and you seem eager to tromp over these sensitivities with combat boots.
I recall that you did the same thing which led to a lengthy thread on the Hiroshima post, when you basically played devil's advocate on behalf of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, even though that led to human experimentation in Manchuria, the Rape of Nanking, and other atrocities concerning which the Chinese and Koreans still hold rancor toward Japan to this very day. Perhaps you think you are appearing cool, rational and fair by arguing in this manner. But to me, and I would imagine many others, you merely come across as cold and insensitive.
J Thomas, you would seem to have arrived at your opinions on this topic without ever having read a single thing about it, except, perhaps, that pamphlet by Karl Pearson I linked to, perhaps supplemented to a trip to Wikipedia to find out a tiny bit about who Karl Pearson was. As you found the discussion of the advantages of lots of babies dying and women dying funny, I'm surprised you don't go looking for more such laughs.
That makes whatever you have to say on this topic uninformed, based on nothing. While that can clearly get you agreement by other, similarly uninformed people, it makes your opinion worthless.
I frequently find that's the case in these blog discussions around Charles Darwin and other topics culturally related to this one.
I'd be curious to find out how you teach, with your level of intellectual engagement and how you keep a job.
Apparently J Thomas thinks growing parsley is of the same historical importance as the creation of a pseudo-science that led to massive violations of human rights, the forced sterilization of minorities and others, and what German eugenics, Rassenhygiene, really was, including that tiny, historically and culturally unimporant detail of mass murder.
The discussion in Germany was already well on its way to that end by the time Darwin died. One of the major themes of Haeckel, Schallmayer and others was that people shouldn't be seen as possessing anything other than material status, including their lives being seen as of variable value and that they, we, have no absolute right to live. And, as his correspondence shows, he was well aware of what German eugenicists were up to.
About the myth that Social Darwinism was a distortion of Charles Darwin's thinking, in looking around the Darwin Correspondence Project yesterday, I came across this.
Darwin to Fick, Heinrich 26 July [1872]
Summary: Thanks HF for his essay ["Über den Einfluss der Naturwissenschaft auf das Recht", Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 18 (1872): 248–77]. CD gives views favouring competition among trades unions and the working classes.
The full text of this letter is not yet available online.
Since I interpret that title to mean "The Influence of Science on The Law" and the mention of trade unions and, especially "the working class", in the context of this discussion, I was curious to find out if that "not yet available" letter had ever been published and found out that it has.
July 26 [1872]
Down
Beckenham, Kent
Dear Sir
I am much obliged for your kindness in having sent me your essay, which I have read with very great interest. Your view of the daughters of short-lived parents inheriting property at an early age, and thus getting married with its consequences, is an original and quite new idea to
me. — So would have been what you say about soldiers, had I not read an article published about a year ago by a German (name forgotten just at present) who takes nearly the same view with yours, and thus accounts for great military nations having had a short existence.
I much wish that you would sometimes take occasion to discuss an allied point, if it holds good on the continent,—namely the rule insisted on by all our Trades-Unions, that all workmen,—the good and bad, the strong and weak,—sh[oul]d all work for the same number of hours and receive the same wages. The unions are also opposed to piece-work,—in short to all
competition. I fear that Cooperative Societies, which many look at as the main hope for the future, likewise exclude competition. This seems to me a great evil for the future progress of mankind. — Nevertheless under any system, temperate and frugal workmen will have an advantage and leave more offspring than the drunken and reckless.—
With my best thanks for the interest which I have received from your Essay, and with my
respect, I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully
Ch. Darwin
Darwinism as politics and, it would seem, the law. Social Darwinism from Charles Darwin. And, for those who will probably claim he would have been unaware because of language barriers, he seems to have read the essay.
I've got to wonder, after those Haeckel letters mentioned above were, also, untranscribed, a work of, maybe, five or even fifteen minutes apiece, why those particular letters seem to be being withheld by The Project, after they've obviously been read.
Apparently J Thomas thinks growing parsley is of the same historical importance as the creation of a pseudo-science that led to massive violations of human rights
No. My point is that you keep refusing to say about your own intentions. People ask you why you harp on this, and you say only that it's true. But of course, your reason is more than truth, you also think it is important. You do say that eugenics is important and evil, and you point to books that describe how it was done wrong, but when asked you still say nothing about your intentions.
Let's say for the sake of argument that Darwin was an evil social darwinist, and that anybody who thinks too much about natural selection will inevitably turn into an evil social darwinist, and that anybody who hopes to improve the genes of any human population will inevitably violate everybody's civil rights. (That might go farther than you want to go, but if so you can say how far you want to go with it. All you have actually asserted is that Darwin said some things that are currently not PC but that were considered acceptable in his time, and that he did not reject early eugenics enthusiasts in his own time.)
If all that is true, what do you want us to do about it? Should we give up thinking about natural selection because that approach to science will make us turn evil? Should we arrange methods to keep mad scientists from getting control of the government and starting abusive eugenics programs?
What is your point?
If it is only that Darwin did not have the instincts that have been conditioned into many of us by propaganda about Nazis etc, so what? How could he have? And what difference does that make today?
You don't see a 'moral issue' regarding the topic of eugenics?
It's of course morally wrong to hurt people who have a right not to be hurt.
In the late 1800's as the industrial revolution paid off suddenly there was far more wealth than before, and governments could take a much bigger share of the wealth without people noticing because they were getting more too. The concept developed that governments should be able to control everything. That concept was much less real in the days when the government share of the workforce had to be rather less than 10% and the government budget was likewise restricted. The idea of a totalitarian authoritarian government spread. Governments could use science to find out things that individual citizens could not know for themselves, and then enforce better methods to make everyone's lives better, despite superstition etc. It was a powerful idea but it did not live up to its promises.
Science was not so good at finding out the things that governments needed to know. The discovery of vitamins was good, and governments could require vitamin supplements to be added to cheap food so that poor military conscripts would be healthier. Public health approaches reduced the incidence of STDs and tuberculosis etc. It was probably an improvement to get the addictive drugs out of patent medicines and junk foods. Of course civil engineering was on the whole a great success.
Out of the big failures we developed the idea that individuals have rights that their governments must accept. (The concept was of course present before, but in the old days governments *had* to be weak.) In the USA we now have the Libertarian movement that wants government cut back to the point it would be harmless, even while government gains more ability to pick dissenting individuals out of the herd and deal with them.
Before we can deal with questions of how to improve human genetics, we must consider everybody's right and also look carefully at what we think would be improvements.
Moreover, why is it so important to you to rehabilitate the word? You keep writing that it is 'good' except when it is 'done wrong'. I wonder if you have any appreciation for how insensitive that sounds to, probably, 90% of the world's population.
If we spend too much of our efforts trying to come up with PC phrasing, it becomes hard to say anything real. If you let the PC thought police control not just your vocabulary but your thinking, it becomes hard to think at all.
...the Hiroshima post, when you basically played devil's advocate on behalf of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere...
You didn't read carefully. The japanese were doing what they thought they had to, to achieve their goals. Their goals -- maintain their population and their culture in a decent lifestyle without being controlled by foreign colonialists -- were not unreasonable. The things they felt forced to do to achieve those simple goals got worse and worse.
I was not at all saying that what they did was right. I said that what they did was not so very different from everybody else. Each nation has its goals, that it tries to accomplish, and when those goals get hard the people try to be hard enough to go ahead.
Notice the USA running missions for flying death robots to kill civilians in foreign nations that they think are terrorists because of eavesdropped phone conversations. If someone had told Americans 65 years ago that this would happen, I doubt they would believe it. Civilized nations don't do things like that! But we do, because we think we have to, otherwise the terrorists will come here and sabotage us. A lot of Americans don't even think there's anything wrong with it.
Of course that's on a far lesser scale. We have not done anything nearly as bad as the japanese did in WWII. Because we have not needed to. If the USA ever sees the urgent need to do ethnic cleansing in, say, Alberta, complete with mass institutional rape, would we? Yes. Without a lot of argument except from a small highly-vocal minority that might not be silenced. But only if we thought it was *necessary*. The USA would never do that sort of thing gratuitously.
Does that sound to you like a defense of WWII Japan? I sure didn't mean it that way.
My point is that you keep refusing to say about your own intentions.
As I've stated my intention to you, at your request, perhaps a half-dozen times, your repeating this is a lie. My intention is to state the truth about Charles Darwin being the inspiration of eugneics. I originally made that point in this thread, in response to a false characterization of what I'd said previously by Miller, in relation to German eugenics and also British eugenics. The discussion developed from there.
The people denying that Darwin was the inspiration of eugenics in both countries, and by extension, elsewhere, have produced not a single piece of documentary evidence to refute the case. I believe I'm the only one who has supported what was said on that subject in this discussion.
You and Rumracket want to rehabilitate one of the most seriously criminal uses that alleged science has been put to in the history of science. Which is both appalling and which provides an insight into a a dangerous ideological position that is current online. It would be as irresponsible as the pre-war eugenicists and those who blithely accepted their tripe as science to ignore the potential for history repeating itself.
As that last letter from Charles Darwin to Fick shows, the Social Darwinists and eugenicists were the ones pushing what is more like the U.S. libertarian line in politics, today. As I pointed out the far right pushes a social policy that has been identical to that made by Darwinists for most of the history of Darwinism, becoming somewhat unfashionable only after people got a good look at what Darwinism as politics could lead to.
I've recently been writing about how many of those who believe they are liberals are really just liberalish libertarians, the usual ideological divide is a belief in materialism. Materialism is fundamentally fatal to liberalism. You can't see people as objects and still believe that they have real, inherently possessed rights and that that fact requires the unwilling to observe those rights. Having people as objects instead of beings having more than material existence was one of the explicitly stated goals of Darwin's earliest followers, including Galton, Huxley, Schallmayer, Haeckel, and others. Eugenics was dependent on that view of people. If you read the original eugenicists, you would find you didn't have to take my word for that, they said so, explicitly.
Here,from The Descent of Man(before Darwin's mealy mouthed demural I mentioned)
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
And a footnote on that point,from that essay I wrote:
You might want to contrast the content and tone with this passage, not much farther on into the book.
Man accumulates property and bequeaths it to his children, so that the children of the rich have an advantage over the poor in the race for success, independently of bodily or mental superiority. On the other hand, the children of parents who are short-lived, and are therefore on an average deficient in health and vigour, come into their property sooner than other children, and will be likely to marry earlier, and leave a larger number of offspring to inherit their inferior constitutions. But the inheritance of property by itself is very far from an evil; for without the accumulation of capital the arts could not progress; and it is chiefly through their power that the civilised races have extended, and are now everywhere extending their range, so as to take the place of the lower races. Nor does the moderate accumulation of wealth interfere with the process of selection. When a poor man becomes moderately rich, his children enter trades or professions in which there is struggle enough, so that the able in body and mind succeed best. The presence of a body of well-instructed men, who have not to labour for their daily bread, is important to a degree which cannot be over-estimated; as all high intellectual work is carried on by them, and on such work, material progress of all kinds mainly depends, not to mention other and higher advantages. No doubt wealth when very great tends to convert men into useless drones, but their number is never large ; and some degree of elimination here occurs, for we daily see rich men, who happen to be fools or profligate, squandering away their wealth. The Descent of Man.
“But the inheritance of property by itself is very far from an evil.... Nor does the moderate accumulation of wealth interfere with the process of selection.” One suspects Darwin’s “moderate accumulation of wealth” which was not yet insalubrious included the wealth of the Darwin -Wedgewood families. Why, since he refuses to consider the possibility that humans’ capacity for reason, moral reflection and self-denial might exempt us from the brutal forces of natural selection, does he seem to think that membership in his notably brutal economic elite should render its members immune?
You also wonder why Darwin didn’t include the laws against stealing in the list of unfortunate curbs on the workings of natural selection. If you doubt that the laws protecting private property are one of the greatest inhibition of the weeding out of the unfit, imagine what would have happened in Darwin’s Britain if it was suddenly legal for the masses of the poor to take from those worthless drones bred to the aristocracy. The resultant struggle might have saved Darwin the embarrassment of explaining how he neglected to discourage their vaccination.
Charles Darwin would be very much at home in today's Republican Party, I would suspect he'd support Paul Ryan's budget as biologically responsible.
@Criminal-
I explained very clearly how you quote mined. I see I must repeat myself over and over and over and over.
You quote mined because you took a quote where Darwin agreed with the idea that genius is partly hereditary, and you portrayed that as Darwin agreeing with coercive eugenics. The quote does not show Darwin agreeing with coercive eugenics. There are no quotes that anyone has found, and there are quotes where CD disagrees with coercive eugenics.
Criminal: There is absolutely no way for his fan club to get past that record or the fact that they had access to more information on that count than we do today.
There is absolutely no way for anti-Darwinists to get past or around the record of what CD wrote: CD opposed coercive eugenics in print, and creationists supported it. We have the evidence. You got necromancy.
Criminal: I'm not sorry to be able to tell you that Leonard Darwin and his eugenicist siblings are far more expert in their father's ideas about eugenics than you or anyone else who didn't know him.
If they were, why did Darwin dispute coercive eugenics in print? Why is there no documentary evidence, in print, of him supporting coercive eugenics?
The case distancing Charles Darwin from eugenics is hopeless because of what they and Charles Darwin, himself, wrote.
What a fantasy world! CD opposed coercive eugenics in print. You lose, badly.
It's part of why evolutionary science has been on an increasingly losing end of a political brawl for the past century.
If your hypothesis were true, then creationists should have been "increasingly losing end of a political brawl for the past century" because creationists supported eugenics more fervently than evolutionists.
As I have explained multiple times, every major creationist from 1920 to 1970 supported eugenics.
A hypothesis needs a negative control. What's your negative control? My negative control is what anti-evolutionists say. Every major creationist from 1920 to 1970 supported eugenics. Therefore, if your hypothesis were correct, they should be losing popularity.
Are they? If yes, creationism is losing popularity and evolution is gaining, then your hypothesis might be correct.
If no, creationism is gaining popularity and evolution is losing, then your hypothesis is falsified.
I find it morbidly fascinating how dishonest anti-Darwinists like Thought Criminal are.
Thought Criminal drags out long-debunked hoaxes like "Darwin to Haeckel to Hitler" which even Weikart admits have been debunked. This rest of Criminal's "evidence" is copied out of Weikart's hoax book, "From Darwin to Hitler."
I don't see anything he proposes that is going to make "Caucasians" any higher than they are, he, clearly, holds that "Caucasians" were already "man in a more civilised state".
Utter bullshit. We can read. Darwin clearly says that man in a future state will be more civilized that Caucasians are now. That implies that man in a future state will not be Caucasian.
That is the evidence. You got nothing against it.
As for predicting the extinction of racial groups, every one in Western civilization predicted the extinction of racial groups before Darwin wrote The Origin. By the time Darwin wrote the The Origin, the extinction of non-white racial groups was already a literary cliche.
American literature started with predictions of the extinction of non-whites: from the Puritans and their biblical expectations of Indian extinction, to "The Last of the Mohicans" and "Song of Hiawatha."
English-language literature in South Africa started with predictions of the extinction of Bushmen and other groups.
Virtually everyone in the 19th century predicted that Bushmen, Native Americans, and Tasmanians would go extinct. To this Australian aborigines were often added, and some African blacks like Kaffirs, and most of the Irish Catholics. Tasmanians were in fact basically extinct by 1855, four years before "The Origin." Fuegians were extinct a few decades after "The Origin." Everyone knew what happened to Caribs, the Guanches, Tasmanians and many Native Americans.
Read Patrick Brantlinger's "Dark Vanishings."
Since Thought Criminal has severe problems with reading comprehension, I will repeat: everyone in the 19th century believed in the extinction of many non-white races, prior to the publication of "The Origin."
Wow, you're a liar. Galton didn't even invent the word "eugenics" until 3 years after Darwin was dead. All you have are dishonest quote mines.
And, as can be seen in Darwin's note that Galton published as well as his citations of Hereditary Genius in The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin approved of eugenics as Galton invented it.
Amazing, just amazing. In the quote Darwin approves of the idea that genius is partially hereditary. You have no evidence that Darwin approved of coercive eugenics. In writing, CD opposed coercive eugenics. The evidence refutes this bullshit. You have nothing.
Bullshit. This proves the exact opposite. We have evidence that Charles Darwin rejected coercive eugenics in print.
Thought Criminal and other anti-Darwinists have no evidence, zero, that Charles Darwin ever supported coercive eugenics. All they have are quote mines.
In the above quotes, Darwin at most agrees that genius can be partially hereditary. This is not agreement with coercive eugenics, but Thought Criminal says that that's Darwin's point.
He's lying. Anti-Darwinists have scoured every single scrap of paper Darwin ever wrote, and never found any evidence that Charles Darwin ever supported coercive eugenics. All they have are quote mines.
As for Weikart's "Darwin to Hitler" hoax, Hitler and Nazism were explicitly creationist, religious and anti-atheist.
Darwinism was banned by the Italian fascists in 1929, by the Nazis in 1935, by racist apartheid South Africa until the end of apartheid, and is still banned today by Saudi Arabia and by recently-racist Bob Jones University. Even the Soviet Union banned Darwinism in favor of Lamarckism. No totalitarian system could ever coexist with Darwinian evolution.
