Posted on 04/12/2007 8:22:33 PM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode
Getting Our History Right: Six Errors about Darwin and His Influence
Hiram Caton, Griffith University
Abstract: The Darwin Exhibition created by the American Museum of Natural History is the centerpiece of the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth. It opened in November 2005 and will circulate to a number of museums before terminating at the London Natural History Museum in February 2009. The Exhibition is also a major contributor to online instruction about evolution for schools. The quality of the Exhibition’s narrative is accordingly of some significance. This paper argues that the narrative is the legendary history that dominates public opinion. The legend has been thoroughly disassembled by historical research over recent decades. My criticism is organized as six theses. (1) Publication of the Origin was not a sudden (“revolutionary”) interruption of Victorian society’s confident belief in the traditional theological world-view. (2) The Origin did not “revolutionize” the biological sciences by removing the creationist premise or introducing new principles. (3) The Origin did not revolutionize Victorian public opinion. The public considered Darwin and Spencer to be teaching the same lesson, known today as “Social Darwinism”, which, though fashionable, never achieved dominance. (4) Many biologists expressed significant disagreements with Darwin’s principles. (5) Darwin made little or no contribution to the renovation of theology. His public statements on Providence were inconsistent and the liberal reform of theology was well advanced by 1850. (6) The so-called “Darwinian revolution” was, at the public opinion level, the fashion of laissez-faire economic beliefs backed by Darwin and Spencer’s inclusion of the living world in the economic paradigm.
You can read the whole article HERE. Caton even rips into the myth that Origin of Species was a sensational bestseller.
For us people with a short attention span, A synopsis would help.
Are you pushing apologetics or are you just anti-science?
Or perhaps both?
Why does science make you mad?
Darwin’s “influence” basically amounts to naziism, communism, two world wars, and hundreds of millions of lives destroyed. Newt Gingrich said it best: Ideas have consequences, and the question of whether a man views his neighbor as a fellow child of God or as a meat byproduct of stochastic processes, simply has to affect human relations.
BS alert!
Agreed!
Total BS.
“whether a man views his neighbor as a fellow child of God or as a meat byproduct of stochastic processes, simply has to affect human relations.”
Sorry, but I have reasoned myself into my beliefs. I did not and do not adopt what I believe to be reality based on what affect it might have on human relations. To do otherwise is irrational, in my opinion.
"Darwin’s “influence” basically amounts to naziism, communism, two world wars, and hundreds of millions of lives destroyed. Newt Gingrich"
In part 6, Caton considers H.G. Wells's Republic of meat by-products....
Mention must be made of the pundit and science fiction novelist, H. G. Wells, who studied biology under Thomas Huxley. In his Anticipations (1901) he envisioned the New Republic of the Twentieth Century, which would be based on the Malthusian insight about the unavoidability of intense competition. The New Republic will program procreation to improve physical and mental qualities. It will identify inferior human stock (which Wells styles “The Abyss”), minimize their reproduction, and eventually eliminate them altogether. Here’s a sample of Wells’ persuasion: “And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black?... the yellow man?... the Jew?... Well, the world is a world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go. ... The ethical system of these men of the New Republic... will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity... And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness... is death. ... The men of the New Republic... will have an ideal that will make the killing worth the while”. ... “Euthanasia of the weak and sensual is possible and I have little doubt that it will be planned and ahieved” (Wells, 1902, pp. 299-302).
page 66 of the pdf is pretty good. Simply states that the Darwin exhibition presents a legend when the truth of the progress of ideas is complicated by mistakes, quirks and cheating; and that it would be better to present that kind of history to students rather than the sanititized version.
Using your very logic: “ideas have consequences”, all the dirt in the church history, from the most recent pedophilia and back as far as the eye could see, ought to be hanged upon one Jesus and his closest collaborators.
So did Hegel. He reasoned himself into believing that the number of planets had to be prime.
I did not and do not adopt what I believe to be reality based on what affect it might have on human relations.
Socialists could have asked themselves: "comrades, why are we putting 30 million people into the Gulags? Let's face it comrades, doesn't it suggest there is something slightly off with our reasoning?" But a good socialist would never reconsider his carefully reasoned reality by what effect it has on people.
To do otherwise is irrational, in my opinion.
Think of it as a reality-check.
[The god of healing] did not want to lengthen out good-for-nothing lives... Those who are diseased in their bodies, [physicians] will leave to die, and the corrupt and incurable souls they will put an end to themselves ....
The children of inferior parents, and any deformed offspring of others, they [the Guardians] will secretly put out of the way as is fitting.--Plato, The Republic
I suppose H. G. Wells studied under Plato as well ...
both.
Well, I cannot comment on the exhibition but I know that Darwin did not “invent” the theory of evolution. He just came up with a mechanism whereby it could work (natural selection). Also Darwin was no Atheist. He understood the implications of his hypothesis and he agonised over it for some time before he wrote “origin of species”. I don’t know how much of a “best seller” it was but it was certainly a very influential book.
Apparently he was also a very keen backgammon player.
You called?
And that automatically invalidates reason and validates faith? Is that your contention?
"Socialists could have asked themselves: "comrades, why are we putting 30 million people into the Gulags? Let's face it comrades, doesn't it suggest there is something slightly off with our reasoning?" But a good socialist would never reconsider his carefully reasoned reality by what effect it has on people.
Are you trying to say that only Socialists go through life without questioning their belief system? Or are you trying to say that only Christians of your particular sect question their belief system?
I always believed that the fight over Evolution was about its truth value and its relation to reality. The question on the anti-evo side is whether or not the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, whether all extant organisms have descended from a common ancestor or set of ancestors, whether modified traits exist in offspring, whether there are a number of selection forces active in the past and now that change the prominence of specific physical traits in a population, and whether we will continue to see selected descent with modification affect populations. Do these things happen. Are they part of the fabric of reality. Science says they are.
You seem to believe that whether Evolution has and is taking place it is more important to ignore reality in favour of some putatively less painful fantasy because reality sometimes has consequences unfavourable to your belief system.
What I find really interesting about this new focus of anti-evolutionists, this 'appeal to consequences', is the willing use of unfounded and/or reconstructed histories to make it appear that the science has more dire consequences than it does in reality. Oops, there I go again, mentioning reality when I know you don't really like it too much.
Has your side really given up on trying to debunk the physical evidence for evolution, or is the dishonesty of using an appeal to emotion rather than rationality when discussing science too desirable to avoid?
What’s real is real, not what some superstition needs to be sustained.
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