Charles Darwin applied his ideas about evolution to humans in “The Descent of Man” (1871). In that book is a chapter called “The Races of Man”. There Darwin considers three main questions (I use his terms):
- Do the races of man belong to the same species?
- Why are savages dying out?
- Why do negroes have such dark skin?
On skin colour he leans towards sexual selection: that negro men love dark skin in women. But then again maybe it is climate or sunlight or immunity to disease. Or something else. It is hard to tell. He doubts it is sunlight because the natives of South America, right across the ocean from Africa, do not have black skin. It could be that black skin somehow protects against tropical diseases: negroes have by far the best immunity, even to diseases of South America and the Caribbean where they are not native to the region.
Savages dying out: You might think it was from European disease and war, but according to censuses taken in the 1800s of Tasmanians, Maoris and Hawaiians, it was mainly because women were not having enough children, shockingly few, in fact. This seems to take place when civilized people move savages from where they had always lived or otherwise cause a change in their way of life, like in food and clothing. Darwin compares it to how wild animals in captivity hardly have any offspring.
One species: Unlike horses and donkeys, it seems that humans from different races can mate and give birth to fertile offspring. When two species live side by side there is no mixing. But when races of humans do, there is plenty of mixing. So much so that it is hard to tell where one race ends and the next one begins – or for scientists to even agree on how many races there are.
Polygenists and monogenists: Most scientists who argued that races were separate species were polygenists. They believed each race was a separate creation by God or nature. They would say that only whites or Caucasians came from Adam and Eve. Darwin was the opposite, a monogenist, believing that races came from a common root. The races were too much alike for it to be an accident:
The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans are as different from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Feugians on board the “Beagle,” with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar their minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate.
Subspecies: Like Linnaeus in the 1700s, Darwin regarded human races as subspecies.
Darwin did not believe in racial equality. He divided humans into civilized and savage, which he likened to domesticated and wild animals. Savages had smaller brains and less intelligence. They had different emotions. Negroes, he said, had distinct “mental characteristics”, like being “light-hearted, talkative”.
See also:
- Darwin
- Is race biologically real?
- Franz Boas – who, unlike Darwin, made clear the difference between race and culture
- “savages”
- melanin
- the oneness of mankind
- blacks
All European or Eurocentric scientists and philosophers are blinded by the assumed superiority of European culture over all others. That assumption excludes clear, objective examination of ANYTHING European. Therefore applying the scientific method is not feasible.
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“Therefore applying the scientific method is not feasible.”
Your final conclusion makes no sense. That people have biases is clear. But Having a bias when using a tool does not mean the tool itself has a bias. The scientific method has no inherent bias, and I think this post neatly demonstrates that Darwin’s racist thoughts came from not using the scientific method stringently enough. Darwin was, like, “OK, the data doesn’t support racism, how do I manipulate it so it does?”. Hence why evolutionary theory nowadays isn’t racist.
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All I can say is that at least Darwin started a discussion about it. They did not have to tools at that time to determine that modern man is “Out of Africa”. But at least Darwin theorized that all humans have a common origin.
Were those the Yamana? They have a museum for them in Ushuaia, Argentina that I went to. It is interesting that they have a museum for the local aboriginal people in Tierra del Fuego, but I have never seen any in the Eastern or Southern US (excluding the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian).
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Reblogged this on oogenhand.
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Kiwi writes: “It makes just as much sense to ask “Why do whites have such light skin?” Whites are not the center of humankind.”
Are you suggesting that those question makes no sense? Or are you just a little miffed that Darwin posed the question relative to blacks?
Ask the question any way you like and see what comes up.
Meanwhile, is there a black Darwin? If whites aren’t the “center of humanity” what race is?
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Nobody is… obviously. there is no “center to humanity” based on external skin pigmentation. Next question please, Professor Obvious?
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Darwin thought humans came from Africa, so he should have asked why everyone is not black. Asked that way the world pattern of skin colour would have made much more sense. But he was too blinded by his Eurocentricism to do that.
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@ Jefe
Right, the Yamana. The English Wikipedia (and Google Images) calls them the Yaghan. Fuegian is what Darwin called them, a vague geographical term (= people from Tierra del Fuego), not a cultural one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaghan_people
Darwin did suspect that humans came from Africa because the apes that were most like them were in Africa. It was not a popular opinion back then. Even in the 1960s people like Carleton Coon in the US resisted the idea.
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I think the first comment form Jacque is entirely applicable to an unproven, though widely accepted, theory like Darwinism…
So YES!…Someone who is blind to their own Racism (white supremacist nonsense) would be incapable of ever applying the scientific method.
Here is one simple and reasoned scientific question that can be posed to all believers and upholders of Darwin’s evolutionary theories:
“…Where is the scientific based observed evidence for the change of one species (kind) into another.?…”
Has any scientist ever been able to properly, utilizing the scientific method, verify this? If not, why not?
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While it most definitely is true that white people cannot be the centre or default peoples for humanity. There is an African centred Template for Humanity. This is what the science agrees on and no matter how it is projected (racially or otherwise) this conclusion is inescapable.
Humanity has an African origin…
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Again, was there a black Darwin?
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What’s so special about the White one?
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How do you get the “hues” from “man” 😉 It is certainly impossible for those who are pheontypically expressing recessive traits and are consistently passing them on to their offspring to be the root. They have to be the branches.
1″I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. 2″Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit.” -John 15
That’s variation and NaTuRal selection right there but with unproductivity and rapacity as rejection criteria. LOL. I’m no Christian (what’s an anointed-ian anyway) but sometimes I like to play with these writings that the Roman Catholic Church canonized but didn’t originate.
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Some of you made my point for me …thanks how nice of you..
Scientific racism has colored EVERYTHING Europeans have written and concluded about peoples who do not look like them….especially in my field..medicine (and medical ethics, psychology,medical research, sociology and POLICY….. We are only now fighting to come back from the mistakes of the past. Yes racists can successfully apply the scientific method to OTHER things…as evidenced by Watson and Crick did with DNA helix research.
But the construct of “race” cannot be looked at in an objective way…because of other construct, “white supremacy” is the elephant in the room.
Deconstructing one will make it necessary to deconstruct the other.
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Jacque says: “We are only now fighting to come back from the mistakes of the past.”
What mistakes? Since you said your field is medicine, does that mean you are referring to medical mistakes?
What did Watson and Crick do wrong? Have you noticed who’s responsible for unlocking most science knowledge?
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Do you notice who excluded everyone else from the field of science, purposely undereducated large groups of ethnic peoples whom they had colonized or oppressed? I wonder why others don’t have as many discoveries in the last 300 years? It’s really a mystery how that happened!
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@ sb
Did you notice who had the most wealth at the time that these discoveries became possible and where that wealth came from?
Did you notice why someone like Frederick Douglass, who was probably as intelligent as any scientist, did not become a scientist?
Did you notice the uneven playing field and who made it uneven?
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@ sb32199
The mistakes are in the form of retracted scientific papers..the Tuskegee.. experiment….human zoos..the procurement of. Henrietta Lack’s immortal cells and subsequent treatment by the staff and faculty at Johns Hopkins. No minorities represented in medical research phase III trials…Need I go on?…I could but its too embarrassing.
