Neo-Darwinism – Wikipedia

Neo-Darwinism is the interpretation of Darwinian evolution through natural selection as it has variously been modified since it was first proposed. It was early on used to name Charles Darwin's ideas of natural selection separated from his hypothesis of pangenesis as a Lamarckian source of variation involving blending inheritance.[1]

In the early 20th century, the concept became associated with the modern synthesis of natural selection and Mendelian genetics that took place at that time.

In the late 20th century and into the 21st century, neo-Darwinism denoted any strong advocacy of Darwin's thinking, such as the gene-centered view of evolution.

As part of the disagreement about whether natural selection alone was sufficient to explain speciation, in 1880, Samuel Butler called Alfred Russel Wallace's view neo-Darwinism.[2][3]

The term was again used by George Romanes in 1895 to refer to the version of evolution advocated by Wallace and August Weismann with its heavy dependence on natural selection.[4]

Weismann and Wallace rejected the Lamarckian idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics that even Darwin took for granted.[5][6] The term was first used to explain that evolution occurs solely through natural selection, and not by the inheritance of acquired characteristics resulting from use or disuse.[7] The basis for the complete rejection of Lamarckism was Weismann's germ plasm theory. Weismann realised that the cells that produce the germ plasm, or gametes (such as sperm and egg in animals), separate from the somatic cells that go on to make other body tissues at an early stage in development. Since he could see no obvious means of communication between the two, he asserted that the inheritance of acquired characteristics was therefore impossible; a conclusion now known as the Weismann barrier.[8]

From the 1880s to the 1930s, the term continued to be applied to the panselectionist school of thought, which argued that natural selection was the main and perhaps sole cause of all evolution.[9] From then until around 1947, the term was used for the panselectionist followers of Ronald Fisher.

Following the development, from about 1918 to 1947, of the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology, the term neo-Darwinian was often used to refer to that contemporary evolutionary theory.[10][11]

Biologists however have not limited their application of the term neo-Darwinism to the historical modern synthesis. For example, Ernst Mayr wrote in 1984 that "the term neo-Darwinism for the synthetic theory [the modern synthesis of the early 20th century] is wrong, because the term neo-Darwinism was coined by Romanes in 1895 as a designation of Weismann's theory."[12][1][7][13] Publications such as Encyclopdia Britannica similarly use neo-Darwinism to refer to current evolutionary theory, not the version current during the early 20th century synthesis.[14] Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould have used the term in their writings and lectures to denote the forms of evolutionary biology that were contemporary when they were writing.[15][16]

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Neo-Darwinism - Wikipedia

Social Darwinism: The Theory of Evolution Applied to Human …

Social Darwinism was the application of Charles Darwin`s scientific theories of evolution and natural selection to contemporary social development. In nature, only the fittest survivedso too in the marketplace. This form of justification was enthusiastically adopted by many American businessmen as scientific proof of their superiority.

Leading proponents of Social Darwinism included the following:

Spencer was widely popular among American capitalist leaders, but held a much smaller following in his homeland.

In 1907, Sumner published his most influential book, Folkways, in which he argued that customs and mores were the most powerful influences on human behavior, even when irrational. He concluded that all forms of social reform were futile and misguided.

Sumner`s views contrasted sharply with those of the advocates of the Social Gospel.

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Social Darwinism in American Thought by Richard Hofstadter.Social Darwinism in American Thought portrays the overall influence of Darwin on American social theory and the notable battle waged among thinkers ov...

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Digital Darwinism (9780749482282) – Kogan Page

About the book

Digital Darwinism takes an exhilarating look at disruptive thinking to inspire those who want to be the best at digital transformation. Change across business is accelerating, but the lifespan of companies is decreasing. Life is more unpredictable than ever and leaders are facing a growing abundance of decisions to make, data to process and technology that threatens to disrupt even the most established business models. These are the forces that could destroy your company but, with the right strategy in place, they could also help you transform it into a market leader. Digital Darwinism is a guiding hand through the turbulence of this moment, offering practical strategies as well as an ambitious call-to-action that lights a fire underneath complacency and inspires creative change.

In this book, Tom Goodwin shines a light into the future by exploring technology, society and the lessons of the past so that you can understand how to adapt, what to embrace and what to ignore. Goodwin proves how every assumption the business world has previously made about "digital" is wrong in order to revolutionize your mindset: incremental change isn't good enough, adding technology at the edges won't work and digital isn't a thing - it's everything. If you want your organization to succeed in the post-digital age, you need to be enlightened by Digital Darwinism.

A fascinating dip into a disruptive future.Dylan Jones, Editor, GQ

This finally answered many questions about innovation which have long haunted me - not least why most large companies are typically so bad at it. It's one of those rare books that is worth reading twice.Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman, Ogilvy & Mather Group, and TED speaker

In a cacophony of voices calling for an immediate digital revolution, how reassuring to hear one advocating a more nuanced and balanced path forward for your business. How refreshing to have an author parting the weeds of digital transformation, offering homespun, achievable suggestions and solutions for your company.The digital world is littered with a baffling array of jargon and acronyms. Goodwin cuts through the gobbledygook to offer down-to-earth, practical advice for transforming your business. Digital Darwinism reassures you that futurizing your company doesn't mean you need to be the next Uber or Amazon of anything. Among the multiple platinum nuggets in this book, the most valuable takeaway is that change must be at the core of your business, not at the edges. Digitally transform your business? First change the way you think about change.

In Digital Darwinism, Goodwin presents a thoughtful canvas of digital wisdom, covering the past, present and future with smart illustrative examples. It's a great map of the entire digital landscape, sprinkled with invaluable insights to act upon.Stefan Olander, former Vice President, Global Digital Innovation, Nike

The future does not fit in the containers or mindsets of the past. This book persuades, provokes and points to ways to rethink your business. Society, business and life are being disrupted by a revolutionary stage of evolution: Digital Darwinism. This book provides ways to thrive in the new environment.Rishad Tobaccowala, transformation expert, speaker and writer, and Chief Growth Officer and member of the Management Committee, Publicis Groupe

Goodwin delivers what he promises in his preface: the book is wildly irritating and inspiring at the same time. It is a passionate cry for more common sense in corporate decision making. The examples he provides demonstrate how little companies have embraced the digital age. Goodwin rightly questions the attempts from corporations to overcome disruption and ambiguity in the digital age either by better planning or by minor adjustments to business models and strategies that were developed in a bygone era of stability, linearity and predictability. He reminds us that a flexible response is the only answer to massively changing corporate environments and that entrepreneurship means maximizing opportunities and overcoming obstacles instead of minimizing risks. An overdue book.

Tom Goodwin sees organizations facing a Darwinian battle for survival, given the pace of technical change. That's familiar ground. What's so refreshing is his notion that empathy will be crucial in that battle - that businesses that put people first are most likely to stay the right side of the chaos.Mark Jones, Commissioning Editor, the World Economic Forum Agenda; formerly Global Editor, Networked Journalism, and Global Communities Editor, Reuters News

Tom Goodwin shows how Darwinian success depends not on ruthlessness but on learning how to play well with others.Douglas Rushkoff, author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

Goodwin is the right kind of futurist: he's a history geek at heart, and recognizes that innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum. Context is king, and there's plenty of that in this intelligently constructed book.Paul Kemp-Robertson, Co-founder, Contagious

If you ever wondered if and how you and your organization could survive and grow in today's disruptive environment this is the book for you. This beautifully written book offers an informative and insightful description of the age of disruption, the need for a paradigm shift in our thinking and practical guidelines for survival and growth. Enjoy, learn and apply.Jerry Wind, The Lauder Professor Emeritus of Marketing, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Today the words disruption and innovation are plastered everywhere. We've become numb to them, lost in a sea of information. The future is here yet it is understood unequally. With Digital Darwinism, Tom Goodwin uses his unique combination of passion, empathy and audacity to give us all an equal understanding of the future as it bowls over us.John Winsor, thinker, advisor and entrepreneur building platforms in the marketing, media and innovation industries, and Founder and CEO, Open Assembly

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Digital Darwinism (9780749482282) - Kogan Page

Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist and …

by Coel Hellier

1: Introduction2: Nazi Racial Theory (de Gobineau)3: Houston Stewart Chamberlain 4: Hans Gnther 5: Hitler and Mein Kampf 6: Creationist denial 7: Religion in the Third Reich 8: Christian Denial 9: Conclusion

Among those who dislike Darwins explanation of human beings as the product of evolution a common accusation is that Darwinian thinking has led to horrors such as the Nazi holocaust. For example the American religious commentator Ann Coulter writes: From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists (which is wrong on all the others, not just Hitler). So widespread is the claim that even many who accept that Darwinian evolution has been established as true, well beyond any reasonable doubt, also believe that Darwinian ideas were misused to justify Nazi atrocities. For example the British political commentator Andrew Marr writes that Darwinism was used to justify the Nazi holocaust.

Are these claims correct? Remarkably, for a claim so widely accepted, no they arent. Indeed, the Nazi ideology underpinning the extermination of the Jews was opposed to and incompatible with Darwinism, instead being a religious and creationist doctrine.

Even such a staunch Darwinian as Richard Dawkins fails to appreciate how anti-Darwin the Nazis were, hugely underplaying the differences. These differences are best illustrated by the schematics in Figure 1. On the left is the Darwinian evolutionary tree showing the origin of man out of monkey-like ancestors. In the middle is a schematic of the family tree of todays dogs. The domestic dog, as with other domesticated and farmed species, is partially the product of Darwinian natural selection and partially the product of human artificial selection to produce desired outcomes. Dawkins is correct to make a distinction between artificial selection something weve known about since the invention of farming and natural selection, Darwins idea explaining the evolution of species over geological timescales.

Fig. 1: The `branching' pattern of descent produced by Darwinian natural selection and by artificial selection contrasts with Nazi racial ideology of separate creation of distinct races, and the sinfulness of "contaminating" the "God's handiwork" Aryan race by allowing inter-breeding with "lesser" races.

Dawkins writes, in response to Ben Steins propaganda film Expelled

Hitler didnt apply NATURAL selection to humans. [] Hitler tried to apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans, and there is nothing specifically Darwinian about artificial selection. It has been familiar to farmers, gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders, pigeon fanciers and many others for centuries, even millennia.

The suggestion here is that Hitler wanted to use farming techniques to artificially select desired traits and so produce a master race. This would indeed be an ideology that had some similarities to Darwinism. However, while Professor Dawkins can be excused for never having looked into Nazi ideology, abhorrent and unscientific as it is, this misunderstands Nazi racial doctrine and what they were trying to achieve. In fact, Nazi racial ideology was radically different, being based on a creationist vision that was totally incompatible with and opposed to Darwinian evolution.

The panel on the right of Fig. 1 illustrates Nazi racial doctrine. They believed that the different human races were distinct and separate, created as God wanted them, and they regarded these permanent racial characteristics as all important to human culture and destiny. Further, they believed that allowing racial inter-mixing had led to the downfall of civilizations, and was a sin against Gods creation. Thus they considered it of overwhelming importance to preserve their own Nordic/Aryan race, which they regarded as superior and created in Gods own image, by preventing inter-breeding with inferior races which they regarded as literally sub-human, being separate creations.

Flag of the Nazi Deutsche Christen

So, yes, the Nazis wanted to use selective breeding, but not to create a master race, but to preserve an Aryan master race, preserving the primordial Aryan characteristics which they believed were the highest image of God.

This ideology shares one thing with Darwinism, namely the possibility of using selective breeding to achieve a desired end, a possibility mankind had known about since the invention of farming, about 12,000 yrs ago. But in all other respects it is profoundly anti-Darwinian. Whereas in Darwinian evolution all mankind evolved out of a common monkey-like ancestor, with all human races sharing a common origin in the recent past, in Nazi ideology the different human races were distinct and separate creations.

In other words, the Nazis, like many creationists today, accepted what creationists call micro-evolution, the operation of natural selection within a species; but, like other creationists, they totally rejected macro-evolution, the evolution of one species into another.

While the mutability of species, with new species evolving out of distant ancestors, is the central theme of Darwinism, the Nazis found that idea anathema, and placed a heavy emphasis on racial purity and the distinctiveness and separateness of different species. Further, the Nazis found abhorrent the materialist notion that man might be just like other animals, and, from their religious and moralistic perspective, they insisted that man had a spiritual soul.

That is why leading Nazi ideologues wrote books explicitly rejecting Darwinism, and why they banned Darwinian works from public libraries. The truth is that nothing in Nazi ideology derives from Darwin the slight overlap is only in areas known about long pre-Darwin. Nor are there any quotes of leading Nazis looking to Darwin or pointing to Darwin as justification if there were the creationists would likely have found them by now. In short, the association of Nazi doctrine with Darwinism is an outright fabrication by those who wish to discredit Darwinism and the scientific account of the origin of man.

The Nazis racial theory is straightforwardly traced back to the writings of Arthur de Gobineau (18161882), a French aristocrat, novelist and diplomat. His work on the Inequality of the Human Races was published in 18531855 (before Darwins Origin of Species), and was translated into English in 1856, and into German in 1897, by Ludwig Schemann, a leading proponent of Nazi theory.

Arthur de Gobineau

De Gobineaus central argument is that humans races are distinct and unequal, and he argues against the unitarian idea that all men are descended from a common origin. In Chapter 11, headed Racial differences are permanent, he writes:

I conclude, from this refutation of the only arguments brought forward by the Unitarians, that the permanence of racial types is beyond dispute; it is so strong and indestructible that the most complete change of environment has no power to overthrow it, so long as no crossing takes place.

By crossing de Gobineau means inter-racial breeding. He argues that inter-racial mixing causes degeneracy, with the blood of the superior races being polluted by that of inferior races.

Much of the book is concerned with the fall of civilizations, asking why the great civilizations of the past fell. He argues that it resulted from the degeneration caused by inter-racial mixing:

And when I have shown by examples that great peoples, at the moment of their death, have only a very small and insignificant share in the blood of the founders, into whose inheritance they come, I shall thereby have explained clearly enough how it is possible for civilizations to fall .

In Chapter 1 de Gobineau, a Catholic Christian, wrote:

The fall of civilizations is the most striking, and, at the same time, the most obscure, of all the phenomena of history. The wisdom of the ancients yields little that throws light on our subject, except one fundamental axiom, the recognition of the finger of God in the conduct of this world; to this firm and ultimate principle we must adhere, accepting it in the full sense in which it is understood by the Catholic Church. It is certain that no civilisation falls to the ground unless God wills it .

This laid the seeds of an idea that would be echoed in Mein Kampf, that the fall of civilizations was God-ordained as a punishment for racial inter-mixing, that God wanted his separately created races to be kept separate, and that allowing racial inter-mixing was counter to Gods will.

de Gobineau admits that one counter-argument which I confess, gives me more concern is that It is said that Genesis does not admit of a multiple origin for our species. He argues that:

We must, of course, acknowledge that Adam is the ancestor of the *white* race. The scriptures are evidently meant to be so understood, for the generations deriving from him are certainly white,

and that:

there is nothing to show that, in the view of the first compilers of the Adamite genealogies, those outside the white race were counted as part of the species at all. Not a word is said about the yellow races, and it is only an arbitrary interpretation of the text that makes us regard the patriarch Ham as black.

Thus de Gobineau is arguing that the Mankind created by God in the Garden of Eden was the White race, and that the other races, who could be regarded as sub-human, had had separate creations. This idea has cropped up periodically in Christian thought, for example in the Dutch Reformed Church as a justification of apartheid, and explains puzzles such as why the Mark of Cain was needed to protect Cain if there were no other peoples.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (18551927) was one of the intellectual founders of Nazism. His The Foundations Of The Nineteenth Century sold a quarter of a million copies by 1938. On Chamberlains 70th birthday, the Nazi party newspaper dedicated five columns to him, describing The Foundations as the gospel of the Nazi movement. This books ideas of Aryan supremacy and a struggle against Jewish influence became the intellectual justification of Nazism, being carried in all public libraries and included in school curricula. Rosenberg described himself as electrified by reading this book, which he regarded as the inspiration for his own Myth Of The Twentieth Century.

Hitler visited Chamberlain several times between 1923 and 1926, and attended his funeral in 1927. In 1923 Chamberlain wrote to Hitler saying:

Most respected and dear Hitler That Germany, in the hour of her greatest need, brings forth a Hitler that is proof of her vitality I can now go untroubled to sleep May God protect you!.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Chamberlain was a Christian, devoting chapters of his Foundations to his version of Christianity. He believed that much of Church doctrine was a distortion of Christs teaching, writing that:

the whole superstructure of the Christian Churches has hitherto been outside of the personality of Christ

and that:

we need a regeneration that shall be specifically religious: we need to tear away the foreign rags and tatters that still hang upon our Christianity as the trappings of slavish hypocrisy: we need the creative power to construct out of the words and the spectacle of the crucified Son of Man a perfect religion fitting the truth of our nature .

In the introduction to Foundations Chamberlain writes of Darwinism as A manifestly unsound system. He explicitly advocates a dualistic and spiritual vision of man, rejecting monism (the idea that humans are simply physical material) and saying that Darwinism and so-called `scientific monism, materialism were shallow and therefore injurious systems [] which have nevertheless in the nineteenth century produced so much confusion of thought.

He then says that as a result of such errors theists become in the twinkling of an eye atheists, a strikingly common thing in the case of Jews .

Chamberlain continued that for us (Teutons) God is always in the background. He contrasts this with a Jewish scholar in whom he had occasion to observe the genesis and obstinacy of the apparently opposite atheistical conception, and remarked that:

It is absolutely impossible ever to bring home to such a man what we Teutons understand by Godhead, religion, morality. Here lies the hard insoluble kernel of the `Jewish problem. And this is the reason why an impartial man, without a trace of contempt for the in many respects worthy and excellent Jews, can and must regard the presence of a large number of them in our midst as a danger not to be under-estimated.

This association of atheism with Jews was later echoed by Hitler in Mein Kampf, and was widespread at the time. As one example, Cardinal Hlond, Primate of Poland, issued a pastoral letter in 1936 to be read in all Catholic churches saying:

It is a fact that Jews are waging war against the Catholic church, that they are steeped in free-thinking, and constitute the vanguard of atheism, the Bolshevik movement, and revolutionary activity. It is a fact that Jews have a corruptive influence on morals [] from a religious and ethical point of view, Jewish youth are having a negative influence on the Catholic youth in our schools.

Although Chamberlain did some work in botany, he described himself in his book The Aryan Worldview (1905) as someone who has no scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, as with many Christians, he had deep antipathy to Darwinism, which he saw as materialist and soul-less. In his major work Immanuel Kant (1905) he attacked Darwinism at length.

