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To: Dumb_Ox
"Erm... You can read, right? "Law" and "Custom" in Darwin's time included anti-fornication laws, anti-adultery laws, and social penalties for sexual misbehavior. Darwin can be easily enlisted in support of polygamy and concubinage."

Nonsense. You're really desperate from your hatred for evolution to make him a free love libertine. Instead, he was a respectable Victorian gentlemen who loved his wife and and gave to his church. There is no way to get from,

"There should be open competition for all men; and the most able should not be prevented by laws or customs from succeeding best and rearing the largest number of offspring." (Darwin)

to Darwin being a libertine or a supporter of free love. It's a call for capitalism and limited government. Obviously you have a problem with that.

" And I'm no crevo, Mr. Heresy Hunter."

Riiiiight. You're no historian, I'll grant you that.
50 posted on 10/07/2005 6:23:26 AM PDT by CarolinaGuitarman ("There is a grandeur in this view of life...")
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To: CarolinaGuitarman
Look, I have no problems with descent with modification, the keystone and apogee of Darwinian theory. I don't even go for that rather flaky distinction between macro- and micro- evolution that somehow accepts the latter but denies the former. I'm a bit puzzled by how Darwinian evolution would affect things like the concept of human nature.

That I have to make this sort of confession of scientific orthodoxy is evidence that this debate is not a disinterested pursuit for truth, but an attempt at browbeating. This only makes me more sympathetic towards Sternberg's eccentric theories, though I don't even know what they are.

What I do have a problem with in Darwinism is the blatant effort to paper over Darwin's muddled, and sometimes downright evil, philosophical claims that too often accompany his better-formed scientific speculations.

Instead, he was a respectable Victorian gentlemen who loved his wife and and gave to his church. There is no way to get from,

Darwin's cousin, "respectable Victorian gentleman" Francis Galton, was the founder of the eugenics movement. Darwin himself latched on to the execrable Herbert Spencer's term "survival of the fittest." Karl Marx actually asked Charles Darwin if he could dedicate Das Kapital to him, and Darwin only refused because he knew Marx's patent atheism would upset his wife. An honorable intention, I suppose, but it shows how screwed up he was philosophically, not to mention theologically.

Darwin himself was the first Social Darwinist, as well, but I won't take the time to plug in my sources. Check out Edward T. Oakes' book review of the sensationalistically-titled scholarly history "From Darwin to Hitler" in an upcoming issue of First Things magazine.

80 posted on 10/07/2005 2:24:36 PM PDT by Dumb_Ox (Be not Afraid. "Perfect love drives out fear.")
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