Dennis Sewell prattles more about Darwin's *dark side*
Glen Davidson
"Bicentennial celebrations have portrayed Darwin as a kindly old
gentleman pottering around an English house and garden. What that
misses is the way his ideas were abused in the 20th century and the
way in which Darwin was wrong about certain key issues. He asserted
that different races of mankind had traveled different distances along
the evolutionary path — white Caucasians were at the top of the racial
hierarchy, while black and brown people ranked below. [Racism] was a
widespread prejudice in British society at the time, but he presented
racial hierarchy as a matter of science. He also held that the poor
were genetically second-rate — which inspired eugenics. "
"In your research, you found vestiges of this warped way of thinking
in an unexpectedly modern setting: school shootings."
"Pekka-Eric Auvinen, a Finnish schoolboy who murdered eight people at
his high school in November 2007, wrote on his blog that "stupid, weak-
minded people are reproducing ... faster than the intelligent, strong-
minded" ones. Auvinen thought through the philosophical implications
of Darwin's work and came to the conclusion that human life is like
every other type of animal life: it has no extraordinary value. The
Columbine killers made similar arguments. One of the shooters, Eric
Harris, wore a "Natural Selection" shirt on the day of the massacre.
These are examples of how easily Darwin's writings can lead to very
disturbed ways of thinking."
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1942483,00.html
An intelligent man would have noted that racism isn't good to
propagate, but instead Sewell blithers on about "Darwin's legacy,"
rather than racism's. Then again, how bright can he be if he uses
Barry Arrington (dolt on UD) as one of his sources on the school
shootings? And it's not unknown (by a moron like Sewell it probably
is) that Darwin's theory was disliked by racists like Agassiz for
telling us that all humans are related.
Then there are these bons mots:
"All things considered, do you believe Darwin was a great luminary in
the path of human progress?"
"What has the theory of evolution done for the practical benefit of
humanity? It's helped our understanding of ourselves, yet compared to,
say, the discovery of penicillin or the invention of the World Wide
Web, I wonder why Darwin occupies this position at the pinnacle of
esteem. I can only imagine he has been put there by a vast public
relations exercise."
Again, an intelligent man would have noted that evolution is part of
what eventually told us that humans not only are all related, but that
there is precious little difference between them all. But he can't be
bothered to learn about that, of course.
He's too stupid or lazy to learn the importance of having a theory in
biology. It's generally hard to say what evolution brought us
directly, but allowing us to understand the evolution of disease
organisms (and no, that didn't come out of creationism, no matter how
much those dolts pretend that "microevolution" isn't "Darwinism," it's
the same kind of evidence used, and microevolution came from
evolutionary theory), the limits in human anatomy and physiology, and
generally informing biology thoroughly is important to doing science.
Beyond that, of course, the big hole in science prior to Darwin was
life, which didn't seem to have come about due to the laws of
physics. Well, simply showing that life is completely due to physics
is crucial to biology, and it makes science complete. That's hugely
important to science, only not to Sewell, who's just droning on with
IDiot talking points.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Glen Davidson
Perhaps it’s worth saying once again that science isn’t prescriptive,
but descriptive. The only prescription that often accompanies it (but
technically needn’t) is that it should not decide what we will do, it
only tells us what is possible.
IDists and the rest of the creationists not only confuse science with
their apologetics, they seem unable to understand that it can’t be
science if it is prescribing either “good” or “evil” to other humans,
that it is then in the ID sphere of religion, or in the sphere of
politics and ideology. Needless to say, because science does tell us
what is, and what is possible, it can be used to machine gun other
humans, poison them, or wreck their societies.
Science is an idealized set of methods, but does not thereby fall into
the “true scotsman fallacy.” It’s just how we understand the world–
according to categories. We conceptually split science off from other
activities, and consider it to be proper science only if it adheres
relatively well to the ideal of being unbiased, apolitical, and non-
religious in nature. Of course the scientist may be a bad person, and
may use science to wrongful ends, yet it can’t be the science that’s
doing it, because science just isn’t prescriptive and still able to be
science, according to the accepted convention of what science is.