In the USA, the creationists behind the Scopes Trial and the campaign to ban Darwinism in the 1920's became vocal supporters of Hitler and Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930's. The Ku Klux Klan was the first national organization to demand a national ban on Darwinism. Every major creationist except one supported eugenics from 1920 to 1970, and all major creationists were racist until the mid-1980's.
Anti-Darwinism has a bloody, racist, deadly legacy.
TTC, you keep insisting that you have no more motive than you have said, and yet in the next few lines you reveal more of your intentions. Some self-reflection might help. It would be easier for you to make your points if you understood what you wanted to say.
You have brought up a collection of Darwin's ideas. For example, his idea that "savages" were usually very healthy, and his supposition that the weak ones quickly died off. I was struck by an example of that when I visited the Mataponi native american visitor's center. They had a collection of exhibits describing how their ancestors lived when the europeans first came. They thought their river was holy, and everyone who was not too sick to manage it, jumped in the river every single morning. They believed that anybody who didn't jump in the river would die soon. In winter when the edges of the river were frozen over, they did it still. The europeans noted how big and healthy the indians were, and how there were not a whole lot of them. Many of the europeans, of course, were physically stunted by malnutrition because there were so many europeans.... I think it's likely that Darwin was sometimes right about that. However, as a pioneering thinker he did not fully understand. In an environment where there's often enough food, selection might choose strong healthy people. But in an environment where there is usually not enough food, and lots of sick people around to spread diseases, selection will favor those who are resistant to the diseases and who can get by on little food. The idea that the big strong "savages" were superior was sheer prejudice. Horses for courses. Sickly europeans had what it took to survive in overcrowded europe.
And of course Darwin came up with self-serving justifications for his own wealth. Wouldn't you? In those days it was mostly true that it was rich people who did amateur science, which was a big fraction of all the science that got done. It didn't have to be that way, but it was. Anybody in a position of privilege can come up with reasons they deserve what they have, if you let them assume that the problems they solve would exist without them and have no better solution.
I think if you want to establish that Darwin originated this line of thinking you need to show at least that people weren't doing it before him. But to my way of thinking you've certainly showed that he did it.
Remember too that Darwin's ideas were based on blending inheritance and on experiments with inbred artificial selection. The inbred populations had lots of deleterious recessive genes and he felt that they would "degenerate" without careful artificial selection. Both theory and experiment led him to expect populations to quickly get worse without intense selection. He had never heard of Hardy-Weiburg. He had no concept of Muller's ratchet, he assumed something much worse.
So where do you want to take that?
Can't everyone just get along. How about some agreement around here: Darwin definitely inspired ZZ Top?
@Rumraket, why are you - and the others - still jumping thru' hoops for this guy? You will still be here at Christmas and TTC will still not have told you what you all want to know (the reason he has a one-track mind, and the conclusions he draws about Biology from his 'investigations'). TTC could be a 'bot, did you all consider that? How would a TuringTest work out....you say X, he says chrysanthemum, you say Y he says chrysanthemum, so you try Z. Same thing happens. See the pattern?
I don't even like bloody chrysanthemums.
Spoiler alert: the next post from TTC will contain _no science at all_
TTC's main points are all outright lies, quote mines, and bare assertions contradicted by the evidence. TTC presented NO evidence that:
1. Darwin supported coercive eugenics.
2. Darwin supported Social Darwinism.
3. Darwin asserted that the racial extinction was a moral good
4. Francis Galton or Schallmayer "invented" eugenics (obviously Galton invented the word.)
Too bad for TTC, we have ample evidence contradicting all four "points."
TTC's case for 1 (Darwin supported coercive eugenics) is all quote mining. TTC's quote mine consists of Darwin agreeing with Galton that genius may be partially hereditary. TTC lies, and tells us that's Darwin agreeing with coercive eugenics. TTC daren't tell you that Galton invented the word "eugenics" three years after Darwin was dead!
That's outright lying. We have evidence of Darwin opposing coercive eugenics. TTC has only quote mines.
TTC's case for 2 (Darwin supported "social Darwinism") is the same quote mine of Darwin that was used by Ben Stein in "Expelled" and by hundreds of other creationists.
TTC's case for 3 (racial extinction) is quote mining, contradicted by the fact that all 19th century intellectuals throughout Western civilization believed non-white races would go extinct, DECADES BEFORE DARWIN PUBLISHED "The Origin of Species." In fact several races went extinct before and shortly after publication of "The Origin." (Read Brantlinger's "Dark Vanishings.")
Anti-Darwinists have scoured every single scrap of paper Darwin ever wrote, and never found any evidence that Charles Darwin ever supported coercive eugenics. We have evidence of Darwin opposing coercive eugenics.
All anti-Darwinists like TTC have are quote mines.
As for Weikart's "Darwin to Hitler" hoax, Hitler and Nazism were explicitly creationist, religious and anti-atheist.
In the USA, the creationists behind the Scopes Trial and the campaign to ban Darwinism in the 1920's became vocal supporters of Hitler and Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930's. The Ku Klux Klan was the first national organization to demand a national ban on Darwinism.
Every major American creationist except one supported eugenics from 1920 to 1970, and all major American creationists were racist until the mid-1980's.
Darwinism was banned by the Nazis in 1935, by the Italian fascists in 1929, by racist apartheid South Africa until the end of apartheid, and is still banned today by Saudi Arabia and by recently-racist Bob Jones University. Even the Soviet Union banned Darwinism in favor of Lamarckism. No totalitarian system could ever coexist with Darwinian evolution.
Anti-Darwinism has a bloody, racist, deadly legacy.
TTC has not even tried to refute any evidence I presented showing that his whole case is built on phony quote mines, and bare assertions contradicted by real evidence.
The "Darwin to Haeckel to Hitler" hoax has already been debunked, even Weikart admits that, and the "evidence" presented by TTC was just another quote mine.
TTC doesn't want you to know that Darwin had been dead for a decade before Haeckel could be said to have turned to "Social Darwinism." Darwin died in 1882. Haeckel, like many Germans including religious ones, turned to right-wing politics in the 1890's.
TTC presented a quote in which Darwin supported Haeckel's scientific ideas in the 1860's, not his political ones of the 1890's. TTC could not show that Darwin supported Haeckel's "Social Darwinism."
The "Darwin to Haeckel to Hitler" hoax was originated by Daniel Gasman, whose thesis has been widely criticized by historians.
TTC has quoted Stephen Jay Gould on the "Haeckel to Hitler" link, but Gould's authority was Gasman, and Gasman's thesis has been debunked and is not respected by historians, which in turn debunks Gould. Even Weikart admitted the Haeckel thesis is debunked.
Moreover, even Gasman (like other historians) admits that Nazis didn't believe in Darwinism, if by Darwinism you mean macroevolution.
Gasman admits that in the last paragraph of his book:
Gasman: "One question remains to be answered, however. Haeckel was clearly accorded recognition by some Nazi intellectuals and by his followers as a forerunner of the Third Reich [Gasman does not tell his readers that the Nazis banned Darwin's and Haeckel's books and disowned them both]. Yet at the same time, it is also apparent that Haeckel did not figure in Nazi propaganda as a major prophet of National Socialism. He never attained the status of [Christian theologian Paul] Lagarde or of [fanatical anti-Darwinist anti-Semite] Houston Stewart Chamberlain in the annals of Nazi history. And the reason is clear. While Darwinism was part of the Nazi educational curriculum in biology, official National Socialist ideology was suspicious of the idea of human evolution and, while not outright denying it, tended to play down the theory of the animal origin of man. [This is false, Hitler and the Nazis outright denied it.] It must be remembered that the Nazis had assigned a heroic and eternally superior character and racial constitution to the Aryans. It was therefore hardly ideologically admissible at the same time to allow for the evolution of the Aryans from a group of inferior anthropoid progenitors. Any theory of this kind would have destroyed the notion that the Aryans were in possession of racial superiority from the beginning."
What bull.
TTC: Just about all of the early eugenicists I'm aware of were anti-religious.
All major creationists except one from 1920 to 1970 were pro-eugenics. That includes the founder of Intelligent Design Theory, A. E. Wilder-Smith. AEWS wrote all about it; chapter 4 of his book "Man's Origin, Man's Destiny" is called "Planned Evolution" (eugenics).
Other creationists for eugenics include William J. Tinkle, who was a founding member of the Institute for Creation Research and did all the legwork in founding that organization; Ernest S. Booth, author of "Biology: The Story of Life", an early creationist, pro-eugenics, racist textbook; T. T. Martin, author of creationist screamfest "Hell and the High Schools" (1923).
Rousas J. Rushdoony, who is arguably the most influential theologian of the 20th century Among Christian fundamentalists, embraced eugenics and racism in his books of theology. Rushdoony helped to broker the publication of Morris' "The Genesis Flood."
All the major creationists of the era supported Tinkle's or other pro-eugenics books, including Henry Morris (author of "The Genesis Flood", Frank L. Marsh, Harold W. Clark, Henry Lammerts (first president of CRS), etc.
Lots of religious leaders supported eugenics. Rabbi Louis L. Mann argued that Jews had traditionally practiced eugenics anyway. This kind of "argument from tradition" was common.
(Nazis also invoked "argument from tradition", saying that the Germans had traditionally practiced eugenics but that the liberal worldview had short-circuited their natural behavior; they cited Frederick the Great, not Darwin, as their inspiration.)
TTC is correct that Catholics had a coherent intellectual response to eugenics. But, Catholic priests and nuns in Germany didn't put it into practice. Priests and nuns assisted in the extermination of the disabled under Hitler's T9 project [see "Betrayal" by Ericksen and Heschel.]
Moreover, the guy in charge of eugenics in Nazi-occupied France was Alexis Carrell, a Catholic who wrote about miraculous faith healing at Lourdes.
For American religious support for eugenics, read the book "Preaching Eugenics."
So ... You've gone to great pains to distance Hitler from Darwin, eh? So much so that you bring in Schallmeyer, and "you can blame Schallmayer for citing Charles Darwin"! You are seriously irony-deficient. You've done your best to distance them but ... "well, there's this fact right here that I must just mention ... I mean nothing ulterior by saying it, but ...". [Spreads arms in best I-did-my-best fashion.]
I think we will all come away from this absolutely none the wiser. You and andyboerger will continue to see 'Darwinists' as blind to the evidence that 'their hero' inspired some unsavoury policies (despite the repeated concession that people were indeed so inspired, albeit with no encouragement from the man himself), and suspiciously sympathetic to those policies (if we could eliminate genetic disease without coercion - that could not be seen as a good thing?). It's a win-win. You can smear evolution and atheists all in one go with your brush, dipped in the poisonous well of 'eugenics'. Onlookers! Observe! See how mean the atheists are!
And 'we' will continue to see you as irony-deficient, obsessive and on a fool's errand to distance a subject from the contribution of its principal founder, to no obvious benefit beyond the smearing of those who admire him.
I wonder what happens if I press this button next to the 'Darwin' one? The one marked "CSICOP"...?
This is a lie.
I have repeatedly refuted their arguments, with citations and hyperlinks. You have never addressed any evidence I presented. You just keep copying and pasting the same quote mines, over and over. They do not get better with age.
Thus I must repeat myself over and over and over, because TTC has zero reading comprehension.
To begin with: we have evidence that Charles Darwin opposed coercive eugenics. TTC has only quote mines alleging to show Darwin "supported" coercive eugenics.
To continue: Nazi racism and eugenics were not based on Darwinian macroevolution. Nazi racism and eugenics were explicitly creationist, religious and anti-atheist.
I have presented much more evidence in comments above, and TTC cannot refute any of it. He loses.
Hitler's creationist beliefs about the Aryan race being "made in the image of God" inspired the Holocaust. The Nazis banned Darwinism and Haeckelism in 1935.
We will keep repeating this and TTC will keep ignoring it because he has no refutation.
If TTC had any evidence that Charles Darwin had supported coercive eugenics, TTC would have presented the evidence. TTC didn't present any such evidence, only quote mines in which Darwin supports Galton's belief that genius is partially hereditary and that Darwin supported Haeckel's scientific views of the 1860's.
Instead, we get "evidence" like this from TTC:
As I said, the more I look at primary source material around this issue the more obvious it is that Darwin was the inspiration of eugenics and, from his and his children's failure to distance himself from it, as well as what he wrote in DoM, he agreed with it.
But again: why has TTC presented NO quotes from DoM in which Darwin expressed supported for coercive eugenics? Because Darwin didn't support it. TTC ignores evidence that Darwin opposed coercive eugenics.
TTC has passed "pathological liar" and now seems completely delusional.
I should confess that learning how little you guys care about evidence as well as the most basic requirements of logic and scholarship...
But this describes TTC himself. He continued to proffer quote mines and long-debunked notions like "Darwin to Haeckel to Hitler" which no historian, not even Weikart, would defend.
TTC has not responded to any evidence I presented showing that he was guilty of quote mines. Quote mines are all he has.
It is TTC who does not care about evidence.
Again, TTC appears to be further evidence that anti-Darwinists are pathological liars.
TTC has no evidence that Darwin supported coercive eugenics-- only quote mines.
TTC brazenly presents the same quote mine of Darwin that comes from Ben Stein's "Expelled" and a hundred other creationist sites.
You think we haven't seen that quote mine debunked already? In the full quote, Darwin called it an "overwhelming present evil" to neglect care for the weak.
Why did you leave that part out of your quote mine, TTC?
Because you have no evidence Darwin supported coercive eugenics, and you ignore evidence against. TTC only has dishonest quote mines and they're not even original-- we've seen them all already, on a hundred creationist websites.
This obsessive fixation with creationist quote mines copied from "Expelled" doesn't just make TTC look like a pathological liar-- he looks dated. How 2006 of you.
As for Schallmayer, TTC here is following Weikart's hoax "From Darwin to Hitler."
Weikart doesn't tell his readers about all the guys who submitted essays for the Krupp prize, and lost (Schallmayer won). They also addressed the issue of what Darwinism meant for society.
The conclusion of most contestants for the Krupp prize was that Darwinism meant that society should have a welfare system, to take care of the weak and the poor. According to most of the contenstants, Darwinism inspired the exact opposite political belief from Schallmayer: protect the weak.
For more on the Krupp Prize, see Alfred E. Kelly, "The Descent of Darwin." He'll tell you the things Weikart doesn't want his readers to know.
TTC things he can flog the Darwin to Hitler hoax. First let's note that Nazi racism and eugenics were explicitly creationist, religious, anti-atheist and anti-materialist.
Again let's note that Darwin in writing opposed coercive eugenics.
Not surprisingly the Nazis banned the ideas of Darwin and Haeckel. They denied that they got their ideas from Darwin or Haeckel. They banned the following books:
Banned by Nazis: "2. The literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism...
5. All historical writings whose purpose is to denigrate the origin, the spirit [das Wesen] and the culture of the German Volk, or to dissolve [aufzulösen] the racial and structural order of the Volk...
6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Haeckel).[Source]
(One wonders how you can say the German Volk evolved from apes without denigrating their origin.)
Nazis in charge of ideology insisted that Nazis was not based on Darwinism, Haeckelsim, or any scientific opinions. Günter Hecht, spokesman for the Nazi party's Department of Race Politics, warned the scientific community:
Hecht: "National Socialism is a political movement, not a scientific one… Therefore neither Lamarck, Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel… nor all of their many, in part scientifically equally significant followers and opponents-- are in any sense opponents, precursors, let alone founders of the basic political principles of National Socialism. In addition, we cannot equate any teachings of a living biologist with the movement, since such a person as a researcher presents his teachings as scientific problems, whereas the principles of the movement serve political-weltanschaulich tasks alone, and become actualized alone through the Führer and his political soldiers... The professors do not carry völkische responsibility for the future; the movement does, whose Führer is fully accountable..." [Anne Harrington, "Reenchanged Science", p.194]
The Nazis were opposed to materialism and atheism and were anti-Darwinist. In 1936 Dr. Gerhard Wagner gave a speech titled "Race and Population Policy" at the Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally.
Gerhard Wagner: "We can only say to these learned critics that our genetic and racial thinking stems in the end not from our scientific, but rather from our National Socialist convictions, and that it was not learned scientists, but rather our Führer Adolf Hitler, and he alone, who made genetic and racial thinking the center of our National Socialist worldview and the foundation of the rebuilding of our people's state. The doctrines of blood and race are not first of all an important and interesting piece of biological science to us, but rather above all else a political-ideological attitude that fundamentally determines our attitudes to things and to the questions of life.
...Those who base their materialist image of the world on the doctrines of a liberal or Marxist era cannot understand how we can have dethroned their idols of "the economy and Mammon," replacing them at the center of our National Socialist process of construction and renewal with the German man..."
There could have been no Nazism without anti-atheism or anti-materialism.
Allan Miller, I don't think you quite get how these things called "history" or "documentation" or "evidence" work. I couldn't "bring in Schallmeyer", that was done by Schallmeyer, Leonard Darwin, the committee that gave him the Krupp prise and anyone else who made that association in the last half of the 19th and early decades of the 20th century. Schallmeyer associated his ideas with Charles Darwin when he wrote his book, Vererbung und Auslese im Lebenslauf der Volker. Leonard Darwin, whose authority on his father, if you need reminding, trumps yours, and mine, is the person I cited as attributing the independent creation of German Rassehygiene to Schallmeyer's reading of On the Origin of Species. And, I'll point out, who failed to distance his father from any of Schallmeyer's other ideas in his article I quoted and linked to. In fact, he didn't disassociate his father from Agnes Bluhm or Alfred Ploetz (!) in that article either.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2962339/pdf/eugenrev00235-0042.pdf
Come to think of it, I've yet to find anywhere that Leonard Darwin has disassociated his father from any of the infamous figures of eugenics, if he had wanted to save his father's name from those associations, he could have at any time.
