Posted on 04/29/2008 8:38:43 PM PDT by Soliton
On 18th April, the day Ben Stein's infamous film was released, Michael Shermer received the following letter from a Jew (referencing a past article that Shermer had written debunking the Holocaust deniers) whose identity I shall conceal as "David J".
Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!
Shermer wrote to Mr J to ask if he had by any chance just seen Expelled, and he received this reply:
Yes I have. You know, I respect you as a human being and you have done great work exposing psychics and frauds, but this is a very touchy issue that affects me and family emotionally. Our family business was affected because of Auschwitz because now, our family has nothing. It is gone. Things began to make sense once I saw the movie and I am just appalled. I have learned a lot from Ben Stein, a Jewish brother, who has opened my eyes up a bit.
It seemed to me that Ben Stein and his lying crew were more to blame than Mr J himself for his revolting letter. I therefore decided to write him a personal letter and try to explain a few things to him. It then occurred to me (indeed, Michael Shermer suggested as much) that there are probably many others like him, whose minds have been twisted in this evil way by the man Stein, and that it would be a good idea to publish the letter. I decided to wait 24 hours to see if he would reply, although I didn't expect him to. I am now publishing my letter to him, exactly as I sent it to him except that I have removed his name.
Richard
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Dear Mr J
Michael Shermer forwarded me a letter from you which suggests that you have unfortunately been taken in by Ben Stein's mendacious and/or ignorant suggestion that Darwin is somehow to blame for Hitler. I hope you will not mind if I write to you and try to undo this grievous error.
1. I deeply sympathize with you for the loss of your relatives in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I don't think that could really be said to justify the tone of your letter to Michael Shermer, who is a kind and decent man, as even you seemed to concede in your second letter to him, and the very antithesis of a Nazi sympathizer. Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States! Just look at those words of yours. Probably you regret them by now. I certainly hope so, but I'll continue to write my letter to you, on the assumption that you still feel at least a part of what you wrote.
2. Hitler's horrible opinions were not all that unusual for his time, not just in Germany but throughout Europe, including my own country of Britain, by the way. What singled Hitler out was the fact that he somehow managed to come to power in one of Europe's leading nations, which was also one of the world's most technologically advanced nations. Hitler had a lot of support in Germany. His horrible bidding was done by millions of ordinary German footsoldiers, and the great majority of them were Christians. Many were Lutheran, and many (like Hitler himself) were Roman Catholic. Very few were atheists, and whatever else Hitler was he most certainly was not an atheist. It is sometimes said that Hitler only pretended to be Catholic, in order to win the Church's support for his regime. In this he was very largely successful. So, whether or not Hitler was himself a true Catholic (as he often claimed) the Church bears a heavy responsibility for what happened. And Hitler himself used religion to justify his anti-Semitism. For example, here is a typical quotation, from the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf. Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. Hitler's obscene anti-Semitism was able to hold sway in Germany because there was a deeply embedded history of anti-Semitism in Germany, and indeed in Europe generally.
3. Going further back in history, where do we think the toxic anti-Semitism of Hitler, and of the many Germans whose support gave him power, came from? You can't seriously think it came from Darwin. Anti-Semitism has been rife in Europe for many many centuries, positively encouraged by most Christian churches, including especially the two that dominate Germany. The Roman Catholic Church has notoriously persecuted Jews as "Christ-killers". While, as for the Lutherans, Martin Luther himself wrote a book called On the Jews and their Lies from which Hitler quoted. And Luther publicly said that "All Jews should be driven from Germany." By the way, do you hear an echo of those words in your own letter to Michael Shermer, "We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States." Don't you feel just a twinge of shame at those truly horrible words of yours? Don't you feel that, as a Jew, you should feel especially regretful that you used those words?
4. Now, to the matter of Darwin. The first thing to say is that natural selection is a scientific theory about the way evolution works in fact. It is either true or it is not, and whether or not we like it politically or morally is irrelevant. Scientific theories are not prescriptions for how we should behave. I have many times written (for example in the first chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave. I have several times said that a society based on Darwinian principles would be a very unpleasant society in which to live. I have several times said, starting at the beginning of my very first book, The Selfish Gene, that we should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics. Darwin himself said the same thing, in various different ways. So did his great friend and champion Thomas Henry Huxley.
