Was Darwin a Racist?

EDIT: This thread has been spun off from a discussion in a thread about Creation, a film about Charles Darwin's life. The post below is a response to this post.

That would depend on the aims of the brotherhood, wouldn't it? If it's all kumbaya and campfires, then sure, very nice. If it's part of a "here, let's help you poor dark-skinned people become civilized like us," then not so much.

Regardless, though On the Origin of Species doesn't contain anything too overt (though, as you've noticed, significant qualifiers like "no more racist than anyone else of his time" are necessary), it does make reference to "savages," which he examines much in the same way one would an animal.

Things become more overt in his next book on the subject, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, which was published 12 years later. In it, he has a chapter on race where he talks openly about how the "civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world," and specifically notes the difference in "intellectual faculties" among races.

Darwin also says that mankind will evolve to the point where the gap between the next-lowest rung will widen. He helpfully offers up examples of this gap, saying the gap will be wider than that between "even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as the baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla." There are, of course, plenty of examples like this where he explicitly states his belief in a racial hierarchy.

And, of course, there's simple logic. Whether or not the theory is owed to a desire to justify an existing racism is obviously difficult to demonstrate, I see little doubt that it has that effect. That's certainly where the thinking leads; if we are merely the products of evolution, how would one avoid the notion that some are more "evolved" than others? It's the logical conclusion of what he was postulating, and he seems to have made this direct observation many times.

So, yeah, kudos for not liking slavery, but I don't know that that actually tells us much about his racism. He just might have been a bit more intellectual and above-the-fray about it. I'm not sure that isn't worse, in some ways. I prefer ignorance to sound as ignorant as possible, for easy identification.

It's a mixture of both, from what I understand. The 'kumbaya' bit is that he promoted the idea of all humans being one species (& hence any potential 'fitness' is achievable by members of any racial group). On these grounds he's way ahead of his time.

He still talks the talk of the time, and does seem to believe in the superiority of white cultures, this is true. But surely you'd agree that patronising benevolence and recognition of 'brotherhood' is preferable to sanctioned exploitation and accusations of inherent inferiority?

That's a rather vague sentence. Do you mean he examined their teeth like a horse and kicked the backs of their legs to check sturdiness? Or do you mean he viewed them from the perspective of humans being of the animal kingdom, as he did with his own children's behaviour, for example? (This is, after all, the man who called his wife-to-be the "most interesting specimen in the whole series of vertebrate animals" )

That quote was a worry of his, not a desire. Such a concern is patronising, but not without precedent (the Spanish extermination of the Aztecs etc).

The latter mini-quote needs context:

It's not like he's saying 'these guys can't do maths', which is what could be assumed from your mini-quote alone. This seems a relatively benign bit of stereotyping, for the time.

(Any evolutionary forces he might then ascribe to these 'distinct' traits could turn down an uglier path, but without further context i can only speculate. His focus in 'Relation to Sex' was partially on the role of partner-selection in driving variety & non-adaptive traits, so I dare say he could go on to say that taciturnity in South Americans has been selected in this way. That's still a far cry from the 'you are inferior and you cannot change' mindset of his time, which is still inherent in the views of modern racists.)

He does seem to be talking about non-Caucasians as taxonomically 'lower' there, which would seem to be at odds with the 'all are Homo Sapiens' stance. I'd appreciate any other 'racial hierarchy' quotes you have to hand. (Incidentally, he's not actually talking about evolution here, but extinction - IE the removal of 'living links' in the evolutionary 'chain').

And of course, this is where you were leading all the time. It's only a miracle you haven't mentioned Hitler yet.

Firstly, your logic is awry. Evolution isn't considered a 'rising scale' of superiority (but rather an ebb & flow of 'suitability' to an environment - the other meaning of 'fittest' so conveniently forgotten by many who read 'power politics' into evolution). The physical 'plasticity' inherent in all species means each one can sustain numerous iterations which may have an incremental advantage in any given environment (& these advantages often are extremely minimal). Conceptually, it seems more accurate to suggest that individuals may be superior in certain circumstances, but inferior in others.

