Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Good stuff. The unfortunate flip side, of course, are the school board capturing fundies, who also have a litmus test, and who are as equally devoted to enforcing conformity.

Seems that getting people to accept a narrow definition for the term person - as loaded a word as any, in nearly every tongue - is important to those with a project of shaping political opinions, or sometin'.

I applaud fundies capturing school boards. The more discredited the schools are, the better. I want people questioning what they're taught, not believing it.

"Evolution as taught in the high schools of this broad land is a deeply vulgar doctrine -- so vulgar it makes vulgar Marxism look relatively refined. It leaves people with a few catch phrases -- like 'survival of the fittest', with its muffled implicit justification for meritocracy and its theodicy of 'competition' -- and a vague belief that Nature labors under a need to optimize; that mammals represent an improvement on molluscs, and so on"

Exactly. It is the corruption of science in the pursuit of ideological goals.

Liberals like to think only other people pull that shit.

Gawad Mr. Smith, this one was awesome. All varying theories on evolution have become media-ized into this Dawkinsian nightmare of capitalist biology, with all the associated hypocritical forgetfulness about market creation. At least the Christian fundies are honest about calling their holy war against the Science fundies a "holy war."

A thousand years from now, the headline reads: Scientific fundamentalists are leading the charge to ban the teaching of Gaiaism from Gates, Inc. schoolrooms, alleging that Gaia is only a "theory," and that it be taught alongside other theories such as "selfishism." Many science-based parents have withdrawn their children from the Gates system entirely, preferring to educate their children at home about the wonders of "cause and effect" and "linear time-based decision-making."

Mr. Smith,

I don't think it's so simple a formula as "fundies capture school boards = people start questioning what they're taught." Lots of cultural backwash goes into the capture, and it ends up becoming as punitive an environment for the dissenters as with the currently "secular" Taylorized school mileu.

Both my kids have been formally disciplined for refusing to say the pledge, sing "God Bless America" or join in with the National Anthem - and this is in very non-religious, anti-clerical NH - because the school boards are routinely used as starting grounds for thumpers and political fundies.

JC -- Your kids are off to a good start. But I think you're wrong to particularize it to thumpers and fundies. What the schools are about is compliance and conformity to whatever the elites in charge think people should do and believe. Whenever the schools can promote themselves as agents of enlightenment it just obscures this fundamental fact. If they're frankly obscurantist then it seems to me that their real role has been flushed out of covert.

It's not just evolution. Distilling any difficult, non-intuitive subject into something teachable to bored, perhaps-not-too-bright 15 year-olds is extremely difficult. "Explain the French Revolution in a 45-minute lecture, use medium-size words, and keep it interesting." Shit, I have no idea, and I don't think socialism is going to make it any easier.

We aren't really in any sort of disagreement about control of the schools being better, when undertaken by progressives as opposed to theocons, Mr. Smith. I'm just wary of the idea that capture by thumpers is a comparative net good, because the environment usually precludes the questioning it could provoke if that environment was what it sadly is not.

My eldest's high school works with the cops to do routine hallway and locker sweeps with police drug dogs. Two of the kids who organized off school, web based resistance were suspended and punished further. Despite tomes of evidence to the contrary, and basic human happiness, nothing can break the anti-drug regime in which most schools are captured.

Giving fundies control of that regime won't lead to questioning or growing illegitimacy. At best, it means more kids with preventable diseases and stupid notions about the ROTC, because the theocons can be counted on to give greater access to the recruiters while cutting the already minimal sex-ed that covers condom and prophylactic use.

A year and a half ago, we had to fight the School Board and the Superintendent to prevent them from giving home addresses away to the Army and Marines, and all we got out of it was a tricksy form which, if not read very carefully, and filled out accordingly, gave away that permission in the broadest strokes, and in some cases acted as a proxy pre-authorization for recruitment.