You boys don't seem to realize that the written record is there to be cited by anyone, so long as they do so accurately. There is no requirement that you like it or what was said or what that means. There is no requirement for me to service your ideology or your preferences. I didn't make any claims about Charles Darwin and his relationship with eugenics in Germany in in the English language that wasn't made by his son, Galton, Schellmayer, Pearson, or other people.
If you don't like Charles Darwin's association with eugenics, blame them and him. I'm within my rights to talk about what they said.
Continued:
Hitler himself, in private, denounced the macroevolution of man from apes.
Hitler: "Where do we get the right to believe that Man was not from the primordial beginning as he is today? A glance at Nature shows us that changes and developments [Veränderungen und Weiterbildungen] happen in the domain of plants and animals. But nowhere does there appear within a genus, a development as wide as the leap [innherhalb einer Gattung eine Entwicklung von der Weite des Sprunges] that Man must have made, had he advanced from an ape-like condition to what he is [now].” [Hitler, Table Talk, night of Jan 25-26, 1942.]
Like Hitler, Hermann Goering also based Nazi racism on creationism.
Goering: "God has created the races. He did not want equality and therefore we energetically reject any attempt to falsify the concept of race purity by making it equivalent with racial equality. We have experienced what it means when a people has to live in accordance with the laws of an equality that are alien to its kind and contrary to nature. For this equality does not exist. We... must reject it also, as a matter of principle, in our laws, and we must acknowledge that purity of race which Nature and Providence have destined." [Göring, 15 Sept. 1935]
Alfred Rosenberg was one of the most important Nazi ideologues. He denounced Darwinism as "pseudoscientific" and "liberal" in his most important book, because it caused atheism.
Rosenberg: "The liberal epoch brought enormous desolation in the church domain. This was precipitated by its many pseudoscientific beliefs such as evolution. ...understanding and reason represent only one means of drawing up a world picture. Religion is fundamentally something else... Science is a system. Religion relates to the will... The tragic thing about the spiritual history of the last hundred years is that the churches have made the liberal materialistic outlook their own... Thus the Darwinian era was able to create enormous confusion." [Rosenberg, "Myth of the 20th Century", Book III Ch. 5]
(Rosenberg's reference to Darwinism causing atheism and "confusion" echo those of his hero and the most important founder of Nazi anti-Semitism, the racist anti-Darwinist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who wrote similar things in his attacks on Darwinism.)
Note also that Rosenberg associated "Darwinism" not with genetic inequality, but rather to him, Darwinism meant the liberal belief that differences between humans are due to environment and NOT genetics:
"This logic [female equality] is just as typical as it is widespread. Essentially, it springs from the dusty milieu theory, according to which man is nothing other than a product of his environment. This Darwinian white elephant must even today bear the burden of providing the ideological support and scientific backbone of the champions of women’s rights." [Rosenberg, "Myth of the 20th Century", Book III Ch. 2]
Well, as Charles Darwin had been dead about 31 years before the Nazi Party was formed, I wouldn't try to make an inept, incompetent and anachronistic case that Charles Darwin had responsibility for the Nazis.
There is no way to divorce your hero from eugenics, however. Not British eugenics, not American eugenics, not German eugenics. Not without making an inept, incompetent and dishonest case denying the evidence.
No author who didn't know Darwin can make that case, no one can overcome the attribution of Leonard Darwin or Francis Galton on that count.
Richard Weikart, other than using his translation of the stated goal of the Krupp prize, which I checked against the original German as given by Leonard Darwin in the article I linked to, I didn't cite him. His translation was accurate. You want to tell me how he got the German wrong?
Diogenes, why do you imagine I would have to talk about the losers of the Krupp prize? Leonard Darwin didn't mention them in that article.
You can't find the relevant documents that would get Charles Darwin off the hook that his son and his cousin put him on. The ones you use don't do it. They aren't even relevant to the argument.
And more on Hitler's inspiration for racism:
Hitler, in his private notes, in 1919 when he was first publicly expressing his anti-Semitism, described his racism and anti-Semitism as coming from the Bible, not from Darwin. In fact Darwin is not mentioned anywhere in Hitler's extensive private notes.
In his private notes of 1919, he invokes the Bible, calling it "the monumental history of mankind." Hitler derives what he calls the "Fundamental Racial Law" from the Bible, citing as an example of superior and inferior races, the "Children of God and of Men," which is a citation to Genesis Ch. 6, a passage frequently cited by creationist racists in support of their racist worldview. [See "Hitler's Letters and Notes," ed. Werner Maser, p. 282-3].
In his notes, he also cited as his source for the Fundamental Racial Law the Lord Disraeli, an Englishman of Jewish descent who converted.
Disraeli was anti-Darwinist and racist. Disraeli said that race was the fundamental law of history. Hitler's inspiration for racism, Disraeli, was also anti-Darwinist, and is often cited by creationists today for that reason.
Disraeli: "Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new-fangled theories."
We must return to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, perhaps the most important ideological founder of Nazism, acknowledged by the Nazis as such. Chamberlain was a pseudoscientific, anti-Semitic lunatic who hated Darwinists and Jews with a purple passion.
Chamberlain: The one thing against which I defend myself is this, that an invisible church served by a priesthood of narrow-minded, arrogant, and intolerant professors, who under the honourable title of “learned“ enjoy a quite unjustified respect... that these enemies of nature, this tribe of fanatics should seize upon my understanding even in childhood... should hold in a scientific vice its healthy thought, and compel my belief in silly dogmas with a tyranny more cruel than the tribunal of the Inquisition. There is no need for me to believe in God; ...but if I refuse to believe in ...the waves that are rays and the rays that are waves, in the amplitudes and oscillations and polarisations and such abominations, together with the descent of man from apes and of apes from jelly-fish, then I am outside the pale." [Chamberlain, "Immanuel Kant" vol. I, p.151]
Chamberlain: "A manifestly unsound system like that of Darwin exercises a much more powerful influence than the deepest speculations, just because of its 'practicability.' And so we have seen the idea of evolution develop itself till it spread from biology and geology to all spheres of thought and investigation, and, intoxicated by its success, exercised such a tyranny that any one who did not swear by it was to be looked upon as a simpleton." [H. S. Chamberlain, "Foundations of the Nineteenth Century", p. lxxxviii ]
He denounced atheism [materialism] and Haeckel's philosophy of monism as producing "confusion" (compare with his disciple Rosenberg, above.)
Chamberlain: "Thus so-called “scientific” monism [Haeckel's], materialism, &c., have arisen, doctrines which will certainly never acquire the universal importance of Judaism ... but which have nevertheless in the nineteenth century produced so much confusion of thought." [H. S. Chamberlain, "Foundations of the Nineteenth Century"]
Diogenies, you are an idiot. Here's what I said about "Expelled" when it came out:
I don’t remember when it was that someone broke the news to me that Ben Stein was going to be in an anti-evolution movie to be released this election year. “Oh, jickit”, I said, “Not the damned Darwin wars again, already”. I’m afraid I really did say “jickit”....
.... A lot of people who believe themselves to be on the left who are taking umbrage over Ben Stein’s lies, distort history as much in defense of what they mistakenly believe to be the truth. Well, surprise, Ben Stein is a big liar, a Dick Morris who can fake gravitas, and so is annoying. But hearing people distort and deny the historical record in a refutation attempt can be kind of grating too. Most aggravating of all, though, is to see them falling for the bait yet another time and risk getting us hooked into a transparent election year set-up job.
You can pile lie on lie, Diogenes, you can try to change the subject with unrelated stuff and push every neo-atheist button there is but it won't change the facts that I laid out or the supporting ones I haven't yet. Charles Darwin was the inspiration of eugenics. There is no way to save your figurehead from that charge. He is damaged goods.
Continued:
The "Darwin to Haeckel to Hitler" hoax was originated by Daniel Gasman, whose thesis has been widely criticized by historians.
TTC has quoted Stephen Jay Gould on the "Haeckel to Hitler" link, but Gould's authority was Daniel Gasman, and Gasman's thesis has been debunked and is not respected by historians, which in turn debunks Gould. Even Weikart admitted the Haeckel-to-Hitler thesis is debunked.
Moreover, even Gasman (like other historians) admits that Nazis didn't believe in Darwinism, if by Darwinism you mean macroevolution. Gasman admits that in the last paragraph of his book:
Gasman: "One question remains to be answered, however. Haeckel was clearly accorded recognition by some Nazi intellectuals and by his followers as a forerunner of the Third Reich [Gasman does not tell his readers that the Nazis banned Darwin's and Haeckel's books and disowned them both]. Yet at the same time, it is also apparent that Haeckel did not figure in Nazi propaganda as a major prophet of National Socialism. He never attained the status of [Christian theologian Paul] Lagarde or of [fanatical anti-Darwinist anti-Semite] Houston Stewart Chamberlain in the annals of Nazi history. And the reason is clear. While Darwinism was part of the Nazi educational curriculum in biology, official National Socialist ideology was suspicious of the idea of human evolution and, while not outright denying it, tended to play down the theory of the animal origin of man. [This is false, Hitler and the Nazis outright denied it, as a I have demonstrated above.] It must be remembered that the Nazis had assigned a heroic and eternally superior character and racial constitution to the Aryans. It was therefore hardly ideologically admissible at the same time to allow for the evolution of the Aryans from a group of inferior anthropoid progenitors. Any theory of this kind would have destroyed the notion that the Aryans were in possession of racial superiority from the beginning."
Richard Weikart also acknowledges that the Haeckel-to-Hitler link is bogus and acknowledges Gasman’s many errors:
Richard Weikart: “Concerning Gasman, you might be interested to know that most historians are contemptuous of his thesis, and with good cause… My beef with Gasman was not that he called attention to some linkages between Haeckel and Hitler (such as biological racism), but that he overplayed the linkages (absurdly claiming that Haeckel's anti-Semitism was a key influence on Nazi anti-Semitism, for instance) and he presented a completely monocausal account of the rise of Nazism (and in his later book, of fascism in general). He ignored the inconvenient facts that Haeckel considered himself a progressive, supporting pacifism, feminism, and homosexual rights.” [Richard Weikart, Response to Larry Arnhart, 2005]
So how can TTC continue to push the Darwin-to-Haeckel-to-Hitler hoax, decades after it's been debunked?
Dishonesty? Total lack of reading comprehension?
TTC repeatedly ignores Charles Darwin's own writings in which CD opposes coercive eugenics.
All TTC has from Charles Darwin are dishonest quote mines. TTC used exactly the same quote mine copied and pasted from Ben Stein's "Expelled" and a hundred creationist websites, leaving off the part where Darwin calls it an "overwhelming present evil" to neglect care of the sick and weak.
Are we supposed to be scared of a quote mine that we all saw debunked six years ago?
Likewise, TTC quote mined Darwin's support for Galton's book on inherited genius. Darwin expressed support for the belief that genius was partially hereditary.
But TTC quote mined it and said that Darwin was supporting coercive eugenics. That was dishonest.
TTC doesn't want us to know that Dalton invented the word "eugenics" three years after Darwin was dead.
Again, TTC quote mined Darwin's support for Haeckel's scientific ideas in the 1860's, and tried to pass that off as support for Haeckel's political ideas of the 1890's, beliefs he (and many other Germans) adopted long after Darwin was dead in 1882.
TTC takes quotes out of context and ignores the dates of key events so as to create a phony appearance of support or agreement.
So it's all dishonest quote mines from TTC. Plus, he trotted out Haeckel-to-Hitler which was debunked decades ago.
How can TTC explain the fact that creationists and religious anti-Darwinists strongly supported eugenics, either not associating it with macroevolution, or else explicitly dissociating it from Darwinism? e.g.
Here is creationist T. T. Martin from 1923, dissociating Darwin from eugenics:
T. T. Martin, 1923: "...hell is almost too good for the whining hypocrite in pulpit or school room who will talk about Evolution and make it mean simply the development of the embryo into the full grown species... or who will talk of the improvement of the species as Evolution. If that is Evolution, why all this parading of Evolutionists as being learned? Every old farmer believes in the development of a stalk of corn from a grain of corn... every one of them believes in the improvement of the species. No, reader, that is not Evolution, AND THE LAST ONE OF THEM KNOWS IT, and they stoop to this miserable, hypocritical camouflaging in order to save their faces and continue to be supported by our taxes...in order to protect these pseudo-scientists from the wrath of the people and help keep them in their positions." [T. T. Martin, "Hell and the High Schools" (1923), Ch. 3]
"Evolution is not the improvement of the species, development within the species. Everybody believes in that; that is the reason we educate our children; that is the reason we line-breed our hogs and our poultry. The man who calls these things Evolution is either a hypocrite or an ignoramus.
Evolution means that all species, from the first living cell up to man, evolved by very slight changes, through many generations for millions of years, from lower species to higher, up to man." [T. T. Martin, "Hell and the High Schools" (1923), Ch. 2]
Where did Thomas Jefferson get this idea?
Jefferson: "The circumstances of superior beauty is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals. Why not in that of men?" [Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia]
What is your evidence that Charles Darwin supported coercive eugenics or Social Darwinism? Do not copy and paste these old quote mines we've seen before. They are only evidence of TTC's dishonesty.
In 1882, when Darwin died, three years before the word "eugenics" was invented, who would have imagined that "eugenics" (or whatever it would have been called) mean coercive eugenics?
Why do you keep bringing up an author and a book I didn't cite? I used primary documents to support my argument. In this particular argument, depending on what Galton, Charles and Leonard Darwin, and other early eugenicists said linking Charles Darwin to eugenics, you have to use primary documents. To overturn that evidence you would need to find relevant, primary documents that contradicted what they said.
You can't do that or you would. I looked for them and couldn't find them, I don't think they exist. Secondary documents and things unrelated to Charles Darwin's inspiration of Galton, Schallmayer, Leonard Darwin and other eugenicists, his citations of those eugenicists, and his correspondence with them can't overcome the conclusive value of those primary documents. You can't overcome the words of the people the argument is about.
The word "eugenics" named something that was already well underway.
Galton said that it was his reading of On the Origin of Species that inspired him to invent eugenics. His son said that he was carrying on his father's work in the book "The Need for Eugenic Reform" and he attributed German eugenics to Schallmayer's reading of On the Origin of Species, SPECIFICALLY SAYING THAT WAS BEFORE SHALLMAYER HAD READ GALTON. Schallmayer's eugenics was attributed to Charles Dawin by Darwin's own son and by Schallmayer.
You can't overcome that Diogenes. You really are the most ironically pseudonymned of the new atheist hacks.
Oh, and as to "quote mined" you can say that until you're blue in the face, it doesn't change the fact that I quoted those things accurately AND I gave citations and links so those could be checked. Something you haven't done.
Typical new atheist lies covered up by words like "quote mined" as the new atheist does what he's whining about. Face it, Diogenes, Charles Darwin inspired eugenics, the post-war revision of that history is a lie.
Creationists who supported eugenics clearly stated that their support for eugenics had no connection to Darwin's theory. Your argument is with them, not me.
Leading Nazis said that their eugenics and racism did not derive from Darwinism. Your argument is with them, not me.
Leading Nazis said their support from eugenics derived from their belief that their race was created in the image of God. Hitler's private notes say that he derived his "racial law" from the Bible.
Creationists like A. E. Wilder-Smith and Rousas Rushdoony derived their support for eugenics from the Bible.
There is no way to save your god from that charge. He is damaged goods.
And where did Thomas Jefferson get this idea?
Jefferson: "The circumstances of superior beauty is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals. Why not in that of men?" [Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia]
Time travellin' Darwin?
As for C. Darwin, why should believe anything you write, until I look it up myself, when we can show that you're a quote miner?
You repeatedly quote mined Charles Darwin in order to falsely portray him as supporting coercive eugenics, when the word "eugenics" wasn't even invented until he'd been dead for 3 years.
You used exactly the same quote mine as Ben Stein in "Expelled". Was it dishonest when he did it, but honest when you did it?
And that's not your only quote mine. Your quote of Darwin supporting Dalton's "Hereditary Genius" is not evidence for Darwin supporting coercive eugenics.
Your quote of Darwin supporting Haeckel's scientific ideas of the 1860's is not proof of him supporting Haeckel's political ideas of the 1890's.
You have zero evidence of Darwin supporting Social Darwinism, to the extent that "social Darwinism" can even be defined.
Sorry. Not impressed by dishonest quote mines. I've seen "Expelled" and many creationist books. I know these quote mines already.
You can copy the same quote mines over and over, they do not become valid the 50th time you copy them.
TTC wrote: "In Germany, no matter what Darwin apologists contend, Darwin's foremost disciple, Haeckel was a direct link between Darwin and Naziism."
The Haeckel-to-Hitler link was debunked decades ago, and even Weikart admits that.
TTC wrote: I used primary documents to support my argument.
Bullshit. You cited Stephen J. Gould, who cited Daniel Gasman, you fucking liar, to support the Haeckel-to-Hitler link. Some primary document!
