February 2, 1809. Both Lincoln and Darwin were born. Who was the greater emancipator?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Ethereal @ Jul 16 2007, 08:00 PM) [snapback]479944[/snapback]</div>

Considering it gave rise to all life I would argue actually the opposite is true.

 

"I agree that the selection criteria the Nazis employed for the Holocaust were bizarre, and probably meaningless. However, there was a pre-Holocaust in which hundreds of thousands of disabled and chronically ill "incurables" were provided "final medical assistance." What other position can a good Darwinist take regarding the survival, care, and even reproduction of the infirm?"

I think you might be misunderstanding the theory of natural selection.
evolution does not have a determined good or bad outcome.
Forced extermination is not "natural selection", it is UNnatural selection.

"evolution is inferred to have taken place based on fossils, radioisotope dating, etc."

There is a lot more evidence than carbon dating fossils.

Here is an example that has been shown, proven, and can be recreated
:
A colony of moths living in the woods are mostly white, some grays and darker ones too.
The woods are mostly birch, which explains the moth coloring (blend in to the tree color, to avoid predators).
An industrial plant, or roadway, etc. goes in nearby that emits soot. Now the birch trees start to take on a gray color. Within a few generations of the moths, most of them are now gray! Some are still white, or darker, but due to natural selection, the white ones get eaten more often by birds than previously, leaving the gray ones as better suited to that particular environment.

This is a simple example of the theory of evolution, and it applies to humans too, but not in time frames most people can comprehend (at least until we have a population crash). Growing populations don't have a lot of "weeding out" going on.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Darwood @ Jul 17 2007, 08:26 AM) [snapback]480232[/snapback]</div>

This is an example of adaptation not evolution. Evolution requires the emergence of entirely new and more “advanced†features through innumerable, completely new genetically-defined traits. Your example is simply the appearance and/or disappearance of existing genetic traits through recombination and/or elimination or genetic code. In the end a moth, is a moth, is a moth.

Wildkow

http://www.arn.org/docs/wells/jw_pepmoth.htm

 

But this is how what you speak of happens. Adaptation is a driver of evolution.

Say this patch of woods is split in 2 by a highway. One side gets all the soot and the moths adapt over generations to a gray moth. The other side stays white. If theses two populations don't intermix, they will over time become incompatible (other changes take place simultaneously) and you are left with 2 species instead of one.
Maybe the white moths become smaller due to the predators on that side having poor eyesight, while the gray moths get bigger, since on their side, the primary predator is frogs, who like smaller moths.

This is a simplified hypothetical, but this is how changes occur, and species divide. The environment drives the changes, not a "roadmap".

It is very hard to understand these in human terms, since our populations have been expanding for so long, that there isn't much "die-off" or "genetic winners". Disease resistance and intelligence are about the only two factors, and these are slow, continual, and impossible to quantify.

"Your example is simply the appearance and/or disappearance of existing genetic traits through recombination and/or elimination or genetic code"

That's how it happens! Even random genetic mutations give rise to new traits. If that new trait offers an adbvantage, it will spread to the whole population, if it doesn't, it won't. Although "Elimination" is a poor choice of words. Genes generally get "turned off" not eliminated. Something like 98% of your genes are not used and are just copied needlessly in every cell. Some of those may mutate to become active again (IE: vestigial tail), some are "on" only as a fetus (gills), and most are just gobbly gook at this point, yet every time a cell divides, it has to copy everything, so the inactive genes live on.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Darwood @ Jul 17 2007, 11:59 AM) [snapback]480387[/snapback]</div>

First, I think you need to define evolution.
Second, you need to define species.

I think that will help this discussion. Personally I don't believe that two different colored or sized moths equals two different species. But if that is your definition then I have no problem in believing in that type/definition of evolution or species.

Wildkow

 

"First, I think you need to define evolution.
Second, you need to define species.

