A friend writes to muse,
A local campus is gearing up for it’s annual Darwin Day “festivities” complete with an “Adaptation Party” (I have no idea what that is!). I have no
problem with their “Day” (it’s a free country and we should have a free marketplace of ideas).
But the thought occurs to me, why no Newton Day? No Kepler Day? No Pasteur Day? No Fleming Day? After all, the last two have unquestionably saved millions of lives. I will go and browse their poster session sporting my Alfred Russel Wallace tie, about whom half of the “celebrants” will be wholly uninformed and pretty much the other half misinformed.
Friend, it might be wise to find out what the Adaptation Party entails before you decide to go. Seriously, Darwinian evolution is actually a cultural phenomenon at this point, more than science.
Another friend writes,
Remember 2009? “Darwin Year” marked the 200th birthday of The Greatest Scientist Who Ever Lived, and the 150th anniversary of The Greatest Book
Ever Written. The celebrations were so excessive that even Darwinists got tired of them.
Friend offers Happy Darwin Day? and The Party’s Over as evidence.
However, many of Darwin’s followers do party on. There is a political move to declare Darwin Day a national holiday. It’s actually Lincoln Day, but move over, Abe. Evolutionary psychology prof David Barash explains,
CHARLES DARWIN and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day: Feb. 12, 1809. It’s a nice coincidence.
Both were great emancipators. Lincoln, as every schoolchild knows, freed the slaves. Darwin, as every creationist resists, freed our minds.
A nice coincidence indeed, when we consider what Darwin thought of black people (which was well understood at one time and underwrote “scientific racism”). From Descent of Man:
The sense of smell is of the highest importance to the greater number of mammals–to some, as the ruminants, in warning them of danger; to others, as the Carnivora, in finding their prey; to others, again, as the wild boar, for both purposes combined. But the sense of smell is of extremely slight service, if any, even to the dark coloured races of men, in whom it is much more highly developed than in the white and civilised races.
I wonder, when they teach Darwin in school, do they teach that?
Barash again:
The two great liberators pointed to the same phenomenon: reconciliation and unity beneath conflict and diversity. Thus, the underlying logic that defeated slavery is not that a country cannot survive half-slave and half-free but that human beings are not divided into distinct “species” — namely the slaveholders and the enslaved. It is a fundamental truth, part of our biology no less than of our politics.
Oh, that’s interesting, because the real Darwin (not the pop Darwin evo psych prof Barash enthuses over) said this:
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. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
It was an inevitable consequence of Darwin’s theory that humanity would speciate over time, when isolation recurred. And he definitely believed that whites are superior.
But of course what the real Darwin thought doesn’t matter. The atheist progressives who lobby for Darwin Day don’t care for facts and evidence, only for narrative and spin. So when they have power, the fake pop Darwin will be celebrated, perhaps officially, and forced on school systems.
Long after his theory is buried by better science. And long after evolutionary psychology is no longer ridiculed because it is just forgotten—except at universities where our future baristas will learn their pop Darwin.
Note: “Quote mining” just means telling people what Darwin actually thought and said, instead of what his followers want us all to believe.
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