I'm not counting on the growing army of thumper-crats to reverse that tide, because they're not stupid. They understand the power of conformity. Unlike liberals, who believe in it, but convince themselves that they're urbane students of diversity, the conservatives know how to organize to hurt the opposition and quell dissent.

Anyway, that's niggling. I accept the validity of evolutionary theory, but I wholeheartedly agree that it's a doxology for self-enlightened progressives who see in new-old cosmologies a threat to their composition of personhood, their control of schools in shaping that conformity, and the politics which follow.

JC -- The whole idea of 'net good' seems bogus to me in contexts like this, since it falsely presupposes that there's a way of reducing the actual polyvalencies to some scalar metric of goodness.

Everything you say about the schools is true, and it will certainly get worse before it gets better; this is for all practical purposes a matter of complete bipartisan consensus between the thumpers and the meritocrats.

And I would have said the meritocrats are pretty good at hurting the opposition and quelling dissent too. They just do it with a look of deep concern on their face, rather than an open flush of sadistic arousal like the thumpers.

It also seems to miss the point of religion to believe science is the weapon to defeat it; people stubbornly cling to religion in spite of, what ought to have been fatal, attempts at refutation, logical or scientific (as have been attempted for centuries). Just what religion is isn't well-defined (a major problem actually), but among other things, in its present manifestations, it seems to serve to fulfill peculiar psychological and social needs, and that identifying and finding alternatives to these needs--such as a politconomy that enables people to feel their lives are worthwhile--is the only effective way what we now call religion may be transcended. However that may be, a caricature of Origins of Species from the forensics podium is self-satisfying, at best.

In a related note, a FB comrade of NYU distinction posted the other day,

Evolutionary psychology may explain the evolutionary basis of religion and neuroscience the neuro-chemical residence of belief. Neither of them can make negative ontological claims on that basis, however. The existence of a "God spot" does not preclude the possibility of an objective correlate--'God'. The only scientific position is agnosticism.

So, much like the selfish gene, our mind/brain has a god spot. Apparently sandwiched somewhere between wonder and hope... From this point it's just a mater of lobotomy.

Exactly backwards. It's indoctrinated academy liberals like MJS who attack evolution, precisely because of their ideological fear of boogeymen like "'survival of the fittest', with its muffled implicit justification for meritocracy and its theodicy of 'competition'". The science is beside the point.

Let's just be clear what this poll really means to furrowed brow liberals:

"Our kids will fall behind kids in other countries in science and math....HOW WILL THEY COMPETE AND WIN IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY???"

"Evolution as taught in the high schools ... bears no resemblance whatsoever to the actual science of evolutionary biology."

I think it does.

Where the former can be equated to evangelical christianity, the latter can be equated to high church.

Although one is vulgar and the other refined, ultimately both are examples of secular religion, which is a subset of theistic religion.

Whether theistic or secular, it seems to me that religion's primary task is to ensure a comparatively homogenous social mindset that's more easily controlled by socially dominant groups.

I like this essay so much that I'm going to put it on a t-shirt! I have friends who have a fundamental aversion to fundamentalists; friends who are, on the other hand, always claiming that whatever calamity comes their way is there to "teach them". Teach them what? Sent by whom? Knoweth they not that Shit Happens?

I also never tire of pointing out to even my relatively well-educated friends that there is no empirical evidence, *whatsoever*, to support the hypothesis that our "universal laws" of science are anything of the sort; we use local standards to evaluate astronomical data from distant sources to "confirm" local standards. We use light waves/ x-rays traveling from millions of light-years away (we think) to come to conclusions that are invalidated if there are even slight variations in the "constants" according to time/location. The original framers of the notion of "universality" could only have been believers in a homocentric, Christianly-symmetrical universe to come to such a risky conclusion. To admit that the "universal laws" of science may not, in fact, apply everywhere, for all time, amen, would be to admit that We are not particularly important to, or noteworthy in, the "universe". Heresy!

