Evolution leads to totalitarianism

[McCulloch]

Also, in denying humanity's original descent from Adam and Eve, and our modern descent from one of Noah's three sons, neo-Darwinist theories of human evolution out of non-human beings in Africa inevitably become totalitarian, religious and racist.

Does evolutionary science inevitably lead to totalitarianism, religion and racism? How?

[micatala]

No,

No,

and No.

In all three cases, applying these words to a scientific theory is a nonsequitur, in my book.

If anyone wanted to attempt such a truly incredible stretch of logic, and say that the scientific theory of evolution somehow inevitably leads to any of these three results, I am certainly willing to watch and heckle from the sidelines at their attempts. My own view is that any such attempts are doomed to futility.

[1John2_26]

The end goal of evolution? No Jesus as Savior. Sounds like some very evil communist countries I've read about. The sickness of the evolutionary anti-Christ, infecting one very large body of people that declare they are Christians. The new future with no dissent no prisoners. I can't wait for my place in either a mental asylum or concentration camp. I will not follow anti-Christs. There is a Creator and He did not make slime-people. It is clear that totalitarianism follows Darwin's little nightmare. Ask Nietzsche. His room at the asylum is open for guess who?

A Bishop Speaks
John Shelby Spong

The Right Man for a New World
The new Archbishop of Canterbury must get rid of the Jesus who "died for our sins."

In late February the Church of England, the mother church of Anglicanism, will install a new leader. He is an interesting man and, in my opinion, the best of all possible choices to head the third largest group of Christians in the world. His name is Rowan Williams.

The Jesus who "died for our sins" has simply got to go in our post-Darwinian world. Christianity must move beyond a rescuing Jesus, who overcame a fall that never happened, even metaphorically, to restore human life to a status it has never had, even mythologically. Williams' task is nothing less than to articulate a new Christianity for a new world.

[micatala]

The end goal of evolution? No Jesus as Savior.

?? Evolution has no 'end goal.' As a biological theory, evolution is simply an explanation for the history and diversity of life as we know it, based on the evidence we have from the fossil record, geology, biogeography, molecular biology, genetics, etc.

Yes, some people might make their own fanciful 'extrapolations' and use evolutionariy language in the attempt, but the theory itself says NOTHING about God and certainly nothing about denying Jesus as savior.

The new future with no dissent no prisoners. I can't wait for my place in either a mental asylum or concentration camp.

I don't follow at all the link between evolutionary science and putting people in prison or trying to quash dissent.

I know I was a bit flip in my first post in this thread. I think M is asking an honest question. FOr many of us, including many of us Christians, we just don't see the logic of a lot of the links that many creationists make between evolution and 'anti-Christ.' I think the idea of this thread is to examine these links in detail. Obviously those like myself who am a sincere Christian but accept the fact of evolution are going to look for what we see as the weak links in the logic.

One other upfront comment I would make is that I would ask we distinguish between the logical implications of the theory, and statements that many people might make using the theory as justification. After all, these people could be (and often are) making erroneous logical leaps and we should discuss these problems as well.

One example is racism. It is true that both Christians and non-CHristians have been and some still are, racists. In the past, both evolutionary language and the Bible have been used to support or justify racism. We should not accept these justifications at face value, since, at least in my view, both white southerners who used the Bible and eugenics pioneers who used evolution, were misusing their sources to justify pre-existing attitudes that they would have held without the justification offered, and did not reach these views by logically deducing them from the given source.

[juliod]

It is clear that totalitarianism follows Darwin's little nightmare.

Since it's "clear", could you explain it more fully?

BTW, since you go into paroxysms of anti-communism, you should know that communist Russia rejected Darwinism in favour of Lamarkism, from which their biological sciences have not yet recovered.

Also, the main proponents of "social Darwinism" were the capitalists, who could not avoid seeing the parallels. Business competition was seen as a form of natural competition whereby the company most fit to survive in the market expands at the cost of the less fit.

DanZ

[MagusYanam]

The end goal of evolution? No Jesus as Savior. Sounds like some very evil communist countries I've read about. The sickness of the evolutionary anti-Christ, infecting one very large body of people that declare they are Christians. The new future with no dissent no prisoners. I can't wait for my place in either a mental asylum or concentration camp. I will not follow anti-Christs. There is a Creator and He did not make slime-people. It is clear that totalitarianism follows Darwin's little nightmare. Ask Nietzsche. His room at the asylum is open for guess who?

And yet... my mother is an evolutionist (a real one; a lab manager for Brown University's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department) who accepts Christ as Saviour and is most definitely not a communist or a totalitarian. So much for that argument.

