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Happy Darwin Day
February 12, 2011 - 3:15am
A song for Charles Darwin
And it's Evolution Weekend at St. Joseph's Catholic Church, Benin, Nigeria.
Ah yes. The week that we enforce the eurosupremacist notion that unil a 20 year old middle-class British man spent 5 years sailing around the world doing "science" the world had no idea about evolution.
Would you prefer Columbus Day?
Yeah, that Darwin charlatan was a real step back from those thinkers who contended that gods making humans out of mud or transmogrified coyotes or buzzards (or the converse) were examples of how species develop.
How about today as an atheist holiday? We need holidays.
I believe you're right. No wait, I don't believe...
Can I get back to you on that?
I would prefer that all holidays celebrating the physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual conquest of the globe by white men from various cities in Europe not be celebrated. So Darwin day, Columbus day, Christmas, whatever...
Stupid and racist. Nice twofer.
Sineed - don't you think that it's time for the tired trope of Darwin versus Creationism to be junked? It's pretty easy to defend Darwin and his specific theory of evolution when you hold it up to Creationism. As Son of QaBong's racist comment shows, the problems of Creationism are still present in the Darwinists and that could be an indication that more vigorous criticism is needed. Though Charlie does look cute with a beard.
Whom did Darwin conquer?
So only white people think evolution is credible science? That's pretty racist; to think non-whites aren't capable of scientific thought.
And what's racist about what I said, Le T? The religion I grew up with said my first ancestor was created out of mud. The coyote and buzzard I made up, to represent hypothetical religious beliefs.
I would add that attempting to shut down rational discourse in the name of cultural relativism is not only anti-intellectual idiocy, but also can be dangerous. For instance, in South Africa, there are members of the government who promote "natural" remedies for HIV, decrying "toxic Western" antiretrovirals. What it's really about, of course, is they don't want to pay for the expensive drugs that work, but they attempt to hide this agenda behind the skirts of the entire alternative medicine movement.
So to get back o/t: unfortunately, creationism vs evolution isn't a tired trope, but still an ongoing battle going on around the world and part of a larger anti-intellectualism, that if it doesnt bamboozle you with pseudoscience, attempts to shame you into silence with accusations of racism, cultural imperialism, and the like.
It bears repeating: rational thought is the common property of humanity and is no more culturally specific than the ability to use language.
A good recent book on the subject is
Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism vs Creationism from Antiquity to the Present
One of the points in this book that I found particularly interesting was the claim by the authors that it was the "revivial of materialism, rather than the emergence of of experimental methods and mathematical advances, that led to the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries and ultimately to the Enlightenment." The authors make reference here to David Lindberg's recent book, The Beginnings of Western Science (2007, U of Chicago Press) on this issue.
The Creationists and their more recent ideological clones who advocate "Intelligent Design" understand very well the importance of philosophical materialism - unlike far too many of their "liberal" opponents - and make war on it every chance they get.
Nah. We atheists work all year round for humanity's salvation. It's the god-fearing folk who should (and can afford to) take a break.
Excellent post, Sineed.
Speaking of South Africa, I have to say I recently had a spat with some few New Agers on the "left" who buy into AIDS denialism. Mbeki was a hero for taking on "Big Pharma" and telling people to eat a natural diet of garlic and beetroot etc. to fight infection.
It seems to me that the materialist world of Newton et al came to an end at the turn of the last century. The materialist view of reality was overthrown by a theory that itself is incomplete even today. According to some scientists, what used to be considered metaphysics is on the verge of becoming mainstream and explaining the real world in which we exist. Apparently time and space are not independent phenomenon but rather flow like river with different paths here and there. Heisenberg wrote that the Copenhagen interpretation led physicists astray from the simplistic materialist views of the 19th century.
Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it. - Niels Bohr
What Niels said.
Einstein... believed that much had been accomplished, but the reasons for the mechanics still needed to be understood."
I'm with Albert..whatever it was that he said.