And that's before we actually get to the modern science. 'Racial' (read regional) genetics currently works under the following mantra: "most genetic differences between individuals occur within traditional racial groups, not across racial divides". This is a conceit that will be tested as the science progresses, but for now no key or 'superior' trait has been found to reside within one race but not another. (Mind you, we haven't really found any 'superior trait genes' full stop )

Which leads to the question... how much did Darwin's views shape his science, and the science that came out of it...

From the reading I've done around this now, it seems that Darwin did indeed entertain many racial prejudices (even if we could say he was more enlightened than many around him on several fronts).

(Incidentally I'd recommend reading this amazon review for a particularly convincing counter-argument to some of the broader claims being made for the influence of the 'brotherhood' aspect, and Darwin's tempered-racism)

The question then is, what legacy did this 'ignorance' leave? Modern versions of evolution don't lend support to racism. Are they products of their time? Most likely. Are the scientific discoveries that have emerged from Darwin's work flexible and far-reaching enough to touch on large swathes of human existence? Seems that way. Can they be abused? Yep. Do they show any signs of Victorian racism? No they don't.

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Another question we could ask is: Did he have any other notable drives or beliefs that did leave a legacy. Well, we could look to his insistence on repeated, long-term, inventive experiments to test his key theories, and his wide-ranging interest in the work of others. And at how the theories that survived these approaches spawned many core principles & facts that are held as true to this day. Those traits could be worth looking at too

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Found an interesting section in 'Descent' which conflicts with the vitriolic racist that you're trying to portray Yods. (And at the very least, seems to further discredit the 'intellectual faculties' argument you've put forward.)

(It's worth noting that 'race' was used at the time for cabbages as much as people IE it meant variants within a species. As such his first work isn't quite the Neo-Nazi handbook that its 'Preservation of Favoured Races' appellation suggests. Although i dare say he did see Caucasian culture as 'favoured' - just not in a 'genetic' sense per se)

We're still cherrypicking here. There's plenty more 'savagery' & sordid Victoriana lurking within his works, I'm sure. But that quote should surely give you pause for thought. No? It's hardly a standard racist sentiment.

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And here's a little more on the 'negro' in question...

Again the Victorian trappings ain't that pretty, but the content really doesn't suggest a man who believed other races to be inherently mentally inferior etc.

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(PS, you might wanna shuttle these posts off to their own thread . How about 'Was Darwin a Racist?')

Just stumbled on a quote backing up the assertion that Darwin saw all races as of the same species (putting him well ahead of the game for the time)

The Euro-centric cultural-superiority theme is still there of course. On his 'between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla' quote, the TalkOrigins site makes a reasonable case for it being about cultural superiority, not biological, incidentally.

Taken within the context of his time, and given his anti-slavery, 'one of my best friends is black', 'equal intellectual capacity' stances, even his cultural racism seems to be of a lesser order than the norms of the time. On those grounds I reckon the big D comes out looking about as 'unracist' as you could get for that period of history. (And given that his remit is the biological, his theories on evolution don't contain any racism per se).

I'd like to flesh this out a little. I don't know with great specificity just what the "norms" were in that time (I'd actually imagine they're more divergent than they are now, and harder to pin down), but I've been frequently surprised by how old-school racism often seemed perfectly willing to accept that the supposedly-lesser races were human, just of an inferior sort.

Preferable in a vacuum, but in practice I'm not sure it makes any difference, or that it's not more insidious. The idea that some races are not really human is made largely out of ignorance which can be theoretically fixed with knowledge. The idea that one race is superior to another culturally, or something of the sort, is a lot harder to disprove, and it's the type of racism that persists to this day. It's a much tougher sort of weed. I call this progress in only the vaguest, most abstract sense of the word.

I actually don't remember which reference to "savages" I was thinking of when I mentioned that. There are quite a few. But I see your point, about how detached he seems to be about this sort of thing in general. More on that in a moment.

