Religions > Atheism > DARWIN AT NUREMBERG: THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL
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DARWIN AT NUREMBERG: THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL |
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DARWIN AT NUREMBERG
Part III
THOMAS MALTHUS and THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL
From The Nebulous Hypothesis:
A Study of the Philosophical and
Historical Implications of Darwinian Theory
=A9 1996 by James M. Foard
Editor and Publisher James M. Foard.
The Darwin Papers may be freely
copied and distributed for non profit use
provided acknowledgement is made
for material written by the author.
The Darwin Papers =A9 2004 James Foard
When we as a society forsake those eternal values that lend legitmacy
and sanctity to human life, and by extension to all of life, by our
outlawing the principles that guarantee life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness for all individuals when we have excluded God and His law
from public life, the end result that we are left with is the mercilous
law of the jungle, of survival of the fittest ruling our conduct, both
privately and publicly; we have the consequences of man left to himself
without the guidance and mercy of an almighty God to shepherd us, we
have Hitler's struggle for a master race, we have the ACLU's banishment
of all religious sentiment to temper man's lust for power and
possession, we have, in essence, the type of society that Barry Lynn
has fought so long and hard for, a society stripped of the values that
enoble us and lift us up from a state of fallen savagery and make us
into the image of God.
When you take God and His statutes away from government and from
society you do not have a civilization left, you have an oligarchy of
secular mind-police ruling in the name of an all powerful state,
determined to stamp out any mention of religion in the public
discourse, for when man's rights come from this state, instead of from
an eternal God who watches over the affairs of men, then what the state
can grant to man, the state can also take away, telling us what to
believe and what not to believe, all under the cloak of so-called civil
liberty.
Today there are many environmental groups making a brave attempt to
save endangered species from extinction. It is a curious phenomenon
that many of these biologists and environmental groups embrace Darwin
as some sort of spokesman for the cause of endangered species, when
nothing could be farther from the truth. We have seen Darwin's brutal
law of letting the strongest species survive and the weakest die at the
end of his eighth chapter of the Origin, and we have read in previous
chapters where Darwin stated his belief in his Origin that during the
course of evolutionary progress weaker, less fit species would be
"beaten out and exterminated during the course of further modification
and improvement."
We have seen from the sixth chapter of the Descent of Man, in the
section On the birthplace and antiquity of man that Darwin endorsed the
future extinction of the African gorilla (as well as African blacks and
aborigines!) since he believed that this would enhance the future
evolutionary potential of the Caucasian race (See Chapter 12 of The
Darwin Papers for the full quote).
Darwin was actually enthralled with the concept of extinction of
species, dealing with the subject over seventy times in his Origin of
Species and Descent of Man. In fact, he saw extinction as being
essentially linked with his theory of natural selection as one of the
main instruments for the evolutionary process to move along: "The
extinction of species and of whole groups of species, which has played
so conspicuous a part inthe history of the organic world, almost
inevitably follows from the principle of natural selection; for old
forms are supplanted by new and improved forms."(Origin,Recapitulation
and Conclusion: How far the theory of natural selection may be
extended)
"As natural selection acts solely by the preservation of profitable
modifications, each new form will tend in a fully-stocked country to
take the place of, and finally to exterminate, its own less improved
parent-form and other less-favoured forms with which it comes into
competition. Thus extinction and natural selection go hand in hand."
(Origin, Chapter Six, Difficulties of the theory: On the absence or
rarity of transitional varieties.)
Darwin goes on to write: "Hence, if we look at each species as
descended from some unknown form, both the parent and all the
transitional varieties will generally have been exterminated by the
very process of the formation and perfection of the new form."
As can be seen from Darwin's own writing, the presence of transitional
forms providing proof for his theory are extremely rare, practically
non-existant, because the law of natural selection would tend to
exterminate them:
" I endeavoured, also, to show that intermediate varieties, from
existing in lesser numbers than the forms which they connect, will
generally be beaten out and exterminated during the course of further
modification and improvement." (Origin, Chapter Ten: On the
Imperfection of the Geologic Record: On the absence of intermediate
varieties at the present day)
There is however a problem with this, for Darwin plainly stated that
all species, including the races of man, in some respect are
transitional forms: "As Sir J. Lubbock has remarked, 'Every species is
a link between other allied forms.'"(Origin of Species, Chapter Ten: On
the absence of intermediate varieties in any one formation.)
This is why, on the very first page of his Descent of Man, Darwin
advocated a race war among human beings, believing that this would
produce "beneficial" results with one of the races of man being
exterminated, since all species of life in Darwin's struggle for
existence are prey to being "beaten out and exterminated during the
course of further modification and improvement."
Did Darwin at least think that all races of man came from the same set
of parents, perhaps making us all one family of man? To look at
Darwin's classification of man himself and thus to find out more of
what he thought of the equality of the various races, we must read his
General Summary and Conclusionto the Descent of Man. Here Darwin wrote:
"Through the means just specified, aided perhaps by others as yet
undiscovered, man has been raised to his present state. But since he
has attained to the rank of manhood, he has diverged into distinct
races, or as they may be more fitly called, sub-species. Some of these,
such as the Negro and European, are so distinct that, if specimens had
been brought to a naturalist, without any further information, they
would undoubtedly have been considered by him as good and true
(separate) species . . .It must not be supposed that the divergence of
each race from the other races, and of all from a common stock, can be
traced back to any one pair of progenitors." (Descent, pp.591, Benton
Pub., 1952)
In Darwin's view all men are not "created equal" as the Declaration of
Independence and the Bible state, but have evolved along with the rest
of the animal kingdom.
Repeating the connection between natural selection and extinction,
Darwin wrote:
"On the theory of natural selection, the extinction of old forms and
the production of new and improved forms are intimately connected
together." (Origin, Chapter Eleven: On the geological succession of
organic beings: Extinction)
Again: "For we have reason to believe that only a few species of a
genus ever undergo change; the other species becoming utterly extinct
and leaving no modified progeny. . .so that the intermediate varieties
would, in the long run, be supplanted and exterminated." (Origin,
Chapter Fifteen, Recapitulation and conclusion: Recapitulation of the
general and special circumstances in its favour)
We have seen earlier that Darwin expressly applied this horrendous idea
to human populations as well in his Descent of Man, even advocating a
race war for the extermination of what he considered to be less evolved
races of man. Darwin not only wrote that in the course of evolution the
"barbarians" would be exterminated, he went on to write that if savage
races were not exterminated by violent means when coming into contact
with more "civilized" nations, then they would simply become sterile
when forced to adopt civilized life, even comparing them with apes:
"It has often been said, as Mr. MacNamara remarks, that man can resist
with impunity the greatest diversities of climate and other changes;
but this is true only of the civilized races. Man in his wild condition
seems to be in this respect almost as susceptible as his nearest
allies, the anthropoid apes, which have never survived long, when
removed from their native country . . . Seeing how general is this law
of the susceptibility of the reproductive system to changed conditions
of life, and that it holds good with our nearest allies, the Quadrumana
(apes), I can hardly doubt that it applies to man in his primeval
state. Hence if savages of any race are induced suddenly to change
their habits of life, they become more or less sterile . . . It is an
interesting circumstance that the chief check to wild animals becoming
domesticated, which implies the power of their breeding freely when
first captured, and one chief check to wild men, when brought into
contact with civilization, surviving to form a civilized race, is the
same, namely, sterility from changed conditions of life." (Descent,
pp.334-355)
Darwin wrote of the diminishing race of Tasmanians after the English
colonization: "With respect to the cause of the extraordinary state of
things, Dr. Story remarks that death followed the attempts to civilize
the natives." (Descent, pp.35`)
Darwin was certainly no proponent of the idea of the equality of the
sexes either. He might be said to have been a classical male
chauvinist. He wrote in his Descent:
"The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is
shewn by man's attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up,
than can woman-whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination,
or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of
the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music
(inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and
philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists
would not bear comparison . . .as well illustrated by Mr. Galton, in
his work on Hereditary Genius . . .the average mental power in man must
be above that of woman. (Descent, Secondary Sexual Characteristics of
Man, Difference in the Mental powers of the two Sexes, pp.566)
This type of blatant racism and male chauvinism should cause those to
hesitate who hold Darwin up as some great intellectual pioneer in the
study of humankind, and should give pause to those liberal
intellectuals who fairly froth at the mouth at the mere mention of
creationism but have installed Darwin upon some pedestal of honor in
place of Moses and the prophets.
