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Proofs of Evolution Examined - Answers to my Evolutionist Friends (excerpt)
www.creationism.org ^ | 4-20-2002 | Thomas F. Heinze

Posted on 08/07/2002 3:02:38 AM PDT by prisoner6

Answers to my Evolutionist Friends  ·   by Thomas F. Heinze


This is the book I am working on now. Would you like to help?
If you find a mistake, let me know. If you think of things I
should have added, tell me. Whatever! Your comments do not
have to be favorable, but try to make them helpful.  (4-20-2002)

Answers to my Evolutionist Friends
Proofs of Evolution Examined
by Thomas F. Heinze

 The theory of evolution gave credibility to atheism because it seemed to provide a scientific foundation which atheism had lacked. Before the theory most people believed that God had created. Many really wanted to believe that there was no God, but it was difficult to be a convinced atheist with no logical explanation at all for matter and life. Where did they come from? Evolution was embraced by many because it provided an explanation: a bridge they could cross over into what seemed to be a fuller understanding of the life that surrounded them without having to involve a Creator. The bridge of evolution was erected on a number of seemingly sturdy pillars of scientific knowledge, each one of which inspired faith in the whole theory.

In the intervening years, a lot of water has washed over these pillars and swept them all away! The shaky old bridge still stands as a religious or philosophical belief system to be clung to by faith, but the seemingly compelling "scientific proofs" which once gave the theory of evolution its credibility have been proven false by subsequent discoveries. This has not been the tragedy to the theory of evolution that one might think. The reason?

--   During the time when it really seemed scientific, the theory attained the status of the sacred religious/scientific tradition taught almost exclusively in the world's schools.

-- The pillars were not all swept away at the same time, so new ideas replaced the old. In this way there was always something an evolutionist could believe in.

As we look back now, though, we see that virtually every evidence which brought people to believe in evolution was based on false facts. As you will see, many of the facts which have long been known to be false are still found in many of today's school books.

The pillars

What are the false ideas that herded people into the evolutionist fold, the pillars that upheld the theory which were swept away by later scientific discoveries?

--   Each evolutionary step moves ahead from a previous step. Go back far enough, and you run out of previous steps.
--   Spontaneous generation: Given the right environment, life just comes about from chemicals.
--   A cell so simple it could happen by chance.
--   The inheritance of acquired traits.
--   Normal variations between individuals chosen by natural selection were the principle mechanism of evolution.
--   Missing links exist. They will soon be found.
--   Evolution happens today. The peppered moths were dark colored and changed to light.
--   The many vestigial organs proved evolution to be true.
--   Comparative anatomy is evidence for evolution.
--   Embryology: The embryo in the womb retraces the stages of its previous evolution.
--   Uniformitarian Geology: Erosion, and sedimentation have always taken place at more or less the same rate as is average today. It was believed that great floods and other events that would deposit many layers of sediment in a short time had not happened.



TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: atheism; creationismbible; crevolist; darwin; evolution; pointless; religion
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To: Mean Daddy
But the one argument I've never heard anyone answer is, if all life and matter exploded from a thimble full of matter and over billions of years planets, stars and eventually life formed, who made the thimble full of matter?

The beauty of science is that science can simply say, "I don't know that right now, but thousands of scientists are putting aside their respective religious beliefs and are currently studying that seeingly unanswerable question." Much like the early astronomers dove into a field that was previously, "known," ie, the world was flat and the sun revolved around it.

the lunacy of bible literalists doesn't bother with the question at all: "god created it, so there," end of debate. I don't know about you, but I'll go with those who actually care about the question.
21 posted on 08/07/2002 3:30:44 PM PDT by whattajoke
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To: Mean Daddy
But the one argument I've never heard anyone answer is, if all life and matter exploded from a thimble full of matter and over billions of years planets, stars and eventually life formed, who made the thimble full of matter

That's outside the realm of human understanding (at least at the moment). Anybody who tells you otherwise is a liar.

