Posted on 09/29/2005 2:21:03 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
The year was 1838. In England, the Industrial Revolution was under way, but it had made rich only the owners of production, not the workers. In increasingly crowded cities, ordinary people struggled for their daily existence. Some of the poor rioted. The Poor Laws were under attack: Welfare to the needy would only increase their dependence and encourage the breeding of still more hungry mouths to feed, said critics. It was in this pivotal year that Darwin, back from his voyage on the Beagle and trying to understand the forces that drove the origin of new species, read the works of Thomas Malthus, a parson and social economist.
In opposition to the utopian thinkers of the day, Malthus believed that unless people exercised restraint in the number of children they had, the inevitable shortfall of food in the face of spiraling population growth would doom mankind to a ceaseless struggle for existence. Out of that unforgiving battle, some would survive and many would not, as famine, disease, and war put a ceiling on the growth in population.
These ideas galvanized Darwin's thinking about the struggles for survival in the wild, where restraint is unknown. Before reading Malthus, Darwin had thought that living things reproduced just enough individuals to keep populations stable. But now he came to realize that, as in human society, populations bred beyond their means, leaving survivors and losers in the effort to exist.
Immediately, Darwin saw that the variation he had observed in wild populations would produce some individuals that were slightly better equipped to thrive and reproduce under the particular conditions at the time. Those individuals would tend to leave more offspring than their fellows, and over many generations their traits would come to dominate the population. "The result of this would be the formation of new species," he wrote later. "Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work."
That theory, of course, was none other than natural selection, the driving force of evolution. Though scholars have debated just how influential Malthus was in Darwin's thinking, there can be no doubt that his view of the struggle in society enabled Darwin to appreciate the significance of the struggle in the wild.
It doesn't say that at all. Not even remotely. You really didn't read this article you linked, did you? Worse, you still haven't read it, despite the fact that you're being beaten silly with it.
Come back when you have a real argument, son. You're wasting everyone's time.
Evolution is a scientific theory. That's it. Like a gun, evolution doesn't kill people, people kill people.
Your associating evolution with eugenics is an irrelevant slander equivalent to associating Christians with Jim Jones.
There *are* people who's first thought after hearing the word "Christian" is Jim Jones, and David Koresh, and "the inquisition". Just because you associate eugenics with Darwin is as irrelevant as those people who think evil about Christianity.
You are both wrong.
Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches
There is plenty more evidence of the nazi war on Christianity, but I'm sure that won't stop your slanderous religious bigotry.
I'm glad to waste your time. You don't seem to spend any time doing anything other than just being a waste.
Wise move - it wasn't going very well for you. I'll be off, then, and leave the thread for anyone else who wants to drive by and laugh at the Tailgunner Joke. CYA.
You lost the argument in post 43 when you failed to rebut my correct definition of Malthusian utopianism. You seem to know nothing at all about Burke, Malthus, or even Darwin, and have offered nothing to this thread but lies, slander and insults. Go crawl back under your rock.
Hilter told the Germans to kill jews because they were cross-breed "sub-humans" who would dilute the master race's genetic superiority and "fitness." Everybody knows this. Your compulsion to deny this fact and say it was all about Christianity is as tranparent as it is reprehensible.
Nazi "Positive Christianity" is no more Christian than Communist "Liberation Theology."
Darwin was not so innocent of eugenics. His associates (and I believe a brother or cousin) were intimately involved with the budding eugenics movement in England. He knew what they were doing and approved of it.
Hitler is obviously only arguing against birth control of aryans in this quote. While Malthus wanted to limit births in order that the poor wouldn't go hungry, Hitler hoped to cause their extinction and the speciation of a "master race" through competition with the unfit. While they had different goals, they both started from the same incorrect premises.
I ran across this quote from Thomas H. Huxley, Darwin's defender.
"The two most important questions in science are 'What can I know?' and 'How can I know it?'"
"Science and religion part ways over the first question, what each can know. Religion, and to some extent philosophy, believes that it can know, or at least address, the question, 'Why?'"
"The question 'why' is too deep for science. Science instead believes it can only learn 'how' something occurs."
There was a lot more, but basically, he said that science does not reject religion. They are not working on the same problems or seeking the same answers. It is religion that rejects science. Looks like it still does.
So if science does not reject religion, then all the evos who show up to mock Christianity and push atheism aren't being very scientific are they?
You must be going to different places than I do. The mocking I hear comes from the Creationists.
I have always thought that science tried to answer the question "how". Then they use that as a basis to predict other things (for example, using the law of gravity and its effect on heavenly bodies to predict the existence of a planet we now call Pluto amny years before it was found -- and there are many other examples in science). Sometimes their predictions are right and sometimes they are wrong. Testing finds out which.
I have not yet seen Creationists (or ID's if you want to be called that now) do that. They cast doubt on evolution, but do not use their "science" to predict anything. Without prediction, it is worthless.
His conclusion would be valid even if technology did advance but at an insufficient pace.
As for silliness, you're a bit too harsh, considering that ever today most people, including Congress, evaluate consequences of their actions assuming everything else being constant. The constancy supposition is perhaps silly for a present-day scholar but apparently not for anybody else.
Where and when this fact has been established?
I wish there were more people who reviled both Charles Darwin and Edmund Burke at once. It would make my enemies all the more obvious.
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