Re: Scientific American's Faulty Criticism of Expelled
- From: ur32212451 <ur32212451@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2008 21:21:28 -0700 (PDT)
On Apr 20, 4:40 pm, "Steven J." <steve...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 18, 4:54 pm, ur32212451 <ur32212...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:> The following was prepared by a friend 'ethan' with assistance from
me, and it is response to Scientific American's review of expelled as
presented by TO's Glen Davidson. He posted it to talk origins, but it
never appeared there. Can we say "Censorship a la Ben Stein's
Expelled?"
A number of my posts to T.O. have never shown up. I blame it on the
vagaries of usenet. Of course, every case of "censorship" mentioned
in _Expelled_ is grotesquely exaggerated, with, e.g. failure to renew
a one-year contract or scheduled termination of an unpaid volunteer
job being treated as firings. So in that case, there is a parallel
between your non-censorship at talk.origins the non-censorship of
Gonzalez, Sternberg, and company.
-- [snip]
"1) Expelled quotes Charles Darwin selectively to connect his ideas to
eugenics and the Holocaust.
And rightly so, IMO. Darwinism strongly influenced the such people as
the German racist Ernst Haeckel:
Is there no relevance in the fact that Darwin himself opposed
eugenics?
Please provide supporting documentation for this claim of yours so
that we can understand your claim in a better light.
Haeckel argued that the developement of the embryo repeated the
progressive stages of evolution from the most primitive phyla to the
most advanced (single cell, invertebrate, primitive vertebrate, early
mammal, primate, and finally ending as a human being). Haeckel
embraced Darwin's view that the superior evolved races eliminated
their inferior unevolved cousins in the preservation of favoured races
in the struggle for life.
Actually, that wasn't necessarily Darwin's view. "Favored races"
meant simply beneficial variants within a species, and existed, e.g.
in plants which had no intentions and took no conscious actions. In a
competition for resources, those able to obtain them better, or use
them more efficiently, would be more successful in propagating whether
they did anything directly to harm competitors or not.
Darwin had stated numerous times in his writings that a struggle for
existence drives his evolutionary mechanism. For instance, using
Malthus theory about exponential population growth leads to food
shortages and eventual famine. Darwin conjectured that those members
of a species that had evolved the most superior traits for obtaining
food would have the most offspring, thus such superior traits for
survival would slowly accumulate over time, thus a fish becomes an
amphibian in slow gradual steps over long periods of time. Darwin
firmly believed that the the more evolved members of a species would
supplant the less evolved members. Darwin's theory was that of
progressive change, simple to more sophistacted and advanced.
Stephen Jay Gould was repelled by Hackel's claim: "... it has
fascinated me ever since the New York City public schools taught me
Haeckel's doctrine, that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, fifty years
after it, had been abandoned by science."
It has been argued that this was not Haeckel's doctrine anyway, and
that Haeckel simply repeated the idea of von Baer that embryology
recapitulated, not the adult stages of ancestors, but their embryonic
stages. Von Baer's views are regarded as broadly sound. But that
public schools in America could not get this right fifty years later
tells us very little about how Haeckel's views influenced the Nazis.
Nor does it tell us that recapitulation is inherently a racist idea.
Haeckle falsfied the actual depiction of his embryo's to support his
recapitulation argument.
Ashley Montagu agrees with Gould: "The theory of recapitulation was
destroyed in 1921 by Professor Walter Garstang in a famous paper.
Since then no respectable biologist has ever used the theory of
recapitulation, because it was utterly unsound, created by a Nazi-like
preacher named Haeckel." Montague-Gish Prinston Debate, 4/12/80
Note that calling Haeckel "Nazi-like" is a classic _argumentum ad
hominem_: unless you've established that "Nazi-like" people can never
be right about any issue, pointing out Haeckel's unsavory political
views tells us nothing about the soundness of his scientific views.
Ashley Montague is (was?) a famous biologists and evolutionists. From
what I read about Haeckel, you are on very thin ice denying haeckel's
true motives and actions.
Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social
Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (New York:
Science History Publications, 1971), p. 40: “By bringing biology and
anthropology to its support, in works that were widely read and
credited, he [Haeckel] succeeded in investing the ideas of racial
nationalism with academic respectability and scientific assurance. It
was Haeckel in other words, who was largely responsible for forging
the bonds between academic science and racism in Germany in the later
decades of the nineteenth century.
Gasman later pointed out (1998) that: "For Haeckel, the Jews were the
original source of the decadence and morbidity of the modern world and
he sought their immediate exclusion from contemporary life and
society.” He goes on to state that Haeckel’s malign influence did not
stop with the Nazis, that Haeckels evolutionary ideas became, the
primary source of fascism throughout Europe in the first part of the
twentieth century.