I think that will help this discussion. Personally I don't believe that two different colored or sized moths equals two different species. But if that is your definition then I have no problem in believing in that type/definition of evolution or species. "

American Heritage® Dictionary: Description of species
NOUN: 1. Biology a. A fundamental category of taxonomic classification, ranking below a genus or subgenus and consisting of related organisms capable of interbreeding.
(Note my point on "incompatible") IE: cannot interbreed.

Evolution
In Biology, a change in the gene pool of a population from generation to generation by such processes as mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Darwood @ Jul 17 2007, 11:26 AM) [snapback]480232[/snapback]</div>

Darwood,

First: congratulations on your gift of disagreeing politely. Seriously. Thank you.

Second: what Wildkow said. Either new and distinct species have arisen within recorded, verifiable history, which I don't think is so, or this emergence is one more speculative aspect of Darwinian biology.

Finally, I appreciate the distinction you draw above, and hope I can illustrate my point with an example.

Recently (last few centuries) it has been discovered that our bodies introduce into our bloodstreams various substances which alter the rate and force with which our hearts contract and the state of tension or relaxation of the muscle in our arterial walls. This is (part of) natural hemodynamics.

Knowledge of these observed phenomena has subsequently been applied, via the systhesis of duplicates or approximations of these substances (or antagonists or modulators of their activity), which can be introduced into the bloodstream to help offset extraordinary perturbations to circulation. Much of what I do for a living could fairly be called unnatural hemodynamics, although the overall effect benefits my patients.

Were mankind, with our knowledge of circulatory physiology and biochemistry, to shrug off the obvious potential to apply such knowledge to the saving of lives, would we not be fools at best and fiends at worst?

If we have observed (well, deduced) that species have evolved to ever more complex and superior forms via the elimination of weak, unfit members by natural selection, and that man is no exception, are we not fools to turn a blind eye to the obvious potential to apply such knowledge to the betterment of our species? What was Aktion T4 but applied Darwinian biology?

Lest I be accused (again) of distorting Darwin, I will let the man speak for himself of his excellent understanding of the potential applications of his theories:

"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."

--Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (emphasis added)

 

Interesting point.
I would argue that the theory of evolution is not a model for how humans ought to frame our societies. It is simply a model to explain how we got where we are and how life is likely to change over the next milennium (not the next 10 or 100 years). Darwin's work was groundbreaking, but it was also very rough and primitive. So to take his words verbotem is a bad idea. Just as (I believe) it is a bad idea to take the bible verbotem. Lots of good info and lessons, but not literally true on a wrod for word basis. Trying to apply his theory to matters of society is a misapplication of the theory and an alternate excuse from the usual ones for commiting atrocities. Bottom line, Darwin was not an expert on human sociology, but rather of ecology (Which granted, we are a part of, but not as simplistically as can be observed in isolated Galapagos island populations). He just happened to be the guy that figured out the basic formula for how life flourished and diversified accross the globe over millions of years.

I'd also say that their is no such thing as a "perversion of natural selection". To do so implies that humans are not of the natural world and somehow above it all. There is also no such thing as devolution. That implies there is a heirarchy of diversity. That somehow one species is "better" than another. That's simply not true. There is no perfect end point of evolution, other than the continuance of life. A so called "less evolved" species, could then be considered "more evolved" should the environment they live in change such that they were once again, better suited for it. We might radiate the planet and kill ourselves off, leaving cochroaches as the "most evolved" species.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Darwood @ Jul 17 2007, 01:05 PM) [snapback]480425[/snapback]</div>

Thanks Darwood, sorry it took so long to reply.

Your definition and coincidentally a lot of other evolutionist’s definition of “evolution†as “gene change†also fits within a creationist model (i.e. adaptation, variation) and therefore it does not distinguish itself. Many evolutionist argue that this type of gene change (bacterial resistance to antibiotics, peppered moth, finch beaks) equals or is the same as the evolutionary transition of one species into another. The evidence does not support this.

Wildkow

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Darwood @ Jul 18 2007, 11:45 AM) [snapback]480911[/snapback]</div>

If we view nature through the lens of the materialist, no natural process has a "perfect end point" or "perversion." They simply do what they do, mindlessly.

