Re: Birdbrain: From the Beagle to Buchenwald; the Trail of the Final
- From: Frank J <fnci@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:13:16 -0700 (PDT)
On Apr 21, 1:32 am, "Steven J." <steve...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 20, 10:44 pm, Jason Spaceman<notrea...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
-- [snip]
Read it athttp://tbirdnow.mee.nu/from_the_beagle_to_buchenwald_the_trail_of_the...
I have composed and attempted to post (we'll see if it shows up:
posting to his blog is quirky) the following reply:
If you mean comments following Birdnow's article, as of 11:00 EDT 4/21
I see only 2, both brief statements of approval. If yours is simply
too long, you might want to select a few punch lines.
First, I suspect that there is a connection between Darwin formulating
his theory of evolution, and the upsurge in state-sponsored slaughter
in the 20th century, but the connection is this: the growth of
technology and science led both to the discoveries (faunal succession
in the fossil record, the nested hierarchy of life, etc.) which led to
Darwin's theory, and to the increasing ability of governments to
orchestrate and carry out mass murder. The Holocaust was to previous
pogroms just what mass production was to cottage industries. Previous
governments didn't murder so many so fast because they couldn't.
Second, while it's a minor point, it's a point on which you're
spectacularly wrong: Marx had published the _Communist Manifesto_ in
1848, and several other works on his economic and political theories
in the following decade, before Darwin published his _Origin of
Species_ in 1858. It's not really clear at all to me that Darwin's
theories contributed anything to the elaborations of Marx's views in
_Capital_ what does natural selection or pangene theory have to do
with Marx's view that labor is the source of value or that trade is a
form of imperialism? Marxists claimed to be applying Darwin's methods
to the sociology and economics, as they had earlier claimed to be
applying Newton's methods, but neither claim strikes me as plausible.
Third, yes, "people back then" seized on evolutionary theory to
provide a specious justification for racism, as earlier (and to some
extent later) they seized on the Bible and the "curse of Ham" in
Genesis. Still, one of Darwin's contributions to evolutionary thought
was to replace the "evolutionary ladder" with an "evolutionary tree,"
that implied that different populations could be equally evolved, but
in different directions (it also implied that "more evolved" did not
logically imply "higher," or "better," or "more complex" or "smarter;"
"more evolved" simply means "more changed, in any way, from the last
common ancestor of the groups being compared). Another central point
of Darwinism was that variation exists in all populations, and that
there is surely no trait shared by all members of one race and no
members of other races on which one could rest a claim of "racial
superiority." If Hitler was a Darwinist, he was a very bad one
indeed.
As long as we're sharing links with interesting quotes, here's one
from the University of Arizona library: <http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/burnedbooks/documents.htm>
Note (about five pages down) that works of "primitive Darwinism" and
Haeckelian "monism" are classed by the Nazis with pacifist, Jewish,
bolshevik, and, yes, atheist literature as "un-German."
Or consider the following passage translated from a Nazi high school
biology text: <http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/textbk01.htm>
Note that despite the highly-colored and enthusiastic descriptions of
natural selection and it's usefulness in preserving the purity of the
race, there is no mention of natural selection transforming one
species into another, or of common ancestry of humans and other
species. Indeed, Hitler never mentions, in his writings or speeches,
Darwin, and his comments relevant to evolution suggest that he did not
actually believe in "macroevolution" (e.g. the comment from the _Table
Talk_ that "From where do we get the right to believe, that from the
very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells
us, that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments
happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the
breadth of the jump , as Man must supposedly have made, if he has
developed from an ape-like state to what he is today." Hitler, if he
really said that (the _Table Talk_ is a second- or third-hand account
of his thoughts, but it's also the source of pretty much all Hitler's
explicitly anti-Christian comments, so take your pick), was a very bad
"Darwinist" indeed, one who accepted next to nothing from Darwin's
theory.
