BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
You are saying Spencer wasn't really a Darwinist? So the whole "survival of the fittest" is wrongly attributed to Spencer in the classroom (smacks forehead)?
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The biogeographic evidence for evolution
- Thread starter Rational Agnostic
- Start date
You are saying Spencer wasn't really a Darwinist? So the whole "survival of the fittest" is wrongly attributed to Spencer in the classroom (smacks forehead)?
BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
Yes. That's how it works. I'm sure you've noticed that humans always give birth to humans as well.
How do you know they are done? Um, when they're born?
As usual, you are being supercilious and patronizing. WHAT GAVE BIRTH TO THE FIRST HUMANS? Proto-humans... apes... lemurs.
You are so full of nonsense.
BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
Your insertion implied I don't know the difference between "sociological" and "biological" which I do, but what I ASKED YOU WAS:
So, encyclopedias got "Social Darwinism" wrong, because it's "just a name"? Please explain their errors? because Hitler, Stalin, etc. were horrible SOCIAL DARWINISTS.
BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
1) PROVE, since cats descended from other animalia, that they will ALWAYS give birth to cats
2) PROVE, since YOU believe cats come from non-cats, why non-cats birthed cats and how you know the future, that cats only birth cats, since YOU claim I don't understand basic evolution
BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
Now you just sound ridiculous. Not that I'm surprised. Intelligent designers (people) formulated Spanish and Italian, sometimes willfully, sometimes passing down errors.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
A bit of a poorly asked question. You do realize that you are still an ape, don't you? There is no hard line between humans and apes. Creationists show this every day when given a line up of skulls in our evolution. They will draw an arbitrary line and try to claim that the skulls on one side of the line are :100% ape" and that those on the other side are "100% ape" the only problem is that they do not draw the line in the same place and some even change where they draw the line.
Biologists cannot even decide where to draw the line for hominems. Some think that chimpanzees and bonobos should be included with us.
BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
Prove how, since cats come from non-cats, that they will ALWAYS produce cats, for millions/billions of years, DESPITE evolution and natural selection. You know, SCIENCE, not ad homs AGAIN.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
No "proof" needed. They are cats by definition.
What? Does this make any sense to anyone? "Cat" is an arbitrary name that we give a clade of animals. But the law of clades tells us that the offspring of a clade will always be in that clade. In fact again it is not so much a "law" as a definition.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
The fact is that you tried to draw a parallell between biological evolution and "social darwinism". And that's what I, along with plenty of others, were objecting to.
This thread is about biogeographic evidence for the biological theory of evolution.
"social darwinism" has literally nothing to do with that.
Don't even pretend that you weren't trying to draw links between evolution theory and nazism, as if the first leads to or necessitates the latter.
Everyone can click back to the posts that lead up to this to see the entire exchange and if you do, you'll see how this thing got started.
It wasn't that we out of the blue felt the need to point out that evolution theory is about biology and has nothing to do with nazism or social organisation of any kind. We were responding to insinuations that said / implied that.
You can run, but you can't hide. The information is out there, for all to see, in this very thread.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
It's just how biology works, what do you want me to tell you?
No, I can't "prove" that all future births will be like that - how would I even do that??? - , just like I can't "prove" that every time you drop a pen in the future, it will fall to earth and not shoot off into space instead.
But you sure would look at me funny if I were to claim that that could happen, wouldn't you?
Cats are still the type of organism that all its ancestors were.
This is again a testament to how ignorant you are on this subject.
Consider languages again. French derives from Latin. Yet no Latin speaking parents ever raised a French speaking child. Latin is a Roman language. Guess what.... so is french.
So, to summarize:
- Cats produce cats.
- Felines produce felines and cats are still felines.
- Mammals produce mammals and cats are still mammals.
- Vertebrates produce vertebrates and cats are still vertebrates
- Eukaryotes produce eukaryotes and cats are still eukaryotes.
Cats, and all the future sub-species extant cats might evolve into in the future, will always stay felines, mammals, vertebrates and eukaryotes.
What does this mean?
It means that at no point in history did a creature produce another type of creature.
A cat is a subspecies of feline.
Felines produce felines.