The full context of the quote doesn't convey any worry to me at all. Whether or not it contains a desire is admittedly arguable (I'm on the fence myself), though he clearly seems to regard it as factual. He also unveils a clear racial chain-of-command at the end of the passage, which I already quoted in the last post (it's the "...some ape as low as the baboon" one).

This is the central argument, I think: the claim that Darwin clearly believed black people (and Australians, incidentally, which now sounds so random as to almost be amusing) to be inferior to whites. The defense is that lots of people back then did, and by acknowledging their humanity at all, he was ahead of his time. I imagine we agree so far.

This may all be true, but I'm not sure it gets us nearer an actual answer. Being awarded humanity, only to be simultaneously deemed an inferior form of it, seems like a bit of a booby prize to me, and on net I'm not sure it's even much of a positive. Whatever gain may come from being recognized as some generic brand of humanity would seem to be lost by such a claim being scientifically codified. In other words, I'll take people who think I'm sub-human through their own ignorance over a man who thinks I'm just flat-out inferior through his own scientific deduction. The former affords me a much better chance of changing minds, for one.

It's not unlike the old Lewis quote that "of all bad men religious bad men are the worst." Similarly, I'd say the worst kind of ignorance is that which comes from educated men. Not only because they should know better, but because their ignorance almost invariably comes with a kind of self-assurance -- and likely authority -- that have ideological consequences for people around them. If a guy on a street corner holds up a sign that says the world is ending, nobody cares and nobody panics or gets hurt. If a guy in a lab coat does it, more people listen.

So, what we really have are two branches of argument: whether Darwin's beliefs were morally superior or inferior for his time, and whether or not they're harmful, regardless of his intention. You bring this up later, anyway, so onward...

Well, the important part is whether "intellectual faculties" refers to innate intelligence or just education. These days it certainly reads like the former. I don't think the context really leans in either direction, though; he clearly seems to favor the "light-hearted, talkative negroes" as superior to the "taciturn, even morose, aborigines," no?

I haven't found anything more damning than that one, I don't think, but I'm not sure. Serves me right for not replying for a friggin' year, or whatever it's been. I had more, I swear! But we seem to agree that his focus is largely on cultural superiority, anyway.

Well, it's a debate about racism and survival of the fittest. It was inevitable. Screw Godwin; it's a stupid law.

Technically, yes, but in practice there's not a lot of debate about things like intelligence always being more useful. It is the dominant trait of importance, far and away. Given that intelligence is the chief thing that makes us more "evolved" than animals, I don't think it's unreasonable to operate under the assumption that more "evolved" versions of ourselves would chiefly be smarter, rather than faster or stronger.

I doubt Darwin knew this at the time. But your point is a fair one all the same, so I should modify my remark not to say that belief in more-evolved humans is inevitable, just that it's probably likely based on generalizations about intelligence. And that generalizing about intelligence being the thing that makes us "fittest" is reasonable.

Ah, here we are: back to the "what were the effects?" line of thought. This is admittedly very nebulous. Darwin is, for all his importance, probably just a cup in the bucket rather than a lowly drop, so we can't parse out all the effects of his work. But we can probably agree that Darwin clearly regarded "civilized" man as significantly superior to the "savages," which has tremendous implications for British imperialism. Indeed, you could hardly custom-build a more convenient justification for it.

It's fair to wonder, I think, given the proximity of his thoughts on natural selection to his thoughts on cultural superiority, whether or not he regarded civilization and culture as the next form of evolution. IE: in the same way intelligence is a very different form of progress than strength or speed, so to is culture a very different use of intelligence than mere survival. There's nothing explicit here, just speculation on my part.