What was it that inspired Darwin with these horrendous ideas that he
propounded: What was the underlying philosophical basis for his
ideology? Who was it that inspired him with the ideas that led to such
genocidal results? It is historically of the first importance that we
get to the truth of this matter. Darwin's writings are still held up as
some great standard of truth in many intellectual circles: he is still
highly honored by the intelligentsia of the print and broadcast media,
he has become an icon of supposed scholarly achievement in the liberal
educational establishment, and as ideas have consequences, ideas based
on erroneous data and faulty conclusions may have catastrophic
consequences for the lives of millions of helpless victims of social
engineering programs designed by people convinced that for the "overall
good" of humanity evolution ought to be given a little "push" via
population planning institutions.
In tracing the philosophical lineage of Hitler, Marx and Darwin, we
find that they converge in a common group of Enlightenment thinkers in
the 16th and 17th centuries. Priestley, the Unitarian minister who
rejected the miracles of the Bible and belief in the Trinity and who
was an intimate of both of Darwin's grandfathers, was strongly
influenced by ideas from the Enlightenment that swept across Europe.
Many of the ideas of the Enlightenment were spawned by men who rejected
the divine revelation of Scripture as the ultimate guide for man's
conduct and purpose in life, and attempted to substitute variously
concocted notions for human reason, apart from God's Word, as the
arbiter to pilot humanity by. This eventually led to the horrors of the
French Revolution, which did much to dispel the popularity of the ideas
of the Enlightenment philosophers.
Man's reason needs to be aided by the Holy Spirit and the Holy
Scripture, for "There are many devices in a man's heart, but the
counsel of the Lord, that shall stand," and "Trust in the Lord with all
your heart, and lean not on your own understanding," and further, "The
Lord knows the imaginations of man's heart, that they are vain." We are
admonished by Holy Scripture that "Except the Lord build the house,
they labor in vain to build it." This is as true in the affairs of
human society today as it was when uttered by the prophet centuries
ago.
There was an undue reliance on Greek philosophy of man and society's
innate perfectibility through reason apart from divine guidance. Jesus
is the door, and apart from Him there will never be a truly equitable
and just government upon this earth, for "The kings of the earth set
themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and
against His Anointed, saying, 'Let us break their bonds in pieces, and
cast their cords away from us."
Ungodly men and governments can only see in the statutes and
commandments of the Lord bonds and cords preventing them from pursuing
their own nefarious schemes and inflicting their intrigues upon their
fellow man for selfish gain.
The truly original scientific thinkers who sparked the Enlightenment,
Pascal, Harvey, Newton, Galileo, and others, were for the most part
quite pious and religious men who saw that nature revealed the
handiwork of God, and reasoned that since an Intelligence had put
certain laws in the Universe, we could through our God given reason
learn about these laws and thus learn more about the eternal Lawgiver
who fashioned them.
Unfortunately this spawned a second generation of less enlightened men
who took only part of that premise, which was that we have a universe
consisting of laws, but they denied the participation of the Lawgiver,
God. These men were skeptics of revealed religion, and denied many of
the miracles of Holy Writ. Many of them were atheists, as atheism
became intellectually fashionable in the 18th century. There was a
rejection of the sacred in human affairs, first through the Protestant
Reformation, which abolished many of the Church holidays and
ecclesiastical functions that townships traditionally held, although at
first this was an attempt to correct some of the abuses of the Catholic
Church at the time. Let it be noted that I am discussing this as a
Protestant Christian myself. Eventually this led to excesses of it's
own, spawning two centuries of bloody conflict between the Catholics
and Protestants in Europe and Britain, with some of the very leaders of
the Reformation itself taking part in the slaughter. Calvin is known to
have executed fifty-eight people over the course of a few years in his
model Christian community of Geneva, where he held virtual dictatorial
powers. He was known to have imprisoned a man for not giving his son a
Christian name from the Bible, and he imprisoned a woman because her
hair was tied too high behind her head.
Luther wrote mordacious tracts attacking the peasants for their revolt
against the aristocracy in Germany, a revolt that had been in large
part brought on by Luther's earlier writings themselves challenging
Papal and civil authority. He called for the most heinous punishments
to be meted to the peasants, which was done in an efficient and brutal
manner. He also wrote scathing diatribes against the Jews, portending
many of the future tides of prejudice that swept across Europe over the
next few centuries.
Chief among the Enlightenment skeptics was David Hume. Hume was a
backslidden former Calvinist who eventually rejected the divine
inspiration of Scripture, believed that monotheism was merely an
outgrowth of primitive polytheism (I have dealt with this error in a
note in the first chapter of this work), without presenting any
credible historical evidence for many of his claims. Nevertheless his
writings became the mainstay for two centuries of radical thinkers,
including Erasmus Darwin and his grandson Charles.
Among various enlightenment thinkers affected by Hume's writings, there
was one who was conspicuous for his influence on Charles Darwin, Karl
Marx, and, through Nietzsche, Adolph Hitler.
In unraveling the twisted thread further between Darwin's theory of
evolution, Marx's Communist Manifesto, and Hitler's racism, we must go
back a few centuries to a gentleman by the name of Thomas Malthus.
Malthus was an Anglican clergyman and the first British professor of
political economy. Malthus' father was profoundly influenced by Hume's
writings, and brought up his son in a liberal education that reflected
the skepticism of that time.
Although he did not coin the term, Malthus (1766-1834) has been called
the founding father of eugenics, or scientific racism. (1)
The idea of a master race is tied in with "eugenics," a term coined by
Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton. This is the notion that certain so
called inferior races of man should be discouraged from breeding, thus
reducing the surplus population, and thereby purifying the human race,
just one typical result of Darwin's bloody legacy. Galton and Darwin
were both inspired by Malthus, and they make reference to him in their
writings.