Again, though, once man learns the laws of nature through observation, (s)he harnesses the knowledge of those laws via application to a human-chosen end. Were it not so, science would be purely descriptive and there would be no such thing as technology.

Newton's laws were (part of) the foundational basis for rocket propulsion that was developed in the 20th century. Man decided it was desirable to apply Newton's 3rd law to the development of air- and space-craft that could propel themselves away from the earth. Man harnessed these observed, mindless natural principles to the purposes of both delivering explorers to the moon and high explosive warheads to the heart of London. Again, looking through the lens of materialism, who is to say that one or the other is good or bad? In each case, the chosen end was simply desired.

Darwin gave us a sort of "3rd Newtonian law of biology:" for every action (in the form of a mass kill-off of individuals from a population) there is an equal and opposite reaction (in that the susbsequent generations of the population express less frequently the traits common to the killed-off individuals). In its natural operation, it had no chosen goal. But enter purposeful man, and a goal can be chosen and pursued.

Darwin, however, gave us something more. Had we merely noted that it was possible to propel mankind toward greater intelligence, for example, via the jet of the corpses of murdered idiots, the question would have loomed large if such a thing were permissible, even if it were desirable. Darwin's biology served as an apt foundation, however, for a cosmology in which the very concept of permissiblity is meaningless, for there is no One of whom to ask permission. Darwin's own autobiography, as I note above, indicates he found this cosmology quite agreeable.

 

This is incorrect. This assumes that more advanced is somehow better, and that evolution always moves towards a more advanced form. There is no overall goal for evolution, other than the continuation of life. It's not like there was some end-point in mind when evolution started, and that species are somehow working towards that goal.

I just finished reading Climbing Mount Improbable and The Selfish Gene. Both were very interesting. Basically, the gist of it is that the genes are looking to pass themselves on to the next generation. Anything that helps them do that in a more efficient manner will be selected to continue. It doesn't have to be more advanced at all. It just has to work better than the alternatives.

Dogs are descended from wolves. Is a Chihuahua more advanced than a wolf? If anything, I would say they are LESS advanced! If the point of a dog from a genetic standpoint is to pass the genes on to the next generation, a chihuahua is LESS capable of doing so, because it is less capable of survival without lots of human assistance. In nature, the annoying yappy dog would probably be taken out of the gene pool rather quickly. So while the chihuahua may have come along later than the wolf, it's not any more advanced than the wolf.

And species sometimes do revert back to earlier adaptations. We know that of the cetaceans at some point were land-based animals. So they started in the water, came to land, and then returned to water. Which would be the more advanced form? In reality, it's not that the animal had the goal of developing lungs on land, then moving back to water. It just means that the animals more adapted to water were better able to survive the conditions at that period of time and thus passed their genes on to the next generation. If conditions had been different, the animals better suited to land would have survived and we'd see something different.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Darwood @ Jul 17 2007, 04:05 PM) [snapback]480425[/snapback]</div>

That's the text book definition, but the truth is, it is nothing more than a human construct used to help organize a complex system. It was logicaly constructed, but it isn't set in stone. The arguments taxonomists have over what is or isn't a species can be more intense than that of global warming. It just isn't interesting enough for the daily news. Since I started keeping aquarium, fish have changed genus. This has no impact on what the lifeforms do out in the wild. Biology is a soft science because reality doesn't conforms to our set definitions.

Dogs and wolves are defined as two separate species. Yet, they can interbreed and their offspring can reproduce. We can redefine them as a single species, and maybe argue over whether the breeds are actually separate sub-species. We choose to let sleeping dogs lie in this case.

Ask a child if the white and black moth are the same. They would likely say no.If black peppered moths were found in one location, and the whites in another, they might have been called different sub-species or even species. Evolution does not care what name we give a lifeform. The lifeform will do what it was going to do no matter what we call it. Same for evolution. Some claim dinosaurs have not died out because birds evolved from them. We can argue over whether a bird is a dinosaur or a dinosaur a bird, but that wouldn't change the fact that a sparrow's ancestors were once scaly and had just legs to get around with like a plebe.

