Yup.
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.
I prefer f.christian's "fossil thumpers." It kinda had a musical quality to it.
No he doesn't. He likes to throw around insults though.
That's all I could gather from your pseudo-intellectual posts, and the last one does not qualify to be such.
Have a good day, Prout, and inquire some day about choice on a given vs. undefined set. But please, not need to reply.
Yup.
"Those individuals would tend to leave more offspring than their fellows, and over many generations their traits would come to dominate the population."
Now where's that thread of the mom giving birth to her 12th baby in the hurricane shelter in Cape Cod.....?
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No he doesn't. He likes to throw around insults though.
Hey, Nathan. You're supposed to be over on that other thread doing your evening's homework! You promised a detailed response to that long and detailed (with no insults) post #211 I provided.
Seriously, I did my homework, with no insults. Its your turn.
regarding the last: you asked a set of stupid hypotheticals, I responded in the same vein.
don't like a mirror? too bad.
That sure is a twist of history. Hitler despised religion, He murdered thousands of Christians, razed thousands of Churches, and imprisoned over 800 preists to die in the labor camps.
Plus, with his belief in Darwinism running so strong, he murdered who knows how many crippled and sickly, disabled men women and children, regardless of race/religion.
I know now. You're getting this crap from Islamic hate sites. You are so full of it it's beyond description. the only one full of revisionist history is YOU!!!! Christians, pope Pios saved countless jews from Hitlers dutch oven network, at a huge cost to themselves. The evidence is clear and everywhere if you care to look. Hitler smashed every catholic church that he could. murdered as many catholic priests as he could.
: )
Hitlers agression against the church is well doccumented, I don't know who wrote the books you are reading, probably the few revisionist Pope Pios haters. Names I can't remember off hand.
It is garbage however. Hitler hated Christians, despised the church. He was an athiest. He killed the sickly and crippled, trying to "Darwinize" his master race. He razed thousands of Churches, imprisoned over 800 priests to die in labor camps. The Church saved hundreds of thousands of Jews, smuggling them through monastaries, giving the Christian birth citificates, keeping Jewish children in orphanges.
Whatever crap your reading is just that. Perhaps you should do a little research and find the truth.
I sound like what, an evil Jew?
why don't you head back to DU. You don't belong here with that mouth.
So there was no "Nazi war on Christianity". Tell that to Niemoeller and Bonhoeffer.
And Germany was and is a Christian nation. Well, possibly in the most nominal sense but even that's a real stretch. There may have been a thin veneer of Christianity in Germany by the 20's but not much more. Not unlike many of the mainline denominations today which would make up the WCC. Masquerading as churches but having little in common with true biblical Christianity , rather espousing a worldview which is antithetical to a biblical worldview. Bonhoeffer lamented the fact that the majority of Germany's churches had no biblical understanding whatsoever and were little more than social gatherings.
Hitler attempted to coopt the churches early on and was opposed by certain pastors (chief among them were Niemoeller and Bonhoeffer). Niemoeller opposed Hitler to his face when he promised pastors that if they would go along they would be taken care of and by 1939 had done 7 stints in prison. Bonhoeffer took to the radio airwaves in the 30's and publicly denounced Hitler's plans which had begun to appear in the medical schools and elsewhere as a not so subtle form of eugenics.
Both of these pastors broke from the rotting corpse of what was left of the German church to form the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer was later hanged by the Nazis at Flossenberg just days before its liberation. In short, Germany by that time was in no way shape or form a Christian country. If she had been there would have been more Niemoellers and Bonhoeffers and Hitler would have never risen to power.
Yes, you're probably right. The reality of a model is that you always have to hold something constant.
As for Congress, most legislation ignores the one thing about economics we know with certainty: Incentives matter in predictable ways (my first undergrand econ professor used to say this almost constantly). This one reality is why tax cuts spur the economy and can actually increase revenues in certain conditions. It is why regulation tends to act the same way as an extra cost imposed on producers. It is why welfare recipients tend to stay on welfare rather than improve themselves. It is why Bin Laden attacked us on 9/11 after Clinton pulled out of Somalia.
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