Born in comfortable circumstances to a wealthy family, Malthus
certainly did not take to heart the Biblical injunction that man does
not live by bread alone. Nor did he invoke the Biblical injunction that
caring for the poor was caring for the Lord. For him the primary
component of human existence was reduced to the lowest common
denominator, food, and he did not believe that there was ever enough of
it to go around. Hence he proposed that there must be various checks to
the growth of population so that all might be fed, although he did not
mean the population of the well to do classes, but checks to the poor
classes of society, to which he often referred to as though they, by
their very poverty, represented a form of evil (2)
According to the International Society of Malthus, there are four core
principles of Malthus' philosophy, namely-
Food is essential for human existence.
Human population tends to grow faster than the power in the earth to
produce subsistence, hence
The balance of both of these disparate forces must be kept equal
Humans do not voluntary check the growth of their own population, so
there are instituted by Nature and Divine Providence certain "positive"
checks to surplus population, namely famine, disease, poverty and war.
(3)
Malthus is best known for his Essay on the Principle of Population,
which, aside from Darwin's Origin and Descent, is unparalleled in the
history of English literature for it's abominably cruel and inhumane
suggestions for the social betterment of the human race. He stated his
barbaric beliefs quite succinctly in the 1826 6th edition of his work:
"We are bound in justice and honour formally to disclaim the right of
the poor to support.
To this end, I should propose a regulation to be made, declaring that
no child born from any marriage, taking place after the expiration of a
year from the date of the law, and no illegitimate child born two years
from the same date, should ever be entitled to parish assistance.
The infant is, comparatively speaking, of little value to society, as
others will immediately supply its place."
In investigating what Malthus believed and wrote, one has the uncanny
sense that if wickedness were to embody itself in a personality, this
man might be a good candidate. Of one thing we can be sure: Malthus was
certainly no friend of the downtrodden. Dickens' Scrooge could have
been inspired by him.
According to Allan Chase, Malthus was not only opposed to aid for
helpless infants and the poor, but "every measure that in any way
improved the health or the minds of the population [particularly the
poor] was, in his view, an even greater crime." (4)
Malthus further stated in the 5th Chapter of Book IV of his Essay that
"All children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the
population to this [desired] level, must necessarily perish, unless
room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons."
Malthus sums up his railing on the poor by stating, in genocidal
fashion:
" . . .we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly
endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this
mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid
form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of
destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending
cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our
towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the
houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should
build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage
settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we
should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those
benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a
service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of
particular disorders." (5)
This odious proposal, so contemptible, so low, so degrading in its
vision for the "improvement" of society, eventually made its way into
Darwin's Origin of Species and his Descent of Man. One can only imagine
Malthus, were he living today, sitting comfortably in an armchair,
while watching a telecast of skeletal, starving children in some third
world country, and nodding in approval as he sipped his brandy.
Malthus held that there were certain Principles of Conflict that
dictated the conditions of human society and were central to human
existence. Malthus' ideas on human conflict were also largely
responsible for Marx's ideology of a class struggle and Darwin's idea
of a struggle for existence. Both Marx and Darwin studied Malthus
before writing out their theories of human struggle.
The International Society of Malthus has stated the Malthusian
principles of politics and conflict:
"The Principles of Conflict
The First Principle of War:
All wars are struggles over the control of resources or struggles for
political control.
Politics is the struggle for power in order to control resources. So
all political struggle is at bottom the struggle over resources.
Subsidiary principle: When resources are scarce or perceived to be
scarce, there will be an increased struggle over the available
resources.
Subsidiary principle:Wars which are not directly or overtly about the
control of resources, are struggles for political control.
Corollary: Resource scarcity is a consequence of too many people
chasing limited supplies.
Corollary: When population reaches a critical mass relative to
available resources, there is always a struggle over the division of
those resources. When there is an easily identifiable minority ethnic
or racial group, that group tends to become a target in times of
scarcity." (6)
Reading Malthus' theories is like reading the doctrine of a demented,
evil mind. His belief that there was a connection between environmental
scarcity and political conflict led him to endorse what he called the
"positive checks" of war, disease and poverty which would limit the
unconstrained growth of population.
Malthus has since been proved wrong, and in fact was proved wrong even
in his own lifetime. Chase made note of the fact that even in Malthus'
own time the tenets of his philosophy were invalidated by the
Agricultural Revolution. Beginning around the turn of the 18th century,
the average yield of grain increased by 43% over the next hundred years
in England, and with the advent of new technologies from the Industrial
Revolution it increased even more in the 19th century. The myth that
birth rates would forever outstrip mankind's ability to supply enough
food for the population grew less true throughout Malthus' entire life,
chiefly because of the success of the Agricultural Revolution in the
18th century and the aid given to agriculture by the Industrial
Revolution in the 19th. Three years before Malthus died Cyrus McCormick
developed his horse-drawn reaper. From this and other developments in
mechanization, in the ten year period from 1838 to 1848 the shipment of
wheat from Chicago went from seventy -eight bushels a year to two
million bushels a year. In the 20th century the increase of crop
production has been even greater. Scientific advancement in agriculture
has proven Malthus to be wrong in everything that he predicted. (7)
Malthus further wrote that poverty was the "necessary stimulus to
industry," for it provided cheap help and child labor for the nouveau
rich among the English from the Industrial Revolution
Chase stated that Malthus was against passage of any legislation that
would diminish poverty, including 'bad' laws that provided welfare and
medical help for the poor, the aged, and the sick; free public schools,
sanitary housing, and community services helping to enable the poor to
at least be able to move up the ladder of social prosperity through
improved living conditions.
What could be more lacking in compassion, more cold-blooded, more
inhumane than Malthus' disposition towards those whom Christ called
Blessed is beyond imagination. One wonders what Malthus' attitude, as a
clergyman, might have been towards the Child born in a poor manger two
thousand years ago who brought salvation to mankind.
Malthus not only wished to deprive the poor the right of procreation
and the benefits of a decent working wage in this life, he also
strongly suggested that the poor would also be denied the benefits of a
heavenly existence in the hereafter, for he believed that the soul of
man, which he identifies with the mind, is formed in an evolutionary
fashion from the material components of the body, hence those children
of the poor who had lesser nourishment, or were defective physically,
would probably be returned to the clay that they were made of, instead
of rejoicing in heaven:
"We know from experience that soul and body are most intimately united,
and every appearance seems to indicate that they grow from infancy
together. It would be a supposition attended with very little
probability to believe that a complete and full formed spirit existed
in every infant, but that it was clogged and impeded in its operations
during the first twenty years of life by the weakness, or hebetude, of
the organs in which it was enclosed. As we shall all be disposed to
agree that God is the creator of mind as well as of body, and as they
both seem to be forming and unfolding themselves at the same time, it
cannot appear inconsistent either with reason or revelation, if it
appear to be consistent with phenomena of nature, to suppose that God
is constantly occupied in forming mind out of matter and that the
various impressions that man receives through life is the process for
that purpose. . . Nothing can appear more consonant to our reason than
that those beings which come out of the creative process of the world
in lovely and beautiful forms should be crowned with immortality, while
those which come out misshapen, those whose minds are not suited to a
purer and happier state of existence, should perish and be condemned to
mix again with their original clay. Eternal condemnation of this kind
may be considered as a species of eternal punishment, and it is not
wonderful that it should be represented, sometimes, under images of
suffering."(Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, Chapters
18-19)
Malthus had a decided effect on Darwin, who wrote that it was Malthus
who inspired him with his theory of a struggle for survival. Darwin
wrote: "In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my
systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on
Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for
existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of
the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these
circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and
unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the
formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by
which to work". (Charles Darwin, from his Autobiography, 1876)
In the introduction to his Origin of Species, Darwin again gave
accolades to Malthus as having been the inspiration for his entire
theory of evolution through natural selection:
"In the next chapter the struggle for existence among all organic
beings throughout the world, which inevitably follows from the high
geometrical ratio of their increase, will be considered. This is the
doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable
kingdoms. As many more individuals of each species are born than can
possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring
struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however
slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and
sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of
surviving, and thus be NATURALLY SELECTED."
