by So here they are.
W,B&TS, Human - Who are we? wrote:The historian H. G. Wells noted the conclusions that many reached after Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859.
"A real de-moralization ensued. . . . There was a real loss of faith after 1859. . . . Prevalent peoples at the close of the nineteenth century believed that they prevailed by virtue of the Struggle for Existence, in which the strong and cunning get the better of the weak and confiding. . . . Man, they decided, is a social animal like the Indian hunting dog. . . . It seemed right to them that the big dogs of the human pack should bully and subdue."
H.G. Wells, The Outline of Histroy, Volume 2, p503 wrote:In all ages there have been skeptics in Christendom. The Emperor Frederick II was certainly a skeptic; in the eighteenth century Gibbon and Voltaire were openly anti-Christian, and their writings influenced a number of scattered readers. But these were exceptional people. Now the whole of Christendom became, as a whole, skeptical. This new controversy touched everybody who read a book or heard intelligent conversation. A new generation of young people grew up, and they
found the defenders of Christianity in an evil temper, fighting their cause without dignity or fairness. It was the orthodox theology that the new scientific advances had compromised, but the angry theologians declared it was religion.
To the young it seemed as if, indeed, there had been a conflict of science and religion, and that in that conflict science had won. The immediate effect of this great dispute upon the ideas and methods of people in the prosperous and influential classes throughout the Westernized world was very detrimental indeed. The new biological science was bringing nothing constructive as yet to replace the old moral stand-bys. A real de-moralization ensued.
There was a real loss of faith after 1859. Towards the close of the nineteenth century a crude misunderstanding of Darwinism had become the fundamental mindstuff of great masses of the "educated" everywhere. Prevalent peoples at the close of the nineteenth century believed that they prevailed by the virtue of the Struggle for Existence, in which the strong and cunning get the better of the weak and confiding. And they believed further that they had to be strong, energetic,
ruthless, "practical," egotistical, because God was dead, and had always, it seemed, been dead - which was going altogether further than the new scientific knowledge justified.
They soon got beyond the first crude popular misconception of Darwinism, the idea that every man is for himself alone. But they stuck at the next level. Man, they decided, is a social animal like the hunting dog. He is much more than a dog -- but this they did not see. And just as in a pack it is necessary to bully and subdue the younger and weaker for the general good, so it seemed right to them that the big dogs of the human pack should bully and subdue. Hence a new scorn for the
ideas of democracy that had ruled the earlier nineteenth century, and a revived admiration for the overbearing and the cruel.
Original available online here.
W,B&TS, Human - Who are we? wrote:Says Richard Leakey: "Darwin's version of the manner of our evolution dominated the science of anthropology up until a few years ago, and it turned out to be wrong."
R.Leakey, The Origin of Humankind, p. 1 wrote:In 1859, in his Origin of Species, Darwin carefully avoided extrapolating the implications of evolution to humans. A guarded sentence was added in later editions: "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." He elaborated on this short sentence in a subsequent book, The Descent of Man, published in 1871. Addressing what was still a sensitive subject, he effectively erected two pillars in the theoretical structure of anthropology. The first had to do with where humans first evolved (few believed him initially, but he was correct), and the second concerned the manner or form of that evolution. Darwin's version of the manner of our evolution dominated the science of anthropology up until a few years ago, and it turned out to be wrong.
Original available here, though you'd have to read the whole chapter to see why it's a quote-mine, I suppose.
W,B&TS, Human - Who are we? wrote:A prominent proponent of the evolution theory in the 19th century, Thomas H. Huxley, wrote: "No one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between . . . man and the brutes . . . , for he alone possesses the marvelous endowment of intelligible and rational speech [and] . . . stands raised upon it as on a mountain top, far above the level of his humble fellows."
T. H. Huxley, Man's Place in Nature, p. 199 wrote:I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural lin of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a psychical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life. At the same time, no one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brutes; or is more certain that whether from them or not, he is assuredly not of them. No one is less disposed to think lightly of the present dignity, or despairingly of the future hopes, of the only consciously intelligent denizen of this world."
Quoted here
W,B&TS, Human - Who are we? wrote:Many evolutionists, according to Elaine Morgan, "have lost confidence in the answers they thought they knew thirty years ago."
Elaine Morgan, The Scars of Evolution", p. 4 wrote:The question of why our bodies are hairless used to be discussed at some lenght, but now thee is a growing tendency to avoid all mention of it. The writers have lost confidence in the answers they thought they knew thirty years ago, and naturally in addressing the layman they are not anxious to shine a spotlight on problems which have not been solved.
Available online here. Morgan's hardly an authority on evolution, but they manage to quote-mine even her.
IOW:
Yeah...