In the section Plato he defended ideas of a Platonic essence, such that different races were of different essence, and totally rejected Darwins ideas of races and species as malleable, and evolving into different species. Here are some quotes:

A characteristic symptom of our modern intellectual disease is the increasing tendency to relegate things to ever remoter and remoter origins. Thus, for instance, man was said to be descended from the ape; the anatomical impossibility of this is established to-day by a thousand reasons

the nonsensical dogmas of the theorisers on natural selection and descent may once and for all be rejected.

That is how anti-science and phantasticism have invaded our times. And how did this happen? It was the inevitable consequence of wishing to understand nature from the process of growth instead of from its Being, [The Being here being the constant Platonic essence, in contrast to changeable Darwinian growth.]

Constancy, not only of single species without any change from the oldest palaeozoic strata until to-day but, as I have just shown, constancy of precisely the same structural conditions down to every detail that is the great fundamental fact, the fact of all facts, which pure conception gives us in regard to life. Life is form, constant form.

And he gets quite disparaging about Darwin: These few remarks only serve to show what a want of reflection disfigures the fundamental thoughts of Darwin and his followers.

And lauds a Darwin critic: This testimony of a professional man rich in knowledge and prudent in judgement, deserves attention at a time when the Darwinian craze works such mischief []

Further, Chamberlain is totally dismissive of the Darwinian idea that man could ascend from a bestial past and that natural selection, in its blind choice, is forsooth to transfigure us into an exalted being.

This passage is worth quoting more fully, since the usual accusation is that the Nazis took from Darwin an idea of using selective breeding to create a master race. Chamberlain, the foremost intellectual founder of Nazism, totally and explicitly rejects this, instead wanting to preserve the past:

Darwin specially recommends his theory for our acceptance in that it also promises to mankind that all corporal and mental endowments will tend to progress in the direction towards perfection. I, on the contrary, should have thought that we might have contented ourselves with the gifts of a Plato, a Descartes, a Leonardo, a Goethe, a Kant how far better this than that we, fooled by delusions out of a bestial past that is no past should with outstretched greedy hands, without cease or rest, clutch at a phantastic future in which natural selection, in its blind choice, is forsooth to transfigure us into an exalted being, the like of which is beyond the imagination of the great and holy and sublime men of the present generation!

Thus, to Chamberlain, Nazi theory was not about using selective breeding to perfect a master race, Nazi ideology was that the Aryans were already a master race, and had always been, since an original creation by God. And that the Aryan master race was now threatened by interbreeding with lesser races of human, which it was their duty to prevent. This theme was later to make up a large swathe of Mein Kampf.

This is a complete rejection of the Darwinian idea of humans having a common origin and having evolved from apes. Indeed Chamberlain is quite disparaging about Darwinism, calling it an English sickness:

If we might not say that this craze [Darwinism] is only the last belated straggler of romanticism and Hegelism in alliance with flat English utilitarianism, and that a hundred years will not have passed before it will be judged as men to-day judge alchemy, if we did not see around us an energetic shaking off of this English sickness, as the Zoologist Friedrich Dreyer called it in a happy phrase, we might abandon all hope of a future for Science and culture.

Alfred Rosenberg was another leading Nazi, and a major proponent of Nazi ideology, who also explicitly opposed and criticised Darwinism. In his Myth Of The Twentieth Century he writes:

The liberal epoch brought enormous desolation in the church domain. This was precipitated by its many pseudoscientific beliefs such as evolution. [] The tragic thing about the spiritual history of the last hundred years is that the churches have made the liberal materialistic outlook their own. [] Thus the Darwinian era was able to create enormous confusion.

The above sections have shown how Nazi racial ideology originated prior to Darwin, in the form of de Gobineau, and from ideologues such as Chamberlain who explicitly opposed and rejected Darwinism. Lets now turn to Nazi ideologues during the Third Reich era, of whom Hans Gnther is a prominent example.

Hans Gnther

Hans Gnther (18911968), known as the Race Pope (Rassenpapst) was the leading Third Reich exponent of Nazi racial ideology. His Short Ethnology of the German People was published in 1929, selling 270,000 copies. He was appointed to a chair in racial theory at Jena in 1931, and joined the Nazi party in 1932, being lauded and decorated by Hitler.

Gnthers major work was The Racial Elements of European History (English translation, 1927). Gnther drew heavily on de Gobineau and Chamberlain, writing (Chapter 12):

The French Count Arthur Gobineau (1816-82), was the first to point out in his work, Essai sur linegalite des races humaines (1853-5), the importance of the Nordic race for the life of the peoples. Count Gobineau, too, was the first to see that, through the mixture of the Nordic with other races, the way was being prepared for what to-day (with Spengler) is called the Fall of the West. it is thanks to Schemann [and] his translation of the Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, which appeared 1898-1901, that Gobineaus name and the foundations he traced for the Nordic ideal have not fallen into forgetfulness. The very great importance of Gobineaus work in the history of the culture of our day is shown by Schemann in his book, Gobineaus Rassenwerk (1910).

About the same time, too, in 1899, appeared the work which for the first time brought the racial ideal, and particularly the Nordic ideal, into the consciousness of a very wide circle through the enthusiasm, and also the opposition, which it aroused: this work was The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by H. S. Chamberlain

Since the works of Gobineau and Chamberlain appeared, many investigators, in the realms of natural and social science, have devoted themselves eagerly to bringing light into racial questions, so that to-day not only the core of the theory both of Gobineau and of Chamberlain stands secure, but also much new territory has been won for an ideal of the Nordic race. A new standpoint in history, the racial historical standpoint, is shaping itself. Following the terms used by Gobineau and Chamberlain, we come here and there upon more or less clear conceptions of the need for keeping the Germanic blood pure, or (following Lapouge) of keeping the Aryan blood pure.

Thus we have the leading Third Reich race ideologue explicitly attributing his ideas to pre-Darwin and anti-Darwin writers. It is true, though, that Gnther then goes on to mention selection and Darwin, saying: the influence of the conception of selection only really begins to show itself after the foundations of modern biology were laid by Darwins Origin of Species in 1859. The conception of selection was bound to have an effect on the view taken of the destiny of the peoples. Darwins cousin, Francis Galton (18221911), the father of eugenics, was the first to see this.

However, it is clear that from Darwin he is taking only a mechanism, namely selection, whereas it is from Gobineau and Chamberlain that he is taking motivation. He continues: Through researches such as these [Darwin, Galton, Mendel] Gobineaus teachings received a deeper meaning, and found fresh support from all these sources, from the sciences of heredity, eugenics, and race: the Nordic movement was born. And Gobineaus central thesis was the anti-Darwinian idea of separately created and permanent racial types, and the idea that allowing racial mixing would destroy the Aryan/Nordic superior race.

After a lengthy lead-up reviewing the origins of Nazi doctrine, lets now turn to Mein Kampf (19251926). This was the book that sold 10 million copies, it was this book above all that was read by the German populace, being the single most influential statement of Nazi doctrine. If a people were willing to support or silently acquiesce to the removal and elimination of the Jews from German society, it was above all the justification presented in Mein Kampf building on a thousand years of Christian antipathy towards Jews that mattered.

Mein Kampf does not mention Darwin even once. Where atheism is mentioned (twice) it is pejorative, associating atheism with Jews and Marxism (namely: They even enter into political intrigues with the atheistic Jewish parties against the interests of their own Christian nation and atheistic Marxist newspapers ). Instead, Mein Kampf presents a religious, creationist and moralistic argument for removing Jews from German society. That is the major theme of the book, running through it repeatedly.

Hitler ends Chapter 2 with:

And so I believe to-day that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.

In line with the above Nazi thinkers, Hitler believed that mankind did not have a common origin, but consisted of several distinct and separately created races. The Aryan race was the superior race, with other races such as Jews and Slavs being literally sub-human. Hitler believed that the Aryans had enjoyed a golden past, and that Germanys current troubles were the result of allowing racial inter-mixing, which was destroying the master race, leading to a degeneration of society. Thus it was morally necessary to prevent racial inter-mixing, if necessary by a final solution to the Jewish problem.

Hitler spends much time criticising the churches for opposing each other rather than the Jews:

Catholics and Protestants are fighting with one another to their hearts content, while the enemy [Jews] of Aryan humanity and all Christendom is laughing up his sleeve. Look at the ravages from which our people are suffering daily as a result of being contaminated with Jewish blood.

Think further of how the process of racial decomposition is debasing and in some cases even destroying the fundamental Aryan qualities of our German people.

This pestilential adulteration of the blood, of which hundreds of thousands of our people take no account, is being systematically practised by the Jew to-day.

Systematically [Jews] corrupt our innocent fair-haired girls and thus destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world.

Note the can no longer be replaced. Hitlers conception was of an original creation of the Aryan race by God, and that any change from there is degeneration. This is creationist and the opposite of idea of creating a master race by selective breeding.

The two Christian denominations look on with indifference at the profanation and destruction of a noble and unique creature who was given to the world as a gift of Gods grace.

So to Hitler the Aryan was a noble and unique creature who was given to the world as a gift of Gods grace, an ideal that was being corrupted.

Everybody who has the right kind of feeling for his country is solemnly bound, each within his own denomination, to see to it that he is not constantly talking about the Will of God merely from the lips but that in actual fact he fulfils the Will of God and does not allow Gods handiwork to be debased.

So to Hitler the Aryan race was Gods handiwork and the Will of God was that it be preserved.

For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against Gods Creation and Gods Will.

So the Aryans are Gods Creation and whoever allows racial inter-mixing destroys His work and wages war on Gods Will.

Over against all this, the VOLKISCH concept of the world recognises that the primordial racial elements are of the greatest significance for mankind.

The primordial racial elements refers to the distinct races as separately created by God. This is the complete opposite of any Darwinian evolutionary account.

In principle, the State is looked upon only as a means to an end and this end is the conservation of the racial characteristics of mankind.

Conservation of what already exists, of a created Aryan race, not the Darwinian idea of an evolving man.

But, on the other hand, [the Volkish principle] denies that an ethical ideal has the right to prevail if it endangers the existence of a race that is the standard-bearer of a higher ethical ideal.

Excusing what might be seen as unethical (oppressing Jews) by appeal to a higher ethical ideal of preserving Gods creation as God intended.

Continued here:

Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist and ...

Marketing Darwinism | by Paul Dunay

Marketing Darwinism met up with Tom Taylor, Managing Director of Blueprint Technologies on his recent trip to NYC. Excerpts from the conversation:

MD: Tom, Blueprint has won award after award for phenomenal growth and customer satisfaction. Whats going on?

Tom: Thanks a ton; we are humbled by the recognition. We believe our success can be attributed to a combination of our unique perspective, drive for innovation, laser focus on the customer, and the quality of our team, our customers, and our partners. Weve been very agile in addressing market and customer needs we move quickly and have established a solid track record of delivering superior customer value.

MD: Great. You lead Client Development at Blueprint, tell us about your approach and where Marketing fits in.

Tom: Our approach is very execution-oriented. We hire entrepreneurial doers with amazing track records in industry and surround them with top-notch technologists and delivery professionals to amplify their effectiveness. Thats a core part of the collaborative approach we take at Blueprint Client Development doesnt end with the team I lead, it runs across the entire company. At Blueprint, all hands on deck really means that everyone aligns around customer value, and delivery excellence.

MD: Marketing?

Tom: Were constantly refining the sophistication of the handshake between Marketing and Client Development, and investing strategically to really accelerate this. Tight integration between Marketing and Client Development is what will continue to drive momentum and support scale as we continue to grow.

MD: What do you see in the Marketplace?

Tom: Were lucky to be in the Seattle area, which is at the forefront of a good number of key technology trends. Data Science, AI, Machine Learning, Business Process Automation, Cloud Solutions all of these are top of mind for many of our customers right now. We often find that while the organizations we work with aspire to these higher order capabilities, they have foundational enablers that need to be addressed at the core infrastructure level around cloud migration, data engineering, modern workforce tool sets, etc. One of Blueprints key value propositions is our ability to traverse and up-level the entire organizational capabilities stack from core infrastructure up to customer experience optimization this allows our customers to achieve wholistic digital transformation rather than just incremental single-point solutions.

I sat down with Srivats Srinivasan, an associate and entrepreneur. Srivats company, Nayamode, just acquired a Bay-Area agency called Bluewave. Interesting to see Seattle companies buying Bay Area outfits! I was particularly interested in this because of the role Marketing plays in Digital Transformation- this acquisition was based on Nayamode rounding out its Digital Transformation services.

Some excerpts from the chat

Marketing Darwinism: Srivats, congratulations on both Nayamodes success and the recent acquisition of Bluewave. Tell us more about your strategy.

SS: Thanks. We felt strongly that growth and evolution really our journey to the next phase required deepening elements of our skill-set as it pertains to the overall rubric of Digital Transformation. In this case, we were enamored with Bluewaves deep design and visual storytelling track-record and understood that it was a key element in this next phase for us. The strong team and delightful customer base was a wonderful addition too!

Marketing Darwinism: You mentioned Digital Transformation. In your conception, what does it mean exactly?

SS: Yes, we understand that it is a term bandied about, almost in fact too much. In our view, Digital Transformation is about using technology judiciously and in context to create products, processes, and services that enhance and accelerate the best parts of the organization and keep the worst tendencies at bay. Digital Transformation is neither a one-size fits all thing nor is it an overnight turn. As with most fundamental shifts, there is a journey required and technology plays only so big a role.

Marketing Darwinism: Nayamode is one of those interesting stories insofar as youve grown without really marketing yourself in a broad sense. As Marketers, our readers would love to understand a bit more about your strategy here.

SS: You are no doubt generally correct but we are changing! At the outset, we grew through the sales process, leveraging our connections and experience in Marketing in large organizations, mostly in technology. As we grew, we certainly evolved, but were lucky in that our customers and we created deep partnerships in which as long as we continued to do great work and listen, we remained loyal to each other. Also, we had a bit of the Cobblers Children problem in which we paid so much attention externally that at times we neglected ourselves. That has changed however. In this phase, very much the most exciting phase in our history as a company, telling our story will be an integral part of the strategy. We are humbled to be included, for instance, in this blog.

Editors Note: While in some cases Marketing is an afterthought, we believe that Marketing firms can lead the process of Digital Transformation because of their keen view of the customer and their expertise in pivoting quickly based on business models and customer needs. This traverses the B to B and B to C spaces. We want to hear about other cases of M&A by Marketing companies looking to complete their Digital Transformation portfolios.

Heres a great video of me and Aseem Badshah the CEO of Socedo, a social media lead generation tool, talking about 7 ways Blockchain can transform marketing! We hope you enjoy it

Two of my very good friends, Romi Mahajan of the KKM Group and Aseem Badshah of Socedo shot a video discussing our most recent blog post on the Return of the Marketing Mix. Ultimately, marketing is a mix of channels, tactics, and bets, of which some are measurable and some are not. Its time for marketers to reclaim their role as engagers, risk-takers, and experimenters!!

Fashions change.

This clich doesnt apply just to hemlines and jeans, but to business as well.Anyone who claims that business is all about logic and data needs to get a reality-check; Marketers are perhaps the worst offenders here, much to their detriment.Of late, Marketers have suffered from a deep alienation from the real essences of their profession and we hope that 2018 will usher in a return to sanity.

This alienation or departure from sanity in Marketing- stems from the over-indexing on Data and Measurement.While this sounds strange, even counterintuitive and heretical, it stands the test of logic and does not require a deep knowledge of Marketing to understand.Data and Measurement are no doubt valuable but they can also be the refuge of scoundrels.

The key in the above paragraph is the term over-indexing.In other areas of life, the tendency to over-index is called zealotry.In Marketing, the zealotry of measurement has created an untenable situation in which Marketing is asked to be as resilient as Physics or Mathematics; So too are Marketers, who feel forced to conform to the fashions of the day.For the past decade or so, the fashion has been Performance Marketing or, in a wild conflation of strategy and channel, Digital Marketing.

The genesis story here is a good one.Marketing for a long time appeared to be a cocktail of guesses mixed with a dose of manipulation.Organizations started to get frustrated with the lack of predictability and rising costs associated with Marketing and the ecosystem of agencies and media companies that had to be invoked when even considering bringing a product, service, or brand to market.Theories of consumer reception abounded, but the overall logic of Marketing appeared to be something akin to do it and it will work.Since no company could afford to shut off all Marketing, they continued in an inertial frame for decades.

Then came the Internet.Almost overnight- or so it seemed- behavior patterns changed.In addition, the almost infinite real estate and low cost of replication on the Internet, allowed for a completely different cost structure for Marketing. Completing the hat-trick was the fact that digitized Marketing can be revved quickly and tests of efficacy can be run in record time.A heady mix indeed!

And for a while it seemed great.Marketers could go to market quickly and bypass the usual middle-men.

Soon, however, the false quants took over and started writing how Marketing was both a Science and Predictive.Tomes could be written about the false attribution that plagued the marketing scene with the eminent measurability of Digital Marketing.We neglectedPater Semper Incertus Est.

Marketers new to the profession became one-channel ponies. They only knew Digital Marketing. They also grew up under the totalitarianism of measurement.They believed in the falsity of attribution and hewed only to the channels that provided an easy story for attribution.

Lo and behold, pundits declared the demise of traditional marketing.Some said TV was dead. Others eulogized radio.Still others print and outdoor.Digital Marketing was ROI Marketing and ROI Marketing was King (forgive the pun!)

The zealotry created real problems for real Marketers.First, they were subjected to Wall Street-type time-frames. What would in a sane world take a year, had to be measured in weeks or months.Second, the need to show ROI created a channel bias in which they were forced to market in only those channels which were eminently measurable.Third, they lost the Art which defined Marketing and chose, instead, to genuflect at the altar of a false science.CMOs lost their jobsin 18 monthsbecause they could not prove the ROI they agreed to.Marketing lost its way.

Fast forward to now.

Are Marketers ready to reclaim their profession?Are they ready to bring back that Evergreen-yet-needs-to-be-green-again concept that defined their art?Yes, you know what we mean- The Marketing Mix.

We predict that 2018 will be the year in which Marketers re-embrace the notion of managing a portfolio of bets, of which some are measurable and others are not.The rush to measurement restricts the channels Marketers pick to engage with, not unlike a Chef with an infinitude of ingredients but only one ladle and one pan with which to create a gourmet meal.

The portfolio will no doubt contain elements of Digital Marketing but will also likely concentrate on what the current and future audience really needs and could, thus, index on physical marketing, TV, Radio, Outdoor, even Print.Who knows.Why discount ideas and channelsa priori?

Ironically, the zealotry around measurability and ROI lands Marketers in an ironic soup- they restrict themselves from generating real ROI by thinking of it as an input and not as an outcome.

All fashions have their arc.Its high time we reclaim Marketing from the ROI zealots and re-engage with the world as it is and as it could be.