In the Descent of Man, Darwin gave high marks to Malthus: " See the
ever memorable 'Essay on the Principle of Population,' by the Rev. T.
Malthus." (Descent of Man, Chapter Two, On the Manner of Development of
Man From Some Lower Form, note)
Although Charles Darwin attempted to imply in his later writings, and
this has been parroted by his followers ever since, that he had been
brought up in traditional Christian beliefs, and only after slowly
examining the scientific facts he was brought around to the belief in
evolution, a little historical inquiry will show that this premise
would seem to be extremely doubtful.
To see more of what shaped Darwin's underlying belief system was from
the start, we must go back two generations in Darwin's family tree, to
investigate the belief system of both of his grandfathers, Erasmus and
Josiah.
We find that Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), the founder of the first
Unitarian Church in America, was first a Unitarian Minister in Britain
who arrived in Birminham in 1780. Priestley did not exactly hold
orthodox Christian view. He denied the virgin birth of Jesus, the
Trinity, and many of the miracles of the Bible. He promptly became an
initiate of both of Darwin's grandfathers, Erasmus Darwin and Josiah
Wedgwood. He joined Erasmus Darwin's Lunar Society in 1780, and had a
strong influence on both men. Desmond and Moore report: "Priestley's
theology was probably even more influential, for it shaped the outlook
of three generations of Darwin's and Wedgwoods . . For Priestley
immortal souls do not exist any more than immaterial 'spirits' in
chemistry. Nor were miracles and mysteries like the Trinity and the
Incarnation part of his Christianity." (Desmond and Moore, pp. 8-9)
Desmond and Moore further report that Darwin's maternal grandfather
Josiah " . . .had dropped so much supernatural paraphernalia that he
had lost sight of the Christian heights. Fall any further and he would
fall with an atheistic bump. Josiah's was Christianity striped naked,
the Trinity had been discarded, along with Jesus' divinity." (Desmond
and Moore, pp. 95)
Thus we find that Darwin's rejection of traditional Christian beliefs
was not the result of some grand scientific breakthrough occurring as a
result of his voyage on the Beagle, he was already philosophically
predisposed towards this outlook as a result of three generations of
atheistic views.
According to Darwin, if after this age there were to be a future life
(and by inference the resurrection of the dead), then evolution would
be obsolete. In his viewpoint, man is merely a physical creature with
no eternal soul, and he clearly stated here that he placed his only
hope in this life through evolutionary development. Of course, St. Paul
stated exactly the same thing ("If in this life we only have hope, we
are of all people the most miserable"), although from a completely
opposite viewpoint.
Darwin also lent generous support to a virulent anti-Christian
organization in the United States, the Free Religious Association,
headed up by Francis Abbot. Abbot gavehis fifty propositions for "'the
extinction of faith in the Christian Confession'" in his pamphlet
Truths For the Time, where he argued for the development of a
humanistic 'Free Religion'.
According to historian James Moore, "These were evolutionary 'truths'"
to which "Darwin responded warmly, writing, 'I admire them from my
inmost heart & agree to almost every word.'"(James Moore, The Darwin
Legend, Baker Books, Grand Rapids Michigan, 1994, pp. 44.)
Darwin also claimed that he had once believed that all species were
specially created but had changed his mind, presumably after carefully
examining the issue, however even this admission is open to question,
as we have seen when examining his own and his family's history.
Instead we find out that all along he had a bias against the concept of
Special Creation by God; Darwin's claim to have stumbled upon the idea
of natural selection entirely on his own and purely from empirical
observations has been generally discredited, and his memory of the
intellectual chain of thought that led to his "discovery" is at best
dubious, fabricated from whole cloth, as even his staunchest admirers
have admitted.
Darwin's viewpoint of the origin of species was also borrowed from his
grandfathers ideas, which we have seen from an earlier chapter. We also
have seen that his evolutionary views led him to believe that the
various races of man could actually be divided up into subspecies, and
we saw that this view led him to propose a race war among the races of
man for the advancement of human evolution.
Let us look at Darwin's basic idea of human origins and the equality or
lack thereof of the races of man. We find where Darwin wrote in his
Descent: "I may be permitted to say, as some excuse, that I had two
distinct objects in view; firstly, to shew that species had not been
separately created, and secondly, that natural selection had been the
chief agent of change, though largely aided by the inherited effects of
habit, and slightly by the direct action of the surrounding
conditions."(Darwin, Descent, Chapter 2: On the manner of Development
of Man From Some Lower Form: Defenceless Condition of Man .
He also discusses the mutual sterility among animals of differing
species, and relates this subject to mankind: "Now let us apply these
generally-admitted principles to the races of man, viewing him in the
same spirit as a naturalist would any other animal."
So Darwin's basic thesis was that man along with other species had not
been created by a supernatural act of God, but had descended through an
evolutionary process.
He further wrote: "Although, as we have now seen, man has no just right
to form a separate Order for his own reception, he may perhaps claim a
distinct suborder or family. Prof. Huxley, in his last work, divides
the primates into three suborders; namely, the Anthropoidea with man
alone, the Simiadae including monkeys of all kinds, and the Lemuridae
with the diversified genera of lemurs. (Descent, pp.334, Benton Pub.,
1952)
Darwin believed that men were descended from apes, and thus his brutal
laws of survival of the fittest that he claimed ruled nature also ruled
in human societies as well, as we have seen from chapter Twelve.
"Thus we can understand how it has come to pass that man and all other
vertebrate animals have been constructed on the same general model, why
they pass through the same early stages of development, and why they
retain certain rudiments in common. Consequently we ought frankly to
admit their community of descent . . .But the time will before long
come, when it will be thought wonderful (equivalent in nineteenth
century English of unbelievable) that naturalists, who were well
acquainted with the comparative structure and development of man, and
other mammals, should have believed that each was the work of a
separate act of creation." (Descent, Chapter One: The Evidence of the
descent of Man From Some Lower Form: Rudimentary structures.)
"We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped,
probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World."
(Descent, chapter Twenty One: General Summary and Conclusion: Main
Conclusion: pp.591, Benton Pub., 1952)
"If the anthropomorphous apes be admitted to form a natural sub-group,
then as man agrees with them, not only in all those characteristics
which he possesses in common with the whole catarhine group, but in
other peculiar characters, such as the absence of a tail and of
callosities, and in general appearance, we may infer that some ancient
member of the anthropomorphous sub-group gave birth to man." (Descent,
Chapter Six: Rank of man in the natural system, pp.335 Benton Ed.)
