[_ Old Earth _] Scopes continued

[Barbarian]

Galton, the Huxleys, Spencer, Sanger, Neitche, Stalin, Hitler....and the list goes on regarding people who based their racism and classism on Darwinian theory....racism is a human problem but it never had an alleged scientific basis until then.

Didn't afterwards, either. As you know, Darwinists like Reginald Punnet showed that it was a foolish misconception.

One such was RC Punnett (Kevles 1995: 165), a geneticist who has given his name to the Punnett Square method of presenting fitness values of alleles. In 1917, Punnett calculated how many generations it would take to reduce “feeblemindedness” if all were sterilised in each generation. He worked out that to reduce the frequency from 1/100 to 1/1000 would require 22 generations, to 1/10000 90 generations and 1/1000000 700 generations! To give an idea of the magnitude of this, 22 generations takes us back to before the Black Death reached Europe. A debate ensued in which R. A. Fisher was taken to task in his attack on Punnett’s work by Herbert Jennings. By 1932, these criticisms had reached the New York Times.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/09/03/john-wilkins-on-eugenics-and-darwin-1/

Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the authors of modern Darwnian theory:
The eugenical Jeremiahs keep constantly before our eyes the nightmare of human populations accumulating recessive genes that produce pathological effects when homozygous. These prophets of doom seem to be unaware of the fact that wild species in the state of nature fare in this respect no better than man does ...
Genetics and the Origin of Species By Theodosius Dobzhansky

By the mid-1930s, eugenics research came under increasing scrutiny, and independent analysis revealed that most eugenic data were useless. A committee of the American Neurological Association reported that "[The definitional problem] invalidates, we believe, the earlier work which comes from Davenport, Rosanoff and the American Eugenics School with its headquarters at Cold Spring Harbor." According to an external visiting committee assembled by the Carnegie Institution of Washington: "Some traits such as 'personality' or 'character' lack precise definition or quantitative methods of measurement; some traits such as 'sense of humor,' 'self respect', 'loyalty' or 'holding a grudge' could seldom be known outside an individual's close friends and associates…Even more objective characteristics, such as hair form or eye color, become relatively worthless items of genetic data when recorded by an untrained observer."


These critiques, among other factors, prompted the Carnegie Institution to withdraw its funding and permanently close down the ERO in December, 1939...

Adherents of the new field of genetics were ambivalent about eugenics. Most basic scientists – including William Bateson in Great Britain, and Thomas Hunt Morgan in the United States – shunned eugenics as vulgar and an unproductive field for research.
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay5text.html

Morgan was important for applying Mendel's discoveries to evolution; his experiments helped produce the New Synthesis of modern evolutionary theory. Bateson, as you might know, was a Darwinian who investigated the evolution of mimickry.

Eugenics was indeed racist, and scientists weren't so fond of it. Creationists, however, loved it. A founder of the ICR was a very vocal advocate for forcible eugenic measures. And his associate, later director of the ICR, declared blacks genetically inferior in intelligence and spirituality.

This is not to say every creationist was or is a racist. But I note that Henry Morris' vulgar claims about blacks were not challenged by any of his fellow creationists.

Compare what happened to James Watson, (co-discoverer of DNA structure) when he claimed that blacks weren't very smart. He lost his job, and became unemployable.

That's another major difference between science and creationism.

 

[Barbarian]

Galton would have been horrified by the kind of eugenic ideas promoted by creationists like Tinkle. Galton preferred finding ways to have superior people have more children, rather than forcible sterilization and instututionalization favored by Tinkle.

Thomas Huxley thought blacks to be inferior, but he was absolutely convinced they deserved equal rights in all respects:
Mrs. P. A. Taylor, of the Ladies London Emancipation Society, said of Huxley, He believes in the doctrine of freedom, or equal personal rights for all men, and he pronounces the system of slavery to be root and branch an abomination -- thus making his physiological definition of the Negro's place among men equivalent to an earnest plea for Negro emancipation. Nay, as will have been noted, be goes farther, and, in virtue of the strength of his feeling with respect to slavery, avows a state of opinion regarding the American War in which many who share his feeling with respect to slavery will refuse to go along with him.
Taylor, P. A. 1864. Professor Huxley on the Negro question.