When Sir Isaac Newton claimed that an object in motion, unless otherwise acted upon, will remain in motion... forever... he was clearly relying on Faith.

To quote Ike:

"When I wrote my treatise about our Systeme I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the beliefe of a Deity and nothing can rejoyce me more then to find it usefull for that purpose."

Fadduh Smiff sez:
Evolution (and 'science' generally; not to mention 'progress') are liberal fetishes, really, and have nothing to do with the revolutionary disposition. In fact I would argue that caring deeply about whether or not people believe in these idols of the caste is more reactionary than otherwise; it insists upon a fideistic acquiescence to expert opinion. Very middle-class, really...

I must respectfully disagree on this. The fact that that many people believe in ideas that are easily proven wrong is a sorry indication of just how goddamn' rock-stupid people in this country are. Science is what gave us many of the technological advances we enjoy today -- like the computer I'm typing this message on -- as well as a much more improved and rational understanding of our planet and the Universe. Science is not a "liberal fetish".

If that many Americans are so goddamn' retarded that they don't believe in scientifically-proven ideas like evolution or the age of the Earth, how the hell are we going to educate them about capitalist exploitation of workers and resources, and the complicity of their "leaders" in this exploitation?

This shit is seriously bad news. Any hopes NASA or others have for exploration and the expansion of humanity off the Earth are pretty much down the toilet as they haven't a snowball's chance in Hell of finding enough competent engineers and scientists to do the job -- because of all the morons who can't even grok evolution and who believe the Earth is ten thousand years old.

Fadduh Smiff sez:
...I'm always amused, in talking with people for whom belief in evolution is a big totem...

It's no "totem". It's a fact; "belief" has nothing to do with it. You can "believe" in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy or God, and it doesn't make it a fact.

This shit's bad news because it points out how much American society has come to be all about "belief" and not about knowledge. It makes me want to lose my lunch when I listen to education poobahs whining about how stupid our kids are and acting as if they can't figure out why -- f'cripesake, it's all those goddamn' school boards mandating that kids be taught that, basically, the Tooth Fairy is real.

It's kind of ironic to think that the collapse of America I've long dreamed of might come about not because of a social revolution, but because successive generations emerge which are more and more stupid, until they reach the point where Americans are too goddamn' stupid to deal with anything important:

"What? Y'mean, there's no such thing as phlogiston? Or evil humours? Oh, shit...!"

I agree with the liberal fetish assessment. Especially insofar as the inadequate understanding of evolution has led to a sort of false dichotomy/"either you're with us or against us"/lesser of two evils kind of mentality.

Much of the out of hand rejection of the holy texts reminds me of how we as nations whistle (fiddle) through the graveyard of empires' (burning) histories. The 10,000 years should be a reference to the lesson we should learn from history: We're aren't the best and brightest by a long shot and we'll wipe ourselves off the face of the earth yet again. And it's not just because of the Fundies that we do it (I refuse to buy the argument that war is because of religion, in other words).

If it's so important to believe in evolution, why isn't it equally important to believe in the Fourier Slice Theorem? The one is as much a fact as the other -- indeed, the theorem is provable, whereas evolution, like any empirical theory, is not -- and unlike evolution, it has consequences in your daily life. If you didn't believe in the FST you might be dubious about your last CAT scan. But nobody runs around berating people's ignorance about it.

Belief in evolution is absolutely not required for modern aeronautics engineers, electrical engineers, and other practitioners of the "hard" sciences in such fields. I work with a lot of electrical engineers and you'd be amazed how many of them are completely comfortable using modern scientific methods to research and develop ever smaller circuits and faster computers while believing simultaneously that the earth is seven thousand years old.

I knew a guy once who was a flight engineer for the space shuttle program and he was as hard right, anti-evolution as they come. But he was a whiz at calculus, vector math and spatial geometry. None of these fields of endeavor require any belief in evolution whatsoever and I've noticed that many folks who go into those fields are quite conservative and often very fundamentalist in their outlook.