I didn’t say Watson and Crick did anything wrong….they were just racists who did one thing right…then got the Nobel prize to boot.
Unlocking of knowledge came through MANY peoples on earth not just Europeans and their descendants! White supremacists have a hard time with that fact.
I will give white people 100% credit for …mayonnaise, eugenics, fascism and J Crew
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@Jacque
Don’t forget about white folk contributions of domestic terrorism, little white lies, Abercrombie&Fitch and Nutella. 🙂
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And so, today’s “race realists” see him as one of many scientific racist prophets to follow to the ends of the Earth.
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…and lederhosen
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Which is rather ironic, Brothawolf, considering that lots of people forget that Charles Darwin was a purebred abolitionist. Didn’t have much contact with black people, though “a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate”, was referring to his taxidermy teacher. Unlike “race realists” Darwin was willing to learn from, not just about black people. A
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I too read that Darwin was an abolitionist and that he married his first cousin.
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• Do you notice who excluded everyone else from the field of science, purposely undereducated large groups of ethnic peoples whom they had colonized or oppressed? I wonder why others don’t have as many discoveries in the last 300 years? It’s really a mystery how that happened!
• Did you notice who had the most wealth at the time that these discoveries became possible and where that wealth came from?
Did you notice why someone like Frederick Douglass, who was probably as intelligent as any scientist, did not become a scientist?
Did you notice the uneven playing field and who made it uneven?
I’m liking it! 🙂
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^ um, the responses I mean, not the violent conquest of the world, by Europe.
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On the one hand, Darwin was on the liberal side in his own time. He opposed the polygenists, who were the hard-core racists, who thought blacks were a separate species between apes and whites. Many polygenists were supporters of slavery.
On the other hand, Darwin was what we would now call a race realist. Even worse, his ideas made racism intellectually respectable, genocide acceptable and eugenics desirable. (Francis Galton, his cousin, invented the word “eugenics”.)
Racism was not seriously questioned by Western science till it was turned against white people. I think it is no accident that scientific anti-racists like Franz Boas, Ashley Montagu and Stephen Jay Gould were all Jewish.
Some people say science is automatically self-correcting, but in this case it does not seem like it was so “automatic”.
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Where would we be without lederhosen ?
I suggest a great read “White Racism the Basics” by Fagin,Vera,Batur…another great book is “Medical Apartheid”
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abagond,
Today, race realists will use that “science” to justify their own emotions. A blogger once told me in my blog that he didn’t hate blacks “until science proved it to him.” (His words.)
Scientific racism of the past and present is the driving force of racists who don’t see themselves as racists but race realists as to why they hate and fear blacks. Even though there are studies that show that there is no such thing as race when it comes to human biology, race realists are quick to denounce such findings as ‘liberal’. It seems funny how race realists portray themselves as logical, but use archaic racist science to massage their ever-present disdain.
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I will give white people 100% credit for …mayonnaise, eugenics, fascism and J Crew
You forgot haggis and fish and chips(with tons of gravy)!
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(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6b7bU3DMiA)
It would only be academic if so many examples of disgusting racism practiced right now werent happening..above is an incident in a recent game with Brazilian Danial Alvez , Brazilian selection regular, where in Spain, they threw a banana on the feild in a known racist jesture…and he ate the banana…
the recent headlines of the Cliiper owner just reek with disgusting racism..now that is the kind of white guy who is horrible for black women..he has a Mexican/black girlfreind…it doesnt get any lower than that , to say the things he did to her..
and , just headlines in Brazil today, 4 guys held in slavery for 10 years…with marks on them…
racism is just too here and now to dismiss it in any way…or academicly haggle about it
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abagond:
“Automatic” should not be confused with “instantaneous”.
Science extracts greater truth about the universe than any other process.
abagond:
Gould perpetrated academic fraud. Boas, while offering laudable egalitarian counterarguments to prejudicial opinions of the time, nevertheless promoted the idea of “cultural relativism” which quite demonstrably in error.
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abagond,
“Some people say science is automatically self-correcting, but in this case it does not seem like it was so “automatic”.”
White supremacy isn’t scientific though. It is inherently antithetic to the scientific method since it depends on the authority and supremacy of white people not the weight of an argument. White supremacy requires restricting the free discussion and dissemination of information from inferior peoples. Science has to be open to questioning from all segments of society.
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I’d say white supremacy is more like religion than science.
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@ Randy
Science, just like religion, is fundamentally a formalized system of agreed upon beliefs. Those beliefs are no more set in stone than either any of the fundamentalist proponents of the two groups would have us believe.
If this was not so. Science would have dispelled the notion or idea of white supremacist bias in its testing or results long ago. It would have defined and resolved or accounted for any such bias. Instead it ignores such charges or pretends no such bias (racism) exists. This is hardly, in its own terms, “scientific” when you think about it. Is it?.
If it is on this basis you believe you can make a statement like the above about science and “universal truth”. Then there really is nothing more I can add here…
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“Here is one simple and reasoned scientific question that can be posed to all believers and upholders of Darwin’s evolutionary theories:
“…Where is the scientific based observed evidence for the change of one species (kind) into another.?…”
Has any scientist ever been able to properly, utilizing the scientific method, verify this? If not, why not?”
Yep. It happened 6 years ago. Richard Lenski did it:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab.htm#.U1_cO1dTVWo
Though of course a lot of Young Earth creationist lunatics were enraged by it. Predictably, they achieved nothing, their protests being limited to “THERE IS A GOD”. But Lenski did it first in a lab. Which doesn’t make all the naturally based changes observed previously less relevant of course.
For those of you who are interested in speciation and evolutionary theory, feel free to check this out: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
Some people completely misunderstand what the scientific method is and say things like “I think the first comment form Jacque is entirely applicable to an unproven, though widely accepted, theory like Darwinism…”
Ya know, to prove something, you need to be able to observe the whole of reality. And also, “theory” doesn’t mean what you think it means. A scientific theory is something that explains observed phenomena completely. On this website, I have noticed a lot of people try to conflate it with the creationist viewpoint that theory only means “something you thought of while drunk”. Finally, proving something is *impossible* since it’d require you to be able to, well, observe the whole universe from the outside. That’s why falsifiablity is the key to the scientific method. Saying that the theory of evolution is just a theory is something I thought nobody with a basic understanding of science would say. Sadly it seems I was wrong. (If you observe the universe from the outside, you just expanded the universe that’s needed to be observed)
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@ Randy @ sb32199 @ solesearch
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Abagond,
“So before we start talking about genetic differences, you gotta come up with a system where there’s equal opportunity, then we can have that conversation.”
Amen
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@ naishee
Forgive me, but I don’t think you properly understood the question in your haste to respond. Lets state it again:…
I think the operative word is kind here. One species into another kind. So for example apes, chimpanzees, etc.. into human beings. Do you follow that? One kind of species changes into another type of species. Producing a different one than before.
This should not be confused with genetic mutations of the same species which your supplied example deals with. I must admit though even I was to agree with the evidence provided that this was the case:
One species of bacteria evolved over successive generations into another new species of bacteria. Wouldn’t it be a “long stretch” to scientifically conclude such changes must apply to ALL other species? Based on what observed law or evidence?