22 posted on 08/07/2002 3:37:54 PM PDT by andy_card
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To: andy_card
Science is LAWS--Truth--philosophy/social science too...evolution is the bs/weeds!
23 posted on 08/07/2002 4:54:01 PM PDT by f.Christian
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To: prisoner6; MedicalMess
An AMAZED this thread is not active (except for medical mess who presented an interesting viewpoint - not that I agree with it) BUMPERS!

prisoner6

24 posted on 08/07/2002 5:10:23 PM PDT by prisoner6
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To: prisoner6
Good web site.
25 posted on 08/07/2002 7:05:16 PM PDT by medved
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To: All

Some useful references:

Major Scientific Problems with Evolution

EvolUSham dot Com

EvolUSham dot Com

Many Experts Quoted on FUBAR State of Evolution

The All-Time, Ultimate Evolution Quote

"If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all came from slime. When we died, you know , that was it, there is nothing..."

Jeffrey Dahmer, noted Evolutionist

Social Darwinism, Naziism, Communism, Darwinism Roots etc.

Creation and Intelligent Design Links


Evolutionist Censorship Etc.


Catastrophism

Big Bang, Electric Sun, Plasma Physics and Cosmology Etc.

Finding Cities in all the Wrong Places

Given standard theories wrt the history of our solar system and our own planet, nobody should be finding cities and villages on Mars, 2100 feet beneath the waves off Cuba, or buried under two miles of Antarctic ice.

Intelligent Versions of Biogenesis etc.

Talk.origins/Sci.Bio.Evolution Realities

Whole books online


26 posted on 08/07/2002 7:12:11 PM PDT by medved
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To: All
Those who find medved's constantly repeated essays and links useful will also be delighted with these:

Debating Creationists: Ted Holden .
VadeRetro's Rebuttal of Medved's spam.
Ted Holden's [a/k/a medved] very own website!.
TIME CUBE .
The Earth is Not Moving!.
Earth Orbits? Moon Landings? A Fraud! .
Flat Earth Society Homepage! .
Creationists' Cartoons .
The Current State of Creation Astronomy.
THE MOON: A Propaganda Hoax.
CRANK DOT NET.

27 posted on 08/07/2002 7:26:51 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: PatrickHenry
There's something wonderfully comical about being called a crackpot by a perv... by somebody who has such a glaring problem with "glass house syndrome" or whatever you care to call it.

Those who find "PatrickHenry"'s infantile attempts at humer via links funny will be rolling on the floor over this one:

Unbridled lust leads to frustration and misunderstanding despite Jimmy Carter's advice to the lustlorn

Highlights include:

You were groping me on the thread. I warned you, you groped on, I pushed the abuse button. Very simple. You then went whining to all your friends and relations. I received about 4 emails from different people: "What happened?" "What did you DO?" "Who are you? Are you impersonating someone?" and other silly tinfoil stuff.

Why would you grope me? Because I had told you in a freepmail as to not embarrass you for comments which indicated your confusion that I was a woman. Do you deny that you received such a freepmail from me? Do you deny that you used it against me on the thread?

Whiners receive lots of attention and scrutiny. If other threads of yours were pulled, my guess is you were harassing someone else.

Then again, there're the FR threads on Who is PatrickHenry...

Granted the clowns who form the inside clique on talk.origins (bandarlog) appear to have it in for me, I don't really view that as a BAD thing; Serious scholars view talk.origins as a philosophical disaster zone of sorts.

The reasons for the bandarlog having it in for yours truly should also be obvious enough...

For the lowdown on Chuck Darwin, stupidest white man of all time and his BS theory, and on the continuing efforts of feebs like Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge to keep the charade going for another generation:



28 posted on 08/07/2002 7:52:54 PM PDT by medved
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To: All
The big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion whicih operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.

The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some aspect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God hates IDIOTS, too!

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:

Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her. In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's great for fantasies...

2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...

3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.

4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.

5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:

ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?




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Splifford the bat says: Always remember:

A mind is a terrible thing to waste; especially on an evolutionist.
Just say no to narcotic drugs, alcohol abuse, and corrupt ideological
doctrines.

29 posted on 08/07/2002 7:57:46 PM PDT by medved
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To: All
Do not post that picture again.

915 posted on 8/7/02 12:28 PM Pacific by Admin Moderator

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: All

Do not post that picture again.

Okay, okay. I'll be good.

916 posted on 8/7/02 12:33 PM Pacific by PatrickHenry

The pic...on the FR---child 'pornography'!

Comments about unmentionable acts!

