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1. Carnival of Socialism: Darwin’s 200th « The Mustard Seed on 15 Feb 2009 at 8:33 pm

   [...] Peterson shows us an interesting article: Reader Elton sent in an intriguing article from The UK’s Telegraph. The [...]

Comments

1. Mary wrote:

   Wow, fascinating! I used to participate heavily in evolution/Creationism debates and “Darwin was RACIST!” was a very popular anti-evolution argument.

   In the end, though, I admit I am leery of putting too much weight on Darwin’s personal views… they are too often used in creation/evolution debates to obscure the scientific facts. If Isaac Newton were a racist, would it make gravity any less real? Likewise even if it comes out that Darwin was a flaming unrepentant racist, it wouldn’t make evolution false either. (Which I realize isn’t exactly the topic at hand, just something I get touchy about!)

   A big theory of mine is that the whole “intelligent design”/natural selection debate is deeply rooted in the struggle between those who would seek to extend the white Christian hegemony and those who would seek to dismantle it through science.

   Yep. And not just “white Christian hegemony,” because I went to a Catholic school and they had no problem whatsoever teaching evolution. So there is also the issue of Christians trying to impose their view of Christianity on other Christians.

   Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 8:21 am ¶

2. baiskeli wrote:

   I can definitely buy this argument, especially after reading Stephen Jay Gould’s excellent “The Mismeasure of Man”. The irony is that people took Darwin’s idea and used it as a justification for social

   inequality (the oft mis-used ‘Social Darwinism’).

   One of this days I’ll get around to reading “The Origin of Species”. So I may be speaking third hand, but from what I understand, Darwin was a man ahead of his time.

   I don’t know whether I’d agree with Elton on the “Intelligent Design/natural selection” thesis. The AMA was founded by a surgeon who had no problem removing black slaves lower jaws with no anesthesia
   because he was convinced (and so was the science of his time) that they were not human.
   Theories of white supremacy and black inferiority have been perpetuated by scientists as well. Any field of study needs
   to be vigilant against societal prejudices.

   Science is not isolated from societal forces, witness the whole IQ debate and the books attempting to justify black poverty by claiming its based on genetic differences in intelligence (i.e “The Bell
   Curve”).

   Sure, the Bell Curve was shoddy science and more an ideological tract (Google “Pioneer Foundation” and “Bell Curve”).

   There are a number of books by scientists taking it apart (i.e “The Bell Curve
   Wars”) but unfortunately the old adage that “Lies are halfway around the world while truth is still lacing up her boots” holds true. And I mean, people love answers that absolve them or their societies of
   anything.

   And lets not forget that the Nazi’s came up with ‘absolute’ scientific proof of Jewish inferiority. Funny how the science just fell in line with their totally F’ed up ideology.

   So I’d be very skeptical of giving Science a free pass because it is ‘empirical’.
   According to “Bell Curve”, blacks in Africa have an average IQ of 75 (great, so me and my brethren are just 5 points shy of
   being borderline retarted, we have something to aspire to wooohoooo!!!).
   What you have to dig about for is that it is based on one study done in South Africa (of course, the Apartheid govt would have no
   interest in showing blacks as sub-human, would it/) in the 1920s and is sourced from a flawed study by a noted racist researcher (Richard Lynn of Ulster University and yet another Pioneer fund recipient).

   For the record, I don’t think IQ tests really measure intelligence. I come from a test intensive background (Primary and High school back home were really intensive) and I test with an IQ of 132-149 , but I won’t be winning any Nobel Prizes. I can definitely tell you intelligence tests can indeed be raised and are more a measure of social and test taking knowledge than a measure of any inherent intelligence.
   That is why people get coached for the SAT’s, yet another test that up until 1992 could be used as an entrance exam for MENSA (of which I’m a member, joined on a lark).

   This is also why worldwide IQ’s have been rising since WW2 (the Flynn effect). They’ve risen by about 15 points, which is higher than the difference between white and black mean IQ scores.
   But the genetically inferior argument is oh so attractive to a lot of people.

   So anyway, I went off on a tangent, but what I wanted to illustrate is that science is not free of bias. It is done by biased human beings and special care has to be taken not to let that creep into it.

   If Darwin was indeed anti-slavery I wouldn’t doubt that it would have driven his scientific rigorousness and refusal to buy into current flawed scientific ideas. What was done with his work (no fault of his) afterward in the field of Sociology is a true tragedy.

   Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 8:41 am ¶

3. Pololly wrote:

   Love the previous message, especially the terry pratchett reference.

   By the way, I can understand the desire to ‘rehabilitate’ Darwin but someone being privately disgusted by slavery doesn’t cut it in my book. Not when other people were open abolitionists. It hardly makes him a hero and I’m pretty uncomfortable with needing to grasp at straws to make him one.

   Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 10:45 am ¶

4. Pololly wrote:

   Also the Telegraph newspaper is a pretty right wing rag and there is probably a hidden agenda in this.

   Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 10:49 am ¶

5. Tim wrote:

   It’s certainly the case that the people most adamantly opposed to evolutionary biology in the 1850s were those invested in a fixed-species theory of race. See for instance Louis Agassiz — or Louis Menand’s portrayal of Agassiz in The Metaphysical Club.

   Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 10:56 am ¶

6. Sarah wrote:

   I thought Darwin was into eugenics? Someone please explain. I’m more confused now.

   Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 11:38 am ¶

7. Renee wrote:

   I find this fascinating. Much of my reading regarding Darwin deals with his conflict between what he could prove scientifically and the Christian faith. The idea that this research was meant to prove that we are all the same i.e human is fascinating. To me it tends to mitigate the conflict he felt between religion and science.

   Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 12:08 pm ¶

8. elle wrote:

   wow, great article, this really made my daly better and is really unique

   Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 1:00 pm ¶

9. Sanguinity wrote:

   @ Pololly:

   Darwin was hardly private about his abolitionist views. In his youth he was an outspoken anti-abolitionist, and spent a good deal of the Beagle’s voyage not on the Beagle because he and the captain had had a severe falling-out over slavery; there was some question as to whether FitzRoy would allow Darwin to continue his position with the ship at all. When he published his account of the Voyage, he argued within the pages against slavery and for indigenous rights.

   Darwin was less out-spoken about slavery in his later years, but he was so about everything: after returning from the voyage, Darwin had persistent, debilitating ill-health, and seldom left his home. He ended up being fairly retiring on most topics, including his own scientific theories — he didn’t even leave Down House to defend Origin of Species.

   Which isn’t to say that you should personally respect him as an abolitionist; other people certainly were far more active in that field. But I am a bit surprised by the language in the Telegraph quote that suggests that this is “new” information about Darwin; he and his family were well-understood to be an abolitionists at the time.

   @ Sarah:

   So the creationists say loudly and often, and so they would have you believe.

   In The Descent of Man, part two of the three-part volume that began with Origin of Species, Darwin clearly argued against eugenics. While he conceded that one could use his theories to attempt to improve humans, one ought not: people love their families and would resist (thus dooming the attempt to failure); education might be a bigger factor than heredity (which would mean that eugenics wouldn’t work); and also because the attempt would damage human sympathies for each other, which he felt to be “the noblest part of our nature.” So, Darwin’s views on eugenics was that it was bad policy, bad science, and bad morals.

   Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 1:29 pm ¶

10. baiskeli wrote:

    
    By the way, I can understand the desire to ‘rehabilitate’ Darwin but someone being privately disgusted by slavery doesn’t cut it in my book. Not when other people were open abolitionists. ..
    
    @Pololly

    I see your point, I hadn’t thought of it that way.

    Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 1:36 pm ¶

11. problematik wrote:

    Really? This whole time I thought Darwin was a documented racist via eugenics as Sarah said.

    Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 1:51 pm ¶

12. Peggy wrote:

    Sarah: Darwin himself wasn’t into eugenics, but there were eugenicists (one of whom was a cousin of Darwin) who cited his work as support for their ideas. Darwin did note that the type of artificial selection farmers and animal breeders have used for thousands of years would work on humans too (which is true).

    From Wikipedia:
    

    Darwin was interested by his half-cousin Francis Galton’s argument, introduced in 1865, that statistical analysis of heredity showed that moral and mental human traits could be inherited, and principles of animal breeding could apply to humans. In The Descent of Man Darwin noted that aiding the weak to survive and have families could lose the benefits of natural selection, but cautioned that withholding such aid would endanger the instinct of sympathy, “the noblest part of our nature”, and factors such as education could be more important. When Galton suggested that publishing research could encourage intermarriage within a “caste” of “those who are naturally gifted”, Darwin foresaw practical difficulties, and thought it “the sole feasible, yet I fear utopian, plan of procedure in improving the human race”, preferring to simply publicise the importance of inheritance and leave decisions to individuals.

    Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 2:08 pm ¶

13. Tgify wrote:

    The irony is that Darwin’s theories have been used to justify the harsh treatment of minorities in this country. Blacks were assumed to be unfit to survive since they were slaves. Native American women underwent forced sterilization. The founder of Planned Parenthood was also a big supporter of this way of thinking as well.

    Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 2:11 pm ¶

14. Jess wrote:

    Sarah–

    Eugenics and evolutionary theory are often confused with each other. They are two very different things.

    Eugenics is the science of improving species through selective breeding. Any dog kennel breeder or cattleman practices it all the time.

    In a human context, it’s a late 19th century invention that proposed humans could be improved through selective breeding. The problem is that there isn’t any good way to test this out (human generations being what they are — lengthy).

    So, a lot of scientists in Europe especially had this idea that people’s intelligence could be improved because smart people tend to run in families, for example. The Europeans were also trying to come up with reasons that civilizations were at different points. Remember, if you take as a given that people originated at the same time, you have to ask why English people figured out iron tools when they did when Australians didn’t. And the question of human cultural differences being hard-wired was still open back then.*

    The problem with this idea was that whatever group the scientist was in seemed to magically end up as the best. (There was a very funny illustration of this in Stephen Jay Gould’s book showing the gradations among Europeans).

    More to the point, the idea that one could use policy to encourage “better” people to have kids gained some currency and was the basis for many lawsd in the US mandating sterilization of people deemed less intelligent.

    The massive problems with figuring out what IQ tests were measuring shows you how wrongheaded this was, and why it didn’t pass muster as a scientific theory after people understood genetics in any real way.

    Darwin had very little to do with the eugenics movement. His theory says that given a certain environment, organisms will have differential reproductive success. The ones that reproduce more become numerous and the ones that don’t die off.

    Note that this doesn’t mean any one species is superior to another. A fish is pretty darned good in the water but you or I aren’t well adapted to that. Species are fit or not for the environment they are in. Change it and you will see them adapt (via random variation) or die.

    So it isn’t like humans are any “higher” than, say, newts. We’re more complex in many ways, but we can’t breathe water and air through our skins either.

    Or take insects. Jack up the carbon dioxide levels — bugs can tolerate levels of CO2 that would kill you.

    The eugenics movement certainly used some of Darwin’s ideas to bolster their point, but it was really a misreading of what Darwin actually wrote (and you will find almost nothing in the Origin of Species about humans, and nothing in the Descent of Man that buys into eugenicist/racist theories either).

    Pololly– the idea that Darwin was an abolitionist — as were many. many Brits at the time — is an interesting bit about the history of science. It doesn’t make him a hero and nobody is trying to do that. People are trying to reclaim Darwin from the crazy-ass racists and the anti-science people who say he was a Nazi enabler.

    Recall that slavery in England was illegal anyway by the time he was active (it had been abolished in 1808). Since he wasn’t an American, and visited the US only a few times (maybe twice?) his lack of activism on the subject is perhaps understandable. Many other British people were working on the slavery issue better than he could.

    *Nowadays, there’s a whole set of sciences that are interrelated and help answer those very questions. Jared Diamond and David Landes are quite useful to read side-by-side in this regard.

    Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 2:22 pm ¶

15. MikeDawc wrote:

    @Sarah
    I think that was Margaret Sanger who was into eugenics.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger

    Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 2:55 pm ¶

16. Fiqah wrote:

    It has been a minute since I picked up The Origin of Species, but I remember being surprised at how NOT racist it was in light of all the racism it was used to validate. Poor maligned Darwin.

    Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 4:55 pm ¶

17. Phrone wrote:

    That’s interesting, but, if true, it kindda backfired. A lot of the ideas of evolution were used to justify a lot of racism. Instead of “blacks/Asians/Latinos/Natives/etc. are just different from white people and inferior” it became “blacks/Asians/Latinos/Natives/etc. are less evolved and thus ~*~scientifically~*~ inferior.” Social Darwinism, anyone?

    Not that it was Darwin’s fault, of course, but it just goes to show that people will wrap their prejudices around scientific ideas.

    Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 5:53 pm ¶

18. pololly wrote:

    I hear the responses and it is really interesting stuff.

    Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 6:12 pm ¶

19. Sarah wrote:

    Thanks everybody for your responses…I am going to have to read Origin of the Species for myself because I am beginning to think that I may have been making an unfair judgement about Darwin based on things that I read somewhere else…this is a great discussion.

    Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 6:27 pm ¶

20. Sarah wrote:

    Oh and I read this interesting snippet about Darwin’s theory in my Newsweek a couple of days ago…here’s a link the article on there website:

    http://www.newsweek.com/id/180103

    If I’m not allowed to post links on here I apologize.

    Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 6:30 pm ¶

21. kahlilg wrote:

    interesting. i just finished my anthro 101 class last semester. has anyone read The Mismeasure of A Man?

    Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 7:54 pm ¶

22. Keely H. wrote:

    I think it’s important to make a distinction between the “argument from design” also called the “teleological argument” and the “design theory movement”. The teleological argument is the philosophical theory that the universe is too complex and orderly to have come about through chance, that there was an intelligent consciousness behind its origins. During the Enlightenment many deists (people who believed that since god created the world it made more sense to study nature than to study the bible in order to come to an understanding of god’s plan) believed in the teleological argument and cited it as an alternative to creationism, the belief that god created Adam and Eve and that all of humanity was descended from them. It was always meant to be a philosophical theory and indeed a supporting argument for why science is important, even from a spiritual perspective.

    However, the “design theory movement” is different. It’s a purely American phenomenon that uses the teleological argument as its basis but then makes the unsupported logical jump that the intelligence that set the world’s existence into motion is the Judeo-Christian god, something the original argument never attempted to claim. It also makes the inexplicable claim that the argument itself is a scientific theory, something the original “argument from design” also never claimed. The “Design Theory Movement” is mainly espoused by a conservative think tank called The Discovery Institute which founded the “Teach the Controversy” campaign. The Discovery Institute also campaigns against stem cell research, abortion rights, physician assisted suicide, the animal rights movement, and the environmental movement. Presumably their reasoning behind supporting the teaching of design theory in public science classes is to advocate changes in public policy based on the belief that humans and only humans have souls at the moment of conception. If the belief in the soul were universally recognized in a government funded program that would set a certain precedent that could be used as a position to advocate a fundamentalist agenda. Whether the Christian fundamentalist movement is racist is an open question.

    Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 9:05 pm ¶

23. NancyP wrote:

    The current “intelligent design” fad is motivated primarily by the need to shore up a “literalist” style of Biblical interpretation against the Protestant “modern” (actually started circa 1820s) and against the Catholic traditional styles of Biblical interpretation. Both modern Protestant and Catholic interpretative methods use textual, form, literary, historical critical techniques and multiple modalities (literal meaning, metaphor and analogy, resonance with other texts, mystical/poetic meaning) of interpretation. The “mainstream” Protestant denominations as a group have little rigidity in interpretation, beyond an acknowledgment of the basic Trinitarian creeds (Nicene, Apostles’, etc). The Catholics have rigidity in interpretation of some texts (the Councils or the Pope says that text means “X” and only “X”), and challenging the interpretation, by bringing additional reasoning or information in, is difficult but not always fruitless. Other texts less significant to the Magisterium (Popes, early Church Councils, established canon law) are freely interpretable. The American evangelical literalists aka fundamentalists use fewer interpretative modalities and are generally less honest about uncertainties and about choices between alternate readings. Basically, to the fundamentalist, the Bible, usually the King James or NIV translations, means what your pastor and the famous preachers of the day, say it means. The “show all work” ethos of mainstream Protestants and scholarly Catholics doesn’t apply.

    I think that the “literalist” approach of the American Protestant fundamentalist tradition is very comforting to certain types of personalities unable to tolerate uncertainty or ambiguity. The attitude has been that if one important passage in the Bible can be proven to be non-factual, then the whole Bible is unreliable. If the Creation accounts are poetic and not actual fact, then Resurrection and Salvation may not mean walking around with wings on your back playing a harp and visiting those relatives and friends who made the cut. Really! Radio preachers state that “real Christians” (fundamentalist literalists) must defend Creationism against the onslaught of Evolution, because people must be able to see that because Creationism is True, bodily Resurrection and eternal life in Heaven and Hell must be True. Otherwise, there would be no reason to fear God and do right, and society would be, and is, in chaos. Darwin is regarded as the direct precursor of godless Hitler and Stalin. Really! (You spend a few hundred hours over years listening to these radio preachers – see for yourself – there’s a lot of anxiety out there).

    Any issues about race are secondary to most literalists today. There are a few “two seed” literalists that claim that non-white races are descended from coupling of humans with non-angelic spirits, but these “Christian Identity” churches have few members. Racism in most fundamentalist churches is swept under the carpet, and racial interpretations of texts are not used by the great majority (99+%) of white fundamentalist believers.