To follow that up, the sea squirt is the most 'advanced' invertebrae because of it's lavral notochord. Mantids are definitely more cooler and interesting, but, alas, we are stuck sitting next to a sack of cells sucking water in one hole and blowing out the other at the table of genetic commonality.

Darwin was a human being, which means he was not above being wrong, or even being an outright dick, when it came to some matters. But people have been wrong and dicks long before Darwin, and they will be long after. In his defense, Darwin was a bit of a libertarian and against government interference. So he may have called for the stupid people to stop breeding, but he wasn't calling for the government to round up the stupid people.
With all the messing around we've done with dogs, cows, peas, etc. in order the get the qualities we want out of them, it was just a matter of time before someone to apply the idea to humans. I don't think people started looking down upon interracial relationships because of what Darwin published.

Precisely, it is man's actions that are good or evil. The knowledge is not in and of itself good or evil. A knowledge of pharmacology can allow a person to help and heal others. It can also used to cause great harm and death. The knowledge has no power over how it is implemented. It is truly neutral, and its use does not polish or blemish the knowledge itself. Even if it is the original purveyor of the knowledge.

I'll also say that Germany didn't need Darwin or his theory to use Newton's Laws to launch rockets into London. They didn't need his cosmology to kill god or get his permission to perform horrible acts. Without evolution, they would of found some other form of rationalization.

Does the evil done in its name make God evil?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ShellyT @ Jul 21 2007, 04:28 PM) [snapback]482876[/snapback]</div>

1.) In the materialist universe, good or evil according to whom? "Killing God," as you put it, cuts morality loose from its moorings to drift out into the sea of relativism.

2.) Actually, they did. I know it's popular to blame the entire Third Reich on the Treaty of Versailles, but it simply isn't so. Ernst Haeckel, a contemporary and admirer of Darwin's who consulted and visited with Darwin often, wrote more freely and ethusiastically than Darwin himself about the potential applications of Darwin's discoveries. He also founded a movement known as "Monism," meant to highlight its distiction from "Dualism" of material and spiritual, which held that all that was real in the universe was material. ("Alles ist Natur, Natur ist Alles," as Haeckel put it.)

Haeckel's Monism applied Darwinism in two ways at once, both sweeping aside any worries over a supernatural Source of moral authority (since Darwin explained how life arose without need for a Creator) and subsuming humans into a biological paradigm where species improve by promptly and efficiently eliminating their weak and unfit. Ernst Haeckel was the lens that focused Darwinism into an instruction manual for at least Aktion T4, if not the entire Holocaust.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ShellyT @ Jul 21 2007, 01:28 PM) [snapback]482876[/snapback]</div>

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(burritos @ Jul 21 2007, 02:11 PM) [snapback]482878[/snapback]</div>

Sadly True, but only the intolerant <strike>hateful morons </strike> agree with that statement.

Wildkow

p.s. oops my bad, sorry.

 

I'm blaming the Third Reich on the basic nastiness all humans have the capacity to do. Which was made more effective by modern technology. Man did not suddenly start applying Newton's laws to projectiles with the invention of the rocket. He has been applying it since cannons, rifles, catapults, arrows, spears, and rocks. A concept doesn't need to be precisely expressed to be applied.
Animals had been domesticated thousands of years before Darwin, and selective breeding has been used to give us dogs to; track, haul freight, defend us, kill vermin, and cattle for tastier meat and more milk. Haeckel did not have the speak with Darwin to come up with removing the weak and unfit, he could have just spoken with a farmer. Man has been implementing the basic concepts of evolution before the voyage of the Beagle.
He also didn't need to get rid of the supernatural morality figure either. Horrible things have been rationalized as the will of god before and since. It would not have been shocking for that to happen in 1930's Germany.