"But a naturalist would undoubtedly have ranked as an ape or a monkey
an ancient form which possessed many characters common to the catarhine
and platyrhine monkeys . . . and as man from a geneological point of
view belongs to the catarhine or Old World stock, we must conclude,
however much the conclusion revolts our pride, that our early ancestors
would have been properly thus designated." (Descent, Chapter Six: On
the Birthplace and Antiquity of Man,pp.336)
Even though we see here that Darwin repeatedly stated his belief that
man was not the object of special creation, but had descended from some
ape-like ancestor, in his Descent he frankly admitted that he never had
any evidence for such a claim: " . . .With respect to the absence of
fossil remains serving to connect man with his ape-like progenitors. .
..those regions which are the most likely to afford remains connecting
man with some extinct ape-like creature, have not as yet been searched
by geologists," etc. (Descent, ibid); "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 . .
.." (Descent, Chapter Six, On the birthplace and antiquity of man,
pp.336, Benton Pub., 1952);
"But we must not fall into the error of supposing that the early
progenitors of the whole simian stock, including man, was identical
with, or even closely resembled, any existing ape or monkey." (Descent,
Chapter Six, pp.336, Benton Edition, 1952);
"In attempting to trace the genealogy of the Mammalia, and therefore of
man, lower down in the series, we become involved in greater and
greater obscurity [in other words, totally lost] . . . no true bird or
reptile intervenes in the direct line of descent," (ibid).
So although Darwin had no actual proof to support his theory, he
nevertheless continued to state his belief as fact! Now in the
evolutionary concept of natural selection, which is expressed in the
phrase "the survival of the fittest," which concept I might remind the
reader Darwin actually wrote into the title of his major work, i.e. The
Origin of Species or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle
for Existence, he clearly applied this idea to the survival of animal
species.
We have seen from chapter 12 of The Darwin Papers that Darwin applied
the theory of the survival of favored races and the extinction of less
advantaged ones to man as well, in other words, he indeed did say that
some races of man were less fit to breed than others, and thus we found
out that this was not just a later interpolation woven into his work by
other less enlightened men who followed in his footsteps but
misunderstood his message. The bloodthirsty idea of a struggle for
survival between different races of man was in his work from the
beginning.
John Pfeiffer reports on the terrible results of projecting an
erroneous, evolutionary bias in interpreting a culture's value and
significance in the modern world, and then applying that bias on a
racial level: "The past treatment of hunter-gatherers and others living
in primitive societies whose behavior patterns resemble those that
prevailed for more than 99 percent of man's time on earth marks a low
point in colonial history. A common notion was that they belonged to
subhuman breeds, occupying 'at best a middling position among the
species,' somewhere between apes and men but rather closer to apes as
far as mentality and morals are concerned. In the name of this belief
(evolution), they were widely dispossessed, enslaved, hunted,
slaughtered, fed poisoned food and otherwise exploited. A later and
somewhat more enlightened attitude, but one based on the same belief,
was that they should be preserved together with other forms of wildlife
as 'living fossils' or lower species that never attained the
evolutionary status of modern man." (Pfeiffer, pp.312)
We have seen that this "common notion" was nothing less than what
Darwin articulated in his Descent of Man, where he espoused quite
similar ideas, as well as espousing quite horrendous solutions to the
problems of racial co-existence.
This is part of the bloody legacy left behind by the man who wrote The
Origin of Species. Having seen from the past two chapters how the
erroneous doctrine of evolution has spawned genocidal results when
applied to human society, let us now look at the true story of mankind,
and find out what might result from a new concept of human origin and
destiny, in the final chapter in our journey through mankind's history,
as we seek to find a new vision for humanity in the final issue of The
Darwin Papers.
1=2E Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New
Scientific Racism, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976, pp. 6
2=2E In researching this section on Malthus, I would be remiss if I did
not mention the great debt that I owe to the late Allan Chase, whose
work on eugenics, The Legacy of Malthus, is a modern classic, and was
instrumental in exposing the inhumane history of the eugenics movement.
3=2E www.igc.org/desip/malthus/principles.html, 7/28/2000
4=2E Chase
5=2E Chase
6=2E www.igc.org/desip/malthus/conflict.htm. 7/28/2000
7=2E Chase, 72-75
8=2E We have seen from Chapter 3 that natural selection does not increase
genetic information; truth be known it actually reduces the amount of
genetic information potential, even given the so-called benefit of
mutational change, and can only lead to variation within a species, or
kind, or family of organisms (what has been called speciation is in
fact variation within a Biblical kind). Also, in Darwin's idea of a
struggle for survival that supposedly would produce new species, we
have to ask ourselves what was the genetic superiority of the humble
rutabaga plant over whatever other species of plant or organism it was
that it supposedly wiped out to appear on the landscape of this planet?
Granted rutabagas survive quite well, but how did they arrive on the
scene in the first place in this mysterious struggle for survival, and
what organisms are they struggling against today to supplant in order
to survive? The entire theory of a struggle for survival originating
new species is ludicrous; it is false science that evolutionists
continue to parade in their stories as fact that has led to monstrous
consequences both in the environmental realm and in the lives and
cultures of human beings.
Yes, there are animals that eat other animals, and there are animals
that eat plants, and plants that eat animals, and plants that eat
plants, and spores and fungus that feed on us all, but they all depend
on their hosts or prey for their nourishment. We need to coexist with
the other species of life here on earth. When one species is wiped out
it might cause the extinction of an entirely different species that
depends on it for food, which in turn could cause a third species to
suffer.
Let us take a glance at one typical story used by evolutionists to
illustrate the struggle for survival:
A pride of lions is hunting on the African savannah. They come upon a
herd of antelope grazing near a river. The lions take positions in the
tall grass and slowly crawl through the underbrush to draw near to
their prey. The antelopes are nervous and glance around, their hind
quarters twitching as they sense that all might not be well. Suddenly
at some unseen signal, the lions burst from their places of concealment
and race toward the herd, singling out their victim while the rest of
the herd stampedes in panic. Their lone victim races from one lion only
to be confronted by another one coming from the other direction.
Confused he reverses course, but by then the one coming from behind
leaps onto his hind quarters and drags him down. The other lions rush
in. There is a brief struggle before the end, and then the lions feast
on their prey.
So far so good. But what did we learn from this? Only that lions eat
antelope, that the fastest lions eat antelope more often, and that the
fastest antelope get away. Are lions evolving through this process into
anything else than lions? Are the antelope that got away evolving into
anything other than more antelope? What would happen of the lions
continued the hunt after their first victim until they had wiped out
the entire herd of antelope? Would that help their chances for survival
a few days or weeks down the road? Is extinction really something that
produces new species in the natural world?
In the Darwinian version though, some of the fur on some of the
antelope would gradually be turning into feathers, while the front legs
would be turning into wings. At the same time their bones would be
turning hollow and they would be developing pin feathers and tail
feathers. Over the course of time those antelope that learned to fly
would be able to escape the lions and would survive better and become a
new species. They would also eventually lose their teeth and evolve
beaks. Eventually some of the lions would also evolve feathers and
hollow bones and wings and then they would be able to fly after the
winged antelope.
After all, this is how we are assured that dinosaurs evolved wings and
turned into birds, and we all know that the Darwinian version is
actually much more scientific than the creationist version and that
creationists are all out to lunch.