I think most people will have heard of or be familiar with the fictitious X-Men characters. These are a bunch of mutant humans they evolved over time through successive mutations into new or different human beings. We could look at the bacteria in the example you gave in the same way. What has been described is mutant bacteria not a fundamentally new species of bacteria all together.
To put this in its proper perspective so you really understand what the question was asking. It would be equivalent to, lets say, a chimpanzee evolving directly over successive time generations and turning into an X-man/woman. There… You would have a complete change of species from one kind into another.
Do you see that?
If such a feat is attainable why would it not be possible to verify this using the verifiable scientific method? The example you provided using bacteria clearly doesn’t show or prove this.
What was it you said again…?
.
On that basis alone then Evolutionary theory would appear to have many shortcomings as a theory more of a non-scientific belief.
Finally, I would say I am far from the view of what you might consider to be a Creationist. As such views, for me, are just as much based on FAITH as Darwinism. But at least the other appears more rational!
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Kwamla:
The main difference between the two is that the claims of science are testable. The claims of religion are not. Scientific beliefs are updated in the face of evidence. Dogmatic belief and obedience are neither required nor desired.
Kwamla:
I respectfully disagree. Complex phenomena can take considerable time to understand. The specific nature of human intelligence is a topic which is not yet fully explained, though progress continues to be made.
The argument of “the practice of science as a tool for understanding the universe is flawed because a particular goal has not yet been reached” confuses the concepts of “position” with “velocity”.
Not being “there yet” in no way undermines the validity or value of the scientific process.
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so are religious beliefs.
How do you explain the wide varieties of Christianity and Islam today? Haven’t each group or sect revised their sets of beliefs based on new evidence or interpretation, sometimes forcing them to split into different groups? And don’t they revise it over time? Don’t new beliefs arise based on new “evidence”? Religious beliefs are being tested and revised continuously.
All you need to do is remember that Christian beliefs were used to justify slavery, genocide, apartheid, anti-miscegenation, domestic violence, etc. Isn’t Mormonism a belief that did not even exist 200 years ago? Sunni Islam in Malaysia is very different from that in Morocco or Pakistan. And they do not remain static.
If your explanation is the explanation of difference between Science and Religion, then Science could be viewed as a form of religion – they do not really differ in that regard.
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@ Randy
That is a fairy tale.
It is certainly not true in the case of racism. Lewontin’s study of human genes in 1972 is most often given as the reason why most scientists no longer believe that race is real. It showed that most of the differences between people are within races, not between them. The idea of gene frequency is also given as a reason: that any given trait is found in all races, it is just a matter of how frequently it shows up.
YET all of that was already known (at the phenotype level) by the late 1800s. Humans of different races had been measured exhaustively, especially their skulls. You could not determine a person’s race from any given trait. The overall averages were different but there were huge overlaps between “races”. Lewontin did not discover anything new about the nature of human variation – he just gave scientists a face-saving way to change their minds. Scientific beliefs were not updated in the face of evidence, they were updated in the face of changing social winds.
Had Hitler won the war or Jews been kept out of academia or if racism had not been turned on whites, scientific racism would probably still be the “consensus” view. And it may well make a comeback under the cover of “new discoveries”.
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Jefe:
Faith is the practice of belief in the absence of evidence. Revised “interpretation” of static texts is 180 degrees away from the concept of “new evidence”.
Jefe:
Science is a process by which claims regarding natural world phenomena can be empirically tested in a repeatable manner, and hypotheses confirmed or refuted. Can you think of a single example within religion which offers the same?
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Kiwi:
That’s a rather trivial and semantic point to make.
I think it’s fair to say that the Higgs Boson prediction was “confirmed”, as was the Poincaré Conjecture.
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Abagond:
Speculation, but let’s go with it for the sake of argument.
You appear to be suggesting that dogma derails the scientific process. I completely agree. We should thus seek to decouple science from dogma of all types wherever it’s found.
Our understanding of genetics is still in its infancy, so it seems entirely possible for new discoveries to indicate that differences between populations of people do indeed exist.
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@Randy
Differences do indeed exists between siblings , otherwise they would be clones heck isn’t that the whole point of our sexual reproduction.
And differences do exist between people and between groups of people.
You just need to define what kind of population and what kind of differences you’re looking for. And then explain why some differences matter while others are overlooked.
Then it’s quite possible to look at our genetic code with a racist or prejudiced gaze as long as you can come up with a plausible explanation.
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Kiwi,
Randy says that Science gives the truth as the Scientific method produces it. However, that in of itself is a belief – there is no way to prove that the Scientific method will deliver us the truth. How can you use the Scientific method to prove the infallibility of the Scientific method? And all hypothesis testing does is to demonstrate the evidence tends to confirm or refute a hypothesis, which by definition is a belief.
It is that belief, in the Scientific method, which is about as static and dogmatic as any religious belief. And it is a social process, subject to all sorts of human biases and beliefs.
The scientific method is nothing more than a set of beliefs.
People will use that extrapolate to claim that computer simulations can “prove” something. It can help us understand a phenomenon, but it cannot prove anything.
Nope. People find evidence all the time to support their belief in their faith.
Don’t get me wrong, I do have faith in Science. But that is my belief.
This points to a logical fallacy similar to how people use the perpetual foreigner stereotype to confirm the “factual basis” of the perpetual foreigner stereotype. How can we use the scientific method to prove the infallibility of the scientific method?
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The difference between scientific evidence and faith-based evidence is that the former can be subject to repeatable and independent verification. I cannot think of a single occasion when the latter has been able to do this.
The “Christian apologetics” movement is one notable attempt to reconcile faith with reason, but ultimately requires that one accepts, without falsifiable evidence, the premise of an omnipotent creator.
Ultimately, in both cases we’re discussing claims which purport to accurately describe reality. Science provides a method for invalidating incorrect claims in order to produce more accurate understandings of reality. Faith lacks such a repeatable feedback mechanism.
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Excellent point Jefe!
“…How can we use the scientific method to prove the infallibility of the scientific method?…”
Its a pity Randy does not pay attention to it. Then he wouldn’t make statements like this:
His unquestioned assumption being, of course, that science is not subject to faith when it obviously is! He just doesn’t see it…A bit like white supremacy (racism) 🙂
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@Kwamla,
I can only chuckle at the discourse:
Are we to understand that the premise of an omnipotent creator is a false claim that we can verify through application of the scientific method (ie, those methods that are subject to repeatable and independent verification)? LOL 😛
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@ Randy
Any logical system of thought is going to have a set of assumptions it cannot prove. Otherwise you end up with an endless regress and can prove nothing.
Western science is no different. For example, it assumes the universe is ordered and that such order is knowable and understandable by the 1400-cc grey blob inside the heads of Homo sapiens sapiens of the Orion Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy of the Virgo Supercluster. There is no reason that has to be true. Nor is there any way to prove it. It comes from a Christian folk belief that God created the universe for man. It is “religious” according to your way of thinking.
As to “Christian apologetics”, I am not sure what you are thinking of. I do not know of any system of Christian thought or persuasion that assumes the existence of God. Maybe you can give an example. The ones I am most familiar with, like that of Aquinas, treat the existence of God as an important, serious question, not as something assumed.
