Category Archives: Darwinism

Aristotle, who is sometimes called the first economist, said that courage, like other virtues, was the mean between opposing vices, in this case rashness and cowardice. He added an important qualification: Courage isnt courageous unless its for a worthy cause. Fighting to defend oneself is brave but not especially admirable animals do that. Fighting to defend ones country, he said, is courageous. If Aristotle were here today he would probably count Zelensky as courageous, but not so the 9/11 hijackers.

Modern economics rejected Aristotles philosophy and replaced it with utilitarianism, which is about maximizing utility, usually defined as pleasure. To a utilitarian, an act of heroism is wasteful if it doesnt result in the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Reducing all of human experience to a quantity of utils is mathematically convenient but doesnt square easily with ancient virtues such as courage, fortitude and prudence.

Another strand of modern economics is devotion to the free market. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages. Many economists, latching onto that concept, came to see selfishness as the engine of prosperity. Courage was, if anything, a pre-capitalist virtue a relic of the age of chivalry.

The demolition of courage seemed to be completed by social Darwinism, a philosophy born in the 19th century that argued that survival of the fittest should apply to people, not just other reproducing organisms. Two centuries after The Wealth of Nations, the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins wrote an influential book, The Selfish Gene, that said, Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.

The philosopher Richard Rorty was content with a lack of heroism in modern democratic societies. In a 1988 work, The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy, he wrote, even if the typical character types of liberal democracies are bland, calculating, petty, and unheroic, the prevalence of such people may be a reasonable price to pay for political freedom.

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Opinion | Courage Seemed to be Dead. Then Came Zelensky. - The New York Times

The work of creating science has been organized for centuries, wrote Popular Science founder Edward Livingston Youmans in his inaugural editors note in May 1872. The work of diffusing science is, however, as yet, but very imperfectly organized, although it is clearly the next great task of civilization.

Over the last 150 years, the editors of Popular Science have published 1,746 issues (very soon to be 1,747), countless web articles, hundreds of videos, and more in our continuing effort to answer that charge: To as perfectly as we can organize the world of scientific inquiry and innovation for curious everyday people as best we can. Or, as Youmans put it, for whoever cares how opinion is changing, what old ideas are perishing, and what new ones are rising into acceptance.

Youmans believed that the US was home to many such curious minds, and that they would only become more numerous in the future. Within just a few years, he was proven correct. Circulation of the periodical grew to 11,000 by the end of 1873 and had reached 18,000 by the time Youmans died, in 1887, at the age of 65. (His brother and collaborator, William Jay Youmans, took up editorship through 1900.) Today, Popular Science reaches an audience of millions across our varied platforms.

At Youmans behest, the publication came into existence at a pivotal moment in the history of science and invention. Then called The Popular Science Monthly, the magazine entered a world where a growing repository of scientific knowledgeone that included vaccines, telegraphs, electricity, locomotives, typewriters, industrial machines like lathes and drill presses, and new materials like vulcanized rubberwas poised to impact everyday life. The barrier between laboratory science and applied science was vanishing. New work quickly spurred more work and fresh experimentation, a dynamism that demanded rapid interpretation.

Youmans implored his authors, most of whom were among the eras most prominent practicing scientists and philosophers, to translate their work into language those outside their fields could more readily understand. Eight-tenths of the patrons of the Monthly will get but a partial comprehension of it, he wrote in a letter to an author explaining his need to edit out jargon in an article about new concepts in mathematics. (A predecessor of mine called this drive to distill complexity without sacrificing accuracy radical clarity, a phrase that has echoed in my brain for some 13 years.)

So it was until the early 1900s, when a change in publisher opened up an iconic period for PopSci, one with vibrant, illustrated covers and images showcasing rapid progress. Editors sought to not simply explain the present, but explore visions of the future. Our early years trotted out a series of world-changing firsts: phone calls, radios, flights, atomic bombs, automobiles, television. By the mid-century, with World Wars in the rearview, the editors began to imagine a world of buzzing metropolises, flying cars, and, of course, personal jetpacks.

If Youmans initial goal was to educate his audience, then here began a phase of aspiration: a shared ideal that science and technology were funnels to a better, safer, healthier, happier, more exciting existence.

In the years since, editors have dubbed PopSci The Whats New Magazine and adopted taglines like The Future Now. But the Popular Science of 2022 does not exist purely in either the educational or the aspirational realm.