    BTW, Margaret Sanger did not start out an eugenicist, but jumped on to the eugenic faddism of the 1920s, in an effort to raise money and “respectability” for Planned Parenthood, which had been sorely lacking in both. She was a follower, not a leader, of eugenics. Sanger started out in 1900-1910 as a settlement house social worker, visiting poor immigrant women. These women saw frequent childbearing as harmful to their health and their ability to work and provide for existing children, and pleaded for some way to prevent future pregnancies, as the husbands weren’t amenable to abstinence. Sanger became radicalized, started traveling with the anarchist / free love crowd (Emma Goldman and associated people, including Sanger’s anarchist first husband), and started passing out pamphlets and eventually pessaries (some of which functioned as forerunners of diaphragms). After bouts of jail and European exile, she eventually drifted from her original focus on fulfilling clients’ needs at the clients’ request, to viewing the clients as in need of direction from “the experts”, to viewing the clients as possible dangers to the American Way of Life if they had more children than the Anglo-Saxons. This might be a cautionary tale on the dangers of fundraising and of marriage to a liberal of the “expert” class – or maybe this was just aging on Sanger’s part.

    Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 11:50 pm ¶

24. PatrickInBeijing wrote:

    How lovely to see so many people who have read “The Mismeasure of Man” by Gould. I used to use it a lot in debating intelligence (I know when I see, but I am darned if I know how to measure it.)

    Darwin being claimed by the neo-nazis and the eugenicists is like the same people claiming that Dr. King advocated color blindness. Not there.

    Some really great comments here, you folks make my day (some days I wonder about my species, then I encounter people here who give me hope, I should always say thanks!!).

    The creationist church (which is almost totally (but not) evangelical) indeed has a connection to the issues of slavery and abolition. Their argument for a 5000 year old (or thereabouts) world suggests a world in which species have not changed since then, but were created “seperately”, so to speak.

    Now any modern biologist will tell us that race is a social construct, and we are not only closer to each other than most of us can imagine, but are closer to some of our cousins in the animal kingdom than we previously imagined.

    Creationism suggests that there are multiple human races, perhaps even species? Evolution and modern biology say nope, not there. Those who wish to argue for white supremacy might find creationism comforting, and evolution threatening.

    Does this tell us anything about ALL believers in evolution or creation? Nope. But it suggests that there may be some hidden motives.

    As to eugenics, certainly it is an attempt to slather idiotic beliefs on top of science. But I have found (in debating this for many years on the net), that if you dug deep enough, the racism shown through.

    It’s not fair to blame Darwin for what other people have done to distort his views, we should blame them. He was a scientist, not a god or saint (a very very good scientist). By the time he developed his theories and popularized them, the war against overt slavery was unlikely to be affected by his writings. He was writing in England, and published in 1859. By then, most people in the USA knew which side they were on. Abolitionists might have praised it, slave owners damned it. But I have never heard that it had a major impact on the struggle against slavery.

    Which doesn’t mean that it hurt, on the other hand. Has anyone read anything suggesting it was an influence on the abolitionist movement?

    Posted 27 Jan 2009 at 7:39 am ¶

25. Jess wrote:

    I’m going to plug a few books here that might also help those that are wondering about how evolutionary theory works. Some should be read side-by-side.

    The Mismeasure of Man already plugged here.

    Wonderful Life also by Gould

    The Flamingo’s Smile

    The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins — put this one up next to Wonderful Life and you can see the way scientists have been debating evolutionary theory — and guess what, it bears no resemblance to what creationists of people claiming Darwin for the racists (I am looking at you, Ben Stein) would tell you.

    Science On Trial Douglas Futuyama — all about the case for evolution. There’s also some really good books on the Dover case out there, this one was written before that.

    Evolution Revolution by Ken McNamara and John Long — this was a nice outline of modern theory.

    Of course, if you want to slog through Darwin, be my guest, but be aware that evolutionary theory doesn’t begin and end with him. It’s moved a lot in the last 100 years.

    It Ain’t Necessarily So by David Lewontin, if you want to understand a bit about genetics. It may be dated in some spots but if you aren’t a subscriber to Cell to start with you won’t notice.

    Of course, all this is because of my firm belief that anyone who believes in social change must, of necessity, be a serious science geek. You needn’t be a science major, but you should be able to discuss science intelligently — it’s a major force in our lives and understanding it is crucial.