Guest post by:Romi Mahajan, Blueprint ConsultingSteven Salta, Agilysys

No matter how much technology has changed our day to day lives, both at home and at work, what remains essential to running a successful business is customershow you treat them, how they feel about your product or service, and whether they share those good (or bad) feelings.

In decades past, interacting with customers and helping to manage their problems and expectations was something that was left mostly to humans, which meant any good or bad things could also be subject to staffing or competing deadlines. But technology has helped with that in a unique way: by automating much of the customer journey through artificial intelligence, or AI.

Customers may not realize it, but a part of the process with many companies is already managed by AI. Its helping with predictive needs, to name just one area. And its use will only continue to grow. This graphic explains what its doing and how business will continue to use AI.

Click To Enlarge

Via Salesforce

On April 6, 2016, the Department of Labor released a 1000-page document known as the Fiduciary Duty rule (DOL fiduciary) requiring financial advisors to always act in the best interest of the client, expanding the meaning of investment advice fiduciary originally defined under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 to also include retirement investment advice. Asset managers have since faced a new set of intricate regulations to comply with, tight timelines to meet, and structural/operational changes to enact within their own firms.

From the very beginning, the fiduciary rule had the weight of inevitability and the social pressure of protecting investors morality behind it. Assets under management in America alone nears $40 trillion, most of which is managed by the USs largest 50 banks.

While the industry foresaw change with the DOL fiduciary rule, my marketing team saw opportunity. What if we could prepare our subject matter experts to react quickly, time our content with the news cycle, and launch an advertising campaign that could help demystify the rule for our clients and potential prospects? Better yet, what if we could be the leading consulting firm on the rule and how to implement it? We immediately got to work.

Program execution

Over the course of 14 months, we helped PwC grow a dedicated DOL team of nearly 200 employees serving 25 clients, 120 projects, and of course we booked business. Best of all we got the call every marketer dreams of from the project team to please turn your marketing off we have too much demand!

In much of industry, the idea of Digital Transformation has taken root. At the core of this process is the need to replace antiquated and slow processes, products, and service offerings with agile, automated, and smart processes, products, and service offerings. In addition, digital transformation is about the inclusion of all potentially interested parties (employees, partners, customers, influencers) in the creation and execution of new lines of business and innovation.

While the concept of Digital Transformation has been around in the entire Internet Age, necessary elements have indeed been missing. First, not always were the underlying technologies ready for prime-time. What works in manicured and controlled environments doesnt always work at scale or in fast-moving, instant-decision environments. Second, the culture of transformation has not always been present with many forces internally and externally being focused on the power of the status quo. Third, Digital Transformation requires the foregrounding of certain parts of the organization at the perceived expense of others parts. With these constraints, the prevailing scenario for transformation has been characterized by the gap between intention and execution.

Of the organizational barriers that impede the progress for Digital Transformation, the schism between IT and Business is perhaps the most profound. Business users in organizations are governed by entirely different imperatives than IT teams are. While business changes, roles and cultures do not always keep up with the dynamism of business models and the directives that come out of the C-suite.

Business users are defined by the Power of NOW! while IT is chartered with issues of security, governance, compliance (and at times control) that if applied in the canonical methodology, are antagonistic to the time-based agility that has come to define modern business.

This happens even when IT teams and Business teams are friendly and believe in the same overall set of goals. This is the result of technology configurations that were not flexible or adaptive, two defining characteristics of true Digital Transformation.

When IT and Business are in Harmony, agility is possible in a way that does not run afoul of the core mandates of IT. When IT and Business are in structural harmony, all of the manic energies of the organization can be trained on the same end goal.

Running IT like a Business and running Business in an IT-native world are keys to Digital Transformation. At stake here is the ability of organizations to navigate the shoals of modernity and complexity, in which every expanding pools of data and ever-growing avenues of expansion characterize business.

As such, Digital Transformation is the ultimate expression of IT-Business Harmony and IT-Business Harmony is the starting point of real Digital Transformation.

Guest post by:Romi Mahajan, KKM GroupSrini Venugopal, Epicor Software

Data is the watchword in organizations large and small. In fact, how an organization frames data is the single most important determination of future success or failure. As some put it, Data is the new oil, the commodity of most value in the modern age.

Many business leaders understand this intuitively. As business-users in the organization are forced to make larger number of critical decisions with larger payloads on a more frequent basis, the idea that these decisions must be data-driven is at the fore. Gut instinct is fine but gut instinct inflected with timely, contextual, and comprehensive knowledge of relevant data is a winning strategy.

While the idea of being data-driven is fundamental and powerful, most organizations fall short. Intentions are necessary but not sufficient. For most organizations, the technology and operational infrastructure that defines their data is predicated on notions that made sense in an earlier era in which there were simply less sources of data and less change to existing sources. The size of the data question makes for a complexity that is not pre-defined and therefore the solution to the data problem has to be flexible and adaptive. Data infrastructure maturity is necessary in todays business environment and has 4 basic qualities: Governance, Security, Agility, and Automation.

Without these 4 qualifiers, 2 core facets of the solution are absent- democratizing access to data and liberating IT from the backlog and fatigue associated with constantly-changing business needs. Business-users work in the NOW timeframe while IT has its own rhythms. In order to truly be data-driven in a way that scales, organizations must empower business-users while simultaneously freeing IT to innovate. While there are cultural hurdles to this state, the biggest blockers are infrastructural.

Until very recently, good enough was, alas, good enough. The internecine conflict between Business and IT was considered just a fact of life, a cost of doing business. With automation technology, business users data needs can be managed on the fly and without the need for reactive hand-coding, conferring agility to the business teams and handing time back to the IT teams to innovate and more resources from lower value tasks to higher value tasks. This structural win-win is available today and harmonizes the needs of Business and IT.

If data is the new oil then an infrastructure to capitalize on it is necessary- an infrastructure that is mature and Hub-like. While all organizations are different, they are similar in their data needs and the data platforms that win will accommodate diversity and change inherently.

Guest post by:Romi MahajanChief Commercial Officer, TimeXtender

Its no secret that the rise of computer apps is transforming both the marketing and customer experience. One of the most intriguing developments in app development is in the area of chatbots that not only can send communications to customers but also respond intelligently to conversations.

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Christian Brucculeri, the CEO at mobile messaging company Snaps, a developer of chatbots and other marketing technology products for companies. Brucculeri explained some of the background of how chatbots came to be, as well as their usefulness as a marketing tool.

Typically chatbots represent a conversational interface between a consumer and a machine, Brucculeri said. Theyre applications that have linguistic structure. It might allow you to ask a question and try to find an answer. They enable one-to-one communication between brands and consumers at scale, and they leverage technology in order to do that.

Certainly chatbots have close technological relatives were already used to, like Apples Siri, Google Home and Amazon Alexa. You might call automated phone systemsthe kind people love to hateas a chatbots second cousin. But so far these are far from able to use artificial intelligence to understand language, and respond appropriately.

And while the technology can be used for entertainment purposesthink Snapchat or Facebook Messenger, for exampleits greatest impact is potentially coming in marketing, Brucculeri told me.

Creating conversations, not messaging

We work with brands across several industry verticals, including tourism, hospitality, entertainment, media, CPG, retail, quick-serve restaurants and more, he said. For example one apparel brand delivers a 30-day workout experience using basic Facebook Messenger. For some hospitality brands, theyre trying to manage their ongoing relationship with consumers and help them manage their rewards accounts.

In many ways, this sounds similar to most apps were used to. So, what makes chatbots a different kind of app?

Where chatbots get really interesting is in personalizing media and responses, Brucculeri suggested. Here, you can really do one-to-one marketing at scale. Brucculeri said Snaps has developed such chatbots for sports teams, where a fan might receive notices of games, results and highlight videos. In the stadium, a chatbot might help a fan find restrooms and snack counters, based on physical location.

Brucculeri said Snaps is developing chatbots that function on a variety of existing platforms. Facebook Messenger, which launched a chatbot in 2016, may be most appropriate in accessing consumers, he said, but theres also Kik, WeChat, Slack and many others, each of which may be experience-specific.

Chatbots also can be connected to customer relationship management platforms, such as Salesforce, to deliver notifications at the right time to the right person, Brucculeri said.

We do CRM integration and user matching to log in and do account management, he said. The result might enable companies to find new customers, engage with existing customers in a fun way, getting customers to take some form of action, or managing the relationship in other ways.

Improving the customer experience

Customer service, driven by artificial intelligence, also can be aided powerfully by such matching, Brucculeri said. Instead of hitting a bunch of digits to get routed to the right person, the artificial intelligence capabilities of chatbotsthe two-way ability to listen and respond appropriatelycan improve this experience immensely.

A chatbot can do this in ways that are more convenient, simple, fast, and better for the customer and probably less expensive for the customer-service function, he said.

The future of chatbots is an intriguing one, as technology evolves and as the bots themselves get smarter and more humanlike in their analyses and responses.

Were long on the idea that conversational interfaces will continue to evolve. Whether consumers are texting with or talking to them, automated systems like bots are almost certainly going to have a role in our future lives Brucculeri said. We see conversational media becoming the next wave and being potentially bigger than application media itself. I think in three years, people might be talking to bots more than theyre typing in bots.

But the main idea remains the same, he said. Might I one day launch a chatbot on Alexa, Amazons voice control system? How about getting some type of visual element to go along with that, such as HoloLens, Microsofts holographic headset? Can these things become really rich experiences, far better than just staring at our phones and typing?

I think some of the form factors are going to change, but I think the fundamental elements are going to be the same, which is conversational commerce. People increasingly will be talking to their computers, and theyre going to get a lot done by doing it.

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Marketing Darwinism | by Paul Dunay

Digital Darwinism: How Disruptive Technology Is Changing …

Social media, mobile, wearables, Internet of Things, real-time these are just some of the technologies that are disrupting markets. Changes in how people communicate, connect, and discover are carrying incredible implications for businesses and just about anything where people are involved. Its not so much that technology is part of our everyday life or that technology is relentless in its barrage on humanity.

The real threat and opportunity in technologys disruption lies in the evolution of customer and employee behavior, values, and expectations. Companies are faced with a quandary as they invest resources and budgets in current technology and business strategies (business as usual) versus that of the unknown in how those investments align, or dont, with market and behavior shifts.

This is a time of digital Darwinism an era where technology and society are evolving faster than businesses can naturally adapt. This sets the stage for a new era of leadership, a new generation of business models, charging behind a mantra of adapt or die.

Rather than react to change or be disrupted by it, some forward-looking companies are investing in digital transformation to adapt and outperform peers.In November 2012, research-based consultancy Capgemini published a report studying the digital maturity of companies pursuing digital transformation. In its report, The Digital Advantage: How digital leaders outperform their peers in every industry, Capgemini found that those companies that are highly vested in both digital intensity and transformation management intensity, aka The Digirati, derive more revenue from their physical assets, theyre more profitable, and they also possess high market valuations.

Why is That?

It comes down to one word, relevance. If consumer behavior is evolving as a result of technology, businesses either compete to get ahead of it, they perpetually react to it, or they belittle it. One of the most problematic aspects around digital maturity is that technology is both part of the solution and also part of the problem.

Enter digital transformation.

Digital transformation may sound like its something youd hear in buzzword bingo, but it is one of the most important movements facing businesses today. It is forcing businesses to look beyond the world as they know it, observe how things are changing on the outside, to change transform philosophies, models, and systems on the inside. Ask 10 different experts in digital transformation for their definition of it though and you may just get 10 different answers. Before strategists can consider digital transformation, they at least have to know what it is, why its important, and what they need to do.

In 2013, I set out to better understand the catalyst and challenges around digital transformation and also the people driving it forward. It is indeed a deep and complex topic. I had to focus my research. Capgemini among others have already made tremendous headway in their work around technology and process models defining the evolution of digital maturity. One of the things I heard over and over was the need to know whos responsible for it and how do companies take steps in the right direction. Specifically, strategists wanted to know how to make the case in the absence of executive leadership pointing in new directions and leading teams to adapt or die! As a result, I explored digital transformation from a more human perspective. After a year of interviewing 20 leading digital strategists at some of the biggest brands around the world, I released my latest report, Digital Transformation: Why and How Companies are Investing in New Business Models to Lead Digital Customer Experiences.

What is Digital Transformation?

Again, it is a sweeping topic. Simply defined, digital transformation the intentional effots to adapt to this onslaught of disruptive technologies and how its affecting customer and employee behavior. As technology becomes a permanent fixture in everyday life, organizations are forced to update legacy technology strategies and supporting methodologies to better reflect how the real world is evolving. And, the need to do so is becoming increasingly obligatory.

In my research, I concentrated on how businesses are pursuing digital transformation in their quest to specifically understand how disruptive technology affects the customer experience. In turn, I learned how companies are reverse engineering investments, processes, and systems to better align with how markets are changing.

Because its focusing on customer behavior, digital transformation is actually in its own way making businesses more human. As such, digital transformation is not a specifically about technology, its empowered by it. Without an end in mind, digital transformation continually seeks out how to use technology in ways that improve customer experiences and relationships. It also represents an effort that introduces new models for business and, equally, creates a way of staying in business as customers become increasingly digital.

Some key findings from my research include:

While early in its evolution, digital transformation represents the next big thing in customer experience and, ultimately, how business is done. Those companies that get it and invest more in learning about their digital customers behaviors, preferences, and expectations will carry a significant competitive advantage over those that figure it out later (if at all). What separates typical new technology investments from those pursued by companies in my report is the ongoing search to find answers to problems and opportunities presented by the nuances of digital customers.

For example:

In the end, digital transformation is not a fad or a trendy moniker. It represents the future of business through the re-alignment of, or new investment in, technology and business models to more effectively engage digital consumers at every touchpoint in the customer experience lifecycle. Its bigger than any one area of technology disruption though and thats the point. Social media, mobile, cloud, et al. are converging into a greater force to push businesses out of comfort zones and into areas where true innovation can manifest.

The Result?

The roles and objectives of everyday marketing, social media, web, mobile and customer service and loyalty, can evolve to meet the needs and expectations of a more connected and discerning digital customer. Additionally, the outcome of even the smallest investments in change brings together typically disparate groups to work in harmony across the entire customer journey. This allows teams to cooperate, or merge into new groups, in uniting the digital journey to improve engagement; deliver a holistic experience; and eliminate friction, gaps, and overlap.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from my research is the pure ambition to make businesses relevant in a digital era.

The road to digital transformation is far from easy, but it carries great rewards for businesses and customers alike. It takes a village to bring about change, and it also takes the spark and perseverance of one person to spot important trends and create a sense of urgency around new possibilities.

But make no mistake. Digital transformation efforts grow market opportunities and profits as well as scaling efficiently in the process.

#AdaptorDie

Brian Solis is a principal analyst at Altimeter Group. He is also an award-winning author, prominent blogger, and keynote speaker. @briansolis

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Digital Darwinism: How Disruptive Technology Is Changing ...

What is Social Darwinism – Science – AllAboutScience.org

QUESTION: What is Social Darwinism?

ANSWER:

Herbert Spencer, a 19th century philosopher, promoted the idea of Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is an application of the theory of natural selection to social, political, and economic issues. In its simplest form, Social Darwinism follows the mantra of "the strong survive," including human issues. This theory was used to promote the idea that the white European race was superior to others, and therefore, destined to rule over them.

At the time that Spencer began to promote Social Darwinism, the technology, economy, and government of the "White European" was advanced in comparison to that of other cultures. Looking at this apparent advantage, as well as the economic and military structures, some argued that natural selection was playing out, and that the race more suited to survival was winning. Some even extended this philosophy into a micro-economic issue, claiming that social welfare programs that helped the poor and disadvantaged were contrary to nature itself. Those who reject any and all forms of charity or governmental welfare often use arguments rooted in Social Darwinism.

At its worst, the implications of Social Darwinism were used as scientific justification for the Holocaust. The Nazis claimed that the murder of Jews in World War II was an example of cleaning out the inferior genetics. Many philosophers noted evolutionary echoes in Hitler's march to exterminate an entire race of people. Various other dictators and criminals have claimed the cause of Social Darwinism in carrying out their acts. Even without such actions, Social Darwinism has proven to be a false and dangerous philosophy.

Scientists and evolutionists maintain that this interpretation is only loosely based on Darwin's theory of natural selection. They will admit to an obvious parallel between Darwin's theory of Natural Selection and Spencer's beliefs. In nature, the strong survive and those best suited to survival will out-live the weak. According to Social Darwinism, those with strength (economic, physical, technological) flourish and those without are destined for extinction.

It is important to note that Darwin did not extend his theories to a social or economic level, nor are any credible evolutionists subscribing to the theories of Social Darwinism. Herbert Spencer's philosophy is only loosely based on the premises of Darwin's work.

However, according to evolutionary theory, nature is a "kill-or-be-killed" system. Those that cannot keep up are either left behind or cut off. If evolution, through chance, is solely responsible for life as we now know it, why should that process be countered? If "survival of the fittest" or "kill or be killed" cannot apply in what we define as "decent society," then, which is wrong, society or evolution? If neither, then how do we explain morality, charity, and compassion? Why drain resources from the strong to support the weak? Certainly, we should be charitable and help those in need.

Though Darwin did not promote Social Darwinism, basic evolutionary theory raises some nagging questions.

What is your response?

Yes, today I am deciding to follow Jesus

Yes, I am already a follower of Jesus

I still have questions

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What is Social Darwinism - Science - AllAboutScience.org

Social Darwinism: The Theory of Evolution Applied to Human Society

Social Darwinism was the application of Charles Darwin`s scientific theories of evolution and natural selection to contemporary social development. In nature, only the fittest survivedso too in the marketplace. This form of justification was enthusiastically adopted by many American businessmen as scientific proof of their superiority.

Leading proponents of Social Darwinism included the following:

Spencer was widely popular among American capitalist leaders, but held a much smaller following in his homeland.

In 1907, Sumner published his most influential book, Folkways, in which he argued that customs and mores were the most powerful influences on human behavior, even when irrational. He concluded that all forms of social reform were futile and misguided.

Sumner`s views contrasted sharply with those of the advocates of the Social Gospel.

- - - Books You May Like Include: ----

Social Darwinism in American Thought by Richard Hofstadter.Social Darwinism in American Thought portrays the overall influence of Darwin on American social theory and the notable battle waged among thinkers ov...

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Social Darwinism: The Theory of Evolution Applied to Human Society

Darwin’s Influence on Ruthless Laissez Faire Capitalism

Introduction

The Darwinian worldview was critical, not only in influencing the development of Nazism and communism, but also in the rise of the ruthless capitalists that flourished in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Morris and Morris, 1996). A key aspect of this brand of capitalism was its extreme individualism which indicated that other persons count for little, and that it is both natural and proper to exploit "weaker" companies. The socalled robber barons often concluded that their behavior was justified by natural law and was the inevitable outcome of history (Josephson, 1934). Many were raised as Christians, but rejected their Christianity or modified it to include their socialist/Darwinian ideas. Gertrude Himmelfarb noted that Darwinism may have been accepted in England in part because it justified the greed of certain people.

