Thursday, April 27, 2017

I Misrepresented Nothing

You claim "you have misrepresented what Darwin and others have said" without specifying what it was I am supposed to have misrepresented and how I misrepresented him.   I often get that from people who, if they will discuss their accusation, generally turn out to have never read anything he or "others" have said.  It is one of the foremost dodges of the St. Darwin Industry which, as I noted, is an ongoing effort.  There is even a buttress to that effort trying to turn the overtly proto-Nazi writings of Ernst Haeckel, claiming they mean what they so obviously don't.  One of its foremost figures of the unlikely canonization cause of Ernst Haeckel was represented at that link I gave.

Considering one of your intellectual persuasion tried to claim to me that when Darwin, as an example of his scientific theory of natural selection that "The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence." "the struggle for existence" would, in the fullness of time, result in the deaths of the losers in that "struggle for existence".  You can't even make it not mean that he anticipated that "the Turkish" would be exterminated by "so-called Caucasians".  That is confirmed in the very next sentence that Darwin wrote as part of his argument that his natural selection had a major role in furthering civilization, "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."  There is no other meaning those phrases and words could have except that Darwin thought that genocide in which "superior" "so-called Caucasians" would slaughter "an endless number of the lower races" and that the results would be salubrious for the survivors.  There is no other way to read that, it is an argument he made before, in one of his major scientific publications, The Descent of Man and in other letters, such as the one he sent to the birth-control advocate, G. A. Gaskell (I did a post presenting their entire correspondence, look it up in my archive). When one of the most lavishly lauded scientists in history makes what he purports is a scientific argument anyone reading what he said, purported to have the reliability of science, is justified as believing he meant exactly what he said..  That is especially true when he has said the same or very similar things, as science, in books published as science and in other writings over a number of years.

By the way, though I haven't done the research to confirm it, I suspect he said "so-called Caucasian" because he favored an African origin for the place humans first arose over a conflicting, even more overtly racist, scientific theory then current that humans arose in Asia.  I haven't done the research to confirm that so I didn't mention it in my post BECAUSE I TRY TO BE CAREFUL ABOUT BEING ABLE TO SUPPORT MY INTERPRETATION OF WHAT SCIENTISTS CLAIM AS SCIENCE.

You people always dismiss these inconvenient facts with the kind of breezy dismissal that you expressed, you never, ever address the relevant texts in the context of the entire work of the authors. That is probably because you so seldom have ever read them, relying on the cherry-picked, quote-mined misrepresentation of them by the St. Darwin cult.

1 comment:

  1. "The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence."

    Only if you stop that "struggle" at the convenient moment when your favored "race" seems to be in the ascendant, as when Frances Fukuyama recently declared history at an end.

    As Keynes is supposed to have observed, in the long run, we're all dead. Properly understood the mechanism of natural selection only explains why what we see alive now, in terms of species, is here now. But when even Darwin can't properly understand that.....

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