By the by, I'm a firm believer in "never judge a belief system by its abuses" (with exceptions for the outliers, perhaps), so I'm not suggesting that any of this has much to do with the validity of his work. The discussion started when I wondered aloud if the film would touch on the racial aspects of the book. It's not so much that I think he was a fire-breathing racist (again, relative to his time), as that I'm perturbed by how rarely the racial aspect of natural selection gets talked about. It's a very dehumanizing theory, and it lends itself so naturally to prejudice. I don't believe we should cease to teach things because they can be abused, but who do you hear even talking about this outside of Christians looking to take the guy down a peg? It's an important aspect of the theory and the circumstances under which it was formed, but we've whitewashed even the book's title in many instances to tiptoe around it.

Oh, sure. I didn't mean this as an indictment of the totality of the man, and I wouldn't expect Creation to dwell on this one topic. I would simply hope it would address it in some form. Perhaps it does; has anyone here seen it?

By the by, I read your more recent posts and figured my response covered the same sort of ground, but let me know if you think I missed anything.

Wow, Yoda. I just got through reading your lengthy post and there's pretty much nothing I can add to the discussion that hasn't already been addressed. I have to say I agree with virtually every point you made, and even gained some new perspective on the argument. Race, with its debated existence, its vagaries in definition, its historical significance, and in particular its social implications is always a delicate topic. I think you managed to make reasonable, sound observations on Darwin and his theories without falling into the trap of simply dismissing his work on the basis of its admittedly racist implications.

I mean...just...damn... There's literally nothing I can say that would sustain the quality of discourse here. I do have a question, though, that you need not answer. What is your 'race,' or since one can hardly be categorized in such a way, what is your ethnicity? Again, that wouldn't change my thoughts on your responses and you don't have to tell me, but I'd just be interested to know. In the interest of equal exposure, I'm African-Irish (dad's side) Filipino-Chinese (mom's side) American.

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"I want a film I watch to express either the joy of making cinema or the anguish of making cinema" -Francois Truffaut

Ah, very kind of you, C&W. Indeed, any discussion I have with Gol is always an enlightening experience. As I've often said, tongue-in-cheekly: it's annoying that he takes such reasonable positions, and I often take forever to reply because I can't swat the things he says out of the air, as is possible with people who are more careless in what they believe (and say). Things would be simpler and easier if he weren't so thoughtful about it all.

Re: my own race. Don't mind you asking at all. German-Scot-Irish, so I fall under the big heading of "WHITE," though beyond that I don't look definitively like any of those three. By the by, though I doubt it's an issue, I hope that no one took any of my comments to insinuate, by arguing hypothetically in the first person about prejudice, that I was a minority, or suggesting I have been persecuted for my own race. If anyone thought that, my apologies; it wasn't my intent.

Re: your own race. African-Irish on your dad's side? Now there's a pairing you don't see everyday. Quite a varied heritage. If you don't mind me asking (and not to get too far off-topic), but are you predominantly one of the four, or is it a fairly even mix? Have you traced your heritage back at all? Because that could be one wild family tree, insofar as genealogies can be wild.

I agree, many of Golgot's arguments were nearly impossible to debate because of their sound logic. But I think you managed to 'win' that discussion (whatever that means). And to be clear, I actually assumed you were white because your argument didn't seem to be emotionally motivated. It never, and I mean never, slipped into a personal discussion on race.

Not to get too far off the discussion, but yeah, I've traced my family tree back to the early 1800's for a school project I did years ago, and it is wild. My ancestors f*cked liked bonobos, with little regard for skin color or social mores on miscegenation. My dad's grandfather was a light-skinned Louisiana Creole (which I suppose also makes me a little French), which I guess looks kind of white, and he moved to Chicago and married an Irish woman. I wonder if she knew he was black? Anyway, my dad's as dark as Denzel, his brother's as light as, say, Rock Hudson, and I resemble a tanned Cary Grant in flesh tone.

My mom's side is much simpler: Her father was born in China, 100% Chinese; her mother was born in the Philippines, 100% Filipino. She was born in the Philippines and moved here at a young age and married my father-a black man, which her family frowned upon and still does.

Yeah, way off topic for this thread, but there you have it.

Hopefully one day, the idea of what race we belong to will be singular, that is to say human.

