Greg writes:
> Wasn't the full title of his book "The Origin of Species By Means of
Natural
> Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"?
> Races, not race.
You are conflating the use of the biological word "race" with your own
politically charged definition of the word. In Darwin's time, and indeed even
now although rarely used any longer, a "race" was biologically synonomous
with "variety". Substitute "variety" in the title and see if you remain as
animated: "The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the
Preservation of Favoured Varieties in the Struggle for Life."
> Now, I have * not * so carefully read all of "The Descent
> of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex", but I was able to find the
> following quote online:
> "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."
> http://www.zoo.uib.no/classics/darwin/descent.chap6.html
Again, I suspect that you are wildly misinterpreting what is being said here.
Darwin very rightly writes that he agrees that all the anthropomorphous apes
(what we now call the "Great Apes") will soon be exterminated. We are only
more blessedly on the edge of doing that now than we were 150 years ago and
if we don't enact substantial measures to prevent it, it will happen in the
lifetime of your children.
Similarly, Darwin wrote that by analogy civilization will in all likelihood
exterminate primitive societies. I don't know anyone who would disagree with
that contention.
But the primary moral is that when both of these events occur, the gap
between a world filled with Englishman, dressed up in all of their finery,
and the remaining primates will be even wider than it is now, and most people
will have an even harder time in believing that there was a chain of
continuous variation from an earlier common ape ancestor that led directly to
them. As it is, I think it's a shame that we lost most of our body hair. That
simple loss has led to a lot of religious breast-beating, trumpheting our
superiority, allowing us to see ourselves as substantially different than the
other apes.
> > Nor is neo-Darwinism a rejection of Darwin's theses. In fact, it's
> > just the opposite
> > and is often called the "New Synthesis," a blending of
> > Darwin's and Wallace's
> > hypotheses on the mechanisms of selection, natural and
> > sexual, and the
> > then-newly emerging science of genetics of the 1940's.
>
> I notice that you use the plural, theses, rather than thesis.
The plural of that sentence refers to both Darwin and Wallace, not that they
generated multiple theses.
> Some of
> Darwin's major points have been entirely rejected, others adjusted. The
> latter is less remarkable than the former.
Absolute nonsense. The only part of Darwin's thesis that is arguably wrong is
the "use and disuse" of particular characters, but even that, when taken in
the proper agricultural context, is not incorrect.
> And new questions are being
> asked, whose very topics Darwin could not have imagined, such as genetics
> and genomics
That's true to a great degree, although Darwin had a reasonably clear idea
about how genetics had to work. But it doesn't invalidate anything that
Darwin said. Darwin also knew nothing of MP3 players or aircraft design
either, but he would be at home with both, once he understood that both are
merely psychophysical and physical imitations of the natural world.
Wirt Atmar
* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *
|