Oddly, actual Nazi references to Haeckel were often unfriendly: the
_Bucherei_, a list of suspect texts issued by Nazi officials, listed
the monism of Haeckel as an unacceptable content for good German books
(the list also mentioned works of "primitive Darwinism"). And have
you noted how Weikart, below, dismisses Gasman as a reliable historian
on this issue? Why quote a source when one of your other sources
refers to his work as a "failed attempt" to demonstrate your point?
Weikart does not dismiss Gasman as an unreliable historian on the
issue. Gasman clearly connected the Darwinisitc views of Haeckel to
Hitler, but Weikart agreed with other historians that Gasman did not
clearly tie it back to Darwin himself. However, Weikart has completed
the provision of evidence required to make this connection from Darwin
to Hitler.
Richard Weikart presses similar claims in his tellingly titled book
From Darwin to Hitler (2004). Weikart’s thesis is that “no matter how
crooked the road was from Darwin to Hitler, clearly Darwinism and
eugenics smoothed the path for Nazi ideology, especially for the Nazi
stress on expansion, war, racial struggle, and racial extermination.
In Weikart’s account, Haeckel simply packed Darwin’s evolutionary
materialism and racism into his sidecar and delivered their toxic
message to Berchtesgaden."
Because, after all, there was no history of anti-Semitism, war,
pogroms, or "racial struggle" in Europe until Darwin came along, so
naturally Darwin (who was not an anti-Semite and not notably fond of
war, and protested against the mistreatment of the Tasmanians) must be
to blame for the inexplicable appearance of these traits.
Darwin rejected the Judeo-Christian worldview and embraced a
materialistic worldview in which the weak are ultimately eliminated by
the strongm and this leads to progress in living beings, man being the
most succesfully evolved creature.
Weikart [Professor of History California State Univ., Stanislaus]
reveals: "In retrospect, the connection between these Darwinian ideas
and Hitler's ideology are obvious. Interestingly, however, when I
began my research on evolutionary ethics, Hitler was not even on my
radar screen. I was wary of connecting Darwin and Hitler because of
Daniel Gasman's failed attempt to draw a direct line from Haeckel to
Hitler in The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, a book with
which most historians rightly find fault. However, the title of my
book--From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism
in Germany (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)--indicates that I made the
connection nonetheless, though in quite a different manner from
Gasman. Indeed, the more I studied books and articles on evolutionary
ethics by German scientists, physicians, and social thinkers, the more
I discovered that I could not avoid the parallels between German
Darwinist discourse and Hitler's ideology. This should not come as a
complete surprise, however, since just about all of Hitler's
biographers have noted the strong social Darwinist elements in his
ideology, as Ian Kershaw does recently in his magisterial two-volume
biography."
What does "social Darwinist" mean in this context, and what, if
anything, does it have to do with the actual evolutionary theory (or,
for that matter, the political or ethical ideas) of Charles Darwin?
I'm not sure that there have been, aside from a few writers in the
late 19th century, any "social Darwinists" (that is, people who
thought of their social ideas as logical implications or
extrapolations of Darwin's theory of evolution) at all. There have
been a lot of people who've been called "social Darwinists" by their
opponents, but that's not quite the same thing.
Social Darwinism is the application of imposing Darwin Theory of
Evolution on our humans to enhanced progressive developemnt of the
human race. The more evolved must eliminate the less evolved for
evolution to contunue its progressive march of physical improvements
on a species.
The pseudo-science of 'eugenics' was founded by Charles Darwin's
cousiin, Frances Galton, who informed Darwin of it.
From the above, I believe that Ben Stein is on solid ground when tying
the Eugenics and The Holocaust to Darwin's Theory "On the Origin of
Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life." It appears to me that it is
Scientific American that is blindly defending Darwins Theory by
setting up a strawman argument to its' ill informed readers. Surely
they could ascertain the real facts that demonstrate how darwinism
contributed strongly to the Holocaust as well as Hitler's Aryan
superior race ideology.
But that makes no sense. Darwin's theory clearly requires and implies
that variation exist within all "races," and that no traits exist, on
which one could rest a claim of "racial superiority," that are common
to all members of one race and absent in all members of other races.
And, of course, to the extent that natural selection has shaped races
differently, a "Darwinist" ought to suspect that they are adapted to
different environments: a trait that is more beneficial in one
environment may well be less useful in a different environment, so
that there are no global standards of "superiority" with which a race
could be endowed anyway.