Maybe the day after that the flying car dealership will open in my neighborhood as well.

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"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo.

This is going to sound like false modesty, but I kind of think Gol's knocked me around a little here. Not saying that to try to sound gracious or anything, either. I usually don't bother to argue with something unless I feel pretty confident about it, and I feel much less confident on some of these particular points than on most of those I discuss.

Then again, it really depends on what we're arguing about -- it's getting hard to tell. If it's just about whether or not there are elements of racism in Darwin's work, and whether or not those should be addressed by the film, I feel I'm on solid ground, and Gol (Tom, by the by) would probably agree with me, anyway. The degree to which I'm right or wrong depends on the degree to which I want to use the word "racist" to apply to a man who lived in a time where most people were racist, and to be honest, I don't know the answer. It's a fair label, but misleading without a caveat or two.

The argument has kind of evolved, anyway, from "should they talk about racism in the movie?" to "was Darwin a racist considering the time he lived in?" to "was Darwin's work harmful even if he wasn't particularly racist for his time?" I think Tom makes a very good case in regards to the second of those questions, though I feel pretty firm on the first and third. But this is how he and I argue, anyway: we're kind of all over the place and as soon as we agree on something or concede a point it goes right on to the next thing, so that we invariably end up talking about the most nebulous, hardest-to-prove stuff anyway. It's a form of argumentative natural selection that weeds out the weakest, easiest-to-disprove arguments and leaves us with the impossible ones.

I won't prod you with any more questions about your ethnicity, but that's some pretty fascinating stuff. Interesting how one side of the family is all over the place, but the other is two people almost totally of one race each. Contrasts even within contrasts.

Oh, and re: discussion turning personal. Couldn't agree more about the importance of that. Though I concede that, from time to time, I do wonder about the role that the personal has in such sensitive discussions. I've no idea whether or not it clouds, or informs, things like this. Probably both. How's that for taking a position?

And then the day after that, maybe your flying car will hit a flying pig. (i.e. it ain't gonna happen). Hopefully soon enough, people will be having sex with enough people of slightly differing 'races' that the gene pool will mix completely and we'll all look like one indistinguishable 'race.'

And what exactly is race, for that matter? How can one be distinguished from another? What makes a black person different racially from a white person? Skin color? Because then where does the line separate the two? I don't know, random thoughts that don't require a response.

I dunno...Tom and Chris are sort of the Twin Towers of debate here on the site. Both have extremely well-tuned debate machines chugging along in their heads.

I can bring a pretty decent debate to the table, but in comparison to these guys, I am rarely informed enough/a match for either of them.

I like this fact, because it's a constant reminder that people of diametrically opposed politic can both put forth solid, intelligent argument. Not what the news media would have us believe...

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So true, Sedai, the problems with news media outlets requires a thread of its own. And I assume Chris and Tom are Yoda and Golgot?

You can't apply modern standards of equality to a historical figure. Darwin sounds a lot like Abraham Lincoln who also expressed what we would now consider racist attitudes, but whose perception about Blacks during the Civil War as he interacted with them by meeting leading Black figures of the time changed quite a bit. Unlike today, racist attitudes was the norm and you had to be thinking way out of the box to get away from it. Even many of the more liberal anti-slave thinkers of the time expressed some racist attitudes as we would now call it in their speeches and writings. But it's pretty mild compared to what the leading overt white supremacists were saying.

I can't tell if that's meant as dissent for the points made by Golgot and Yoda, or if you're reinforcing their statements. Because I think both of them repeatedly clarified that the social climate has changed dramatically since Darwin and his beliefs were pretty forward-thinking if not progressive for the era.

I think I'm going to have start with your last point here, as it's the one I disagree with the most, and it percolates throughout the other issues...

But it seems there is no racial aspect to his argument as such. Biologically speaking (and this was his remit) his conclusion is that all races are of one species. He doesn't seem at any point to make a biological argument for superiority or inferiority between races. (If anything he emphasises the opposite, pointing out that 'intelligence' is common currency around the world etc).