These felines speciated into (among others) the subspecies of cat.
Cats produce more cats. If they speciate into another subspecies - that subspecies will still be a cat.
Do you get it now?
My money is on "no".
That never happened. Just like Latin speaking parents never raised a French speaking child.
Instead, Latin gradually morphed into French (among others). And at no point during that process, did parents raise a child that spoke another language then them.
This is the nature of gradualism.
If you're not going to inform yourself on this subject, the only thing you'll accomplish is continue to being wrong about it.
Just like I know the future that pens will always fall to earth when you drop them and will never shoot into space instead. That's just how gravity works.
Just like how the above is how biology works.
And you clearly don't.................. As you have demonstrated yet another time. And I'm absolutely positive that the third post you replied to me, which I still have to read, will be no different.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
How so?
Wow..... do you really think that at some time in history, some folks sat down and just decided to invent a new language???????
Think that through for a second.
And to make it easier on you, I suggest you replace "errors" with "mutations".
Now, take 5 minutes to think it through.
2000 years ago, people spoke Latin.
2000 years worth of mutating the language slightly every generation later, people speak French, Spanish, Italian and Portugese.
How did that happen?
Suddenly or gradually?
Did a Latin speaking parent raise a spanish speaking child?
Or is it rather the case that every single child ever spoke the same language as the people that raised said child?
Just as an additional FYI: a spanish speaking person can not hold a conversation with a latin speaking person because they can't understand eachother.
Let's see if you can figure it out on your own.
My money is again on "no".
He was a *social Darwinist*, but was not a biologist.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
The "despite", even with added emphasis in capital letters, is again a demonstration of your ignorance on the subject.
Read this with great attention, it is very important:
If tomorrow a cat gives birth to a non-cat, then EVOLUTION IS SHOWN FALSE
Your "despite" mention, implies that you think that "evolution and natural selection" says / expects the opposite: that at some point cats will produce non-cats. You couldn't be more wrong. You could try, but you would not be successfull.
Come to think of it, even the mention of "evolution AND natural selection" is a demonstration of ignorance.
The word "and" implies that evolution is a thing and natural selection is another thing. Incorrect as well.
Can you get anything right?
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
Ironically there is far more evidence that Hitler was a Christian than a "Darwinist". Bring that up and @BilliardsBall will surely cry foul.
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
A human. Humans give birth to humans. Cats give birth to cats.
What nonsense am I full of? You're the one who thinks cats give birth to dogs or whatever.
Perhaps I took the tone I did because I'm fully aware that you've been corrected on this multiple times in the past, AND you've been provided with complete explanations as to how evolution works.
And yet, you're still saying this stuff.
There was no 'first human'. The problem is that the term 'human' is vague enough that the transition happened through many generations. It isn't a hard line; it is a soft progression.
Think of it like this: there was no 'first French speaker'. All native French speakers were taught by other native French speakers. Current French speakers will likely teach French to their children. BUT, there was a time when there were no French speakers.
Once you understand how that is possible, you can start to understand your misunderstandings of evolution.
tas8831
Well-Known Member
I was responding more to:
"So, encyclopedias got "Social Darwinism" wrong, because it's "just a name". "
It IS just a name, coined by people describing the unwarranted extrapolation from/misinterpretation of what Darwin actually proposed.
Those folks - the 'Social Darwinists', just like the KKK, just like you, MISINTERPRET what 'survival of the fittest' meant in evolution and ran with it.
In real life, intelligent, informed people would write:
Social + DARWINISM = Whaaa? What does that even mean?
That is like writing:
Social + Newton's Laws of Motion = ????
Let us recall that you are on this kick because:
1. You lack the ability to provide scientific/empirical evidence for creation and thus feel compelled to attack "Darwin" by any means necessary.
2. You have bought into the lies and nonsense churned out by professional creationists and their right-wing religious "scholar" pals who have traded in their integrity for acceptance, money, and the furtherance of their sickening beliefs - all because it suits your needs.