5. Darwinism gives NO support to racism of any kind. Quite the contrary. It is emphatically NOT about natural selection between races. It is about natural selection between individuals. It is true that the subtitle of The Origin of Species is "Or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life" but Darwin was using the word "race" in a very different sense from ours. It is totaly clear, if you read past the title to the book itself, that a "favoured race" meant something like 'that set of individuals who possess a certain favoured genetic mutation" (although Darwin would not have used that language because he did not have our modern concept of a genetic mutation).
6. There is no mention of Darwin in Mein Kampf. Not one single, solitary mention, not one mention in any of the 27 chapters of this long and tedious book. Don't you think that, if Hitler was truly influenced by Darwin, he would have given him at least one teeny weeny mention in his book? Was he, perhaps, INDIRECTLY influenced by some of Darwin's ideas, without knowing it? Only if you completely misunderstand Darwin's ideas, as some have definitely done: the so-called Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer and John D Rockefeller. Hitler could fairly be described as a Social Darwinist, but all modern evolutionists, almost literally without exception, have been vocal in their condemnation of Social Darwinism. This of course includes Michael Shermer and me and PZ Myers and all the other evolutionary scientists whom Ben Stein and his team tricked into taking part in his film by lying to us about their true intentions.
7. Hitler did attempt eugenic breeding of humans, and this is sometimes misrepresented as an attempt to apply Darwinian principles to humans. But this interpretation gets it historically backwards, as PZ Myers has pointed out. Darwin's great achievement was to look at the familiar practice of domestic livestock breeding by artificial selection, and realise that the same principle might apply in NATURE, thereby explaining the evolution of the whole of life: "natural selection", the "survival of the fittest". Hitler didn't apply NATURAL selection to humans. He was probably even more ignorant of natural selection than Ben Stein evidiently is. Hitler tried to apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans, and there is nothing specifically Darwinian about artificial selection. It has been familiar to farmers, gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders, pigeon fanciers and many others for centuries, even millennia. Everybody knew about artificial selection, and Hitler was no exception. What was unique about Darwin was his idea of NATURAL selection; and Hitler's eugenic policies had nothing to do with natural selection.
8. Mr J, you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and potentially to many others. I do not know whether they knowingly and wantonly perpetrated the falsehood that fooled you. Perhaps they genuinely and sincerely believed it, although other actions by them, which you can read about all over the Internet, persuade me that they are fully capable of deliberate and calculated deception. You are perhaps not to be blamed for swallowing the film's falsehoods, because you probably assumed that nobody would have the gall to make a whole film like that without checking their facts first. Perhaps even you will need a little more convincing that they were wrong, in which case I urge you to read it up and study the matter in detail -- something that Ben Stein and his crew manifestly and lamentably failed to do.
With my good wishes, and sympathy for the losses your family suffered in the Holocaust.
Yours sincerely
Richard Dawkins
It has been oft asserted as more than a theory on FR and many other places. It has been called truth, fact, and all sorts of terms which are reminiscent of Algore's 'settled science'.
I don't think anyone would dispute micro-evolution as a fact; no need to look beyond different dog breeds, or ring species. That is an established fact.
Agreed, except for the ring species part. That is just a redefinition of the original concept of species to include cases where the organisms are still able to mate and reproduce.
Macro-evolution is still a theory; anyone who claims otherwise is scientifically wrong. However, general relativity is still a theory as well. Should it not be taught?
The issue is not whether the TOE is a theory or not; it is whether or not it is called 'fact'. Adaptation and Natural Selection are facts because they can be tested, observed, and falsified. Not so for the TOE, though.
ID does not have any examples NOR observations to even warrant a rigorous definition of a hypothesis, let alone a theory. How come it should even be taught in a school?"
I don't call ID a scientific theory -- as many on FR do. I think it's an interesting idea to discuss but it can't be tested using scientific principles so it shouldn't be called science.
I am all for using the same standards for any theories -- that is, the classical approach where theories have to be tested and observed in controlled conditions. By this standard ID cannot be considered science but neither can the TOE be considered fact.
