Monthly Archives: February 2022

Photo: Charles Darwin in 1855, by Maull and Polyblank, Literary and Scientific Portrait Club, via Wikimedia Commons.

Editors note: The following is excerpted from Chapter 1 of Richard Weikarts new book,How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism.

In 1881, toward the end of his life, Charles Darwin wrote to a colleague that the more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.1This was not just some offhand comment unrelated to Darwins science. It reflected important elements of his theory of human evolution. Indeed, he articulated this same principle in his scientific study of human evolution,The Descent of Man (1871), where he claimed, At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.2Not only racism, but racial extermination was an integral feature of Darwins theory from the start.

This is a position that has been articulated by many historians of science.3Two prominent historians specializing in the history of Darwinism, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, mince no words about the racism inherent in Darwins theory. In their magisterial biography of Darwin, they state, Social Darwinism is often taken to be something extraneous, an ugly concretion added to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwins image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality were written into the equation from the start Darwinism was always intended to explain human society.4

It might come as a surprise to some that Desmond and Moore include racial extermination in this list, since in a later book,Darwins Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwins Views on Human Evolution, they emphasize Darwins humanitarianism and portray his loathing of slavery as a fundamental influence on his view of human evolution.5However, if one actually readsDarwins Sacred Cause, one may be surprised to find that despite their primary thesis Desmond and Moore have not at all changed their position about Darwin embracing racism and even racial extermination. They state:

By biologizing colonial eradication, Darwin was making racial extinction an inevitable evolutionary consequence. Races and species perishing was the norm of prehistory. The uncivilized races were following suite [sic], except that Darwins mechanism here was modern-day massacre. Imperialist expansion was becoming the very motor of human progress. It is interesting, given the familys emotional anti-slavery views, that Darwins biologizing of genocide should appear to be so dispassionate. Natural selection was now predicated on the weaker being extinguished. Individuals, races even, had to perish for progress to occur. Thus it was, that Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. Europeans were the agents of Evolution. Prichards warning about aboriginal slaughter was intended to alert the nation, but Darwin was already naturalizing the cause and rationalizing the outcome.6

Thus, despite stressing Darwins opposition to slavery, Desmond and Moore freely admit that he saw genocide something most of us would consider an even graver evil than slavery as a progressive force in human evolution. He was thereby justifying the imperialist wars against aboriginal peoples that Europe was conducting in his time. (By the way, Darwin was not unique in embracing both abolitionism and racism, as quite a few 19th-century abolitionists were also racists.)

Desmond and Moore reinforce this point later in the book by quoting from a letter Darwin wrote to Charles Kingsley: It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, will have spread & exterminated whole nations. Desmond and Moore then provide this explanation of Darwins sentiments that he expressed in that letter: While slavery demanded ones active participation, racial genocide was now normalized by natural selection and rationalized asnaturesway of producing superior races. Darwin had ended up calibrating human rank no differently from the rest of his society.7Darwins theory thus provided justification, not only for racism, but for racial struggle and even genocide.

How had Darwin come to embrace these racist views? As many scholars have pointed out, Darwins view that races are unequal is unremarkable. Such racist ideas were circulating widely throughout Europe, both in scientific and popular circles, long before Darwin came on the scene. Many Europeans and Americans used these ideas to justify race-based slavery in the Americas, as well as the European conquest of other lands, such as Australia, New Zealand, the Americas, and later Africa.

However, not all British men and women in the 19th century embraced racism. Some prominent British intellectuals, missionaries, and church leaders believed that black Africans, for instance, were equal to Europeans and only needed the proper education and upbringing to attain the technological sophistication of the Europeans. The famous British missionary and African explorer David Livingstone not only rejected the notion that black Africans were unequal to Europeans, but also devoted his life to showing them love and compassion. He dedicated his energies to fighting against the slave trade, and he even expressed support for the Africans when they fought against British colonial encroachments.8No wonder Livingstone was beloved by Africans and is still fondly remembered by black Africans.9One of the most prominent British intellectuals in the 19th century, John Stuart Mill, likewise rejected the idea of racial inequality.10Mill, like many of his contemporaries, embraced environmental determinism, so he believed that humans were shaped primarily by education and upbringing, not by their biology and heredity. Finally, Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, also rejected racism and opposed the idea that non-European races were somehow closer to non-human animals than their European counterparts.11

Read more:

The Racism of Darwin and Darwinism - Discovery Institute

Photo credit: Phil Hearing via Unsplash.