ID, of course, is prescriptive, demanding that a silly criterion like
“functional complexity,” which can’t be entailed by design, be taken
as the mark of design. It also demands that it be taken seriously as
science when it isn’t serious science. And no, we can’t conceptually
split a “scientific ID” from their politics and theology, because ID’s
impetus comes from religion (and occasionally from contrarianism).
The thing is that the charge that “Darwinism” causes evil consequences
works so well for them, because it smuggles into the claim that idea
that evolution isn’t science, rather ideology, theology, or politics,
without their having to support such a lame claim. If evolution were
prescriptive, it wouldn’t even be science. It isn’t prescriptive, ID
is, and thus ID isn’t science.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Mitchell Coffey
wrote:
> Same mindless junk as before, but now it's reproduced by Time:
>
> "Bicentennial celebrations have portrayed Darwin as a kindly old
> gentleman pottering around an English house and garden. What that
> misses is the way his ideas were abused in the 20th century and the
> way in which Darwin was wrong about certain key issues. He asserted
> that different races of mankind had traveled different distances along
> the evolutionary path — white Caucasians were at the top of the racial
> hierarchy, while black and brown people ranked below. [Racism] was a
> widespread prejudice in British society at the time, but he presented
> racial hierarchy as a matter of science. He also held that the poor
> were genetically second-rate — which inspired eugenics. "
This is virtually the opposite of what Darwin actually wrote.
Apparently people who blather thusly are not required to defend their
work.
> "In your research, you found vestiges of this warped way of thinking
> in an unexpectedly modern setting: school shootings."
>
> "Pekka-Eric Auvinen, a Finnish schoolboy who murdered eight people at
> his high school in November 2007, wrote on his blog that "stupid, weak-
> minded people are reproducing ... faster than the intelligent, strong-
> minded" ones. Auvinen thought through the philosophical implications
> of Darwin's work and came to the conclusion that human life is like
> every other type of animal life: it has no extraordinary value. The
> Columbine killers made similar arguments. One of the shooters, Eric
> Harris, wore a "Natural Selection" shirt on the day of the massacre.
> These are examples of how easily Darwin's writings can lead to very
> disturbed ways of thinking."
[snip]
The fallacies here should be noticeable by any intelligent middle
schooler.
Mitchell Coffey
All-seeing-I
wrote:
Oh my.
You forgot to mention that Darwin was a spoiled brat that was catered
to by his sisters because of the untimely death of their mother.
He lived off of his daddy's dime most of his life because he just
could not hold a job.
He disliked medical school because of the blood but has no problem
gutting and stuffing animals for a while as a living.
He was an odd sod. No wonder he saw delusions on Galapagos island.
VoiceOfReason
Darwin could have been a child-molesting commie transvestite, and it
would STILL make no difference to the validity of the scientific
evidence. When will you get that through your head?
Ye Old One
Was he?
>that was catered
>to by his sisters because of the untimely death of their mother.
Nothing unusual there, before the advances in maternity care a lot of
women died early.
>
>He lived off of his daddy's dime most of his life
Not quite true.
> because he just
>could not hold a job.
He did a lot of jobs that he was not paid for. That is true of people
even today.
>
>He disliked medical school because of the blood but has no problem
>gutting and stuffing animals for a while as a living.
Charles Darwin was an undergraduate at Edinburgh University's Medical
School from 1825 to 1827. It is common knowledge that Darwin loathed
the sight of blood, and this is often said to have prevented him from
taking up a medical career. While this is partly true it is not the
whole story. He found the subject boring to a certain extent, but most
importantly he could not face the pre anesthetic days of surgery.
>
>He was an odd sod. No wonder he saw delusions on Galapagos island.
Delusions?
--
Bob.
People may not always remember exactly what you said, but they will
always remember just how bright you made them feel.
Boikat
<snip>
>
>
> >He was an odd sod. No wonder he saw delusions on Galapagos island.
>
> Delusions?
Adman projection.
Boikat
Boikat
Irrelevant.
>
> He lived off of his daddy's dime
You're just envious.