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Abagond:
I don’t think those are necessary conditions for science. One isn’t required or even encouraged to hold beliefs which aren’t substantiated by evidence. “We don’t know”, “We may be incapable of knowing”, and “To the extent that we have been able to observe…” are all perfectly reasonable assessments about any phenomena or area of inquiry.
Abagond:
Doesn’t every system of Christian thought presume the existence of God?
Regarding “apologetics”, I’m thinking of William Lane Craig. A number of debates between him and various opponents can be found on youtube.
When the topic of miracles has arisen, I seem to recall his responses being along the lines of “miracles are just manifestations of natural law which we haven’t yet categorized” or else “miracles should pose no difficulty for an omnipotent God”.
The first argument lacks evidence other than first, second, and thirdhand personal accounts from ancient times, and so is open to skepticism while the second argument is circular.
Craig is a skilled and well-read speaker, and I found those debates enjoyable and edifying to watch.
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Book Review: ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’ by Nicholas Wade
A scientific revolution is under way—upending one of our reigning orthodoxies.
By Charles Murray
May 2, 2014
America’s modern struggle with race has proceeded on three fronts. The legal battle effectively ended a half-century ago with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The second front, the battle against private prejudice, has not been won so decisively, but the experiences of Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling in the past few weeks confirm a longstanding truth about American society: Expressions of racial prejudice by public figures are punished swiftly and severely.
The third front is different in kind. This campaign is waged not against actual violations of civil rights or expressions of prejudice or hatred, but against the idea that biological differences among human populations are a legitimate subject of scholarly study. The reigning intellectual orthodoxy is that race is a “social construct,” a cultural artifact without biological merit.
A Troublesome Inheritance
By Nicholas Wade
The Penguin Press, 278 pages, $27.95
The orthodoxy’s equivalent of the Nicene Creed has two scientific tenets. The first, promulgated by geneticist Richard Lewontin in “The Apportionment of Human Diversity” (1972), is that the races are so close to genetically identical that “racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.” The second, popularized by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, is that human evolution in everything but cosmetic differences stopped before humans left Africa, meaning that “human equality is a contingent fact of history,” as he put it in an essay of that title in 1984.
Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, what is known by geneticists has increasingly diverged from this orthodoxy, even as social scientists and the mainstream press have steadfastly ignored the new research. Nicholas Wade, for more than 20 years a highly regarded science writer at the New York Times, NYT -1.40% has written a book that pulls back the curtain.
It is hard to convey how rich this book is. It could be the textbook for a semester’s college course on human evolution, systematically surveying as it does the basics of genetics, evolutionary psychology, Homo sapiens’s diaspora and the recent discoveries about the evolutionary adaptations that have occurred since then. The book is a delight to read—conversational and lucid. And it will trigger an intellectual explosion the likes of which we haven’t seen for a few decades.
The title gives fair warning: “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.” At the heart of the book, stated quietly but with command of the technical literature, is a bombshell. It is now known with a high level of scientific confidence that both tenets of the orthodoxy are wrong.
Mr. Lewontin turns out to have been mistaken on several counts, but the most obvious is this: If he had been right, then genetic variations among humans would not naturally sort people into races and ethnicities. But, as Mr. Wade reports, that’s exactly what happens. A computer given a random sampling of bits of DNA that are known to vary among humans—from among the millions of them—will cluster them into groups that correspond to the self-identified race or ethnicity of the subjects. This is not because the software assigns the computer that objective but because those are the clusters that provide the best statistical fit. If the subjects’ ancestors came from all over the inhabited world, the clusters that first emerge will identify the five major races: Asians, Caucasians, sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans and the original inhabitants of Australia and Papua New Guinea. If the subjects all come from European ancestry, the clusters will instead correspond to Italians, Germans, French and the rest of Europe’s many ethnicities. Mr. Lewontin was not only wrong but spectacularly wrong. It appears that the most natural of all ways to classify humans genetically is by the racial and ethnic groups that humans have identified from time out of mind.
Stephen Jay Gould’s assurance that significant evolution had stopped before humans left Africa has also proved to be wrong—not surprisingly, since it was so counterintuitive to begin with. Humans who left Africa moved into environments that introduced radically new selection pressures, such as lethally cold temperatures. Surely, one would think, important evolutionary adaptations followed. Modern genetic methods for tracking adaptations have established that they did. A 2009 appraisal of the available genome-wide scans estimated that 14% of the genome has been under the pressure of natural selection during the past 30,000 years, long after humans left Africa. The genes under selection include a wide variety of biological traits affecting everything from bone structure and diet to aspects of the brain and nervous system involving cognition and sensory perception.
The question, then, is whether the sets of genes under selection have varied across races, to which the answer is a clear yes. To date, studies of Caucasians, Asians and sub-Saharan Africans have found that of the hundreds of genetic regions under selection, about 75% to 80% are under selection in only one race. We also know that the genes in these regions affect more than cosmetic variations in appearance. Some of them involve brain function, which in turn could be implicated in a cascade of effects. “What these genes do within the brain is largely unknown,” Mr. Wade writes. “But the findings establish the obvious truth that brain genes do not lie in some special category exempt from natural selection. They are as much under evolutionary pressure as any other category of gene.”
Let me emphasize, as Mr. Wade does, how little we yet know about the substance of racial and ethnic differences. Work in the decade since the genome was sequenced has taught us that genetically linked traits, even a comparatively simple one like height, are far more complex than previously imagined, involving dozens or hundreds of genes, plus other forms of variation within our DNA, plus interactions between the environment and gene expression. For emotional or cognitive traits, the story is so complicated that we are probably a decade or more away from substantial understanding.
As the story is untangled, it will also become obvious how inappropriate it is to talk in terms of the “inferiority” or “superiority” of groups. Consider, for example, the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. What are the ideal points on these continua? They will differ depending on whether you’re looking for the paragon of, say, a parent or an entrepreneur. And the Big Five only begin to tap the dozens of ways in which human traits express themselves. Individual human beings are complicated bundles of talents, proclivities, strengths and flaws that interact to produce unexpected and even internally contradictory results. The statistical tendencies (and they will be only tendencies) that differentiate groups of humans will be just as impossible to add up as the qualities of an individual. Vive les différences.
The problem facing us down the road is the increasing rate at which the technical literature reports new links between specific genes and specific traits. Soon there will be dozens, then hundreds, of such links being reported each year. The findings will be tentative and often disputed—a case in point is the so-called warrior gene that encodes monoamine oxidase A and may encourage aggression. But so far it has been the norm, not the exception, that variations in these genes show large differences across races. We don’t yet know what the genetically significant racial differences will turn out to be, but we have to expect that they will be many. It is unhelpful for social scientists and the media to continue to proclaim that “race is a social construct” in the face of this looming rendezvous with reality.
After laying out the technical aspects of race and genetics, Mr. Wade devotes the second half of his book to a larger set of topics: “The thesis presented here assumes . . . that there is a genetic component to human social behavior; that this component, so critical to human survival, is subject to evolutionary change and has indeed evolved over time; that the evolution in social behavior has necessarily proceeded independently in the five major races and others; and that slight evolutionary differences in social behavior underlie the differences in social institutions prevalent among the major human populations.”