All the 'cultural superiority' perspectives that appear in his work seem to arise in the more conjectural and conversational areas, in keeping with the style of the time. I'm not aware of him focusing any of his scientific skills on the theme of cultural difference (in terms of creating experiments & comparing with the literature of the time - the backbone of his rigorous approach to biology/archaeology for which he's known etc).

You're going to have to qualify those statements. How specifically is it 'dehumanising'? And in what ways does it promote prejudice? (I know you're suggesting it embodies a 'fitter than thou' mind-set, but similar ideas emerge wherever people divide down tribal or cultural lines. That sort of thinking pre-dates Darwin by millennia. But more specifically I don't think you can extrapolate that argument from his work - I go into it in the 'intelligence as a measure of human evolution' bit below...)

I take it you're talking about Origin's subtitle: 'Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life'. As mentioned before:

(a) That book didn't deal with human evolution (deliberately so, as he knew it'd be controversial).
(b) 'Race' at that time was a term used for all 'sub species' and applied to cabbages, cows, what have you.

So there's nothing to whitewash. The fact that people normally only mention the catchy main title is far from unusual.

I've resorted to wiki to try and get a flavour of the time. It backs up what I've read incidentally of 'sub human' science doing the rounds at the time. 'Polygenist' theories etc. D looks good in comparison.

Given that plenty of racists also believe in biological superiority of their race, or the inferiority of others, then I'd say both strands remain important - and D should get some kudos for not buying into that one (and for being on the 'soft' end of the former).

If you ask anyone who's been on racially abused, you'll often find that it's the 'biological' defamation that stays with them the longest (IE being told 'Your food stinks' / 'Your country is backward' is bad, but being told 'You stink' / 'You're inherently lazy' etc comes with the subtext of it being an ingrained / unchangeable part of yourself).

Well, as I say, there was precedent for Western cultures wiping out newly 'discovered' ones etc. The reason for seeing it as a worry rather than a desire is that he often speaks with admiration of the 'savage' cultures he's encountered. He certainly never voices any opinion approximating to 'wipe these people off the earth' or the like.

Further he was also a fan of flora and fauna, so to interpret the quote as being desirous of these extinctions would imply he looked forward to the 'anthropomorphous apes' being wiped out too. Seems unlikely.

On the face of it it seems very damning. Contextually tho it looks quite possible that he's blurring biological & cultural taxonomy to communicate with his audience (and/or because of confusions in his own theories at the time as to the influence of 'nurture' on evolution). As I say the TalkOrigins argument makes a reasonable case for this being the situation. It's not entirely satisfactory on its own, but given that his broader theory suggest there should be no significant 'fitness' difference within species, and given his more clearly evoked arguments for all races belonging to one species, I currently see this as far less damning/conclusive than it first appears.

Nope, we are at odds here . The majority of the material I've seen suggests he didn't believe 'black' to be inferior to 'white' in terms of race etc, but did believe 'West' to be superior to 'Everywhere else', as it were. The only defence of the latter is that it seems likely to have been the norm (Imperial beliefs of superiority etc), coloured by his occasional personalised expressions of admiration for 'savages' etc.

He certainly does seem to have a preference there. I think I can only turn to the intelligence he mentions in his 'negro' friend from previous quotes, which suggests to me he thought 'intelligence' a trait obtainable by all (and that again would be in keeping with his definitions of us as one human group etc).

Well you're welcome to bring ole tiny tash to the party, but I think you'll find there's more evidence that Himmler's chicken husbandry influenced their eugenics policies than Darwin doing so. (One interesting snippet I read today was that the German translation of Origin had 'progressive perfection' ideas shoehorned in by the translator which Darwin never supported - IE the idea that evolution moves towards 'perfection').