You have moved away from Darwinian evoution by appealing to
adaptation. Mendellian Genetics thoroughly explains how species can
adapt to many different environments by the expression of existing
alleles best suited for each environemt. Mendellian Genetics taps an
enormous reservoir of stored traits that enable a species to adapt to
changing environments and different ecological niches. One needs only
consider that the chiuaua and the wolf are the same species, their
physical differences being that the Chiuaua has had a lot of its
genetic traits eliminated from its' gene pool.
Darwin never knew what caused species to vary from generation. Darwin
was deeply puzzled as to why offpring would not express certain traits
there parents had, but then these missing traits show up in the next
generation of offspring. Darwin merely pointed out that changes did
occur and he further assumed that these changes can accumulate in
generations of offspring to the point where a creature that had no
wings can have (distant in time) offspring with wings. This idea was
not very scientific at all. there was no way of testing it except by
the fossil record, but paleontologists of his day pointed out that
layer upon layer of fossils revealed zero evolution, the long lineages
of offspring never seemed to differ much from the initial parental
ancestor. This remains true today.
The cofounder of Darwinian evolution, Wallace, rejected and argued
against Mendellian genetics because he realized that it refuted
Darwin's theory. Wallace pointed out that Mendellian Genetics restored
fixity to the species, that all obsevations of variation from
generation to generation were merely expressions of different existing
alleles. Nobel Laureate biologists Peter Medawar pointed out that the
human genome has so much variablity in its genes that no two people
will ever be born identical in their expressed traits.
Contrary to what is taught in schools, all observed variation of
Change Over Time or Changes in Allele Frequency is not Darwinian
Evolution in action, but rather, it is simply Mendellian Genetics in
action. The species are static after all. The believeable scientific
statement is that God created each type of creature according to its
seed. Each seed type was rich in allele traits which led to numerous
radiations of different subtypes, just as the wolf radiated int German
Shephards, Daschunds, Great Danes, etc. (and in the case of dogs,
usually with human intelligent design guiding the evolution from wolf
to the many variety of dogs we see today). It is simply a matter of
eliminating the necessary genes in order to produce the so called
'purebreeds'. On the other hand, all of Darwin's finches can
interbreed, and different ecologies of the Galapogos Islands happen to
favor different traits, and adaption has been noted to occur rather
quickly. A very similar radiation of finches has been observed on some
Caribean Isles.
Even before Darwin, Creationists such as William Paley recognized the
role of natural selection in preservng the existing created type by
allowing for adaptation to changing environments or new ecologies.
Thus placiing some cichlids in Victoria Lake led to a rapid radiation
of cichlids, each different type adapting to a different niche of the
lake. Charles Darwin, materialist that he was, set out to eliminate
God from the equation.
Darwinian theory requires new genetic information for species to
evolve from algae to man over time, and Darwins Theory fails to detail
the cause and effect that will bring about the required biological
changes without killing off the species. For one, the distance between
different protein classes are far too apart for one protein class
evolve into a new protein class as required for evolving new physcial
traits not existing in its assumed ancestry.
Hitler's racial ideology is radically anti-
Darwinian (and, by the way, "favored races" in the title of _Origin of
Species_ does not refer to human races -- Darwin barely alludes to
human evolution in _Origin of Species_ -- and does not necessarily
refer even to "races" as subspecies of nonhuman species, but to
varieties and variations).
I quoted his views from his 1871 book "Descent of Man'. He saw
'savages' as less evolved inferior beings that will naturally be
eliminated by the more advanced human races because, according to
Darwin, That is how evolution works. Darwin stated this in his "On the
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation
of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." and Darwin applied this
to humans in his "Descent of Man." As I have already documented. There
is no point in being in denial of Darwins' real views.
Now let's look at Scientific American's analysis of Darwin's words as
used in 'Expelled'.
When the film is building its case that Darwin and the theory of
evolution bear some responsibility for the Holocaust, Ben Stein's
narration quotes from Darwin's The Descent of Man thusly:
"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We
civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process
of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the
sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will
doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly
anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
"This is how the original passage in The Descent of Man reads
(unquoted sections emphasized in italics):
"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those
that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized
men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of
elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the
sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost
skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is
reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a
weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the
weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who
has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this
must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon
a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of
a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly
anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
"The producers of the film did not mention the very next sentences in
the book (emphasis added in italics):
"The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an
incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally
acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered,
in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely
diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard
reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The
surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he
knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were
intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a
contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.