To develop his case, Mr. Wade draws from a wide range of technical literature in political science, sociology, economics and anthropology. He contrasts the polities and social institutions of China, India, the Islamic world and Europe. He reviews circumstantial evidence that the genetic characteristics of the English lower class evolved between the 13th century and the 19th. He takes up the outsize Jewish contributions to the arts and sciences, most easily explained by the Jews’ conspicuously high average IQ, and recounts the competing evolutionary explanations for that elevated cognitive ability. Then, with courage that verges on the foolhardy, he adds a chapter that incorporates genetics into an explanation of the West’s rise during the past 600 years.
Mr. Wade explicitly warns the reader that these latter chapters, unlike his presentation of the genetics of race, must speculate from evidence that falls far short of scientific proof. His trust in his audience is touching: “There is nothing wrong with speculation, of course, as long as its premises are made clear. And speculation is the customary way to begin the exploration of uncharted territory because it stimulates a search for the evidence that will support or refute it.”
I fear Mr. Wade’s trust is misplaced. Before they have even opened “A Troublesome Inheritance,” some reviewers will be determined not just to refute it but to discredit it utterly—to make people embarrassed to be seen purchasing it or reading it. These chapters will be their primary target because Mr. Wade chose to expose his readers to a broad range of speculative analyses, some of which are brilliant and some of which are weak. If I had been out to trash the book, I would have focused on the weak ones, associated their flaws with the book as a whole and dismissed “A Troublesome Inheritance” as sloppy and inaccurate. The orthodoxy’s clerisy will take that route, ransacking these chapters for material to accuse Mr. Wade of racism, pseudoscience, reliance on tainted sources, incompetence and evil intent. You can bet on it.
All of which will make the academic reception of “A Troublesome Inheritance” a matter of historic interest. Discoveries have overturned scientific orthodoxies before—the Ptolemaic solar system, Aristotelian physics and the steady-state universe, among many others—and the new received wisdom has usually triumphed quickly among scientists for the simplest of reasons: They hate to look stupid to their peers. When the data become undeniable, continuing to deny them makes the deniers look stupid. The high priests of the orthodoxy such as Richard Lewontin are unlikely to recant, but I imagine that the publication of “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be welcomed by geneticists with their careers ahead of them—it gives them cover to write more openly about the emerging new knowledge. It will be unequivocally welcome to medical researchers, who often find it difficult to get grants if they openly say they will explore the genetic sources of racial health differences.
The reaction of social scientists is less predictable. The genetic findings that Mr. Wade reports should, in a reasonable world, affect the way social scientists approach the most important topics about human societies. Social scientists can still treat culture and institutions as important independent causal forces, but they also need to start considering the ways in which variations among population groups are causal forces shaping those cultures and institutions.
How long will it take them? In 1998, the biologist E.O. Wilson wrote a book, “Consilience,” predicting that the 21st century would see the integration of the social and biological sciences. He is surely right about the long run, but the signs for early progress are not good. “The Bell Curve,” which the late Richard J. Herrnstein and I published 20 years ago, should have made it easy for social scientists to acknowledge the role of cognitive ability in shaping class structure. It hasn’t. David Geary’s “Male/Female,” published 16 years ago, should have made it easy for them to acknowledge the different psychological and cognitive profiles of males and females. It hasn’t. Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate,” published 12 years ago, should have made it easy for them to acknowledge the role of human nature in explaining behavior. It hasn’t. Social scientists who associate themselves with any of those viewpoints must still expect professional isolation and stigma.
“A Troublesome Inheritance” poses a different order of threat to the orthodoxy. The evidence in “The Bell Curve,” “Male/Female” and “A Blank Slate” was confined to the phenotype—the observed characteristics of human beings—and was therefore vulnerable to attack or at least obfuscation. The discoveries Mr. Wade reports, that genetic variation clusters along racial and ethnic lines and that extensive evolution has continued ever since the exodus from Africa, are based on the genotype, and no one has any scientific reason to doubt their validity.
And yet, as of 2014, true believers in the orthodoxy still dominate the social science departments of the nation’s universities. I expect that their resistance to “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be fanatical, because accepting its account will be seen, correctly, as a cataclysmic surrender on some core premises of political correctness. There is no scientific reason for the orthodoxy to win. But it might nonetheless.
So one way or another, “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be historic. Its proper reception would mean enduring fame as the book that marked a turning point in social scientists’ willingness to explore the way the world really works. But there is a depressing alternative: that social scientists will continue to predict planetary movements using Ptolemaic equations, as it were, and that their refusal to come to grips with “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be seen a century from now as proof of this era’s intellectual corruption.
—Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Is that you Chuckie? Can I have your autograph? Thanks in advance.
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@ sb32199
Thank you for the review. As I think you can imagine, I am not a fan of Charles Murray (even if he was kind enough to sign my copy of “Coming Apart”):
This part is especially disingenuous:
Nicholas Wade works for the New York Times. That is as mainstream as you can get. Before that he was a deputy editor of Nature. He has been writing about the “new research” for the mainstream press since at least 2002:
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Abagond,
“It comes from a Christian folk belief that God created the universe for man.”
I thought the traditional belief was the universe was mysterious and unknowable. Or maybe more accurately that anything we didn’t know was assigned to the unknowable work of god or gods. God works in mysterious ways and all that.
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Abagond,
“For example, it assumes the universe is ordered and that such order is knowable and understandable by the 1400-cc grey blob inside the heads of Homo sapiens sapiens of the Orion Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy of the Virgo Supercluster. ”
But we have observable evidence that some things in the universe are understandable to humans and that give us reason to believe we can understand more. The assumption isn’t that we can understand the entire universe now with our current human brains.
Also this assumption leads to questioning and investigating everything especially this assumption. Christianity depends on complete faith. Doubt is a sin.
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@ Solesearch
We observe patterns in the universe (facts), which are real, but then come up with ideas to make sense of them (interpretation). Children do that too – and we laugh at the reasons they come up with. There is no reason to believe our science is, at bottom, much better than that.
Ptolemy, for example, said the earth was the centre of our planetary system. It fit the facts! It was not till the late 1500s and early 1600s that new observations made by Galileo and Tycho Brahe showed that it was wrong. Did Ptolemy “understand” the universe?
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@ Randy
That of Thomas Aquinas, the main system in the West from 1300 to 1600, did not.
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Indeed, I have full reason to contemplate that much of what we believe to be “FACT” today will be shown to be silly in a few centuries.
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@ Solesearch
Maybe some forms of Christianity ask you to turn off your brain. The one I am most familiar with, Catholicism, does not. God gave us a brain and he expects us to use it. Otherwise he would have made us sheep.
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Abagond,
“Ptolemy, for example, said the earth was the centre of our planetary system. It fit the facts! It was not till the late 1500s and early 1600s that new observations made by Galileo and Tycho Brahe showed that it was wrong. Did Ptolemy “understand” the universe?”
He understood somethings about the universe. The continued questioning and observation is what lead to proving heliocentrism. Doubt, not faith. Ptolemy’s faith stopped him and countless others from considering heliocentrism.
