Posted: Feb 19, 2015 9:04 am
Darwinsbulldog wrote:
Apparently, the universities you frequent don't put much value in intellectual honesty. What matters is the facts, and while sometimes people do get upset or heated this was not one of those times.
“Those universities I frequent” refers to my rebuttal of your claim:
“it is clear to me you have never attended an academic meeting or workshop involving educators at any university. ”
Now you claim with as little evidence for what you say is clear to you, that these universities where I have studied or taught, don’t put much value on intellectual honesty”. Again you are wrong. Two of them are the top ranked in South Africa. In any case, you are being seriously illogical; you can’t dismiss an unidentified university because of what one person says.
Darwinsbulldog wrote:
It is true I could not believe such ignorance. Ignorance can be a pejorative term. We are all ignorant to some extent, it is what we do about it that matters. The gentleman in question did what any academic worth his salt would have done-looked at the evidence.
You do not understand anything about Australian indigenous peoples. I have never met a people so committed spiritually to their land. What I demonstrated was that science was not the enemy. Yet certain sections of the Australian community are bad-mouthing science and using it as a scape-goat for real injustices committed by others. These include some religious organisations, which are as we speak being investigated for other types of abuse [including sexual] by the Royal commission.
You see Jayjay, there are folks who can look past the fact that someone is a Wadjela and see just a person. You can't even recognize that Darwin was anti-racist because you are so obsessed with fevered imaginings of how science, and in particular, evolutionary biology, is not the enemy.
I should have known better than to share a personal story in my life with you, you despicable human being.
Anyone reading your post critically would notice that the personal story you recounted as an example of intellectual courage, was one where a lecturer abjectly and immediately folded on the basis of your giving him very inadequate information (a) that Darwin’s theory didn’t predate the earlier massacres of aborigines and therefore, they couldn’t be blamed on “Social Darwinism”. (b) Evolutionists claimed that aborigines had occupied Australia even longer that did Young Earth creationists. You express warm admiration for someone who immediately caved in and agreed with you and contempt for those who don’t. That doesn’t agree with styling yourself “Darwinsbulldog”. A bulldog is known for dogged persistence. So your attitude to others has been governed purely by whether they are on your side or not. Partly, that can be blamed on the mutual grooming by Ratskep posters. It’s not leading anywhere good.
On reflection I’m inclined to blame that abject climbdown by your speaker not so much on the pathetic position of aborigines engulfed by a much larger politically dominant western society, but maybe on his being aware of the dangerously weak foundation his Creationist educators had placed him on. That’s a problem for Young Earth creationists. Suppose your speaker had known of Darwin’s argument that aborigines helped to make evolution look reasonable, by lessening the gulf between “civilized” society and the apes? And that he had publicly predicted the inevitable extinction of aborigines, at the very time when a “civilized” races was massacring aborigines? Would the speaker then have so easily accepted that “science” and Darwin was on his side and his creationist educators on the other side?
Both those arguments by Darwin are expressed in one paragraph of The Descent of Man, Chapter 6:
“The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, from general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution. Breaks often occur in all parts of the series, some being wide, sharp and defined, others less so in various degrees; as between the orang and its nearest allies- between the Tarsius and the other Lemuridae- between the elephant, and in a more striking manner between the Ornithorhynchus or Echidna, and all other mammals. But these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct. At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked,* will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
That paragraph is often quoted by creationists and as often dismissed by evolutionists as a quote-mine. By the way, by “evolutionists” I mean, people acculturated into arguments with creationists; not simply people who accept the theory of evolution as broadly correct. I need some term for the argumentative group, and will look at any reasonable alternative you offer.
What could annoy one about a quote of that passage, is its being used to unfairly smear Darwin as a racist. The fact is that Darwin was pretty much un-smearable: he was moderately liberal, humane and generous, a first rate scientist, of deep penetration, trusting the scientific method to guide him towards the truth. And Darwin was a brilliant, attractive stylist, maybe the only scientist of his day who is still widely read with instruction and enjoyment. The problem with Social Darwinism wasn’t with Darwin, it was something deeper, to do with the scientific vision of nineteenth century Europe.
The Wikipedia entry on “Social Darwinism” says this:
The term first appeared in Europe in 1877,[12] and around this time it was used by sociologists opposed to the concept.[13] The term was popularized in the United States in 1944 by the American historian Richard Hofstadter who used it in the ideological war effort against fascism to denote a reactionary creed which promoted competitive strife, racism and chauvinism.
Well that “ideological war effort against fascism” was driven by the Allies finding out that the Nazis had actually been doing almost unbelievably nasty things particularly to the Jews. The Wiki entries on Eugenics and Action T4 (the Nazi scheme for killing asylum inmates, which developed the mass-killing technology that was transferred to the death camps) raise the connection between those horrors and Social Darwinism. Darwin himself was cautious about eugenics. The deep influence of science on the bad things of the twentieth century have something to do with the question, given that Darwin was so humane, why did he foresee the extinction of aborigines with such a cold eye? Why didn’t he add a caveat, that the aborigines would become extinct unless something were urgently done to stop that happening. Surely a modern scientist, foreseeing an extinction would add such a clause? Surely, his whole point in raising the possibility of extinction would be to call for remedial action? By taking over the narrative of Creation as something Nature had done, Darwin imbued the natural process with a prestige and an inevitability. In the same way that a naturalist tells one not to interfere with a lion killing a zebra, so one shouldn’t interfere with aborigines dying out. And if colonial police kill a hundred aborigines well that might be morally repugnant but it would not an offense against Nature- in the long run they were bound to die out anyway. It’s noteworthy by the way, that this prediction by Darwin- about the most explicit one he made- turned out to be wrong. He was right that a particular flower implied the existence of an as-yet undiscovered moth. And he was right that Man emerged in Africa. But he looks like being wrong about the aborigines, thank God.
So I’m suggesting that the naturalists didn’t do a good thing in taking over the human origin narrative. Science might have done better leaving it in the hands of the geologists through paleontology- it was geologists, in the decades before Darwin, who had built up the correct long time scale for the creation and established uniformitarianism as a ruling guide for explaining the past.