Moreover your quote mines are the same quote mines used by creationists over and over again, like the quote mine of Darwin where you leave out Darwin saying "overwhelming present evil."
Creationists who supported eugenics clearly stated that their support for eugenics had no connection to Darwin's theory. Your argument is with them, not me.
Leading Nazis said that their eugenics and racism did not derive from Darwinism. Your argument is with them, not me.
Leading Nazis said their support from eugenics derived from their belief that their race was created in the image of God. Hitler's private notes say that he derived his "racial law" from the Bible.
Creationists like A. E. Wilder-Smith and Rousas Rushdoony derived their support for eugenics from the Bible.
There is no way to save your god from that charge. He is damaged goods. If we follow your logic, your god should be dumped as the face of religion.
Re. Social Darwinism
Diogenes, look above to the letter to H. Fick I quoted, in full, Charles Darwin endorsing what would be called "Social Darwinism", very specifically. You might have to look up the definition of Social Darwinism and read, very, very closely, perhaps taking a Xanax immediately after, though. I think you might need Xanax, the way you're carrying on here today.
TTC: Oh, and as to "quote mined" you can say that until you're blue in the face, it doesn't change the fact that I quoted those things accurately
The fuck you did-- you took them out of context to reverse their meaning. You used exactly the same quote mine as Ben Stein in "Expelled". Was it dishonest when he did it, but honest when you did it?
When you quoted Darwin and left off the part about him calling it "an overwhelming present evil" to neglect the weak, just like Ben Stein did in "Expelled", was that honest?
You repeatedly quote mined Charles Darwin in order to falsely portray him as supporting coercive eugenics, when the word "eugenics" wasn't even invented until he'd been dead for 3 years.
And that's not your only quote mine. Your quote of Darwin supporting Dalton's "Hereditary Genius" is not evidence for Darwin supporting coercive eugenics.
Your quote of Darwin supporting Haeckel's scientific ideas of the 1860's is not proof of him supporting Haeckel's political ideas of the 1890's.
You have zero evidence of Darwin supporting Social Darwinism, to the extent that "social Darwinism" can even be defined.
The word "eugenics" named something that was already well underway.
Bullshit. Eugenics wasn't politically implemented until after Mendelian genetics was rediscovered. And that was in the middle of the Eclipse of Darwinism.
Sorry. Not impressed by dishonest quote mines. I've seen "Expelled" and many creationist books. I know these quote mines already.
Creationists who supported eugenics clearly stated that their support for eugenics had no connection to Darwin's theory. Your argument is with them, not me.
Leading Nazis said that their eugenics and racism did not derive from Darwinism. Your argument is with them, not me.
Leading Nazis said their support from eugenics derived from their belief that their race was created in the image of God. Hitler's private notes say that he derived his "racial law" from the Bible.
Creationists like A. E. Wilder-Smith and Rousas Rushdoony derived their support for eugenics from the Bible.
There is no way to save your god from that charge. He is damaged goods.
The fuck he did. He opposed some policies of trade unions, like piece work. You're fucking desperate.
At most, Darwin today would be called a compassionate conservative. On Fox News, they'd call him a socialist radical.
All you have are quote mines. You left off Darwin saying "Overwhelming Present Evil" so you're as dishonest as Ben Stein.
What we've seen so far is that without anti-atheism, there would be no Nazism and no holocaust. No anti-atheism, no holocaust.
Anti-atheism was central to Nazism and to Nazi support for eugenics, which Hitler always expressed in religious, creationist terms.
Creationists who supported eugenics clearly stated that their support for eugenics had no connection to Darwin's theory. TTC's argument is with them, not me.
Leading Nazis said that their eugenics and racism did not derive from Darwinism. TTC's argument is with them, not me.
Leading Nazis said their support from eugenics derived from their belief that their race was created in the image of God. Hitler's private notes say that he derived his "racial law" from the Bible.
Creationists like A. E. Wilder-Smith and Rousas Rushdoony derived their support for eugenics from the Bible.
You are unhinged.
In that letter Darwin badmouthed unions. You can't seem to read.
You can talk about the Nazi period all you want, distorting that all you want, it doesn't change the facts of what I said about people, all of whom were dead before then except the extremely aged Leonard Darwin. I'd love to find out if he realized that his great ideas had been tried and would soon become the major pseudo-scientific scandal of the 20th century. His nephew, Charles GALTON Darwin, didn't as he was still pushing eugenics into the 1950s.
You can't make a legitimate case against the one I presented so you try to change the subject and to lie about what I said. Typical new atheist PR tactics.
Now, Diogenes, why don't you cut the nonsense and present the relevant primary documents from people closer to Charles Darwin than his sons who could absolve him from being the inspiration of eugenics. Go on, do what it would take to overcome their superior knowledge of their own father.
I just noticed a typo above. 31 should read 38. Odd that on one noticed.
I don't think you quite get how these things called "history" or "documentation" or "evidence" work.
I don't think you quite get there's an extra little factor, 'interpretation'. And your interpretation is so obviously skewed in favour of your demonisation campaign. Darwin inspired eugenics? How - by writing in favour of it, calling for it, ongoing activism? No. By having a son and cousin that were into it, admiring a book by the latter, and being name-checked by some eugenicists.
So no, I am not denying historical record, I'm laughing my socks off at your resentment of my jokingly ascribing to you a 'knee-jerk' association between Darwin and Hitler, and then proceeding to illustrate that exact point by joining those dots, again and again and again.
And I don't really give a fuck. If Darwin inspired some people in the Nazi party, that is not his fault - as you acknowledge, noting the gap between his death and its formation ... but then you do it again!
"Look! His son attested to the influence of Origin on Schallmeyer! It's a matter of historical record! Blame him! I'm not trying to make a link between Darwin and Nazism because that would be crass but ... looooook! It's a matter of historical record! And Lenny didn't disassociate his father from Agnes Bluhm or Alfred Ploetz or Attilla the Hun, so that clinches it.".
If his son and his cousin were eugenicists, it does not make him one. I don't care either way - I don't see eugenic sympathies as pigeon shit to be frantically wiped off some holy statue - but as a matter of historical record - that thing you hold as a shining beacon - Darwin expressly writes against coercive eugenics. Full stop. If the evidence was stronger, I'd agree with it; it isn't so I don't. And the only reason I waste my energy pursuing the point is on that matter of historical accuracy. Perhaps that's all you are bothered about too, but you certainly pursue it to the point of pure crankery.
If you must besmirch him, try and do it with things that happened before his death. To state the obvious, his relatives and later audience weren't him.
Galton said that it was his reading of On the Origin of Species that inspired him to invent eugenics.
I'm ready to believe this is true. So what?
If someday somebody decides to censor science and they say they were inspired by you personally, does that make you the evil one?
You haven't shown Darwin supporting Galton in coercive eugenics. He might have done so, and I don't see why we should care a whole lot if he did, but you haven't yet shown that. Unless I missed it.
And of course Darwin came up with self-serving justifications for his own wealth. Wouldn't you? J Thomas
Good Lord, J Thomas, The Descent of Man was supposed to be a science book, you think there's supposed to be room in a science book for " self-serving justifications for his own wealth"?
I'm just shocked, shocked that the vigorous defenders of Darwin didn't miss your shocking charge against Charles Darwin's scientific integrity.
You mustn't, though, assume all of us have that little integrity. I'm quite sure I wouldn't do that. And it's doubtful I'd become rich like Darwin did because I wouldn't hold railway stocks, as Darwin did, being I'm a socialist. And I certainly haven't inherited wealth from my laboring class parents.
J Thomas writes:
You haven't shown Darwin supporting Galton in coercive eugenics. He might have done so, and I don't see why we should care a whole lot if he did, but you haven't yet shown that.
This is correct. The word eugenics can mean different things in different contexts.
So, besides TTC's egregious crimes where quote mining is concerned-- he uses the same quote mines as Ben Stein in "Expelled", and he pretends like we haven't read "Expelled Exposed" already-- and besides his idiotic insertion of the long-debunked "Darwin to Haeckel to Hitler" hoax that no historian believes nowadays-- TTC also equivocates.
By equivocation I mean doing a bait-and-switch with a word with two or more meanings. In his quotes Darwin's children attribute "eugenics" to CD, but there is no reason to believe this "eugenics" is anything like Nazi eugenics (which was technically negative coercive eugenics) which was based on creationism, anti-atheism and their religious beliefs.
Eugenics can mean different things and it meant different things at different times.
1. Research into hereditary basis of disease. Still legal, PC and common.
2. Research into hereditary basis of moral /intellectual qualities. Still legal but not PC and not common.
3. Voluntary eugenics, negative or positive (e.g. those with hereditary diseases should refrain from marriage). Still legal, PC and common.
4. Coercive negative eugenics (e.g. snipping someone's gonads).
When Francis Galton's research started it meant 1 and 2. Darwin supported 1, 2 and maybe 3 but opposed 4.
TTC has presented no evidence that when scientists said "eugenics" they were proposing 4 in Darwin's lifetime. The word "eugenics" was invented 3 years after he was dead.
G. A. Gaskell wrote him about eugenics and Darwin opposed the idea.
Darwin: "With regard to your third law [Social Selection, or the Birth of the Fittest], I do not know whether you have read an article (I forget when published) by F. Galton, in which he proposes certificates of health, etc., for marriage, and that the best should be matched. I have lately been led to reflect a little, (for, now that I am growing old, my work has become [word indecipherable] special) on the artificial checks, but doubt greatly whether such would be advantageous to the world at large at present, however it may be in the distant future. Suppose that such checks had been in action during the last two or three centuries, or even for a shorter time in Britain, what a difference it would have made in the world, when we consider America, Australia, New Zealand, and S. Africa!" [Letter to G. A. Gaskell, 15 November 1878]
And that's that. Darwin opposed coercive eugenics. Period.
Eugenics started to be implemented by states after Mendelian genetics was discovered, during the Eclipse of Darwinism, which lasted about 1875-1930, when scientists believed in evolution but not by natural selection.
So, it was Mendelian genetics, not Darwinism, that inspired coercive state eugenics. Darwinism may have inspired research into hereditary diseases, and that's all.
Moreover, such laws were introduced in US states that considered banning Darwinism. The same year that Minnesota considered banning Darwinism is also passed eugenics laws. Minnesota was the home state of William Bell Riley, who founded fundamentalism in the US, arranged the Scopes Trial in 1925, and supported Hitler and Nazi anti-semitism in the 1930's.
As for the Nazis, they said their worldview was theistic, based on creationism and anti-atheism. Creationists loved eugenics.
When coercive state eugenics was introduced, it was during a time period when scientists believed in evolution but not by natural selection, and it occurred in places where Darwinism was not popular.
No Mendelism, no eugenics.
I'm ready to believe this is true. So what? J Thomas
So, that means my case is proven, the inventor of eugenics said, in plainest terms, that his inspiration was his cousin and colleague, Charles Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species. Oh, and it means that the post-war myth of Darwin's complete innocence of inspiring eugenics is a falsification. Maybe I'll transcribe or even translate some of the German that pretty much says the same thing in that line of pseudo-science, someday.
If someday somebody decides to censor science and they say they were inspired by you personally, does that make you the evil one?
What do you mean by "censor science"? I'd have to know that before I'd know if there's anything I've ever said that would support the charge that I'd inspired someone to do it.
With Darwin, as natural selection is the very foundation of eugenics, as Darwin encouraged Galton in both a letter that Galton published and as Darwin glowingly cited the book that was the foundation of eugenics in English as I documented above, over and over, as his own son who, I'll remind you knew him better than anyone who tried to distance him from eugenics, proudly attributed eugenics to his father, not only through Galton but, independently, through Schallmayer, I'd say the case I presented is considerably stronger than just someone saying he inspired them. He was an obvious participant in its encouragement and support and positive citation to support his own eugenic contentions in The Descent of Man rather clinches the case.
I don't have to show Darwin supporting Galton in "coercive eugenics" all I have to show is that he inspired eugenics in Galton and in Schallmayer, and I have. Not without the considerable help of, not only Galton and Schallmayer but also Leonard Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Karl Pearson and, of course, Charles Darwin, himself. I am tempted to give other, perhaps as shocking confirmation but will hold that for now. As I said, I wrote an essay on this topic four years ago and I do like to try to support my arguments with solid documentation. I'm tempted to use more of my evidence here but will save it for the next time this comes up.
I'm rather stunned at your cynical indifference to the most basic requirements of scholarship. I can understand that in some blog boy, tire biter who learned everything they have from cable TV shows featuring second rate stage magicians and stunt men, but am kind of shocked that a university teacher would say what you have.
How can I be accused of "besmirching" Charles Darwin for being responsible for things he, clearly, praised as he praised Galton's eugenics, not to mention Haeckel's. How can I have "besmirched" him any more thoroughly than his own sons who were involved with eugenics did?
You boys don't seem to realize that until the Nazis discredited eugenics, it was considered respectable science. Respectable because it flattered the ruling class and the economic relief and said it was a scientific fact that they were superior to the great, much despised, unwashed. Especially the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic elites.
For crying out loud, Francis Galton and Thomas Huxley are the ones who Charles Darwin's survivors asked to plan his funeral. Galton was no outsider in the Darwin family. He was honored with Darwin children named after him for at least two generations.
I didn't besmirch Charles Darwin, I told the truth about him.
Oh no! We missed the chance for a "gotcha!"? Curses! And it makes all the difference to the point, too.
Ah, Diogenes, still putting the load into "load more".
OK, one more thing, since the "coercive eugenics" card is being played. I'm not done researching this point yet, but I'm kind of amazed by Charles Darwin's September 25, 1873 letter to
Haeckel,
I thank you for the present of your book ('Schopfungs-geschichte,' 4th edition. The translation ('The History of Creation') was not published until 1876.), and I am heartily glad to see its great success. You will do a wonderful amount of good in spreading the doctrine of Evolution, supporting it as you do by so many original observations. I have read the new preface with very great interest.
The delay in the appearance of the English translation vexes and surprises me, for I have never been able to read it thoroughly in German, and I shall assuredly do so when it appears in English.
Has the problem of the later stages of reduction of useless structures ever perplexed you? This problem has of late caused me much perplexity....
I wonder if Darwin ever addressed Haeckel's enthusiasm for infanticide in Schopfungsgeschichte, about as drastic a form of "coercive eugenics" as there is, after the English translation was published.
See pages 170-174
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=YS4IAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA170
I'm unaware of any place where Darwin publicly criticized his foremost representative in Germany (Thomas Huxley had called him the Coryphaeus of Darwinism in the late 1860s) for his growing enthusiasm for killing people. I'm unaware of any criticism of Haeckel on that count by Leonard Darwin. Francis Darwin, the editor of the "Life and Letters of Charles Darwin" from where I copied the letter doesn't seem to have any qualms about Haeckel and how he was developing up till 1887, when he wrote his introduction to the first volume. You'd think that they'd want to disassociate their father from the advocacy of infanticide.
I'd welcome any citations that quote Charles Darwin to that effect.
TTC, you keep acting as if you have no understanding of history whatsoever. And yet you talk like you read a lot of original sources, how to you manage to keep such an ahistorical provincial attitude while you read?
Modern ideas of science came out of "natural philosophy" which turned into physics and chemistry, and "natural history" which turned into geology, biology, economics, etc. The first use of the word "scientist" has been traced back to 1837, before that people used "science" to mean "knowing".
Your idea of a "science book" is all modern. People didn't think like that in Darwin's time, as you should have noticed.
You mustn't, though, assume all of us have that little integrity. I'm quite sure I wouldn't do that. And it's doubtful I'd become rich like Darwin did because I wouldn't hold railway stocks, as Darwin did, being I'm a socialist. And I certainly haven't inherited wealth from my laboring class parents.
There's every reason to think that if you had inherited wealth, you would not be a socialist. Or maybe one of those polite wealthy "socialists" who keeps tight control of their money because they want to "do good" with it and they don't trust anybody else to do that as much as they trust themselves.
There's a DC folk saying that goes "Where you stand depends on where you sit.". Meaning, the stands that bureaucrats make on issues depend on how their own careers are affected. And it tends to be that way with civilians, too. You can say "If everything was different about my life I would still be the same and behave the same" but it's very hard to document that.
No Mendelism, no eugenics. Diogenes
Oh, dear. You really don't know the first thing about this topic, do you. As you, Diogenes noted that Galton hadn't yet called his "science" eugenics until after Charles Darwin died - though he, himself notes that the actual beginning of it at at least the publication of Hereditary Genius - your declaration fails for a very simple reason, Mendel's paper was unknown to him at that time and the Galton school rejected Mendel. GALTON'S MAJOR DISCIPLE, PEARSON, REJECTED MENDELISM AFTER IT WAS "REDISCOVERED" C. 1900 BECAUSE IT CONFLICTED WITH GALTON'S COMPETING THEORY. I very much suspect that Mendel having been a Catholic priest had more than something to do with that, as well. William Bateson was the major figure in Mendelism in Britain for the rest of Galton's life.
Galton's biometric theory of inheritance sufficed for his eugenics purposes. As the entire history of Darwinism presumes the inheritance of traits from parents, even under Charles Darwin's even more wrong theory of inheritance, the bases of eugenics were in place. Natural selection wouldn't work at all without that level of inheritance being assumed.
