M
- Status
T
The_Barbarian
Guest
Read the list. Of course, there are a good number that don’t identify the person, so we don’t know what their qualifications are. But read the ones that are.
Silly accusation, and pointless. But an engineer or a computer programmer, or a minister are not scientists.
The job description specified evolutionary science.
They fired him because he didn’t want to do the job they hired him to do.
The grant specified research in developmental biology, a division of evolutionary science. The gentleman in question took the job, and then told his boss that he could not in good conscience do what the grant had funded. Why would anyone be surprised that he was told that he would be expected to do the job he was hired to do?
T
tonyl
Guest
Wow, if I ever get murdered and there are no witnesses, I hope you’re not on the jury.
The fact that no one was there is immaterial. There exist fossil evidence that supports the theory of evolution. In addition, there is a growing body of genetic information that correlates with the fossil evidence and supports the theory of evolution. Indeed, there is genetic evidence for which common descent is the only realistic explanation. In addition, the processes which are used to explain evolution have been observed by people and are continuing to be observed by people. For example here is an example of the recently observed evolution of a new structure in a group of lizards.
Why do you have to believe that their reasons are legitimate? There are people out there saying that HIV does not cause AIDS. But that does not mean that their reasons for doing so are legitimate. (And yes, there is a sizable number of people who say this, some of whom are scientists)
All evidence indicates that the interest in ID and creationism has been fairly stable for the last 20 years. Their rejection of evolution is not based on science but based on their inability to reconcile their specific religious beliefs with the science of evolution.
What approach? He didn’t have an approach, he just wanted to be excused from part of his job. He, like every other ID advocate, has yet to propose a theory of ID, nor has any ID advocate proposed any research program.
You can’t prove a negative, but there exists no evidence of the following:
- There exists a theory of ID.
- There are testable ID hypothesis.
- ID is being suppressed by the scientific community.
I
Icarus
Guest
Phrase borrowed from a very wiseman.
D
drpmjhess
Guest
The “no one was there” argument applies also to Genesis 1:1-2.
T
The_Barbarian
Guest
Even more to the point, people have directly observed the evolution of new species. Most creationists have now admitted that this is a fact.
Indeed, the ICR has endorsed John Woodmorappe’s idea of hyperevolution of species, genera, and families in a few thousand years, in order to make some sense of a literal interprestation of Noah’s Ark.
Indeed, the ICR has endorsed John Woodmorappe’s idea of hyperevolution of species, genera, and families in a few thousand years, in order to make some sense of a literal interprestation of Noah’s Ark.
D
drpmjhess
Guest
They would also have to endorse post-diluvial hyper-swift-continental drift to get the continents–with their loads of indigenous speices–into their current configuration. Koalas and kangaroos can’t swim that far!
Petrus
M
MaryJohnZ
Guest
Genesis !:1-2 is an inspired scripture verse, not the same thing as a fossil and the interpretation of the fossil.
The thing is that most scietific facts can be tested while Evolution and Darwinism rest on hypothesis that are stated as fact. The drawings of the animals based on the skeletons are all done based on supposition. No one can say for sure that they looked the way the artsist rendered them.
Besides, i feel the last run of posts have again been emotional smoke to draw attention away from the post I gave about the influence of American scientists of the Nazi movement. I posted that and immediately everyone was emotionally charging me with attacking Priests and other tangents, no one adfdressed the substance of that article, including the concern that the one
scientist escaped the Nazi trials and was part of the genetics movement in our country.
Also, in the line of fire against any notion that scietists with view points other than evolution were being persecuted in terms of finding work, being fired from job, etc. the bit about the education
community offering to assist anyone or group who felt they needed help fending off the includion of ID in classrooms was ignored as well.
Also, since one poster claims to have friends who are 'Priests" doing studies in evolution, why is it so impossible that some of the ministers and philosophers on the list of scientists are not also doing research? People can wear more than one hat after
all! I feel that again more smoke is being blown into the room to confuse and distort things. Again, I go along with CS Lewis who said:
‘What inclines me now to think that you may be right in regarding it [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders.’
Peace! I won’t counter any points until the article about the Nazi ties to eugenics movement in America are addressed in some kind of sincere way.
MaryJohnz
PS. I am reposting the article so you can address it.
M
MaryJohnZ
Guest
Excerpt from Eugenics and the Nazis – the California connection
sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/09/ING9C2QSKB1.DTL
Even the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes’ words in their own defense.
Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.
Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti- Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. Hitler’s race hatred sprung from his own mind, but the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.
During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany’s fascist eugenicists. In “Mein Kampf,” published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. “There is today one state,” wrote Hitler, “in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”
Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. “I have studied with great interest,” he told a fellow Nazi, “the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”
Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenics leader Madison Grant, calling his race-based eugenics book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” his “bible.”
Now, the American term “Nordic” was freely exchanged with “Germanic” or “Aryan.” Race science, racial purity and racial dominance became the driving force behind Hitler’s Nazism. Nazi eugenics would ultimately dictate who would be persecuted in a Reich-dominated Europe, how people would live, and how they would die. Nazi doctors would become the unseen generals in Hitler’s war against the Jews and other Europeans deemed inferior. Doctors would create the science, devise the eugenic formulas, and hand-select the victims for sterilization, euthanasia and mass extermination.
During the Reich’s early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler’s plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.
In 1934, as Germany’s sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe, upon returning from Germany, ebulliently bragged to a colleague, “You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”
That same year, 10 years after Virginia passed its sterilization act, Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, observed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”
More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany’s eugenic institutions.
By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 – almost $4 million in today’s money – to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 toward creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler’s systematic medical repression.
Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s complex of eugenics institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the institute, once again, was Hitler’s medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin’s organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.
Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.
Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, declared of Nazism, “While we were *****-footing around … the Germans were calling a spade a spade.”
A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For decades,
American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into heredity.
The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an unprecedented level. On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York dispatched a radiogram to its Paris office: JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON
TWINS AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM.
At the time of Rockefeller’s endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of that institute continued both directly and through other research conduits during Verschuer’s early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer left the institute to form a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that was much heralded in the American eugenics press. Research on twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed by government decrees. Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenics doctor’s journal he edited, that Germany’s war would yield a “total solution to the Jewish problem.”
Verschuer had a longtime assistant. His name was Josef Mengele.
On May 30, 1943, Mengele arrived at Auschwitz. Verschuer notified the German Research Society, “My assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer (captain) and camp physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anthropological testing of the most diverse racial groups in this concentration camp is being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsführer (Himmler).”
Mengele began searching the boxcar arrivals for twins. When he found them,
he performed beastly experiments, scrupulously wrote up the reports and sent the paperwork back to Verschuer’s institute for evaluation. Often, cadavers, eyes and other body parts were also dispatched to Berlin’s eugenic institutes.
Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenics studies in Nazi-occupied Europe before the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.
After the war, eugenics was declared a crime against humanity – an act of genocide. Germans were tried and they cited the California statutes in their defense – to no avail. They were found guilty.
However, Mengele’s boss Verschuer escaped prosecution. Verschuer re- established his connections with California eugenicists who had gone underground and renamed their crusade “human genetics.” Typical was an exchange July 25, 1946, when Popenoe wrote Verschuer, “It was indeed a pleasure to hear from you again. I have been very anxious about my colleagues in Germany . . . I suppose sterilization has been discontinued in Germany?” Popenoe offered tidbits about various American eugenics luminaries and then sent various eugenics publications. In a separate package, Popenoe sent some cocoa, coffee and other goodies.
Verschuer wrote back, “Your very friendly letter of 7/25 gave me a great deal of pleasure and you have my heartfelt thanks for it. The letter builds another bridge between your and my scientific work; I hope that this bridge will never again collapse but rather make possible valuable mutual enrichment and stimulation.”
Soon, Verschuer again became a respected scientist in Germany and around the world. In 1949, he became a corresponding member of the newly formed American Society of Human Genetics, organized by American eugenicists and geneticists.
This post is related to the topic :“science leads to lkilling people.”
The question is about whether Darwinism and material evolution which talks about the process of life develping on earth purely from
an agnostic viewpoint can be said to said to be part of the problem
we have in our culture with recognizing the dignity of the himan person as a unique creation of God with an eternal soul.
That is what I think we should be discussing. I really am not here to argue for either evolution or ID, and I don’t feel qualified to do so,…just here to talk abotu ethics and science,
that is what concerns me.
Peace,
MaryJohnZ
sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/09/ING9C2QSKB1.DTL
Even the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes’ words in their own defense.
Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.
Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti- Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. Hitler’s race hatred sprung from his own mind, but the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.
