No I don't. Not really. I was born in 1957.
When I think of 1860, I think of Quaker Oats.
Posted on 05/24/2008 9:04:49 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The folks at Scientific American are steamed at Ben Stein: (see links):
Ben Stein's Expelled: No Integrity Displayed (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ben-steins-expelled-review-john-rennie)
Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn't Want You to Know...(http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=six-things-ben-stein-doesnt-want-you-to-know)
Stein's controversial movie Expelled links Charles Darwin to Adolf Hitler, the ultimate scientific hero to the ultimate manifestation of human evil. "A shameful antievolution film tries to blame Darwin for the Holocaust," shouts John Rennie's headline. Rennie then declares that its "heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency."
The problem is, that the link is quite real. In fact, undeniable. One doesn't need to see the film to make that link. Simply read Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.
Darwin's Descent of Man applies the evolutionary arguments of his more famous Origin of Species to human beings. In it, Darwin argues that those characteristics we might think to be specifically human—physical strength and health, morality, and intelligence—were actually achieved by natural selection. From this, he infers two related eugenic conclusions.
First, if the desirable results of strength, health, morality, and intelligence are caused by natural selection, then we can improve them by artificial selection. We can breed better human beings, even rise above the human to the superhuman. Since human beings have been raised above the other animals by the struggle to survive, they may be raised even higher, transcending human nature to something—who knows?—as much above men as men are now above the apes. This strange hope rests in Darwin's very rejection of the belief that man is defined by God, for "the fact of his having thus risen" by evolution to where he is, "instead of having been aboriginally placed there" by God, "may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future."
Second, if good breeding gives us better results, pushing us up the evolutionary slope, then bad or indiscriminate breeding drags us back down. "If…various checks…do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men," Darwin groaned, "the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule."
Now to Hitler. The first, most important thing to understand is that the link between Darwin and Hitler was not immediate. That is, nobody is making the case that Hitler had Darwin's eugenic masterpiece The Descent of Man in one hand while he penned Mein Kampf in the other. Darwin's eugenic ideas were spread all over Europe and America, until they were common intellectual coin by Hitler's time. That makes the linkage all the stronger, because we are not talking about one crazed man misreading Darwin but at least two generations of leading scientists and intellectuals drawing the same eugenic conclusions from evolutionary theory as Darwin himself drew.
A second point. We misunderstand Hitler's evil if we reduce it to anti-Semitism. Hitler's anti-Semitism had, of course, multiple causes, including his own warped character. That having been said, Nazism was at heart a racial, that is, a biological political program based up evolutionary theory. It was "applied biology," in the words of deputy party leader of the Nazis, Rudolph Hess, and done for the sake of a perceived greater good, racial purity, that is, for the sake of a race purified of physical and mental defects, imperfections, and racial inferiority.
The greater good. We need to remember that, even though we rightly consider it the apogee of wickedness, the Nazi regime did not purport to do evil. In a monstrous illustration of the adage about good intentions leading to hell, it claimed to be scientific and progressive, to do what hard reason demanded for the ultimate benefit of the human race. Its superhuman acts of inhumanity were carried out for the sake of humanity.
Hitler had enormous sympathy for the downtrodden he witnessed as a young man in Vienna. "The Vienna manual labourers lived in surroundings of appalling misery. I shudder even to-day when I think of the woeful dens in which people dwelt, the night shelters and the slums, and all the tenebrous spectacles of ordure, loathsome filth and wickedness."
He believed that the social problems he witnessed in Vienna needed a radical, even ruthless solution if true change were to be effected. As he says with breathtaking concision, "the sentimental attitude would be the wrong one to adopt."
"Even in those days I already saw that there was a two-fold method by which alone it would be possible to bring about an amelioration of these conditions. This method is: first, to create better fundamental conditions of social development by establishing a profound feeling for social responsibilities among the public; second, to combine this feeling for social responsibilities with a ruthless determination to prune away all excrescences which are incapable of being improved."
The proposed ruthlessness of his solution was in direct imitation of nature conceived according to Darwinism. "Just as Nature concentrates its greatest attention, not to the maintenance of what already exists but on the selective breeding of offspring in order to carry on the species, so in human life also it is less a matter of artificially improving the existing generation—which, owing to human characteristics, is impossible in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred—and more a matter of securing from the very start a better road for future development."
How do we secure a better road for future development? By ensuring that only the best of the best race, the Aryan race, breed, and pruning away all the unfit and racially inferior. That isn't just a theory; it's eugenic Darwinism as a political program. As Hitler made clear, "the State is looked upon only as a means to an end and this end is the conservation of the racial characteristics of mankind." Jews have to be pruned away, but also Gypsies, Slavs, the retarded, handicapped, and any one else that is biologically unfit.
That's Darwinism in action. Does that mean that Darwin would have approved? No. Does that mean that Darwin's theory provided the framework for Hitler's eugenic program? Yes.
LOL! Good spoof!
There's more than one type of scientific method. And archaeological findings are results, while the other is a method. So...?
Since the Theory is still theory, it's not in fact science per se,
HUH?!?!?!?
The dispute about any Darwin/Hitler/eugenics connection, by the way, is being used as a red herring to distract from the even bigger issues.
Agreed.