Rachels noted that "the survival of the fittest" theory in biology was quickly interpreted by capitalists as "an ethical precept that sanctioned cutthroat economic competition" (1990, p. 63, see also Hs, 1986, p. 10). Julian Huxley and H. B. D. Kittlewell even concluded that social Darwinism "led to the glorification of free enterprise, laissez-faire economics and war, to an unscientific eugenics and racism, and eventually to Hitler and Nazi ideology" (in Huxley and Kittlewell, 1965, p. 81).

Darwinism helped to justify not only the ruthless exploits of the communists, but also the ruthless practices of capitalist monopolists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Kenneth Hs (1986, p. 534) noted:

Like Stalin, Marx, Lenin, and Hitler, Carnegie also once accepted Christianity, but abandoned it for Darwinism and became a close friend of the famous social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer. Carnegie stated in his autobiography that when he and several of his friends came to doubt the teachings of Christianity,

Carnegie's conclusions were best summarized when he said:

John D. Rockefeller reportedly once said that the "growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest . . . the working out of a law of nature . . ." (Ghent, 1902, p. 29). The Rockefellers, while maintaining a Christian front, fully embraced evolution and dismissed the Bible's early books as mythology (Taylor, 1991, p. 386). When a philanthropist pledged ,000 to help found a university named after William Jennings Bryan, John D. Rockefeller Jr. retaliated the very same day with a ,000,000 donation to the openly anticreationist University of Chicago Divinity School (Larson, 1997, p. 183). Morris and Morris noted that the philosophy expressed by Rockefeller also was embraced not only by railroad magnate James Hill, but probably most other capitalists of his day (1996, p. 87). Morris and Morris have suggested that many modern evolutionists:

Morris and Morris also noted that both the left wing MarxistLeninism and the right wing ruthless capitalists were anticreationists and "even when they fight with each other, they remain united in opposition to creationism . . ." (p. 82). Many capitalists did not discard their Christianity, but instead tried to blend it with Darwinism. The result was a compromise somewhat like theistic evolution. Although most American businessmen were probably not consciously social Darwinists,

Several studies have documented the important contribution of Darwin to laissezfaire capitalism: An analysis of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission (1902-1903) hearings found:

Rosenthal (1997) showed that, historically, biogenetic doctrines had the effect of promoting an attitude of acceptance of the problems of racism, sexism, war, and capitalism. The field of biogenetics has offered no new scientific evidence that human social behavior has a biogenetic basis, or that business/social competition, male dominance, aggression, territoriality, xenophobia, and even patriotism, warfare, and genocide are genetically based human universals. Yet biogenetic doctrines have occupied a prominent place throughout most of American sociological history. Rosenthal noted that Cooley, Sorokin, Sumner, Ross, and even Park adhered to biological racist doctrines that in the past have signaled and encouraged reactionary social policy.

The Darwinian concept, applied to business, still is very much with us today. Robert Blake and his coauthors in their 1996 book, Corporate Darwinism, attempted to apply modern Darwinism to business. They concluded that business evolves in very predictable ways, specifically in defined stages very much like the stages of human evolution. This "business evolution" is natural; business in keeping with Darwinian principles either swallows the competition, or finds that it will be swallowed by that competition.

Darwin's ideas played a critically important role in the development and growth, not only of Nazism and communism, but also of the ruthless form of capitalism as best illustrated by the robber barons. While it is difficult to conclude confidently that ruthless capitalism would not have blossomed as it did if Darwin had not developed his evolution theory, it is clear that if Carnegie, Rockefeller, and others had continued to embrace the unadulterated JudeoChristian worldview of their youth and had not become Darwinists, capitalism would not have become as ruthless as it did in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Morris and Morris (p. 84) have suggested that other motivations (including greed, ambition, even a type of a missionary zeal) stimulated the fierce, unprincipled robber baron business practices long before Darwin. Darwinism, however, gave capitalism an apparent scientific rationale that allowed it to be taken to the extremes that were so evident in the early parts of last century.

Blake, Robert, Warren Avis and Jane Mouton. 1966. Corporate Darwinism. Houston, TX: Gulf Pub. Carnegie, Andrew. 1920. Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, ed. John C. Van Dyke. 1986; reprint, Boston: Northeastern University Press. Doukas, Dimitra. 1997. "Corporate Capitalism on Trial: The Hearings of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission, 1902-1903." Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 3(3):367-398. Ghent, William. 1902. Our Benevolent Feudalism. New York: Macmillan. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 1962. Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution. New York: W.W. Norton. Hs, Kenneth. June 1986. "Darwin's Three Mistakes," Geology, (vol. 14), p. 532-534. Hs, Kenneth. 1986. The Great Dying: Cosmic Catastrophe, Dinosaurs and the Theory of Evolution. NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Huxley, Julian and H.B.D. Kittlewell. 1965. Charles Darwin and His World. New York: Viking Press. Josephson, Matthew. 1934. The Robber Barons. New York: Harcourt and Brace. Larson, Edward J. 1997. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books. Morris, Henry and John D. Morris. 1996. The Modern Creation Trilogy. vol. 3. Society and Creation. Green Forrest, AR: Master Books. Oldroyd, D.R. 1980. Darwinian Impacts. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Rachels, James. 1990. Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism. New York: Oxford University Press. Rosenthal, Steven J. 1977. Sociobiology: New Synthesis or Old Ideology? American Sociological Association. Taylor, Ian T. 1991. In the Minds of Men: Darwin and the New World Order. Minneapolis: TFE Publishing.

* Jerry Bergman, Ph.D., is on the Biology faculty at Northwest State College in Ohio.

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Darwin's Influence on Ruthless Laissez Faire Capitalism

What is Social Darwinism

QUESTION: What is Social Darwinism?

ANSWER:

Herbert Spencer, a 19th century philosopher, promoted the idea of Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is an application of the theory of natural selection to social, political, and economic issues. In its simplest form, Social Darwinism follows the mantra of "the strong survive," including human issues. This theory was used to promote the idea that the white European race was superior to others, and therefore, destined to rule over them.

At the time that Spencer began to promote Social Darwinism, the technology, economy, and government of the "White European" was advanced in comparison to that of other cultures. Looking at this apparent advantage, as well as the economic and military structures, some argued that natural selection was playing out, and that the race more suited to survival was winning. Some even extended this philosophy into a micro-economic issue, claiming that social welfare programs that helped the poor and disadvantaged were contrary to nature itself. Those who reject any and all forms of charity or governmental welfare often use arguments rooted in Social Darwinism.

At its worst, the implications of Social Darwinism were used as scientific justification for the Holocaust. The Nazis claimed that the murder of Jews in World War II was an example of cleaning out the inferior genetics. Many philosophers noted evolutionary echoes in Hitler's march to exterminate an entire race of people. Various other dictators and criminals have claimed the cause of Social Darwinism in carrying out their acts. Even without such actions, Social Darwinism has proven to be a false and dangerous philosophy.

Scientists and evolutionists maintain that this interpretation is only loosely based on Darwin's theory of natural selection. They will admit to an obvious parallel between Darwin's theory of Natural Selection and Spencer's beliefs. In nature, the strong survive and those best suited to survival will out-live the weak. According to Social Darwinism, those with strength (economic, physical, technological) flourish and those without are destined for extinction.

It is important to note that Darwin did not extend his theories to a social or economic level, nor are any credible evolutionists subscribing to the theories of Social Darwinism. Herbert Spencer's philosophy is only loosely based on the premises of Darwin's work.

However, according to evolutionary theory, nature is a "kill-or-be-killed" system. Those that cannot keep up are either left behind or cut off. If evolution, through chance, is solely responsible for life as we now know it, why should that process be countered? If "survival of the fittest" or "kill or be killed" cannot apply in what we define as "decent society," then, which is wrong, society or evolution? If neither, then how do we explain morality, charity, and compassion? Why drain resources from the strong to support the weak? Certainly, we should be charitable and help those in need.

Though Darwin did not promote Social Darwinism, basic evolutionary theory raises some nagging questions.

What is your response?

Yes, today I am deciding to follow Jesus

Yes, I am already a follower of Jesus

I still have questions

Original post:

What is Social Darwinism

The Institute for Creation Research

Introduction

The Darwinian worldview was critical, not only in influencing the development of Nazism and communism, but also in the rise of the ruthless capitalists that flourished in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Morris and Morris, 1996). A key aspect of this brand of capitalism was its extreme individualism which indicated that other persons count for little, and that it is both natural and proper to exploit "weaker" companies. The socalled robber barons often concluded that their behavior was justified by natural law and was the inevitable outcome of history (Josephson, 1934). Many were raised as Christians, but rejected their Christianity or modified it to include their socialist/Darwinian ideas. Gertrude Himmelfarb noted that Darwinism may have been accepted in England in part because it justified the greed of certain people.

Rachels noted that "the survival of the fittest" theory in biology was quickly interpreted by capitalists as "an ethical precept that sanctioned cutthroat economic competition" (1990, p. 63, see also Hs, 1986, p. 10). Julian Huxley and H. B. D. Kittlewell even concluded that social Darwinism "led to the glorification of free enterprise, laissez-faire economics and war, to an unscientific eugenics and racism, and eventually to Hitler and Nazi ideology" (in Huxley and Kittlewell, 1965, p. 81).

Darwinism helped to justify not only the ruthless exploits of the communists, but also the ruthless practices of capitalist monopolists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Kenneth Hs (1986, p. 534) noted:

Like Stalin, Marx, Lenin, and Hitler, Carnegie also once accepted Christianity, but abandoned it for Darwinism and became a close friend of the famous social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer. Carnegie stated in his autobiography that when he and several of his friends came to doubt the teachings of Christianity,

Carnegie's conclusions were best summarized when he said:

John D. Rockefeller reportedly once said that the "growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest . . . the working out of a law of nature . . ." (Ghent, 1902, p. 29). The Rockefellers, while maintaining a Christian front, fully embraced evolution and dismissed the Bible's early books as mythology (Taylor, 1991, p. 386). When a philanthropist pledged ,000 to help found a university named after William Jennings Bryan, John D. Rockefeller Jr. retaliated the very same day with a ,000,000 donation to the openly anticreationist University of Chicago Divinity School (Larson, 1997, p. 183). Morris and Morris noted that the philosophy expressed by Rockefeller also was embraced not only by railroad magnate James Hill, but probably most other capitalists of his day (1996, p. 87). Morris and Morris have suggested that many modern evolutionists:

Morris and Morris also noted that both the left wing MarxistLeninism and the right wing ruthless capitalists were anticreationists and "even when they fight with each other, they remain united in opposition to creationism . . ." (p. 82). Many capitalists did not discard their Christianity, but instead tried to blend it with Darwinism. The result was a compromise somewhat like theistic evolution. Although most American businessmen were probably not consciously social Darwinists,

Several studies have documented the important contribution of Darwin to laissezfaire capitalism: An analysis of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission (1902-1903) hearings found:

Rosenthal (1997) showed that, historically, biogenetic doctrines had the effect of promoting an attitude of acceptance of the problems of racism, sexism, war, and capitalism. The field of biogenetics has offered no new scientific evidence that human social behavior has a biogenetic basis, or that business/social competition, male dominance, aggression, territoriality, xenophobia, and even patriotism, warfare, and genocide are genetically based human universals. Yet biogenetic doctrines have occupied a prominent place throughout most of American sociological history. Rosenthal noted that Cooley, Sorokin, Sumner, Ross, and even Park adhered to biological racist doctrines that in the past have signaled and encouraged reactionary social policy.

The Darwinian concept, applied to business, still is very much with us today. Robert Blake and his coauthors in their 1996 book, Corporate Darwinism, attempted to apply modern Darwinism to business. They concluded that business evolves in very predictable ways, specifically in defined stages very much like the stages of human evolution. This "business evolution" is natural; business in keeping with Darwinian principles either swallows the competition, or finds that it will be swallowed by that competition.

Darwin's ideas played a critically important role in the development and growth, not only of Nazism and communism, but also of the ruthless form of capitalism as best illustrated by the robber barons. While it is difficult to conclude confidently that ruthless capitalism would not have blossomed as it did if Darwin had not developed his evolution theory, it is clear that if Carnegie, Rockefeller, and others had continued to embrace the unadulterated JudeoChristian worldview of their youth and had not become Darwinists, capitalism would not have become as ruthless as it did in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Morris and Morris (p. 84) have suggested that other motivations (including greed, ambition, even a type of a missionary zeal) stimulated the fierce, unprincipled robber baron business practices long before Darwin. Darwinism, however, gave capitalism an apparent scientific rationale that allowed it to be taken to the extremes that were so evident in the early parts of last century.

Blake, Robert, Warren Avis and Jane Mouton. 1966. Corporate Darwinism. Houston, TX: Gulf Pub. Carnegie, Andrew. 1920. Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, ed. John C. Van Dyke. 1986; reprint, Boston: Northeastern University Press. Doukas, Dimitra. 1997. "Corporate Capitalism on Trial: The Hearings of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission, 1902-1903." Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 3(3):367-398. Ghent, William. 1902. Our Benevolent Feudalism. New York: Macmillan. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 1962. Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution. New York: W.W. Norton. Hs, Kenneth. June 1986. "Darwin's Three Mistakes," Geology, (vol. 14), p. 532-534. Hs, Kenneth. 1986. The Great Dying: Cosmic Catastrophe, Dinosaurs and the Theory of Evolution. NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Huxley, Julian and H.B.D. Kittlewell. 1965. Charles Darwin and His World. New York: Viking Press. Josephson, Matthew. 1934. The Robber Barons. New York: Harcourt and Brace. Larson, Edward J. 1997. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books. Morris, Henry and John D. Morris. 1996. The Modern Creation Trilogy. vol. 3. Society and Creation. Green Forrest, AR: Master Books. Oldroyd, D.R. 1980. Darwinian Impacts. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Rachels, James. 1990. Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism. New York: Oxford University Press. Rosenthal, Steven J. 1977. Sociobiology: New Synthesis or Old Ideology? American Sociological Association. Taylor, Ian T. 1991. In the Minds of Men: Darwin and the New World Order. Minneapolis: TFE Publishing.

* Jerry Bergman, Ph.D., is on the Biology faculty at Northwest State College in Ohio.

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The Institute for Creation Research

The Royal Society’s Evolution Meeting: James MacAllister …

James MacAllister, curator of the Lynn Margulis archive at the University of Massachussetts Amherst. He wrote a thorough review of the London 2016 evolution conference at the Royal Society.

James MacAllister is the volunteer archivist for the Lynn Margulis archive at the University of Massachussetts-Amherst.

Jim runs envevo.org, the Environmental Evolution website. Lynn Margulis was the champion of Symbiogenesis theory.

She fought tremendous opposition from Neo-Darwinists to get the theory accepted. Today she is widely regarded as one of the greatest evolutionary biologists of all time.

I met Jim at the Royal Society evolution meeting in London, and in a very brief conversation discovered much in common. Jim runs envevo.org, the Environmental Evolution blog.

He wrote a fantastic synopsis of the Royal Society meeting. I encourage you to read his entire report. Meanwhile, some highlights:

The Modern Synthesis, while undoubtedly productive for a time, is a misconception of reality that has reached the limits of its explanatory power. The problems are fundamental. No amount of cosmetic surgery is going correct them.

Most of these new trends are not new nor are they trends. They have been known and studied quite apart from neo-Darwinism for a long time. Symbiosis and symbiogenesis, for example, have been investigated for over a century while being dismissed and discouraged by proponents of the Modern Synthesis.

Awareness or mentions of these processes by neo-Darwinists fall far short of serious investigation. It is true that these processes have been bolstered or confirmed by evidence from molecular biology, but that evidence generally contradicted the view of the Modern Synthesis. The Modern Synthesis is no longer synonymous with evolutionary biology, molecular biology, or any of the multiple disciplines currently contributing to our understanding of evolution.

Martin Brasier, the late Oxford paleontologist, defined science not as the revelation of underlying simplicity, laws or ideals, but as a unique system for the measurement of doubt. This is a helpful conception because it explains why science must be skeptical, but also measured in its skepticism. It avoids the temptation of certainty and leaves the mind open to surprise. Science measures. It compares tests to controls. Experiments and analyses are designed to minimize bias and expose logical fallacies. Results must be reproducible. Science questions unquestioned assumptions. Its theories must be predictive. It does not ignore anomalies, but acknowledges and investigates them.

There is also the current HBO series West World where the character of Dr. Robert Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins) explains to his assistant Bernard (played by Jeffrey Wright) that evolution forged all of sentient life on this planet using only one tool, the mistake.

The Modern Synthesis toolbox holds only one tool: the mistake, the blind random mutation. The organism is acted upon by the environmental elimination process: natural selection. No mention of new trends.

Lets not forget that Darwin himself had a better selection of tools in his On the Origin of Species toolbox. Now we are presented with a toolbox that holds many tools. Some vintage ones, such as symbiogenesis. And long recognized ones, such as horizontal gene transfer, that couldnt be swept under the rug. But wait theres more: interspecific hybridization, whole genome duplications, the movement of mobile genetic elements (natural genetic engineering), plasticity, and niche construction. Magically, we are told that all these fit in the The Selfish Gene toolbox. What ever happened to that little toolbox that only held one tool, the mistake?

John Hands has reported on the meeting in the BBC online Science Focus. During the first Round Table audience discussion, Hands introduced himself as the author of Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe (outstanding book by the way) and made the following comments.

Its appropriate that this meeting is being held at the Royal Society, whose motto, we were reminded yesterday, is Nullius in verba: Accept nothing on authority. The current paradigm in evolutionary biology, NeoDarwinism, also called the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, has been the authority for some 65 years. It is, of course, a mathematical model based on several unquestioned assumptions, whose proof was given by 1940s game theory borrowed from economics.

What we have heard over the last 2 days is empirical evidence that new species arise rapidly, from such mechanisms as symbiogenesis, horizontal DNA transfer, hybridisation, whole genome duplication, interactive systems producing novel emergent properties, and other mechanisms described in Part 2 of my book. These mechanisms contradict the fundamental tenets of neo-Darwinism, namely:

To the contrary, Darwinian competition causes not the evolution of species but the destruction of species. It is collaboration in its various forms that causes biological evolution. Hence Im surprised by calls for extending the neo-Darwinian Evolutionary Synthesis. You cant extend something that is broken. Surely what is needed now, after 65 years, is using the empirical evidence to develop a new paradigm for biological evolution.

Read Jim MacAllisters entire report on the London evolution conference here.