Actually, reading this ill-informed tirade, it is clear that you have no understanding whatsoever of the scientific theory of evolution - evolution (as every biology-educated person knows) does not argue for 'slime-people' or against a Creator, it argues for gradual trends in the general population of a species that tend over long periods to accommodate adaptation to a biological niche and - as science - deals only with the material world and makes no claims regarding the divine or the spiritual. Also, Nietzsche was a political philosopher, not an evolution biologist. I fail to see what relevance Nietzsche or his political philosophies have to the scientific principle of biological evolution.

[steen]

The end goal of evolution? No Jesus as Savior.

That is a serious misrepresentation of the Scientific Theory of Evolution. If you want to argue against the science, at least do so on honest claims, not made up stuff like this.

Sounds like some very evil communist countries I've read about.

And has nothing to do with reality either.

The sickness of the evolutionary anti-Christ, infecting one very large body of people that declare they are Christians.

you know, this is pure hate mongering. Please cease your false claims about those who accept the science.

The new future with no dissent no prisoners. I can't wait for my place in either a mental asylum or concentration camp. I will not follow anti-Christs. There is a Creator and He did not make slime-people. It is clear that totalitarianism follows Darwin's little nightmare. Ask Nietzsche. His room at the asylum is open for guess who?

Sorry, but to me this seems like nothing but an emotional rant.

[plunge]

Interestingly enough, the idea that there were different races with their own distinct characters and superiorities had existed throughout all of human history until very recently. In Darwin's time, the two major scientific theories about mankind and race were:

1) God had created good (white) humans as Adam and Eve in the garden, and later created inferior (black, others) races separately elsewhere (these being who Cain and some of the other children of Adam and Eve had mated with). These inferior races had a chance for goodness when one was spared to go with Noah, but blew it and continued to be base.

2) God cerated humans just once, and he inferior (non-white) races around today represent simply degraded forms of the original good (i.e. white) race (every race, perhaps, degraded, but the whites had degraded least)

That was pretty much it! Even abolitionists and civil rights leaders (including African Americans like W.E.B.D.) at the time believed the races to be distinct, each having their own distinct characters: this was known as racialism (distinct from racism in that it wasn't necessarily a view that held one race as better than others)

Darwin himself was no different as a racialist, though he was anti-slavery and generally among the more progressive views of his time (that while the races might have different characters, equal rights and dignity were deserved by all). His theory, however, was probably the thing that ultimately destroyed the whole concept of "race" as a meaningful gauge of someone's worth. That's because it for the first time pointed us towards ways of gauging both large-scale ancestry and change in human beings, and blew apart the accounts of race abd descent that had prevailed. Genetics would then deliver the deathblow to racialism and racism both by showing that there was more genetic variation between any two people (of any race) than amongst any two races. For the first time in human history, the idea of racial difference bit the big one. I'd say that's a pretty significant blow AGAINST totalitarianism.

Darwin was, of course, part of the tail end of the free-inquiry liberal-enlightenment tradition of scientific inquiry: the same movement that brought us capitalism and democracy as values. Not exactly a star of totalitarianism there, either.

[snappyanswer]

Darwinism to totalitarianism. Very Nietzsche. Very ubermensch.

Let's see where it came from or where it leads:

http://www.all.org/abac/eugen02.htm

Eugenics

Introduction to Eugenics
The principal manifestations of eugenics are racism and abortion; eugenics is the basis for "scientific racism" and laid the foundation for legalizing abortion. It is the driving force behind euthanasia, in vitro fertilization, and embryo and fetal research. It is the driving force in global population policy, which is a key element in American foreign policy. It is the force driving much of the environmentalist movement, welfare policy, welfare reform, and health care. It is found in anthropology, sociology, psychologyall the social sciences. It is reflected in much American literature, especially science fiction. So it is worth some study.

DEFINITION
Eugenics is the study of methods to improve the human race by controlling reproduction. The word was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton believed that the proper evolution of the human race was thwarted by philanthropic outreach to the poor: misguided charity encouraged the "unfit" to bear more children. This upset the mechanism of natural selection. Hence, the human race needed a kind of artificial selection, which he called "eugenics," from Greek for good birth. Galton wanted eugenics to develop from a science to a policy and finally into a religion.1

A Study . . .
Galton defined eugenics as "the science of improvement of the human race germ plasm through better breeding." He also said: "Eugenics is the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally." This definition was used for years on the cover of the Eugenics Review, a journal published by the Eugenics Education Society (later simply the Eugenics Society).

A Program . . .
The American Journal of Eugenics 2 in 1906 called eugenics a "science," but also noted that the Century Dictionary defined it as "the doctrine of Progress, or Evolution, especially in the human race, through improved conditions in the relations of the sexes."

In 1970, I. I. Gottesman, an American Eugenics Society director, defined it actively: "The essence of evolution is natural selection; the essence of eugenics is the replacement of 'natural' selection by conscious, premeditated, or artificial selection in the hope of speeding up the evolution of 'desirable' characteristics and the elimination of undesirable ones."