Since our Last Big Anniversary Year (number 125, in 1997), weve experienced a paradigm shift in the role of science in everyday life. In June 2007, Steve Jobs showed the world the iPhone for the first time, setting in motion a change in the average persons daily interface with technology and information. Our collective ability to findand sharethat information with such great ease has made parsing the clamor more difficult than its ever been.

We still believe in a better futurea relentless optimism that sees the potential to make good out of even our toughest challengesbut the Popular Science of the COVID-era world is first and foremost a lighthouse of the now. In many ways, weve gone back to the basics, which has invited a few barbs about how PopSci now cares more about being popular than about science. When you look closely, however, what weve actually done is fully embrace what the word popular really means.

To the current generation of Popular Science editors, popularity means meeting people where they are, and introducing them to scientific concepts through the lens of their own daily experiences. It means satisfying a universal sense of wonder that subtly reminds everyone that were all beneficiaries of scienceand that most of us, whether we realize it or not, are already big fans of it too. It also means ensuring our work speaks to the population not as a homogeneous mass, but as a diverse bunch with shared needs and interests. And many different ones too.

We only wish wed gotten here sooner.

Paging through our early days puts us face-to-face with representations were not proud of. World War II provides a particularly potent example, as caricatures of enraged Japanese pilots stand in stark contrast to stately depictions of American victors. (In 1945, the editors, we must note, made no celebration in their commentary following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) After the War, our view of life at home painted whats now a reductive, discriminatory picture, casting women as homemakers and people of color as domestic workers. A modern eye will even find sexism encoded in articulations of our mission, championing that the man who masters a balky furnace and the woman who bakes a better muffin are often unconscious scientists in a May 1947 75th anniversary retrospective.

Our publication has also contributed to egregious wrongs. It could be argued, for instance, that our founder was integral to the dissemination of social Darwinism in the US. British philosopher Herbert Spencer, a contemporary of Darwin who coined the phrase survival of the fittest in his 1864 book Principles of Biology, applied ideas about evolution and inheritance sociologically: He offered that those who thrive in society deserve their wins while those who flounder have earned their losses. Youmans zeal for his work led to its publication in our first issue, and nearly a dozen times after.

Spencers ideasand related interpretations of Darwins theory of evolutionwould inform a chilling era in American science.

Around the turn of the 20th century and into the early 1900s, Popular Science lent credence to the eugenics movement, a field of study that proposed a path to perfect civilization through selective breeding. Now rightly regarded as bigotry under a veneer of pseudoscience, the ideology applied advances in our understanding of evolution and genetic inheritance to support racist, sexist, and xenophobic policies that disproportionately impacted Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people. Eugenicists pushed through laws that allowed states to forcibly sterilize persons deemed feeble-minded and legislation that excluded certain nonwhite immigrants. Searching the first 25 years of our archive nets dozens of articles presenting supposedly scientific arguments for such practices. Historians now widely accept that American eugenics had an outsize impact on the genocidal policies of the Nazi party.

In eugenics, PopScis founding writ to deliver science to the public was also our Achilles heel. Our continued coverage of the field and its proponents only served to normalize the idea. In 1923, Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas washed the practice as the science of fitter families in an article recounting eugenic successes in the state. A 1925 dispatch from Chicago described with fanfare a device that could predict the inheritance of criminal behavior. As recently as 1962, a retrospective we published highlighted the movementthis time citing proof of eugenic ideas allegedly observed within a particular South African tribewithout critical comment.

Investigating ugliness in our past is a vital part of our future. In addition to deciphering the world of science for everyday readers, it has long been part of our ethos to embrace and explore faultsand to be constructive as we chart a path forward. In our last quarter century, for instance, the distasteful eugenic period has driven us to bring greater cynicism to topics from DNA sequencing to designer babies. And coverage in the magazine and on popsci.com under the current generation of editors has broadened its focus to explore how racism continues to pervade in science and society, including in drug criminalization, environmental destruction, and inequities in public health.

This month were continuing that work by introducing a series called In Hindsight: a collection of stories highlighting researchers from the last 150 years whose contributions are missing from our pages, but who deserve recognition. In our 75th anniversary retrospective, editors trumpeted a roster of 12 white men who helped popularize science. Were only just beginning to fill in the gaps. Some of the great minds well showcase, like microbiologist Esther Lederberg, made key contributions to prizewinning work, while others, like physicist Caroliyn Beatrice Parker, had their brilliance cut short by barriers of sexism and racism.