During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany’s fascist eugenicists. In “Mein Kampf,” published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. “There is today one state,” wrote Hitler, “in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”
Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. “I have studied with great interest,” he told a fellow Nazi, “the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”
Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenics leader Madison Grant, calling his race-based eugenics book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” his “bible.”
Now, the American term “Nordic” was freely exchanged with “Germanic” or “Aryan.” Race science, racial purity and racial dominance became the driving force behind Hitler’s Nazism. Nazi eugenics would ultimately dictate who would be persecuted in a Reich-dominated Europe, how people would live, and how they would die. Nazi doctors would become the unseen generals in Hitler’s war against the Jews and other Europeans deemed inferior. Doctors would create the science, devise the eugenic formulas, and hand-select the victims for sterilization, euthanasia and mass extermination.
During the Reich’s early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler’s plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.
In 1934, as Germany’s sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe, upon returning from Germany, ebulliently bragged to a colleague, “You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”
That same year, 10 years after Virginia passed its sterilization act, Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, observed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”
More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany’s eugenic institutions.
By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 – almost $4 million in today’s money – to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 toward creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler’s systematic medical repression.
Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s complex of eugenics institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the institute, once again, was Hitler’s medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin’s organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.
Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.
Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, declared of Nazism, “While we were *****-footing around … the Germans were calling a spade a spade.”
A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For decades,
American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into heredity.
The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an unprecedented level. On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York dispatched a radiogram to its Paris office: JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON
TWINS AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM.
At the time of Rockefeller’s endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of that institute continued both directly and through other research conduits during Verschuer’s early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer left the institute to form a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that was much heralded in the American eugenics press. Research on twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed by government decrees. Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenics doctor’s journal he edited, that Germany’s war would yield a “total solution to the Jewish problem.”
Verschuer had a longtime assistant. His name was Josef Mengele.
On May 30, 1943, Mengele arrived at Auschwitz. Verschuer notified the German Research Society, “My assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer (captain) and camp physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anthropological testing of the most diverse racial groups in this concentration camp is being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsführer (Himmler).”
Mengele began searching the boxcar arrivals for twins. When he found them,
he performed beastly experiments, scrupulously wrote up the reports and sent the paperwork back to Verschuer’s institute for evaluation. Often, cadavers, eyes and other body parts were also dispatched to Berlin’s eugenic institutes.
Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenics studies in Nazi-occupied Europe before the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.
After the war, eugenics was declared a crime against humanity – an act of genocide. Germans were tried and they cited the California statutes in their defense – to no avail. They were found guilty.
However, Mengele’s boss Verschuer escaped prosecution. Verschuer re- established his connections with California eugenicists who had gone underground and renamed their crusade “human genetics.” Typical was an exchange July 25, 1946, when Popenoe wrote Verschuer, “It was indeed a pleasure to hear from you again. I have been very anxious about my colleagues in Germany . . . I suppose sterilization has been discontinued in Germany?” Popenoe offered tidbits about various American eugenics luminaries and then sent various eugenics publications. In a separate package, Popenoe sent some cocoa, coffee and other goodies.
Verschuer wrote back, “Your very friendly letter of 7/25 gave me a great deal of pleasure and you have my heartfelt thanks for it. The letter builds another bridge between your and my scientific work; I hope that this bridge will never again collapse but rather make possible valuable mutual enrichment and stimulation.”
Soon, Verschuer again became a respected scientist in Germany and around the world. In 1949, he became a corresponding member of the newly formed American Society of Human Genetics, organized by American eugenicists and geneticists.
This post is related to the topic :“science leads to lkilling people.”
The question is about whether Darwinism and material evolution which talks about the process of life develping on earth purely from
an agnostic viewpoint can be said to said to be part of the problem
we have in our culture with recognizing the dignity of the himan person as a unique creation of God with an eternal soul.
That is what I think we should be discussing. I really am not here to argue for either evolution or ID, and I don’t feel qualified to do so,…just here to talk abotu ethics and science,
that is what concerns me.