On a new episode ofID the Future, biophysicistCornelius Hunterexplores Charles Darwins theological arguments for his theory of evolution. By theological, Hunter doesnt mean that Darwin was arguing for theistic evolution. He means that Darwin received what is known as theological utilitarianism from the intellectual culture of his youth, which had strong deistic tendencies and expected everything in creation to be perfectly adapted, and he made a case against it, presenting mindless evolution as a better explanation for his observations of the biological world than theological utilitarianism. But one problem with this approach, according to Hunter, is that it assumed that theological utilitarianism is THE alternative to blind evolution. In fact, there are other alternatives, including an orthodox Judeo-Christian understanding of Gods relationship to his creation.

In Hunters conversation with host Casey Luskin, he discusses the differences in this other understanding of God and shows how Darwins tunnel-vision fixation on theological utilitarianism led him into multiple problems. Hunter shows that this basic theological mistake of Darwins also crops up in later defenders of Darwinism. Hunter and Luskin end the discussion by making what may strike some as a surprising claim: Evolutionary theory, argued in the way that Darwin and many of his followers argue the case, is fundamentally theology-based, whereas the theory of intelligent design, which points to a design of life and the cosmos, is strictly science-based. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

The occasion for the interview is Hunters chapter on this subject in the recent anthology co-edited by Luskin,The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Check it out.

Read this article:

Darwin's Rhetorical Foundation of Sand: Theological Utilitarianism - Discovery Institute

Photo: Darwin statute at the Natural History Museum, by Alan Perestrello, via Flickr (cropped).

In his 2013 bookDarwin Deleted,Peter Bowler speculated about how history might have unfolded differently had Darwin never published On theOrigin of Species. Actually, few people realize just how close we came to that. Left up to his own devices, it is doubtful Darwin would have ever published anything like theOrigin. This fact should be given much more prominence in any assessment of the scientific value of this infamous work.

Darwin had completed a sketch of his species theory by 1844, but except for instructing his wife Emma to have it published posthumously in the event of his untimely death, Darwin had no intention of publishing this short sketch while he was alive. He knew he needed to accumulate much more evidence to convince skeptical readers of his theory. Though he shared his ideas with Emma, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and a few others, Darwin mostly kept his species work to himself.

In April 1856, during a visit to Down House, Charles Lyell was finally brought into the circle of Darwins confidants, and shortly thereafter wrote to Darwin, I wish you would publish some small fragment of your data [on]pigeonsif you please & so out with the theory & let it take date & be cited & understood. Lyells exhortation to publish was not well received by Darwin. It put him in a considerable bind. Darwin did not want to risk losing priority, but he feared a short sketch could not do his work justice because as Darwin put it, every proposition requires such an array of facts. Publishing a short sketch just did not seem tenable, a point Darwin made clear in a letter to Hooker:

I believe I should sneer at anyone else doing this, & my only comfort is, that Itrulynever dreamed of it, till Lyell suggested it.I am in a peck of troubles & do pray forgive me for troubling you.

On May 1, 1856, Darwin confided to Hooker, I beginmost heartilyto wish that Lyell had never put this idea of an Essay into my head. On June 8, he reported to his cousin, William Darwin Fox, that he was going ahead with a preliminary essay, but complained, my work will be horridly imperfect & with many mistakes, so that I groan and tremble when I think of it. As he wrote, Darwin quickly discovered that he could not condense his material down to the length of an essay, and so he began instead to write what he would call his big book on species.

But the big book proved to be a Herculean task that taxed Darwin beyond his capabilities. On November 29, 1857, he reported to Asa Gray:

What you hint at generally is very very true, that my work will be grievously hypothetical & large parts by no means worthy of being called inductive; my commonest error being induction from too few facts.

The following spring, Darwin wrote to his oldBeagleassistant Syms Covington:

I have for some years been preparing a work for publication which I commenced 20 years ago.This work will be my biggest; it treats on the origin of varieties of our domestic animals and plants, and on the origin of species in a state of nature. I have to discuss every branch of natural history and the work is beyond my strength and tries me sorely.

While Darwin wrestled with whether he would ever complete and publish his big book on species, his life took an unexpected turn when Alfred Russel Wallaces manuscript from Ternate, laying out a theory of natural selection closely mirroring Darwins, arrived at Down House.

Darwin was close to giving up his priority by helping Wallace get his paper published. If he had, we would speak today of Wallaceism rather than Darwinism. But Lyell had other plans. In collaboration with Hooker, he arranged for Wallaces paper and a short sketch by Darwin to be read before the Linnean Society. Darwin could follow up with a longer work while Wallace remained immersed in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and Darwin would then receive most of the scientific attention. Lyells plan only created more worries, however, for an anxiety-ridden Darwin.

