America's Taliban strikes again

The Holocaust wasn't Hitler's fault. Darwin made him do it. Complicit as well are any who buy into the scientific theory that modern man evolved from lower animal forms.

That's the latest lunacy from one of our more fanatical right-wing American Christian television outfits, the Coral Ridge Ministries in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Coral Ridge espouses that America is not a free-religion nation, but a Christian one. It argues there should be no separation of church and state.

It certainly has a propensity for explaining or excusing Hitler. A few years ago it brought in a conference speaker to argue that American abortion was a more horrible atrocity than the Holocaust.

One year it disinvited Cal Thomas as a conference speaker after Brother Cal got too liberal. You're thinking I must be kidding. But I kid you not. Brother Cal had displayed the utter audacity to co-author a book contending that American Christian conservatives ought to worry a little more about spreading the gospel from the bottom of the culture up rather than from the top of politics down.

Now this: Coral Ridge is airing a couple of cable installments of a "documentary," called "Darwin's Deadly Legacy," that seek to make a case that, without Darwin, there could have been no Hitler.

Authoritative sources for the program include no less than columnist Ann Coulter, noted scientist, who says she is outraged that she didn't get instructed in Darwin's effective creation of Hitler when she was in school. She says she has since come to understand that Hitler was merely a Darwinist trying, by extermination of a group of people he considered inferior because of their religion and heritage, to "hurry along" the natural survival of the Aryan fittest.

Also quoted is Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Project, who tells the Anti-Defamation League that his comments were used out of context and that he is "absolutely appalled" by the "utterly misguided and inflammatory" premise of Coral Ridge's report.

The documentary's theme is really quite simple: Darwin propounded the theory of evolution. Hitler came along and believed the theory. Hitler killed Jews. So, blame Darwin for the Holocaust. Blame, too, all others who agree with or advance Darwin's theory. Get back to God and Adam and Eve and all will be right again with the world.

"To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler," said Dr. D. James Kennedy, president of Coral Ridge Ministries. "The legacy of Charles Darwin is millions of deaths."

Obviously, the theme is breath-taking nonsense. You can't equate academic theory with murderous practice. You can't equate a thinker and a madman, or science and crime.

And you can't ever blame one man for another's actions. That once was a proud conservative precept. In a different context, you'll no doubt find Coral Ridge fervently preaching personal responsibility. Except, apparently, for Adolf Hitler, to whom these religious kooks issue a pass. Ol' Adolf, it seems, just fell in with a bad crowd.

By Coral Ridge's premise, Mohammed is to blame for Osama bin Laden. Actually, Coral Ridge might not argue with that. So how about this: The pope is to blame for the IRA. And Jesus is to blame for Mel Gibson, not to mention Coral Ridge Ministries.

This is where the eugenicists are wrong. In evolutionary thinking, there is no "better," as such a term would be used by the eugenicists.

While I agree that the eugenicists are wrong in a moral sense, I must disagree with your claim that evolution does not support the idea of "better" as eugenicists proclaim it. However, evolution gives us a relative convept of "better," because it is explicitly a (local) optimization process. Indeed, it's not really possible to use the theory of evolution to explain evolved traits without a concept of "better."

It's also really not convincing to say that eugenics isn't "evolutionary" just because it claims to see an evolutionary trend and seeks to emphasize it. It's like saying that, because the aerodynamics of airplanes have gone where no birds have gone, aircraft design has no contact with the aerodynamics of birds. In both cases -- eugenics and aerodynamics -- the natural and man-made effects both rely on the same underlying principles.

The major assumption here is that there is any significant evolutionary difference between the races. There isn't--insufficient time has passed for the races to have significantly diverged. Racists who try to argue from an evolutionary perspective say that other races (most notably blacks, who really can't accurately be considered as one race, which I will return to later. . .) are "less evolved", which doesn't make sense because blacks have not been in stasis since caucasians diverged, they've continued breeding under selection as well. The question then is whether the selective pressures facing the different races is different enough to have introduced any major differences. The evidence shows that this hasn't happened. Any contrary claim is so contrary to the evidence for humans and other populations of organisms as to bear the burden of proof.

There probably is some variation in type and level of intelligence among the races, but as I said before, the difference is not very great, and it is a difference in the average. Even if a race's average IQ is a few points lower than another's there are a good many people in that race with intelligence higher than a lot of members of the other race. Additionally, there isn't a lot of reason for thinking that intelligence is responsible for good morals (beyond a certain minimal level that is required for proper understanding of consequences and thus impulse control). As you mentioned, it appears that some groups of Asians test higher in average intelligence than caucasians, yet Communist China is not known for its excellent human rights track record. It often seems that being smart doesn't make a person more virtuous, just better at getting away with vice.

You mention sub-Saharan Africa and its lousy state. I agree with you that part of that is due to culture. However, a lot of it is due to environment (and indeed culture is tangled up with environment). There's an interesting book called Guns, Germs, and Steel that talks about various factors that are responsible for the rise and fall of civilizations. We probably owe our current status in the world more to the humble wheat plant, our domesticated livestock, and the availability of various metals than to our relative racial intelligence distribution. The problem in Africa would probably be better handled by fighting the endemic diseases prevalent there (especially AIDs, which is shifting the demographics dramatically towards a younger age, which isn't really good for civilized life in any population), reforming corrupt governments, and assuring ownership of private property rather than by selective breeding programs for higher intelligence.