> most of his life because he just
> could not hold a job.
Obvious and irrelevent bullshit.
>
> He disliked medical school because of the blood but has no problem
> gutting and stuffing animals for a while as a living.
I thought you just said he could not hold a job? Besides that, many
people can have no problem processing game for food, but cannot stand
the site of human blood, so what was your point?
>
> He was an odd sod. No wonder he saw delusions on Galapagos island.
You're an anti science 'tard-boy, no wonder you grasp at irrelevancies
and insanely think that has any bearing on the validity of the ToE.
If anyone is deluding themselves, it's you.
Boikat
bpuharic
>
>Oh my.
>
>You forgot to mention that Darwin was a spoiled brat that was catered
>to by his sisters because of the untimely death of their mother.
>
>He lived off of his daddy's dime most of his life because he just
>could not hold a job.
>
>He disliked medical school because of the blood but has no problem
>gutting and stuffing animals for a while as a living.
>
>He was an odd sod. No wonder he saw delusions on Galapagos island.
coulda been worse. he coulda been a misogynist who approved of slavery
and thought some guy rose from the dead....
like st paul did
heekster
<ap...@email.com> wrote:
What you do not know about Darwin would fill several books.
In fact, it does.
I doubt that you will ever read them, though, since you worship the
high holy sepulchre of willful ignorance.
Ye Old One
He is nuts.
In the UK we would say that Cadburys would take him and cover him with
chocolate :)
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ7QxKuB4gg]
>
>Boikat
--
Bob.
When D-G made Madman out of clay he forgot to magic the brain. I think
that explains everything.
John Wilkins
<heek...@ifiwxtc.net> wrote:
Just so the rest of us know which books:
Appleman, Philip, ed. 1970. Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition. New
York: Norton.
Barlow, Nora, ed. 1967. Darwin and Henslow: the growth of an idea;
letters, 1831-1860. London: Murray [for] Bentham-Moxon Trust.
Bowler, Peter J. 1983. The eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian
evolution theories in the decades around 1900. Baltimore and London:
John Hopkins University Press.
���. 1990. Charles Darwin: the man and his influence, Blackwell science
biographies. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
���. 2007. Monkey trials and gorilla sermons: evolution and
Christianity from Darwin to intelligent design, New histories of
science, technology, and medicine. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard
University Press.
Browne, Janet. 1995. Charles Darwin: A biography. Vol. 1. Voyaging.
London: Jonathan Cape.
���. 2002. Charles Darwin: A biography. Vol. 2: The power of place. New
York: Knopf.
Darlington, Cyril Dean. 1959. Darwin�s place in history. Oxford: B.
Blackwell.
de Beer, Gavin. 1963. Charles Darwin: evolution by natural selection.
London: Nelson.
Dennett, Daniel C. 1995. Darwin�s dangerous idea: evolution and the
meanings of life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Depew, David J., and Bruce H. Weber. 1995. Darwinism evolving: systems
dynamics and the genealogy of natural selection. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore. 1991. Darwin. Harmondsworth UK:
Penguin.
Desmond, Adrian J., James R. Moore, and E. Janet Browne. 2007. Charles
Darwin. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Eiseley, Loren. 1961. Darwin�s century: evolution and the men who
discovered it. Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, Anchor Books.
Ellegard, Alvar. 1990. Darwin and the general reader: the reception of
Darwin�s theory of evolution in the British periodical press,
1859-1872. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Flew, Antony. 1984. Darwinian evolution. Edited by A. Flew. London
Paladin.
George, Wilma. 1982. Darwin. Edited by W. George. London: Fontana.
Ghiselin, Michael T. 1984. The triumph of the Darwinian method, with a
new preface. rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Original
edition, 1969.
Glass, Bentley, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Straus Jr., eds. 1959.
Forerunners of Darwin, 1745-1859. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
Gray, Asa. 1963. Darwiniana; essays and reviews pertaining to
Darwinism. Edited by A. H. Dupree. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press.
Greene, John C. 1961. Darwin and the modern world view. Baton Rouge
Louisiana State University Press.