No suspensions?

30 posted on 08/07/2002 8:26:17 PM PDT by f.Christian
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To: All
Do not post that picture again.

915 posted on 8/7/02 12:28 PM Pacific by Admin Moderator

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: All

Do not post that... picture(link)---again.

Okay, okay. I'll be good.

916 posted on 8/7/02 12:33 PM Pacific by PatrickHenry

The pic...on the FR---child 'pornography'!

Comments about unmentionable acts!

No suspensions?

31 posted on 08/07/2002 8:33:51 PM PDT by f.Christian
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To: medved
The first Nazi post in the thread. (We know it will always happen.) By Godwin's Rule: the first person to make the Nazi post loses.

Gott Mitt Uns
32 posted on 08/07/2002 8:34:24 PM PDT by Doctor Stochastic
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To: prisoner6
A good summary of how scientific facts have disproven evolution.
33 posted on 08/07/2002 9:43:45 PM PDT by gore3000
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To: Doctor Stochastic
By Godwin's Rule:

Methinks that this guy Godwin, whoever he was (probably well known at home at dinner time) was wrong. Evil does not come from good, not a single murderer has ever quoted the Sermon on the Mount as an excuse for his deeds.

34 posted on 08/07/2002 9:50:00 PM PDT by gore3000
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To: Doctor Stochastic
You say you don't like hearing or reading about the obvious connection between Darwinism and naziism?? How about drug dealing then?

In forming a judgement of evolutionism, you must at some point consider the circumstances under which it arose and the most probable set of reasons for its rise to dominance.

You've heard of the Medelin Cartel, El Pino, Pablo Escobar, the Pagans, and all of the other drug dealers of our times. The truth is, all together they probably don't add up to a hill of beans compared to the operations of the British empire in the 19'th century. At least one major eastern city was set up for no other reason than to serve as a conduit for Indian opium into China and an entire war was fought to protect the opium trade.

Now, you don't need to be Albert Einstein to comprehend that for a supposedly Christian nation to be engaging in this sort of business must have created at least two problems on an organizational level. One was the question of motivating men to fight and die for such causes: "For God, Bonnie Queen Vickie, and the Opium Trade, CHARGE!!!!!!" probably wouldn't get it...

The other problem which springs to mind immediately would be that which the CEO or chairman of the board of the East India Company must have faced in conducting board meatings. Picture it:

"Gentlemen, I have some good news, and I have some bad news. The good news is that profits are up 73.2% on a volume of trade which has increased 27% over the same three-month period last year, and that all of our operations appear to be running smoothly. Indigenous peoples of India, Burma, China, and several other areas with a propensity to cause problems are now happily stoned out of their minds on our products, and are causing no further trouble."

"The bad news is that we're all probably going to spend the next 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years roasting on a barbecue pit for this shit..."

Now picture Chuck Darwin walking into this scene and telling all of these people that they're sitting around worrying over nothing, and that the only moral law in nature is "The Survival of the Fittest". Can you not see all of those peoples' eyes lighting up, their hair standing straight up, and somebody screaming "By Jove, I think he's got it?"

I mean, it doesn't even matter what led Darwin to devise the theory of evolution. In any normal time or set of circumstances, he'd have either been laughed to scorn, hanged, or burned. He succeeded precisely because he solved several major problems for the Godfathers of 100 years ago. In other words, there's more than a little truth to my claim that someone has to be stoned to buy off on this BS.

35 posted on 08/08/2002 4:07:04 AM PDT by medved
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To: f.Christian
Was the dufe (PatrickHenry) really posting kiddie porn images? I mean, it wouldn't surprise me. You'd figure that when the moderators keep on having to pull the same stupid posts from this guy several times a week they'd ultimately figure out that they'd save work for themselves by just tossing the guy... all I can figure is that the powers that be would just as soon see the evolution threads go away and figure that having two or three total jackasses on them (the crevo threads) will drive people away from them.

Basically, I can see the thinking here, i.e. FR is basically a conservative political forum, the main function of which is to aid conservative political causes, and you'd just as soon not get sidetracked with religious flamewars.