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Abagond,
“Maybe some forms of Christianity ask you to turn off your brain. The one I am most familiar with, Catholicism, does not.”
Really? How so? Is it not faith/authority based?
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@ Abagond,
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George Ryder
Sure as in you would bet your life on it? I say this because I have heard people day many things on this blog regarding Christianity but usually whites interpret it wrong or something along those lines.
It is safer to ask people what they think than to guess based on skin color and what blogs they frequent. I visit anti-vaccination and anti-cirumsism sites. I don’t believe or hope to support either of them.
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George
From what I have heard there actually are books that have been removed from the Bible due to it not fitting with the time or translation based on the will of the king. This is of course speculation. This is however off topic and I will simply leave it at that.
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@Kwamla
“I think the operative word is kind here.”
True. It’s the type of vague, nonscientific term that people who do not accept the theory of evolution use to move the goalpost. ‘Kind’ can mean whatever they want it to mean and existing examples of speciation are never good enough.
“chimpanzee evolving directly over successive time generations and turning into an X-man/woman. ”
If something like that happened that would be a major blow to the theory of evolution. Evolution does not do that. Well, at least it’s not supposed to. According to evolution, you can get a chimpanzee that looks more like a human, but you are not going to get a human. The human looking chimpanzee would not somehow stop being a ‘kind’ of a chimpanzee. Just like our relatively recent ancestors never stopped being primates.
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jefe:
Quite possibly so. And it will no doubt be a scientific-type of process which unveils those discoveries.
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@ eco
“…According to evolution, you can get a chimpanzee that looks more like a human, but you are not going to get a human…”
Thanks for this. You have effectively proved the point I was making…
Evolutionary theory has no observable scientific evidence for what it purports to be FACT.
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@Kwamla
“Evolutionary theory has no observable scientific evidence for what it purports to be FACT.”
The theory of evolution doesn’t claim that it is possible to get a human from a chimpanzee. The straw man you have constructed, does.
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Maybe it will be the scientific method itself, as practiced today, to be the thing that is found to be silly. And they will use a new method to determine this based on a completely different system of beliefs.
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Here is Steve Sailer’s review of Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance”, which comes out tomorrow:
http://takimag.com/article/the_liberal_creationists_steve_sailer/print#ixzz30Nn4DRXz
Sailer makes the book sound even more racist than Charles Murray did. For example, according to Wade’s book:
and:
My post on Steve Sailer, for those who do not know who he is:
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@ eco
Perhaps it might be educational for everyone here concerned if you would describe in your own words what Evolutionary Theory DOES claim? Rather than simply leaving it to be guessed or assumed. Which I am sure you would agree is not very scientific now is it?
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@Kwamla
“Perhaps it might be educational for everyone here concerned if you would describe in your own words what Evolutionary Theory DOES claim?”
That sounds like a lot of work and a monumental waste of my time. I’ll simply explain why I said that your interpretation of the theory of evolution is a straw man.
First I’ll point out something that should be obvious: organisms do not have the capacity to erase their ancestors from their DNA or morphology. You can selectively breed chimpanzees and get some strange, human-like chimps, but you would not be able to get a human, because you wouldn’t be able to replace their biological heritage with ours. Based on their DNA you would be able to determine that their ancestors are not the same as ours and call the human-like creatures a “kind” of chimp.
The ‘there are no new kinds’ crowd of evolution-deniers (mainly creationists) usually expects to see the type of speciation, which according to the theory of evolution and according to genetics is simply unrealistic. When you are saying that chimpanzees should be able to evolve into people and somehow stop being of the chimp “kind” along the way, you are constructing a straw man, a caricature of the theory of evolution. If something like that happened that wouldn’t be evidence for, but against both evolution and genetics.
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@ eco
How do you deal with the irreducible complexity argument?
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@ eco
Kwamla
“…Perhaps it might be educational for everyone here concerned if you would describe in your own words what Evolutionary Theory DOES claim?…”
eco
“…That sounds like a lot of work and a monumental waste of my time…”
Allow me to help you dear eco…
I’ve highlighted in bold for you where you might want to find the observed scientific evidence for this…I’ll wait…
Why waste your time knocking down straw men instead?
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George Ryder
I doubt you have read all of them as there are some that have been lost. Lost as in destoryed or missing centuries ago. Regardless I did not bring it up to shake your faith but rather to point out the wealth of knowledge and source for people to get their own ideas of the Scriptures.
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@ George Ryder
Not wishing to shake your faith but here is one book which definitely was left out…!
http://sonsonthepyre.com/1500-year-old-bible-confirms-that-jesus-christ-was-not-crucified-vatican-in-awe/
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George,
Any book that is valued at roughly $28 million and has the Catholic Church (Vatican) seriously interested in examining and acquiring must have some authority. Don’t you think ?
At the very least it should be investigated. Its hardly a dust old book…
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@King
“How do you deal with the irreducible complexity argument?”
I think of them as ‘God of the gaps’ arguments. I’ve only heard of a few of the irreducible complexity arguments. I bet there are many more, but the ones creationists use most often are probably the ones they consider to be their strongest. Like in the case of the eye or the flagella, evolutionary biologists usually have examples of some sort of partial functionality that I consider convincing. At that point creationists usually say that we do not have enough transitional forms to support the claim that the irreducibly complex systems came from simple ones and that is essentially a ‘God of the gaps’ argument, because they are not offering a better explanation. The evidence for evolution isn’t perfect thus Jesus did it.
@Kwamla
“I’ve highlighted in bold for you where you might want to find the observed scientific evidence for this…”
Why should I list examples of speciation when none of them are going to be drastic enough for you to accept them? You are expecting organisms to be able to change their “kind” and that’s simply not how things work. You’ll always be able to link an organism to its ancestors and say that it isn’t really new, that it’s the same “kind” as something older. The drastic changes you are expecting to see are not supposed to happen.
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@ George
Your comment was moderated for the word “trash”. That is moderated for “white trash” and “trailer trash”.
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George,
“…“Another modern fake, I’m afraid ..”
I think you will find this depends on who you read. The existence of the book is not denied and some have suggested it may be one of 3 copies (‘Gospel of Barnabas’) hidden in the same area.
Also,
“…That book claimed Jesus was never crucified so immediately you can throw it in the trash along with any Davinci Code nonsense…”
I’ve come across many different sources which also state this. As well as obvious ones, like the Quran, which deny this.
This is typically an area of Belief or Faith rather than applied Scientific investigation
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All books should be apart of it regardless of whether one feels it is useful or not. The only reason to leave anything out is to hide information.
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Kwamla,
“Perhaps it might be educational for everyone here concerned if you would describe in your own words what Evolutionary Theory DOES claim? Rather than simply leaving it to be guessed or assumed. Which I am sure you would agree is not very scientific now is it?”
Evolution is the process by which one organism changes into another. It is the process through which every living thing on earth came to be.
It depends on mutation and selection. Radiation, sunlight, cosmic rays, chemicals, and very rarely DNA copying errors cause mutations to occur in an organisms’ nucleotides. Nucleotides are the part of dna that have the instructions on how to copy the DNA and directions on all other functions of the cell.
