Darwin's Dystopia

But if you disagree with another member on a subject, must that member be eternally damned and never be allowed to comment on that subject forever without self-proclaimed judges jumping all over him

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But if you disagree with another member on a subject, must that member be eternally damned and never be allowed to comment on that subject forever without self-proclaimed judges jumping all over him

Pretty much. If a member spouts the same crap over and over, I suppose we could make an alphaneumeric code that embodies my complaints. As for you, you may wish to wear your blinders and attempt to present yourself as a voice of "reason", I dont buy that one either.

And, as one portion has already degenerated into apes, so the civilized man of the present day will at last, under the action of the inevitable law of necessity, be also succeeded by like descendents. If we may judge of the future by the actual present, it certainly does seem possible that so unspiritual and materialistic a body as our physical scientists should end as simia rather than as seraphs.

The argument from landscape predicts that the European stock of the Americas will be moulded back into the aboriginal forms they found there and which had evolved within that landscape.

Read your Owen and Wendt.

Get your gardens started before its too late.

Apparently gunga dim has chosen to abandon another of his lame threads .

farmerman wrote:

Apparently gunga dim has chosen to abandon another of his lame threads .

He gets a little visibility for his causes. That's probably all he wants.

I'm sorry if you are incapable of integrating more than one thought at a time--maybe it is something in your genes?

For instance, is the following (from that article) incorrect? If so how? If you disagree with the conclusions reached, why not say why those conclusions are wrong?

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Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not
through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the
fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed
there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.
But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as
far as our reason permits us to discover it; and I have given the evidence
to the best of my ability. We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to
me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for
the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but
to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has
penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system--with
all these exalted powers--Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible
stamp of his lowly origin.

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Second, if good breeding gives us better results, pushing us up the evolutionary slope, then bad or indiscriminate breeding drags us back down. "If…various checks…do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men," Darwin groaned, "the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule."

To believe that man was aboriginally civilised and then
suffered utter degradation in so many regions, is to take a pitiably low
view of human nature. It is apparently a truer and more cheerful view that
progress has been much more general than retrogression; that man has risen,
though by slow and interrupted steps, from a lowly condition to the highest
standard as yet attained by him in knowledge, morals and religion.

Now to Hitler. The first, most important thing to understand is that the link between Darwin and Hitler was not immediate. That is, nobody is making the case that Hitler had Darwin's eugenic masterpiece The Descent of Man

in one hand while he penned Mein Kampf in the other. Darwin's eugenic ideas were spread all over Europe and America,

until they were common intellectual coin by Hitler's time[/u]. That makes the linkage all the stronger, because we are not talking about one crazed man misreading Darwin but at least two generations of leading scientists and intellectuals drawing the same eugenic conclusions from evolutionary theory as Darwin himself drew.

For me the world is not a simple place and I have long been a student of the psychological conditioning and processes that go into the value system of any society and/or individual.

There was a time when segregation was considered a normal policy in this country and a majority of Americans had no problem with it.

Now, a tiny tiny minority thinks there is any moral or practical justification for segregation. There was a time when certain words were simply not used in polite society or allowed on the radio or in the movies. Now those words are commonplace and most people don't think of them as unusual anymore. There was a time when you wouldn't see two people in bed on television or in the movies--if they were even ON the bed together, somebody's foot had to be on the floor. Well, as you know all that has change.

The older I get, the more there is to observe of the dynamics and shifts in societal attitudes. Is it necessary to link Darwin's quite innocent observations and theories to what a crazed Hitler might have made of them? Of course not.

Is it interesting? It is to me.

You just continue to post irrelevant quotes (if indeed that was even a quote from authority , because the author seems so ill informed from the start). Read your Owen and Wendt.

Are there any scientific rebuttals of these statements.

Spendius, you really are crazy, aren't you?

Yeah, Gunga Dim (kudos, Boss) dropped this one like a hot rock. Sometimes he follows his threads for a while and attempts to defend what passes for a thesis--

In the end, though, Roswell has nailed it--Gunga Dim is just following a favorite tactic of the bible-thumpers who attack science. It's ironic, in fact, since it is the "big lie" tactic which Hitler perfected. Tell the same lies often enough, and shout them loudly enough, and they'll gain currency even without the least shred of plausible support for the idiotic claims embodied in them.

Ultimately, the knowledge science provides us is far too function to simply be debated away philosophical ramblings or even mere denial.