Don't get me wrong, I consider evolution a proven theory but as I have pointed out it is quite complex and easily distorted by those who wish to use the science as a cudgel for their ideological agendas. Because the theory of evolution challenges traditional religious explanations of the creation story it is useful in a way that other hard sciences are not to be abused and misused in such a manner.

the expansion of humanity off the Earth

That there is what the universe is craving. The stewards of Earth franchising across the galaxies.

i'm flatered father
you chose a progression
an ascent to homo classicus
that includes me on the far left
the midget nellie stage
of the homo evolve-ment
too often i'm over looked as an embarassment

and imagine it all happened from me to that
jimmy dean lookin guy in less then 65 years !!!

the singer of"big bad john"
is now the mirror of gay fashion i take it

Liberals' reductionist science posturing looks like a subset of their Enlightenment Values™ fetishism. It's a plagiarism of the conservatives' "last respectable prejudice" fetish.

Very good piece, and I say that as someone as otherwise has no problem with science or evolutionary theory.

And while we're sort of on the subject, it's interesting to note that there were Christian fundamentalists in the early 20th century who were actually quite progressive on economic and labor issues, but that began to change with the advent of Cold War politics.

ah, phlogiston [can we call it 'ether']--

Abstract
In 1905 A. Einstein banished the ether from physics in connection with the
formulation of his Special Relativity. This fact is very well known but it is almost
unknown that in in 1916 he reintroduced the ether in connection with his General
Relativity. He denominated it ,,new ether” because, in oppposition to the old
one, the new one did not violate his Principle of Relativity. The purpose of this
paper is to present a short outline of the history of Einstein’s new concept and to
show which elements of the mathematical formalism of General Relativity were
considered by Einstein as mathematical tools describing the relativistic ether.

http://www.mathem.pub.ro/proc/bsgp-10/0KOSTRO.PDF [PDF]

he had also worked with Bose on field theory, which may be related.

"The fact that that many people believe in ideas that are easily proven wrong is a sorry indication of just how goddamn' rock-stupid people in this country are. Science is what gave us many of the technological advances we enjoy today -- like the computer I'm typing this message on -- as well as a much more improved and rational understanding of our planet and the Universe. Science is not a "liberal fetish"."

I have two problems with this attitude. First of all, no advanced knowledge of geology and Earth's age is required to knock down American Christianity.

I have yet to meet a Christian who could provide anything like a good answer to questions like "If God loves us and is omnipotent, then how come bad things happen to good people?" or "If the birth of Christ was the most important thing that ever happened in history, how come God took 1500 years to get around to mentioning it to the Americans?"

Questions like that require no scientific knowledge whatsoever, and frankly, they don't even require a particularly careful mind.

On the other hand, suppose you were to stop me on the street, press a gun to my head, and say, "Prove Einstein's theory of special relativity to me right now, or you die!" I'd end up with my brains splattered all over the sidewalk.

I reckon that special relativity probably explains a lot about the universe, but honestly, the entire basis of my belief in that fact is that I've heard a lot of people assert it and those folks sure seem to know what they're talking about.

I can't even really tell you what special relativity is. Something with fire? When clocks are passing through fire?

But I doubt I'll ever get shit about believing in it, no matter how poor my reasons may be.

I'm not a philosopher, so I don't know what the solution is. Certainly, the repeatability of the scientific method makes the things scientists come up with seem more plausible then things based on unrepeatable personal revelation, but still, they could be making this Einstein guy up and it's not like I'd ever find out.

You all win.

Incidentally, several of the Enlightenment Values™ crowd's scientist heroes were a bit batty, e.g. Richard Feynman who went on TV to advise folks to stop brushing their teeth and TED talks talker James Watson who I suppose also gets a pass for proudly proclaiming himself a "Democrat and atheist". His nasty racism does not subtract much from his rational greatness (check out lovely comments where the topic of discussion is "niggers" and moral courage of the Nobel laureate who "just said what everyone thinks but few say.").