Now if the mutation helps an organism to survive in its environment it is passed on. This is natural selection. Overtime this accumulation of mutations changes an organism into a different organism.
This is evolutionary fact. It’s not a theory.
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“It’s not like everyone could add a verse you know, final verses of revelation warn us about the consequences of doing that.”
_ _ _
The following is an excerpt from a Wikipedia article pertaining to the Apocrypha:
” “Apocrypha” was also applied to writings that were hidden not because of their divinity but because of their questionable value to the church. Many in Protestant traditions cite Revelation 22:18–19 as a potential curse for those who attach any canonical authority to extra-biblical writings such as the Apocrypha. However, a strict explanation of this text would indicate it was meant for only the Book of Revelation. Rv.22:18–19f. (KJV) states: “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.” In this case, if one holds to a strict hermeneutic, the “words of the prophecy” do not refer to the Bible as a whole but to Jesus’ Revelation to John.”
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocrypha
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George
What does you or I adding something have to do with including all biblical accounts (books)? It is not wikipedia. I am talking about books in the biblical sense not all books around the world and then some.
Considering you have not read all of them how do you know whether or not they match up with the old or new testament? On top of that is the purpose of them to match up with one another or to testify of the truthfulness of God and son? You either want the truthfulness of God or you want information to fit what you want to believe.
Even in the king James version of the bible, I was told that the book is the most accurate but the ruling king made changes to go in line with his rule.
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Pay it forward
Thank you for adding that information. I just ran across it in my search.
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@ Solesearch
Did you miss my comment here?
Most of what you’ve said is covered here. I also highlighted the main problem with treating Evolutionary theory as factual rather than an unproven system of beliefs.
Do not allow your faith to get in the way of your commitment to the scientific method…!
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Kwamla,
Yes, I did.
So what part of this don’t you agree with?
That the accumulation of mutations create new species?
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Kwamla,
Humans have created new varieties plants and animals in a short amount of time through artificial selection or domestication. I don’t understand your objection to this process. Or is your question what denotes a new species? How many mutations does it take to create a new species and/or what type of mutations does it take?
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Abagond,
“Maybe some forms of Christianity ask you to turn off your brain. The one I am most familiar with, Catholicism, does not.”
Can you be an agnostic catholic?
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Is it news that the Bible and the Quran and every other defining religious book are works of Fiction?
Obsessing about “missing” books in the Bible is like wondering about missing episodes of the Honeymooners.
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@ Solesearch
Its all very well to do this with plants. Are you suggesting this was or could be done with humans?
Remember what you are describing is an artificial process none of which would have occurred on its own through a process of Evolution or “natural selection”. If you did not know such plants or animals were artificially created and you attempted to prove these were a direct result of “natural evolution” do you believe you would get very far?
Think about what you are implying here and ask yourself where is the scientifically observed evidence for the change of one species through a natural (non-artificial) process into another one. A process from which we could build a law around ?
There isn’t one…! And your comment here has beautifully illustrated this point.
So thank you for making it..!.
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Kwamla,
“Its all very well to do this with plants. Are you suggesting this was or could be done with humans?
Remember what you are describing is an artificial process none of which would have occurred on its own through a process of Evolution or “natural selection”. If you did not know such plants or animals were artificially created and you attempted to prove these were a direct result of “natural evolution” do you believe you would get very far?
Think about what you are implying here and ask yourself where is the scientifically observed evidence for the change of one species through a natural (non-artificial) process into another one. A process from which we could build a law around ?
There isn’t one…! And your comment here has beautifully illustrated this point.
So thank you for making it..!.”
The same process works for plants and animals. There are domesticated animals as well.
So you’re saying the process can only work through artificial selection…? Not through natural selection? You don’t believe the environment selects which mutations are beneficial? Or is it that it only does it for plants? The mutation process is the same for plants and animals. I don’t understand what you’re objection is.
Here are the examples you asked for:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/100201_speciation
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George Ryder
“for all practical purposes you are talking about an ancient bible wikipedia where everyone and anyone Bible related would be included. terrible idea”—I am not talking about a “biblical” wikipedia as in that case things are added on a whim. I am talking about actual books that exist that were originally to be included in the bible, but were not because it did not fit with the ruling king.
“you and i both know how long and convoluted that book would be if there were no canon. there are very good reasons the other books aren’t included (just do a google search and you can find out for yourself)”—I have done quite an extensive search and ” because it did not fit with the time” is not a good reason for them not to be added.
http://www.bibleufo.com/anomlostbooks.htm
“And King James didn’t change any content, where are you getting this info?”—Removing information is still changing it. I do believe this would apply to all biblical accounts not just King James version
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@ George
Any further talk on religion I will take to another thread because it seems to be going off topic in here. I will simply post to link with any further replies.
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@Solesearch
“Here are the examples you asked for:”
He’ll tell you that’s not really speciation, because the new animals are of the same “kind” as their ancestors, in 5… 4… 3…
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George Ryder
That is because you did not read my source to begin with. It actually does not mention ufo other than in the name of the url. Besides most of his information can be found in other sources as well with a Google search plus the added bonuses that he mentions theologians reports. So the idea that it is not credible is based solely on what YOU want to believe and not on any findings that it is not.
Though not one source disputes that the reason they were removed was based on it not fighting with the churches or kings idea of what the book should reflect. I am curious on what source you have that days other wise?
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Says
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Correction fitting
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This is the proper thread to discuss this.
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Eco,
“He’ll tell you that’s not really speciation, because the new animals are of the same “kind” as their ancestors, in 5… 4… 3…”
Yes, I’m sure. I’m just using this to make sure I understand evolution. Looking for missing links in my own knowledge.
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Well Done eco !
At least you’ve proved you understand the question which Solesearch is having such a hard time trying to grasp! And I can’t think why because it really is not that difficult.
eco is quite right to point out that they are indeed still the same kind – birds! And they are even still within the same family of birds finches! So this is not the observed scientific evolutionary evidence I asked for and the article itself should be ashamed of pretending it does! When it clearly does not!
Here is some more perspective for you Solesearch concerning the nonsensical evolutionary proposition that some form of Ape could turn into a humanoid being (one kind into a another new kind)
Apes have 48 chromosomes and Humans 46. How did this happen? Observable scientific evidence would show us variants of Ape like beings and Humanoid like beings with with 46,48, even 47 chromosomes through a process of “natural genetic mutation”
Perhaps you would like to spend some time searching for this type of evidence?
Good luck with that…!
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@Kwamla
“So this is not the observed scientific evolutionary evidence I asked for”
Sure it is. You’re using a nonscientific, purposely undefined term “kind”, that can mean whatever you want it to mean, and allows you to reject any valid evidence of speciation.
“Apes have 48 chromosomes and Humans 46. How did this happen?”
Chromosome fusion. Even high school kids know this kind of stuff… Just google it.
“Observable scientific evidence would show us variants of Ape like beings and Humanoid like beings with with 46,48, even 47 chromosomes”
Again, a straw man, a misinterpretation of the theory of evolution. Mutations do not have to be beneficial thus we have no reason to expect to see species representing all possible mutations. People with 47 chromosomes exist, but for example: kids with Down’s syndrome aren’t likely to start a new species.
