God decided to create a species with whom he could have fellowship. Who are we to say that evolution was a dumb way to do it? It was an incredibly elegant way to do it.

Exactly. The periodic tinkering of "Intelligent Design" seems kind of sloppy in comparison.

djs:

Except that evolution does appear to be punctuated rather dramatically, rather than gradualist as Darwinism requires.

Thinkers who try to come up with something to discredit religion (Marx, Freud) generally don't succeed. Thinkers who are looking for something else entirely and happen to find something that can be interpreted as discrediting a religion (Galileo, Darwin, Einstein) are much more successful.

I can't recall if it's Watson or Crick who has given interviews more or less espousing eugenics that didn't make him sound anti-religion--they make him sound anti-human.

Let's run through the itinery:

Darwin, Marx and Freud all together in this arbitrary 'bearded godkiller' category? Check.

Darwinism advocates eugenics? Check.

Science is primarily motivated by a desire to discredit religion, especially the Christian religion (which is, after all, the most important one)? Check.

All present and correct. And now for the evidence:
"Coincidentally or not, it was Darwin's cousin Francis Galton who coined the word "eugenics" to describe this movement."

Preferably, this line should be read aloud with a knowing sideways look and a barely-suppressed snort of contempt on the word "coincidentally".

And while you can almost touch the tangible wisdom of the Penzias and Collins quotes, Watson's "every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely" is of course uttered "blithely", probably over a G&T before he saunters causally off to conduct a bizarre and cruel cloning experiment on a fresh batch of orphans.

Another prize coconut. Quite marvellous.

Actually, evolution seems to be a constant mechanism of gradual small changes. Speciation, on the other hand, is wildly punctuated, which implies that there is something else going on. Whether that something else is dramatic global environmental crises, baths of extraterrestial radiation, alien experiments, the hand of G-d or mere coincidence has yet to be shown.

David:

All punctuation need imply is the reproductive isolation of small populations.

Absent the conservative factors in large populations (gene flow etc), and given a siginificantly different environmental niche for the new 'founder' population, relatively rapid speciation makes perfect sense.

Of course, there might be varying reasons for this isolation itself. External intervention isn't impossible, but neither is it implied by punctuated equilibrium.

brian:

Such fine distinctions elude me.

David:

If by Evolution we mean nothing more than small changes within a species over time then the evolutionists have really given up the game. No one argues that such does not occur.

Brit:

Yes, there's no need to bring Galton into it-Darwin himself justified the Nazi platform:

"Natural Selection as affecting civilized nations. ... But some remarks on the action of Natural Selection on civilized nations may be worth adding. This subject has been ably discussed by Mr W.R.Greg, and previously by Mr Wallace and Mr Galton. Most of my remarks are taken from these three authors. With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the mained, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

OJ:

As evidenced by your quote, Darwin believed that human civilisation prevented the ordinary mechanisms of natural selection, as they might occur outside of a society.

He did not say that this was a bad thing. He said it was a thing.

Galton said it was a bad thing, which is why Galton is called the 'father of eugenics', not Darwin.

But even Galton was nothing new. Plato advocated selective breeding.

Yes, Darwin justified eugenics, he didn't advocate it.

Evil is older then Plato

OJ:

Darwin believed that human civilisation, with its vaccinations, and medicine, and help for the poor etc, prevented the ordinary mechanisms of natural selection, as they might occur outside of such a civilised society.

Do you think he was right or wrong in this observation?

Brit:

wrong

So you don't think that people would die without vaccinations and medicine.

Brit: When you write about the "ordinary mechanisms of natural selection", you move from a positive description of a mechanism to a normative ethic, as Darwin does in OJ's quote.

The environment we live in includes advanced medical care, and thus diseases, injuries and defects that would kill in other environments are not selected against. That is how natural selection works. You might as well argue that animals in northern climes with thick fur and layers of fat are not subject to the ordinary mechanisms of natural selection as they function at the equator.

(By the way, I suspect that I disagree with you about punctuated speciation, but I have to think about it little more.)

Brit:

No, I think civilization has nmothing to do with human construction. Nazi Germany was a human construct. Civilization depends on revelation to restrain humans.

