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George, whatever do you mean by "ahistorical relativism"? "That word--I do not think it means what you think it means." Perhaps you missed the point of my post: what made it possible for Darwin to be in the Galapagos Islands? How did a middle-class English lad end up in an island that belongs to modern-day Ecuador? A happy accident? Or a fortunate coinicidence built on the back of three centuries of imperialist expansion and exploitation?
The answer to the question comes from "historical materialism." Not whatever you are talking about.
Historical analysis, like that of colonialism and imperialism, is the result of some pretty excellent scientific work in social sciences. Perhaps it's only SOME science that George wants to acknowledge ... and other science that he'd just as soon forget.
Marx dealt with that sort of thing from day one and set a rather brilliant example, regardless of how much he was wrong about this or that, of how to deal with antipathy towards well formed conclusions that derived from his brilliant new perspective.
Interestingly, Marx dedicated "Capital" to Darwin but his offer was refused (or something like that) on the excellent grounds that Darwin might then have surpassed Marx himself for being the most hated man of the 19th century. Hated, that is, by the well-to-do.
Well if everyone thought that Einstein's cosmological constant and dark energy are nonsense, then perhaps physicists should retire now and collect their pensions early. Because what's the bleepin point? Will Greene and Deutsch and Kaku and Susskind, Polyakov etc and Deepak, too, be racked and quartered for their heresies?
In any discussion of historical accomplishments, in circumstances where an inventor, politician, scientist, etc, would not otherwise have amounted to a footnote in history had it not been for the benefits and privilege of racism and imperialism, one question to bear in mind is this: Were they able to contribute anything to the universal good from their station? Darwin came from a time that can arguably be described as one of the most racist eras in recorded history. European based supremacy was exported to all corners of the world. The strength of what Darwin managed to describe for modern science though, through his access and privilege within the imperial order, lays precisely in the fact that no serious challenge to the ramifications of his theory have since arisen, which, in conjunction with Pasteur's pitre dish experiments and the work of Oparin and Haldane, tell us quite convincingly that we all came from the same primordial soup. There is no such thing as a master race, the evidence is irrefutable.
Darwin and Racism
First, to establish my credentials or lack thereof, I have not read The Origin Of Species, but might have skimmed the abridged Norton edition in my Victorian non-fiction course. I did, however, read Darwin's autobiography in the same class, and found it a charming piece of work.
If I recall correctly, Darwin in the autobiography didn't have a lot of kind words for Herbert Spencer, beyond to say that he found him an interesting conversationalist. But I can't recall the exact specifics of his dislike for Spencer. I did find it somewhat amusing that Spencer is the guy who coined the phrase most commonly associatied with Darwinism, but in his book, Darwin just seems to have viewed him as one dinner-guest among many, and not an entirely pleasant one at that.
Darwin also really despised Thomas Carlyle, not least because Carlyle defended slavery. And probably Carlyle's whole quasi-religious mode of exposition was quite foreign to Darwin's temepermant.
Happy B day Darwin...
Really? I wasn't aware that the 19th century was "one of the most racist eras in recorded history". We can clearly see that Euro-supremacy (dare i say white supremacy) is alive and well in this thread as the noble defenders of "Science" defend Darwin's theory because any other theory (they don't actually know any but keep jousting with the strawperson of orthodox Abramic beliefs and some racist construction of "natives") are "not rational", "non-scientific", "myths about shape-shifting coyotes and vultures". These are exactley the same ideas that were thrown around in 19th century England.
The ideas in this thread are based in ignorance: not one person even aware of the many, many, theories of evolution that came before Darwin (some he no doubt came into contact with and plagarised because you don't need to cite non-Europeans).
The ideas in this thread are based in Eurosupremacy, placing the onus on Indigenous Peoples (structurally excluded from this conversation) to upset the fantastical idea that one white man from 19th century England is responsible for the theory of evolution.
This thread will come in handy the next time babblers engage in a "why is there so many white, settler, men on this board" navel gaze.
Gotta link?
If you're asking for a link to the knowledge of the thousands of indigenous communities through out the world then you are a fucking idiot.
I guess I'm asking for a link to any one of them.
Any one.
@Le T: I think posts #34, 35, and 44 listed some of Darwin's predecessors, although none of them had developed the full-boat "evolution through natural selection" theory. Were you thinking of some other predecessors of Darwin?