The problem is that this particular religious flamewar and American politics are intimately bound up. If you look at every political movement which has come down the road over the last 100 years which is antithetical to the ideas embodied in the American constitution, communism, naziism, whatever, and look at Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and every tinhorn dictator and antirepublican politician down to and including Slick Klinton and all the various psychopaths who served in the Klinton administration, the one thing they all had in common, the one thing which permitted them all to conduct themselves the way they did, was this belief that there are no real consequences to their actions, that this life is all there is, that, as Newt Gingrich put it, their fellow man is basically a meat byproduct of stochastic and random events and processes rather than a fellow child of God.

Evolutionism is the security blanket of all evil people, everywhere, and the glue which binds them all together, and that goes triple or quadruple for leftists. Take evolution away, and they'll all be sitting around mumbling to themselves.

36 posted on 08/08/2002 4:39:35 AM PDT by medved
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To: All

Chuck Darwin and Tom Malthus...

Carol Hugunin, a biologist on the staff of 21'st Century Science recently wrote an article titled:

It's Time to Bury Darwin And Get On With Real Science

Noting:

"For more than a century, Darwin has dominated the biological sciences, but his hypothesis for the evolution of life does not cohere with natural history and leads to a philosophical morass."

What would you figure the final fall-back position of the evolutionists will eventually be after it finally reaches the point at which they cannot even talk about evolution without inviting laughter and ridicule?

I fully expect, within the next five years, to hear from the talk.origins crowd and others like them, something like:

"Well, Darwin may not have been much of a scientist, and evolution was obviously a crock of BS, but Darwin was basically a good boy who simply went wrong, and he treated his dog good and his mother loved him..."

Don't believe it. The Bible itself tells us that is unlikely:

16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

Hugunin delves into the social and political melieu which spawned Darwinism, and the story which emerges is somewhat different from the picture evolutionists would have us see of Darwin, to say the least:


In an entry to his diary dated October 1838, the affable Darwin tells exactly how he came up with this hypothesis:

"I happened to read for amusement Malthus On Popula- tion, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-con- tinued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favor- able variat{ons would tend to be preserved, and un- favourable ones to be. destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at least got a theory by which to work."

Parson Thomas Malthus, an economist working at the British East India Company college in Haileybury, England, had insisted that population (of men and of other living crea- tures) tends to expand geometrically, while food supply ex- pands arithmetically. Hence, the Malthusian world is so arranged that in the natural course of things, horrible crises must occur as population presses against fixed resources. This cycle can be alleviated only by the depopulating effects of "vice and misery"-that is, nonreproductive sexual activity and death-dealing poverty. To cull the human flock, neo- Maithusians advocated active social measures beyond accep- tance of starvation and disease.

The original full title of Darwin's 1859 opus, it should be noted, is

Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.

Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, went a step further than Malthus in explicitly proposing that the human race should be culled on the basis of the inferiority of certain sub- groups, thus winning his title as the father of British eugenics. With the support of T.H. Huxley, Darwin's publicist, Darwin's son Leonard wrote The Need for Eugenic Reform, "dedicated to the memory of my father. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could towards making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book."

As for Malthus, publication of his dogmas led to the enact- ment of the 1830s Poor Laws in England, which abolished "outdoor relief"-the equivalent of today's welfare pay- ments-and forced the unemployed into workhouses,. where they slaved for scant rations of food until they took sick and died. This was the practical corollary of Malthus's precept that charity (or, even worse in his view, policies of elevating a na- tion's per capita living standards and productive capabilities) would simply lead to disastrous overpopulation.

Like Alexander von Humboldt, Malthus and the East India Company knew that statecraft can transmit the benefits of sci- entific progress throughout society. The United States was al- ready a living example of geometric expansion of new re- sources when Malthus assembled his Essay Humboldt and his associates devoted themselves to promoting that statecraft, while the Malthusians devoted themselves to opposing it.

Malthus's collaborator Sir James Mackintosh at Hailey- bury was the father-in-law of Darwin's cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood; Charles himself married his Wedgwood cousin and lived on his wife's Wedgwood wealth. The Darwin- Wedgwood~cIan were among the leading merchant-banking clans with immense control over colonial raw materials.

Can we simply ignore those dark, Malthusian thoughts, or are they perhaps relevant to the scientific issues? It is generally said that Darwin synthesized and subsumed the work of the scientists such as Humboldt who preceded him, but can this be the case, when we consider how at variance their funda- mental assumptions really are?

