The intellectual vacuity of attributing “agency” and “purpose” to organisms
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On December 23m I called attention to the huge amount of money that the
John Templeton Foundation (JTF) was throwing at biology projects giving
evidence of...
5 hours ago
49 comments:
I just saw this, and it's absolutely bloody brilliant! :-)
Mate, I like your style. More please!
I'm sorry, but I just don't believe it. I think it's a crude forgery. Speaking as an independent scientist with an advanced degree in an unrelated field, I solemnly assure everyone that a genuine letter from Charles Darwin would have included his Zip code!
So there.
Absurd.
haha
Patently a fake. Darwin always referred to his home village as Down. Downe is a later spelling.
Wow CJ, you're a smart one...
CJ isn't quite right. Darwin did use Downe as the name of the village on several occasions.
letter 1686a
letter 1968
letter 1960
letter 2359
But the "e" never appears in the name of the house, so yes, this is a forgery. Perhaps from the same hand as the Hitler diaries ;-)
Will be posting more about Dawkins, Darwin and Hitler on my own blog later today:
http://roughguidetoevolution.blogspot.com
Since creationists routinely fail to understand satire and parody, I have to wonder how long it will take before we start seeing creationists claiming that Darwin sent a letter and a copy of Origin to Hitler's mother...
I always knew Darwin could see the future. Now people will finally believe me!
LV
http://theistsanonymous.blogspot.com/
I have evidence that Darwin WROTE the Hitler diaries, so that's not conclusive, above.
Obviously, this letter is a fabrication. Discovery Institute no doubt made it up. It contains at least one error. Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, so if the letter was written in 1881, then Adolf would be born eight, not eleven, years later. Eleven years from 1881 would give us 1892. And the letter was apparently written to one of Adolf Hitler's parents. That's odd! Was Charles Darwin supposedly to be acquainted with them? Geez!
Please post links (and comments and POSTS, if you wanna!) at:
www.ICallBS.net
Karridine (noted voice artist) is already working on ways to record your work... or Darwin's essays... or Obama's secretary's phone-calls... or Michelle's calls to The Messiah's tailor...
This is all very cute but will not obscure the fact that the Nazis were heavily influenced by what Darwin set in motion, plain and simple. There is abundant evidence for this and cleverness will not undo it.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v13/i2/nazi.asp
@Nick: Nazis rejected The Origin of Species; it was on their list of banned books.
On the other hand, the long-standing tradition of Christian anti-Semitism in Germany goes back a long, long way indeed. (Compare Martin Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies.) Funny how AiG fails to mention that...
For that matter, most modern racist and anti-Semitic movements reject the theory of evolution as well. And nearly all of them are Christian: The Klan, the numerous Christian Identity movements, the Council of Conservative Citizens...
Nick: the Nazis were heavily influenced by what Darwin set in motion
The Nazis were less "influenced" by Darwin than by anti-Semitic ideology, in the service of which some of them may have used Darwinian terms to suggest their destruction of "lesser" races was all part of nature's plan. The real point of "master race" rhetoric was not accelerated natural selection, it was self-aggrandizement.
By the way, Answers in Genesis is about as unreliable a source for scholarly citations as could be imagined. Try using references that are not linked to propaganda sites.
It's true... I saw Dan Rather touting this letter earlier this evening!
The Nazi movement was not directly influenced by Darwin per se, but was heavily influenced by Eugenics, which was a natural spin off of his theory. (This is no dig at Darwin. He was one of the histories greatest men, and I named my dog after him..) The truth is that the Nazi movement was hugely affected by ideas of hygenics, and health, and obsessive about Purity. So was much of the rest of the western world. The German-Nazi version of these ideas were twisted into seeing racial contamination as akin to biological disease. Dont blame Darwin for a Socialist Totalitarian system run amok.
If eugenics came about as a "natural spin off" from Darwin's theory, then Darwin indeed possessed a time machine, since humanity has practiced eugenics both with people and domestic animals since the dawn of recorded history.
Remarkable that his time machine both allowed future travel to observe Herr Hitler and past travel to influence the ancients.
And, purely for shits and giggles, let's lambast Newton and his "theory" of gravity and then blame him for the aeronautical science that without which we wouldn't have had 11 September 2001.
Linking to AiG as answers for anything (except for evidence of how bizarre and messed up christian biblical literalists are) is pure comedy gold.
At least that's how I read your comment.
Wait, you were serious?!
Eugenics has been around at least since Aristotle, who recommended it. But evolutionary adherents are the very antithesis of eugenicists, as those who accept evolutionary theory would wish environmental selection to proceed untinkered with, while eugenicists all wanna substitute their own self-annointed 'intelligent designs.'
I just noticed that this blog post is getting a few hits. I wrote it in a couple of minutes a few months back as a quick joke on the idea of a direct connection between Darwin and Hitler. As for any indirect link I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that demonstrates the Nazi's actually understood the theory of evolution. Sure, they might have occasionally paid lip service to the term 'evolution', but they co-opted and misused many diverse ideas to fit in with their pre-existing delusion of racial superiority.