Spencer, Sanger, Stalin, Hitler

No Darwinians there. Hitler's program was soundly refuted by Darwinist Reginald Punnett (of Punnett square fame) in 1917, when he showed mathematically, that eugenic proposals were completely impractical. And Theodosius Dobzhansky (who was one of the few who formed modern evolutionary theory with genetic) wrote:

The eugenical Jeremiahs keep constantly before our eyes the nightmare of human populations accumulating recessive genes that produce pathological effects when homozygous. These prophets of doom seem to be unaware of the fact that wild species in the state of nature fare in this respect no better than man does with all the artificality of his surroundings, and yet life has not come to an end on this planet. The eschatological cries proclaiming the failure of natural selection to operate in human populations have more to do with political beliefs than with scientific findings.
http://todayinsci.com/D/Dobzhansky_Theodosius/DobzhanskyTheodosius-Quotations.htm

Stalin outlawed Darwinian science, imprisoning and executing scientists who accepted Darwin's ideas.
The Lysenkoists employed Stalinist terror in their struggle with Darwinian biologists for bureaucratic and academic positions. Anti-Lysenkoists faced the threat of public denunciation, loss of Communist Party membership, loss of employment position and arrest by the secret police. Between Lysenko's grip on power and the "disappearances" of numerous of his opponents, it would be years until the Soviet biology program would recover.[2] Similar political strong-arm tactics also hobbled the Soviet nuclear physics program, requiring Soviet scientists to follow only theories that had the Communist Party's blessing. This forced them to steal working designs from the United States, including the decisive Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb design.

Like much of Stalin's legacy, Lysenkoism fell out of favor in the mid-late '50s and early '60s, as Nikita Khrushchev "de-Stalinized" the Soviet Union. Lysenko himself was stripped of his power as head of the Soviet agricultural academy in 1956 after a couple of years of intense criticism by the Party, and he slipped into obscurity afterwards. However, Lysenkoism would retain some influence well into the '60s.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

And so on. Perhaps it would be a good idea to look at those websites with a bit more skepticism.

 

[brother Paul]

To what websites are you referring the one's YOU went to?

Long before I read about the continuance of the problem in articles like WHY THE "AIDS TEST" DOESN'T WORK IN AFRICA, By Christine Johnson, Rethinking AIDS, Jan. 2001, I was already writing the W.H.O., and the World Conference on Racism, asking them why they were putting African people on Aids cocktails when all they had done was a single Elisa Test? They never replied and continue to do so, on this basis, to this very day.

We here in America KNOW that a single Elisa tells us nothing of fact. We also KNOW that the various Aids cocktails if given to a person who does not have the disease will surely kill them. Since the Elisa yields about 60% false positives, we always must do a second Elisa (this test is very cheap). If both tests indicate HIV they most likely have the disease and then we then do a Western Blot test (more precise and unfortunately more expensive) to be sure….and only then do we subject a person to the medication remedies (which are a blessing for those who actually have the disease).

So when we hear that almost a billion people on the African continent have HIV (over 25,000,000 just in sub-Sahara Africa) this means that that many showed HIV positive based on a single Elisa test. They will all be put on the medication (as it becomes available to them). Yet about half of them DO NOT HAVE Aids. The World Health Organization has been told by scientists, and know, but they still do this. Senselessly killing people of African descent by the millions (netter we should give them food, water, and medical attention).

So why do they do this? Why not at least two (cheap) Elisa’s to be sure? Is Julian Huxley's "Eugenics Problem" a factor in their consideration? What is the basis of the World Health Organization’s approach to medicine?

http://www.who.int/global_health_histories/seminars/presentation11.pdf

 

[brother Paul]

“The influence primarily responsible for the modern eugenics movement was the establishment of the doctrine of organic evolution following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859.” —Samuel J. Holmes, Human Genetics, ch.25 (1936). Holmes himself was a Darwinian Biologist….