(Evolutionist response: "Don't be ridiculous! Everybody knows that
dinosaurs evolved their wings from scales while running around trying
to catch insects and jumping out of trees!")
But of course. It was scales that turned into feathers, not hair. Now
that makes perfectly good sense!
We have the same scenario played out in the animated and digital
stories of dinosaurs, where they are in this constant state of savage
warfare; all the dinosaurs always fighting each other in gigantic
wrestling matches to the death. Would any of that really have produced
new dinosaur species? Granted the stronger and faster ones from some
species would have survived better, but this would only have been a
preserving principle, not an originating principle; it would act to
conserve certain traits that already existed. There is also the
question of how many dinosaurs were really battling it out with each
other. What percentage of dinosaurs were of the carnivorous kind? What
percentage were omnivorous and what percentage were herbivorous. How
many of the dinosaur species were even struggling with each other at
all?
Even the carnivorous types of dinosaur, like the lions in the example
above, would have depended on their prey for their very existence, and
would not have wanted to wipe out the entire species. This is
incidentally a pretty good argument for the preflood enriched
atmosphere in the Noahdic world with the greater amount of vegetation
and the universally mild climate. In today's world the vast majority of
land surface is covered by desert, ice and rugged mountains. Where
would there be an adequate source of vegetation for the dinosaurs to
survive if their world were like ours? The average raw tonnage of an
elephant's diet is 330 lbs. of food a day. Given that many of the
herbivorous dinosaurs were much larger than elephants, how would they
have survived unless they had an enoumous amount of herbs and grains
for their food supply?
There is only one valid explanation for the marvelously diverse types
of life that exist here on this specially created planet that houses
them in this marvelously intricate and interdependent biosphere: God in
His infinite wisdom, with loving care created all of the species of
life on this earth by miraculous fiat through His Word.
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| User: "Dave Oldridge" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG: THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL |
19 Mar 2006 12:46:16 PM |
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"Sound of Trumpet" <soundoftrumpet@mail2world.com> wrote in
news:1142777075.282656.267810@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
http://www.thedarwinpapers.com/oldsite/number14/Darwin14.htm
This HAS to be almost a length record for argumentum ad baculum fallacies.
Anyone know of a longer one? I suppose some sophist somewhere must have
written a book-length one.
Do creationists absorb flawed logic by osmosis because they are soaked in
it growing up, or do they get training in it from their spiritual (ugh!)
mentors?
--
Dave Oldridge+
ICQ 1800667
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| User: "wbarwell" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG: THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL |
19 Mar 2006 02:28:56 PM |
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Dave Oldridge wrote:
"Sound of Trumpet" <soundoftrumpet@mail2world.com> wrote in
news:1142777075.282656.267810@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
http://www.thedarwinpapers.com/oldsite/number14/Darwin14.htm
This HAS to be almost a length record for argumentum ad baculum fallacies.
Anyone know of a longer one? I suppose some sophist somewhere must have
written a book-length one.
Do creationists absorb flawed logic by osmosis because they are soaked in
it growing up, or do they get training in it from their spiritual (ugh!)
mentors?
Its the old idea that if you don't have a good
argument, maybe 50 bad ones will work by sheer
overwhelming of one's opponent.
--
So you want to fight the Master!
First you must fight my brother Chang!
Cheerful Charlie
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| User: "Dave Oldridge" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG: THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL |
21 Mar 2006 12:04:18 AM |
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wbarwell <wbarwell@mylinuxisp.com> wrote in
news:121rfabf9u038b3@corp.supernews.com:
Dave Oldridge wrote:
"Sound of Trumpet" <soundoftrumpet@mail2world.com> wrote in
news:1142777075.282656.267810@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
http://www.thedarwinpapers.com/oldsite/number14/Darwin14.htm
This HAS to be almost a length record for argumentum ad baculum
fallacies.
Anyone know of a longer one? I suppose some sophist somewhere must
have written a book-length one.
Do creationists absorb flawed logic by osmosis because they are
soaked in it growing up, or do they get training in it from their
spiritual (ugh!) mentors?
Its the old idea that if you don't have a good
argument, maybe 50 bad ones will work by sheer
overwhelming of one's opponent.
Ahhh, you mean the argumentum ad nauseum fallacy added to all the others!
--
Dave Oldridge+
ICQ 1800667
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| User: "Joseph Hertzlinger" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG: THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL |
21 Mar 2006 01:30:52 AM |
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After reading one too many claims that the Holocaust was caused by
Charles Darwin, I realized that the 911 attack was caused by Isaac
Newton. After all, if you can go from "the unfit won't survive" to "we
must make sure the unfit won't survive" (without analyzing what is
meant by unfit), you can go from "things fall down" to "we must make
sure things fall down" (without analyzing which things fall down).
--
http://hertzlinger.blogspot.com
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG: THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL |
01 Apr 2006 05:23:08 AM |
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On 19 Mar 2006 06:04:35 -0800, "Sound of Trumpet"
<soundoftrumpet@mail2world.com> wrote:
[all words and letters snipped, recycled]
Why humans fear fundamentalists...
.... they can see, hear, read and think.
Christopher = 'bearing, carrying Christ'
So in the service of the church and king, Christopher Columbus voyaged
to the 'new world', seeking to pillage and plunder to obtain riches to
be used by the church to further its empire.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/explanation/columbus.html
So in bringing Christianity to the 'savages' of the new world,
Christopher and crew were known to:
1] grab suckling babies from their mother's bosom, swing them by the
legs to smash their heads against any nearby rock or tree, then toss
the mangled body to their attack dogs.
2] whack innocent Indians in half, on petty bets, to see who's sword
was sharpest, so as to do it in the fewest strokes.
3] behead 8 y.o. kids carrying pet birds, just for sport
4] Slice flesh from Indians to test the sharpness of their knives
5] hang Indians from a beam and slow roast them alive over a fire, 13
at a time. Why 13? To honor Jesus and the 12 apostles of course!
And that was only the beginning. The English Christians were far more
brutal. They even hung other white Christians who held alternative
beliefs than the fundamentalist Puritans exercising political
authority. When the king heard reports of his subjects being so
mistreated and made inquiries, the governor of Massachusetts wrote
back explaining that while the Quakers committed no capital crime
whatsoever, they questioned their authority and the beliefs of the
local church, so they just HAD to be hung.
One might note that the native populations in USA and Canada are
virtually wiped out, the remnants having little if any control of
their lives or freedom to determine their own destiny. Whereas south
of the border, indigenous populations who were subjected more to the
Spanish and Portuguese atrocities fared better and are still in the
majority. The Mexican population, even though still dominated by
Spaniards and other foreigners, consists of 30% fullblood native and
60% mixed blood.
About 1685, the colonizer's assigned Pastorius to establish a
community in the 'new world'. Pastorius did a demographic survey of
'his domain' and reported back thusly:
"Concerning the Inhabitants of this Province
Of these, three sorts may be found: 1. The natives, the so-called
savages. 2. The Christians who have come here from Europe, the
so-called Old Settlers. 3. The newly-arrived Associations and
Companies.
