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The Darwinism that the Darwin lobby would sue to PREVENT children from learning in tax-funded schools

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Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New Atlantis Books) In “People Matter: Robert Zubrin’s powerful critique of antihumanism” (City Journal, 22 June 2012, 22 June 2012), Bruce S. Thornton reviews Robert Zubrin’s Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, revealing the Darwinism that Darwin’s lobby does notwant taught to schoolchildren:

Charles Darwin embraced Malthus’s apocalyptic theories, too. Overpopulation, he believed, would eventually be cured by natural selection, the “weeding out of ‘unfit’ individuals and races.” As Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man: “At some future period . . . the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” Like Malthus, Darwin had no patience with sentimental Christian or Enlightenment ethics that sought to alleviate suffering and improve human life with medical advances such as vaccinations, or with asylums and other social-welfare institutions that cared for the sick, insane, or poor. Because of this effort “to check the process of elimination,” Darwin maintained, “the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” As Zubrin summarizes Darwin’s argument: “Peace, plenty, care, and compassion were interferences in the course of nature. All progress was based on death.”

The mixture of Malthusian and Darwinian theory soon conjured up racist eugenics.

Too bad someone doesn’t go to court to force the whole story of Darwinism to be taught, if any of it is.

Or should we just let it collapse on its own?

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Comments
Why does Bruce S. Thornton remove Darwin's words from context, which show that Darwin approved of sentimental Christian or Enlightenment ethics, calling them "the noblest part of our nature"? Here are Darwin's words in fuller context:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. 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 anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.
CheersCLAVDIVS
June 28, 2012
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