(I’m on vacation this week, so it took a while to respond. Toured the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory today. Cool place! Touring the Googleplex tomorrow. Trying to do this quickly from a hotel business center. :-)
“RETREAD ALERT”
—I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I’m not entirely sure what a “retread” is, although I’ve seen the term quite a few times.
““goodusername”: You have ~ 492 postings since you signed up as a newbie on May 15, 2009 - a mere year and a half ago.”
—How time flies!
“You also appear to be quite drawn to the threads related to atheism in the context of Crevo debates, as well.”
—I’m flattered that you find m so interesting - that’s not as common as you might think! :-) I’m not really drawn to “atheism” threads per se, but am interested in the crevo discussions obviously. There are some other topics that interest me, and that I read fairly regularly, although
admittedly I post very little if anything on the threads. Partly it’s due to limitations of time, and partly due to me not feeling that most people would be as interested in my contributions as you are.
“You have a writing style which resembles the style of an atheist academic I recall debating frequently, prior to the to the time the majority of the Darwin Central cabal were flushed out of here and banned.”
—I sound like an academic? I’m flattered again (well, maybe. Or maybe not. Whichever academic you’re thinking definitely shouldn’t be.)
I’m again a little embarrassed to admit that I’m not entirely sure what Darwin Central is, although I’ve seen it referenced quite a few times. I figured it was either a spin-off site friendly to FR or a rival site of some sort; from what you’re saying I’m now guessing the latter.
(I did visit it once briefly since it was mentioned so often, but it didn’t catch my interest.)
"You can take your point up with that late Harvard professor, Stevie Gould."
--I certainly wasn't disagreeing with Gould, and IMO Gould would have agreed with what I wrote.
"The preponderance of ANTI-racist material did not increase, as you appear to imply, as a consequence of the publication of Darwin’s silly work."
--I implied that the amount of anti-racist material increased for the same reason that the amount of racist material increased - because of the rapid growth of anthropology.
"Might you site the reference where Darwin upbraids his dear protégé and fond “bulldog,” Tommy Huxley for this contemporaneous commentary?"
--I'm not sure what Darwin thought of that statement. It's very possible he agreed with it.
"Will you pretend that Darwin knew nothing of his contemporary’s philosophies and sentiments: of Gobineau, or Wallace, or Haeckel?"
--uh, why would I?
He was obviously familiar with Wallace.
(I’m not sure if you think Wallace contributed to racism too, but as Gould puts it: “Alfred Russel Wallace, codiscoverer of natural selection with Darwin, is justly hailed as an antiracist.” Mismeasure of Man, pg 70)
Darwin was also, of course, familiar with Haeckel, and he disagreed with Recapitulation and instead agreed with the embryological ideas of Haeckel’s rival von Baer.
I'm not sure if he was familiar with Gobineau.
"There is evidence in Darwin’s writing to suggest as much."
--Such comments don't carry much weight from someone who is actually (and hilariously) ignorant enough of Darwin to say something like
"There are “breeds” of animals, but where are the scientists referring to any of them as “races?”" when Darwin - literally - uses such examples on just about every other page of Origin.
"It is perhaps possible to suspect that Gobineau’s musings on Aryan racial superiority inspired Darwin’s own chosen extended title for “Origin...” which includes a direct reference to the preservation of “favored races.""
--I don't believe Gobineau ever wrote anything about preservation of favored races or natural selection, so I'm not sure how you think the anti-evolutionist could have inspired such a subtitle.
The purpose of subtitles is to give a brief summary of the book, which is precisely what the subtitle does.
Species can split into two or more separate non-interbreeding (or at least rarely interbreeding) populations (or "races" in the vernacular of the time). Each population then, as a result of having their own unique mutations and selection pressures, become separate species. And so we get the incredible diversity of life we see today.
“I repeat: Can you honestly say that Hitler and these medically inclined academics and physicians who laid philosophical, scientific, and political foundations of Naziism “were remarkably disinterested in evolution”? Hitler sure needed his Nazi doctors there didn’t he?”
--What has Hitler's comment about doctors got to do with Darwinism? I don’t think we can credit Darwin for us believing that having doctors is good for our health.