"Darwin explicitly rejected the idea of eliminating the "weak" as
dehumanizing and evil. Those words falsify Expelled's argument. The
filmmakers had to be aware of the full Darwin passage, but they chose
to quote only the sections that suited their purposes.
It is clear even from the expanded 1st paragraph quoting Darwin that
Charles Darwin states that evolution is progressing among savages
whose weaker members are left to die off while the civilized
[Christianized] people of Europe care for their weaker offspring, keep
them alive, and allowed to infect their offspring with their weaker
traits which are thus maintained in the population, thus stiffling the
natural progressive flow of survival of the fittest and the evolution
of superior races displacing the inferior. This is plain reading of
Darwin's meaning from that paragraph.
Evolution is not the same thing as "progress," not that Darwin's
theory provides us with a clear metric of "progress" anyway.
Evolution by natural selection is adaption: it may involve an increase
or decrease in complexity, the elaboration or simplification of organs
and limbs, or increase or decrease in size and strength. The parasite
that has lost many parts that enabled its free-living ancestors to
survive without a host is as much the product of evolution as its host
is. And, of course, different enviroments call for different
adaptions: Darwinian evolution implies a tree, with many different
standards of "more evolved" or "fitter," rather than the "evolutionary
ladder" of crude popular Lamarckian evolution.
And again, to appeal to adaption as evidence of Darwin's Theory in
action begs the question, what is the origin of the many existing
alleles that already exist in the genome? Science has been unable to
explain the origin of the vaste amounts of beneficial genetic
information found in the types of creatures living today by means of
materialistic evolution. I know you are not able to answer this.
Darwin feared that "civilized races" were evolving towards being
weaker and sicklier on average, dependent on their advanced technology
to thrive and unable to survive without it. Strictly speaking, this
would not have been a loss of fitness, since fitness is dependent on
the environment, but a sort of fitness that was appropriate only to a
refined and unlikely environment. Note, by the way, that "savages"
aren't accused of (or credited with) "leaving" their weaker members to
die, but simply lack the medical skills to keep them alive, so they,
presumably, are evolving in an environment that does not adapt them to
depend on high tech and advanced medicine.
This is special pleading. Chalres Darwin was quite clear in his book.
Civilized society was impeding their evolution in their role as the
most favoured race by maintnaing the lifespan of the weak, sickly and
needy while in the savage (i.e. black) races were advancing in accord
with Darwin's theory that the fittest survive and suppplant their less
evolved peers.
In that paragraph, and the ensuing prargraph quoted by Scientific
American, Charles Darwin demonstrates that he has learned a lot from
his mentor, Charles Lyell. Darwin knows that if he attacks the morals
of Christianity directly, this would give his opponents ammo to attack
his theory and the public may be swayed to turn on his theory. So
Charles Darwin backs off a bit with the comment that "but if we were
intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a
contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil." Thus he bows
to the morals of the day, but still refers to eliminating the weak as
having a contingent benefit. The word Darwin used to described the
elimination of the weak humans, 'Contingent', has meaning. Contingent
means 'likely but not certain to happen'.
Actually, "contingent" means "depending on circumstances that are not
certain to happen." A "contingent benefit" is a benefit in one set of
circumstances, but a hardship or loss in different circumstances.
That is, neglecting the poor would be justified when all resources had
to be dedicated to saving anyone at all, and not everyone could be
helped.
1: Contingent - likely but not certain to happen Merriam Webster
Dictionary.
So I find Scientific American's report on Expelled to be unworthy of a
credible science journal.
Thank you for sharing your opinion.
Furthermore, if they journeyed into Darwin's writing beyond those two
paragraphs, they would have discovered Darwin's views on 'Savages',
whom today are known as black people or dark skinned people.
No, really, "savages" are people who don't have cities or writing.
Technological level is not the same thing as skin color.
Let me make Darwin's meaning more clear for you by quoting Darwin's
whole paragraph from his book: The Descent of Man.
"At some future period, not very distant as measure by centuries, the
civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace,
the savage races throughout the world. At the same time
Anthropomorphic Apes, as Professor Schaafhausen has remarked, will no
doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies
will be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised
state, as we may hope, even that the caucasian, and some apes as low
as a baboon, instead of as now between negro, Australian [aborigine],
and the gorilla." London, p. 156, 1887. Darwin was a racist and his
theory gave comfort and ammo to racism. Just in case you do not
understand 19th century english, Darwin stated that the gap between
man and his nearest living ancestors will, in the next several hundred
years, be that of Caucasian (hopefully) and the lowly baboon, instead
of now where the gap is between caucasian and the Anthropomorphic
Apes: negro, Australian aborigine, and the gorilla. These savage races
will have been exterminated.