Peace,
MaryJohnZ
T
The_Barbarian
Guest
(Statements from lawyers, judges, politicians, etc. endorsing eugenics)
But let’s go on…
**Davenport and his contemporaries failed to recognize that not all familial traits are biologically inherited, and that even traits that are inherited can have complex causes. This, coupled with an evangelical commitment to create a society molded in their own image, led the eugenicists to make simplistic and unsupportable claims about human heredity. Punnett made an early indictment of the methods during a presentation at the First International Congress on Eugenics in 1911 – the year The Trait Book was published: “Except in very few cases, our knowledge of heredity in man is at present far too slight and too uncertain to base legislation upon…It must be clearly recognized that the collection of such [accurate] pedigrees is an arduous undertaking demanding high critical ability…”
eugenicsarchive.org/html/…ssay4text.html
By the mid-1930s, according to Daniel Kevles, ‘mainline eugenics had generally been recognized as a farrago of flawed science.’ By then, most geneticists accepted that eugenic sterilization could not rid society of its undesirables.
P.M.H. Mazumdar, ‘Reform’ eugenics and the decline of Mendelism
“Reform eugenics” continues today, in such things as genetic counseling to help couples assess the risks of genetic disorders in children they might have, and to help people avoid hereditary disorders by managing diet and exposures.
But classic eugenics were finished before Hitler gained power. At least as far as scientists were concerned.
In Western countries like the United States and Britain, criticisms began to arise over the sloppiness of many eugenicists’ research methods. Among the first and most important critics in the United States was Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866–1945), a geneticist at Columbia University and prior to 1915 a moderate supporter of eugenics. Morgan felt that the movement had become more propagandistic than scientific and criticized eugenical claims in print, starting with his book Evolution and Genetics (1925). He chastised eugenicists for lumping many mental and behavioral conditions together under a rubric like “feeblemindedness” and treating it as if it had a single underlying cause in a single gene…Furthermore, as Reginal C. Punnett (1875–1967) (of Punnett Square fame) noted, even if a trait were found to be controlled by a single Mendelian gene, unless it was a dominant, it would take hundreds of generations of rigorous selection to eliminate it from the population…H. J. Muller (1890–1967), a student of Morgan, delivered a searing attack on “old style” eugenics at the Third International Eugenics Congress in New York City in 1932. Muller, who harbored strong eugenical beliefs as well as socialist leanings, argued that until the economic and social environment could be equalized, it would be impossible to know how much of any individual’s “social inadequacy” was due to heredity and how much to environment.
science.jrank.org/pages/9250/…-Eugenics.html
Daniel Hunt Morgan, as you might know, was the man most responsible for the Neo-Darwinian revision of evolutionary theory. Muller is known for his evolutionary studies of “Mullerian” mimickry.
But lawyers, politicians and religious leaders continued to believe.
It is one of the more despicable lies Stein is peddling. He’s blaming the very people who debunked the kind of ideas the Nazis promoted.**
Specifically, it was about Ben Stein, and whether or not he lied about scientists telling his people to go into gas chambers. As is clear now, he lied. Not just that, but about numerous other things.
But let’s go on…
Since you seem to have missed the evidence about that, I’ll repeat:
**Davenport and his contemporaries failed to recognize that not all familial traits are biologically inherited, and that even traits that are inherited can have complex causes. This, coupled with an evangelical commitment to create a society molded in their own image, led the eugenicists to make simplistic and unsupportable claims about human heredity. Punnett made an early indictment of the methods during a presentation at the First International Congress on Eugenics in 1911 – the year The Trait Book was published: “Except in very few cases, our knowledge of heredity in man is at present far too slight and too uncertain to base legislation upon…It must be clearly recognized that the collection of such [accurate] pedigrees is an arduous undertaking demanding high critical ability…”
eugenicsarchive.org/html/…ssay4text.html
By the mid-1930s, according to Daniel Kevles, ‘mainline eugenics had generally been recognized as a farrago of flawed science.’ By then, most geneticists accepted that eugenic sterilization could not rid society of its undesirables.
P.M.H. Mazumdar, ‘Reform’ eugenics and the decline of Mendelism
“Reform eugenics” continues today, in such things as genetic counseling to help couples assess the risks of genetic disorders in children they might have, and to help people avoid hereditary disorders by managing diet and exposures.
But classic eugenics were finished before Hitler gained power. At least as far as scientists were concerned.