Your logical-historical disconnect won't, of course, bother you as it's one disconnect after another with you, but I thought I should note it.
J Thomas, if Charles Darwin was using using one of his major scientific publications to promote his financial interest, which, of course, he was, it doesn't do much for his general credibility. Considering that Thomas Malthus provided the spark of inspiration for natural selection, that alone makes skepticism of the concept on the basis of Darwin's self-interest fully justified. As I said, I'm skeptical of the idea as being of lasting value, since other, perhaps, more powerful ways of change have been discovered. I suspect in the future it will be seen as an artifact of Victorian aristocratic thinking that survived into the 21st century due to not all that much being known yet. Like so many other theories of science have been. That won't be a tragedy, it's the natural history of science for ideas to go extinct when they're not useful anymore. It's not surprising that Darwinism, almost immediately, gained a political interpretation that led to horrible results. With its Malthusian pedigree, that was almost certain to happen, Parson Malthus was writing a particularly vicious and class motivated form of political-economics, after all. What is surprising is how durable the most putrid aspects of that idea are proving to be, surviving even the real life phenomena of the actual application of it in eugenics and race "science". You can see that increasing since the 1980s with books like "The Bell Jar" and in some of the most appalling publications of evo-psy. As I mentioned, Gould, Lewontin and others warned it was coming in "Against Sociobiology". I find their prediction rather impressive.
I think the history of the 20th century requires a far more critical look at Darwin than is permissible so long as he's sacrosanct.
I don't think this argument is important, but it's kind of interesting. TTC keeps failing at simple logic.
Why do you keep bringing up an author and a book I didn't cite?
You didn't understand. He says this book made all the same arguments you make, with the same quotes. And he says it has been utterly discredited.
If so, you could get a big step up in your own research by reading it. You've repeated all this work. If you read the rebuttals, you will get that much farther ahead. Instead of being stuck on the same old discredited talking points, you can see why they are wrong. Or if you can show the rebuttals are wrong you could make a contribution that way. He's done you a big favor.
I used primary documents to support my argument.
You keep repeating that as if it helped you. Let me expand on Diogenes's point. I think he didn't spell it out because he assumed you would get it.
Other anti-Darwinists made your same claims. From original documents, they found the same handful of quotes that you use. There are various ways to interpret that.
1. Maybe you did not research original documents yourself, but instead you quoted the same things the other guys did. If Darwin was an evil eugenicist there should be thousands of quotes to show it, and you didn't look for them. That would make you look bad. But you claim you did. Lying about it would make you look worse. But there are other explanations.
2. Many anti-Darwinists have combed over thousands of pages of Darwin, and this pitiful handful of quotes is all they could find. They and you present it anyway, knowing that they misrepresent him. That also makes you look bad.
3. Maybe out of a lot of material that shows Darwin was an evil social darwinist etc, by sheer coincidence you chose the same quotes everybody else chose. You did find thousands of others. They found thousands of others. It's sheer coincidence that everybody quoted the same few. That doesn't make you look bad. Of course, if you were familiar with secondary sources and not just the primary documents, you could have prevented this by choosing your own damning quotes. But -- maybe because you decided to do it all yourself without reading anybody else's results -- you did not know to do that.
Can you see why he makes a big point of this? It makes you look utterly incompetent.
In this particular argument, depending on what Galton, Charles and Leonard Darwin, and other early eugenicists said linking Charles Darwin to eugenics, you have to use primary documents. To overturn that evidence you would need to find relevant, primary documents that contradicted what they said.
No. Logic is enough. You claim Darwin is the only inspiration for eugenics. As evidence you say that a few prominent eugenicists said Darwin inspired them individually, and you have a few examples that you claim show Darwin approving of people who would later become prominent eugenicists. You have a few examples of Darwin saying things that sound like he thought there should be more natural selection.
You think that anybody who disagrees with you must provide documents showing that your documents are wrong.
In response Diogenes pointed out that the bad eugenics came mostly after Darwin, so for example the word "eugenics" was coined after Darwin died.
You said that didn't matter because the roots of eugenics were getting strong in Darwin's time and with his help.
Diogenes said that the roots of eugenics were getting strong before Darwin.
To show that Darwin was the only or even the main inspiration for eugenics, you must show that eugenics had no previous inspiration. You have not tried to do that.
I don't have to refute your primary sources to show that you are wrong. It's enough to show that your conclusions do not follow from the evidence you say you have, though you wrongly say they do.
With Darwin, as natural selection is the very foundation of eugenics,
What the hell? Where did that come from? You claim to know something about eugenics and you can come up with a ridiculous claim like that?
The concepts are opposed. Natural selection will reduce the surplus population down to what the environment can support, and we find out what survives best by watching it survive best.
Eugenics involves somebody deciding what genes they approve of, and striving to increase the frequency of those genes in the population.
If the genes you approve of are established in the population, if they're present in quantities that make it unlikely for them to be lost by accident, and they are in facted favored by natural selection, then it is not necessary for anybody to do anything to increase their frequency. They *will* increase unless they must compete with something else that is increasing faster.
I repeat, the concepts are opposed.
How could you possibly miss such a basic fact?
You have never had much credibility, but you keep coming up with these whoppers....
G. A. Gaskell wrote him about eugenics and Darwin opposed the idea. Diogenes
You seem to have missed the words "at present" in that part of the Darwin letter YOU MINED, yourself. And you seem to have not noticed that Darwin longingly speculates what might have been if that form of eugenics (which he doesn't reject as scientifically wrong but he merely doubts its PRESENT possibility) had been instituted so that an improved Brit could have colonized the world.
Since you are so very, very opposed to "quote mining" I wonder why you cut off the end of the letter:
No words can exaggerate the importance, in my opinion, of our colonisation for the future history of the world.
If it were universally known that the birth of children could be prevented, and this were not thought immoral by married persons, would there not be great danger of extreme profligacy amongst unmarried women, and might we not become like the "arreoi" societies in the Pacific? In the course of a century France will tell us the result in many ways, and we can already see that the French nation does not spread or increase much.
I am glad that you intend to continue your investigations, and I hope ultimately may publish on the subject Charles Darwin
So, in line with his anticipation of "Caucasians" replacing other races such as the negro or Australian (see relevant quote from The Descent of Man above) Darwin considers British invasion of the rest of the world of major importance for the "future history of the world". How Darwin as fortuneteller passes muster with the CSICOP crowd, I'll leave for now.
And notice that Darwin seems to find contraception and knowledge of it posing a "great danger of extreme profligacy amongst unmarried women". In other words, he's afraid of women having sex if they learn how to avoid pregnancy. Which, since Darwin said it in this context, accounts for a good part of his doubting the practical possibility of some eugenics proposals.
I will note that he seems to have seen the kind of vicious, violent struggle he describes elsewhere as preferable to the idea of women enjoying sex out of wedlock. In fact, if you read Gaskell's letter that Darwin was responding to, as I have, you will see that he said:
The weak in body or mind may be cared for and protected so long as they conform to the social mandate not to continue their race. They may, to use Professor Mantegazza's words, "love, but must not have offspring."
In conclusion, I submit, the birth of the fittest offers a much
milder solution of the population difficidty, than the survival of the fittest and the destruction of the weak.
Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness, Jane Humer Clapperton APPENDIX TO CHAPTER XVIII.
So, Darwin seems to be expressing a preference for that kind of vicious struggle over the possibility "great danger of extreme profligacy amongst unmarried women".
You know, Diogenes, I have researched this topic a bit, if that wasn't clear. I have many, many more citations that show as bad if not worse.
Yeah, you're a shining beacon of truth-telling. Galton was invited to arrange Darwin's funeral by his kin specifically to give the seal of approval to eugenics? That what you're saying? Or are you just gathering together a whole bunch of vague, rather desperate innunendo?
Here are a couple of diagrams to help you organise your thinking:
{Darwin} {Other People}
See the distinction?
[The past] [Now] [The future]
See how that 'now' forms a moving cursor left-to-right along a timeline?
[Before his birth] [Darwin's life] [After his death]
See how that middle period is the thing of interest, when we are examining Darwin's character? People who encountered him have had lots to say about it, pre- and post-death, and it has nearly all been favourable. So - since you are such a noble servant of THE TRUTH an'all - how come you manage to fail to mention one solitary word about that in your endless, era-hopping diatribes?
Focus, man! Charles Darwin. Was he, or was he not, a twat?
There's every reason to think that if you had inherited wealth, you would not be a socialist.
I'd really rather not make this all about me, as that's a rather less interesting topic than the one under discussion. However, there is no reason to think that except it's what you prefer to think. You don't know me.
Or maybe one of those polite wealthy "socialists" who keeps tight control of their money because they want to "do good" with it and they don't trust anybody else to do that as much as they trust themselves.
I think you're describing a Fabian and I am nothing like a Fabian. If you could bring yourself to read a book, I'd suggest reading Mother Country by Marilynne Robinson, I completely agree with what she says about that kind of "socialist" in that book.
Of course that should be ...books such as "The Bell Curve".... Sylvia Plath was guilty of several things, committing eugenics, not one of those as far as I can tell.
Paulo Mantegazza, by the way, is yet another eugenicist who cited Darwin as their inspiration. Living in a Catholic country, though, he fortunately gained no political traction.
I should point out that "Scientific Meliorism" is available online. You can't understand that often used Darwin response to Gaskell without reading the entire exchange, including Gaskell's letters that are rather longer than I'd feel comfortable with posting complete. If you read Gaskell's letter it makes Darwin's response clear and far different from the way it usually is characterized.
http://archive.org/details/scientificmelio01clapgoog
"With Darwin, as natural selection is the very foundation of eugenics,
What the hell? Where did that come from? You claim to know something about eugenics and you can come up with a ridiculous claim like that? J Thomas
You don't understand that much? That the entire concept of eugenics is a reaction to the idea that human culture has interrupted natural selection in the human population and so the "weaker members" of the population are over breeding and dragging the entire population down because they aren't dying before they have children?
Why are you involved in this J Thomas. You seem to know nothing about the topic of eugenics. Which, since you couldn't name a single book on the topic isn't really a surprise.
Are you waiting for Penn Jillette or the Myth Busters to do a eugenics show?
I think the history of the 20th century requires a far more critical look at Darwin than is permissible so long as he's sacrosanct.
Write a book, then. You are expending enormous amounts of energy in the bowels of a thread most people have lost interest in, arguing with people whose points 'whoosh' over your head, and who don't buy your thesis, so perhaps you should sell it on the open market, and let the reading public decide its merits.
That the entire concept of eugenics is a reaction to the idea that human culture has interrupted natural selection in the human population and so the "weaker members" of the population are over breeding and dragging the entire population down because they aren't dying before they have children?
Ah, I see what you're saying now. Not that natural selection is anything like a foundation for eugenics. But that some people arrived at the mistaken belief that natural selection no longer operated on humans, and so they needed some sort of artificial selection to replace it. Yes, some people did make that mistake.
See, when you said that natural selection was the foundation of eugenics, it sounded like you had the crazy idea that natural selection was the foundation of eugenics, which from your explanation I'm sure you'll agree is completely wrong and absurd.
You can hardly blame me for thinking that you were making the ridiculous claim that natural selection was a foundation of eugenics, right? I got confused because you said something that sounded a whole lot like that. But now you have explained what you actually meant, and so we can agree that of course natural selection was not at all a foundation for eugenics.
But that some people arrived at the mistaken belief that natural selection no longer operated on humans, J Thomas
If you had ever read anything about this you would know that your "some people" include Charles Darwin, Francis Gallton, W. Schallmayer, Ernst Haeckel, and every other eugenicist I've ever read.
We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. Charles Darwin The Descent of Man
That, J Thomas satisfies every part of what I said. "Thus the weak members of civilised society propagate their kind", due to housing them in "asylums" giving even the notoriously stingy aid of the Victorian poor laws (see Charles Dickens for details on what that entailed), giving them medical care and, singled out for a sentence all of its own, vaccinating them against small pox. And as a result of them living to the age where they can "propagate their kind" there can be little doubt that "this must be highly injurious to the race of man".
If you knew anything about eugenics, you'd know that is a classical statement of its premise.
You don't even know enough about the subject to know that you don't know anything about it. There was a time I'd be surprised by someone alleged to have an education behaving as you are here. I lost my innocence about things like that on the science blogs.
You are expending enormous amounts of energy in the bowels of a thread most people have lost interest in Allen Miller
You think this is an enormous expenditure of energy? I guess my major was a bit more rigorous than yours.
What are you doing here whining in the bowels or the thread?
But that some people arrived at the mistaken belief that natural selection no longer operated on humans....
If you had ever read anything about this you would know that your "some people" include Charles Darwin, Francis Gallton, W. Schallmayer, Ernst Haeckel, and every other eugenicist I've ever read.
And you agree they were all wrong, yes?
If you knew anything about eugenics, you'd know that is a classical statement of its premise.
And they were deluded. Starting from incorrect assumptions, they made a complete botch of it. To the point that other deluded chumps think the very goal is bad.
Like people who look at the history of Christianity and decide that the various travesties mean that Christianity itself is a bad thing. It's the same mistake as the one you are making.
You are expending enormous amounts of energy in the bowels of a thread most people have lost interest in Allen Miller
You think this is an enormous expenditure of energy? I guess my major was a bit more rigorous than yours.
OK, I apologise for thinking you put some effort into it.
And you agree they were all wrong, yes?
Jeesh, it's no wonder climate change legislation is in trouble. Better advocates for saving the planet.
OK, I apologise for thinking you put some effort into it.
I did but it didn't take an enormous expenditure of energy and I did most of it as research four years ago. Most of the information was easy to find, I just ignored the secondary sources because those don't do the job and a lot of them are an ideological distortion of the historical record.
It's been mostly a matter of looking at my old notebooks here.
So write the book. If Darwin is 'sacrosanct', and you wish to pursue this political mission to depose him from this assumed pedestal, gather your notes into a cohesive narrative.
I do think you will have a fundamental problem though: a failure to distinguish "Natural Selection" and "Artificial Selection", and reviewers will pounce on that. I don't expect you to ever slap your forehead and proclaim: "by jiminy, he's right!".
According to Barry Arrington, the Columbine shooters had "Natural Selection" on tee-shirts. Yet no-one ever suggested that Natural Selection equated to the deaths of organisms that happened to be in a particular vicinity, so they got it wrong. And maybe that's illustrative of the general problem - piss-poor science education. I'm not drawing a line from education to Columbine here, but misunderstanding of NS is rife. You wish to see the concept eliminated because it is routinely misunderstood - you clearly don't understand it yourself, though you are aggressively convinced you do. It's that word 'selection', isn't it? You seem to think that means choice.
It is hereditary variation in survival and reproduction, sifting a population without a supervening force that compares any member of the population with any other (except, perhaps, females, the ultimate eugenicists). The summation of singular instances of birth and death. It's 'nature' doing blindly what a breeder - such as a eugenicist - may do with intent.
You seem to be slipping in more stuff that is irrelevant to the question of Charles Darwin being the inspiration of eugenics. And, as you are using blog posts to try to refute what Darwin, Galton, Schallmeyer, Haeckel, Leonard Darwin, etc. said, in their own words, it doesn't do what you want it to do.
You need primary sources as close to the issue as the sources I'm using, and there are none close than the ones I'm using, to refute my case. You'd have to produce where these same people said the opposite of what they said and that would only produce a case that they were guilty of double talk. Which is actually an accusation that could be made in Charles Darwin's case, I don't see how anyone who had read much of his written record could come away without noticing that. But, in every case I've followed the documentary trail, especially from the letters, what he said only makes it more apparent that he was a Social Darwinist and the foundation of eugenics.
Now, why don't you deal with primary sources instead of ideological tripe from blogs.
I can understand why the Darwin Fan Club, not to mention the considerably profitable Darwin Industry, would want to change the subject but I doubt Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Fredrich Wilhelm Schallmeyer, Ernst Haeckel, Leonard Darwin, .... had ever heard of Columbine, Co. And am certain they never heard of Barry Arrington(I don't know who he is), so that is entirely irrelevant to my contention or the case I've made. Though your bringing it into this points to it actually being an ideological and not a scientific brawl.
no-one ever suggested that Natural Selection equated to the deaths of organisms that happened to be in a particular vicinity
What do you imagine happens in the "selection" part of natural selection? In a follow up to my essay and the weeks long furor it incited, four years ago, I made this point:
"Darwin used a metaphor to describe the unchecked breeding of the “weaker members” of the human species and the bad results it would have for future generations. He said:
"Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."
He introduced the idea that it was stupid to allow certain people to have children after lamenting that they would survive to child bearing age. By comparing people to farm animals in this context he was clearly lamenting that people wouldn’t be treated like animals in a commercial breeding operation.
Let me stop here to ask, isn’t that outrageous enough in itself? Not even animals in the wild, but comparing human beings to animals in a commercial breeding operation? Where else have we seen that idea not only posed by carried out?
Darwin’s Defender didn’t seem to realize that animals selected as not to be bred are not kept as pets on a farm but are marked for early slaughter. I’ll point out that this is entirely in keeping with the earlier part of the paragraph where Darwin laments that human beings will survive long enough to breed."
As I also point out in that post, Darwin had years of experience with what he said being poured over for detailed meaning, he had experience in how controversial his ideas could become. Yet he chose to use this metaphor, if he intended it as a metaphor. Clearly, many of his followers took it somewhat more literally than a metaphor is, including Haeckel, during Charles Darwin's lifetime, in a book he had in hand, in German, and which he eagerly intended to read in its English translation.