To subscribe to Jims Environmental Evolution newsletter, send an email to jmacallister {at} environmentalevolution.org with the word subscribe in the subject field and please include your name and email address in the body.

Environmental Evolution, the first Big Earth History and Earth systems science course, was taught by Lynn Margulis at UMass from 1986-2010. Margulis was also the principle collaborator with James Lovelock on the Gaia hypothesis, the proposal that the entire earth can be understood as a single macro-organism.

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The Royal Society's Evolution Meeting: James MacAllister ...

Darwinism: Survival without Purpose – The Institute for …

Humans have always wondered about the meaning of life...life has no higher purpose than to perpetuate the survival of DNA...life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.1 --Richard Dawkins

Evolution is "deceptively simple yet utterly profound in its implications,"2 the first of which is that living creatures "differ from one another, and those variations arise at random, without a plan or purpose."3 Evolution must be without plan or purpose because its core tenet is the natural selection of the fittest, produced by random copying errors called mutations. Darwin "was keenly aware that admitting any purposefulness whatsoever to the question of the origin of species would put his theory of natural selection on a very slippery slope."4 Pulitzer Prize author Edward Humes wrote that the fact of evolution was obvious but "few could see it, so trapped were they by the humandesire to find design and purpose in the world." He concluded:

Darwin's brilliance was in seeing beyond the appearance of design, and understanding the purposeless, merciless process of natural selection, of life and death in the wild, and how it culled all but the most successful organisms from the tree of life, thereby creating the illusion that a master intellect had designed the world. But close inspection of the watchlike "perfection" of honeybees' combs or ant trailsreveals that they are a product of random, repetitive, unconscious behaviors, not conscious design.5

The fact that evolution teaches that life has no purpose beyond perpetuating its own survival is not lost on teachers. One testified that teaching evolution "impacted their consciences" because it moved teachers away from the "idea that they were born for a purpose something completely counter to their mindset and beliefs."6

In a study on why children resist accepting evolution, Yale psychologists Bloom and Weisberg concluded that the evolutionary way of viewing the world, which the authors call "promiscuous teleology," makes it difficult for them to accept evolution. Children "naturally see the world in terms of design and purpose."7 The ultimate purposelessness of evolution, and thus of the life that it produces, was eloquently expressed by Professor Lawrence Krauss as follows: "We're just a bit of pollution. If you got rid of usthe universe would be largely the same. We're completely irrelevant."8

The Textbooks

To determine what schools are teaching about religious questions such as the purpose of life, I surveyed current science textbooks and found that they tend to teach the view that evolution is both nihilistic and atheistic. One of today's most widely-used textbooks stated that "evolution works without either plan or purpose. Evolution is random and undirected."9 Another text by the same authors added that Darwin knew his theory "required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its byproducts." The authors continued:

Darwinian evolution was not only purposeless but also heartless--a process in which...nature ruthlessly eliminates the unfit. Suddenly, humanity was reduced to just one more species in a world that cared nothing for us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of evolving neurons. Worst of all, there was no divine plan to guide us.10

Another text taught that humans are just "a tiny, largely fortuitous, and late-arising twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life" and the belief that a "progressive, guiding force, consistently pushing evolution to move in a single direction" is now known to be "misguided."11 Many texts teach that evolution is purposeless and has no goal except to achieve brute survival: the "idea that evolution is not directed towards a final goal or state has been more difficult for many people to accept than the process of evolution itself."12 One major text openly teaches that humans were created by a blind, deaf, and dumb watchmaker--namely natural selection, which is "totally blind to the future."

Humans...came from the same evolutionary source as every other species. It is natural selection of selfish genes that has given us our bodies and our brains. Natural selectionexplainsthe whole of life, the diversity of life, the complexity of life, |and| the apparent design in life."13

The Implications

Many texts are very open about the implications of Darwinism for theism. One teaches that Darwin's immeasurably important contribution to science was to show that, despite life's apparent evidence of design and purpose, mechanistic causes explain all biological phenomena. The text adds that by coupling "undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous."14 The author concludes by noting that "it was Darwin's theory of Evolution that provided a crucial plank to the platform of mechanisms and materialismthat has been the stage of most western thought."15 Another text even stated directly that humans were created by a random process, not a loving, purposeful God, and:

The real difficulty in accepting Darwin's theory has always been that it seems to diminish our significance. |Evolution| asked us to accept the proposition that, like all other organisms, we too are the products of a random process that, as far as science can show, we are not created for any special purpose or as part of any universal design.16

These texts are all clearly teaching religious ideas, not science. An excellent example is a text that openly ruled out not only theistic evolution, but any role for God in nature, and demonstrated that Darwinism threatened theism by showing that humans and all life "could be explained by natural selection without the intervention of a god." Evolutionary "randomness and uncertainty had replaced a deity having conscious, purposeful, human characteristics."

The Darwinian view that present-type organisms were not created spontaneously but formed in a succession of selective events that occurred in the past, contradicted the common religious view that there could be no design, biological or otherwise, without an intelligent designer. In this scheme a god of design and purpose is not necessary. Religion has been bolstered by the comforting idea that humanity was created in the image of a god to rule over the world and its creatures. Religion provided emotional solace, a set of ethical and moral values. Nevertheless, faith in religious dogma has been eroded by natural explanations of its mysteries. The positions of the creationists and the scientific world appear irreconcilable."17

Darwin himself taught a totally atheistic, naturalistic view of origins. He even once said, "I would give nothing for the theory of natural selection if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent."18 John Alcock, an evolutionary biologist, therefore concluded that "we exist solely to propagate the genes within us."19

Leading Darwin scholar Janet Browne makes it very clear that Darwin's goal was the "arduous task of reorienting the way Victorians looked at nature." To do this Darwin had to convince the world that "ideas about a benevolent, nearly perfect natural world" and those that believe "beauty was given to things for a purpose, were wrong--that the idea of a loving God who created all living things and brought men and women into existence wasa fable."

The worldsteeped in moral meaning which helped mankind seek out higher goals in life, was not Darwin's. Darwin's view of nature was dark--black. Where most men and women generally believed in some kind of design in nature--some kind of plan and order--and felt a deep-seated, mostly inexpressible belief that their existence had meaning, Darwin wanted them to see all life as empty of any divine purpose.20

Darwin knew how difficult it was to abandon such a view, but realized that for evolution to work, nature must ultimately be "governed entirely by chance." Browne concludes:

The pleasant outward face of nature was precisely that--only an outward face. Underneath was perpetual struggle, species against species, individual against individual. Life was ruled by death...destruction was the key to reproductive success. All the theological meaning was thus stripped out by Darwin and replaced by the concept of competition. All the telos, the purpose, on which natural theologians based their ideas of perfect adaptation was redirected into Malthusian--Darwinian--struggle. What most people saw as God-given design he saw as mere adaptations to circumstance, adaptations that were meaningless except for the way in which they helped an animal or plant to survive.21

Neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins recognized the purposelessness of such a system:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.22

How widely is this view held by scientists? One study of 149 leading biologists found that 89.9 percent believed that evolution has no ultimate purpose or goal except survival, and we are just a cosmic accident existing at the whim of time and chance. A mere six percent believed that evolution has a purpose.23 Almost all of those who believed that evolution had no purpose were atheists. This is only one example that Sommers and Rosenberg call the "destructive power of Darwinian theory."24

Purpose and Christianity

Christianity teaches that God made the universe as a home for humans. If the universe evolved purely by natural means, then it just exists and any "purpose" for its existence can only be that which humans themselves attribute to it. But our own experience and intellectual attainments argue against this. The similarity of human-constructed machines and the orderly functioning of the universe is the basis of the design argument. Just as a machine requires a designer and a builder, so too the universe that we see requires a designer and a builder.

Determining the purpose of something depends on the observer's worldview. To a nontheist the question "What is the purpose of a living organism's structure?" means only "How does this structure aid survival?" Eyesight and legs would therefore have nothing to do with enjoyment of life; they are merely an unintended byproduct of evolution. Biologists consistently explain everything from coloration to sexual habits solely on the basis of survival. Orthodox neo-Darwinism views everything as either an unfortunate or a fortuitous event resulting from the outworking of natural law and random, naturally-selected mutations. Conversely, creationists interpret all reality according to beliefs about God's purpose for humans. Evolutionists can usually explain even contradictory behavior, but creationists look beyond this and try to determine what role it plays in God's plan.

Conclusions

Orthodox evolution teaches that the living world has no plan or purpose except survival, is random, undirected, and heartless. Humans live in a world that cares nothing for us, our minds are simply masses of meat, and no divine plan exists to guide us. These teachings are hardly neutral, but rather openly teach religion--the religion of atheism and nihilism. The courts have consistently approved teaching this anti-Christian religion in public schools and have blocked all attempts to neutralize these clearly religious ideas.

As the Word of God states, "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables" (2 Timothy 4:3-4).

References

* Dr. Bergman is Professor of Biology at Northwest State College in Ohio.

Cite this article: Bergman, J. 2007. Darwinism: Survival without Purpose. Acts & Facts. 36 (11): 10.

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Darwinism: Survival without Purpose - The Institute for ...

How Darwinism Corrodes Morality: Darwinism, Immorality …

This book is extremely comprehensive in scope, dealing with the effects of Darwinism and eugenics in a host of areas. He has expanded on some of the "facts" that I thought I knew by introducing even more startling and shocking numbers. I learned details, unknown to me before, about the lives of Kinsey, Nietzsche, Sanger, Hitler and even Charles Manson. Darwin left his mark on all of them. I have considered myself to be a theistic evolutionist, but I'm having a harder and harder time resisting Dr. Bergman's teaching. He may have "converted" me. It's my honour to give an enthusiastic "thumbs up" for Jerry's new book. -Thomas B. Stogdill, M.D., Bluffton, Indiana America is seriously ill and the symptoms are self-evident. Our case of spiritual acid reflux grows worse with each daily news cycle. In his eye-opening book, Professor Jerry Bergman shines a spotlight on the cause of this relativistic malady with remarkable clarity. Our nation's "good idea filter" is occluded; it has been poisoned by generational over-exposure to the falsehoods of evolution-only, particles-to-people indoctrination! What can cure our chronic and debilitating spiritual infection? Only by swallowing the truth can we be saved. Heavy dosage of the morality-reality therapy Dr. Bergman prescribes is civilization's only hope to recover from what has been aptly described as a death struggle between two civilizations. -Judge Darrell White, founder and president of American Judicial Alliance This latest book by Jerry Bergman is extremely important in exposing the true stripes of several renowned Americans, i.e., Margaret Sanger, Benjamin Spock, Alfred Kinsey and Havelock Ellis, some of whom are still unwittingly held up by many today with the highest regard. In his masterful research style, Bergman has sliced through many suppressed layers, bringing to light the facts as to just how deeply involved these individuals were in undermining decency in our society and catering to the basest nature of man, advocating for many outrageous evils including eugenics, abortion and unrestrained immoral behaviour. At the core was an acceptance and passion for Darwinism. Especially tragic is how many pastors and church bodies, which should be the very sanctuary of truth, caved to Darwinism and were actually in league with those who undermined many foundational truths. This book will force many to stop and think about the ramifications of falling away from "the Way, the Truth, and the Life." -Bryce Gaudian, Hayward, Minnesota. development manager for Agilis Corporation Dr. Bergman rigorously demonstrates the intellectual fingerprints of Darwinism in the eugenics movement, which was surprisingly popular even in egalitarian America. He shows the trajectory of moral decline and loss of religious faith, acceptance of sexual anarchy, abortion and even the next logical step of infanticide, as well as racism and genocide. With the "scientific" justification of "improving the species," unspeakable atrocities can be seen as laudable. -Ross Olson, M.D. pediatrician

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How Darwinism Corrodes Morality: Darwinism, Immorality ...

Economic Darwinism | On the origin of crises by unnatural …

For Yves Smith:

Testimony of Chairman Ben S. Bernanke Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the CongressBefore the Committee on Financial Services, U.S. House of RepresentativesJuly 18, 2007

Chairman Bernanke presented identical testimony before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, U.S. Senate, on July 19, 2007

Chairman Frank, Ranking Member Bachus, and members of the Committee, I am pleased to present the Federal Reserves Monetary Policy Report to the Congress. As you know, this occasion marks the thirtieth year of semiannual testimony on the economy and monetary policy by the Federal Reserve. In establishing these hearings, the Congress proved prescient in anticipating the worldwide trend toward greater transparency and accountability of central banks in the making of monetary policy. Over the years, these testimonies and the associated reports have proved an invaluable vehicle for the Federal Reserves communication with the public about monetary policy, even as they have served to enhance the Federal Reserves accountability for achieving the dual objectives of maximum employment and price stability set for it by the Congress. I take this opportunity to reiterate the Federal Reserves strong support of the dual mandate; in pursuing maximum employment and price stability, monetary policy makes its greatest possible contribution to the general economic welfare.

Let me now review the current economic situation and the outlook, beginning with developments in the real economy and the situation regarding inflation before turning to monetary policy. I will conclude with comments on issues related to lending to households and consumer protectiontopics not normally addressed in monetary policy testimony but, in light of recent developments, deserving of our attention today.

After having run at an above-trend rate earlier in the current economic recovery, U.S. economic growth has proceeded during the past year at a pace more consistent with sustainable expansion. Despite the downshift in growth, the demand for labor has remained solid, with more than 850,000 jobs having been added to payrolls thus far in 2007 and the unemployment rate having remained at 4-1/2 percent. The combination of moderate gains in output and solid advances in employment implies that recent increases in labor productivity have been modest by the standards of the past decade. The cooling of productivity growth in recent quarters is likely the result of cyclical or other temporary factors, but the underlying pace of productivity gains may also have slowed somewhat.

To a considerable degree, the slower pace of economic growth in recent quarters reflects the ongoing adjustment in the housing sector. Over the past year, home sales and construction have slowed substantially and house prices have decelerated. Although a leveling-off of home sales in the second half of 2006 suggested some tentative stabilization of housing demand, sales have softened further this year, leading the number of unsold new homes in builders inventories to rise further relative to the pace of new home sales. Accordingly, construction of new homes has sunk further, with starts of new single-family houses thus far this year running 10 percent below the pace in the second half of last year.

The pace of home sales seems likely to remain sluggish for a time, partly as a result of some tightening in lending standards and the recent increase in mortgage interest rates. Sales should ultimately be supported by growth in income and employment as well as by mortgage rates thatdespite the recent increaseremain fairly low relative to historical norms. However, even if demand stabilizes as we expect, the pace of construction will probably fall somewhat further as builders work down stocks of unsold new homes. Thus, declines in residential construction will likely continue to weigh on economic growth over coming quarters, although the magnitude of the drag on growth should diminish over time.

Real consumption expenditures appear to have slowed last quarter, following two quarters of rapid expansion. Consumption outlays are likely to continue growing at a moderate pace, aided by a strong labor market. Employment should continue to expand, though possibly at a somewhat slower pace than in recent years as a result of the recent moderation in the growth of output and ongoing demographic shifts that are expected to lead to a gradual decline in labor force participation. Real compensation appears to have risen over the past year, and barring further sharp increases in consumer energy costs, it should rise further as labor demand remains strong and productivity increases.

In the business sector, investment in equipment and software showed a modest gain in the first quarter. A similar outcome is likely for the second quarter, as weakness in the volatile transportation equipment category appears to have been offset by solid gains in other categories. Investment in nonresidential structures, after slowing sharply late last year, seems to have grown fairly vigorously in the first half of 2007. Like consumption spending, business fixed investment overall seems poised to rise at a moderate pace, bolstered by gains in sales and generally favorable financial conditions. Late last year and early this year, motor vehicle manufacturers and firms in several other industries found themselves with elevated inventories, which led them to reduce production to better align inventories with sales. Excess inventories now appear to have been substantially eliminated and should not prove a further restraint on growth.

The global economy continues to be strong. Supported by solid economic growth abroad, U.S. exports should expand further in coming quarters. Nonetheless, our trade deficitwhich was about 5-1/4 percent of nominal gross domestic product (GDP) in the first quarteris likely to remain high.

For the most part, financial markets have remained supportive of economic growth. However, conditions in the subprime mortgage sector have deteriorated significantly, reflecting mounting delinquency rates on adjustable-rate loans. In recent weeks, we have also seen increased concerns among investors about credit risk on some other types of financial instruments. Credit spreads on lower-quality corporate debt have widened somewhat, and terms for some leveraged business loans have tightened. Even after their recent rise, however, credit spreads remain near the low end of their historical ranges, and financing activity in the bond and business loan markets has remained fairly brisk.

Overall, the U.S. economy appears likely to expand at a moderate pace over the second half of 2007, with growth then strengthening a bit in 2008 to a rate close to the economys underlying trend. Such an assessment was made around the time of the June meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) by the members of the Board of Governors and the presidents of the Reserve Banks, all of whom participate in deliberations on monetary policy. The central tendency of the growth forecasts, which are conditioned on the assumption of appropriate monetary policy, is for real GDP to expand roughly 2-1/4 to 2-1/2 percent this year and 2-1/2 to 2-3/4 percent in 2008. The forecasted performance for this year is about 1/4 percentage point below that projected in February, the difference being largely the result of weaker-than-expected residential construction activity this year. The unemployment rate is anticipated to edge up to between 4-1/2 and 4-3/4 percent over the balance of this year and about 4-3/4 percent in 2008, a trajectory about the same as the one expected in February.

I turn now to the inflation situation. Sizable increases in food and energy prices have boosted overall inflation and eroded real incomes in recent monthsboth unwelcome developments. As measured by changes in the price index for personal consumption expenditures (PCE inflation), inflation ran at an annual rate of 4.4 percent over the first five months of this year, a rate that, if maintained, would clearly be inconsistent with the objective of price stability. 1 Because monetary policy works with a lag, however, policymakers must focus on the economic outlook. Food and energy prices tend to be quite volatile, so that, looking forward, core inflation (which excludes food and energy prices) may be a better gauge than overall inflation of underlying inflation trends. Core inflation has moderated slightly over the past few months, with core PCE inflation coming in at an annual rate of about 2 percent so far this year.

Although the most recent readings on core inflation have been favorable, month-to-month movements in inflation are subject to considerable noise, and some of the recent improvement could also be the result of transitory influences. However, with long-term inflation expectations contained, futures prices suggesting that investors expect energy and other commodity prices to flatten out, and pressures in both labor and product markets likely to ease modestly, core inflation should edge a bit lower, on net, over the remainder of this year and next year. The central tendency of FOMC participants forecasts for core PCE inflation2 to 2-1/4 percent for 2007 and 1-3/4 to 2 percent in 2008is unchanged from February. If energy prices level off as currently anticipated, overall inflation should slow to a pace close to that of core inflation in coming quarters.