So far as concerns the first, the savages, they are, in general,
strong, agile and supple people, with blackish bodies; they went about
naked at first and only wore a cloth about the loins. Now they are
beginning to wear shirts. They have, usually, coal-black hair, shave
the head, smear the same with grease, and allow a long lock to grow on
the right side. They also besmear the children with grease, and let
them creep about in the heat of the sun, so that they become the color
of a nut, although they were white enough by nature.
They strive after a sincere honesty, hold strictly to their promises,
cheat and injure no one. They willingly give shelter to others, and
are both useful and loyal to their guests.
Their huts are made of young trees, twined, or bent, together, which
they know how to roof over with bark. They use neither table nor
bench, nor any other household stuff, unless perchance a single pot in
which they boil their food.
I once saw four of them take a meal together in hearty contentment,
and eat a pumpkin cooked in clear water, without butter and spice.
Their table and bench was the bare earth, their spoons were
mussel-shells, with which they dipped up the warm water, their plates
were the leaves of the nearest tree, which they did not need to wash
with painstaking after a meal, nor to keep with care for future use. I
thought to myself, these savages have never in their lives heard the
teaching of Jesus concerning temperance and contentment, yet they far
excel the Christians in carrying it out.
They are, furthermore, serious and of few words, and are amazed when
they perceive so much unnecessary chatter, as well as other foolish
behavior on the part of Christians.
Each man has his own wife, and they detest harlotry, kissing and
lying. They know no idols, but they worship a single all-powerful and
merciful God, who limits the power of the devil. They also believe in
the immortality of the soul, which, after the course of life is
finished, has a suitable recompense from the all-powerful hand of God
awaiting it.
They accompany their own worship of God with songs, during which they
make strange gestures and motions with the hands and feet, and when
they recall the death of their parents and friends, they begin to wail
and weep most pitifully.
They listen very willingly, and not without perceptible emotion, to
discourse concerning the Creator of Heaven and earth, and His divine
Light, which enlightens all men who have come into the world, and who
are yet to be born, and concerning the wisdom and love of God, because
of which he gave his only-begotten and most dearly-loved Son to die
for us. It is only to be regretted that we can not yet speak their
language readily, and therefore cannot set forth to them the thoughts
and intent of our own hearts, namely how great a power and salvation
lies concealed in Christ Jesus. They are very quiet and thoughtful in
our gatherings, so that I fully believe that in the future, at the
great day of judgment, they will come forth with those of Tyre and
Sidon, and put to shame many thousands of false nominal and canting
Christians.
As for their economy and housekeeping, the men attend to their hunting
and fishing. The women bring up their children honestly, under
careful oversight and dissuade them from sin. They plant Indian corn
and beans round about their huts, but they take no thought for any
more extensive farming and cattle raising; they are rather astonished
that we Christians take so much trouble and thought concerning eating
and drinking and also for comfortable clothing and dwellings, as if we
doubted that God were able to care for and nourish us.
Their native language is very dignified, and in its pronunciation much
resembles Italian, although the words are entirely different and
strange. They are accustomed to paint their faces with colors; both
men and women use tobacco with pleasure; they divert themselves with
fifes, or trumpets, in unbroken idleness.
---------
The second sort of Inhabitants on the province are the old Christians,
who came here from Europe.
These have never had the upright intention to give these native
creatures instruction in the true living Christianity, but instead
they have sought only their own worldly interests, and have cheated
the simple inhabitants in trade and intercourse, so that at length
those savages who dealt with these Christians, proved themselves to be
also for the most part, crafty, lying, and deceitful, so that I can
not say much that is creditable of either. These misguided people are
wont to exchange the skins and peltry which they obtain for strong
drink, and to drink so much that they can neither walk nor stand; also
they are wont to commit all sorts of thievery, as the occasion may
arise.
Owing to this, their kings and rulers have frequently complained of
the sins of falsehood, deceit, thieving, and drunkenness, introduced
here by the Christians, and which were formerly entirely unknown in
these parts."
========================
Francis Daniel Pastorius, on the founding of the settlement at
Germantown, "at a distance of two hours walk from Philadelphia", 1685
========================
Many years later, as the evangelicals sought to 'civilize' the
surviving Indians, one missionary made a visit to a Cherokee village.
Seeking permission to preach, he was interviewed by one of the
Cherokee elders, who wanted to ascertain the nature of the minister's
message.
The elder listened intently as the minister read some chapters from
the gospel of Matthew. Then, after pondering on those scriptural
words, he remarked 'That sounds like a good book. It is strange though
that you white people are not better persons, you have had it so
long.'
A tree is known by its fruits. Just what fruits has the tree of
Christianity born over the last 2000 years?
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| User: "raven1" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG: THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL |
19 Mar 2006 11:39:53 AM |
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On 19 Mar 2006 06:04:35 -0800, "Sound of Trumpet"
<soundoftrumpet@mail2world.com> wrote:
A Study of the Philosophical and
Historical Implications of Darwinian Theory
Which are completely irrelevant to the scientific truth or falsity of
said theory. Why is that simple fact so difficult for some people to
grasp?
--
"O Sybilli, si ergo
Fortibus es in ero
O Nobili! Themis trux
Sivat sinem? Causen Dux"
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| User: "Dave Oldridge" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG: THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL |
19 Mar 2006 12:48:25 PM |
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raven1 <quoththeraven@nevermore.com> wrote in
news:uo5r12du00rt8ivd4skrm7hl3komvlpnv1@4ax.com:
On 19 Mar 2006 06:04:35 -0800, "Sound of Trumpet"
<soundoftrumpet@mail2world.com> wrote:
A Study of the Philosophical and
Historical Implications of Darwinian Theory
Which are completely irrelevant to the scientific truth or falsity of
said theory. Why is that simple fact so difficult for some people to
grasp?
I think that they (latter-day fundamentalists) grow up so soaked in
sophistry that they really cannot actually wrap their minds around proper
logical inference. Aquinas is rolling over in his grave!
--
Dave Oldridge+
ICQ 1800667
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| User: "Elmer" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG: THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL |
19 Mar 2006 12:52:32 PM |
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raven1 wrote:
On 19 Mar 2006 06:04:35 -0800, "Sound of Trumpet"
<soundoftrumpet@mail2world.com> wrote:
A Study of the Philosophical and
Historical Implications of Darwinian Theory
Which are completely irrelevant to the scientific truth or falsity of
said theory. Why is that simple fact so difficult for some people to
grasp?
--
"O Sybilli, si ergo
Fortibus es in ero
O Nobili! Themis trux
Sivat sinem? Causen Dux"
Maybe I'll do one on "A Study of the Philosophical and Historical
Implications of Newtonian Theory" and explain why gravity causes men to
drop bombs on people or why people sometimes slip and fall killing
themselves.
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| User: "sanitys IittIe helper" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG: THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL |
19 Mar 2006 09:54:41 AM |
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Sound of Troll quote-mined:
From The Nebulous Hypothesis:
A Study of the Philosophical and
Historical Implications of Darwinian Theory
© 1996 by James M. FOAD
Editor and Publisher James M. FOAD.
Now, at least, it's entertaining.
--
David Silverman
aa #2208
Atheist for life.