I used to buy the post-war myth that was constructed to save Darwin from that side of his legacy. I started researching this confident that the myth was based on solid, honest research. Only, as I found out almost immediately, the opposite was the case. The more I see of the original documentation, the more obvious it is that Charles Darwin is responsible for eugenics and Social Darwinism. His followers extended some pretty putrid ideas from there, after he died, though, in Haeckel, and the fact that Darwin was reading the relevant books and articles, he could have seen where things were headed.
There was considerable skepticism about natural selection among accomplished biologists up into the 20th century. It was the synthesis with Mendelian genetics that saved the case for natural selection. With time that case gets changed, here and there, a bit of stretching, new stuff that is irrelevant to natural selection,... As I said above, I've come to the conclusion that natural selection will, with time, either erode into irrelevancy or morph into something very different or it will merely be superceded by ideas based on more information.
Its political implications are absolutely anti-democratic and its practical application in human society is a disaster and a crime.
I'm going to repost that essay on my blog sometime in the coming month, with any changes I decide to make.
Just looked up Barry Arrington. He's wrong about evolution. Period.
What do you imagine happens in the "selection" part of natural selection?
Individuals with certain variants of a trit produce more offspring on average than other individuals possessing alternative variants at the same, genetically particulate, locus, of course. You think there's some great decision-making eugenicist-in-the-sky? I expect you do, but this is not what NS relates to.
To be honest, I gave up reading the rest halfway through, because you are becoming tedious. It's like being cornered in a bar by someone who just HAS to buttonhole me about some grand conspiracy he has unearthed. Any and every point made in opposition is missed or dismissed, because, you see, there's this grand conspiracy afoot and the world must be told.
I can understand why the Darwin Fan Club, not to mention the considerably profitable Darwin Industry, would want to change the subject but I doubt Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Fredrich Wilhelm Schallmeyer, Ernst Haeckel, Leonard Darwin, .... had ever heard of Columbine, Co. And am certain they never heard of Barry Arrington(I don't know who he is), so that is entirely irrelevant to my contention or the case I've made. Though your bringing it into this points to it actually being an ideological and not a scientific brawl.
Are you serious? I stare slightly open-mouthed at that, as in any way addressing the point I was making. It wasn't relevant to any of YOUR contentions, but to mine! To whit: NS is routinely misunderstood, including people who use it to justify unacceptable social behaviour, and their critics. You think the world revolves around you? You are doing a fine job of demonstrating your misunderstanding, even as you accuse me of trying to 'change the subject'! That is rich - an accurate understanding of Darwinian NS has no bearing upon the influence of Darwinian NS?
Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to have to drink up and go and rejoin my wife.
Just looked up Barry Arrington. He's wrong about evolution. Period.
I mention him only as the source of the "Natural Selection" story - he was a lawyer on the Columbine case.
Just noticed something I'll have to investigate.
Given Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Karl Pearson and others going on and on about the dysgenic effect of medical care in the human population, and in light of Darwin 's metaphor comparing human populations to animals in a breeding operation, contending that it tended to lead to "the degeneration of a domestic race", I wonder if there is anyplace where the Darwinians said things that bad about veterinary medicine being applied to animals in a breeding operation. I have read quite a few things and don't remember anything like that in any of them. Apparently they weren't as bothered by medical care of farm animals as they were of "modern medicine" (the kind of medical care available between 1870 and the early 20th century!)being available to people.
As I also noted four years ago, Charles Darwin seemed to seek extensive medical care, requiring that "medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of [Charles Darwin] to the last moment". Despite a lifetime of illness that he and his followers would probably say marked any member of the poor as being a "weak member of civilised societies".
See, the longer you really think about what they said and what they did, the worse it gets.
Allan Miller, not everything important to an argument is going to be as much fun as watching a BBC costume drama about St. Charles Darwin. Sometimes you have to look at the small details and compare them.
You can just adore Charles Darwin but that won't make you think.
It wasn't relevant to any of YOUR contentions, but to mine! To whit: NS is routinely misunderstood, including people who use it to justify unacceptable social behaviour, and their critics.
OK, if you insist on me addressing it, have you ever wondered what it was about natural selection that seems to a lead to such an impressive number of instances in which it's "routinely misunderstood"? Especially by people who are attracted to violence?
Here, I'll quote your hero, yet again:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick;...
That the savages in your example had guns only changes the medium of elimination, not the dynamics of violence. I don't have any idea if they were wearing tee shirts that said "Natural Selection" or not, I would tend to doubt it, being aware that creationist PR is at least as dishonest as Darwin Fan Club PR, but, really, if there's any "misunderstanding" of natural selection its among those who want to divorce it from the savage violence that is one of its mechanisms, as frequently asserted by Charles Darwin and his followers. Violence is an intrinsic part of natural selection. Along with disease, starvation, ... violence is intrinsic to the idea.
TTC: In that letter Darwin badmouthed unions.
This is irrelevant-- TTC's point is still falsified. He has no support for his claim that Darwin supported "Social Darwinism" (a term invented in 1944, after Darwin had been dead 62 years.)
So TTC must equate opposition of some union practices (e.g. equal wages for all union workers) = "Social Darwinism."
The phrase "Social Darwinism" has never been clearly defined, and every scholar acts as if his unique definition is the only one.
Here TTC, desperate for imagined evidence, equates "Social Darwinism" = opposition of some union practices (e.g. equal wages for all union workers). Ad hoc redefinition.
I can't say TTC's not allowed to redefine Social Darwinism, because all scholars have their own personal definition of it.
But if TTC were honest, he would say, "Charles Darwin opposed some practices of trade unions."
That would be true, but it doesn't make Darwin sound horrible enough.
So instead TTC desperately blurts "Charles Darwin was a Social Darwinist", using a term invented 62 years after Darwin was dead. Pathetic and desperate.
Shithead has repeatedly demonstrated throughout this thread his deep ignorance of the history of eugencis, science, Nazism, the Third Reich and Christianity. Not to mention his inability to understand sentences written in plain English.
But TTC writes:
Oh, dear. You really don't know the first thing about this topic, do you.
Oh, dear, you are a moron, aren't you. This from a drooling moron who promotes the Darwin-to-Haeckel-to-Hitler hoax, and ignores the fact that Nazi eugenics was based on anti-materialism, and that all major American creationists from 1920 to 1970 supported eugenics.
At no point did Asshole inform his readers that the word "eugenics" was coined 3 years after Darwin died.
Mendel's paper was unknown to him [Darwin] at that time and the Galton school rejected Mendel.
So what, moron? Everybody knows Darwin didn't understand Mendelian genetics.
Who cares what "the Galton school" did?
Coercive eugenics wasn't implemented in the US until after the acceptance of Mendelism and well into Eclipse of Darwinism, when scientists didn't believe Natural Selection drove evolution.
This disproves moron's infantile claim that Natural Selection is essential to eugenics.
Natural selection wouldn't work at all without that level of inheritance being assumed.
Then why was eugenics implemented by governments only after natural selection was rejected as the basis of evolution?
So your infantile thesis is disproven.
Mendelism drove the belief that everything was controlled by single genes-- feeblemindedness, alchoholism etc.
Why does TTC have no evidence for the shit he flings here?
He blames it on a conspiracy at the Darwin project! Yeah, that explains his lack of evidence! It's a conspiracah!
Nazi eugenics was based on Christian moral values and anti-atheism, as they explicitly stated. Your argument is with Hitler, not me.
Blah,blah,blah,blah
You can't make an argument that gets past the evidence, all you can do is try to deflect attention from it and fling words and insults.
And that's good enough for the very sciencey new atheists because they don't really care about whether or not what they say is true.
"Diogenes", yeah, right. You could walk around with a trillion watt lamp, if you found someone telling the truth you'd never recognize it.
Larry Moran, you want to enlighten "Diogenes" about the history of Mendelism in this context? Beginning with the boy's very own problem of chronology between Galton coining the word "eugenics", a point the boy used, rather incompetently, in another comment, and the "rediscovery" of Mendel's paper in Britain?
I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the intellectual car wreck that is "Diogenes".
It's not surprising that Darwinism, almost immediately, gained a political interpretation that led to horrible results.
Like what? Not eugenics. It's not surprising that anti-Darwinism, and anti-materialism even more so, almost immediately, gained a political interpretation that led to horrible results.
Nazism was fanatically anti-atheist and their eugenics was motivated by their religious belief that their people were created in the image of God, and the Jews were materialists (in the philosophical sense). No anti-atheism, no Holocaust.
Eugenics was implemented during the Eclipse of Darwinism when scientists didn't believe NS drove evolution, and eugenics was supported by all major American creationists who hated atheism and materialism.
Anti-atheism and anti-materialism and anti-Darwinism are correlated with strong support for Nazism and eugenics.
Many prominent evolutionists opposed eugenics, but no major American creationists opposed eugenics. The architects of the Scopes Trial, bans on Darwinism, and American fundamentalism supported Hitler and Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930's.
You are mentally ill. There isn't any reason to answer you. You don't belong on a blog, you belong in therapy.
I will add, though, that you are clearly not all that bright either, making up stuff, contradicting yourself, doing what you accuse other people of. Stupidity and mental illness, it's not a good combination.
If I said anything inaccurate, you could present evidence that what I said was inaccurate. You presented no such evidence because you know I have proof of everything I wrote.
TTC was presented with direct evidence that Charles Darwin opposed coercive eugenics, and in fact TTC's own quoting of Gaskell's letter makes it very clear what Darwin was against: coercive eugenics. Gaskell described it, Darwin opposed it.
And the cherry on the sundae is that Darwin also opposes Galton's plan for "marriage certificates." So Darwin's definitely against coercive eugenics.
Open and shut case. TTC defeated.
But no, TTC's counter-argument is... what, exactly? That Darwin believes in imperialism? Wow, shocking. Like 99% of all white people alive at that time, Darwin believed in imperialism.
Now if TTC wanted to say, "Darwin is bad because he believes in imperialism," he might at least be respected.
But what TTC really means is, "Darwin must have supported coercive eugenics even though he stated opposition to it in print, because he supported imperialism," that is just TTC once again using an ad hoc redefinition of eugenics, here eugenics = imperialism (similar to when TTC claimed without evidence Darwin supported "Social Darwinism" 62 years before the term was invented, because TTC says "Social Darwinism" = disagreeing with union policies.)
I have many, many more citations that show as bad if not worse.
Bullshit; he doesn't. If he had evidence he would have presented it. He didn't so he doesn't.
Moreover, TTC has already explained his lack of evidence for his propositions by saying there's a conspiracy at the Darwin Project. Yeah, that explains why he's got no evidence.
TTC: If he [Darwin] encouraged him [Haeckel] along that line, it's pretty damning, which makes one wonder at the motives of the Darwin Correspondence Project for failing to transcribe them.
TTC: I've got to wonder, after those Haeckel letters mentioned above were, also, untranscribed, a work of, maybe, five or even fifteen minutes apiece, why those particular letters seem to be being withheld by The Project...
It’s a conspiracah! No wonder TTC can't present evidence to back up his claims-- "They" are suppressing the evidence he doesn't have!
TTC: If you read Gaskell's letter it makes Darwin's response clear
TTC is right: Gaskell's letter makes it especially clear what Darwin was opposing: coercive eugenics, thus disproving TTC's huge pile of manure.
I've been presenting that information since you entered into the discussion. And have shown you to be the quote miner, not even quoting entire paragraphs but cutting them off for reasons of distorting what they mean (the Gaskell letter), and for loading the threads with junk not relevant to the discussion. Not to mention lying about what I said. You are a completely dishonest, uninformed crackpot who can't stand that your atheist hobby horse has been shown to have been the grandfather of eugenics, as not only the inventors of eugenics in Britain and Germany said, but his own sons as well. Not to mention countless other eugenicists up till the second world war. He is also the father of neo-eugenics.
The eugenics free Charles Darwin is a post-war myth invented so he could remain useful to atheist polemics in a period when eugenics was seen for what it is, a crime against humanity. That phony Charles Darwin is shown to be a lie by his own words, the words of Francis Galton, Leonard Darwin F. W. Shallmayer and Ernst Haeckel.
All you've got is lies and irrelevancies to throw up against the truth. I've generally found that atheists are prone to lying. Perhaps that's because they really don't believe that there is anything real to morality. I can quote your heroes quite convincingly to back up that case, as well.
TTC has been confronted with direct evidence that Darwin opposed coercive eugenics.
Having been defeated, he continues to copy and paste the same dishonest quote mine used by Ben Stein in "Expelled" over and over and over again. It does not get less dishonest the 100th time he copies it.
If TTC isn't really Ben Stein, then he's copying Ben Stein.
Here is the following part of the quote, that TTC has snipped out because it disproves his fantasy world.
Darwin: The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.
Some anti-Darwinists are just pathological liars.
TTC has been confronted with direct evidence that Darwin opposed coercive eugenics. He's defeated.
In his "defense", he copies and pastes Ben Stein's quote mine of Darwin from "Expelled."
If asshole knew anything about eugenics, he'd know that in that quote he himself is citing, Darwin is ONCE AGAIN opposing coercive eugenics and neglect of the weak.
TTC doesn't want you to know the rest of that quote because it's further disproof of his lying bullshit.
Here is the following part of the quote, that TTC has snipped out because it proves he is a liar.
Darwin: The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.
Everyone saw that quote mine exposed after Ben Stein tried it in "Expelled", but TTC thinks we're too dumb to know the truth.
Try it on the yokels, they're more easily impressed.
Yeah, how much effort does it take to copy and paste quote mines from creationist websites?
Quote mining again, eh, Diogenes? I am quite familiar with that particular clip from that particular paragraph, I've dealt with other new atheists who've done exactly what you just did here. Unlike you, I've read the book, I know what you cut off. Here's the entire thing, as Darwin wrote it in the The Descent of Man, with my bolding of what you cut out.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.
"We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind;"
"though this is more to be hoped for than expected"
The eugenicist hypocrite was undermining his ass covering demurral even as he was making it, and as he went on to undermine it throughout the rest of the book, after the far stronger preceding paragraph guaranteeing disaster that I've given here.
You are a quote miner, caught at it twice just on this thread, to distort the meaning of what you used.
I will add that by the last edition he made of Descent of Man Charles Darwin had read quite a few eugenics proposals, including the early ones hinting at the benefits of infanticide made by his German "Chorus leader" (Thomas Huxley, Darwin's "bulldog" called Haeckel that) as well as British ones that he couldn't have misunderstood. G. A. Gaskell's was one of the milder ones, which Darwin rejected because he was afraid that unmarried women might fool around if they learned about contraception (that letter you cut off to distort its meaning on this thread, Diogenes). As Gaskell pointed out in his letter that Darwin was responding to, his proposal was considerably less brutal than what Darwin had said would happen.
By that time Darwin had every reason to know how those warnings he was issuing were being taken by his audience, including Haeckel. He had correspondence with a number of early eugenicists and he cites the very books in which some of those ideas are presented.
You're just a sore head because I caught you quote mining.
Twice.
TTC repeatedly copies and pastes Ben Stein's quote mine of Darwin from "Expelled" which, as everyone knows, was debunked years ago when "Expelled" came out. Even Wikiquote debunks that quote mine.
In that quote mine TTC himself is citing, Darwin is ONCE AGAIN opposing coercive eugenics and neglect of the weak.
Here is the following part of the quote, that TTC has snipped out because it proves he is a liar.
Darwin: The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.
How much brains does it take to copy and paste from Ben Stein?
As the clearly mentally ill Diogenes is going back to drool inaccurately and irrelevantly over every comment I make I'm going to have to depend on whatever honest readers wading through him to read what I really said.
TTC was proven wrong by direct evidence in two quotes-- the quote mine from Ben Stein and the Gaskell letter-- that Darwin opposed coercive eugenics.
TTC: G. A. Gaskell's was one of the milder ones, which Darwin rejected
Oh not just Gaskell, no, but Galton's ideas are also rejected in that letter-- remember Galton? Darwin might've rejected Gaskell's idea for multiple reasons, including female "virtue", but opposing eugenics still proves TTC is wrong.
TTC did not say, "Darwin opposed eugenics except when he was defending female virtue." No.
Instead TTC said: I pointed out what you would need to counter that massive and massively convincing evidence that Darwin was, not only a "convert (his word)" won over by Galton, but also an enthusiastic participant in the early stages of eugenics.
No qualifier here about female virtue. But for that statement, TTC doesn't have any evidence for Darwin supporting eugenics, and TTC admits it.
TTC: I don't have to show Darwin supporting Galton in "coercive eugenics"
Where'd the "massive and massively convincing" evidence go?
TTC: I'm tempted to use more of my evidence here but will save it for the next time
"More of my evidence"? You didn’t provide any evidence the first time. OK, "next time" you'll show us evidence you didn't have in this thread.
So "next time" you won't be a dumb piece of shit, but in this thread you're a dumb piece of shit who was proven wrong by his own Darwin-against-eugenics "Ben Stein" quote mine.
TTC: Darwin had every reason to know how those warnings he was issuing were being taken by his audience
You don't have any quotes about what "his audience" was saying, that we know Darwin read, when some of it was in German and he couldn't read German. So why should I give a damn about your fantasy life?