At each of its four meetings so far this year, the FOMC maintained its target for the federal funds rate at 5-1/4 percent, judging that the existing stance of policy was likely to be consistent with growth running near trend and inflation staying on a moderating path. As always, in determining the appropriate stance of policy, we will be alert to the possibility that the economy is not evolving in the way we currently judge to be the most likely. One risk to the outlook is that the ongoing housing correction might prove larger than anticipated, with possible spillovers onto consumer spending. Alternatively, consumer spending, which has advanced relatively vigorously, on balance, in recent quarters, might expand more quickly than expected; in that case, economic growth could rebound to a pace above its trend. With the level of resource utilization already elevated, the resulting pressures in labor and product markets could lead to increased inflation over time. Yet another risk is that energy and commodity prices could continue to rise sharply, leading to further increases in headline inflation and, if those costs passed through to the prices of non-energy goods and services, to higher core inflation as well. Moreover, if inflation were to move higher for an extended period and that increase became embedded in longer-term inflation expectations, the re-establishment of price stability would become more difficult and costly to achieve. With the level of resource utilization relatively high and with a sustained moderation in inflation pressures yet to be convincingly demonstrated, the FOMC has consistently stated that upside risks to inflation are its predominant policy concern.

* * *

In addition to its dual mandate to promote maximum employment and price stability, the Federal Reserve has an important responsibility to help protect consumers in financial services transactions. For nearly forty years, the Federal Reserve has been active in implementing, interpreting, and enforcing consumer protection laws. I would like to discuss with you this morning some of our recent initiatives and actions, particularly those related to subprime mortgage lending.

Promoting access to credit and to homeownership are important objectives, and responsible subprime mortgage lending can help advance both goals. In designing regulations, policymakers should seek to preserve those benefits. That said, the recent rapid expansion of the subprime market was clearly accompanied by deterioration in underwriting standards and, in some cases, by abusive lending practices and outright fraud. In addition, some households took on mortgage obligations they could not meet, perhaps in some cases because they did not fully understand the terms. Financial losses have subsequently induced lenders to tighten their underwriting standards. Nevertheless, rising delinquencies and foreclosures are creating personal, economic, and social distress for many homeowners and communitiesproblems that likely will get worse before they get better.

The Federal Reserve is responding to these difficulties at both the national and the local levels. In coordination with the other federal supervisory agencies, we are encouraging the financial industry to work with borrowers to arrange prudent loan modifications to avoid unnecessary foreclosures. Federal Reserve Banks around the country are cooperating with community and industry groups that work directly with borrowers having trouble meeting their mortgage obligations. We continue to work with organizations that provide counseling about mortgage products to current and potential homeowners. We are also meeting with market participantsincluding lenders, investors, servicers, and community groupsto discuss their concerns and to gain information about market developments.

We are conducting a top-to-bottom review of possible actions we might take to help prevent recurrence of these problems. First, we are committed to providing more-effective disclosures to help consumers defend against improper lending. Three years ago, the Board began a comprehensive review of Regulation Z, which implements the Truth in Lending Act (TILA). The initial focus of our review was on disclosures related to credit cards and other revolving credit accounts. After conducting extensive consumer testing, we issued a proposal in May that would require credit card issuers to provide clearer and easier-to-understand disclosures to customers. In particular, the new disclosures would highlight applicable rates and fees, particularly penalties that might be imposed. The proposed rules would also require card issuers to provide forty-five days advance notice of a rate increase or any other change in account terms so that consumers will not be surprised by unexpected charges and will have time to explore alternatives.

We are now engaged in a similar review of the TILA rules for mortgage loans. We began this review last year by holding four public hearings across the country, during which we gathered information on the adequacy of disclosures for mortgages, particularly for nontraditional and adjustable-rate products. As we did with credit card lending, we will conduct extensive consumer testing of proposed disclosures. Because the process of designing and testing disclosures involves many trial runs, especially given todays diverse and sometimes complex credit products, it may take some time to complete our review and propose new disclosures.

However, some other actions can be implemented more quickly. By the end of the year, we will propose changes to TILA rules to address concerns about mortgage loan advertisements and solicitations that may be incomplete or misleading and to require lenders to provide mortgage disclosures more quickly so that consumers can get the information they need when it is most useful to them. We already have improved a disclosure that creditors must provide to every applicant for an adjustable-rate mortgage product to explain better the features and risks of these products, such as payment shock and rising loan balances.

We are certainly aware, however, that disclosure alone may not be sufficient to protect consumers. Accordingly, we plan to exercise our authority under the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA) to address specific practices that are unfair or deceptive. We held a public hearing on June 14 to discuss industry practices, including those pertaining to pre-payment penalties, the use of escrow accounts for taxes and insurance, stated-income and low-documentation lending, and the evaluation of a borrowers ability to repay. The discussion and ideas we heard were extremely useful, and we look forward to receiving additional public comments in coming weeks. Based on the information we are gathering, I expect that the Board will propose additional rules under HOEPA later this year.

In coordination with the other federal supervisory agencies, last year we issued principles-based guidance on nontraditional mortgages, and in June of this year we issued supervisory guidance on subprime lending. These statements emphasize the fundamental consumer protection principles of sound underwriting and effective disclosures. In addition, we reviewed our policies related to the examination of nonbank subsidiaries of bank and financial holding companies for compliance with consumer protection laws and guidance.

As a result of that review and following discussions with the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Federal Trade Commission, and state regulators, as represented by the Conference of State Bank Supervisors and the American Association of Residential Mortgage Regulators, we are launching a cooperative pilot project aimed at expanding consumer protection compliance reviews at selected nondepository lenders with significant subprime mortgage operations. The reviews will begin in the fourth quarter of this year and will include independent state-licensed mortgage lenders, nondepository mortgage lending subsidiaries of bank and thrift holding companies, and mortgage brokers doing business with or serving as agents of these entities. The agencies will collaborate in determining the lessons learned and in seeking ways to better cooperate in ensuring effective and consistent examinations of and improved enforcement for nondepository mortgage lenders. Working together to address jurisdictional issues and to improve information-sharing among agencies, we will seek to prevent abusive and fraudulent lending while ensuring that consumers retain access to beneficial credit.

I believe that the actions I have described today will help address the current problems. The Federal Reserve looks forward to working with the Congress on these important issues.

1. Despite the recent surge, total PCE inflation is 2.3 percent over the past twelve months. Return to textReturn to top

2007 Testimony

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The Imminent Death of Darwinism and the Rise of …

The Imminent Death of Darwinism and the Rise of Intelligent Design

"He will guide you into all truth" (John 16:13).

According to Darwinism, all life on earth arose by natural variation and selection of the most fit. But many questions raised by Darwin's contemporaries remain unanswered today. These problems are compounded by the unique DNA sequence information now in from the human genome project (Venter, 2001; Lander, 2001) and our understanding of the irreducibly complex function of biological systems (Behe, 1996). Intellectual honesty will soon force many scientists to abandon Darwin's theory of the evolution of species in exchange for intelligent design or outright Biblical creation.

Studies of outward appearances of organisms led Darwin and his successors to propose elaborate phylogenetic trees in which man was placed on a branch common to apes and monkeys. Major limbs in the animal trunk contained the fish, giving rise to reptiles, birds, and mammals. At the root are three major divisions of true bacteria: "old" bacteria (archaebacteria), and organisms with nuclei including plants, fungi, and animals. Discoveries in biology over the last half of the twentieth century at first seemed to support Darwinism. All organisms were found to contain the same building blocks for the genetic code in DNA. All used the DNA to transcribe RNA and all used ribosomes to make protein from the RNA. Many proteins and RNA's were similar from one life form to another, even between bacteria and man. However, these data support intelligent design by a single set of principles just as well. Furthermore, recent multi-gene comparisons of the amount of divergence between different organisms now provide better support for a complex relationship between different organisms, a relationship that first looked more like a shrub, with many more early branches. Now the trend seems to be toward nearly independent origins, a model more like grass. This model is consistent with the independent origins of major kinds of plants, sea life, and animals described in the Genesis account.

If Darwinian evolution applies at the molecular level, the gene sequences of all organisms should resemble each other because of descent. Closely related animals should have the most closely related gene sequences. On the other hand, if there were independent origins for major kinds of animals, then a large portion of the genome should be original, unique sequences not present in other kinds of organisms. In 1997 scientists reported the complete 4,639,221 base DNA sequence of E. coli (Blattner, et al., 1997), a common bacterium in our intestines. As each gene sequence is discovered, it is placed in the GenBank database. By comparison of a new gene to all others in the database using the BLAST program (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov), scientists can determine how similar one gene is to another. In comparison to Haemophilus, Synechocystis, and Mycoplasma bacteria, of the 4,288 coded proteins in E. coli, there are only 111 proteins (2.6%) in common with these three eubacteria. Sixty percent of the E. coli sequences are completely unique, with less than 30% common to the sequences of these other bacteria. Thirty-eight percent of the E. coli genes have no known function. Examining all the organisms in table 1 shows a surprisingly high percentage of genes with no match in other organisms. The average for bacteria is 29% unique. That's 29% unique genetic information with no known origin, no possible descent. In the case of a fly, a worm, and a human, 50-60% of the genes are unique or with no known function. Most of the emphasis has been on how similar genes are in man and bacteria, with little attention to the differences. Where did this unique genetic information come from? Unique genes do not come from small numbers of base changes that scientists routinely produce in the lab or by breeding or by gene rearrangements. These data provide better support for the alternative hypothesis of independent origin by intelligent design than for evolution by descent.

To begin life as we know it, cells would need to have a genetic program of DNA or RNA. They would need to protect their genome from degradation from outside with a lipid membrane, and they would need the machinery to transform chemical energy into metabolic energy to replicate. This machinery requires pre-existing proteins to catalyze the reactions of metabolism and replication. And the synthesis of proteins requires other pre-existing proteins and a small factory called the ribosome. Take away any of these components and life doesn't exist. All this complexity is required at the same time and place for the most simple single-celled life. Michael Behe (1996) has termed this requirement irreducible complexity. Life can't evolve by the gradual addition of one of these components at a time. Life and its requisite requirement for replication needs it all. Not only is irreducible complexity required for the start of life, but each complex system in our bodies: the eye, the kidney, blood coagulation, red blood cells . . . the list goes on and on. Though scientists are familiar with this complexity, they fail to realize and accept the requirement for intelligent design. Furthermore, decades of experiments have failed to demonstrate an origin of any life from organic molecules, much less evolution of protein synthesis or DNA replication. Also, decades of genetic manipulation of bacteria and other organisms have never produced a new species like Darwinism would require. Although the universal negative (that evolution of species is impossible) can never be proven, enough evidence has amassed that funding agencies will no longer support organic origin of life research, and those trying have moved on to other subjects. The death of Darwinism will be a hard pill to swallow because it requires replacement by intelligent design, a paradigm outside the box of naturalism that many scientists embrace.

Theories are to be modified or abandoned when they are inconsistent with one significant fact. Based on relationships of similar genes, large numbers of unrelated genes and irreducible complexity, Darwin's evolution of species needs to be replaced by intelligent design. According to the Bible, the Designer was God with more than adequate intelligence and power to create all the major kinds of life in a short period of time. While we will never be able to prove the singularity of creation by God, the evidence better supports faith in God, rather than faith in Darwinism.

* Dr. Brewer is Professor of Neurology and Medical Microbiology at Southern Illinois University.

Cite this article: Gregory J. Brewer, Ph.D. 2001. The Imminent Death of Darwinism and the Rise of Intelligent Design. Acts & Facts. 30 (11).

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FitzRoy, Captain of the Beagle, Fierce Critic of Darwinism

FitzRoy, Captain of the Beagle, Fierce Critic of Darwinism

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Background

Admiral Robert FitzRoy is better known as the Captain of HMS Beagle, the ship that carried Darwin on his famous voyage. FitzRoy was born into a notable royal family line and gained command of a ship at the young age of 23, mainly through his exceptional ability, and only partly from his lineage. He could in fact trace his ancestors back through the Royal line of Charles II, and Barbara Villiers, the Duchess of Cleveland, and he was also a nephew of Lord Castlereagh. He was later nominated to fellowship of the Royal Society for his hydrographic and chronographic survey, and was also chosen as the first Chief Statist of the newly formed Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade in the UK (Now the UK Meteorological Office). Throughout his life he had a strong sense of Christian duty and desire to protect life, especially the lives of fellow sailors, and he was a pioneer in the development of a system of storm warnings around Britain following the Royal Charter naval disaster, and was the first to produce and issue regular weather forecasts.

FitzRoy was born on July 5, 1805, at Ampton Hall, Suffolk, and trained at the Portsmouth based Royal Naval College, formerly the Royal Naval Academy founded in 1733. He gained the distinction of being the first student to win the gold medal from this long established institution with a 100 percent pass rate, demonstrating the ability of an extraordinary scholar.1 Supporters of Darwin later tried to rubbish his reputation, but FitzRoy is now recognized as a man of exceptional scientific ability.

In 1828 he took command of HMS Beagle, and three years later in 1831 he began his most famous second voyage. This was the journey that carried the naturalist Charles Darwin on expedition to South America and the Galapagos Islands. FitzRoy also became a more devout Christian and was later a major critic of the theory of evolution following the publication of Darwin's book The Origin of Species, in 1859.

The voyage of the Beagle was commissioned and organized by Admiral Francis Beaufort and left Plymouth on December 27, 1831. However, the original plan of FitzRoy had been to arrange a trip at his own expense to carry three natives back to Tierra del Fuego. Lavallee has previously shown in an Impact article how these three had been brought to England from the previous voyage, and FitzRoy's plan had been to educate them as Christians and send them back with two missionaries.2 The Navy took over the organization of the trip, and it was to last much longer than any had expected. Its main naval purpose was to survey the coast and waters of South America, so that accurate charts could be drawn of the southern passage, this for reasons of maritime safety.

Beagle Voyage

The young Darwin joined the Beagle as the ship's naturalist and companion of the Captain, following the recommendation of his former Professor, John Henslow. FitzRoy and Darwin remained friends for many years after. While FitzRoy was examining the coast on this long trip, Darwin was expected to survey the surrounding geology, flora, and fauna. Both FitzRoy and Darwin wrote up the exploration of the Beagle in a three-volume work, known as the Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle. FitzRoy wrote the first two volumes with Darwin the third (although the first volume mainly used edited material from Parker King and Pringle Stokes). What unfolds from FitzRoy's account is that he seemed at first unsure of the truth of Genesis and was in fact responsible for giving Darwin a copy of Lyell's book Principles of Geology to read on the long voyage, a decision he later bitterly regretted. Despite his early years of doubt, FitzRoy later became a strong Christian and humanitarian. He commented,

I suffered much anxiety in former years from a disposition to doubt, if not disbelieve, the inspired History written by Moses. I knew so little of that record, or of the intimate manner in which the Old Testament is connected with the New, that I fancied some events there related might be mythological or fabulous, while I sincerely believed the truth of others; a wavering between opinions, which could only be productive of an unsettled, and therefore unhappy, state of mind.3

Some have suggested that marriage to a devout wife changed FitzRoy's view from doubter to preacher, but from the Narrative it seems that the geological evidence observed first hand on the voyage was a major influence in changing his mind to accept the literal truth of Genesis. In April and May, 1834, FitzRoy commanded a trip up the Rio Santa Cruz in whaleboats to survey the river course with Darwin a passenger. On his return to England, FitzRoy reported these findings to the Royal Geological Society and wrote up his survey in the Narrative showing him to be an able geologist. FitzRoy comments,

Is it not remarkable that water-worn shingle stones, and diluvial accumulations, compose the greater portion of these plains? On how vast a scale, and of what duration must have been the action of those waters which smoothed the shingle stones now buried in the deserts of Patagonia.4

Though the bed of the river is there so much below the level of stratum of lava, it still bears the appearance of having worn away its channel by the continual action of running water. The surface of the lava may be considered as the natural level of the country, since, when upon it, a plain, which seems to the eye horizontal, extends in every direction. How wonderful must that immense volcanic action have been which spread liquid lava over the surface of a vast tract of country.5

From these observations it appears that FitzRoy was beginning to see catastrophes at work in shaping the landform, both in terms of the action of water and volcanoes. But it seems that evidence of shells found in mountain rocks was foundational for FitzRoy in coming to accept the literal nature of the Genesis Flood.

It appeared to me a convincing proof of the universality of the deluge. I am not ignorant that some have attributed this to other causes; but an unanswerable confutation of their subterfuge is this, that the various sorts of shells which compose these strata both in the plains and mountains, are the very same with those found in the bay and neighbouring places . . . these to me seem to preclude all manner of doubt that they were originally produced in that sea, from whence they were carried by waters, and deposited in the places where they are now found.6

After the voyage FitzRoy continued to visit Darwin at Down House in Kent regularly until the spring of 1857,7 but their friendship became severely strained following the publication of Darwin's book in November 1859. FitzRoy became a major critic of his friend's work, and although he suffered from depression and a sharp temper he never bore grudges and showed compassion to those he disagreed with. In December 1859, FitzRoy began an exchange in The Times criticizing the dating of stone tools found near the river Somme, these dated to 14,000 years BP. This exchange was under a pseudonym Senex, from the Latin nemo senex metuit louem, meaning, "An old man should be fearful of God."8

1860 Oxford Debate

In June of 1860, some six months after Darwin published his Origins book, a famous debate took place in Oxford, England, with notable speakers Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley. The Bishop, the son of the anti-slave campaigner William Wilberforce, was not a scientist, but instead was briefed by Richard Owen, founder of the Natural History Museum in London. This meeting was held by the British Association and was attended by a packed audience of some one thousand people. Things turned sour, and followers of Darwin and Huxley later claimed victory, although the evidence does not really support this and exactly what happened and who won is still open to debate. Times were changing and Huxley's rudeness to a leading Bishop, with his fierce, rhetorical style won him popularity from the audience.

FitzRoy also spoke at this emotionally charged meeting. At the end of the meeting FitzRoy is reported to have held a heavy Bible above his head like an Old Testament prophet and "implored the audience to believe God rather than man,"9 commenting that Darwin's work caused him "the acutest pain."10 The official report in The Athenaeum records FitzRoy as saying that ". . . [he] regretted the publication of Mr. Darwin's book and denied Professor Huxley's statement that it was a logical arrangement of facts."11

FitzRoy seems to have been shouted down for his comments, and Lady Brewster, overcome by the heated atmosphere and passion created, fainted and had to be carried out.12

FitzRoy's contribution to the debate seems to have been most memorable. Julius Carus in a private letter to Darwin some six years later comments that,

I shall never forget that meeting of the combined sections of the British Association when at Oxford in 1860, where Admiral FitzRoy expressed his sorrows for having given you the opportunities of collecting facts for such a shocking theory as yours.13

Sir David Brewster, a co-founder of the British Association was also a strong opponent of evolution and in private correspondence to FitzRoy, commented that,

Darwin's book and the essays and reviews are most alarming proof of the infidelity and rashness of distinguished men.14

Some time later in another correspondence with Brewster, FitzRoy referred to Revelation 13 likening Darwin's theory of evolution to the "beast rising up out of the sea . . . opening his mouth in blasphemy against God."15

FitzRoy was an exceptional scholar and scientist, and a fierce and important critic of Darwin's theory of evolution, disputing the facts that Darwin presented. Supporters of Darwin later attacked FitzRoy's reputation because it was recognized that the Captain of the Beagle's comments could do enormous damage to the theory of evolution. Nevertheless, FitzRoy was a notable scientist and supporter of Flood geology and Special Creation.