They equally misused anthropology, historical analysis and even medicine yet it is clearly idiotic for modern societies to abandon these disciplines on that basis and revert to superstition.
One question to creationists on this one. Why Germany?
What was it about Germany that led the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection having such consequences that failed to materialize elsewhere? (Not that genocidal episodes never happened before or since WW2 but these are curiously never attributed to Charles Darwin).
Ha!
Hitler certainly believed in survival of the fittest in his last days, especially when he ordered to destruction of German infrastructure as the Russians approached Berlin. When Albert Speer commented that it would mean the end of the German people, Hitler replied:
"If the war is lost, the people will be lost also... For the nation [Germany] has proven to be the weaker, and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation [Russia]."
A decade ago, my stepdaughter-to-be's old school was Downe House, which was housed in Darwin's Downe House until it moved to Cold Ash in the Twenties . I'm So pretty down on Down, even though it doesn't amount to a syndrome.
John Derbyshire has surfaced a discovery of mine connecting to this parody, the difference being that the Hitler quote is real-
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTFiNjI1MmI0YWM1MGMxMzVmZmM4YzdiM2VlMzU2YzM=
Nice find Russell. Your link didn't work for me but I found the piece by doing a search on the national review site using the terms 'John Derbyshire' and 'Darwin'.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTFiNjI1MmI0YWM1MGMxMzVmZmM4YzdiM2VlMzU2YzM=
Mike, survival of the fittest, in regards to wars is a tautology. It basically means the strongest will win - and that belief is pretty much universal. In biological evolutionary terms, however, 'fittest' does not necessarily mean 'strongest'. It means 'best suited to a particular environment' That can often mean a physically weak organism will outcompete a physically strong competitor due to particular genetic advantages (such as resistance to a particular disease or the ability to eat certain foods during famine periods). The term survival of the fittest is almost never used by modern biologists when talking about evolution as it creates a misleading impression of evolution being a series of one on one combat matches rather than a much more nuanced and complex process.
I confess to an unfair advantage- a decade ago my stepdaughter to be was at Downe , the school founded in Darwin's Downe House , but which moved to Cold Ash in 1922,
Although it doesn't amount a a syndrome the alumnae are very down on those who spell it Down.
As to the Hitler correspondence on Creation , nothing beats realty and what that man actually wrote about
it beggars parody- Here a link to my article containing the recently rediscovered quote, which John Derbyshire cites in his link to this blog-
Here is the Springtime For Darwin Hitler quote-
http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2008/08/springtime-for-darwin.html
Apologies for the delay to those looking for my post on Dawkins on Darwin, economics and Hitler. It is now available here.
There is not a single comment here that is not biased. Who then can know the absolute truth? It is foolishness to argue...
Sorry about the length. Oops.
LauraBrooke (August 19, 2008 3:35 PM) said:
There is not a single comment here that is not biased. Who then can know the absolute truth? It is foolishness to argue...
That sounds a bit nihilistic. It is still possible to understand some (or heck, many) subjects to a reasonable degree of certainty, even if the Absolute, Ultimate Truth (tm) is forever beyond the grasp of us humble, flawed humans. Similarly, trying to improve our knowledge is not futile, even if the new knowledge it leads to is only provisional and of limited scope.
There was an excellent article by Daniel Harper, archived at the bottom of this page.
It is a bit disorganized--being a series of nested replies--and slightly off-topic since the origianl was apparently about Biblical Literalism; but his 'War of 1812' example is exactly right.
We make the best explanations we can, at the moment, with as much of the evidence as we happen to have. New evidence may come along and change our explanations, but the strongest, most powerful explanations arise from many independent (and converging) lines of evidence. It can become vanishingly unlikely to find evidence which shakes these explanations. This is how history is known.
Within exactly this kind of framework, Darwin's ideas of 'Common Descent' and 'Descent with Modification' have united vast amounts of data to become the foundation principles of modern biology; and in exactly this framework the 'Hitler cribbed all of his most abominable ideas directly from Darwin' meme has failed utterly.
The point of discussing it? Some folks get a few laughs (and the world needs all the laughter it can get); others get valuable exposure to ideas they haven't encountered before, and come away better informed.
Since creationists routinely fail to understand satire and parody, I have to wonder how long it will take before we start seeing creationists claiming that Darwin sent a letter and a copy of Origin to Hitler's mother.
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I'm sorry, but I just don't believe it. I think it's a crude forgery. Speaking as an independent scientist with an advanced degree in an unrelated field, I solemnly assure everyone that a genuine letter from Charles Darwin would have included his Zip code!
So there.
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Truth be told, what you wrote is something that was a long time coming.
Obviously, this letter is fake. It is found that institute. It contains at least one mistake. Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, so if this letter was written in 1881, and then adolf was born eight, not eleven, years later. 11 years from 1881 to 1892. And this letter is obviously write a Hitler's parents. This is strange! Is Charles Darwin called to understand them? Day!
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