3. Being a creationist, you are immune to correction and refuse to stop using phony arguments that you were just so convinced would be winners - since they were put forth by your hero Christian types and they totally convinced you, a multi-degree holding scholar and minister of some sort - since you believe that admitting error on things (even things that you foolishly demolished all on your own) you have based your greatest anti-evolution "argument" on will undermine your whole sense of self and being. Which it will because you base your sense of self on a worldview that relies on the promulgation of disinformation and fibs to survive.
And let us end with a reminder that all of your hemming and hawing and re-defining and re-iteration and re-assertion and burden shifting and pedanatery will not save this, your worst, most-failed "argument", a well poisoning fallacy on its best day, desperate mendacity on its worst, and an utter failure- as shown by your own unwitting hand:
I categorically reject anything by Weikart due to many instances of his shoddy scholarship:
"Weikart is best known for his 2004 book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany.[24][25] The Discovery Institute, the hub of the intelligent design movement, funded the book's research.[26] The academic community has been widely critical of the book.[4][13] Regarding the thesis of Weikart's book, University of Chicago historian Robert Richards wrote that Hitler was not a Darwinian and criticized Weikart for trying to undermine evolution.[27] Richards said that there was no evidence that Hitler read Darwin, and that some influencers of Nazism such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain were opposed to evolution.[27]"
But I do thank you for linking the Roberts article, for it would appear that you did not read it, for it concludes, any emphases mine:
"Countless conservative religious and political tracts have attempted to undermine Darwinian evolutionary theory by arguing that it had been endorsed by Hitler and led to the biological ideas responsible for the crimes of the Nazis. These dogmatically driven accounts have been abetted by more reputable scholars who have written books with titles like From Darwin to Hitler [was that not written by your hero, Weikart the righty propagandist?] . Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s great German disciple, is presumed to have virtually packed his sidecar with Darwinian theory and monistic philosophy and delivered their toxic message directly to Berchtesgaden or at least,individuals like Daniel Gasman, Stephen Jay Gould, and Larry Arnhardt have so argued. Many more scholars are ready to apply the casual, but nonetheless, telling sobriquet to Hitler of "social Darwinian.” In this essay I have maintained these assumptions simply cannot be sustained after a careful examination of the evidence.
To be considered a Darwinian at least three propositions would have to be endorsed: that the human races exhibit a hierarchy of more advanced and less advanced peoples; that the transmutation of species has occurred over long stretches of time and that human beings have descended from ape -like ancestors; and that natural selection — as Darwin understood it — is the principle means by which transmutation occurs. Hitler and the Nazi biologists I have considered certainly claimed a hierarchy of races, but that idea far antedated the publication of Darwin’s theory and was hardly unique to it. There is no evidence linking Hitler’s presumption of such a hierarchy and Darwin’s conception. Moreover, Hitler explicitly denied the descent of species, utterly rejecting the idea that Aryan man descended from ape - like predecessors. And most of the Nazi scientists I have cited likewise opposed that aspect of Darwin’s theory. Hitler did speak of the “struggle for existence,” but likely derived that language from his friend and supporter Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an avowed anti-Darwinian. Moreover, by Hitler’s own testimony, his anti-Semitism had political, not scientific or biological roots; there is no evidence that he had any special feeling for these scientific questions. And in any case, remote and abstract scientific conceptions can hardly provide the motivation for extreme political acts and desperate measures.
Among Nazi biologists, at least those publishing in an official organ of the Party, Mendelian genetics and de Vriesian mutation theory were favored, both vying at the beginning of the twentieth century to replace Darwinian theory. Moreover, the perceived mechanistic character of Darwinism stood in opposition to the more vitalistic conceptions of Nazi biologists and that of Hitler — or at least vitalism accords with the
drift of his thought about race. Finally, though his own religious views remain uncertain, Hitler often enough claimed religious justification for racial attitudes, assuming thereby the kind of theism usually pitted against Darwinian theory.
If “Social Darwinian” is a concept with definite meaning, it would have to refer to individuals who apply evolutionary theory to human beings in social settings. There is little difficulty, then, in denominating Herbert Spencer or Ernst Haeckel a social Darwinian. With that understanding, Darwin himself also would have to be so called.
