@raprap,
Quote:I am, to this day, confounded by Germany, the same country gave the world Schopenhauer, Schweitzer, and Strauss also gave the world Goebbels, Himmler and Dachau.
I believe in returning favors, ruprup, and since you have provided me with such a nifty design for a T-shirt this morning, I'm going to clear up the thing about Nazi racial policy for YOU.
The German Nazis were not guilty of any sort of a breakdown in logic or even very much of a breakdown in ethics. What they WERE guilty of was a failure to discern legitimate science from junk science; they were merely following what was viewed as accepted science at the time i.e. Darwinism and Social Darwinism.
Granted Haldane's precise formulation of the idea of genetic death did not exist at the time, the basic idea was understood. Nonetheless, for all the noise we hear about evolution, the way that "natural selection" is actually supposed to work remains a mystery to most people. A clear understanding of this idea of "genetic death" goes a certain way towards explaining some of the nazi-era thinking about racial policies.
There are two things conspicuously missing in the evolutionites picture.
One is the missing intermediate fossils; two is the missing intermediate "people".
In other words, aside from the fact that Darwinism demands that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediate types and none have ever been found, there is the question of why, if apes or "ape-like creatures(TM)" evolved into humans, we do not see creatures of every stage of such a process walking around today.
The basic answer, according to evolutionite dogma, is that natural selection kills off the old stock at every stage of such a process as one "beneficial mutation" after another after another is substituted into the herd.
You can picture this as a pipeline or tunnel of sorts, with apes walking in at one end and humans walking out the other, and picture the pipeline made in ten-foot segments, with some sort of a meat-grinder at the junction of each pair of segments. The old stock does not get past the meat grinder at any one stage of the process.
The thing has to work this way because the vast bulk of all mutations are harmful or fatal, and that means you'd be being exceedingly generous to admit that one mutation in every 10,000 or so might be "beneficial". In fact the normal English term for 'mutation' is "birth defect" and you might have noticed that the women going door to door for the Mothers' March of Dimes are ALWAYS collecting for research to PREVENT mutations and not to CAUSE them...
Nonetheless the claim which evolutionites make is that evolution is driven by a combination of chance mutations and "natural selection". Now, this also means that you cannot have multiple mutations spreading through the herd at one time in the process; the bulk of the mutations spreading around would be harmful/fatal and wipe out the herd.
That means that the only way this process can work at all is for one new trait (beneficial mutation) to get passed entirely through the herd, and then the next, and the next, and the next; thus the idea of a pipeline in ten foot segments, which does not allow the old stock past the gate at any one segment.
According to the theory, "genetic death" is the agency of all this. A "genetic death" occurs when somebody dies without heirs, i.e. takes himself out of the gene pool. The theory of evolution requires that there be a "cost" of substituting a genetic change into the herd and that this cost be in terms of genetic death. J.B.S. Haldane came up with a figure of 30 genetic deaths per substitution which was as favorable to evolution as he could get, and that means that for either you or me to get the good "beneficial mutation" AND THE WHOLE PIPELINE SCHEME WORK, 30 people have to die without heirs.
This dying out without heirs is supposedly CAUSED by the supposed advantage and selection pressure of the "beneficial mutation" involved at each step; this is the thing which weeds out all those not having the beneficial mutation at each step. In other words, the introduction of each new "beneficial mutation" causes all of those not having it to die out from jealousy and/or the inability to compete with those having it.
If that sounds stupid, it's probably because it IS stupid; nonetheless that's the way the theory supposedly works.
Haldane also figured that historically, when you include every sort of gentic death which the human birth rate has to compensate for, our species has had an excess birth rate capacity of something like ten percent, meaning that it would take 300 generations on average for each 30 turnovers of the population involved in substituting a single genetic change through the whole ape===>human evolving population.
Nobody had ever tried to quantify the whole thing before. The basic result indicates that it would take quadrillions of years to evolve from ape to man. That is the so-called "Haldane Dilemma".
This basic pipeline/genetic-death scheme is also the thing which Hitler and the other nazis were seeing in evolutionism. They were simply taking Charles Darwin at his word and, granted they were a a collection of major-league assholes and were guilty of all kinds of ****, they were NOT guilty of any sort of a breakdown in basic logic. They were assuming that if the rise of a new and supposedly better racial stock GUARANTEED the extinction of the old stock, then they were not doing the members of the old stock any favors by prolonging the agony. Similarly, when asked about the firebombing raids over Japan, Curtis LeMay replied that you're not doing a dog with a cancerous tail any favors by cutting the tail off in slices.
Hitler and other nazi bosses were assuming that Jews, gypsies, and others were not going to make the cut one way or another for this pass through the evolution meatgrinder, and that they were not doing them any favors leaving them around to a slow and unpleasant group demise.
