Posted on 04/11/2009 9:21:02 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Art as Propaganda for Evolution
April 10, 2009 — Should a scientific theory be propagated by appeal to scientific evidence, or by appeal to emotions through visualization? Nature this week contained two articles that shamelessly praised art as propaganda for evolution. Surprisingly, one of them mentioned Charles Darwin as someone “at the cutting edge of visualization.”
The exhibit examines the history of art as Darwinism was overtaking traditional religious beliefs.
The exhibit does a good job of showing how differently people saw the world at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Nature was replete with signs of divine design. A painting of Noah’s flood was considered historical art. Yet Darwin was able to learn a great deal from art of this time, whether he was studying illustrations of geological formations or marvelling at the paintings of French–American naturalist John James Audubon, who Darwin met as a teenager.Zimmer claims that Darwin did not use pictures merely to illustrate ideas, but to investigate them. For instance, “the very notion of beauty was something Darwin wanted to explain: the beauty of orchids actually masked a complex contrivance for getting pollen onto insects; the beauty of an Argus pheasant’s feathers was the result of sexual selection.” Artists, in sympathetic vibration, paid attention to Darwin. “They replaced sentimental scenes of nature with bleaker portraits of the struggle for survival.”
As Darwin developed as a scientist, he made some modest art of his own. On his journeys in South America, he painted the rock strata of the Andes in watercolour. On his return to the United Kingdom, he began to scribble odd little tree diagrams in his notebooks – a visual expression of his great epiphany that species are related through common descent. Darwin worked closely with artists to illustrate his books. This may surprise readers of On the Origin of Species – a book with a single illustration showing the branching of species. But his other books were lavishly illustrated....
Darwin was at the cutting edge of visualization. His 1872 work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was one of the first books ever to be illustrated with photographs – including pictures of faces distorted by electric currents, produced by the work of French physician Guillaume Duchenne.
Zimmer was glad the exhibit did not shy away from difficult subjects. “....some [artists] wrongly took it [evolution] as justification to elevate whites over other races, cloaking their freak-show voyeurism in the guise of anthropology.”Why Zimmer gives the exhibit “great credit” for this was not explained. Is he glad that the dark side of evolutionary thinking is being exposed?
God – or Gorilla hints at a larger clash of visual cultures between modernists and fundamentalists: Neanderthals versus Adam and Eve, church frescoes depicting ascent from protozoa against a ‘picturable God’. That would be a great topic for further research, which would need to pay religious icons more attention, but this highly readable book is valuable as it stands. It is also timely. The 1920s shaped pictures of evolution, and of evolutionary debate, that are still in our heads. As biologists work with illustrators to communicate science, and creationists attack textbook icons,3 it is helpful to reflect on the struggles of that decisive decade.Hopwood thus identified the evolutionist imagery as useful to science, whether or not it was accurate. Clark, for instance, said “Cartoons played on images of the Scopes ‘monkey trial’, and people joked about missing links.” In museums, tree diagrams and misleading sequences like the fossil horse series were presented as “unvarnished facts.” Hopwood did not condemn any of this. For instance, he disparaged the attempts of Henry Fairfield Osborn to imply that evolution was compatible with religion. “This theistic evolutionism repelled secular scientists and fundamentalist Christians alike, but was often presented as the scientific consensus.” Hopwood seems to imply that the scientific consensus allows no such accommodationism – it must be anti-religious and materialistic.
458, 704-705 (9 April 2009) | doi:10.1038/458704a; Published online 8 April 2009.
3. This seems to be a direct reference to Icons of Evolution by Dr. Jonathan Wells (Regnery, 2000). Visualization is one of several pedagogical aids that can enlighten or propagandize, depending on how it is used. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with cartoons, simplified illustrations, and diagrams if they illuminate the truth. However, wrong inferences can be made – such as Darwin’s photos of people expressing emotion being used to infer they inherited these capabilities from apes. Art and visualization can distract, mislead, mischaracterize, or create emotional responses in lieu of scientific evidence. Darwinists have been very skilled at this propaganda since their master wrote his materialist manifesto. They should be scorned, not praised, for pretending that peppered moths prove humans had bacteria ancestors, or for piecing together unrelated fossils into a story of evolutionary progression. Awareness of the danger of visualization is the best defense, and the best offense is to unmask it as propaganda. Truth needs illumination, not varnish.
At least one of them did.
Did they have any drawings or artist's renderings?
Go to the site and see.
Okay, I'll do that.
Did I make a mistake telling you what I knew about the Creation Museum when you asked?
They have one, “collagen fibers” and all. “Deceptive propaganda”, or illustration?
It’s O.K., I don’t think any less of you as a person and we can keep it between us (with maybe a few insomniacs).
The double post is an OOPS.
I’ll try to do better in the future.
Propaganda without question.
Even though it’s clearly labeled “artist’s rendering”?
Oh, absolutely! The rendering is just a part of the whole. NatGeo and propaganda is like grits and gravy.
So it's "propaganda" or "illustration" depending on who drew it.
Let’s not jump to unwarranted conclusions. Unlike the Darwinists I don’t automatically dismiss what is said on the basis of it’s source.
But as I said before, images of any kind are always part of the whole.
I'm trying to find something in your explanations that doesn't warrant that conclusion, but I'm not having much luck. You've said you're only interested in discussing art as propaganda for evolution, but not as propaganda for anything else.
If you wish to discuss propaganda in general I’ll be glad to do so. My earlier comment was an attempt to stick to the article but since we’ve strayed a bit from that my objection is really invalid now.
What examples or sources of propaganda do have in mind?
How about the article?
But it is unusual to be so caught up that you don’t recgonize what goes on around you. To say the least.
I recognize "what's going on around me" well enough to know I don't care to participate in it.
How was metmom “rude”?
You fool no one but yourself.
She knows where to find me if she wants to talk about it. I don’t owe you any explanations.
You made the (empty) accusation, so to to say you’re somehow above the fray is meaningless. I don’t care if you explain it or not, it is what it is.
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