But how could one possibly ascribe that term to Hitler, who rejected evolutionary theory? Only in the very loosest sense, when the phrase has no relationship to the theory of Charles Darwin, might it be used for Hitler. In order to sustain the thesis that Hitler was a Darwinian one would have to ignore all the explicit statements of Hitler rejecting any theory like Darwin’s and draw fanciful implications from vague words, errant phrases, and ambiguous sentences,neglecting altogether more straight -forward, contextual interpretations of such utterances. Only the ideologically blinded would still try to sustain the thesis in the face of the contrary, manifest evidence.
Yet, as I suggested at the beginning of this essay, there is an obvious sense in which my own claims must be moot. Even if Hitler could recite the Origin of Species by heart and referred to Darwin as his scientific hero, that would not have the slightest bearing on the validity of Darwinian theory or the moral standing of its author. The only reasonable answer to the question that gives this essay its title is a very loud and unequivocal No!
To be considered a Darwinian at least three propositions would have to be endorsed: that the human races exhibit a hierarchy of more advanced and less advanced peoples; that the transmutation of species has occurred over long stretches of time and that human beings have descended from ape -like ancestors; and that natural selection — as Darwin understood it — is the principle means by which transmutation occurs. Hitler and the Nazi biologists I have considered certainly claimed a hierarchy of races, but that idea far antedated the publication of Darwin’s theory and was hardly unique to it. There is no evidence linking Hitler’s presumption of such a hierarchy and Darwin’s conception. Moreover, Hitler explicitly denied the descent of species, utterly rejecting the idea that Aryan man descended from ape - like predecessors. And most of the Nazi scientists I have cited likewise opposed that aspect of Darwin’s theory. Hitler did speak of the “struggle for existence,” but likely derived that language from his friend and supporter Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an avowed anti-Darwinian. Moreover, by Hitler’s own testimony, his anti-Semitism had political, not scientific or biological roots; there is no evidence that he had any special feeling for these scientific questions. And in any case, remote and abstract scientific conceptions can hardly provide the motivation for extreme political acts and desperate measures.
Among Nazi biologists, at least those publishing in an official organ of the Party, Mendelian genetics and de Vriesian mutation theory were favored, both vying at the beginning of the twentieth century to replace Darwinian theory. Moreover, the perceived mechanistic character of Darwinism stood in opposition to the more vitalistic conceptions of Nazi biologists and that of Hitler — or at least vitalism accords with the
drift of his thought about race. Finally, though his own religious views remain uncertain, Hitler often enough claimed religious justification for racial attitudes, assuming thereby the kind of theism usually pitted against Darwinian theory.
If “Social Darwinian” is a concept with definite meaning, it would have to refer to individuals who apply evolutionary theory to human beings in social settings. There is little difficulty, then, in denominating Herbert Spencer or Ernst Haeckel a social Darwinian. With that understanding, Darwin himself also would have to be so called.
But how could one possibly ascribe that term to Hitler, who rejected evolutionary theory? Only in the very loosest sense, when the phrase has no relationship to the theory of Charles Darwin, might it be used for Hitler. In order to sustain the thesis that Hitler was a Darwinian one would have to ignore all the explicit statements of Hitler rejecting any theory like Darwin’s and draw fanciful implications from vague words, errant phrases, and ambiguous sentences,neglecting altogether more straight -forward, contextual interpretations of such utterances. Only the ideologically blinded would still try to sustain the thesis in the face of the contrary, manifest evidence.
Yet, as I suggested at the beginning of this essay, there is an obvious sense in which my own claims must be moot. Even if Hitler could recite the Origin of Species by heart and referred to Darwin as his scientific hero, that would not have the slightest bearing on the validity of Darwinian theory or the moral standing of its author. The only reasonable answer to the question that gives this essay its title is a very loud and unequivocal No!
So please, for the sake of your integrity as a human, STOP trying to trot out this failed implication that Darwin=Hitler that you do so often when all your other lame arguments fail. Your own links are not going to disappear, your own failure will just keep being documented.
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BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
I'm not "on a kick", I'm stating that Hitler and Stalin were Social DARWINISTS. I'm open if you'd like to disagree.
BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
Are you saying a "clade" is a biblical "kind" or boundary, beyond which evolution will not cross, in the future, that is, you SUPPORT THE BIBLE?