Scientific method and archaeological findings are two very different things. Since the Theory is still theory, it's not in fact science per se, it's a belief system--often in fact a religion practiced by fanatics whose origins insecurity is overcompensated by dogmatic assertions and with frauds like Piltdown Man that help perpetuate 'research' funding.Uuuuumm.... You don't understand science *at all*. Gravity and the rest of Newtonian mechanics are theories too. Can you stop believing in gravity and levitate?
“the Theory is still theory, it’s not in fact science per se”
The Theory of Evolution is definitely not established as factual, scientific-method-proven verified fact.
;^)
My goodness, you’re the most militantly ignorant poster in the history of creationist threads on FR. That’s pretty impressive.
The Theory of Evolution is definitely not established as factual, scientific-method-proven verified fact.Uuuuuuuum...
Take them all, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Elijah, Elisha, David, Solomon, Joseph, Samuel, Jonah, Job they were all living in a world full of evil.
Racism is not even hinted at in the Bible and it all boils down to the teachings of the revelation of Jesus Christ the Son of God.
Jesus taught every Christian to love their neighbor.
Who is your neighbor the scholars asked?
He who is in need.
The meek shall inherit the earth.
That is the exact opposite of Darwin. Diametrically opposed.
;-)
“Darwinists have tried mightily to convince the American public that Darwinism is true and have mostly failed.”
In fairness, most Americans don’t know the difference between an atom and a molecule, or the difference between our solar system and our galaxy. Frankly, the ability to convince the public of anything is the poorest test of its veracity.
Take them all, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Elijah, Elisha, David, Solomon, Joseph, Samuel, Jonah, Job they were all living in a world full of evil.Sigh... you have *no* idea what the 1860's were like do you?Racism is not even hinted at in the Bible and it all boils down to the teachings of the revelation of Jesus Christ the Son of God.
Jesus taught every Christian to love their neighbor. Who is your neighbor the scholars asked? He who is in need.
The meek shall inherit the earth.
That is the exact opposite of Darwin. Diametrically opposed.
Forget the sunscreen.
The conflict between "nature red in tooth and claw" and our human yearning for utopian peace is reflected in Isaiah 11:6-9, "... and the lion shall eat straw like the ox" etc.
Of course, these verses have been the subject of endless exegesis of all kinds, including the idea that the present state of nature is "fallen", that it does not reflect God's ideal nature, but a corrupted and debased existence, at some time to be corrected.
So don't blame Darwin! ... "he didn't start the fire."
More surely even than anticipated objections to firm insistence on proper defining and use of scientific method, I can replicate the effects of gravity. I can replicate the rate of acceleration of the falling apple, etc.
Universally verifiable and replicable.
As opposed to a tooth or bone fragment or fraudulent Piltdown skull from which one can construct a fantasy animal and make-believe a place in the ‘fossil record’ for it, to much fanfare.
Let’s call religion religion, science science and theory theory, since only from that honest forum will any worthwhile discussion ensue; I have no time for any other kind.
It’s late. Good-night.
From their website...
Quaker’s history traces back to 1901, when several American pioneers in oat milling came together to incorporate under the name The Quaker Oats Company. It all started in the late 1800s when three different Midwest milling companies had independently begun to process and sell high-quality oats for the consumer giving the American family a product that would be superior in quality to the oats sold in open barrels at general stores.
In Ravenna, Ohio, Henry D. Seymour and William Heston had established the Quaker Mill Company and registered the now famous trademark.
In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, John Stuart, his son Robert and their partner, George Douglas, operated the largest cereal mill of the time.
Ferdinand Schumacher, known as “The Oatmeal King,” founded German Mills American Oatmeal Company in 1856, after selling oats in his Akron, Ohio, store for two years.
Combining these companies after the turn of the century brought together the top oats milling expertise in the country and gave the newly formed corporation a name that even then was a symbol of quality and purity.
You should check out Antiquity of Man (1915) by Piltdown scientist Sir Arthur Keith. It has lots more of that "scientific" comparison between monkeys, ape-men, and Tasmanian savages and such. You can pick it up here .
I've always said that this is good enough for me ... but I'm easy.
Still, I don't see how else it can be viewed.
More surely even than anticipated objections to firm insistence on proper defining and use of scientific method, I can replicate the effects of gravity. I can replicate the rate of acceleration of the falling apple, etc.Uuuumm... You realize the physicists and biologists who "use the scientific method" cheat all the time right? They're constantly getting busted for doctoring results and making stuff up. Piltdown man is hardly an anomoly.Universally verifiable and replicable.
As opposed to a tooth or bone fragment or fraudulent Piltdown skull from which one can construct a fantasy animal and make-believe a place in the ‘fossil record’ for it, to much fanfare.
Let’s call religion religion, science science and theory theory, since only from that honest forum will any worthwhile discussion ensue; I have no time for any other kind.
It’s late. Good-night.
Also evolution and physics are more similar than you think. There are plenty of physical models like gravitation, where *we have no idea* why they work like they do. We just know that we can observe them.
Evolution is no different. We can observe the outcomes of evolution(fossils of extinct species, similarities of DNA in related species etc...) and even limited examples of speciation(drosophila, green warblers and salamanders).
You did say that "everything in science is false", didn't you? Why, if I remember correctly, you even highlighted everything with asterisks, like so: "*everything* in science is false." Have you changed your mind about this recently?
LOL... The fact that fundies have appropriated materialism so thoroughly is really quite bizarre. You don’t understand *anything* about your own beliefs do you?
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