Heck, even someone who would have gladly built an A-bomb for Hitler--and was only foiled by his own hubris and maladministration--is treated with kid gloves and his quandary is classified as a "universal dilemma" by his understanding stateside peers in New Mexico who while away their working lives by running simulations that will allow further miniaturization of multiple independently targetable warheads.

Oh dear lord, Christopher; you haven't talked to enough of them:

(1) Good things happen to bad people because God is a clockmaker. He makes a clock and it ticks away. Sometimes people are imperfect, but this is because they have free will to choose whether or not to behave in a certain way or not. The long-term affects of free will sometimes cause bad things to happen, but without a free world for humans to play in, they do not have the opportunity to come to know God and beauty on their own, and be elevated thereby to Heaven.

(2) Same answer, but also, devils and idolaters gained strength in some parts of the world, and were allowed to tempt people to determine if they would choose sin and Hell or good and Heaven. Or, if you roll Mormon, Jesus did come to the Americas, but His message was heard by very few, due to the work of said idolaters/devils. Thanks to the glory of God, though, His followers eventually spread to American shores to bring the message to all, allowing the good and faithful to meet Jesus and be saved.

By virtue of, say, the evil demon thought experiment, the Christian God could well exist, and all that stuff could be true. You can't disprove it scientifically, because any direct biblical inaccuracy can be written off as metaphor. The best thing to say about God is to morally refute Him: i.e., if your God really does think fags should be beaten to death, then your God is evil, and fuck Him.

Granted, Christians don't like hearing that, but as someone who's actually said that to some of their faces in a haven or two, it's possible to do so and survive. They're smart enough to outlast all of your archaeologically-based arguments, but if you stick with the morals, you have an inherently sound position.

sk, thank you sooooo much. That last paragraph alone was like stepping onto the terrace for a cool breeze after being stuffed in a room filled with people smoking cigars made from rolled-up David Brin Ego. Mind if I quote you?

Exactly backwards. It's indoctrinated academy liberals like MJS who attack evolution, precisely because of their ideological fear of boogeymen like "'survival of the fittest', with its muffled implicit justification for meritocracy and its theodicy of 'competition'". The science is beside the point.

This is amusing. MJS didn't attack evolution. Just the opposite. I assume our anonymous commenter has had no exposure to evolutionary theory, with its 'quandaries, paradoxes, and perplexities in proportion to the immense value of its fundamental insights.' For what it's worth, and I concede the hopelessness of convincing our sneering friend, evolutionary theory doesn't supply a justification for meritocracy. Meritocratic notions themselves can be refuted by one day of work in any organization with a pyramid hierarchy. If that's too much, read a Matt Yglesias column. Then chant "survival of the fittest" three times.

Go right ahead, High Arka. Here is a relatively humble scientist who does not keep his mouth shut or head in Olympian clouds and not coincidentally also does not pour scorn on religion unlike his esteemed Nobel winning buddy who has nothing but Dawkinesque contempt for the "primitive" people who find solace in the institution even as they are herded into the camps of a "heartless world...and...soulless conditions".

natural selection
was a great notion indeed
despite its vulgarizations
like fitest outcomes
red in tooth and claw
selfish
and many other overlays

i'm sure all of you know marx got a hoot out of
Darwins own bourgeois realization
of the great truth he birthed

then there's
random variation ..not so great that

---too brutishly anti theistical
for my dialectically intoxicated
blend of self deluding sapience---

the paradigm
of
a self organizing system
got quite a work out
these last 240 years or so...eh ?

What a nice chorus of echoes of smugness.

Oh, hell, here we have yet another privileged Obamaphile ready to tell us we're objectively pro-wingnut. Let me guess: there's a poll at Daily Kos that will "prove" you're right.

LoL. Exactly, Al.