Man, in Darwins view, is just another beast and thus the human herd might be culled (via eugenics) just as one might cull a herd of cattle. And once one tries to justify eugenics, in- evitably the claim is made that some groups of men, for rea- sons of skin color, reIigion or whatever - are more fit than another.

Compare Darwinian eugenics to Alexander Humboldt's view: Humboldt insists that man and human civilization are of a higher order that is not dominated by the same kind of law- fulness that characterized the evolution of life up to that point.

Humboldt, Dana, and others of the continental science tradi- tion assert not only that man is the crowning glory of the process we call evolution, but also that man goes beyond this, taking evolution into a different, a higher realm.

This is very much a hot issue today. The much publicized book The Bell Curve, for example, by scientists Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, claims that human beings of darker pigmentation are just not as "fit" as those of lighter pigmenta- tion. The research for the book was supported by The Pioneer Fund, which had its start in the eugenics movement of the first half of this century. Before World War II, Harry Laughlin, leader of the Pioneer Fund, wanted the "lowest" 10 percent of the human population sterilized, in order to better build a race of human thoroughbreds. Laughlin and his Fund distributed Hitler's propaganda films in American schools, while Hitler put the Darwinian implications of eugenics into practice in slave labor camps.

Other contemporary researchers with a eugenics theme in- clude neuroscientist Xandra Breakerfield at Harvard University, who is trying to prove that violent behavior is genetic, while others are trying to prove that homosexual behavior is genetic.

At this point, it ought to be clear that no scientist studying something as broad as the origin and evolution of life can to- tally avoid issues that have political, philosophical, and reli- gious connotations. As much as such scientists might want to stay out of politics, the political questions are raised because of the very nature of the underlying assumptions adopted.


37 posted on 08/08/2002 4:44:12 AM PDT by medved
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To: medved

Darwin/Hitler Test

This is an old talk.origins archive post. Basically, I had challenged the talk.origins crew (bandarlog) to see if they could tell the difference between ideological writing samples from the famous racist and evolutionist, Chuck Darwin, and the famous racist and evolutionist, Adolf Hitler. A champion (Pflanze) from amongst the bandarlog arose to take up the challenge:

Subject: Re: Darwin/Hitler Test
From: medved@access.digex.net (Ted Holden)
Date: 1997/05/11
Message-ID: <3375fdd4.143923491@newsreader.digex.net>
Newsgroups: alt.fan.publius,alt.fan.splifford,alt.christnet,talk.origins

On 11 May 1997 12:06:52 GMT, cwpf@news.utk.edu (Charles W Pflanze) wrote:

Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development.

>This is more likely Darwin's work. Anyone doing experimental or
>developmental work in biology knows and uses all the the above
>observations. What's the big deal?

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world...

>This is more likely Hitler's work. Now we read about civilized races
>exterminating "savage races."


My reply:

Congratulations, you have earned an incredible distinction for yourself; you can tell your grandchildren that you were the first to flunk the official alt.fan.splifford Hitler/Darwin test. In years to come, after evolutionism has been laughed to scorn and is no longer taught in civilized nations, your name will be famous. Textbooks will note that, once it became obvious that even a genius such as Charles Pflanze could not tell the difference between Darwin's writings and those of Adolf Hitler, it was pretty much all over but the shouting.

38 posted on 08/08/2002 4:47:13 AM PDT by medved
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To: medved
If evolution had any substance, why don't we see monkeys eveolving into humans today........or did evolution suddenly stop at a point in the past? Evolution is a joke and has no logic or intellect whatsoever. Yes, I am a Christain and darn proud of it!
39 posted on 08/08/2002 5:10:58 AM PDT by newfreep
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To: Piltdown_Woman
You folks like your little Postie-Notes? A chemist in the 1950s was doing pure research and discovered a nifty adhesive for which there was no use at the time. 3M paid the man and shelved the product until they discovered a use.

Can you source this? Your dates are wrong by about 20 years. Nobody shelved this. It took others with "applied" research sense to come up with a use. I know a polymer chemist at 3M and the real story is not as tinfoiled as you'd like to believe.

40 posted on 08/08/2002 5:55:43 AM PDT by Nebullis
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