Endnotes

* Andrew Sibley is a Meteorologist working for the Met Office in the UK. He has a Masters of Science and is a Council member of the Creation Science Movement.

Cite this article: Andrew Sibley, M.S. 2005. FitzRoy, Captain of the Beagle, Fierce Critic of Darwinism. Acts & Facts. 34 (11).

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FitzRoy, Captain of the Beagle, Fierce Critic of Darwinism

The eclipse of Darwinism – Wikipedia

Julian Huxley used the phrase "the eclipse of Darwinism"[a] to describe the state of affairs prior to what he called the modern synthesis, when evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles but relatively few biologists believed that natural selection was its primary mechanism.[2][3] Historians of science such as Peter J. Bowler have used the same phrase as a label for the period within the history of evolutionary thought from the 1880s to around 1920, when alternatives to natural selection were developed and exploredas many biologists considered natural selection to have been a wrong guess on Charles Darwin's part, or at least as of relatively minor importance.[4][5] An alternative term, the interphase of Darwinism, has been proposed to avoid the largely incorrect implication that the putative eclipse was preceded by a period of vigorous Darwinian research.[1]

While there had been multiple explanations of evolution including vitalism, catastrophism, and structuralism through the 19th century, four major alternatives to natural selection were in play at the turn of the 20th century:

Theistic evolution largely disappeared from the scientific literature by the end of the 19th century as direct appeals to supernatural causes came to be seen as unscientific. The other alternatives had significant followings well into the 20th century; mainstream biology largely abandoned them only when developments in genetics made them seem increasingly untenable, and when the development of population genetics and the modern synthesis demonstrated the explanatory power of natural selection. Ernst Mayr wrote that as late as 1930 most textbooks still emphasized such non-Darwinian mechanisms.[6]

Evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles within a few years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, but acceptance of natural selection as its driving mechanism was much less.[7] Six objections were raised to the theory in the 19th century:[8]

Both Darwin and his close supporter Thomas Henry Huxley[f] freely admitted, too, that selection might not be the whole explanation; Darwin was prepared to accept a measure of Lamarckism, while Huxley was comfortable with both sudden (mutational) change and directed (orthogenetic) evolution.[12]

By the end of the 19th century, criticism of natural selection had reached the point that in 1903 the German botanist, Eberhard Dennert (de), wrote that "We are now standing at the death bed of Darwinism", and in 1907 the Stanford University entomologist Vernon Lyman Kellogg, who supported natural selection, asserted that "... the fair truth is that the Darwinian selection theory, considered with regard to its claimed capacity to be an independently sufficient mechanical explanation of descent, stands today seriously discredited in the biological world." [13] He added, however, that there were problems preventing the widespread acceptance of any of the alternatives, as large mutations seemed too uncommon, and there was no experimental evidence of mechanisms that could support either Lamarckism or orthogenesis.[14] Ernst Mayr wrote that a survey of evolutionary literature and biology textbooks showed that as late as 1930 the belief that natural selection was the most important factor in evolution was a minority viewpoint, with only a few population geneticists being strict selectionists.[6]

A variety of different factors motivated people to propose other evolutionary mechanisms as alternatives to natural selection, some of them dating back before Darwin's Origin of Species. Natural selection, with its emphasis on death and competition, did not appeal to some naturalists because they felt it was immoral, and left little room for teleology or the concept of progress in the development of life.[15][16] Some of these scientists and philosophers, like St. George Jackson Mivart and Charles Lyell, who came to accept evolution but disliked natural selection, raised religious objections.[17] Others, such as Herbert Spencer, the botanist George Henslow (son of Darwin's mentor John Stevens Henslow also a botanist), and Samuel Butler, felt that evolution was an inherently progressive process that natural selection alone was insufficient to explain. Still others, including the American paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Alpheus Hyatt, had an idealist perspective and felt that nature, including the development of life, followed orderly patterns that natural selection could not explain.[10]

Another factor was the rise of a new faction of biologists at the end of the 19th century, typified by the geneticists Hugo DeVries and Thomas Hunt Morgan, who wanted to recast biology as an experimental laboratory science. They distrusted the work of naturalists like Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, dependent on field observations of variation, adaptation, and biogeography, considering these overly anecdotal. Instead they focused on topics like physiology, and genetics that could be easily investigated with controlled experiments in the laboratory, and discounted natural selection and the degree to which organisms were adapted to their environment, which could not easily be tested experimentally.[18]

British science developed in the early 19th century on a basis of natural theology which saw the adaptation of fixed species as evidence that they had been specially created to a purposeful divine design. The philosophical concepts of German idealism inspired concepts of an ordered plan of harmonious creation, which Richard Owen reconciled with natural theology as a pattern of homology showing evidence of design. Similarly, Louis Agassiz saw the recapitulation theory as symbolising a pattern of the sequence of creations in which humanity was the goal of a divine plan. In 1844 Vestiges adapted Agassiz's concept into theistic evolutionism. Its anonymous author Robert Chambers proposed a "law" of divinely ordered progressive development, with transmutation of species as an extension of recapitulation theory. This popularised the idea, but it was strongly condemned by the scientific establishment. Agassiz remained forcefully opposed to evolution, and after he moved to America in 1846 his idealist argument from design of orderly development became very influential.[19] In 1858 Owen cautiously proposed that this development could be a real expression of a continuing creative law, but distanced himself from transmutationists. Two years later in his review of Darwin's On the Origin of Species Owen attacked Darwin while at the same time openly supporting evolution,[20] expressing belief in a pattern of transmutation by law-like means. This idealist argument from design was taken up by other naturalists such as George Jackson Mivart, and the Duke of Argyll who rejected natural selection altogether in favor of laws of development that guided evolution down preordained paths.[21]

Many of Darwin's supporters accepted evolution on the basis that it could be reconciled with design. In particular, Asa Gray considered natural selection to be the main mechanism of evolution and sought to reconcile it with natural theology. He proposed that natural selection could be a mechanism in which the problem of evil of suffering produced the greater good of adaptation, but conceded that this had difficulties and suggested that God might influence the variations on which natural selection acted to guide evolution.[22] For Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley such pervasive supernatural influence was beyond scientific investigation, and George Frederick Wright, an ordained minister who was Gray's colleague in developing theistic evolution, emphasised the need to look for secondary or known causes rather than invoking supernatural explanations: "If we cease to observe this rule there is an end to all science and all sound science."[23]

A secular version of this methodological naturalism was welcomed by a younger generation of scientists who sought to investigate natural causes of organic change, and rejected theistic evolution in science. By 1872 Darwinism in its broader sense of the fact of evolution was accepted as a starting point. Around 1890 only a few older men held onto the idea of design in science, and it had completely disappeared from mainstream scientific discussions by 1900. There was still unease about the implications of natural selection, and those seeking a purpose or direction in evolution turned to neo-Lamarckism or orthogenesis as providing natural explanations.[24]

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had originally proposed a theory on the transmutation of species that was largely based on a progressive drive toward greater complexity. Lamarck also believed, as did many others at the time, that characteristics acquired during the course of an organism's life could be inherited by the next generation, and he saw this as a secondary evolutionary mechanism that produced adaptation to the environment. Typically, such characteristics included changes caused by the use or disuse of a particular organ. It was this mechanism of evolutionary adaptation through the inheritance of acquired characteristics that much later came to be known as Lamarckism.[25] Although Alfred Russel Wallace completely rejected the concept in favor of natural selection, Charles Darwin always included what he called Effects of the increased Use and Disuse of Parts, as controlled by Natural Selection in On the Origin of Species, giving examples such as large ground feeding birds getting stronger legs through exercise, and weaker wings from not flying until, like the ostrich, they could not fly at all.[26]

In the late 19th century the term neo-Lamarckism came to be associated with the position of naturalists who viewed the inheritance of acquired characteristics as the most important evolutionary mechanism. Advocates of this position included the British writer and Darwin critic Samuel Butler, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, the American paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Alpheus Hyatt, and the American entomologist Alpheus Packard. They considered Lamarckism to be more progressive and thus philosophically superior to Darwin's idea of natural selection acting on random variation. Butler and Cope both believed that this allowed organisms to effectively drive their own evolution, since organisms that developed new behaviors would change the patterns of use of their organs and thus kick-start the evolutionary process. In addition, Cope and Haeckel both believed that evolution was a progressive process. The idea of linear progress was an important part of Haeckel's recapitulation theory of evolution, which held that the embryological development of an organism repeats its evolutionary history. Cope and Hyatt looked for, and thought they found, patterns of linear progression in the fossil record.[27][28] Packard argued that the loss of vision in the blind cave insects he studied was best explained through a Lamarckian process of atrophy through disuse combined with inheritance of acquired characteristics.[29] Packard also wrote a book about Lamarck and his writings.[27][30]

Many American proponents of neo-Lamarckism were strongly influenced by Louis Agassiz and a number of them, including Hyatt and Packard, were his students. Agassiz had an idealistic view of nature, connected with natural theology, that emphasized the importance of order and pattern. Agassiz never accepted evolution; his followers did, but they continued his program of searching for orderly patterns in nature, which they considered to be consistent with divine providence, and preferred evolutionary mechanisms like neo-Lamarckism and orthogenesis that would be likely to produce them.[27][30]

In Britain the botanist George Henslow, the son of Darwin's mentor John Stevens Henslow, was an important advocate of neo-Lamarckism. He studied how environmental stress affected the development of plants, and he wrote that the variations induced by such environmental factors could largely explain evolution. The historian of science Peter J. Bowler writes that, as was typical of many 19th century Lamarckians, Henslow did not appear to understand the need to demonstrate that such environmentally induced variations would be inherited by descendants that developed in the absence of the environmental factors that produced them, but merely assumed that they would be.[31]

Critics of neo-Lamarckism pointed out that no one had ever produced solid evidence for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The experimental work of the German biologist August Weismann resulted in the germ plasm theory of inheritance. This led him to declare that inheritance of acquired characteristics was impossible, since the Weismann barrier would prevent any changes that occurred to the body after birth from being inherited by the next generation. This effectively polarised the argument between the Darwinians and the neo-Lamarckians, as it forced people to choose whether to agree or disagree with Weismann and hence with evolution by natural selection.[32] Despite Weismann's criticism, neo-Lamarckism remained the most popular alternative to natural selection at the end of the 19th century, and would remain the position of some naturalists well into the 20th century.[28][33]

As a consequence of the debate over the viability of neo-Lamarckism, in 1896 James Mark Baldwin, Henry Fairfield Osborne and C. Lloyd Morgan all independently proposed a mechanism where new learned behaviors could cause the evolution of new instincts and physical traits through natural selection without resort to the inheritance of acquired characteristics. They proposed that if individuals in a species benefited from learning a particular new behavior, the ability to learn that behavior could be favored by natural selection, and the end result would be the evolution of new instincts and eventually new physical adaptations. This became known as the Baldwin effect and it has remained a topic of debate and research in evolutionary biology ever since.[34]

Orthogenesis was the theory that life has an innate tendency to change, in a unilinear fashion in a particular direction. The term was popularized by Theodor Eimer, a German zoologist, in his 1898 book On Orthogenesis: And the Impotence of Natural Selection in Species Formation. He had studied the coloration of butterflies, and believed he had discovered non-adaptive features which could not be explained by natural selection. Eimer also believed in Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics, but he felt that internal laws of growth determine which characteristics would be acquired and guided the long term direction of evolution down certain paths.[35]

Orthogenesis had a significant following in the 19th century, its proponents including the Russian biologist Leo S. Berg, and the American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn.[36] Orthogenesis was particularly popular among some paleontologists, who believed that the fossil record showed patterns of gradual and constant unidirectional change. Those who accepted this idea, however, did not necessarily accept that the mechanism driving orthogenesis was teleological (goal-directed). They did believe that orthogenetic trends were non-adaptive; in fact they felt that in some cases they led to developments that were detrimental to the organism, such as the large antlers of the Irish elk that they believed led to the animal's extinction.[35]

Support for orthogenesis began to decline during the modern synthesis in the 1940s, when it became apparent that orthogenesis could not explain the complex branching patterns of evolution revealed by statistical analysis of the fossil record by paleontologists. A few biologists however hung on to the idea of orthogenesis as late as the 1950s, claiming that the processes of macroevolution, the long term trends in evolution, were distinct from the processes of microevolution.[10][11]

Mutationism was the idea that new forms and species arose in a single step as a result of large mutations. It was seen as a much faster alternative to the Darwinian concept of a gradual process of small random variations being acted on by natural selection. It was popular with early geneticists such as Hugo de Vries, who along with Carl Correns helped rediscover Gregor Mendel's laws of inheritance in 1900, William Bateson a British zoologist who switched to genetics, and early in his career, Thomas Hunt Morgan.[37][38]

The 1901 mutation theory of evolution held that species went through periods of rapid mutation, possibly as a result of environmental stress, that could produce multiple mutations, and in some cases completely new species, in a single generation. Its originator was the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries. De Vries looked for evidence of mutation extensive enough to produce a new species in a single generation and thought he found it with his work breeding the evening primrose of the genus Oenothera, which he started in 1886. The plants that de Vries worked with seemed to be constantly producing new varieties with striking variations in form and color, some of which appeared to be new species because plants of the new generation could only be crossed with one another, not with their parents. DeVries himself allowed a role for natural selection in determining which new species would survive, but some geneticists influenced by his work, including Morgan, felt that natural selection was not necessary at all. De Vries's ideas were influential in the first two decades of the 20th century, as some biologists felt that mutation theory could explain the sudden emergence of new forms in the fossil record; research on Oenothera spread across the world. However, critics including many field naturalists wondered why no other organism seemed to show the same kind of rapid mutation.[39]

Morgan was a supporter of de Vries's mutation theory and was hoping to gather evidence in favor of it when he started working with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in his lab in 1907. However, it was a researcher in that lab, Hermann Joseph Muller, who determined in 1918 that the new varieties de Vries had observed while breeding Oenothera were the result of polyploid hybrids rather than rapid genetic mutation.[40][41] While they were doubtful of the importance of natural selection, the work of geneticists like Morgan, Bateson, de Vries and others from 1900 to 1915 established Mendelian genetics linked to chromosomal inheritance, which validated August Weismann's criticism of neo-Lamarckian evolution by discounting the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The work in Morgan's lab with Drosophila also undermined the concept of orthogenesis by demonstrating the random nature of mutation.[42]

During the period 19161932, the discipline of population genetics developed largely through the work of the geneticists Ronald Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright. Their work recognized that the vast majority of mutations produced small effects that served to increase the genetic variability of a population rather than creating new species in a single step as the mutationists assumed. They were able to produce statistical models of population genetics that included Darwin's concept of natural selection as the driving force of evolution.[43]

Developments in genetics persuaded field naturalists such as Bernhard Rensch and Ernst Mayr to abandon neo-Lamarckian ideas about evolution in the early 1930s.[44] By the late 1930s, Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky had synthesized the ideas of population genetics with the knowledge of field naturalists about the amount of genetic diversity in wild populations, and the importance of genetically distinct subpopulations (especially when isolated from one another by geographical barriers) to create the early 20th century modern synthesis.[45] In 1944 George Gaylord Simpson integrated paleontology into the synthesis by statistically analyzing the fossil record to show that it was consistent with the branching non-directional form of evolution predicted by the modern synthesis, and in particular that the linear trends cited by earlier paleontologists in support of Lamarckism and orthogenesis did not stand up to careful analysis.[46] Mayr wrote that by the end of the synthesis natural selection together with chance mechanisms like genetic drift had become the universal explanation for evolutionary change.[6]

The concept of eclipse suggests that Darwinian research paused, implying in turn that there had been a preceding period of vigorously Darwinian activity among biologists. However, historians of science such as Mark Largent have argued that while biologists broadly accepted the extensive evidence for evolution presented in The Origin of Species, there was less enthusiasm for natural selection as a mechanism. Biologists instead looked for alternative explanations more in keeping with their worldviews, which included the beliefs that evolution must be directed and that it constituted a form of progress. Further, the idea of a dark eclipse period was convenient to scientists such as Julian Huxley, who wished to paint the modern synthesis as a bright new achievement, and accordingly to depict the preceding period as dark and confused. Huxley's 1942 book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis therefore, argued Largent, suggested that the so-called modern synthesis began after a long period of eclipse lasting until the 1930s, in which Mendelians, neo-Lamarckians, mutationists, and Weismannians, not to mention experimental embryologists and Haeckelian recapitulationists fought running battles with each other.[1] The idea of an eclipse also allowed Huxley to step aside from what was to him the inconvenient association of evolution with aspects such as social Darwinism, eugenics, imperialism, and militarism.[1] Accounts such as Michael Ruse's very large[1] book Monad to Man[47] ignored, claimed Largent, almost all the early 20th century American evolutionary biologists. Largent has suggested as an alternative to eclipse a biological metaphor, the interphase of Darwinism, interphase being an apparently quiet period in the cycle of cell division and growth.[1]

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Modern synthesis – Wikipedia

The modern synthesis[a] was the early 20th-century synthesis reconciling Charles Darwin's and Gregor Mendel's ideas in a joint mathematical framework that established evolution as biology's central paradigm.[2][3]Julian Huxley invented the term in his 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis.

The 19th century ideas of natural selection by Darwin and Mendelian genetics were put together with population genetics, between around 1918 and 1932. The modern synthesis also addressed the relationship between the broad-scale changes of macroevolution seen by palaeontologists and small-scale microevolution of local populations of living organisms.

Further syntheses came later, including evolutionary developmental biology's integration of embryology with genetics and evolution, starting in 1977, and Massimo Pigliucci's proposed extended evolutionary synthesis of 2007.

