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To: r9etb
Me: "He wasn't perfect, but he was very good in his field, an excellent writer, and he never harmed anyone."

You: The same could be said of many people, including Karl Marx.

Well, Marx wasn't perfect, but in his field he was the pits, as a writer he was below the pits, and his work harmed hundreds of millions. You think any of that could be said of Gould?

84 posted on 05/20/2002 2:26:58 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: PatrickHenry
Well, Marx wasn't perfect, but in his field he was the pits, as a writer he was below the pits, and his work harmed hundreds of millions. You think any of that could be said of Gould?

I tend to agree with you as to Marx's readability. However, if one judges him by his influence, and the fact that he's still in print after 150 years, Marx was quite a successful fellow. He did not, however, personally harm anyone, so far as I know. Nor did his work -- words on a page, after all -- harm anybody. The fact that other people used his ideas as the basis to harm hundreds of millions does not change the fact that Marx himself had no direct part in it.

Yet it is quite proper to condemn Marx for the harm his ideas have caused, because his ideas were so very pernicious. Which sets us up nicely to apply the same standards to Gould.

Gould's work has been widely used -- especially by the left -- as a justification to undermine the traditional moral foundations of our society, the disappearance of which has resulted in harm to many people. If we can condemn Marx, we can plausibly condemn Gould, too.

Of course, the very idea that "harm to hundreds of millions" is a bad thing, is something that Gould the atheist evolutionist could not rationally have defended. After all, developing the means to inflict harm, or to avoid being harmed, are presented as the primary engine of evolution.

At any rate, random evolution does not allow us to make the sort of absolute moral claims that is required to condemn a man for his ideas.

97 posted on 05/20/2002 2:47:58 PM PDT by r9etb
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