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 Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide 
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Joined: Sat Sep 23, 2006 8:55 am
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
ABO wrote:
"The German Fuhrer...has consistently sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution." Evolution and Ethics 1947, Sir Arthur Keith p.230

The full quote is actually,
""The German Fuehrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution. He has failed, not because the theory of evolution is false, but because he has made three fatal blunders in its application."
-Sir Arthur Keith, Essays on Human Evolution, (London: Watts & Co., 1946), 210 (cf. Evolution and Ethics, (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1947), 229.)"

In other words, Hitler and the practice of Germany DID NOT conform to the theory of evolution. Hmmmm. That's not a dishonest quote-mine, is it?

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Fri Mar 30, 2012 11:10 am
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
Oh Henry wrote:
ABO wrote:
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainty exterminate and replace, the savage races throughout the world." Charles Darwin, The Decent of Man


A time-worn Christian Creationist quote-mine. See http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part4.html#DarwinRaceQuotes



So what "savage races" was Darwin talking about?


Fri Mar 30, 2012 11:29 am
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
In Darwin's time, the primitive cultures found in places like Africa, Australia, the Brazilian Amazon area, the American Indians, etc, were considered savage races due to their lack of civilization. For what it's worth, my original degree was in anthropology, and the history of early anthropological studies of primitive cultures is fascinating, but this didn't happen to well after Darwin's time.

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Fri Mar 30, 2012 11:38 am
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
MikeH wrote:
Eugenics had plenty to do with evolution, and although it is now called "Pseudoscience" it was accepted for decades. Charles Darwin certainly did not think his cousins work was "Pseudoscience".

Eugenics was, like Keith's assessment of Hitler's Germany above, a misapplication of the concepts of heredity. As the study of heredity and genetics began to unfold, eugentics was eventually seen for what it is: nonsense.

There is nothing remarkable about people proposing or (provisionally) accepting hypotheses and theories BEFORE they have been debunked, discredited, or falsified.
-Newton was a Creationist simply because that was the accepted view of his day and there wasn't any evidence to suggest anything else.
-Lord Kelvin wouldn't accept that the age of Earth was more than 40 million years because there was no known mechanism that would allow the sun to burn that long before using up all its fuel. The discovery of radiation would later change that.
-Einstein, in one of his last official acts, wrote a glowing forward to a book by Charles Hapgood that laughed at the possibility of continental drift. After Einstein's death, conclusive evidence was found to show that the crust is indeed in motion.
No one faults these people for their conclusions because the contradicting evidence was not at their disposal.

What is remarkable, is when people continue to support hypotheses and theories AFTER they have been debunked, discredited, or falsified.

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Fri Mar 30, 2012 11:43 am
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
Jack Krebs wrote:
In Darwin's time, the primitive cultures found in places like Africa, Australia, the Brazilian Amazon area, the American Indians, etc, were considered savage races due to their lack of civilization. For what it's worth, my original degree was in anthropology, and the history of early anthropological studies of primitive cultures is fascinating, but this didn't happen to well after Darwin's time.


So was Darwin correct to call them "savage races"?

There is no doubt that his work affected political actions in the last decades of the 19th century and the early 20th century.


Fri Mar 30, 2012 11:47 am
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
Everyone called them savage races, not just Darwin. That was the prevalent view in all the Western world (think American attitudes towards the Indians.) It took the hard work of many to help us start to see the basic common humanity in primitive peoples - the Western world consistently acted upon the misconception that differences in the level of civilization were related to differences in innate capabilities. The history of our actions based upon this misconception are not pretty.

And as O'Henry has pointed out, this problem was not in any way because of Darwin or his thoughts of about evolution - the Western colonizing world took this attitude that primitive people were savages from the beginning of the age of exploration, which started in the 1400's. Also, as I have pointed out, anthropological studies that brought about advocates for seeing primitive people differently didn't arise until after Darwin’s time.

For instance, one of the earliest such works were Edward Tyler’s books on Primitive Culture and Religion in Primitive Culture, published in 1871, which I read portions of when I was in college. Wikipedia says this:

Quote:
Unlike many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Tylor asserts that the human mind and its capabilities are the same globally, despite a particular society’s stage in social evolution.[8] This means that a hunter-gatherer society would possess the same amount of intelligence as an advanced industrial society. The difference, Tylor asserts, is education, which he considers the cumulative knowledge and methodology that takes thousands of years to acquire. Tylor often likens primitive cultures to “children”, and sees culture and the mind of humans as progressive. His work was a refutation of the theory of social degeneration, which was popular at the time.[4] At the end of Primitive Culture, Tylor writes, “The science of culture is essentially a reformers' science.”


So it was people like Tyler who started us on understanding that less civilized people were not innately inferior, but were different, including in ways that we consider less civilized, because of culture. Darwin lived before these ideas became commonplace, and so like virtually everyone else, he believed in the idea that primitive cultures were "savage races" that were innately inferior to civilized Caucasians.

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Fri Mar 30, 2012 12:29 pm
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
I would argue that Darwin's interpretation of the evidence of evolution (as it applied to ideas about "races") was more influenced by prevailing political and cultural ideology than the other way around.

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Fri Mar 30, 2012 12:36 pm
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
Exactly.

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Fri Mar 30, 2012 12:54 pm
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
ABO wrote:
Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.
—Stephen Jay Gould


Here is the full quote:
"Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory. The litany is familiar: cold, dispassionate, objective, modern science shows us that races can be ranked on a scale of superiority. If this offends Christian morality or a sentimental belief in human unity, so be it; science must be free to proclaim unpleasant truths. But the data were worthless. We never have had, and still do not have, any unambiguous data on the innate mental capacities of different human groups--a meaningless notion anyway since environments cannot be standardized. If the chorus of racist arguments did not follow a constraint of data, it must have reflected social prejudice pure and simple--anything from an a priori belief in universal progress among apolitical but chauvinistic scientists to an explicit desire to construct a rationale for imperialism."