Sure but it still falls down at the hurdle that traditional Darwinism doesn't seem to suggest that said intellectual fitness is unobtainable by any race, and modern evo theories certainly don't. (Furthermore, mainstream 'Neo Darwinism' would also suggest that any inherent advantages would arise over glacial time frames, & would spread throughout the species if their benefit was of any great significance). On the 'legacy' front it's not like anyone's out there saying Americans are inherently smarter than Afghanistanis. Not any biological scientists anyway ()

As with many things attributed to big D, I think they existed well before him. Certainly Imperialism was virulent enough then that I think the causal arrow points from it to him, rather than the other way round

It's a fair point, and as the TalkOrigin piece suggests, he was somewhat undecided on the role of culture in evolution even towards the end. Certainly the orthodoxy that arose from his work has shifted away from such 'Lamarkian' ideas of daily lives impinging on genetics, so in that sense his legacy is again not one that could be said to back up 'culture creates uber-humans' lines of thought. (But there is a lot of fun modern thought on the issue - it tends to run more along the lines of environments boosting or stifling the 'plastic' possibilities inherent in the average joe).

I have I'll stick my review below.

And as it happens, no, they don't touch on it that I recall. But given that it's very much focused on his family life, they don't touch on a huge swathes of his life or science all told. (Mind you, if a more sci/social-focused version were made, I'd want it to show his peers outraged at being not only descended from apes but, the trappings of society aside, no different from a black gentleman too )

Ah yes, sorry to use actual names - I need to stop doing that!


As to the point count on this particular issue, I think both of you are nailing some issues down pretty well, but as I mentioned earlier, you are approaching the material from diametrically opposed standpoints that have inherent differences for which there is no middle ground. You could try to keep it in a strictly political arena, but theology is invariably going to emerge as an important (and necessary) touchstone to the discussion. I mean, if one debater (Damn you The Toy for forever discoloring the word debater for me) is a man of faith while another is a man of science, you will eventually reach an stalemate on the validity of Darwin's entire works.

Good luck with this one!

So as Donnie Darko once said "If you can't know...well, I just don't debate it anymore, cause why bother??"

Why, Donnie? You were clearly never a MoFo, mister!



Oh and, on the whole inferior/superior human issue. Does this fall under Humanism? I know there is a specific school of thought centered around the concept... maybe it's part of nihilism?

I think it's also important to classify some of Darwin's conduct under Xenophobia, more so than racism.

(Here's that there review)

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And yes Mikey stop doing that

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Cheers for the kind words knocking around y'all, to both me and his Yodness. We do like the odd set to about news and taboos and what have you. Always good to have other people involved too tho

*TREBLE EDIT FOR LUCK*

Mikey Seds...

Hopefully we won't totally polarise out into nothing (I did love Yods' 'Chrisening' of 'selection of the impossible' as our argument style just now incidentally ). I think I may be inflating Darwin a little too large in response to the characterisations I feel are too broad, and certainly there are big Nazi/life-philosophy backdrops lurking around, but luckily things aren't quite that clear cut. On a normal day I'm a science-questioner as much as its defender - and one of the many things I've learnt from debating with C is that even those of strong religious convictions can be suffused with conceptual flexibility (I had to learn that, I know! ).

The point being, I'm hopeful we'll add more nuance to each other's views as much as force ourselves back into our respective pews

Not sure where this is all fits into the 'Humanism' picture - I always thought they just started with uber-athiesm then went from there? (Not really my bag. I'm happy with some ragtag agnosticism ). On the xenophobia distinction I think that does cover his more 'social superiority' angle, but again still lacks those little caveats that me and YC have got an accord going on (IE the idea that D has lines of thought that contradict even that tag too, at least for his times).

Maybe I missed it or it's a reference that somehow got lost somewhere, but I am interested in the part about Australians and where Yoda got that from because to me, at least in the context of Yod's argument, it seems clear that "Australians" refers to dark-skinned aborigines. Golgot rebuts this but once again there's no citation. I don't have a horse in this race (at least yet; what do you expect? I have a Biology degree), but this part I'm interested in hearing some clarification with backing evidence, if possible.

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