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) was successful in convincing most biologists that evolution had occurred, but was less successful in convincing them that natural selection was its primary mechanism. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, variations of Lamarckism, orthogenesis ('progressive' evolution), and saltationism (evolution by jumps) were discussed as alternatives.[4] Also, Darwin did not offer a precise explanation of how new species arise. As part of the disagreement about whether natural selection alone was sufficient to explain speciation, George Romanes coined the term neo-Darwinism to refer to the version of evolution advocated by Alfred Russel Wallace and August Weismann. which depended heavily natural selection.[1] Weismann and Wallace rejected the Lamarckian idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics, something that Darwin had not ruled out.[5]

Weismann's idea, set out in his 1892 book Das Keimplasma: eine Theorie der Vererbung (The Germ Plasm: a theory of inheritance),[6] was that the relationship between the hereditary material, which he called the germ plasm (German, Keimplasma), and the rest of the body (the soma) was a one-way relationship: the germ-plasm formed the body, but the body did not influence the germ-plasm, except indirectly in its participation in a population subject to natural selection. Weismann was translated into English, and though he was influential, it took many years for the full significance of his work to be appreciated.[7] Later, after the completion of the modern synthesis, the term neo-Darwinism came to be associated with its core concept: evolution, driven by natural selection acting on variation produced by genetic mutation, and genetic recombination (chromosomal crossovers).[1]

Between around 1890 and 1930, there was a widespread belief among biologists that Darwinian evolution was in deep trouble, principally because experiments had failed to show that progressive evolution could gradually modify species by making many changes to small inherited variations. This eclipse of Darwinism (in Julian Huxley's phrase) was challenged when population genetics showed that Mendelian genetics could indeed support exactly that model of evolution, and was replaced as a general belief by the promotion of the idea of a modern synthesis by Huxley and others in the 1940s.[8]

Gregor Mendel's work was re-discovered by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns in 1900. News of this reached William Bateson in England, who reported on the paper during a presentation to the Royal Horticultural Society in May 1900.[9] It showed that the contributions of each parent retained their integrity rather than blending with the contribution of the other parent. This reinforced a division of thought, which was already present in the 1890s.[10] The two schools were:

A traditional view is that the biometricians and the Mendelians rejected natural selection and argued for their separate theories for 20 years, the debate only resolved by the development of population genetics, giving a date of 1918 for the start of the supposed synthesis after a period of eclipse.[12][13]

A more recent view, advocated by the historians Arlin Stoltzfus and Kele Cable, is that Bateson, de Vries, Morgan and Reginald Punnett had by 1918 formed a synthesis of Mendelism and mutationism. The understanding achieved by these geneticists spanned the action of natural selection on alleles (alternative forms of a gene), the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, the evolution of continuously-varying traits (like height), and the probability that a new mutation will become fixed. In this view, the early geneticists accepted natural selection but rejected Darwin's non-Mendelian ideas about variation and heredity, and the synthesis began soon after 1900.[14] The traditional claim that Mendelians rejected the idea of continuous variation is false; as early as 1902, Bateson and Saunders wrote that "If there were even so few as, say, four or five pairs of possible allelomorphs, the various homo- and hetero-zygous combinations might, on seriation, give so near an approach to a continuous curve, that the purity of the elements would be unsuspected".[15]

Thomas Hunt Morgan began his career in genetics as a saltationist, and started out trying to demonstrate that mutations could produce new species in fruit flies. However, the experimental work at his lab with the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, which helped establish the link between Mendelian genetics and the chromosomal theory of inheritance, demonstrated that rather than creating new species in a single step, mutations increased the genetic variation in the population.[16]

In 1918, R. A. Fisher wrote the paper "The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance,"[17] which showed mathematically how continuous variation could result from a number of discrete genetic loci. In this and subsequent papers culminating in his 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection,[18] Fisher showed how Mendelian genetics was consistent with the idea of evolution driven by natural selection.[19] During the 1920s, a series of papers by Haldane applied mathematical analysis to real-world examples of natural selection such as the evolution of industrial melanism in peppered moths.[19] Haldane established that natural selection could work in the real world at a faster rate than even Fisher had assumed.[20] Fisher also analysed sexual selection in his book, but his work was largely ignored, and Darwin's case for such selection misunderstood, so it formed no substantial part of the modern synthesis.[21]

Sewall Wright focused on combinations of genes that interacted as complexes, and the effects of inbreeding on small relatively isolated populations, which could exhibit genetic drift. In a 1932 paper, he introduced the concept of an adaptive landscape in which phenomena such as cross breeding and genetic drift in small populations could push them away from adaptive peaks, which would in turn allow natural selection to push them towards new adaptive peaks.[19][22] Wright's model would appeal to field naturalists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr who were becoming aware of the importance of geographical isolation in real world populations.[20] The work of Fisher, Haldane and Wright helped to found the discipline of theoretical population genetics.[23][24][25]

In his 1930 book Embryos and Ancestors, the evolutionary embryologist Gavin de Beer anticipated evolutionary developmental biology by showing that evolution could occur by heterochrony, such as in the retention of juvenile features in the adult. This, he argued, could cause apparently sudden changes in the fossil record as embryos fossilise poorly.[26] The traditional view is that developmental biology played little part in the modern synthesis,[27] but Stephen Gould argues that de Beer made a significant contribution.[28]

Theodosius Dobzhansky, an emigrant from the Soviet Union to the United States, who had been a postdoctoral worker in Morgan's fruit fly lab, was one of the first to apply genetics to natural populations. He worked mostly with Drosophila pseudoobscura. He says pointedly: "Russia has a variety of climates from the Arctic to sub-tropical... Exclusively laboratory workers who neither possess nor wish to have any knowledge of living beings in nature were and are in a minority."[29] Not surprisingly, there were other Russian geneticists with similar ideas, though for some time their work was known to only a few in the West. His 1937 work Genetics and the Origin of Species[30] was a key step in bridging the gap between population geneticists and field naturalists. It presented the conclusions reached by Fisher, Haldane, and especially Wright in their highly mathematical papers in a form that was easily accessible to others. It also emphasized that real world populations had far more genetic variability than the early population geneticists had assumed in their models, and that genetically distinct sub-populations were important. Dobzhansky argued that natural selection worked to maintain genetic diversity as well as driving change. Dobzhansky had been influenced by his exposure in the 1920s to the work of a Russian geneticist Sergei Chetverikov who had looked at the role of recessive genes in maintaining a reservoir of genetic variability in a population before his work was shut down by the rise of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union.[19][20]

E. B. Ford's work, starting in 1924, complemented that of Dobzhansky. It was as a result of Ford's work, as well as his own, that Dobzhansky changed the emphasis in the third edition of his famous text from drift to selection.[31] Ford was an experimental naturalist who wanted to test natural selection in nature. He virtually invented the field of research known as ecological genetics. His work on natural selection in wild populations of butterflies and moths was the first to show that predictions made by R. A. Fisher were correct. In 1940, he was the first to describe and define genetic polymorphism, and to predict that human blood group polymorphisms might be maintained in the population by providing some protection against disease.[32]

Ernst Mayr's key contribution to the synthesis was Systematics and the Origin of Species, published in 1942.[33] Mayr emphasized the importance of allopatric speciation, where geographically isolated sub-populations diverge so far that reproductive isolation occurs. He was skeptical of the reality of sympatric speciation believing that geographical isolation was a prerequisite for building up intrinsic (reproductive) isolating mechanisms. Mayr also introduced the biological species concept that defined a species as a group of interbreeding or potentially interbreeding populations that were reproductively isolated from all other populations.[19][20][34] Before he left Germany for the United States in 1930, Mayr had been influenced by the work of German biologist Bernhard Rensch. In the 1920s Rensch, who like Mayr did field work in Indonesia, analyzed the geographic distribution of polytypic species and complexes of closely related species paying particular attention to how variations between different populations correlated with local environmental factors such as differences in climate. In 1947, Rensch published Neuere Probleme der Abstammungslehre. Die transspezifische Evolution (1959 English translation of 2nd edition: Evolution Above the Species Level).[35] This looked at how the same evolutionary mechanisms involved in speciation might be extended to explain the origins of the differences between the higher level taxa. His writings contributed to the rapid acceptance of the synthesis in Germany.[36][37]

George Gaylord Simpson was responsible for showing that the modern synthesis was compatible with paleontology in his book Tempo and Mode in Evolution published in 1944. Simpson's work was crucial because so many paleontologists had disagreed, in some cases vigorously, with the idea that natural selection was the main mechanism of evolution. It showed that the trends of linear progression (in for example the evolution of the horse) that earlier paleontologists had used as support for neo-Lamarckism and orthogenesis did not hold up under careful examination. Instead the fossil record was consistent with the irregular, branching, and non-directional pattern predicted by the modern synthesis.[19][20]

The botanist G. Ledyard Stebbins extended the synthesis to encompass botany including the important effects on speciation of hybridization and polyploidy in plants in his 1950 book Variation and Evolution in Plants.[19][38]

The modern synthesis of the early 20th century is claimed to have bridged the gap between evolution, experimental genetics, ecology, and paleontology. However, different advocates of the synthesis such as Dobzhansky, Huxley, and Mayr made different claims for it.[39][40][41]

By 1937, Dobzhansky was able to argue in his Genetics and the Origin of Species that mutations were the main source of evolutionary changes and variability, along with chromosome rearrangements, effects of genes on their neighbours during development, and polyploidy. Next, genetic drift (he used the term in 1941), selection, migration, and geographical isolation could change gene frequencies. Thirdly, mechanisms like ecological or sexual isolation and hybrid sterility could fix the results of the earlier processes.[42]

By 1942, Julian Huxley's Evolution: The Modern Synthesis introduced a name for the synthesis and intentionally set out to promote a "synthetic point of view" on the evolutionary process. He imagined a wide synthesis of many sciences: genetics, developmental physiology, ecology, systematics, palaeontology, cytology, and mathematical analysis of biology, and assumed that evolution would proceed differently in different groups of organisms according to how their genetic material was organised and their strategies for reproduction, leading to progressive but varying evolutionary trends.[43]

However, the book was not what it seemed. In the view of the philosopher of science Michael Ruse, and in Huxley's own opinion, Huxley was "a generalist, a synthesizer of ideas, rather than a specialist".[44] Ruse observes that Huxley wrote as if he were just adding empirical evidence to the mathematical framework established by Fisher and the population geneticists, but that this was not so. Huxley avoided mathematics, for instance not even mentioning Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection. Instead, Huxley used a mass of examples to demonstrate that natural selection is powerful, and that it works on Mendelian genes. The book was successful in its goal of persuading readers of the reality of evolution, effectively illustrating island biogeography, speciation, competition and so on. Huxley further showed that the appearance of orthogenetic trends - predictable directions for evolution - in the fossil record were readily explained as allometric growth (since parts are interconnected). All the same, Huxley did not reject orthogenesis out of hand, but maintained a belief in progress all his life, with Homo sapiens as the end point, and he had since 1912 been influenced by the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson, though in public he maintained an atheistic position on evolution.[44]

Also in 1942, Mayr's Systematics and the Origin of Species asserted the importance of and set out to explain population variation in evolutionary processes including speciation. He analysed in particular the effects of polytypic species, geographic variation, and isolation by geographic and other means.[45]

The modern synthesis largely ignored embryonic development to explain the form of organisms, since population genetics appeared to be an adequate explanation of how forms evolved.[46][47] In 1977, recombinant DNA technology enabled biologists to start to explore the genetic control of development. The growth of evolutionary developmental biology from 1978, when Edward B. Lewis discovered homeotic genes, showed that many so-called toolkit genes act to regulate development, influencing the expression of other genes. It also revealed that some of the regulatory genes are extremely ancient, so that animals as different as insects and mammals share control mechanisms; for example, the Pax6 gene is involved in forming the eyes of mice and of fruit flies. Such deep homology provided strong evidence for evolution and indicated the paths that evolution had taken.[48]

In 2007, more than half a century after the modern synthesis, Massimo Pigliucci called for an extended evolutionary synthesis to incorporate aspects of biology that had not been included or did not exist in the mid-20th century.[49][50] It revisits the relative importance of different factors, challenges assumptions made in the modern synthesis, and adds new factors[50][51] such as multilevel selection, transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, niche construction, and evolvability.[52][53][54]

Looking back at the conflicting accounts of the modern synthesis, the historian Betty Smocovitis notes in her 1996 book Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology that both historians and philosophers of biology have attempted to grasp its scientific meaning, but have found it a moving target; the only thing they agreed on was that it was a historical event.[55] In her words "by the late 1980s the notoriety of the evolutionary synthesis was recognized . . . So notorious did 'the synthesis' become, that few serious historically minded analysts would touch the subject, let alone know where to begin to sort through the interpretive mess left behind by the numerous critics and commentators".[56]

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The Effect of Darwinism on Morality and Christianity | The …

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It sometimes is claimed that one can be both a Darwinist and a Christian (Miller). Others argue that religion and Darwinism are incompatible because they are separate fields that should not be intermixed (Gould). In fact, the Darwinism worldview leads directly to certain clear moral and religious teachings about the origin, purpose, and ultimate meaning of life that are diametrically opposed to the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic faiths. The problem is that Darwinists,

Some scientists are more open and forthright than Miller and Gould, some even concluding that "there is something dishonestly selfserving" in the tactic claiming that "science and religion are two separate fields" (Dawkins, p. 62). Most evolutionists fully understand what is at stake in the creation/evolution controversy. Futuyma admits that anyone who "believes in Genesis as a literal description of history" holds a "worldview that is entirely incompatible with the idea of evolution . . ." (pp. 12-13). Futuyma then claims that Darwinists insist on "material, mechanistic causes" for life but the "believer in Genesis" can look to God for explanations.

Historians have documented meticulously the fact that Darwinism has had a devastating impact, not only on Christianity, but also on theism. Many scientists also have admitted that the acceptance of Darwinism has convinced large numbers of people that the Genesis account of creation is erroneous, and that this has caused the whole house of theistic cards to tumble:

As a result of the widespread acceptance of Darwinism, the Christian moral basis of society was undermined. Furthermore Darwin himself was "keenly aware of the political, social, and religious implications of his new idea. . . . Religion, especially, appeared to have much to lose . . ." (Raymo, p. 138).

Numerous scientists have noted that one result of the general acceptance of Darwinism was acceptance of the belief that humans "are accidental, contingent, ephemeral parts of creation, rather than lords over it" and humans are not "the raison d'tre of the universe" as all theistic religions teach (Raymo, p. 163).

The Darwinism belief that humans (and all living things) are nothing more than an accident of history, "cosmically inconsequential bundles of stardust, adrift in an infinite and purposeless universe" is a belief that is now "widely embraced within the scientific community" (Raymo, p. 160). Darwinism was a major factor in causing many eminent scientists to conclude, in the words of Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, that the "more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless" (p. 154). Darwinism teaches "that our lives are brief and inconsequential in the cosmic scheme of things" (Raymo, p. 110), and that life has no ultimate purpose because there is no heaven, hell, or afterlife and "nothing we know about life requires the existence of a disembodied vital force or immaterial spirits, or a special creation of species" (Raymo, p. 42). Raymo concludes:

One of the most eminent evolutionists ever, Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, taught that, "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind" (p. 345).

Raymo concludes that Darwin's theory was "not what we want to hear" because it is difficult for humans who have long thought of themselves as "the central and immortal apex of creationthe apple of God's eyeto accept that" we are, "unexceptional, contingent, and ephemeral in the cosmological scheme of things" (p. 129).

Raymo adds that since Darwinism has demolished the belief that the universe and human beings have an ultimate purpose, our educational system must inculcate young people in "cold and clammy truths like descent from reptilian or amoebic ancestors," Raymo then suggests that although it,

Cruel or otherwise, Raymo states that Darwinism "is a fact by every criterion of science" and that our "school kids do not need intellectual security blankets" (p. 144). The implications of Darwinism "perhaps the most revolutionary idea in the history of human thought" are clear.

Acclaimed Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins has written extensively about the implications of Darwinism. In a speech titled "A Scientist's Case Against God," Dawkins argued that Darwinism "has shown higher purpose to be an illusion" and that the Universe consists of "selfish genes;" consequently, "some people are going to get hurt, others are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason for it" (Easterbrook, p. 892).

Dawkins believes that people who believe life was created for a purpose not only are mistaken, but are ignorant: "Only the scientifically illiterate" believe we exist for a higher purpose. The scientifically literate know there is no reason "why" we exist, we "just do" as an accident of history. Dawkins also teaches that no evidence exists to support theism, and that "nowadays the better educated admit it" (Easterbrook, p. 892).

The central message of Richard Dawkins' voluminous writings is that the universe has precisely the properties we should expect if it has "no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pointless indifference" (Easterbrook, p. 892). Dawkins even admitted that his best-selling book, The Selfish Gene, was an attempt to get rid of what he regarded as an "outright wrong idea" that had achieved a grip in popular sciencenamely, the erroneous "assumption that individuals act for the good of the species," which he believes is "an error that needed exploding, and the best way to demonstrate what's wrong with it . . . was to explain evolution from the point of view of the gene" (Easterbrook, p. 892). Dawkins added that the reason why The Selfish Gene was a best seller could be because it teaches the "truth" about why humans exist, namely humans,

Dawkins obviously is proud of the depressing effect his writings have on people. Raymo even claims that the dominant view among modern Darwinists is that our minds are "merely a computer made of meat" (pp. 187-188), and that "almost all scientists" believe the idea that a human soul exists is a "bankrupt notion"; and consequently, the conclusion that our minds are "merely a computer made of meat" is considered by Darwinists "almost a truism" (pp. 192-193, emphasis his).

In Futuyma's words, "if the world and its creatures developed purely by material, physical forces, it could not have been designed and has no purpose or goal" (pp. 12-13). Furthermore, he notes that the creationist,

Is this pessimistic, antitheistic, and nihilistic view of humans widespread? One researcher claimed that "ninety-nine percent of the scientists whom I met in my career . . . support the view expressed by Dawkins [that anyone] . . . who denies evolution is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked" (Rrsch, p. F3). This oft' made claim is totally false: an estimated 10,000 scientists in the USA and about 100,000 creation scientists in the world reject Darwinism, and hold instead to a creation worldview (Bergman). A question every concerned parent and grandparent should ask is: "Do we want our children taught that life has no ultimate purpose, and that our minds are merely a computer made of meat?" The fact is:

Why do so many people believe the pessimistic, nihilistic, and depressive Darwinist view? One reason is they are convinced that science has proven Darwinism to be true. Sadly, however, many scientists are unaware of the large body of evidence supporting creationism. And numerous scientists recognize that, at best, the view common among elite scientists is unscientific. Shallis argues that:

Darwinists have indoctrinated our society for over 100 years in a worldview that has proven to be tragically destructive. And they often have done this by a type of deceit that began before the Piltdown hoax and continues today in many leading biology textbooks (Wells).

Acknowledgments:

Bert Thompson, Ph.D., and Clifford L. Lillo for their insight.

References

* Jerry Bergman, Ph.D., is on the Biology faculty at Northwest State College in Ohio.

Cite this article: Jerry Bergman, Ph.D. 2001. The Effect of Darwinism on Morality and Christianity. Acts & Facts. 30 (6).

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