Yes, I think Albert Einstein was a self-declared materialist. And yet he is known as the godfather, or at least one of the founders of quantum mechanics. He didn't think his own theories were right or worth proving, or some such, with regard to the quantum. Einstein and his colleagues set out to prove something called locality. It's an important aspect of materialism.
But since Irish physicist John Stewart Bell showed that pixies and garden gnomes may well exist, more scientists are now non-materialist in their views of reality.
There is nothing un-materialist or metaphysical about quantum mechanics. It's still physics, not theology.
Yes. But he appreciated the way David Hume approached the material world..requiring observation. And Spinoza, who apparently made it still possible for God to abstain from rolling the dice...although I have not read Spinoza to know how that worked out.
Obviously not what I said. It's racist because you dismiss literally every other theory of evolution as "gods making humans out of mud or transmogrified coyotes or buzzards (or the converse)". If you don't know why reducing every other theory of evolution with the exception of the one that was developed by a rich, white guy from England to transmogrified coyotes or buzzards isn't extreamly ignorant and racist then you should return to square one.
How about the people from where ever al QaBong lives for a start? He doesn't even know the indigenous knowledge from the terrritory that he is living on but somehow knows about Darwin. He is so confident in his idea that Darwin's theory of evolution is the one Truth that he back-hands thousands of years of science that he has not even bothered to engaged with in the slightest by spouting racist stuff like i've quoted above. It's called hegemony. It's really important if you want to commit cultural genocide (which I would include as a form of conquering).
It bears repeating: rational thought is not the property of Western Science and the equating of the two has been an important tool in maintaining the dominance of Eurocentric thought in colonial relationships.
I would ask people to consider that Darwin was not the first person to develop a theory of evolution and that questioning the methods, biases and assumptions in his work is NOT synonomous with supporting the child-abusing, bible-thumping, anti-intellectual community that your parents forced you to participate in every Sunday. This is not about cultural relativism or governments trying to get out of providing medicines. This is about pointing out that when you go around waving Darwin flags and spitting on all the non-believers you are participating in a reformed version of a continuous attempt at global domination by a small minority of humans. Not to mention that dismissing the knowledge systems of 90% of humanity is at best anti-intellectual.
And just a quick show of hands... who has read On the Origin of Species?
Say, is there a theory of devolution that would apply here?
No, he was merely the first person to get it right.
I give up.
Fixed.
*waves hands*
Standard model theorist Larry Krauss had this to say:
The older Newtonian scientific view of materialism was essentially an If you can't see it, it's not there approach. But gravity exists even though we can't see it. What other laws of nature are there we can't see? Human consciousness is now considered part of the the universe we live in. Scientist as unobserved observer looking on is no longer thought to be true. We are not independent of each other and the universe so much as part of the whole. I am for you, M. Spector, and you are for me. We must demonstrate this natural law by doing the Vulcan mind meld. We are one. Scuse while I go make us a ham sandwich. Cheese and lettuce?
Philosophical materialism is not simple mechanistic materialism. Some babblers seem to be proceeding from this mistaken view - by representing mechanistic materialism AS all of materialism - and then jumping to all sorts of problematic conclusions.
In particular, Einstein and Bohr took contrary views on, eg. the phenomenon of light. Einstein, and others, were OK with the idea of the dual nature of light - that it could be BOTH a wave AND a particle - and some others, Bohr in particular, claimed it was an Either/or.
When the history of 20th and 21st century physics (esp sub-atomic physics) is finally written, a lot of claims of today are going to be debunked, all this spending on particle accelerators will be seen as a terrible diversion of resources, and certain concepts will likely be chucked. my personal prediction is that dark matter will go.
I wish people would realize that physics is one of the last domains in science in which religious and anti-materialist views find a home. Such views need to be rooted out of any science and driven back to the seminary from whence they came.
I wish people wouldn't confuse materialism with determinism.
Very good points, Spector and Beltov. Unfortunately much of popular culture (the What the Bleep movies, the writings of Deepak Chopra, etc.) reinforces this nonsense.