These profiles also include the story of our founders sister Eliza Ann Youmans, a botanist and textbook author. Elizas contributions to her brothers early work and PopSci are by no means a secret: His biographers regularly note that she was his reader and scribe during a period of blindness in his twenties, and she penned numerous articles and reviews for the magazine, including his obituary. But generally speaking, we know precious little about her and the extent to which her influence may have shaped and marked the brands earliest years.

While we know its important to embrace our shortcomings, theres certainly more in our history to be proud of than not. Over the decades, we successfully delivered dispatches on sciences watershed moments and the stories of the scientists behind them. In 1883, we published the revolutionary idea that microscopic germs, not bodily impurities, caused disease. In 1931, a Popular Science reporter was there when Auguste Piccard became the first person to reach the stratosphere (we also watched when Felix Baumgartner jumped from those same heights in 2012). And, in 1984, we were among the first to get up close with Steve Jobs and his new Macintosh computer. This month, well be resharing one such story every weekday, providing a tour through world-changing breakthroughs like Salks polio vaccine and allowing readers to peek into the pastand the marvelous visions it held of our future.

Over the coming months, well also be checking in on our progress toward some of innovations most-compelling ideas in the Are We There Yet? series. Here, well assess the realities of those visions and gut-check their feasibility, practically, and necessity. Weve been wondering, for example, if medical science will find a cure for aging since at least 1923, asking when artificial smarts will supplant baseball umpires since 1939, envisioning cities with complete streets since 1925, and questing after airplanes that fit in household garages since 1926.

Of course, wed be giving PopScis founding legacy short shrift if we didnt also look at the scientific moment were in nowand speculate smartly on what the future might hold. On May 17, well drop our Summer digital issue, which explores the current state of technology through our species ever-changing relationship with metal. Central to that is our current tug-of-war with the conductive elements we need to power a wave of electrification. On the same day, were also publishing a special newsstand-only print edition that calls on 50 visionariesfrom neuroscientists to sci-fi authorsto gaze into the next 150 years and tell us what they see.

Popular Science, even after 150 years, is not unlike those visions: a work in progress. Itd be an act of great hubris to claim weve reached the goal post our founder set of perfectly organizing the dissemination of science. To claim otherwise would be unscientific. One of Zenos great paradoxes, after all, holds that its impossible to close the gap between two things. What we can claim, however, is increasingly rapid progress toward that North Star.

Check out all our anniversary coveragehere.

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As PopSci turns 150, we reflect on the highs and lows of our long history - Popular Science

In his past interviews, Lando Norris revealed that he is glad that he didnt end up at Red Bulls drivers programme when he was a child.

The Briton sensation Lando Norris had a successful career in several youth competitions that allowed him to graduate to F1 at the age of 19. Now, into the fourth year of his F1 career, Norris has cemented his spot in the sport.

Much of that credit goes to McLaren, who supported him from the right age and eventually gave him a chance in F1. Meanwhile, Norris never said that there were offers from Red Bull, but certainly, the Milton-Keynes based setup had eyes on him.

But Norris was never fond of the Red Bull drivers programme. In the Beyond the Grid podcast, he mentioned that he was never keen on joining Red Bulls programme.

Being a free guy basically, not getting caught up in Red Bull, said Norris. Once youre in, youre on a tight leash with what you can do, he added.

Im sure Carlos [Sainz] has told you about that, guessed Tom Clarkson. Yes, he has, replies Norris. At that time, Norris was independent and had yet to associate with a team.

Norris thinks that was the best decision his manager could have made in hindsight. Though one cannot guess what would have happened had the Briton race driver had joined Red Bull academy, so far, his choices seem to be precise and have helped him immensely.

Also read:Red Bulls Sergio Perez arrives to the Miami circuit way too early after a miscommunication with boss Christian Horner

Since Carlos Sainz left McLaren for Ferrari, Daniel Ricciardo struggled with the Woking-based team. Norris has been promoted as the lead driver in the pecking order.

The 22-year-old race driver has put in some fantastic performances in 2021 and the first four races of the 2022 season. Last years exhibitions also earned him a new bumper contract with McLaren, which keeps him with the team till 2026.

So far, it seems that Norris has a bright future in F1. He is also considered to be the future world champion. It only remains to be seen how his career will take course ahead.

