Posted on 03/08/2007 7:46:04 PM PST by ofwaihhbtn
The enthusiasm Nietzsche expresses in this passage is for eugenics, a theory of biological determinism invented by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s first cousin. However extreme Nietzsche’s recommendation might sound today, by the first part of the twentieth century eugenics came to be widely practiced. In 1933, little more than thirty years after Nietzsche’s death, the Hereditary Health Courts set up in Nazi Germany were enforcing a rigorous policy of enforced sterilization; to a lesser degree, similar policies were carried out in societies from the United States to Scandinavia.The full text of the article is here: The Gentle Darwinians - What Darwin’s Champions Won’t MentionIn 1912, in his presidential address to the First International Congress of Eugenics, a landmark gathering in London of racial biologists from Germany, the United States, and other parts of the world, Major Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son, trumpeted the spread of eugenics and evolution. As described by Nicholas Wright Gillham in his A Life of Francis Galton, Major Darwin foresaw the day when “eugenics would become not only a grail, a substitute for religion, as Galton had hoped, but a ‘paramount duty’ whose tenets would presumably become enforceable.” The major repeated his father’s admonition that, though the crudest workings of natural selection must be mitigated by “the spirit of civilization,” society must encourage breeding among the best stock and prevent it among the worst “without further delay.”
Leonard Darwin’s recognition of his father’s role in the formation and promotion of eugenics was more than filial piety.
(Excerpt) Read more at commonwealmagazine.org ...
Yes. It's akin to claiming to be able to determine the probability of rolling a six using an unknown number of dice with an unknown number of sides with unknown numbers in an unknown number of passes.
"Frankly, the opinions of mathematicians, unless they are also trained in biochemistry or a related field, is irrelevant. All biochemists have some mathematical training, but not all mathematicians have biochemical training. Relatively few have even taken college-level general chemistry."
Actually, I think you have it backwards. Biology and biochemistry are subjects that any reasonably intelligent person can "pick up" with some effort, but advanced mathematics is something that requires not only more effort but more talent. A biology curriculum requires a lot of memorization, but a math curriculum requires much more deep understanding.
My impression is that many biologists are simply out of their league when it comes to mathematics. Hence, their complete and utter failure to even understand the problem of explaining he first living cell in purely naturalistic terms.
In fact, when you get right down to the heart of the matter, the whole concept of ID is a mathematical concept. Just as the analysis of SETI signals in search of intelligence is in principle a mathematical problem, so is the search for ID in biological systems. And the people who deny that any such analysis is even possible are mathematically illiterate or close to it.
It's been fun folks, but I think I've wasted about enough time on this thread.
The more you move fromo biology to chemistry (i.e. biochemistry) the greater the need for higher math.
In fact, when you get right down to the heart of the matter, the whole concept of ID is a mathematical concept. Just as the analysis of SETI signals in search of intelligence is in principle a mathematical problem, so is the search for ID in biological systems. And the people who deny that any such analysis is even possible are mathematically illiterate or close to it.
Your problem is that you are confusing math and science. You can theorize all you want about science via mathematics, but that is just theory. Not all math theorums manifest themselved physically. Math is used as a tool by science to describe physcial phenomena. Math is not a scientific end-development. Without physical measurements, the math theorizing you describe is unsubstantiated.
So you only preach the choir?
Prove how the first cell came into existence.
Prove how it didn't.
What an assinine statement. We all know that there was a first cell. Why should I prove that it didn't come into existence?
Good point. SETI is looking for something that resembles known human artifacts, but coming from a source other than earth. In this sense, it is a form of archaeology.
The modern "science" of eugenics follows directly from a mistaken notion about heredity on the part of darwinians. This notion is not present in mendelian genetics. 140 years of science education has had almost no effect on this whatever. The darwinian notion of heredity persists, and it is as current today as it was a century ago. Dennett, Dawkins, and most sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists still make a living off this error, despite any attempt at correction. Compare these two notions:
1. Darwinian notion of heredity. If a trait arose in a population by selection, that trait must correspond to something inheritable (something in the germ-plasm). If all traits are adaptations, then all traits must be in some way inheritable.2. Mendelian notion of heredity. The only traits in a population that can be inherited are those that correspond to genetic factors.
You will notice that (2) is roughly the opposite of (1). Here is an example of (1) from a modern darwinian, Gregory Carey. This is from his Intro to Evolutionary Psychology, 1998...
"Now imagine that you and your partner are moths instead of humans. Faced with a bright light on a dark night, both of you would orient and then proceed to the light quite oblivious to the other. There would be no social discourse or give-and-take maneuvering to achieve consensus. There is only a built-in stimulus response connection. So why do humans and moths behave differently? Among the several levels at which this question can be answered is an evolutionary level. Moths have a hardwired response to light because at some point in their evolutionary history moths that oriented and flew toward light reproduced more often than those who did not. We humans followed a different evolutionary path."Here Carey makes the assumption that the moth's behavior is an adaptation, arising by natural selection, and by application of (1) he is led to conclude that there must be a genetic factor corresponding to this behavior, regardless of whether or not there really is such a genetic factor.
It is easy to see that notion (1) leads directly to eugenics, but notion (2) does not. For the instant that one claims traits such as feeble-mindedness, alcoholism, prostitution, poverty, and unemployment are "adaptations", i.e, the result of selection pressure, one is also saying that they are genetically inherited: that they "run in the germ-plasm", regardless of empirical evidence. And from this follows the modern "scientific" justification for sterilizing or gassing alcoholics, the feeble-minded, prostitutes, the unemployed, the poor, etc.
Darwin Medalist Karl Pearson was one of the most prominent British eugenicists. Hiram Caton writes...
" Mendel’s publication enjoyed none of the braggadocio of “revolutionary” enlightenment. Indeed, it had no uptake whatever during his time. Yet eventually biologists rediscovered his work and embarked on a course leading to the discovery of chromosomes, genes, alleles, and sexual replication. It is a lesson worth repeating that Darwinians of the day recoiled in horror from these splendid discoveries. They proudly declared their “faith” in the master while hurling themselves vehemently at the new science. One, the brilliant Karl Pearson, persisted in dogged opposition to genetics until his death in 1936! So much for evidence."
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