No, that's not a dishonest quote-mine, either.

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Fri Mar 30, 2012 2:12 pm
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
The title of this thread and most of the discussion is implicitly about social Darwinism, of which much has been written and today is mostly rejected. The idea was articulated by English philosopher Herbert Spencer (who invented the phrase “survival of the fittest”) before Darwin’s “Origins of Species” was even published (1859). Here’s a quote by Spencer in 1851:

Philanthropists, blind to the fact that under the natural order of things, society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, and faithless members, (nevertheless) advocate an interference which not only stops the purifying process, but even increases the vitiation ---- absolutely encouraging the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by offering them an unfailing provision and discourages the multiplication of the competent and provident”. (from The Rough Guide to Evolution, by M. Pallen, 2009).

Pretty strong stuff by today’s standards but right at home in Victorian England. Many social evils have been attributed to S.D., not only racism and forced eugenics, but also laissez-faire capitalism, colonialism, German militarism, and socially immobile class systems. Darwin himself occasionally let his social prejudices show through in his abundant writings, but mostly stayed away from such subjects. In any case, social Darwinism is a corruption of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and certainly not promulgated by Darwin himself. S.D. is about social and economic success, not biological success. It’s about what people desire, not what is natural or necessary for reproductive success and perpetuation of gene pools. By focusing on “survival of the fittest”, it stresses strength and power over the weak instead of the great subtleties of adaptation and natural selection that Darwin so well described and understood. It’s a shame that such a discredited idea bears his name.


Fri Mar 30, 2012 3:10 pm
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
Oh Henry wrote:
I would argue that Darwin's interpretation of the evidence of evolution (as it applied to ideas about "races") was more influenced by prevailing political and cultural ideology than the other way around.


So, Darwins "interpretation" of the "evidence" of evolution was party based on ideology?


Fri Mar 30, 2012 3:11 pm
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
To O'Henry, re the quote from Gould:

Very interesting. As I posted, the field of anthropology began to open doors for understanding the commonality of humanity despite differences in civilization, and yet the powers that were had a vested interest in considering the "savage races" as inferior and fit for conquest and conversion to Christianity. "The survival of the fittest" became a phrase that could be used to support attitudes and practices that has been in place for centuries, despite the fact that evolutionary theory itself is totally silent on these social issues.

As Tyler said in the quote from Wikpedia, "“The science of culture is essentially a reformers' science": studying mankind from an anthropological view was a contributing factor to the humanistic reforms that started in the late 1800's by, among other things, dispelling the idea of innately inferior races or cultures.

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Fri Mar 30, 2012 3:41 pm
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
Mike, O'Henry clearly said that "Darwin's interpretation of the evidence of evolution (as it applied to ideas about "races") was more influenced by prevailing political and cultural ideology than the other way around." You didn't quote the pertinent part.

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Fri Mar 30, 2012 3:44 pm
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
Jack Krebs wrote:
Mike, O'Henry clearly said that "Darwin's interpretation of the evidence of evolution (as it applied to ideas about "races") was more influenced by prevailing political and cultural ideology than the other way around." You didn't quote the pertinent part.


Quite right; so to be more precise, do you believe Darwin's interpretation of the "evidence" of evolution as it applied to ideas about races was at partly influenced by ideology?


Fri Mar 30, 2012 3:50 pm
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Post Re: Evolution Justifies Racism and Genocide
Oh Henry wrote:
ABO wrote:
"The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it." Margret Sanger

This is the most intriguing of all your quotes since,
1. It doesn't actually address or say anything about evolution.

So I did some more checking:
2. I just downloaded the free kindle version of Sanger's book, Woman and the New Race (http://www.amazon.com/Woman-New-Race-ebook/dp/B000JQV0RW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1333116696&sr=8-2). The quote is found on pg 30 of the Kindle edition, in ch 5: "The wickedness of creating large families." In this chapter she describes the deplorable situation of (Pre-Depression era) large families. Both on the family (poverty, abuse, neglect, awful health outcomes, high rates of infant and child mortality with successive children) and on society (child labor, low wages, war, prostitution). She is so disgusted by the utter depravity that large families frequently seem to find themselves in, she condemns them as being worse than death, just like a Kansas basketball fan would say, "I will kill myself If Missouri wins the championship." No one is actually advocating suicide, they're just commenting on their feelings about Missouri.

3. A search for the word "infanticide" in this book produces some relevant quotes that would suggest that she isn't actually advocating infanticide:
"Women in all lands and all ages have instinctively desired family limitation. Usually this desire has been laid to economic pressure. Frequently the pressure has existed, but the driving force behind woman's aspiration toward freedom has lain deeper. It has asserted itself among the rich and among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent. It has been manifested in such horrors as infanticide, child abandonment and abortion." - Sanger, Margaret (2005-08-01). Woman and the New Race (pp. 7-8). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.
"It is apparent that nothing short of contraceptives can put an end to the horrors of abortion and infanticide." - Sanger, Margaret (2005-08-01). Woman and the New Race (p. 14). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

4. Did I mention that the quote had nothing to do with evolution?

It not just a quote it's a belief. Sanger was a staunch evolutionist. Her rational is animalistic survival. Unlike the aspect of having children as a blessing which could add wealth, killing of a few is considered beneficial.


As the founder of Planed Parenthood the world's most efficient self help killing machine, Sanger does contradict herself with words and deeds as to the horrors of abortion and infanticide.


Fri Mar 30, 2012 9:55 pm
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