David:

Not quite. You're reading something controversial into what is a perfectly uncontroversial statement.

By 'ordinary mechanisms' I mean the mechanisms that might occur outside of a civilised society, or in a 'state of nature'.

I agree that this is a hypothetical situation, and that the environment humans live in does in fact include medicine etc.

Darwin observes nothing more than that some aspects of civilisation allow the sick to survive, and the weak to breed as successfully as the strong. Not very controversial.

I am not being prescriptive. And if I was, I should say that the aspects of civilisation which allow the sick access to medicine etc, are rather good sorts of things.

It takes a Galton or a Nazi to extract from the obervation that these aspects are bad sorts of things, and that engineering is required to 'improve' the race.

It takes an accidental or a deliberate misreading, or better still, a selective quotation, to argue that Darwin himself agrees with Galton and the Nazis.

Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Also, Brit, you are assuming, at least tacitly, that humans are different. I agree.

David:

Yes, that's what I mean by selective quotation.

"excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

Pretty obviously suggests that we are that ignorant when it comes to man.

Brit-

Regarding his theory, Darwin appears to have been fully aware of the implications. As a 19th century, scientific materialist he seems to have been ready to see it put into practice. What constraints did he believe should have been placed on such practice and why? None as far as I can see. Why would eugenics not arise as a consequence? In Darwin and his followers scientism, humanity is material to be rationally planned toward temporal perfection. And why not?

Because You Can't Get An Ought From An Is.

If it's a fact, it's a fact, and there it is. Darwin was a scientist, not a politician.

He was not an advocate of eugenics, which you would know if you read more of his work than the snippets carefully selected by OJ.

It is raining, we ought to close the window.

reproductive isolation of small populations

This is a fancy way of describing what normal folks call in-breeding.

The results, as far as I know, are uniformly bad.

I seems that I am not alone in this belief.

Inbreeding (reproduction by closely related individuals) occurs in small and isolated populations. Inbred individuals are homozygous at many gene locations, allowing expression of normally recessive, deleterious genes. Common results are infertility, low survival rates and compromised resistance to disease. These results have been clearly documented in zoo populations and have been observed in several wild populations. In a decreasing population, inbreeding depression of reproduction and survival may accelerate a decline toward extinction.

(Emphasis added UB)

Nazis and Bolshies certainly did( ought from is ), misguided though they were, retrospectively.

Uncle:

Kinda cool--it's both the only way to get speciation and leads to extinction.

Tom and OJ:

Both of you have just demonstrated that you don't understand the axiom (from Hume) "you can't derive an ought from an is".

It means that you cannot validly derive an 'ought' statemnt (ie. one carrying moral or prescriptive force) from a statement of fact, without presupposing substantive 'ought' statements.

From the statement "guns can kill people" it would be invalid to derive "it is right to kill people with guns". It would also be invalid to derive "it is wrong to kill people with guns."

From the statement "civilisation allows people who would otherwise die to survive" it is invalid to derive "it is wrong that civilisation allows people who would otherwise die to survive"; and it is also invalid to derive that "it is right civilisation allows people who would otherwise die to survive".

It's just a statement of fact.

Brit:

That you can derive more than one ought from an is only weakens your prior statement.

Erm. You might want to try reading it again. Are we back to OJ's special language where 'yes' means 'no' and 'can't' means 'can'?

Brit: Words like weak, highly injurious, want of care, care wrongly directed, degeneration, ignorant and worst are "ought" words, not "is" words. In fact, Darwin's comments make no sense in terms of natural selection, which, as we've discussed before, does not draw moral distinctions but rather allows for the survival of those individuals without any traits that are incompatible with survival. Darwin's quote is, in fact, concerned entirely with the condition of the genotype, not the phenotype.

Darwin is not saying "in the modern environment, individuals survive despite traits that, in an earlier environment, nature would have selected against." Rather, he is saying that modern society results in the degeneration of the race through the free breeding of the weak.

You are undoubtedly better read in Darwin than I and I certainly accept that the best of us can make individual comments that misrepresent our actual beliefs. Still, it takes a quote to beat a quote. Where does Darwin say that, as a Darwinist, he cannot judge whether one phenotype is weaker or more degenerate than another so long as it survives to reproduce, or that he has no problem with the continued degeneration of the race?