I am quite tired and will end here. I have read your remaining
thoughts on this subject and I believe I have fully responded to them
in this post. I thank you for taking the time for responding in such
detail to my post and sharing your thoughts. I appreciate your own
implied aversion to racism. You can believe what Darwin so plainly
wrote, or you can believe your own (or borrrowed) apologetic revision
of Darwin's intent.
Charles Darwin repeatedly described in his jounal on the Beagle that
the Fuegians of Tiera Del Fuego as ‘miserable degraded savages,’.
That, "I could not have believed how wide was the difference between
savage and civilized man: it is greater than between a wild and
domesticated animal, inasmuch as in man there is a greater power of
improvement." That they are "the most abject and miserable creatures I
anywhere beheld’ and that they exist "... in a lower state of
improvement than in any part of the world. … These poor wretches were
stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white
paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their
voices discordant, and their gestures violent. Viewing such men, one
can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures and
inhabitants of the same world. It is a common subject of conjecture
what pleasure in life some of the lower animals can enjoy; how much
more reasonably the same question may be asked with respect to these
barbarians. At night, five or six human beings, naked and scarcely
protected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate, sleep on
the wet ground coiled up like animals. … with their naked bodies
bedaubed with black, white, and red, they looked like so many
demoniacs who had been fighting," ... ‘The party altogether closely
resembled the devils which come on the stage in plays like Der
Freischütz." [I'm not really familiar with Der Freischutz, but I think
i get the idea from context.]
Concerning their language Darwin wrote, "The language of these people,
according to our notions, scarcely deserves to be called articulate.
Captain [James] Cook has compared it to a man clearing his throat, but
certainly no European ever cleared his throat with so many hoarse,
guttural, and clicking sounds." Darwin thought their sound to be
repetitive and thus only consisted at most, of a few hundred words. In
actuality, their language consisted of over 30,000 words and
inflections (per Christian missionary E. Lucas Bridges). Darwin
clearly was convinced that the Savages were an inferior, less evolved
race, standing somewhere between man and animals.
I have read a number of creationists who contrast human beings who can
read and write with animals who cannot: Hank Hanegraaff explains that
the distance between a literate man and an ape is "the distance of
infinity," while Perloff in _Tornado in a Junkyard_ assumes that human
beings must have invented writing as soon as _Homo sapiens_ existed.
So the idea that preliterate cultures don't seem entirely human is
hardly limited to Darwin or evolutionists. Note that Darwin's
subjective impressions of the Tierra del Fuegians are not part of
evolutionary theory, nor are they logically implied by the theory
(note that evolutionary theory neither depends on Darwin's personal
authority, nor incorporates all and only his ideas). Is your argument
here that not merely Darwin's ideas of common descent and material
mechanisms for descent with modification, but also his personal views
on South American Indians, permeated German society and Nazi thought?
This seems to me rather unlikely.
Though these were Darwin's views on the Beagle, and despite the
wonderful progress of the missionaries made in Tierra DeL Fuego, This
did not change Charles Darwin's views of them. In the very same book
that Scientific American quotes, The Descent of Man (1871), Charles
Darwin repeatedly presents his racist view that primitive peoples are
less evolved and stand between the animals and man, Charles Darwin
states therein, "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."
London, p. 156, 1887.
And at the same time, he thought, the nonhuman great apes would also
become extinct. Darwin was not basing this view on evolutionary
theory, but on observations of history and current events (indeed, he
was not dealing with the implications of evolutionary theory on human
relations, but on why "ape-men" did not still exist as living
intermediates between gorillas and humans: he thought our stone-age
_H. sapiens_ ancestors had killed off the "ape-men").
I refuse to believe that Scientific American is as ignorant of the
truth as they seemingly reveal themselves to be in their review of
'Expelled', I believe that Scientific American has deliberately lied
to us in order to 'DIS' the Ben Stein Movie as they assume their
protective roll as saviours of 'The Theory of Evolution'.
The Fuegians were eventually wiped out, deliberately, with deadly
germs, so their land could by taken by a 'superior' race.
You mean, they suffered the same fate as scores of Indian tribes which
had vanished before Darwin was ever conceived, much less set pen to
paper? Your quarrel seems to be with human nature, not with Darwin's
explanation of it. Note (as others have pointed out) that if Darwin
had wiped out the Fuegians personally, and encouraged the Germans to
do the same to the (civilized) Jews, it would tell us nothing about
the correctness of common descent or the role of natural selection.
-- Steven J.
.
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