And I can't believe I overlooked the "Anonymous" Ranroid who like other Social Darwinists, misinterprets and distorts Darwin's theories.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism
http://books.google.com/books?id=twjVSv2_upAC&pg=PA215&lpg=PA215&dq=%22a+rather+good+squib%22&source=bl&ots=6kkcSM0WVP&sig=NFAp8QP1fRdQ7BnrT6ilEkIPAjw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=VPrLT8SjO8bE2gXy7KXbCw&ved=0CD4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22a%20rather%20good%20squib%22&f=false

Randroid, sorry.

"here we have yet another privileged Obamaphile ready to tell us we're objectively pro-wingnut."

Al, you know if Obama isn't elected were all doomed. Doomed I tell ye! Captain Ahab type doomed!!!!!

Yep.

JTG, I'd be willing to bet the Randroid is also a lesser-eviling liberal. They love the vicious sociobiology as much as any American Enterprise Institute crackpot. But they prefer it with a "muffled implicit justification". I gather that's somehow more tasteful than the raw bigotry of the wingers.

Drunk Pundit, I want to help our hysterical liberal friends, but hysterics suit them. They were kind of cute when they were threatening to move to Canada. Electoral satisfaction makes their asses look fat.

"Drunk Pundit, I want to help our hysterical liberal friends"

Al, I've said it before and I'll say it again, you're a better man than me.

But nobody runs around berating people's ignorance about it.

That's because religious fundamentalists haven't spent over a century attacking the Fourier Slice Theorem and trying to get it driven out of the schools. You act as if the whole conflict over evolution is a one-way street started by your favorite bugaboo, "liberals."

Many people have an excessive faith in scientific concepts they know little about, not just liberals. But scienctific reality manifests itself continuously in our everyday lives while I have yet to see an iota of evidence validating any religion in human history. Planes fly, morphine kills pain, Windoze sucks and Krazy Glue binds instantly, but God in his myriad incarnations remains a mere assertion. Why is it wrong to point this out?

Most religious claims are bullshit. Why can't we say that? Do you have to be an expert on evolution to know that the world is more than 6,000 years old?

If there is a fetish in our society, it is the demonization of "secularism" and the "Enlightenment" that has become all the rage as much among liberals as it is among fundies. Everything that is not religious is by definition secular, but clever religious apologists have elevated non-religion to the status of a religion which they call secularism. Since "secular" is such a broad category, it has become a convenient wastebasket for religionists to dump all the world's problems in.

What do the local PTA, Britney Spears and Adolf Hitler all have in common? They all subscribe to an idoeology that has killed more people in human history than all religious wars combined. Voltaire and Rousseau are as much the cause of the Holocaust as Hitler is.

If there is anything the fundies and liberals have in common, it's the belief that secular Western civilization and "Enlightenment values" are the wellspring of all human evil. Where Christians see Satan operating the mechanisms of the Enlightenment, the liberal sees the White Male—the liberal equivalent of Christianity's god of evil—creating in the Enlightenment the ideological justification of racism, slavery, sexism. homophobia and capitalism.

Nietzsche didn't just kill God, he taught you to hate women and minorities.

"Most religious claims are bullshit. Why can't we say that?"

Feel free!

That's a helluva nice, well written post Sean. I couldn't have said it better myself, although for the purposes of this thread that's not what I was trying to say. But still...

The social genius of liberalism lies in a feckless effort to counter bullshit, self-serving claims of conservatism. Liberals oppose bullshit claims couched in religious terms with bullshit claims couched in rotting hunks of vulgarized science jargon. They call this reason, Both religion and science are incidental to the dog and pony show. The essence is bullshit; disciplinary bullshit.

Reading that, a liberal will claim I 'hate science' and read MJS's post as an attack on evolutionary theory. Neither is true.

After a while, it becomes obvious that the liberal vs. conservative contests are so much squabbling over which means shall to be used to reach the same end, with liberals playing the role of hapless, apple-polishing schnook and conservatives playing the role of gaseous, bullying loon. They keep their respective flocks in line with this. Under pressure, they unite to respond violently to dissent.

