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Breaking story: Holocaust museum murderer influenced by evolution theory?
| June 11, 2009 | Posted by O'Leary under Intelligent Design |
64 Responses to Breaking story: Holocaust museum murderer influenced by evolution theory?
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Onlookers and participants:
Of the three onward comments, the one that is the most helpful is that by Magnan.
And so, to that we primarily turn; with it in mind that physics — my home discipline — is forever scarred by the memory of two burning Japanese cities in 1945; burned by unleashed nuclear fire. A fire that arguably was in part unleashed because leading scientists in the Manhattan Project reported a false consensus claim to the decision-makers, instead of giving the duly weighted balanced counsel of the senior scientists.
And, a lot closer to home, where I sit, the repeated claims of “consensus” among scientists on the state of the Montserrat volcano in the early years of the crisis, helped create a false sense of control of the situation that led to imprudent public policy and foolish individual actions. Officially, nineteen people paid with their lives for that early individual and collective folly; and the official forensic inquiry found the local and metropolitan UK Govts to bear partial responsibility for the deaths of fourteen individuals. (Sadly, it seems the messenger then found himself attacked for the message of unmet responsibility, and an attitude of blaming the victims — not to mention the warners — is still not yet fully rooted out.)
It was only after the wave of deaths in 1997, that a process of expert elicitation that reports on the credibility-weighted range of scientific opinions, was adopted; so that the majority and dissenting views are more or less built in to the official decision-making process. (Resemblance to my views on the need for balance on origins science is NOT coincidental.)
I will not elaborate on my own experience as a publicly dissenting scientist here, commenting from the points where my own discipline gave me insights, or that of other concerned citizens. Just, let us say that the personal element gives bite to my observation that:
In short, there is indeed a delicate balance of responsibility that a serious profession has, including that of self-policing. (Which is not to be confused with institutional censorship, or suppression of responsible dissent.)
And, where such a profession fails to address its social responsibilities for long enough, sufficient damage can be done that those whose duty is to protect the public’s welfare, have a duty of intervention in the interests of the public. (Ignorance of this issue is one reason why I have long felt that a Science in Society ethics course should be a compulsory part of an undergraduate major in science, and a similar seminar should be an element of any graduate level programme. Examples should come from all major disciplines, and of course Hiroshima, the Holocaust and the issues of scientific racism should be prominently featured in those case studies.)
On Mr Kellogg’s remarks, I simply note that the significance of a book — as opposed to a film — should be understood in light of the corpus of Francis Schaeffer’s writings (several of which were based on use of tapes of speeches etc, but which stood in their own strength as a WRITTEN corpus); as may be seen from the five volume “Complete Works” issued even as he battled cancer in the waning days of his life.
Similarly, Mr Frank[y] Schaeffer’s views of his father as linked by DK should be balanced by those of Os Guinness; who is in effect Francis Schaeffer’s main intellectual heir.
When it comes to the remarks by Seversky, lamentably, all he has managed to do is to underscore the depth of the now generations-long professional failure to fully and frankly reckon with and properly address the moral hazard uncovered at the heart of Mr Darwin’s work, writings and scientific-cultural legacy.
Attempts to deflect responsibility and to distract attention from this moral hazard (including blaming the messenger), simply show the weakness of the underlying dismissive argument.
Of such, the best that can be said, is that it reflects the underling issue that Science is now a major cultural institution and profession in our civlisation.
As such it now — and in fact, for generations — has a major professional responsibility on matters of ethics and on those of due intellectual balance and humility in light of the inherent limitations of the scientific methods. Sadly, major leaders and institutions have repeatedly failed in this duty, now over generations, but in our day particularly highlighted by issues surrounding the Darwin 200 celebrations.
Further failure to fully and properly address and correct failings will in the end force the public and their representatives to act in the defense of the safety of the community.
We have been warned.
The question now is: will we heed the lessons of sad history, or will we be instead doomed to repeat its worst chapters?
GEM of TKI
Mr Kairosfocus,
I see that you say you are a scientist. I thought you were a preacher. My apologies.
I don’t usually read your posts due to the low information content (in the Shannon sense). however this caught my eye from upthread:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. [NB: Predicts genocide as the consequence of NS in action among human races - then does not address the exposed moral hazard or suggesxt a remedy; the "remedy" of coruse, was Eugenics, which prevailed up to the post WW 2 era, and which has consequences still]
Three things strike me about this quote and commentary sentence.
1 – you are consistently using the term ‘moral hazard’ in an odd way. The term has an established meaning – the consequences of information asymmetry on risk taking. I have tried to interpret your text were you use this term in the standard way, it doesn’t work. I can on;y assume you are using it in some private way as equivalent to ‘moral danger’. There is no need to put another barrier in way of communicating with your audience, there are enough.
2 – you write that Darwin did not propose a remedy to the problem under discussion, and then state that the remedy was eugenics, all in a section trying to tie Social Darwinism directly to Darwin himself. That is pretty self-throat-cuttingly incoherent.
3 – you write that Darwin predicted genocide as the consequence of NS. That is nowhere in the quoted sentence. He plainly say extermination, which was a process he saw happening around the world by small and individual choices, such white settlers hunting aboriginal peoples for sport, or by economic means. The example of the ethnic cleansing of the eastern North America by the US goverment of its native population was available to him, but I do ot see in this sentence an anticipation of we have come to understand as genocide. Had he done so, he would not have posited that the process would take centuries.
Further, and more importantly, it is not as a result of the publicatioin of his books that this process of extermination is taking place. Even if Darwin himself saw it as selection, the actors in that process, the Boers and Australians and Americans, were not acting under the influence of his ideas. They had other motivations, perhaps social, economic, or religious, or perhaps their own animal appetites.
Of course every person who sees such injustice should fight it, and fight it Darwin did, by writing Descent of Man.
I’ll repeat my earlier comment, because no one has responded directly on it. I would be interested.
“It is certainly arguable that Darwinism is inherently racist, if this means implying that the races are unequal in abilities due to evolution, and that moral issues of equality are secondary and relative. But from a totally objective standpoint this is irrelevant to the scientific debate. But should the science of the debate be muzzled out of concern for the moral/political correctness of it?”
All this didn’t prevent Rusty DePass from being a racist.