But we do know what Galton and Gaskell were saying, and we know Darwin opposed that.
TTC presented NO EVIDENCE of anything Darwin DID support. Supposition, innuendo and hearsay are inadmissible in a court of law. All the real evidence here is negative.
TTC: Charles Darwin had read quite a few eugenics proposals, including the early ones hinting at the benefits of infanticide made by his German "Chorus leader"
Bullshit. TTC has no evidence Darwin read any eugenics proposals except Galton and Gaskell-- if TTC had evidence, he'd have presented it. He didn't present it because he doesn't have the evidence.
So it's just his fantasy life where, sometime in the future, he'll have evidence that Darwin could read Haeckel's books in German that supposedly are pro-infanticide.
Instead, TTC quotes Darwin asking Haeckel about the reduction of rudimentary structures! Wow! Darwin asked Haeckel about scientific ideas in ~1870, that proves Darwin agreed with the political ideas Haeckel had twenty years later, ten years after Darwin was dead.
But TTC has an excuse for his lack of evidence. The Darwin Project is conspiring to suppress the evidence he's never had!
TTC: If he [Darwin] encouraged him [Haeckel] along that line, it's pretty damning, which makes one wonder at the motives of the Darwin Correspondence Project for failing to transcribe them.
TTC: I've got to wonder, after those Haeckel letters mentioned above were, also, untranscribed, a work of, maybe, five or even fifteen minutes apiece, why those particular letters seem to be being withheld by The Project
It’s a conspiracah! That explains why he's got no evidence: the Darwinists are keeping him from getting any! Wow, they're double-evil!
TTC: I am tempted to give other, perhaps as shocking confirmation but will hold that for now.
Oh you’re tempted to provide evidence, are you little doggy? Don't post again until you've got more than "I'm tempted".
TTC is angry because I debunked the quote mine he copied from Ben Stein. Waah!
TTC failed to provide any evidence of Darwin supporting coercive eugenics.
The word eugenics wasn't even invented until 3 years after Darwin was dead, and the term "Social Darwinism" was invented 62 years after he was dead. TTC has no evidence of Darwin supporting whatever those meant in his own time.
TTC has no response to the letter in which Darwin opposes the eugenic ideas of Francis Galton and Gaskell, apart from TTC pounding the sand in impotent rage.
TTC also trotted out the same quote mine which he copied from Ben Stein, in which Darwin opposes neglecting care of the weak.
But don't worry-- TTC has excuses for his lack of evidence!
TTC: I don't have to show Darwin supporting Galton in "coercive eugenics"
Where'd his "massive and massively convincing" evidence go?
We don't need no steenkin' evidence. You just gots to believe.
TTC: I'm tempted to use more of my evidence here but will save it for the next time
OK so "next time" you won't be a dumb piece of shit, but in this thread you're a dumb piece of shit, who was proven wrong by his own Darwin-against-eugenics "Ben Stein" quote mine.
But TTC has an excuse for his lack of evidence. The dog ate his homework, and, uh...
The Darwin Project is conspiring to suppress the evidence he's never had! Yeah, that's the ticket.
TTC: If he [Darwin] encouraged him [Haeckel] along that line, it's pretty damning, which makes one wonder at the motives of the Darwin Correspondence Project for failing to transcribe them.
TTC: I've got to wonder, after those Haeckel letters mentioned above were, also, untranscribed, a work of, maybe, five or even fifteen minutes apiece, why those particular letters seem to be being withheld by The Project
It’s a conspiracah! That explains why he's got no evidence: the Darwinists are keeping him from getting any! Wow, they're double-evil!
TTC: I am tempted to give other, perhaps as shocking confirmation but will hold that for now.
Oh you’re tempted to provide evidence, are you little doggy? From what's been presented here, you look incredibly good at resisting the "temptation" to show evidence.
Don't post again until you've got more than temptation.
f there's any "misunderstanding" of Christianity its among those who want to divorce it from the savage violence that is one of its mechanisms, as frequently asserted by Jesus Christ and his followers. Violence is an intrinsic part of Christianity. Along with disease, starvation, ... violence is intrinsic to the idea.
Fixed.
have you ever wondered what it was about Christianity that seems to a lead to such an impressive number of instances in which it's "routinely misunderstood"? Especially by people who are attracted to violence?
Fixed.
Diogefnes, it's not my fault if they read what Charles Darwin and his closest followers have written. I've cited the books, which I've read. You haven't.
Maybe if you had ever read anything Darwin had written you'd know where they found it.
I've yet to see any evidence on this thread that any of Darwin's defenders have ever read any of his books, papers or letters. Diogenes, you seem to be completely ignorant of his record.
That ignorance is what the myth of St. Darwin depends on.
Diogenes, You quote mined that paragraph to distort what Darwin said because you never read the book. You don't know anything about Charles Darwin that you haven't gotten from Darwin cult sources, whereas I've gotten what I have, just about entirely, from the original sources.
Primary source material, taken from the subjects, themselves, wins over your secondary sources and tertiary junk. That's just the way history works. Your arguments fail because they are contradicted by the primary sources.
Allan Miller, how do you like being on Diogenes side?
Ah, Diogens, I don't happen to be a Christian. As I've said many times before on these blogs.
Anyone who claimed to be Christian and killed someone was acting against the teachings of Jesus. Anyone who was a materialist and killed someone wasn't acting against the teachings of materialism. Materialists don't have to violate their ideology to murder, singly or in the millions. Lying isn't a violation of materialist ideology either, so you con continue on as you are, knowing that you're being true to your faith.
Of course, the biggest irony in this, Diogenes, is that every comment you post only demonstrates you would fall well into the category of people Darwin said shouldn't be propagating. His followers Galton, Haeckel, Leonard Darwin, ... would have advocated your involuntary sterilization, at least.
Allan Miller, how do you like being on Diogenes side?
In so far as we are broadly agreed on the facts and interpretation of the matter, I like it just fine! He chooses a way of expressing himself that is more robust than mine, but that's up to him. I presume you would not regret your position on a matter simply because it aligned you with someone else? I'm sure we could all find fault with each other if we really tried hard enough.
So his cutting off paragraphs to distort their meaning, his assertions with no documentary support, his use of clearly ideological crap in place of primary documentation, his wildly irrelevant side-tracking, his outright lies and corprolalia are just fine with you.
Let me get this stright, you guys believe that kind of thing gets you closer to reality. Really.
For anyone who cares about reality who might read this, is it any wonder that the public understanding of evolution is suffering when this stuff is presented as championing it.
I would not welcome people doing that trying to align themselves with me. Luckily, doing real research tends to weed them out of the discussion.
OK, I'll quote the entire response, the letter that Diogenes cut the end off of to make his claim and I'll provide the place where you can read the entire correspondence between Gaskell and Darwin, on the thin chance that anyone still reading this has the mental capacity to look at original sources.
Down, Beckenham, Kent,
November 15M, 1878.
Dear Sir,
Your letter seems to me very interesting and clearly
expressed ; and I hope that you are in the right
Your second law appears to be largely acted on in all civilized countries, and I just alluded to it in my remarks to the effect (as far as I remember) that the evils which would follow by checking benevolence and sympathy in not fostering the weak and diseased would be greater than by allowing them to survive and then to procreate.
With respect to your third law, I do not know whether you
have read an article (I forget when published) by F. Galton, in which he proposes certificates of health, etc., for marriage, and hat the best should be matched.
I have lately been led to reflect a little (for now that I am
growing old, my work has become merely special) on the artificial checks to increase, and I cannot but doubt greatly, whether such would be advantageous to the world at large at present, however it may be in the distant future.
Suppose that such checks had been in action during the last
two or three centuries, or even for a shorter time in Britain, what a difference it would have made in the world, when we consider America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa ! No words can exaggerate the importance, in my opinion, of our colonization for the future history of the world.
If it were universally known that the birth of children could be prevented, and this was not thought immoral by married persons, would there not be great danger of extreme profligacy amongst unmarried women, and might we not become like to "arreois" societies in the Pacific?
In the course of a century, France will tell us the result in many ways. We can already see that the French nation does not spread or increase much.
I am glad that you intend to continue your investigations, and I hope ultimately may publish on the subject.
I beg leave to remain, dear Sir,
Yours faithfully,
Ch. Darwin.
P.S. — This note is badly expressed and written, but I have not time or strength to re-write it
And what was Gaskell's "third law" that Darwin was opposing, in the context of his stated reservations about birth control.
The third is the Judicial Law, evolved as a rule of conscience for well-being. It gradually annuls the preceding laws while combining their beneficial results, on the basis of tending to greater strength and health, both in the aggregate and in the unit. It is the final outcome of Human Evolution in the order offerees governing race propagation. It is necessarily evolved in the mind by the interaction of reason and sympathy, and its development proceeds on the fact of artificial birth-control,unopposed to the force of sexual passion which otherwise would, with the weaker individuals, most certainly be too powerful to permit its action.
As Diogenes cut off the letter before Darwin discussed why he doubted "whether such would be advantageous to the world at large at present, however it may be in the distant future." you wouldn't know what Darwin was talking about in his answer to Gaskell. He was doubting that using artifical birth control was a good idea because he was afraid of single women enjoying sex without having to worry about becoming pregnant. Notice he says nothing about unmarried men doing the same.
And notice, he didn't say the idea was wrong or unscientific because he said that it might be practical in the future, "however it may be in the distant future".
He was opposing birth control. And he explicitly encouraged Gaskell to keep going, "I am glad that you intend to continue your investigations, and I hope ultimately may publish on the subject."
If you doubt the accuracy of what I said, you can look it up yourself at the URL I give above.
TTC,
You have been guilty, whether deliberately or not, of the practices you claim to deplore: out-of-context quotation, elision without marking such etc ... and therefore, one could add the charge of hypocrisy.
I don't agree with everything Diogenes writes, nor always his manner of expression. But your own accusations of mental deficiency, the apparent bigotry you display in dismissing the arguments of 'materialists', 'atheists', 'Darwin fanboys' and the rest, and a general tendency to address the argumenter not the argument - these aren't particularly edifying characteristics either.
I realise you have a crusade to pursue, trying to stuff the genie of "Natural Selection" back in its bottle (as if it was ever intended as a sodding manifesto for how human society should be run!). So I will detain you no further.
Violence is an intrinsic part of natural selection. Along with disease, starvation, ... violence is intrinsic to the idea.
You still don't get it. How does one trait increasing in frequency faster than another require any violence? Violence occurs, between certain traits in certain animals. But that does not mean that Natural Selection is a 'theory of violence'! Are organisms with better immune systems violent towards those with weaker? Is pollen that sticks better to a bee being violent towards that which doesn't?
Oh, I don't know. Why don't you ask Darwin what he anticipated would wipe out entire racial groups as well as apes, leaving a greater distance between "Caucasians" and whatever primates were left.
I'll add you to the list of devoted Darwinists discussing this topic without having read a single book relevant to this argument. Try starting with the full title of his most famous book, the one that Dawkins flubbed when challenged to give it last year "Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life", then you can read the book. You can go on to read, really read, "The Descent of Man". Though the long quotes I provided are sufficient to show his analysis was not nonviolent.
I don't think I've read a single instance in which he rejected any of the pretty vicious stuff that his closest associates said, Huxley, Haeckel.... etc.
Are you enjoying the understanding of Darwinian evolution among his great defenders and admirers, LM? I'd rate them about at the same level of understanding of science as your typical creationist. Not to mention their total lack of understanding of history, evidence and logic.
I'll add you to the list of devoted Darwinists discussing this topic without having read a single book relevant to this argument.
I think I am beginning to see why Diogenes thinks you're a fuckwit. I have read the Origin, and much else besides. And I have already seen your feeble attempt to diss both Darwin and Dawkins with regard to the full title of his magnum opus. You think he was ONLY talking about races as we would understand the term? Human races? Does he mention them even once? Not peas and barnacles and bees and orchids and pigeons and stuff ... y'know, 'nature'?
Of course, the Descent is a different book on a different subject. But when we talk of Natural Selection, we are not talking about a topic from Descent. Inasmuch as Man is an animal, there is a possibility of competitive extinction, and direct violence with a genetic basis to the competition. But if that extinction is based upon cultural differences, then it is not "Natural Selection". NS is about heritable variation in offspring numbers. It has nothing essentially to do with organisms beating the living shit out of each other, though clearly that can happen. But so can a mahoosive amount of other stuff in the arena of producing-more-and-better-offspring, in this subject called biology of which, for all your self-puffed erudition, you are woefully ignorant.
Your misplaced intellectual superiority on the matter of Natural Selection is an absolute hoot.
Oh, the dichotomy! One either accepts your thesis, or one adores him. Got it.
You don't have to accept my thesis but you have to tell the truth about him, warts and all.
I used to be a believer in St. Darwin, myself, until I started doing research on a blog post that I thought was going to be in line with the eugenics-free, non-Social-Darwinist, Charles Darwin. Though I was hoping to be less cloyingly urpsome than most of the tripe. Funny thing is, when I started looking at the primary sources for the first time, those all showed that the case for the cannonization of Darwin was far more in need of an evolutionist as devil's advocate than another cultist.
Evolution is true, natural selection is hanging on as the required explanation of it (though, I doubt, for much longer), St. Darwin is a pious myth invented in the post-war period after his previously respectable legacy, openly attributed to him in the pre-war period, became a liability. It's about as real as some of the cults of non-existent Catholic saints that, eventually, get dropped from the calender. I'm looking forward for him to just be another scientist whose work gets superseded on the basis of more information.
Descent of Man is entirely based on the concept of natural selection as is Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, the book that Darwin said, if he'd had it before he'd finished it, he'd not have written DoM. All of those excerpts I've posted here (with citations and links so they could be checked) presume natural selection.
I don't recall a single piece of documentary evidence from Darwin or anyone else from you, with citation in this discussion. Where are they? Or, is it, as I suspect, that you can't produce any that support your argument so you just don't try. I'd welcome quotes from either, or any of the Darwins, Galton, Huxley, Haeckel, Schallmayer (sometimes that second a is an e, for some reason) or, indeed, any prominent person who knew or corresponded with Charles Darwin who denied his role in eugenics. I haven't even seen any eugenicists in the pre-war period who deny that.
You don't have to accept my thesis but you have to tell the truth about him, warts and all.
I think Desmond and Moore have done a pretty good job of presenting the man, his ideas, his times, his warts. You seem to set yourself up as the sole arbiter of this 'truth', and if one does not accept your version, one is stuck into the box labelled "Darwin fanboy".
This "pious myth" is itself a myth. As someone pointed out waaaaay upthread, the people who think Darwin was marvellous in every regard exist only in your head. Perhaps you're addressing yourself of long ago, the 'believer in St Darwin'.
But, as I have said, your thesis is muddled specifically because you refuse to wrap your head around the actual concept of Natural Selection, and the fact that eugenicists were/are attempting to either counteract it, or compensate for its presumed absence, artificially, not to apply it to society. Darwin's humanism is apparent - had he been truly heartless, he may have advocated simply 'letting nature [NS] take its course' upon the starving, the sick, the infirm. But he advocates assistance, and then is slagged by the ignorant of future generations for prompting the infanticide, euthanasia and sterilisation of coercive policies.
Y'know what I think? I think you have a knee-jerk reaction when you see the name "Darwin"...
Darwin's humanism is apparent
There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
A humanist who, with absolutely no data to support his bald statement, says that "there is reason" to think that vaccinating the poor against small pox is going to "lead to the degeneration" of "a domestic race", obviously the HUMAN race. And why will it lead to the degeneration of the human race? Because people will live long enough to have children because they won't obligingly die of small pox as children.
And notice in that statement, comparing human beings to animals in a commercial breeding operation, "but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed." Obviously, Darwin imagines someone as being in a position to "allow his worst animals to breed," in reference to the human population. I see every single aspect of eugenics in place in that passage.
Oh, but then, shortly before he assures us that rich boys inheriting money and accumulating wealth - and he notes the inhibition to natural selection at the start of that paragraph [See where I gave that paragraph above, or check the actual book out] - he covers his shame at having said what he did in the preceeding paragraph, kind of.
With my editorial comment in square brackets:
" The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, [But, still, a "benefit.] with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; [the undoubtedly bad effects of the 'weak' surviving and propagating their kind, contrast that with what he says about "usless drones" of the aristocracy one short paragraph after] but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected. ["more to be hoped than expected." What a ringing endorsement for overlooking the "degeneration of a domestic race" Darwin guarantees will follow his slim hope that the poor can be induced to maintain their virginity until their fertility is in decline]."
The old hypocrite undermined his weak voiced call for "assistance" as he made the empty gesture.
I can understand how, with the fraud that the word has been turned into since the late 1940s, how you could consider Charles Darwin's "humanism" as apparent. Maybe you should compare what he says with Thomas More, though, given your side of the discussion, Erasmus' In Praise of Folly would be more appropriate.
So his humanism is not full-throated enough for you? That the problem?
Do you think a species would not decline if Natural Selection were opposed, and every member got an equal shot at breeding, deleterious mutations an'all? It clearly would, yet he is unequivocally saying that we should not allow Natural Selection to operate unopposed on the human race.
OK, Diogenes wins this argument.
TCC provided the following quote:
We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
This is from Darwin's _Descent of Man_, Chapter 5. TCC says this shows Darwin is an evil eugenicist with bad intentions.