Darwin feared that if he published a longer work after having seen Wallaces paper, it would appear that he was trying to usurp Wallaces priority. Or worse, that he had plagiarized Wallace. Darwin tried every strategy he could to rationalize not publishing. But not wanting to disappoint Lyell, he forged ahead with an abstract of the big book on species he had been working on, an abstract that became theOrigin of Species.

As he neared completion of the abstract, Darwin wondered who would publish such a thing. Given Lyells involvement in getting Darwin to publish, it made sense for Lyell to approach his publisher, John Murray, on Darwins behalf. But Darwin struggled with how to present his manuscript to Murray. He wrote to Lyell:

Would you advise me to tell Murray that my Book is not more unorthodox than the subject makes inevitable. That I do not discuss origin of man. That I do not bring in any discussions about Genesis &c, only facts, & such conclusions from them, as seem to me fair. Or had I better saynothingto Murray, & assume that he cannot object to this much unorthodoxy.

There was no reason for Darwin to be so concerned about Murrays opinion of his unorthodoxy. On the strength of Lyells recommendation and his familiarity with Darwins previous works, Murray offered to publish Darwins abstract without even seeing the manuscript, a decision, however, that he may have come to regret.

Once Murray received Darwins manuscript, he sent it to Whitwell Elwin, editor of theQuarterly Review, for his opinion. Elwin advised against publication, not on the grounds of the works unorthodoxy (as Darwin feared), but due to Darwins work being a mere abstract sorely lacking the facts and evidence necessary to support its theoretical propositions. Elwin wrote to Murray:

It seemed to me to put forth the theory without the evidence would do grievous injustice to his views, & to his twenty years of observations & experiment. At every page I was tantalized by the absence of proofs. All kinds of objections, & possibilities rose up in the mind, & it was fretting to think that the author had a whole army of facts, & inferences from those facts, absolutelyessentialto the decision on the question which were not before the reader. It is to ask the jury for a verdict without putting the witness into the box.

Elwin was concerned not only with the lack of evidence presented to the reader, but also with the style of the writing. In contrast to DarwinsJournal of Researches, which Elwin called one of the most charming books in the language:

The dissertation on species is, on the contrary, in a much harder and drier style. I impute this to the absence of the details. It is these that give relief and interest to the scientific outline. So that the very omission that takes from the philosophical value of the work destroys in a great degree its popular value also. Whatever class of public he wants to win he weakens the effect by an imperfect, & comparatively meagre exposition of his theory.

We dont know what Murray thought of Elwins critical review, but having already offered to publish Darwins abstract, he had little choice but to go ahead. For his part, Darwin once again sought a possible off ramp by informing Murray that if after seeing the manuscript he deemed it unlikely to generate significant sales, Darwin would free him from any obligation to publish.

Of course, Darwins abstract did appear, and with every presentation copy he instructed Murray to send out, Darwin sent a letter informing recipients that theOrigin of Speciesis only an abstract, and should therefore not be viewed as a comprehensive exposition of his theory containing all the facts and evidence on which the theory of natural selection is founded, facts and evidence that he never did publish despite expectations of his readers that he would.

We must wrestle much more than we have with the irony that perhaps the most famous and influential scientific treatise in the Western world was viewed by its author as nothing more than an imperfect abstract of a larger work that never saw the light of day. And this abstract only made it into print through an unlikely series of serendipitous circumstances and virtually against the wishes of its author. TheOrigin of Specieshas dubious scientific value. The fact that it gets treated as seminal is a clear testament to the artificial and ideological nature of the entire edifice of the evolutionary theory that is built upon it. Even Darwin would be aghast at what the world has made of a mere abstract that he was almost pathologically ambivalent about ever publishing.

Read more:

Darwin's Reticence: On the Origin of a Book - Discovery Institute

Fiery characters, staunch supporters and insult-slingers - Dunedin citizens were embroiled in a tempestuous public debate over Darwin's Theory of Evolution in the 1880s.

Strongly in the Darwin camp was the curator and director of Otago Museum, Professor Thomas Jeffery Parker, and it's his story that fascinated the museum's current honorary curator of science history, Dr Rosi Crane.

She has written a paper on Parker.

Dr Rosi Crane Photo: supplied

Parker was just nine when the Origin of Species was published, she says.

He goes on to a medical career becoming a GP and in 1880 winds up in Dunedin.

