I guess the cost of trying to get smart people to think is that it often causes shallow people to emote and pout.
Read the citations, tell me why Darwin and his closest colleagues didn't know what they were saying because that's what you're really contending.
I gave you the relevant quote from Darwin, the one you conveniently left off your post. Try to stay away from Victorian English, as you seem to have problems with rhetorical questions and answers.
ReplyDeleteYou really are pretty stupid JR, I not only addressed the "aid we feel compelled to give" paragraph, I gave it in full instead of the so often quote-mined version you gave me, pointed out how Darwin undermined and diminished his pose of saying we "must", against the urgings of "hard reason" give that aid, though it was just about certain to cause disaster. And I put that so often quote mined passage into a wider context by giving the preceding paragraph and showing how later, in the same chapter, Darwin, so predictably, said the opposite about the "useless drones" bred to the aristocracy.
ReplyDeleteI wrote that piece two years before you posted your comment on this blog and reposted it as a response, I'd pointed it out in less detail seven years earlier when I wrote a post about it at Echidne's blog.
Charles Darwin was giving himself a rather implausible bit of plausible deniability that he'd advocated the premise of eugenics even as he gave it and as he gave it, repeatedly in the same book, The Descent of Man which I've read along with Darwin's citations in that book of Galton's first book and articles promoting eugenics and Haeckel's where he promotes proto-Nazi ideas on the basis of Darwin's natural selection, which you, apparently haven not read.