Hardy, Alister, Sir. 1984. Darwin and the spirit of man. Edited by S.
A. Hardy. London Collins.
Haught, John F. 1999. God after Darwin : a theology of evolution.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 1959. Darwin and the Darwinian revolution. London
Chatto and Windus.
Hodge, Jonathon, and Gregory Radick, eds. 2003. The Cambridge Companion
to Darwin. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hull, David L., ed. 1973. Darwin and his critics; the reception of
Darwin's theory of evolution by the scientific community. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Huxley, Julian, and H.B.D. Kettlewell. 1965. Charles Darwin and his
world. London: Thames and Hudson.
Huxley, Thomas Henry. 1893. Darwiniana: essays. London Macmillan.
Keynes, Randal. 2001. Annie's box: Charles Darwin, his daughter and
human evolution. London: Fourth Estate.
Kogan, Bernard R., ed. 1960. Darwin and his critics: the Darwinian
revolution. San Francisco: Wadsworth.
Kohn, David, ed. 1985. The Darwinian heritage. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, in association with Nova Pacifica.
Levine, George Lewis. 1988. Darwin and the novelists: patterns of
science in Victorian fiction. Edited by G. Levine. Cambridge, Mass. :
Harvard University Press.
Mayr, Ernst. 1959. Darwin and the evolutionary theory in biology. In
Evolution and anthropology: a centennial appraisal, edited by B. J.
Meggers. Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington:1-10.
���. 1991. One long argument: Charles Darwin and the genesis of modern
evolutionary thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
McCalman, Iain. 2009. Darwin's armada. Camberwell, Vic.: Viking.
McKinney, Henry Lewis, ed. 1971. Lamarck to Darwin: contributions to
evolutionary biology, 1809-1859. Lawrence, Kan.: Coronado Press.
Miller, Jonathan. 1982. Darwin for beginners. Edited by J. M. a. B. V.
Loon. 1st American ed ed. New York: Pantheon Books.
Moore, James R. 1994. The Darwin legend. Edited by J. Moore. Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books.
Moorehead, Alan. 1969. Darwin and the Beagle. London: Hamilton.
Oldroyd, David R. 1980. Darwinian impacts: an introduction to the
Darwinian revolution. Kensington, N.S.W.: New South Wales University
Press.
Ospovat, Dov. 1981. The development of Darwin's theory: natural
history, natural theology, and natural selection, 1838-1859. Cambridge;
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Richards, Robert John. 1987. Darwin and the emergence of evolutionary
theories of mind and behavior. Edited by R. J. Richards. Chicago
University of Chicago Press.
���. 1992. The meaning of evolution: the morphological construction and
ideological reconstruction of Darwin�s theory, Science and its
conceptual foundations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Romanes, George John. 1895. Darwin, and after Darwin: An exposition of
the Darwinian theory and a discussion of the post-Darwinian questions.
3 vols. Vol. II - Post Darwinian questions: heredity and utility.
London: Longmans, Green and Co.
Ruse, Michael. 1979. The Darwinian revolution: science red in tooth and
claw. Edited by M. Ruse. Chicago University of Chicago Press.
���. 1989. The Darwinian paradigm: essays on its history, philosophy,
and religious implications. Edited by M. Ruse. London; New York
Routledge.
���. 1999. The Darwinian revolution: science red in tooth and claw. 2nd
ed. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shermer, Michael. 2002. In Darwin's shadow: the life and science of
Alfred Russel Wallace: a biographical study on the psychology of
history. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1889. Darwinism: an exposition of the theory of
natural selection, with some of its applications. London: Macmillan.
Wilkins, John S. 2009. Darwin. In A Companion to the Philosophy of
History and Historiography, edited by A. Tucker. Chichester UK:
Wiley-Blackwell:405-415.
Withers, Graham Robert Arthur. 1971. Charles Darwin and the theory of
evolution. London: Edward Arnold.
Young, Robert M. 1985. Darwin�s metaphor: nature�s place in Victorian
culture. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
I don't like all of these, but every single one is better informed on
Darwin than our ASInine friend.