The Dunedin public waskeen to meet him, she says.

But he slips in quietly in winter of 1880 and just gets on with lecturing. And when the university session starts again in 1881, he produces an inaugural lecture to start session.

Parker had learned in England from Thomas Huxley, known as Darwins Bulldog, some rhetorical flourishes, she says. A few rhetorical tub-thumping techniques of being absolutely adamant about where things are.

But doesn't quite work with Parker, because he's naturally quite a shy chap and delivery tails off towards the end of the sentences, however it doesn't deter him.

His inaugural lecture is heavily attended by the clergy, she says.

He's standing on the platform with a whole bunch of clerics either side of him, and in the front rows a whole bunch of clerics, which would normally send the sort of fear of God into you.

But undeterred, he stands there. And he says, and I paraphrase, a better day dawns for biology, Darwin's brought the study of biology, with the all-embracing law of evolution, and making the theory of special creation once and for all an impossibility. It's unsupported by the evidence, and it is unthinkable.

So here he is 30 years old, and all the clerics are considerably older. And he has not realised quite what a hornet's nest is stirred up.

Darwins theory had been a troubled topic in the preceding years in Dunedin, she says.

Evolution was just an undercurrent in the cultural life of Dunedin and indeed the whole colony.

People were wrestling with the origin of life and man's place within it. But still, these questions were really troublesome to particularly the religious.

Special creation meant one of three things, she says.

Either God created the world end of story, or God created the world, but God created all the living things in it several times over, so that allowed for fossils and living things, or God created the world and let everything get on with it. In each case, he distinguished man from other animals by giving him a human soul.

The evolutionists come along and say this is all wrong, she says.

But now along comes the evolutionists Parker amongst them to say, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not how it worked.

We've got evidence to show that it was actually the Descent of Man, one thing evolved into another into another over a very long time.

The letters page in the ODT was abuzz, she says.

One, for instance, talks about for sober-minded reasons special creation is far more rational than evolution.

And another one says, if he thinks he can kill our faith in the Bible, he's much mistaken.

The controversy rumbled on for several months, she says, possibly because of the people who had settled there.

I suspect thats partly because of course it was a town dominated by a Scots Presbyterians who were Bible readers first and foremost.

Go here to read the rest:

Evolutionary Thinking: On Darwinism, Doubt and Dunedin - RNZ

Statue of a young Charles Darwin, Shrewsbury School, by Ailurus~frwiki / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).

Editors note: We are delighted to introduce a new series by biologist Jonathan Wells on the top scientific problems with evolution. This is the first entry in the series, excerpted from the new bookThe Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Find the full series so far here.

In 1973, biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.1In 1989, biologist Richard Dawkins wrote, It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but Id rather not consider that).2

But whatisevolution?

The wordevolutionhas many meanings. In one sense, it simply means change over time. In another it refers to the history of the cosmos, or the progress of technology, or the development of culture. No sane person believes that nothing changes over time, or that the cosmos, technology, and culture have no history. In these senses,evolutionis uncontroversial.

In biology,evolutioncan refer to the fact that many plants and animals now living are different from those that lived in the past. It can also refer to the fact that minor changes occur within existing species; we see such changes in our own families. But these uncontroversial meanings of biological evolution were not what Dobzhansky and Dawkins had in mind when they used the word. They meantDarwinianevolution.

Charles Darwin called his theorydescent with modification, by which he meant that all living things are descended from one or a few common ancestors that lived in the distant past. The ancestors were then modified by unguided processes such as small variations and natural selection (survival of the fittest). Darwin wrote inOn the Origin of Species,I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long ago, and that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.3He also wrote in hisAutobiography, There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.4

In the modern version of Darwins theory, often calledneo-Darwinism, accidental DNA mutations are considered to be the primary source of new variations. I will useevolutionto mean neo-Darwinism throughout the rest of this chapter.

Likeevolution,sciencehas several meanings. In this chapter, I will usescienceto refer toempiricalscience: the enterprise of searching for the truth by comparing hypotheses with evidence. So the question is: What are the top problems with the evidence for neo-Darwinism?

Following Darwins termdescent with modification, I will first consider the evidence for descent (the hypothesis that all living organisms are descended from common ancestors). Specifically, I will focus on homology, fossils, and molecular phylogeny. Then I will consider the evidence for modification (the hypothesis that organisms have evolved by strictly unguided natural processes). I will focus on natural selection, mutation, and speciation (the origin of new species).

Tomorrow, the problem of homology.

Read the original here:

Top Scientific Problems with Evolution - Discovery Institute