A Religion . . .
Galton's suggestion that eugenics should function as a religion was ehoed by George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russel and others.3 A pungent assertion of the religious character of eugenics comes from Julian Huxley, the first Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and a member of the Eugenics Society: "We must face the fact that now, in this year of grace, the great majority of human beings are substandard: they are undernourished, or ill, or condemned to a ceaseless struggle for bare existence; they are imprisoned in ignorance or superstition. We must see to it that life is no longer a hell paved with unrealized opportunity. In this light, the highest and most sacred duty of man is seen as the proper utilization of the untapped resources of human beings."

"I find myself inevitably driven to use the language of religion." Huxley continued, "For the fact is that all this does add up to something in the nature of a religion: perhaps one might call it Evolutionary Humanism. The word 'religion' is often used restrictively to mean belief in gods; but I am not using it in this sense...I am using it in a broader sense, to denote an overall relation between man and his destiny, and one involving his deepest feelings, including his sense of what is sacred. In this broad sense, evolutionary humanism, it seems to me, is capable of becoming the germ of a new religion, not necessarily supplanting existing religions but supplementing them."4

The Population Council, one of the new eugenics organizations that emerged after World War II, no longer spoke of eugenics as a religion, but launched "studies relating to the social, ethical and moral dimensions" of population studies, recognizing that these questions involved matters "of a cultural, moral and spiritual nature."5 The new field of bioethics is a response to issues raised by eugenics.6 Bioethics is based on situation ethics, which was developed largely by Joseph Fletcher, a member of the American Eugenics Society. In 1973, Daniel Callahan, a prominent Catholic dissenter and a member of the American Eugenics Society, outlined the new field in the first issue of Hastings Center Studies.7


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HISTORY OF EUGENICS
In 1798, an English clergyman and economist named Thomas Robert Malthus published the Essay on the Principle of Population. The central idea of his book is that population increases exponentially and will therefore eventually outstrip food supply. If parents failed to limit the size of their families, then war or famine would kill off the excess. The idea has been remarkably resilient, although the specific predictions that Malthus made were wrong. Malthus argued that the island of Britain could not sustain a population of 20 million, but 150 years later the population was more than triple Malthus' ceiling.

Charles Darwin, the biologist, was immensely impressed by Malthus' ideas, and the Malthusian theories are embedded in Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection (The Origin of Species, 1859, and The Descent of Man, 1871). But after Darwin borrowed ideas from economics and inserted them into biology, his cousin reversed the process and discovered ideas in biology that could be applied to humans. This is one of the first tricks that amateur magicians learn, like "finding" a coin in a child's ear. The amazing thing about Galton's stunt is that it has fooled so many people for so long.

At least one contemporary understood what Galton was doing. Friedrich Engels, a collaborator with Karl Marx, was contemptuous of the way Malthus' ideas about economics were inserted into biology and then retrieved as gospel: "The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes' doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes and of the bourgeois doctrine of competition together with Malthus' theory of population. When this conjurer's trick has been performed...the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved. The puerility of this proceeding is so obvious that not a word need be said about it."8

When it began, eugenics was embraced by conservatives and denounced by Engels. It is noteworthy that over time this ideology of arrogance proved to be appealing on the right (Galton), then the left (British Socialists), then the right (German National Socialists), then the left (American environmentalists and the abortion movement), then the right (see the Bell Curve debate).

Galton's work is still used today. He used statistical methods, including the now-famous "bell curve," to describe the distribution of intelligence within a population. He devised various methods for measuring intelligence, and concluded that Europeans are smarter than Africans, on average. And he suggested systematic studies of twins to distinguish the effects of heredity from the effects of environment.

Galton's work was carried on, especially at the University of London, where he endowed a Chair of Eugenics. According to eugenics scholar J. Philippe Rushton, Galton's work was carried on especially by Karl Pearson and Charles Spearman, then by Cyril Burt, and in our time by Raymond Cattell, Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen.9 The work of these academics is built explicitly on Galton's theories, but the eugenics ideology spread far beyond this core of true believers.


IT CONTINUES IN A LONG ARTICLE

[MagusYanam]

Darwinism to totalitarianism. Very Nietzsche. Very ubermensch.

Let's see where it came from or where it leads:

And yet, Galton's eugenics is nothing like biological evolution, nor does acceptance of the latter lead to the former, as demonstrated by my own beliefs on the subject. This line of argumentation is what we call the slippery-slope fallacy, and is a form of red-herring. snappyanswer is trying to steer the debate away from biological evolution and onto the unrelated topic of eugenics.

Darwin himself was firmly abolitionist and disbelieved fervently that it was the place of whites to rule over everyone else. Since he admittedly incorporated the ideas of Malthus, it must be noted that Malthusian population projections do not apply to industrial societies as demonstrated over and over by historians. Once the Malthusian trap is broken, as has been the case ever since the Renaissance, biological evolutionary principles like natural selection no longer apply to human societies.