Fourth, regarding the predicted extinction of "savage races" in
_Descent of Man_, Darwin was trying to resolve an apparent problem for
his theory of human evolution: the apparent wide gap between civilized
humans and the most humanlike anthropoid apes. He argued that, given
the historical willingness of humans to exterminate technologically
less-advanced rival human cultures, early Homo sapiens had probably
wiped out any ape-men who lived at the same time they did (thereby
widening the gap between humans and nonhuman apes). This treatment,
he predicted, would continue (given his actual argument, it did not
matter if stone-age cultures were wiped out entirely or assimilated by
more technologically advanced cultures), and, as well, nonhuman apes
would also be driven extinct (this prediction is usually left out when
creationists quote this passage), and the gap would be, as he noted,
be between humans even more technologically advanced than Victorian
Englishmen and monkeys, rather than between stone-age hunter-gatherers
and gorillas.
Yes, his way of putting this was shockingly insensitive and
politically incorrect (although if you're going to rebuke his racism
in seeing preliterate cultures as less obviously distinct from
gorillas than civilized cultures, at least note that the same
criticism ought to be applied to, e.g. James Perloff, whose _Tornado
in a Junkyard_ argues that the human race can't be much older than
written records, because real humans would get around to inventing
writing right away (unlike, e.g. those "savage" Africans of whom
Darwin spoke and whom Perloff apparently forgot). But the point was
that Darwin was not advocating the extermination of anyone, nor was he
saying that the disappearance of "savage races" would lead to "a more
civilized state;" rather, his point was that, given past human
behavior, this seemed likely to accompany technological advances.
This has nothing to do with solving the "problem" of "lesser branches
of humanity," and everything to do with people acting, after they'd
heard of evolution, pretty much the same way they behaved before
they'd heard of evolution, but with higher technology at their
disposal.
Fifth, Darwin is not the prophet of evolutionary theory, and his
writings are regarded as neither inerrant scripture nor the final word
on all matters evolutionary. Some of his ideas on evolution (not all
his ideas are, strictly speaking, about evolutionary theory at all)
have been abandoned, others have been modified or supplemented. The
term "Darwinist" implies, falsely, that modern evolutionary theory
rests on Darwin's authority and must retain true to his every word.
Sixth, it is a logical fallacy (the _argumentum ad consequentiam_) to
assume that if acceptance of a theory leads to socially undesirable
results, this shows that the theory is in fact wrong. Your entire
post might be interpreted as the sort of argument that C.S. Lewis'
Screwtape summarized as "believe this [in this case, that "Darwinism"
is false], not because it is true, but for some other reason."
Seventh, it seems to me that creationists and ID proponents often
argue that various theories in biology have been
"Darwinized" (Jonathan Wells' term), regarded by "Darwinists" as part
of evolutionary theory even though they do not depend on the
assumption of common descent. But surely this applies to eugenics, as
well? Humans were using selective breeding for thousands of years
before they first thought it had anything to do with speciation or
that nature could shape species to new environments. If one holds, as
I suppose a creationist who recognizes that natural selection exists
must hold, that God created natural selection to preserve "kinds" from
degenerating, might this not imply that eugenics is in fact the will
of God, an attempt to preserve the purity of His creation?
It seems odd to me that creationists complain both (and sometimes
simultaneously) that evolution implies that our existence is an
accident and that nature lacks goals, and that it somehow implies that
we ought to direct society and regulate breeding (and breathing)
privileges to achieve these (nonexistent) goals of evolution and
natural selection. Likewise, the creationist who complains, today,
that "Darwinism" tells us that the white man is superior to the Black
man will complain, tomorrow (or did yesterday), that "Darwinism" tells
us that the white man is not even superior to a banana slug: that we
are just apes without purpose.
In point of fact, politically progressive people, who wanted to use
society to achieve what they considered a better world, embraced both
evolution and eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th century, but
there is no particular logical connection between those ideas.
J. Spaceman
-- Steven J.
.
- References:
- Birdbrain: From the Beagle to Buchenwald; the Trail of the Final Solution
- From: Jason Spaceman
- Birdbrain: From the Beagle to Buchenwald; the Trail of the Final Solution
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