Charles Darwin’s son Leonard was an avid follower of his father’s work they had many conversations discussing the details and implications of his theory. After daddy passed, Leonard went on to co- found The Eugenics Society and became its President from 1911 through 1928 and remained on board in an honorary position until 1943.

In American Philosophical Society, piece on Leonard Darwin, we read a letter from the German Society for Race Hygiene sent to Leonard Darwin about attending the International Commission for Eugenics. (which he attended as a speaker)

I am told that his grandson Charles Galton Darwin has his legacy as well. He was a Eugenics Society life fellow, vice-president 1939, director 1939, president 1953–1959, committee 1960. And was the advisory editor (along with Josef Mengele’s mentor Von Verschuer) of the racist journal Mankind Quarterly.

Daniel Gasman, Scientific Origins of Nazism and Race Hygiene (1971) tells us that another of Darwin’s followers, Dr. Alfred Ploetz, in 1904, “…became one of the principal founders of the racially inspired eugenic journal, Archiv fur Rassen und Gesellschaftsbiologie. Among the editors were not only such future Nazi scientists as Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, but also Ludwig Plate, a close colleague of Haeckel, a member of the Monist League, and the successor to Haeckel’s chair in zoology at the University of Jena. The first issue of the Archiv was dedicated to Haeckel and to August Weismann. In the articles of the journal, Haeckel’s name was constantly referred to; it is clear that the contributors regarded him as Germany’s major prophet of political biology, and one cannot avoid noticing the great weight which at all times was attached to his scientific authority, and to his ideas on politics and eugenics (Dubois was his prodege'). The Archiv, which continued to be published right up through the Nazi period (until 1944), became one of the chief organs in Germany for the dissemination of eugenic ideas and provided a respectable scientific framework for Nazi writers…”

Believe me I have a continuous array of examples so I am going to stop because we went way off the OP. So you can make the final statement about this...

 

[Barbarian]

As you have seen, it was creationists who were working in America for eugenics, and Darwinians who were criticizing it on moral and scientific grounds.

So, there you are. Opinions are one thing, but facts are quite another. Depends on what you value, I suppose.

 

[Barbarian]

Perhaps we can explore why the creationists at the Scopes trial did not accept YE creationism.

The Fundamentals, a collection of 12 books published in from 1905 to 1915, sets forth the “fundamentals” of the Christian faith (such as the Virgin Birth, the Deity of Christ, etc.). The Fundamentals discuss the creation of the world but present several theories as orthodox, including the view that creation took place over millions of years and that the “days” of Genesis are actually epochs of time. (See Gen. 2:4 where the word “day” is used to mean an indefinite period of time.)

Not all fundamentalists, therefore, held to a 6-day creation and Bryan himself, as it turns out, did not believe in a literal 6-day creation (!).
http://www.themonkeytrial.com/

YE creationism, as we know it today, was invented by the Seventh-Day Adventists in the early 1900s.

 

[brother Paul]

And neither do I....

 

[jasonc]

barb, if the yec was invented by the sda why do the jews TODAY use the the calendar based on the seven day literal creation time frame. they have done that for centuries and did so long before the rcc was around and let alone at the time of jesus. so please stop saying that. being of that lineage I know that to be the case. I do feasts when I can which sadly has only been channukah and that is based on the jewish religious calendar.

 

[brother Paul]

Jason is right. Traditionally most of the Jewish people believe the 7 days of creation to be a literal 7 days even though Psalm 90 shows us the term also has a figurative application.

 

[turnorburn]

There is one truth that Gods people believe, Gods word, when he says

Exodus 2:11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

We believe it, its that simple, what man says is a different story, man has never been satisfied with the truth, look what man did to our savior, and it all started when Satan said "hath God said"

tob

 

[Barbarian]

barb, if the yec was invented by the sda

As you know, creationism back at the time of the Scopes Trial was old Earth creationism. They were fine with millions of years. The visions of a "prophetess" was sold to some fundamentalists, and spread to other denominations. Would you like me to show you that?

why do the jews TODAY use the the calendar based on the seven day literal creation time frame.

Probably why we have a seven-day week. Assumptions aren't God's word.