In Western countries like the United States and Britain, criticisms began to arise over the sloppiness of many eugenicists’ research methods. Among the first and most important critics in the United States was Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866–1945), a geneticist at Columbia University and prior to 1915 a moderate supporter of eugenics. Morgan felt that the movement had become more propagandistic than scientific and criticized eugenical claims in print, starting with his book Evolution and Genetics (1925). He chastised eugenicists for lumping many mental and behavioral conditions together under a rubric like “feeblemindedness” and treating it as if it had a single underlying cause in a single gene…Furthermore, as Reginal C. Punnett (1875–1967) (of Punnett Square fame) noted, even if a trait were found to be controlled by a single Mendelian gene, unless it was a dominant, it would take hundreds of generations of rigorous selection to eliminate it from the population…H. J. Muller (1890–1967), a student of Morgan, delivered a searing attack on “old style” eugenics at the Third International Eugenics Congress in New York City in 1932. Muller, who harbored strong eugenical beliefs as well as socialist leanings, argued that until the economic and social environment could be equalized, it would be impossible to know how much of any individual’s “social inadequacy” was due to heredity and how much to environment.
science.jrank.org/pages/9250/…-Eugenics.html
Daniel Hunt Morgan, as you might know, was the man most responsible for the Neo-Darwinian revision of evolutionary theory. Muller is known for his evolutionary studies of “Mullerian” mimickry.
But lawyers, politicians and religious leaders continued to believe.
It is one of the more despicable lies Stein is peddling. He’s blaming the very people who debunked the kind of ideas the Nazis promoted.**
Do you suppose ethics has anything to do with making accusations regarding issues you don’t know anything about?
D
drpmjhess
Guest
To use a favorite creationist question, How do you know it’s inspired? Were you there? You know Genesis 1:1-2 is literally true because it appears in a book the Church claims is inspired? And how do you know that Church is trustworthy? Because the inspired book says so. And how can you trust that book? Because the Church tells us the book is inspired.
R
reggieM
Guest
No, that’s the Protestant critique based on Sola Scriptura.
We trace the origins of the Church to the early communities and not through the written word (which didn’t exist while Catholic communities were already built and disseminating the truth).
We know the Church is trustworthy through the testimonies of the martyrs and successors of the Apostles – and of the Apostles themselves who build the Churches which survive to this day. The teaching of Christ was handed down to them.
We know Christ is trustworthy because of what He taught (the New Testament is not necessary to know that since it was originally communicated by Tradition), His miracles and His resurrection.
The Church is trustworthy as the inheritor of Christ’s teaching and mission – part of which is in the Bible. The Church has divine power – to determine which books are inspired and which are not.
You can learn more these facts and about Catholicism itself by reading something like the Baltimore Catechism.
D
drpmjhess
Guest
Right, but your Young Earth creationism is your own invention, not a legacy of the Church, which always wisely distinguished between truths knowable by revelation and those known through reason.
Petrus
R
reggieM
Guest
I wouldn’t ever accuse you of being precise with your responses. I guess that’s a habit learned from modern theology – fluffy and fuzzy, lots of hugs and smiley faces make everything ok in the end.
S
Swan
Guest
M
MaryJohnZ
Guest
So you want to put the blame on lawyers, politician and philosophers and free science from any responsibility in this?
If that is all you want to do, then I can agree there is plenty of blame to go around. Ideas circulate and are spread in many ways.
I would wholeheartedly agree that science/scientists are not the only ones to blame in this.But as a lay/non-scientiest, I will argue that scientists have a large responsibility in the original basis for eugenics and for any contiuation of the philosophy is the different forms it still rears its head in our culture and society. I would say the medical profession has a large responsibility to stay true to its original oat to protect innocent life, stand up for suthentic health practices and to do everything to inform the general public of the truth in these different areas.
In this I would say the oveall medical field has failed us. I don’t have to look far for that evidence.
Exolain to me why so many babies are being aborted based on medical tests that determone they could probably have disabilities of some type. I doubt we can estimate how many children have thus been slected for distinction.
Perhaps the eugenics movement has modified the way it presents things and approaches things but I would not say we are free from the Nazi pholiosphy, which had its roots in those ideas. And as much as you say the scientists changed those original ideas, the changes were merely in reference to time spans for eliminating defective traits. That is hardly reassuring.
. I think the abortion industry contiues the same type of selective killing od dibled and even now millions of babies have been killed based on sex selection in some countries like China and India.
. Some professors in our own country have gone so far as to say parents should have the ability to kill their children up to the age of memory, 2 or 3 years old…but where does it stop? And then you have the euthanasia movement, how is that different from killing the disabled, elderly during the nazi regime? The language may be different. The arguments lead to individuals choosing death rather than being taken to death camps, but the end is the same.
