Mark Baard - January 15, 2009

Here’s an interesting take on Darwin’s legacy: Darwin was the Black Man’s best friend, according to the organizers of an upcoming symposium (excerpt and link from the conference website, below).

Darwin’s racial views were complex. (He was an abolitionist who seemed to believe blacks were inferior to whites.) And his theories have been very effective in the hands of eugenicists and racists.

The organizers of the MIT symposium, celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday, blame the impacts of Darwin’s theories on misinterpretations of his work. They also advise President Obama to “follow Darwin’s lead (to unite Man into a single, global, civilization).”

A snippet from the symposium organizers’ web page:

The pseudo-scientific arguments that human “races” are separately evolved continues to rear its head, despite both fossil and genetic evidence establishing that all modern humans had their origin in Africa, before migrating and dispersing through Europe, Asian and the Pacific Islands. Modern genomics reveals clearly that all human groups share a common gene pool. Natural selection certainly continues to operate in human populations, but the invention of language has meant that many of the key features selected for in human populations are transmitted through culture and not through genes. Certainly this is true for the leaps that led to the expansion of humans across the Earth – domestication of plants and animals, irrigation, tool and weapons development, food storage and processing, textiles and clothing, sanitation, long range transportation and communication technologies. But biological determinism still lives, promoting pseudo-scientific claims that the variations that exist in the genomes and physiology of humans, represents profound differences between groups, rather than the normal range of variation found in large populations.

via Darwin and Lincoln ‎(Darwin Bicentennial Project‎).

Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911): 'The feeble nations of the world are necessarily giving way before the nobler varieties of mankind.'

Henry Lamb - December 27, 2008

Eugenics pioneer, Francis Galton, defined eugenics as “the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations.”

Global warming can be defined as: “The study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the environmental quality of future generations.”

The eugenics movement and the global warming movement are similar in many respects. Both ideas were introduced by scientists, advanced by politicians, popularized by the media, embraced as a moral necessity, resulted in severe consequences and eventually rejected as harmful hogwash.

Eugenics, thankfully, has run its course. Global warming, however, is approaching its zenith, just before imposing severe consequences, and is, perhaps, still a generation away from being rejected as the hogwash it is.

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Daniel Steinvorth - 09/23/2008

Fundamentalist Christians in America are not the only ones leading a crusade against Darwin. Creationism and “intelligent design” are becoming increasingly popular among Turkey’s Muslims, too.

The man who wants to save the world goes by the name of Harun Yahya and resembles an actor from the age of silent films. He wears a white silk suit, gold cufflinks and has a finely trimmed beard on his chin. “In 20 years,” he says in serious tone, “humanity will enter a golden age.”

Yahya says that he discovered these joyful tidings in the Bible and the Koran. He maintains that it is a “scientific fact” that Jesus and Mahdi, the Muslim messiah, will return to mankind to solve all global conflicts. Beforehand, however, he says that these two heavenly emissaries will have to tackle another challenge: They must eradicate the heresy of British naturalist Charles Darwin, who postulated that all life arose from a process of natural selection.

Full story