Worshipful Mayor of Awphucket.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG: THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL |
19 Mar 2006 09:15:51 AM |
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Sound of Trumpet wrote:
http://www.thedarwinpapers.com/oldsite/number14/Darwin14.htm
DARWIN AT NUREMBERG
Part III
THOMAS MALTHUS and THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL
From The Nebulous Hypothesis:
A Study of the Philosophical and
Historical Implications of Darwinian Theory
=A9 1996 by James M. Foard
Editor and Publisher James M. Foard.
The Darwin Papers may be freely
copied and distributed for non profit use
provided acknowledgement is made
for material written by the author.
The Darwin Papers =A9 2004 James Foard
When we as a society forsake those eternal values that lend legitmacy
and sanctity to human life, and by extension to all of life, by our
outlawing the principles that guarantee life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness for all individuals when we have excluded God and His law
from public life, the end result that we are left with is the mercilous
law of the jungle, of survival of the fittest ruling our conduct, both
privately and publicly; we have the consequences of man left to himself
without the guidance and mercy of an almighty God to shepherd us, we
have Hitler's struggle for a master race, we have the ACLU's banishment
of all religious sentiment to temper man's lust for power and
possession, we have, in essence, the type of society that Barry Lynn
has fought so long and hard for, a society stripped of the values that
enoble us and lift us up from a state of fallen savagery and make us
into the image of God.
When you take God and His statutes away from government and from
society you do not have a civilization left, you have an oligarchy of
secular mind-police ruling in the name of an all powerful state,
determined to stamp out any mention of religion in the public
discourse, for when man's rights come from this state, instead of from
an eternal God who watches over the affairs of men, then what the state
can grant to man, the state can also take away, telling us what to
believe and what not to believe, all under the cloak of so-called civil
liberty.
That's all blather. When we look at the evidence, we see that a
lack of religion among the people is accompanied by increased
respect for each others' rights. The only part of the West where
religion seems to be on the rise is the United States, and it is
the United States that is abandoning civil liberties and
slipping into a nightmare of repression and imperialism.
What we really ought to study is the persistent connection
between religion and fascism. And it is the religious people
who most ought to take up this question.
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| User: "Steven J." |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG: THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL |
19 Mar 2006 05:54:57 PM |
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Sound of Trumpet wrote:
http://www.thedarwinpapers.com/oldsite/number14/Darwin14.htm
DARWIN AT NUREMBERG
Part III
THOMAS MALTHUS and THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL
From The Nebulous Hypothesis:
A Study of the Philosophical and
Historical Implications of Darwinian Theory
=A9 1996 by James M. Foard
Editor and Publisher James M. Foard.
-- [snip of prefatory blather]
Today there are many environmental groups making a brave attempt to
save endangered species from extinction. It is a curious phenomenon
that many of these biologists and environmental groups embrace Darwin
as some sort of spokesman for the cause of endangered species, when
nothing could be farther from the truth. We have seen Darwin's brutal
law of letting the strongest species survive and the weakest die at the
end of his eighth chapter of the Origin, and we have read in previous
chapters where Darwin stated his belief in his Origin that during the
course of evolutionary progress weaker, less fit species would be
"beaten out and exterminated during the course of further modification
and improvement."
Now, the entire article posted here is one long _argumentum ad
consequentiam_ (the fallacy that an idea is mistaken because believing
it would have unwanted effects), but in addition to that, it is
mistaken about the contents of evolutionary theory and its
consequences.
Darwin's theory was (and its successor theories are) descriptive, not
prescriptive: it told us how nature operated, not how it ought to
operate, or how humans ought to conduct their affairs. The "laws of
nature" are not like that laws of society: the limit what can happen,
not what we ought to "let" happen or cause to happen.
There is no implication that it is good, or serves some goal of
evolution (evolutionary theory posits no goals for evolution or natural
selection), for the strong to survive and the weak to die; this is
simply what happens. Every species on the planet is, after all, the
legacy of a succession of the "fittest" (commonly expressed as, "every
one of your ancestors scored!"), the product of a unique and
unrepeatable evolutionary history, and part of the environment to which
other species around it are adapted. It is valuable both as a source
of knowledge about evolutionary history and as a participant in the
environment. To suggest that because no species can endure forever it
is irrational for an evolutionist to want to conserve them, is as silly
as saying that preserving works of art is absurd merely because no art
restorer thinks art can be eternal.
We have seen from the sixth chapter of the Descent of Man, in the
section On the birthplace and antiquity of man that Darwin endorsed the
future extinction of the African gorilla (as well as African blacks and
aborigines!) since he believed that this would enhance the future
evolutionary potential of the Caucasian race (See Chapter 12 of The
Darwin Papers for the full quote).
You have not seen that, because it is not true. Darwin was discussing
why the "ape-men" his theory implied must have existed in the past did
not still exist in the present. He noted that humans pressed hard on
both other species and on technologically less sophisticated human
cultures that competed for the space and resources we use. Thus, e.g.
the American Indians and African and Australian hunter-gatherers were,
in his day, declining in numbers and in territory (Darwin's distinction
was not between "whites" and "blacks," but between "civilized nations"
and "savages"). Darwin inferred that the "ape-men" must have fared
even worse against the early _Homo sapiens_ than human "savages" fared
against their higher-tech conspecifics.
I have read creationists argue against evolution on the grounds that
humans, unlike apes, can read -- implying that even in their eyes,
there seems a smaller gap between chimps and illiterate
hunter-gatherers than between chimps and technologically sophisticated
literates. How can you excoriate Darwin for sharing the same
prejudices of the creationists you support? Darwin noted that when
future civilizations were even more technologically advanced, and the
great apes were extinct (and thus could no longer serve as living
intermediates between humans and monkeys), the gap between humans and
other primates would seem even wider. He did not advocate the
extinction either of the great apes or of human "savages," nor did he
imply that doing so would do anything to promote the advance of
civilization.
Darwin was actually enthralled with the concept of extinction of
species, dealing with the subject over seventy times in his Origin of
Species and Descent of Man. In fact, he saw extinction as being
essentially linked with his theory of natural selection as one of the
main instruments for the evolutionary process to move along: "The
extinction of species and of whole groups of species, which has played
so conspicuous a part inthe history of the organic world, almost
inevitably follows from the principle of natural selection; for old
forms are supplanted by new and improved forms."(Origin,Recapitulation
and Conclusion: How far the theory of natural selection may be
extended)
Note that extinction was a major problem in Darwin's day. Early
zoologists and botanists, assuming that God's creation was perfect and
that He would not allow any species to go extinct (isn't this an
implication of the Noah's Ark story?) were troubled and perplexed by
fossils of species that had no living members (note that even the deist
Thomas Jefferson asked Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for mammoths;
since a fossil of the beast had turned up in American, Jefferson
assumed it must still exist somewhere). Any theory that could explain
how it was possible for any species to go extinct had that fact in its
favor, so Darwin emphasized it.
=20
-- [snip of remaining errors and confusions]
-- Steven J.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG: THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL |
19 Mar 2006 08:07:03 PM |
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Oscar Wilde (although the epigram is also attributed to
Churchill and De Gaulle and others) once said:
"America is the only country to have gone from barbarism to decadence
without an intervening period of civilization.
I would substitue 'enlightment' for
" intervening period of civilization".
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