Also read:Alex Albon could visit Charles Leclercs mum to get his hair fixed

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"RB takes Darwinism very seriously" Lando Norris doesn't think highly of Red Bull driver programme; Carlos... - The Sportsrush

Photo: Darwins statue, Natural History Museum, by http://www.cgpgrey.com [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Many books have been written about scientific problems with the theory of evolution. Neo-Darwinism, as the leading construct of evolutionary theory, has its fierce supporters as well as its opponents. Few topics have the capability of generating heated conversations and of turning friends into foes. Few people, though, ever ask the So what? question. How does Darwinist thinking affect the man on the street? Or is Darwinism simply a neutral scientific doctrine? How does Darwinism influence what we do once you or I wake up in the morning?

At first glance, it might seem that whether we believe in evolution as a purely material, unguided process should make no difference to values or morality. Yet, in his 2007 bookDarwin Day in America: How Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science, Discovery Institutes John West looks at the question more deeply and shows otherwise. In a nearly encyclopedic manner, he documents the numerous impacts Darwinism has had in the public square. It has had a distinctively destructive effect on our society. Dr. West provides a plethora of examples in each chapter of how Darwinism has changed the courts, the schools, the medical establishment, the conduct of the scientific community, and, indeed, the man on the street.

As the book shows, Darwinism is aWeltanschauungat war with the Judeo-Christian theistic system on which Western civilization and scientific inquiry are based. Many of Dr. Wests examples were unknown to me, and will be news to many other readers. In a skillful and scholarly fashion, he unearths the contest between faith and science, while providing references for any claims that he makes. The book is divided into sections, with each oriented around a specific theme. Ill be as brief as possible in this two-part review.

I took a psychology class in college and wrote a book review and rebuttal to B. F. SkinnersBeyond Freedom and Dignity.I got an A on that paper, and still have it in my files. This was back in the day when colleges (I attended the hyper-liberal Portland State University) still had free speech. Looking back on this paper recently, I noted that I had used what John West calls the nothing buttery argument, and could not remember where I picked up that phrase since I did not provide references in my paper. It was thus with great surprise that I noted the title of the first chapter ofDarwin Day in America, Nothing Buttery.Thankfully, Dr. West referenced the book that is the source of the phrase, a book I had first read between high school and college. It isA Clockwork Image: A Christian Perspective on Science, by Donald MacKay.

Nothing buttery is when a scientist makes the preposterous (and impossible to prove) claim that the world is nothing but what we can detect and observe through science. Truly, it is science-of-the-gaps thinking which forces a pseudo-scientific explanation on the entirety of the world. So much of what we see and know is unprovable and so much more is simply unknowable, yet advocates of nothing buttery use science to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. Out of this nothing-buttery scientific materialism, there emerged the DarwinistWeltanschauungthat is currently deconstructing our society. West, in a subsequent chapter, gives a brief and instructive summary of the rise of Darwinism as a picture of reality.

In the next section of the book, he addresses the themes of crime and punishment. When Dostoevsky wrote his masterpieceCrime and Punishment, there was still a ChristianWeltanschauung, and the novelist knew that his readership would comprehend the sense of guilt after committing murder. If written today, his book probably would not pass muster with critics, though Woody Allens 1989 filmCrimes and Misdemeanorscould stillplay on the residual Judeo-Christian worldview of 30-plus years ago. Through a number of examples, West shows how the Darwinian mindset removes responsibility for crime, or turns the criminal into nothing more than a victim of mental illness. Rather than punishment or restitution, rehabilitation becomes the recommended treatment. Science is claimed as the guiding beacon for the new management of criminal offenses. However, it strains the imagination to see how injustice and recidivism reflect a scientific approach.

On our journey through the dismal night of Darwinian conceptions, West turns next to wealth and poverty. This section covers big finance, eugenics (and though only indirectly mentioned, critical race theory), utopianism, advertising, architecture, and more. All have been heavily influence by a materialistic worldview deriving from Darwinism. West offers multiple examples, and I believe that he succeeds in his argument.

The section on how Darwinism has affected education is fascinating. The establishment does NOT want you to know how campus free speech has been stifled, and this is especially true in the context of teaching students, or not teaching them, about the controversy that still exists about Darwinian theory. Though it is a theory as leaky as a colander, educators feel that to admit problems with the theory would be troubling to young people, who might then even dare consider intelligent design as an alternative. How horrid that would be! On the other hand, sex education and the new thinking on sex, including any sexual deviancy under the sun, is permissible, should we be in reality functional blobs generated by a few accidents in the primordial slime.

