On Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:50:45 -0700 (PDT), Terry Cross
hotmail.com> wrote:

Not very thoroughly, since I didnt' have the opportunity to do more
than a few searches on google before responding. In these kinds of
circumstances it's probably better if the person making the claim
would provide some accurate leads.

After all, it's hard to make an exhaustive search for the nonexistence
of a society's goals.

I never said he did. I said he came up with his theory of evolution
_by natural selection_. Some people actually predated him in that --
or so I have heard -- but they never did the real work, and just
mentioned the notion in passing.

Of course -- many people had long believed in _evolution. Darwin's
contribution was to provide a _theory of evolution, along with a lot
of grunt work in support of it.

Everything I have heard makes it a conspiracy. You are right to chide
me for talking about conspiracy theories as if they were always loony.
Got me there. Sorry.

Beside the point, but as far as subscribing to any theory about Julius
Caesar's assassination, well -- I'm not a historian and I really don't
much care. Nowadays the significance is in the cultural item, and not
so much in the actual event.

What I meant was wacky conspiracy theories that seem to try too hard
to see beneath the "surface" and that often seem to be mainly in the
service of somebody's political outlook.

Yes.

In a sense, yes. He was showing the idiocy of his age.

First of all he is not a saint to me. I do not look to Darwin for
"the truth" in any way -- either moral or factual. At this point it
seems to me that Darwin could _almost have never existed, since other
people were bound to develop the same insight anyway. It probably
would have gone in slightly different directions, but natural
selection would have been well known by now.

Why do you think I look to Darwin as to a saint? And why are you
trying to paint him as a devil? I think he was a very bright guy who
hit on the right idea at the right time for it to spread, and the
first one who was willing to do the in-depth work of investigating its
plausibility.

In any case, the quote you gave from him is pretty poor as evidence
that he endorsed eugenics. It was in fact a description of what was
happening at his time, both in North America and in Australia --
especially Tasmania. I think that it would have looked to many people
of his time like the "more civilized races" were bound to continue
with that kind of thing, and could not be stopped.

If I told you that humanity would certainly bomb itself out of
existence, would that mean to you that I hoped we would?

Anyway, here is the quote with a bit more context.

"The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest
allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species,
has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is
descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of
much weight to those who, from general reasons, believe in the general
principle of evolution. Breaks often occur in all parts of the series,
some being wide, sharp and defined, others less so in various degrees;
as between the orang and its nearest allies—between the Tarsius and
the other Lemuridæ—between the elephant, and in a more striking manner
between the Ornithorhynchus or Echidna, and all other mammals. But
these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have
become extinct. At some future period, not very distant as measured by
centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly
exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At
the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen
has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and
his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between
man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the
Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between
the negro or Australian and the gorilla."

Now there is obviously some egregious racism in there. What did I say
about Darwin not being a saint? But I see no advocacy there for the
elimination of the "savage races", any more than for the extermination
of all apes more intelligent than baboons.

Yes, Darwin said some things that we now see as awfully racist -- and
that really were racist. It would have been hard at that time to find
a European man who would not have said such things. Even Abraham
Lincoln said things that were that racist.

But the question to me is whether that kind of racism means anything
for our evaluation -- today -- of the basic idea of evolution by
natural selection.

Would you disbelieve in Relativity if Hitler himself, instead of a
refugee Jew, had proposed it in his spare time while menacing the
world and attempting genocide? Would his other activities have
mattered in your evaluation of the theory?

I'm talking about the naturalistic fallacy, not legal positivism.

I didn't say that what I thought should matter to you. I just said
what I thought.

I never said I liked everything Darwin was in agreement with.

I think that is true as well. Religion is a bitch sometimes.

But the statements I made are not, I think, irrelevant to the issues
that you have raised yourself, which is the connection of some
horrible later developments to the political -- or, even, emotional --
commitments of some of their supposed predecessors. _I am the one who
should be saying that such statements are irrelevant.

Maybe I should have contented myself with that, instead of also
arguing with you about the actual political and emotional attachments
of Darwin...

I was too emphatic, but I do think that it would be hard for a Nazi to
see Nietzsche's point in light of their own very, err, forceful and
invasive notion of power. It was the intellectual and emotional
precursors of Nazism that Nietzsche railed against most in the Germans
as he saw them, and only deliberate blindness and manipulation (both
of which actually happened) could make him seem to provide a rational
basis for the Nazis.

I do. I'm reading a book called _Theories of Race and Racism -- a
Reader_ as we speak. Sometimes it has even meant people of like mind
who were a subset of a phenotypically homogenous population. It has
also meant many other things.

In any case -- I feel that I have to say it again -- what Darwin
thought about anything matters not at all now. He is a figure from
history and if his memory -- and only his memory -- were to be
entirely blotted out then it would not matter to science.

Hooold on! First you want to tell me that your summary of what Darwin
said wrt "races" did not have all the implications I thought it had
because "race" has had many meanings -- and _then you let me know in
no unclear terms that you were _not quoting from Darwin but using your
own terms. In that case "race" ought to mean what it normally means
today (although that is still not perfectly simple) instead of what it
would have meant to Darwin.

What makes you think that he thought it would be a consequence of his
theory?

And even if he did think so, he was wrong. So far -- and into the
foreseeable future.

It had _everything to do with what I saw as the purpose of the first
post of yours I responded to. In fact that was the reason I responded
to it. Let me paste that post here to jog your memory:

I don't know what point that post of yours could have had other than
to associate Darwin (and by implication natural selection) with widely
loathed names and practices. And thereby to make people look at
Darwin's theory with loathing. If the post had some other point, then
I imagine you will be able to explain it to me.