Posted on 05/12/2008 9:05:36 AM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode
It's in post 1.
- Sir Arthur Keith, Antiquity of Man, 1924.
Primarily among British anthropologists. Folks working in other areas had different ideas. (They were right.)
No, I didn’t read that. I read the article and when I got to post 1 it didn’t look like it had anything to do with archeology so I just passed it by. It didn’t make sense.
Maybe you should.
Why? What does it have to do with the article or my comment on it?
Do you mean "good" in the sense of good science, or in the sense of entertainment?
"If you can find a skull of one of the aborigines of Australia in a museum anywhere, you will find it interesting to compare it with a European's, for it is primitive in many ways. Notice the small brain-case and the large eyebrow ridges and the receding forehead. The hairy Australian natives are the most primitive people living on the globe to-day. "
For an early twentieth century paper on the findings of archeology it appeared to be well written. Do you have a problem being straight forward? I made a simple remark and you reply with an obsequious repost of part of the article. Then you make an unexplained suggestion that I read something entirely unrelated. Then I asked you a simple question and I get back another obsequious question. If you’re trying to get at something why don’t you just say it?
You like Baker's frank and accessible diction? Here's more for you to enjoy:
All the hundreds of thousands of kinds of animals have evolved from very simple forms of life, and presumably from inorganic matter originally, without the existence of any mind to plan them. Mind itself is one of the products of evolution, and now at last one kind of living thing only has got the ability to control and plan the course of evolution. That one kind of living thing is the human kind. For centuries men have selected certain types of domestic animals for breeding, and have thus created all the variety of horses and cattle and sheep and pigs and dogs that exist to-day. They have improved all these animals for the purposes for which they require them, but they have not improved themselves. There is no reason at all to suppose that the inborn mental capacity of man has increased since prehistoric times.When men were just evolving from ape-like ancestors, they evolved because the best individuals survived and had young ones, whilst the worst died oft and had none. That does not happen in civilisation. With us the weakly are looked after by the strong. If the weakliness is an inherited character, it is unfortunate that the people who have it should have children, because they will pass it on, generation after generation. On the average, the most successful people have the fewest children in most civilised countries to-day, and the least successful the most. It is possible nowadays for ordinary people to arrange whether they will have many or few children, or none at all. It would certainly be better if the most successful people had most children, because success in life is partly due to inherited qualities. Many people with excellent inherited qualities never get an opportunity to show them, from lack of a sufficiently good education. If we wanted to improve our race, we should give everyone an equal chance in life as far as possible. We should then encourage the most successful to have a lot of children. Many people are what is called feeble-minded. Their brain never develops beyond that of a child of six. Often this is a character which is inherited in the same way as blue eyes. If two such feeble-minded people marry, all their children will be feeble-minded. If a feeble-minded person marries a normal person, the children will be normal, but some of their descendants will be feeble-minded. It would be a good plan to prevent people who have inherited feeble-mindedness from having children, because feeble-minded people are not happy themselves, and they are not useful to other people, and they cost other people a lot of money. Unfortunately, they are increasing rapidly in numbers in Great Britain. Before long they will form quite a large proportion of our population, unless we decide not to allow them to have children. Members of Parliament, who decide these things, think it best to let them go on multiplying. When they were young, Members of Parliament did not have An Outline for Boys and Girls.
- John R. Baker, from the left-wing children's encyclopedia An Outline for Girls and Boys (1932).
You don't get the big picture.
The goal is to trash the theory of evolution without studying anything about it.
So, you trash science in general, and evolutionary theorists in particular through a big smear campaign. You make a big deal of eugenics, tie that to Darwin's relatives and scientists, use that to trash Darwin's character, and hence you disprove the theory of evolution.
Double score for dragging in Hitler and the Nazis. Bonus points if you actually fool anyone.
If you have some sort of agenda shouldn't this be posted in the religion forum or at least the chat forum? Posting 80 year old articles in the news/activism forum doesn't seem appropriate to me. As for the game you're playing I could give a rat's patoot about it.
I guess I just got caught off guard. I thought it was just a posting of an interesting old article. Nothing surprising to me about the man’s POV given the cultural context of the early 20th Century. That was how most people saw things.
When men were just evolving from ape-like ancestors, they evolved because the best individuals survived and had young ones, whilst the worst died oft and had none. That does not happen in civilisation. With us the weakly are looked after by the strong. If the weakliness is an inherited character, it is unfortunate that the people who have it should have children, because they will pass it on, generation after generation.
I'm still not sure what your point is. What he says here is basically true. For example; before man invented corrective lenses near sightedness was probably weeded out and kept to a small percentage of the population. Now it's prevalent. With my eyesight I wouldn't last long in an agrarian society and not a day in a hunter gatherer tribe. When he says that's unfortunate that sounds cold today but self-reliance was still a valued thing in the first part of the 20th Century. Back then few could have guessed how far science would come in dealing with genetic problems. The only method known then was culling which man had discovered with the domestication of plants and animals and practiced for around forty thousand years. It sounds pretty harsh now in our PC saturated society where the culture of victimhood has taken prominence.
See post 1.
See a psychiatrist.
How often do you run into pre-Nazi-era articles written in 2008?
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