The core rule of morality, 'Do unto others..(or Do not do...)' has arisen in multiple philosophies, some of which didn't have a supernatural source. The entire idea of not messing with somebody's stuff because you don't want them messing with yours is pretty basic. A person does not need god to be moral. Likewise, a person with god isn't always moral.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ShellyT @ Jul 22 2007, 01:15 PM) [snapback]483169[/snapback]</div>

1.) If you mean the Third Reich's war machine, I do not disagree. If you mean the Third Reich's extermination machine, I do indeed. I have to ask seriously: are you not aware of the Eugenic Movement that appeared and flourished in the first eighty years after the publication of Origin? The movement was not limited to Germany or Europe; the United States had numerous advocacy organisations promoting eugenic policies, and more than half the states adopted laws compelling the sterilisation of various "undesirables." When the Allies invaded Germany in 1944-5 and started uncovering extermination camps, western enthusiasm for eugenics withered pretty quickly.

2.) Haeckel remarked that when he read Origin, "the scales fell from my eyes." Darwin framed a biological model that not only joined man with "lower" animals in kind and heritage, but in which selective breeding and destruction bring man and all other animals into being. The legitimacy of applying the farmer's methods to humans was advanced immensely by Darwin's theories.

I want to draw a distinction between what I believe Darwin himself would likely have approved and what others, energized by his theories, did. I do believe Darwin grasped the potential application made real by National Socialism. He was somewhat muted in writing about the potential eugenic applications of his theories, and I have read two lines of speculation regarding this. Some believe Darwin appreciated and would have approved of the methods of National Socialism, but dared not write of such things for fear of scandalizing his core theory. Others, with whom I am more inclined to agree, believe Darwin glimpsed such potential but could not countenance it. Descent of Man makes some oblique appeals for selective human breeding, but I doubt Darwin would have approved, even secretly, of the National Socialist extermination programmes.

That said, I still hold that at least Aktion T4 was a legitmate, if horrific, application of Darwinism. The fact that it would have appalled Darwin the man makes it no less an apt employment of Darwinism the theory.

 

"That said, I still hold that at least Aktion T4 was a legitmate, if horrific, application of Darwinism. The fact that it would have appalled Darwin the man makes it no less an apt employment of Darwinism the theory."

Nor does it make the theory of evolution false. A biological theory has nothing to do with good vs. evil, only how things happen.

"horrific, application of Darwinism"
That's like saying "dropping a brick on someone is a horrific application of the laws of gravity"!

Kow-
"Your definition and coincidentally a lot of other evolutionist’s definition of “evolution†as “gene change†also fits within a creationist model (i.e. adaptation, variation) and therefore it does not distinguish itself. Many evolutionist argue that this type of gene change (bacterial resistance to antibiotics, peppered moth, finch beaks) equals or is the same as the evolutionary transition of one species into another. The evidence does not support this."

I'm not really sure what your point is here. You seem to think that species are a static thing. They are not. They are dynamic and INFINITE in variety. Man tries to label the species, since we need to be able to communicate information about them somehow. If you know of a better way, I'm sure scientists everywhere would like to know.

"a lot of other evolutionist’s definition of “evolution†as “gene change†also fits within a creationist model"

Ahhh, there's your point. The creationist model is a new attempt to view scientific concepts with the inclusion of God, as opposed to traditional science which does not in any way try to address or refute God. Of course some definitions "fit", creationism was created later, and hence uses many of the same definitions. It is an attempt to simultaneously co-opt and obfuscate science. Science does not need god to explain mathmatical theory, why does it need god to explain biological theory?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Darwood @ Jul 23 2007, 02:47 PM) [snapback]483675[/snapback]</div>

No, but this thread was started on the premise that Darwin was a "greater emancipator than Lincoln." I sustain that Darwin's theories "emancipated" hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives from this earth via a particularly grisly but thoroughly legitimate application.

Take note of the word "legitimate." Dropping a brick on someone's head is a purely arbitrary application of the law of gravity. Sterilising or exterminating the "undesirable" is a necessary application of Darwinism if mankind is not to "progress" back to his less civilised state. Darwin (quietly) pointed this out, while some of his contemporaries were not so quiet.