““…he will end by uniting all the forms which graduate into each other, under a single species….” Darwin’s statement, after having quoted all those other stupid racists, is Darwin merely straddling all the other similarly impoverished intellects of his counterparts on the matter. That some “graduate,” also implies that others may not “graduate” and in Darwin’s way of thinking those who don’t “graduate will be in Darwin’s words “exterminated” as shown earlier (post #52). Clearly, you are as gullible and stupid as Darwin hoped you would ever be. “
--For crying out loud, take some time to actually think about what you’re reading. Yes, the naturalist takes all the forms which graduate into each and puts them into a single species. Those that do not are designated as a different species. Darwin just got done arguing that all the human races graduate into each other and thus should be considered a single species (“But the most weighty of all the arguments against treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they graduate into each other”). In fact they graduate into each other so much that people that those that try to define races come up with laughably different results. So who’s left to be “exterminated”?
(Yes, of course, there are those don’t “graduate” – chimps, gorillas, rabbits, tuna, etc.)
“I’ll just call bull shit on that claim and raise you. When you say “popular” you imply mainstream. Polygenism was basically “popular” to Morton as an audience of one, and few others. Popular opinion in the 18th and 19th centuries was formed more by influences of Christian theologians preaching from pulpits. No one in “popular” discourse was even using the term “species” widely, so you are just making up your “facts” on the fly.
Busted.”
--Polygenism was popular enough in America that Europeans referred to polygenism as the “American school of anthropology.”
Here’s professor Michael Flannery of the Discovery Institute:
“As America headed towards Civil War, the polygenists held the upper hand. The biblical monogenism of James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848) looked antiquated against the “scientific” racism of Josiah Clark Nott (1804-1873), George R. Gliddon (1809-1857), and others.” (Should also mention Louis Agassiz, probably the leading polygenist, and arguably the leading scientist of America in the 19th century, and ardent anti-evolutionist).
"When Darwin writes like the following in Origins,… Chapter VII, what sort of an impression at that critical time do you think he was trying to leave?
“I opened fourteen nests of F. sanguinea, and found a few slaves in all. Males and fertile females of the SLAVE-SPECIES are found only in their own proper communities, and have never been observed in the nests of F. sanguinea. The slaves are BLACK and NOT ABOVE HALF THE SIZE OF THEIR RED MASTERS, so that the contrast in their appearance is very great…. “
--?? Are you serious?
I'm not sure why you seem to think the colors are somehow relevant; unless perhaps you think he's trying to give the impression that Native Americans are a master species?
We often find things in nature that appear analogous to human activities. So what? Apes have been witnessed carrying out what very much appears to be rape, stealing, murder, and even warfare. Is there a problem in pointing that out? Does it imply that such things are ok?
Nevermind that he decried slavery time and time again in the strongest language – he points out that there’s an insect that does something similar! He’s trying to tell us it’s ok!
It never ceases to astonish me the depths people go to villainize Darwin.
"For you and for Hitler, if you lose Darwin-Gobineau-Wallace-Galton, you lose your excuse for your own ill-conceived perception of racial and “intellectual” superiority." --Umm… what perception of "racial and intellectual superiority"? I've never had such a perception and don't believe there was ever a good excuse for such.
Perhaps you're confusing me with someone else.
"He [Haeckel] convinced masses of his countrymen they must accept their evolutionary destiny as a ‘master race’ and ‘outcompete’ inferior peoples, since it was right and natural that only the ‘fittest’ should survive. His version of Darwinism was incorporated in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925), which means ‘My Struggle,’ taken from Haeckel’s German translation of Darwin’s phrase, ‘the struggle for existence.’ "—*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 207 [also 312-313].
--The more usual and accepted (albeit less interesting) story of the title of Hitler’s book is that he wanted to name it “Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice”, but the publisher didn’t like the title (can’t imagine why) and suggested the more catchy “My Struggle”. (The rise and fall of the Third Reich: a history of Nazi Germany By William L. Shirer, pg80”)
I'm disappointed in your post. No, not in the irrelevant tangents and inane insults - I expect them (although the accusations are new) - but.. no pictures!