No, that was pretty impressive. I'm going to have to rethink my opinions now not only on Hitler but Ted Kennedy, Mario Cuomo and Nancy Pelosi.
Those questions are out of the realm of science at this point. Just because some people would rather not have to face such questions doesn't mean scientists shouldn't follow the evidence wherever it leads.
It uses a fitness function - a means of determining how well the solution fits the target goal. In biological terms, that would be how well the individual survives and thrives. In mathematical terms, it's an overall fitness score based upon what you want.
So if the target is mobility and you get useless mutations that will only be useful when the final protein is in place many generations in the future, how does the algorithm know to save these mutations? In irreducibly complex systems, they don't function if all the pieces are not in place. In order for the algorithm to be able to produce an irreducibly complex system, it needs foresight to save the pieces that could be useful in the future.
No, you don’t need foreknowledge; the GA doesn’t retain that information. Mutations happen, and often the same mutation will pop up every few dozen generations. The key is the sample size you test - literally millions (or in the case of biological evolution, trillions of trillions) of solutions.
“If tectonics and seismics didn’t mess with the data points we could trust them all, but we can’t.”
Hmmmmm. How convenient.....
Actually it pretty inconvenient. Unless you're looking for an excuse to abandon the research altoghether because it can't produce perfect results.
However you wish to phrase it, biological fitness is a function that depends on offspring.
many approaches with GAs use the approach of the fittest “parents” get extra children, while the worst parents get no children.
With a moment of reflection, I'm sure you will see that if one were to use the biological notion of fitness here, one would be trying to determine the offspring of a parent in terms of a function that depends on the offspring of the parent. So the program would simply (and obviously) not work.
ECO:”However you wish to phrase it, biological fitness is a function that depends on offspring.”
The interesting thing in this mathematical analysis is that outcomes and second generational success is based on “intelligence”. How is the result determined to be a “good” outcome?
PugetSoundSoldier is forgetting that the programmer/mathematician is making an intelligent determination of what is a successful outcome - there is inherent “intelligence” in the simulation because of this.
This is akin to saying that monkeys/apes can communicate through sign language. Sure, we can create a laboratory experiment using a reward system that can produce a desired outcome. But the bigger question is, without outside “intelligence”, whether these primates would choose to communicate in this manner. In the same way, could these GA simulations randomly result in a good outcome without an intelligent measurement of success and reward.
Richard Dawkins is basically an idiot with a 180 IQ. Expelled is a legitimate candidate for best film of 08.
“PugetSoundSoldier is forgetting that the programmer/mathematician is making an intelligent determination of what is a successful outcome - there is inherent “intelligence” in the simulation because of this.”
This is what makes cryto-analysis interesting. A solution to an encrypted sequence can appear mathematically valid but it takes intelligence to verify that it is the correct solution.
If you think that expelled will win an Oscar, you are a fool. I will take every dime you can scrape together as a bet.
You can just ignore the vitriolic fountains.
They have their knickers in a knot because Expelled exposes their dogmatic lie.
That’s about the way I see it.
You left off the tag.
You left off the [/sarcasm] tag.
And then he tells Beck that Dawkins wrote on his blog that he was trying to simplify matters because Stein was so stupid. That's not the point of what Dawkins wrote at all--his point that he thought Stein was honestly stupid, not just playing stupid to lure Dawkins into saying something that could be distorted and made fun of later.
A shameful performance.
Yes, for example, he said that R.A. Fisher was the greatest darwinian since Darwin. Fisher was a eugenist. Fisher's magnum opus "The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection" is about eugenics. It will be up on my FR page soon. We should remember that Dawkins said that about Fisher.
HHTVL:”I just saw some of Ben Stein’s appearance on the Glenn Beck show, and even in the short bit I caught, it was distressingly obvious just how dishonest he’s willing to be.”
You might try actually viewing the movie you are so quick to criticize. If you had seen the entire film, you would understand that the excerpt you saw was just a small part of the discussion with Dawkins. Sure there was voice-over commentary by Ben Stein throughout the film (that was actually the point of the documentary), but Dawkins dug his own grave on the topic of intelligent design possibilities.
Watch the ENTIRE film and then tell me your view Of Dawkins...
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