But Diogenes provides the very next sentences:
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.
When Diogenes called TTC a liar it was not just one flamer flaming another flamer.
TCC was completely wrong to give the first part of that without this other part which gives the opposite conclusion. How could this happen?
I checked the result independently. Diogenes was not lying, Darwin really did write it just this way.
I see only two possible explanations.
1. TCC is a liar who is trying to trick people. If this is true he deserves no sympathy and no attention, beyond people pointing out that he is a lying deceiver any time they notice him posting.
2. Possibly TCC read the part he quoted at the bottom of one page, but did not bother to read the top of the next page. Then he is not a lying deceiver. He is merely utterly incompetent at the task he proclaims he has done. In that case there is no moral stigma on TCC. He has not lied about his scolarship. He has however made such a howler of a mistake that no one should take his "research" seriously until they have checked his results carefully and found that they are correct.
Oh wait, here's a third possibility.
3. Maybe there is some way that TCC could possibly argue that he read the whole thing and he thought it meant something different from what any reasonable person would think it means. If he can make a good argument that it wasn't absurd to decide from this quote that Darwin was an evil eugenicist, then maybe people would give him the benefit of the doubt and decide that he isn't a liar, and he isn't totally incompetent, but he merely has a weird way of looking at things.
There is no point in discussing anything else with TTC until this is resolved. Is he a liar, or an utter incompetent at the thing he claims to be good at, or is there some way to argue that instead he has some weird but not invalid way to look at things?
Now the first order of business is not to decide whether Darwin was an evil eugenicist. It is to decide whether TTC is an evil liar.
This from a man who couldn't cite a single book he's read on the subject except the horrible pamphlet by Karl Pearson which I suggested he read. Of course, I didn't think that J Thomas would find that document of eugenic depravity "funny"[his word] and that he'd subsequently declare that eugenics was "good"[his word]. I figured he wasn't depraved enough to find the idea of women dying from birthing children with bowed legs (which Pearson regretted didn't happen so often, anymore) "funny".
Thank you, J Thomas, you don't know how reassuring your endorsement of Diogenes on this point is. Do you assign papers to your students?
Maybe there is some way that TCC could possibly argue that he read the whole thing ....
Well, as this morning I completed the paragraph that Diogenes had "quote mined" before the thickest part of Charles Darwin's undermining of his "call for assistance", the part which showed how obviously insincere your hero is, I'd say it's pretty apparent I was the only one here who actually read the thing. Not to mention analyzing it. Diogenes obviously took it from one of the many Darwin cult sources that use that and the Darwin to Gaskell letter, generally distorting the meaning of that by leaving off the last part as well as removing it from the context of what it was responding to.
I'd point something else out but I'm waiting to see if one of you boys points it out as an indication that you'd used even one of those other citations I provided.
I don't recall, were you the one who got worked up trying to absolve Charles Darwin from approving Heinrich Fick's political analysis of Darwin after I cited that last weekend?
Because if you'd read just the next paragraph from that one in the book, you'd find the citation by Darwin for Fick's "Ueber den Einfluss der Naturwissenschaft auf das Recht". One of the early documents of political Darwinism. Perhaps among the earliest instances of a jurist drawing legal conclusions based on natural selection, on the basis of absolutely no data to support that conclusion, other than natural selection, which was just about entirely theoretical at that point.
In every country in which a large standing army is kept up, the finest young men are taken by the conscription or are enlisted. They are thus exposed to early death during war, are often tempted into vice, and are prevented from marrying during the prime of life. On the other hand the shorter and feebler men, with poor constitutions, are left at home, and consequently have a much better chance of marrying and propagating their kind. (11. Prof. H. Fick ('Einfluss der Naturwissenschaft auf das Recht,' June 1872) has some good remarks on this head, and on other such points.)
Sounds very much like it could be an anti-war statement, doesn't it? Only if you read what Fick's "good remarks" consist of, it wasn't anti-war, it was all about rigging the marriage age so the cannon fodder could breed before they got done in and depriving the "unfit" of assistance so they wouldn't procreate instead.
Maybe there is some way that TCC could possibly argue that he read the whole thing ....
Well, as this morning I completed the paragraph that Diogenes had "quote mined" before the thickest part of Charles Darwin's undermining of his "call for assistance", the part which showed how obviously insincere your hero is, I'd say it's pretty apparent I was the only one here who actually read the thing. Not to mention analyzing it.
Can you present any defense of your despicable actions? You have not done so in this particular comment.
TTC, you don't seem to understand the situation you are in.
You claimed that you have superior knowledge because you read original sources, so we should trust you in your claims.
But here is an example where you misquoted terribly. You quoted a passage that made Darwin sound like some sort of eugenicist. But you made your quote out of context, snipping the part that showed he was opposed to precisely what you said he favored!
When we ask you how you explain that, you accuse us of various things. You accuse Diogenes of doing the same thing you have been caught doing. Suppose that is true. If it were to turn out that Diogenes is as utterly despicable as you are, that does you no good at all. Perhaps we will wind up despising him as much as you, will that make you feel better?
You accuse me of not reading the original literature, and you repeatedly say that I can't list my sources. I have not done so because I don't want to play that game, you have no basis to decide what I can't do. But more important, so what? If it were to turn out that I was uninformed enough that I took you seriously, but then I look up examples that Diogenes points out of you lying and I find that they are in fact lies, how does it help you to tell me I am uninformed? I'm informed enough to see you lying to me.
I'm ready to give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you were not intentionally lying. I'm asking you to tell us what you were doing, instead of calling you a liar for your lie.
And so far you have not presented any defense whatsoever. Only attacks. I hope you can understand that this does not make you look good.
Please, give us some explanation that shows how you could do that and not be lying.
Or else slink away and never come back.
Re J Thomas
Actually, Frankenberger wasn't elected Chancellor. He was appointed by German President von Hindenberg as the leader of the largest party in the German Parliament. He headed the largest party because of the inability of the left to unite behind a single candidate.
But you made your quote out of context, snipping the part that showed he was opposed to precisely what you said he favored! J Thomas
Watch those pearls, dearie.
I was the one who quoted the whole thing, this morning. It was your good buddy Diogenes who cut the last part of it off to distort its meaning, like the Darwin Fan Club often does.
The Thought CriminalThursday, August 16, 2012 3:40:00 AM
Quote mining again, eh, Diogenes? I am quite familiar with that particular clip from that particular paragraph, I've dealt with other new atheists who've done exactly what you just did here. Unlike you, I've read the book, I know what you cut off. Here's the entire thing, as Darwin wrote it in the The Descent of Man, with my bolding of what you cut out.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.
I'm the only one here who has given that entire section of the book.
There is a limit to the length of a blog comment, J Thomas. You can't post the whole book every time you want to make a point about something.
I'm the only one who has linked to the entire text and I'm pretty sure the only one here who has read it.
Which of Charles Darwin's books have you read, J Thomas? From cover to cover.
Oh, and I wasn't the one who made Darwin sound like a eugenicist, Charles Darwin made Charles Darwin sound like a eugenecist. In that infamous paragraph, in the Fick paragraph, after his ass covering in the one after that where he talks up the accumulated wealth of the wealthy and exempts the "worthless drones" of the aristocracy from being a drag on natural selection, after beginning the paragraph by noting that accumulated wealth would, indeed, inhibit natural selection.
As I'm pretty sure whatever I've quoted here accounts for pretty much all of the book that you've read, why don't you regales with your deep insights into what it means.
By the way, I found confirmation that my interpretation of the Gaskell letter was a criticism of birth control and not a criticism of eugenics in the form of your hero, Karl Pearson. He pointed out that Darwin and Galton pretty much agreed on that point. As Pearson was Galton's chosen biographer, there couldn't be a more credible source for that observation.
Where is the evidence that those things Darwin criticized in that passage cause a dysgenic effect in the general population? Charles Darwin cited no data to support those pretty drastic contentions. He just said "there is reason to believe" it. That reason, of course, was his claim to fame, natural selection, which didn't even have a plausible mechanism of inheritance behind it when Darwin set out the premise of eugenics.
Do you know of data that shows "There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind."? Because I'd guess you'd be making the anti-vaxxers very happy and Orac very sad if you convinced people that vaccination was bad. Charles Darwin was not only anti-birth control because he worried about single women enjoying sex, he bad mouthed vaccination.
Some radical icon, huh? Especially when you mix in what he said about the virtues of the rich.
TTC, do you claim that your earlier quote, that did not include either the part where Darwin said we must compassionately assistthe unfortunate, or the last part you now quote where he says we must accept that the "weak" will survive and propagate their kind -- do you claim that what you did quote was not utterly misleading?
Do you claim you were not lying by making that quote out of context?
How would you justify that claim?
I'm the only one who has linked to the entire text and I'm pretty sure the only one here who has read it.
It doesn't matter whether you have read the whole book, if you lie to people when you talk about it. Claiming that you have read the whole thing is not in any way a defense.
Once again, you claimed that Darwin was approving of eugenics, and you quoted a part of a statement he made in which he specifically said that we must not do eugenics! But you left that part out. And now you make no defense whatsoever of your action!
What kind of baldfaced liar are you?
Oh, and I wasn't the one who made Darwin sound like a eugenicist, Charles Darwin made Charles Darwin sound like a eugenecist.
If we catch you lying about him, we can't take you at your word about that.
As I'm pretty sure whatever I've quoted here accounts for pretty much all of the book that you've read, why don't you regales with your deep insights into what it means.
I'm not the one who claims to know all the quotes and what they mean. But I have seen a quote that you lied about. So I'm not ready to accept you as an authority.
By the way, I found confirmation that my interpretation of the Gaskell letter was ...
Why would I care what else you claim? I tried to give you a chance to explain your lie, and you ignored it and just made new claims, and new personal attacks on other people.
I'll review the bidding:
You: Darwin was a filthy eugenicist. I know all about it because I spent a lot of effort reading original sources.
Me: Wait a minute, when I checked one of the things you said, it was a lie. Can you explain that?
You: You're ignorant. You don't know the truth. So trust me.
Can you see that this is not a good way to get people to trust you?
So there is no reason to believe that vaccination helps people with genetically weaker constitutions survive to a greater extent than it helps people with genetically stronger ones? More of the latter would survive anyway. An unvaccinated population would be biased in a different manner to a vaccinated one - classic Natural Selection, assuming a heritable link with survival. But even if he is wrong about the genetic link in this case, Darwin is still moving to the conclusion that we should oppose Natural Selection, out of 'humanity'.
And how in hell do you twist that into me being anti-vaccination, let alone him? You jumped the shark months ago, but that's just slimy word-twisting worthy of the basest of creationists.
J Thomas: But here is an example where you misquoted terribly. You quoted a passage that made Darwin sound like some sort of eugenicist. But you made your quote out of context, snipping the part that showed he was opposed to precisely what you said he favored!
I would add here that my first encounter with TTC on this very topic a few months back unfolded in closely equivalent manner. The mean-sounding quote was not followed by the conclusion to which the earlier quote was heading.
You'll have to take this as unsupported at the moment, since (as I'm sure you can appreciate) there is no way of knowing from thread titles where to even begin looking for the exchange, and I have no intention of wading through to find it! I do recall saying "you, sir, are a common quote-miner". I found the complete quote by the simple expedient of pasting the first part into Google. So there is history, and this has been pointed out to TTC before.
Google returns a lot more than just the full text, of course, including site after site that attempts to use this, usually edited, comment, in the manner familiar from TTC. To be fair (why?) he did restore the passage in a comment to me - but felt impelled to add editorial comment, lest a reader be incapable of their own comprehension.
A classic hit from Google was this JAQ-question in Yahoo! Answers: "How many people have been put to death as the result of Darwin's theory of Eugenics to date?"
Among the sensible answers was this: "100,000,000 would be a conservative guess. Combine German, Cuba, China, USSR and Cambodia"
It would be hilarious if it weren't so goddamned sad. TTC may be violently opposed to 'Hitler-style' racial purity notions (as we all are, FFS!), but he is an assiduous student of his propaganda. Or am I being devious in making make such a deliberately manipulative connection?
Allan Miller, you want me to lie about history, I am not going to do that.
J Thomas, I've got to say that your activity on this comment thread has given me a disturbing insight into how truly ignorant someone holding a teaching job at a major university can be.
The lie is that Charles Darwin had no association with Ernst Haeckle, as both Charles Darwin's, Ernst Haeckel's, Francis Darwin's and others prove by what they said. The lie is that he didn't inspire eugenics, as the words of Francis Galton, Leonard Darwin, Fredrich Willhelm Schallmayer, Karl Pearson, Ernst Haeckel, and a huge number of other eugenicists and Charles Darwin, himself prove.\
I'm not going to lie about that to make you guys happy. You can lie to each other to do that but don't be surprised when people who look at the historical record conclude you are liars.
Larry Moran, I'm certain that you must see the problem, especially as that documented quote from Francis Darwin on the Plantinga thread shows there's a pretty good chance that Ernst Haeckle might have been treated to a nature hike on Sandwalk by none other than his host, Charles Darwin.
I have begun writing this up, with names, perhaps real names of participants where those are available to me, and will post it on my blog.
Yeah, and he knew he was covering his ass as he said it and as he undermined his proposal for "assistance" as he gave it. And, having covered his ass, he went on to give massive support for Galton, Haeckel, Fick and other eugenicists in the rest of the book, not to mention Herbert Spencer.
No, Allan Miller, I'm not going to lie for the phony myth of St. Darwin when his own words and actions prove that myth is a lie constructed more than 60 years after he died, by people who never knew him.
But I have held that the new atheism is a shallow, bigoted, dishonest intellectual fad, and every one of those adjectives have been validated by what you boys have said here. Scholarship doesn't come any more shallow, bigoted and dishonest than that of the Darwin Fan Club.
Allan Miller, you want me to lie about history, I am not going to do that.
I'm delighted to hear it (if I had made such a suggestion, that is).
Darwin's association with Haeckel, the person and scientist, is not under dispute. What you have failed to demonstrate is the case either that Darwin endorsed his political views, or is responsible for any subsequent consequences that Haeckel's views may have had via Nazi policies.
I have begun writing this up, with names, perhaps real names of participants where those are available to me, and will post it on my blog.
Oh no! I'm sure you will be a completely dispassionate and impartial chronicler of the facts. Be sure to point your readers to this thread, to check the facts for themselves, won't you?
I will add, that I am such a militant suppressor of The Truth About Darwin that I actually suggested, in all seriousness, that you write a book presenting your case! Yet you read me as somehow ordering you to lie? I'd certainly advise you to gen up on biology, since your view of what Natural Selection means is just dense; for the rest, do what the hell you like.
It's this kind of selective blindness and cognitive disconnect that undermines your credibility in this kind of forum. Write your book, where you can avoid becoming embroiled in side-snipes about the integrity and intellectual capacity of yourself and your readers.
Why would someone write something and then immediately start 'covering his ass' in the next paragraph? He could simply strike the whole, if he feels the sentiments too strong. But he is presenting a two-part argument. He discusses factors and reaches a conclusion on the moral dilemma posed.
1) Natural selection 'improves' a population. This would be unexceptionable if we were to step back and talk dispassionately of 'species X'.
2) We aren't talking about 'species X', we are talking of humankind, and given that, we cannot just sit back and let Natural Selection operate.
Scholarship doesn't come any more shallow, bigoted and dishonest than that of the Darwin Fan Club.
'Scholarship' that descends to dismissing opposing views by simplisting name-calling and lazy labelling has clearly left the tracks.
Yeah, and he knew he was covering his ass as he said it and as he undermined his proposal for "assistance" as he gave it. And, having covered his ass, he went on to give massive support for Galton, Haeckel, Fick and other eugenicists in the rest of the book, not to mention Herbert Spencer.
You could make that argument, if you have evidence. But you suppressed evidence that said otherwise, and when people asked you about that you claimed that Darwin didn't mean it so it didn't count.
This is utterly dishonest on your part. You have shown that you are untrustworthy about quotes and literature citations.
And you are completely unapologetic. You appear to not even understand what you did wrong.
You have no credibility left among people who have seen you do this.
You can of course express your opinions about whatever you have opinions on. You have the right to your own opinions.
But please stop telling people that your opinions are informed opinions because you have researched the primary literature. You have shown that you are not an honest researcher and your work cannot be trusted.
Excellent information given on catalyst and enzymes.Food industry has used new processing techniques and chemicals to extend the durability of product.
Electrophilic Aromatic Substitution
If we catch you lying about him,
Geesh, J Thomas, can you read? Oh, wait, that would account for why you can't name a single book on this subject that you've read when asked, over and over again.
I'M THE ONE HERE WHO POSTED NOT ONLY THAT ENTIRE PARAGRAPH BUT THE ONE BEFORE THAT AND THE TWO AFTER IT. You'd probably never read a single word by Charles Darwin until I did that. You'd join several of your other friends and many of the blog atheists I've argued Chuckie Darwin with on that count.
I'm going to make you guys famous.
http://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/2012/08/notice-of-intent_18.html
Has TTC ever read the bible? There's a real inspiration for a catalog of evils throughout history.
Thanks for recommending and linking my article!
Gotta say Larry, I am dissapointed this thread got hijacked by some crazy Darwin and eugenics nonsense. You need a cleanup on aisle 9.
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