As the 9-year-old girl carrying new tiles to the kiln told Dickens when he toured a brickyard about the same time Darwin introduced his theory: 'You can't do nothin' wit' a brickie.'

Which turned out not to be correct.

I'm not sure what the purpose of this post was. To prove that a playwright who was not a professional biologist made mistakes about Darwinism? Or Christianity?

Heck, we knew how that works from this blog already.

This morning on the way to work, I listened to a radio preacher who was condemning the gullibility of spiritualists who do not realize that bad demons are trying to lead us astray. According to him (and Corinthians), there are bad demons everywhere.

How many antidarwinian posters here have been accosted by a bad demon lately?

If not, why not?

Every time you post something.

No. According to Corinthians, the bad demons disguise themselves as good demons.

So the answer to your question: "How many antidarwinian posters here have been accosted by a bad demon lately?" is quite possibly many. Maybe I'm the bad demon? Did you have a point?

David:

If we shed some light on this little muddle, we can actually untangle (at least) two separate strands of argument.

These are:
1) that a belief that Darwinism is true is equivalent to a belief that eugenics is desirable
2) that Charles Darwin, the man himself, was in favour of eugenics

Argument (1) is clearly false for is-ought reasons. Tom above states: “Nazis and Bolshies certainly did( ought from is ), misguided though they were, retrospectively” but fails to acknowledge that his own statement proves argument (1) to be false. Nazis did indeed have to impose ‘ought’ interpretations on Darwinism, so Darwinism does not equal eugenics.

The antidarwinian response to this will be "but even if Darwinism does not equal eugenics, if you take Darwinism to its logical conclusion you inevitably end up there".

Which is a philosophically weak argument stemming from a confusion between Darwinism - the branch of biological science - and what is sometimes called “social darwinism”. Darwinism is a descriptive theory about the history of all biology, not a prescriptive theory about the future of human society. The argument is also not substantiated by any evidence in the scientific cannon. There’s an awful of lot of Darwinists out there, none of whom are eugenicists. No, not even Dawkins. If OJ could dig up a significant quantity of scientific papers advocating eugenics, it might be more persuasive. Except they wouldn’t even be scientific papers, they’d be sociology/philosophy papers.

Argument (2) – that Charles Darwin, the man himself, was in favour of eugenics – is of course quite distinct to argument (1). ‘Darwinism’ is not the sum total of the written words of the man Charles Darwin. It’s named after him, certainly, but Darwinists do not treat The Origin of Species as Bible-literalists treat the Testaments.

‘Darwinism’ really refers to ‘Modern Synthesis’ – which has come a long way from the writings of Charles Darwin.

So even if (2) is correct and Darwin was in favour of eugenics, it doesn’t follow that (1) is true.

But is (2) actually correct? The argument always hinges on the interpretation of the passages quoted by OJ - which, taken in isolation, look sympathetic to Galton. But take the body of Darwin’s work as a whole, and it is clear that he is concerned with scientific fact. He gives prescriptive arguments, and even conclusions about the implications of his theories for religion, a very wide berth indeed.

And in so doing justifies eugenics and racial hygeine theory.

...oh yes, and don't forget communism, Watergate and Janet Jackson's nipple.

Brit:

All of those deny natural selection theory.

Brit, David:

Thanks for an excellent discussion.

Brit:

I have no problem with point 1. I would, in fact, go further and state that logically Darwinism, as we have defined it here (the "weak" theory of natural selection), is logically incompatible with eugenics.

On point 2, I have no opinion. It would not shock me for a 19th century man to have politically incorrect racial or class views.

There is a point 2.5, though. The popular but wrong strong theory of natural selection -- that natural selection is a fine sieve that passes through only ever better creatures, resulting in us (however defined), the flower of creation -- lends itself easily to eugenics and the most vicious racism.

That should be, of course, point 1.5.

David:

Agreed - but of course 1.5 isn't Darwinism.

It's a misconception of Darwinism: at best, an accidental misconception held by people who have only a passing interest in it; at worst, a deliberate distortion by opponents of Darwinism in an attempt to discredit the proper theory.