Next, Darwinism and Scientific Totalitarianism.

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Darwinism and the So What? Question: John West's Darwin Day in America - Discovery Institute

Andrew Carnegie was known as a major steel tycoon. He built the largest steel company in the world, called the Carnegie Steel Company. Andrew Carnegie usedan unusal and harshmethod when it came to his business procdecures and practice to build up his company. This methodwasknow asvertical intergration. Vertical integrationoccurred when"a single company was responsible for all facets of the business from the raw materials to the finished product" (ProQuest). In order for Andrew Carnegie to rise to the top of thebusiness world, hejustified his harsh practices with thmethodof natural selection.The method in which he used can be explained by Social Darwinism,which basically means"survival of the fittest." This idea put workers up against each other creating a very competitive nature.Andrew Carnegie's company always remained at the top of the business world and was able to conquer and even destroymany other smaller companies. He easilybecame one of the richest men in the world. Andrew Carnegie retired from the steel industry in 1901 and focused his energy on philanthropy. He published his own book called The Gospel of Wealth. In his book he had a change of heart by explaining that the rich should use to their wealth to aid the poor.

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Andrew Carnegie - Social Darwinism & Andrew Carnegie

Photo: Charles Kingsley, by Charles Watkins via Wikimedia Commons.

Editors note:We are delighted to present a new series by Neil Thomas, Reader Emeritus at the University of Durham, Origin of Species: From Discussion Document to Nihilist Dogma.This is the fourth article in the series.Find the full series so far here. Professor Thomass recent book isTaking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design(Discovery Institute Press).

Charles Darwins backtracking emendations to his theory, noted in my last post, indicate that the unresolved tensions in his mind remained with him right up to the time preceding his death in 1882. In fact, asignificant reason that his 19th-century peers were but little inclined to accord theOriginthe kind of non-negotiable canonical status foisted upon it by many 20th-century legatees lay with some of Darwins own prevarications and ambiguous statements. He had for instancefamously concluded hisOriginby referencing the ancient doctrine of the divinepneuma, writing that life had been breathed into simple forms, and that from those beginnings there had come about an evolution of more complex forms by dint of laws impressed upon matter by the Creator.

Since such statements are clearly inconsistent with purely natural processes, it was easy for those with more traditional opinions to deduce from themthat everything owed its existence ultimately to a power transcending the natural order. Oxfords bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, arraigned Darwin for committing a grand category error, charging that Darwin was in effect deifying the phenomenon he had chosen to hypostatize under the name of natural selection. Darwin, Wilberforce averred, was illogically imputing the same ontological status to evolving Nature that theists bestowed upon the Christian God that is, of an entity capable of bringing about transformative miracles.

This form of objection inevitably left the door ajar to the kind of hybrid interpretation favored by some in both Britain and America in the later Victorian period. This involved a tacit grafting on to Darwins text of a thin but crucial layer of theistic evolutionism, as James Moore documented in his standard study of post-Darwinian controversies.1In other words, the deity (being regarded as more hands-on than was allowed for in the minimalist conceptions of deism) emerged as the ultimate choreographer of all evolutionary selection. In such ways did some recipients weave advances in biological understanding into an overarching theological interpretation.

Some, like author Charles Kingsley and future Archbishop Frederick Temple actually professed to find their religious faithstrengthenedby Darwinism since it appeared to them as a form of progressive revelation science coming through for humanity by illuminating what had previously been hidden.Kingsley even seems to have viewed biological evolution as a branch of what German theologians callHeilsgeschichte,that is, salvationhistory, according to which God constantly works behind the scenes to promote the human potentialities and ultimate salvation of His subjects.

Indeed, for Kingsley this hidden hand approach seemed more satisfactory than the deist position which postulated a God who had made a once-and-for-all effort of creation but had since that time supposedly retired from his exertions with little more care for his Creation. For Kingsley, by contrast, evolution took on the spiritually reassuring aspect of underscoring Gods tutelary and pastoral role as the unwavering guardian and promoter of his Creation. Surprisingas it may seem today, Darwin was seen by Kingsley and others as making a contribution to theological understanding every bit as important as his contribution to biology.

Next, AsMany Opinions as There Are Men?

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The Rise of Theistic Darwinism - Discovery Institute

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

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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.

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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