    (But I think the Sokal hoax was hilarious. More humanities-oriented people seem to disagree).

    Posted 27 Jan 2009 at 9:23 am ¶

26. Restructure! wrote:

    In the end, though, I admit I am leery of putting too much weight on Darwin’s personal views… they are too often used in creation/evolution debates to obscure the scientific facts. If Isaac Newton were a racist, would it make gravity any less real?

    I agree. Newton was ridiculously misogynist, too.

    interesting. i just finished my anthro 101 class last semester. has anyone read The Mismeasure of A Man?

    Yes. I join the others and highly recommend this book.

    Of course, all this is because of my firm belief that anyone who believes in social change must, of necessity, be a serious science geek. You needn’t be a science major, but you should be able to discuss science intelligently — it’s a major force in our lives and understanding it is crucial.

    YES. I concur.

    Posted 27 Jan 2009 at 11:40 am ¶

27. Jess wrote:

    @Restructure–

    Also, Newton was one wacky mystic, and is famous in England for hanging counterfeiters as much as for gravity. (He was director of the Royal Mint for a while). He also might have gone a little crazy because of his penchant for tasting some of the chemicals that, as an alchemist, he would create. (heavy metals + brain tissue = whackjob).

    But reading Principia — I mean, wow. I’d recommend it to people who have no calculus background at all because if you can wade through the 17th century prose (translated from Latin IIRC) he actually explains it really well. Doesn’t even use much math-y notation (it wasn’t invented yet).

    Darwin, in particular, was careful to separate his personal beliefs from the results of his observations. He was actually really unhappy about publishing and dithered for years.

    I wish more people would understand that physical reality is under no obligation to respect your feelings or your politics, and science is a way of describing how the world works, not how you should behave. That’s why cdesignproponentists and other people who claim Darwin for all kinds of weirdness get in trouble — they can’t make that distinction.

    Posted 27 Jan 2009 at 2:32 pm ¶

28. deb wrote:

    If this is indeed true, I might consider celebrating Darwin Day (Feb. 12th)!

    Posted 27 Jan 2009 at 5:49 pm ¶

29. Nick wrote:

    Phew, thank you Jess for pointing out a primary principle of science.

    It’s conclusion based on observation. You derive theories based on what you can measure.

    Personal opinion/hope/belief does not and should not enter into it.

    I’m an empiricist by nature and it’s frustrating when people attack you for believing in things you can see/hear/feel.

    I mean, what is the alternative?

    Faith.

    Fair enough, but don’t tell me that my acceptance of scientific results is because of my prior belief. I base my worldview on what can be tested.

    Posted 27 Jan 2009 at 8:13 pm ¶

30. Melissa S. wrote:

    Have you ever read A.J. Jacobs A Year of Living Biblically? It’s really interesting in terms of humorous memoirs go. But there’s a part where Jacobs visits a natural history museum centered around intelligence design and the curator talks about how this theory eliminates racial difference as well, yet they’re both used to make racial differences which shows kind of how unsolid they are.

    Posted 27 Jan 2009 at 9:16 pm ¶

31. Evie wrote:

    I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the commenters who:

    a) thought Darwin was a racist (without knowing anything about him at all)
    b) even worse than that, thought that his works themselves contained racism (without ever having bothered to read them)
    c) thought that his ideas (and not the incorrect interpretation of them by the willfully ignorant) had anything to do with social “Darwinism” or eugenics

    are Americans. I had no idea that the creationists and religious fundamentalists had managed to do such a job on him and his ideas.

    Darwin was a hero because his ACTUAL ideas furthered scientific knowledge and UNDERMINED the notion that any race could claim superiority over another, and he did so without any of the objectionable methods many other scientists have used. Darwin was disgusted by the slavery he observed in the Americas, but slavery had already been abolished in his own country and he undoubtedly felt that others were better qualified to speak out against it. Martin Luther King Jr fought for civil rights, he didn’t fight for the women’s liberation movement or to have third world debt abolished for example, does the fact that he didn’t fight every injustice known to humankind mean he wasn’t a hero?

    Darwin’s works are in the public domain, if anyone’s interested in rectifying their ignorance: http://darwin-online.org.uk/

    Posted 28 Jan 2009 at 11:17 am ¶

32. MomTFH wrote:

    This is also discussed in the current (I think) Smithsonian magazine.

    Posted 01 Feb 2009 at 4:59 pm ¶