Even if some of the eugenics scientists were changing their arguments before or during the Nazi regime, the original basis for what Hitler did came from those Eugenic theories. The concpet that ‘ideas have consequences’ holds true. And a total materialistic view of life, with the consequence of expelling God, will lead to a view of the human person as only a series of mechanisms and chemical responses…something to be tested, manipulated, like a machine. And as we can see, to be retired and eliminated when that seems the most expedient.
Souless science and medicine leads to a souless world view that is cold, full of greed and ill suited to treating the ture human person created in God;s image, body, mind and soul.
I am reminded of the book “The Will to Believe” by William James in which he talks about how impossible it is for him to believe in a God and a heaven in which millions and millions of people can be welcomed and all loved… If you can’t believe in that, how can you believe in a world here on earth in which every person is loved and cherished just as they are.
When I went to BU they had about twenty copies of 'The Will to Believe" on the library shelf and I read the book based on a recommendation. It was the coldest view of a world i could ever imagine.
God Bless, maryJohnz
T
The_Barbarian
Guest
The case is stronger than that. As you just learned, Darwinists strongly and effectively refuted the claims of the eugenists, particularly the ones used by Nazis to justify the Holocaust. They were on the other side. There were lawyers and theologians and philosophers who agreed with the Darwinists that classical eugenics was bunk, of course. But the fact remains that Stein is trying to justify his position by blaming the group that most strongly opposed what Hitler did. As you probably realize by now, he depends on lies and prejudice to persuade.
We’ve already tested that claim. As you saw, Darwinians destroyed any rationale for classic eugenics.
Politicians have made it so. Few of them are scientists.
Today, it’s pretty much genetic counseling, to let people know the risks of passing on a problem to their children.
No. The point of Punnett, Morgan, Muller, and other Darwinians was that the whole idea was flawed.
By the mid-1930s, according to Daniel Kevles, ‘mainline eugenics had generally been recognized as a farrago of flawed science.’ By then, most geneticists accepted that eugenic sterilization could not rid society of its undesirables.
P.M.H. Mazumdar, ‘Reform’ eugenics and the decline of Mendelism
The killing continues, but there is no justification according to evolutionary theory.
In fact, most of their policies came from people like Martin Luther; if you read “The Jews and Their Lies”, you will see Hitler’s program, with only the gas chambers missing. Let’s be honest about the issue, um?
I see you’re not happy to realize that scientists debunked the Nazi ideas long before the Wannsee Protocols were drawn up. But that’s the reality. Do you now understand why decent people find Ben Stein’s libel so despicable?
Evolutionary theory does not assert materialism, nor does it assert that humans are merely material processes. Darwin, in his book, asserted that God created the first living things. Wallace, who co-discovered modern evolutionary theory, asserted that man was a unique creation of God, apart from the animals. Again, you’re blaming science for the sins of your own people.
L
Lev_20
Guest
Don’t forget, liberal humanist scientists are in the forefront of promoting evil acts like ESCR and infanticide, as well as promoting homophilia euthanasia and many other anti-Christian beliefs and practices.
Sciencism and positivism are old enemies of the Church.
Sciencism and positivism are what you get from science-without-God.
Sciencism and positivism are old enemies of the Church.
Sciencism and positivism are what you get from science-without-God.
R
reggieM
Guest
The Holy See warned that it does in some cases and we are not free to accept such theories.
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The_Barbarian
Guest
Barbarian observes:
Evolutionary theory does not assert materialism, nor does it assert that humans are merely material processes.
So let’s review:
Evolutionary theory does not assert materialism, nor does it assert that humans are merely material processes.
No. “Evolutionary theory” is the one scientists use. There are philosophies of evolution that deny God, but they are not part of science, which can make no such judgements.
Fortunately, it’s a moot point. Since there are no scientists of any consequence who say that evolutionary theory can deny God, I’ll leave it to you and the other non-scientists to work that out. Meantime, the real theory including common descent, was declared by our current pope to be “virtually certain.”
So let’s review:
- Evolutionary theory is not only acceptable to the church, it’s considered by the pope to be virtually certain.
- Any theories (using “theory” in the colloquial sense, because such ideas couldn’t be scientific theories) that deny God or His providence are not permissible.
- Since Evolutionary theory (again, the one used by scientists) does not deny God or His providence, it is entirely acceptable to the Church.
- Status