I Swear We Live In That Post Literate Dark Age And, As Can Be Seen, That Light Among The "Brights"* Was Never That Strong

FIRST I WASN'T THE ONE who pointed out that Darwin and those he relied on grossly exaggerated the number of people who were killed by the Inquisition, since I was about to slam a Brit "Anglo-Saxon" supremacist, I used the Encyclopedia Britannica to do that.  Darwin claimed:

During this same period the Holy Inquisition selected with extreme care the freest and boldest men in order to burn or imprison them.  In Spain alone some of the best men—those who doubted and questioned, and without doubting there can be no progress—were eliminated during three centuries at the rate of a thousand a year.

Which would represent a figure of those "in Spain alone" of up to 300,000 people burned or imprisoned.  Since the most infamous of Spanish inquisitors is judged to have, over the course of sixteen years, been responsible for about 2,000 executions, it's clearly an absurd claim.  The Britannica article on the rightly infamous Spanish Inquisition is where the 2,000 figure came from.

I wasn't trying to minimize the number of people killed in the Spanish Inquisition, I was pointing out that inflating that number was known to have been done for dishonest purposes, especially among the  Brits.  You don't get to lie conveniently about things, not even bad things.

Neither did you get my main point, DARWIN WAS CLAIMING THAT GROTESQUELY INFLATED FIGURE SO HE COULD CLAIM NATURAL SELECTION ACCOUNTED FOR A DECLINE IN THE POWER OF SPAIN, using one of the most common forms of bigotry among English speaking men of education to do it.   He had to lie about that figure or his claim would appear as absurd as it does, in fact, when you don't do what an aristocratic Brit of his time would do, not put things into a large context of what was happening in England as well as other countries where blood-letting was as common and most common of all at the hands of civil authorities, not the Church.   If Darwin's claim, made as reliable scientific knowledge, were true then the blood letting of the Tudor attack on the Catholic Church, which Darwin had also slammed for being the central location of learning, would certainly have led to a decline in the power and fortune of Britain, something which, of course, didn't happen.  Indeed, from Thomas More down, a very large number of those murdered or expelled by Henry, Edward and Elizabeth were people of learning and accomplishment, as well as hapless common people, for whom Darwin and Darwinism doesn't much care.

I have noted that in Darwin's use of anti-Irish propaganda as science (supplied to him by a textile merchant who played evolutionary biologist as a hobby and as a means of promoting his bigotry) also made a better refutation of natural selection because of the decimation of the Irish population through the infamous potato famine during Darwin's lifetime and the earlier one a century earlier.  If Darwin's natural selection selected out the "least fit" then you would expect the survivors of those brutal cullings would, in fact, represent the "fittest" of the Irish population, something which the English and Scottish populations did not undergo.  But the great seer of natural selection, the man who had what Stephen J. Gould rather too enthusiastically called the best idea in science, failed to notice that the Irish potato famine was the best real-life test of his theory and failed to understand his claims about the degeneracy of the Irish (no doubt popular among his fellow Brit and many American scientists) was an effective refutation of his theory.

Natural selection is always, in every case I've seen, a double-speaking ideological assertion in which the very same things that are held to be true when desired to say one thing are held to be the opposite when desired.   

Natural selection is an ideological insertion directly into what is science, which is not a close following of scientific method in order to find more reliable information about the physical universe BUT WHATEVER SCIENTISTS CALL SCIENCE OR PERMIT TO BE CALLED SCIENCE AT ANY GIVEN TIME.   Natural selection not only doesn't follow scientific method, it can't, its subject matter totally escapes the level of observation necessary to come to much of any conclusion except the ones already desired.  Like the even more obvious pseudo-science of psychology, that's why its findings are so ephemeral. 

*That is "Brights" in Daniel Dennett's pudding-headed proposal that atheists in those heady days of the atheist fad of the 00's call themselves.  If anyone remembers that idiocy.  I'm sure Dennett as a Darwin worshiper would include ol' Chuck among the "enlightened".