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eco,
As usual you are attempting to make things more complicated than they are. I have already presented examples of what “kind” would be defined as. You have also admitted it is not possible for one kind of species to turn into another kind. But this is what the theory of evolution would have us believe.
Lets keep it simple. Lets look at the evidence for apes (primates) turning into humans. Where is the evidence for this “natural” Chromosome fusion that took place? Its no good saying such things are possible but then being unable to find the evidence to support it. That is non-scientific working backwards from unsubstantiated beliefs.
But unfortunately, this does seem to be the form most of your arguments take.
“… Mutations do not have to be beneficial thus we have no reason to expect to see species representing all possible mutations…
Question: How are mutations then chosen as part of “natural selection”?
Or are you just making this up as you go along?
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@Kwamla
“it is not possible for one kind of species to turn into another kind. But this is what the theory of evolution would have us believe.”
No, no it doesn’t. That’s a straw man. Maybe that’s how some people who never had 8th grade biology understand it, but it’s not what the theory of evolution actually implies. When mutations accumulate a species can become so diverse that it no longer makes sense to classify it as one. That is how new species are created. They are never something drastically different than their ancestors. We are still eukaryota, still animals, still primates, and so on. We’ve never truly became a new “kind”. Nothing ever is a new “kind”.
“Its no good saying such things are possible but then being unable to find the evidence to support it.”
A nice summary:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2012/07/19/the-mystery-of-the-missing-chromosome-with-a-special-guest-appearance-from-facebook-creationists/
“Question: How are mutations then chosen as part of ‘natural selection’?”
The ones that survive, that get passed on to the carrier’s offspring, are the successful ones.
“Or are you just making this up as you go along?”
Have you ever read a high school biology textbook?
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Ahh…eco…
This paragraph of yours above illustrates why I requested to you several comments ago to explain in your own words the basics of what you understand Evolutionary theory claims to be about.
I wanted it to be clear what it was you were claiming Evolution and the process of Darwinian evolution was really about. I even helped you when you declined by quoting you a simple one from wikipedia. So while you seem at pains to point out to me that it is not about the changing of one kind of species into another. In your explanation, it seems, this is exactly what you are describing!!!
I’ve highlighted it in bold for you so you can deny your own explanation again! Eco.. you are simply being disingenuous if you believe the process you describe does not attempt to account for the same process of changing one kind of species into another (example; Apes into Humans) Anyone can see it does!
Clearly you are saying that Apes and Humans share the same common ancestry. We do share between 95 -98.5% of the same DNA (according to the latest science) – This is true but we are clearly different beings.Different species perhaps?
This is part of the problem of simply holding steadfastly to indoctrinated beliefs be they Evolutionist or Creationist. Neither, in my view and in a good deal of many others, stand up to reasoned, rational scrutiny.
Instead these anomalies like: “the missing humans with 48 chromosomes” call for another investigative approach which takes a more rational and reasoned scientific account of the observed evidence.
Which, incidentally, the evidence you provided for the explanation of chromosome fusion appears not to do so (depending on who you read of course!)
So neither science involved in Evolutionary or Creationist theories can account for the REAL truth about human origins and the origin of life on this planet. For that we really need to turn to a third alternative and that one is an Interventionist theory
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@Kwamla
“while you seem at pains to point out to me that it is not about the changing of one kind of species into another. In your explanation, it seems, this is exactly what you are describing!!!”
No, it isn’t. What I’m talking about are subgroups, more diversity, more species within a “kind”, not changing “kinds”.
What you are talking about would look like this:
First there is a “kind” of animals
[]
Then, because of mutations, it’s becoming more diverse, separating:
[ | ]
And finally we have two separate “kinds”:
[] []
That’s not evolution.
Evolution looks more like this:
First there is a “kind”
[]
Then, because of mutations, it’s becoming more diverse:
[ | ]
And finally we have subgroups:
[ () () ]
There is more diversity within a “kind”, but “kinds” do not change into other ones. Later, we can have subgroups withing the subgroups, but everything would still be in that original “kind”.
That’s obviously a simplification of the process, but it’s still far more accurate than talking about “kinds” turning into different “kinds”.
“you are simply being disingenuous if you believe the process you describe does not attempt to account for the same process of changing one kind of species into another (example; Apes into Humans)”
I’m not disingenuous, I simply paid attention during my high school biology classes.
Go to wikipedia and look up “Homo sapiens”. On the right you should see a panel called “Scientific classification”. These are some of the groups we belong to. They are not separate things. Each is contained within the ones above it.
Click on the Family, it’s “Hominidae”, a.k.a. “great apes”. This means we are not great apes that turned into humans. We are humans, a subgroup of great apes. We are still great apes. We haven’t turned into something that isn’t a great ape.
So when you said earlier:
“chimpanzee evolving directly over successive time generations and turning into an X-man/woman.”
That wasn’t evolution at all. What can happen is new subgroups developing within existing ones. So we are not going to see a chimp evolving into a human. They are not our ancestors and their offspring aren’t going to evolve into us. They can develop their own subgroups that may be human like, but they are not going to be homo sapiens, because they are not going to be able to erase their chimp ancestry, their chimp subgroup, from their DNA.
“Instead these anomalies like: ‘the missing humans with 48 chromosomes’ ”
I do not see which part of the theory of evolution implies such a species should be around today. I do not see how this is a problem for evolution.
“So neither science involved in Evolutionary or Creationist theories can account for the REAL truth about human origins and the origin of life on this planet. For that we really need to turn to a third alternative and that one is an Interventionist theory”
Oh Christ… Of course you think aliens did it. What else could you believe? I’m sure the, you know, lack of known aliens isn’t bothering you. Oh wait, I remember now. You believe aliens live amongst people, right? Yeah, that’s totally more rational than evolution.
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To Kwamla:
“…Human DNA reveals evidence for Intervention. Lloyd Pye discusses the smoking gun inside human DNA- humans could not have evolved by mutation and natural selection…”
Consider the source:
“Lloyd Anthony Pye Jr. was an American author and paranormal researcher best known for his promotion of the Starchild skull. He claimed it was the relic of a human-alien hybrid, although DNA testing showed it to be from a human male..”
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@ Uncle Milton
I don’t know where you obtained your source for this testing:
“… although DNA testing showed it to be from a human male….”
Perhaps you would like to share it. Meanwhile you can read about the late Dr Lloyd Pye’s extensive testing and years of research here:
http://www.lloydpye.com/starchildskull.htm
You might also be interested to check out the work of Dr Stephen Greer who has also done his own similar study on the remains of another undeniable human-ET hybrid he found.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRKLJ_o8Pjw&hd=1)
But, if you carry on researching you will find there are indeed others too who have found similar remains and also DNA tested them. With the same results.
The challenge lies not in the DNA testing but in the scientists doing the testing keeping hold of their reputations. Since the established scientific orthodoxy are keen to maintain your erroneous conclusion.
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Seems Darwin was more complex than we realise today. Just because he was an abolitionist didn’t stop him from believing in natural hierarchies of humans. I have a similar post:
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[…] Source: https://abagond.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/darwin-the-races-of-man/ […]
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Reblogged this on Project ENGAGE.
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