Another oversimplification of this evolutionary approach to racism is the assumption that race is easily determined solely by skin color. In actuality skin color is a pretty lousy way of splitting people into groups with shared genetic traits. If you look at blacks in Africa, for instance, there are many groups with noticeable differences. Caucasians also can be split into multiple groups, as can Asians and any other racial group you choose to examine.

There are those who say that race is an obsolete construct. I disagree solely because races and subraces indicate the presence of different gene pools (although I'm completely in favor of them getting as mixed up as they like) with alleles of differing frequencies, and many of these alleles are significant because they may be responsible for tendencies towards certain diseases. If we are aware of this, we can take action to prevent the development of these diseases or begin early treatment. For instance, many Asian women tend to have more visceral fat than women of other races, and are at a higher risk for heart disease than women of other races with the same body mass index. Some small groups in certain races are so inbred as to warrant consideration as a separate subrace, such as the Amish, who are increasingly developing health problems rare in the larger population. Interestingly, there is a lot of evidence to show that considering all blacks a single race is a mistake since blacks have the highest allelic variation of any race. This is evidence that the out of Africa model is correct since it shows that the African population has been there breeding and accumulating new alleles for a long time while other races went through relatively recent bottlenecks, supposedly when they descended from small groups of people who left Africa. Amusingly this provides an argument that whites are inferior to blacks because whites are comparatively inbred!

I do think that Darwin had some idea of evolution as a directional process, probably residual from his earlier Christian beliefs (seeing life as a process of sanctification). Just because Darwin pioneered the theory of evolution does not mean that his philosophical assumptions and conclusions were scientifically grounded! Indeed, science is a bad beginning for philosophy as a general rule. . .

Yay! More Creationist quote mining!

"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." -Charles Darwin, "Origin of Species, pg.

Wow look, Darwin seems to claim the eye couldn't have evolved! Wow!

Let's tag on the *REST* of the quote, shall we?

Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real."

[p. 217, Charles Darwin, 1859. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. John Murray, London, 1859 (published by Penguin Books, London, England, 1968, reprinted 1986 with an introduction and bibliography by J.W. Burrow]

So, did you know it was a misquote when you posted it, or are you just ignorant? Or perhaps both?

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The heresies of recent centuries not withstanding -- a proper christian would say that Jesus is both fully Man and and Fully God. But what about the eyes?Are the eyes Man made or God made.

Consider the spectrum in which man can see. Which is more proper to say. That man animals and wee beasties exploited a gap in the light spectrum in order to see. Or is it better to say that God provided the Gap. Consider this.

4- The Absorption Coefficient Anomaly in the Visible Region:

Another interesting property of water lies in its absorption of light. Every
substance has a characteristic absorption spectrum that shows how much light at a particular wavelength is absorbed. If the absorption coefficient is high at a particular wavelength then the material will look opaque at that wavelength. If it is low, light at that particular wavelength will be transmitted and the material will appear transparent.

In Figure 2, the absorption coefficient of water is plotted as a function of wavelength (red line). The first thing you notice is that water has a very high absorption coefficient, except for a very narrow region around 500nm. In this small region of wavelength, the absorption coefficient is ten million times smaller than the neighboring regions. What is more interesting than this enormous drop in the absorption coefficient is that this dip happens exactly at the visible part of the spectrum. The human eye can only see wavelengths between 400-700 nm. This visible part of the spectrum is indicated by a rainbow colored strip in the graph. It is amazing that this exactly coincides with the region where water is transparent. Adding to this pleasant surprise is the fact that the amount of light emitted by the sun peaks around this dip as well.

Everything is conveniently adjusted for the habitants of this blue planet. The maximum intensity of emitted sunlight happens to be in the narrow range of the spectrum that we can see. And water on the atmosphere lets this part of the spectrum through thanks to the strange dip in the water absorption spectrum. Worried about the dangerous UV radiation from the sun? This is taken care of too. Just below the visible region, the absorption coefficient of water is ten million times higher. So water vapor in the atmosphere very effectively removes most of the dangerous UV light and shields us.

The spectrum of the light from the sun, the absorption spectra of water and the visible region of the spectrum that we can see are all physically independent phenomena. Yet, it is worth noting that each of these phenomena behaves in such a way that it seems they should have a precise knowledge of each other. If you think this is too much of a coincidence, there is even more. Water is also designed to maximize our visual pleasure. You are probably astonished by the lovely color match between the blue sky and the blue sea. Most people assume that this is because the sky is blue and the sea appears to be blue because it reflects the sky. In fact this is wrong. Water is blue since its absorption coefficient is higher in red; therefore it absorbs more red and reflects the blue part of the spectrum. This can be seen in Figure 2, in which the absorption coefficient in the red colored segment of the rainbow strip is more than 100 times greater than the blue part. The sky is blue for an entirely different reason (since it is blue light that is scattered the most by the nitrogen in the atmosphere). Again two very different, independent physical phenomena are at work here, but the result is a pleasant view for us.

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