The liberal as standard bearer for science is as much a joke as the conservative as standard bearer for religion.

The Drunken Pundit sez on 06.02.12 @12:40:
Don't get me wrong, I consider evolution a proven theory but as I have pointed out it is quite complex and easily distorted by those who wish to use the science as a cudgel for their ideological agendas...

Oh, y'mean, like the notorious "social Darwinist" Randroids and the like? No shit, Drunken One. I want to knee that lot in the groin so bad it's not funny.

Al Schumann sez on 06.03.12 @16:01:

Oh, hell, here we have yet another privileged Obamaphile ready to tell us we're objectively pro-wingnut. Let me guess: there's a poll at Daily Kos that will "prove" you're right.

Hey, waitaminnit -- wasn't "Piltdown Man" revealed to be a fraud?

YOU HAVE ENTERED 11TH DIMENSION COMMENT BLOG-INTRIGUE:

"nowhere near as big a fraud as holding a charade of multiple commenters but all authored by the same person, or an actual gathering of different people who all post the same idea with only bare formal changes in content and no differences in writing style.

Interesting how "Al Schumann" and "JTG" leapt to assume "Piltdown Man" was an Obamabot, a Wingnut, a Gooper or a "Randroid".

If I could do all these voices I would be Shakespeare, and I would be writing for the theater and shtupping ingenues, instead of sitting in my alter-kaker rocking chair writing blog posts -- and not very often, at that.

Caves, do you really believe you're worth the effort of multiple sock puppets?

Oh, caves is worth any amount of effort. Comments like his (hers?) are what I live for.

I recall a previous episode in which Caves proved I was Owen's sock puppet. But if I'm your sock now, does that mean you're Owen's sock? I have no objections to the sock layering, needless to say.

Nice how everybody pretends not to know who Caves/Piltdown is. He probably buys into the pretense of his stealthiness. Calling him a Ramaphile was a nice touch.
exeunts to applause from the gallery after which there a rumble in the distance

I genuinely don't know who Caves/Piltdown is. Could you tell me?

We're all Smith here, StO.

I am not Smith! I am Hog Dentwood, spiter of "yahoos"

Caves:
That's right, I'm not Vidal. I thought he was dead.

I don't have a web of identities. Just the one.

Notice I pretended to be pre occupied
Taunting the crowfootnik while all this happened

Hee hee hee hah hah hah ho ho ho

"Social Darwinism", "scientific racism" etc are just the kinds of boogeymen liberals conjure up; funny to see it being simultaneously demonstrated and denied by the hosts here.

That's why they revile people like Richard Dawkins even as they pay lip service to an ideologically-dictated version of evolution that allows of only altruistic traits for Homo sapiens.

Anonymous,

Some phenomena have a meaningful impact, for good or ill, even if liberals claim the phenomena exist. The source doesn't always indict the observation.

The existence of an attribute, the acknowledgment of the attribute's existence and the observation of the attribute in action doesn't preclude the existence of attributes that work to counter it.

Yeah, "scientific racism" is just something poofter crybabies dream up so they can run and tell to the campus diversity officer. Real men -- edgy contrarians who defy the bland consensus of our pantywaist age -- believe that blacks are genetically pre-programmed to slurp down buckets of Colonel Sanders, and whites are biologically constituted to be accountants and listen to Yanni.

One explanation of Darwinism is that it imports .. 18th c. Malthusian economic theory into the field of Biology. It's really sorta fantastic inna McLuhan/Foucault kinda way ..

Pablo
That observation is literally true of course

Both Darwin and Wallace were inspired by that eminent plagiarist

Indeed the whole paradigm of self organizing systems comes
from 18 th century Econ con...eh?

Malthus stealing from parson demographers
In his projected snuffing of Godwin had it's ironic repercussions

Clio mon amour
never at rest are you