Snert... you don't get it. You don't know what indigenous knowledge is and it might shock you to know that not everything is a link on the internet.
ygtbk... i'm not talking about other white men who might have had similar ideas. I'm talking about the fact that Eurocentric knowledge production (the kind that Darwin was a part of) is a baby in the world of knowledge. It was not the first time that humans used scientific method, it was not the first time that humans used rational thought. These are racist lies that are needed to maintain Eurosupremacy. Darwin grew up in a society that a few hundred years earlier burned millions of scientists as witches and then decided to declare that only things discovered by the offspring of the men who did the burning would be considered truth.
Bertalanffy didn't discover systems theory and Darwin didn't discover evolution through natural selection. The only reason that they get credit is because of the hegemony of Eurosupremacism.
I think we should refer back to Trevor Kidd's post. It isn't that Darwin was the first to think of the idea, it was that he was the first to provide scientific proof to back it up.
You mean that he was the first person to provide scientific proof in a form that was written down in a European langauge and could be understood by the white men who had an extremely limited understanding of the world. (i.e. Darwin could provide a link)
If I were to make the bold claim that indigenous peoples fully documented the social implications of money and capital, centuries before Marx, I'd expect someone to want to see SOME KIND of evidence of this. Particularly if I were to insinuate that anyone who mentions Marx without mentioning all of these others who beat him to the idea must be some kind of white supremacist.
Anyway, I'm quite aware that not all knowledge is on the intertubes yet, but given the "thousands" of communities you say hold this knowledge, I guess I might have expected there to be the odd reference to it.
Returning to the Marx example, I'm not confident that in lieu of supporting my claim I could just tell everyone that they "don't get it". What do you have to support your claim? If you have nothing, just say so and let's save a few posts.
This is the best that I could find on people who might have discovered natural selection before Darwin:
http://www.science20.com/genomicron/natural_selection_before_darwin
Did somebody before Darwin write down the scientific proof of evolution through natural selection in a non-European language?
Did somebody before Darwin come up with a scientific proof of evolution through natural selection that could not be understood by white men because of their extremely limited understanding of the world?
Did Darwin actually steal his theory from a non-European (as implied by the "Darwin could provide a link" comment)?
If the answer to all of these questions is no, then why would you seek to add all those qualifications and caveats to Pogo's statement?
If the answer to any of those questions is yes, then I would say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Any at all would suffice at this point.
Well, I said arguably. If you want to argue that it wasn't that is fine, but then where would you place it on the scale of things?
It's all relative, Jack. You're looking for absolutes of testable science and you absolutely won't find them in this thread.
In this thread the point is being argued that Darwin made a unique contribution to all of humankind because his theory of evolution by natural selection was the first to use scientific evidence and rational thought. At the same time it is being argued (and rightly so) that scientific method and rational thought are the common property of all of humankind. But when I mention that there are other theories that preceded Darwin that are also based on scientific observation of the world and rational thought but are in oral tradition, this claim is labelled as "extraordinary".
For some reason my claim is extraordinary but the competing claim that Darwin and a gagle of other exclusively white, middle-class, european men were the only people ever in the history of humankind to develop a theory of evolution by natural selection is not extraordinary?
This means that rich, white, city-dwelling men from post-enlightenment europe clearly have some inherited or learned trait that makes them better than the 99.99% of remaining humans at understanding ecology OR that eurocentrism, patriarchy and colonialism are huge confounding variables that people are not taking into consideration.
If people want scholarship that deals with Eurocentrism and knowledge production...
Battiste and Henderson (2000)Protecting Indegenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge
Excellent synopsis of eurocentrism and cognitive imperialism.
Smith (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies
Talks about the terrible impact that Western Science has had on Indigenous communities and the lingering colonialism in so-called objective scientific method
Gunn Allen (1992) The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions
Includes a great essay on the many parts of North American culture that are actually from Indigenous Peoples' cultures and remain unacknowledged.
Cajete (1999) Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence
Good explanation of why Western Science is a very specific non-universal form of science and rational thought.
This was off the top of my head. There is tonnes of scholarship on this stuff and i'm shocked that people could speak so authoritatively on this subject having obviously read none of it.
If you want me to link to some website or book that outlines theories of evolution by natural selection in oral traditions i'm affraid i can't do that. It's actually pretty ironic that i'm being asked to do so give the nature of this discussion. People who are interested in these teachings would have to get up from their computer screens and form a human connection with someone who has those teachings. Or if you want to take the slacker road, you could just go to something like the Trent Elders' and Traditional Peoples' Gathering, which is going down this weekend in Peterborough and is open to anyone to attend. There are going to be at least 12 traditional teachers there from different nations who you could litterally walk up to and ask about evolution. Similar events are held around the country.
I have to say that i am really disheartened that a bunch of people living in colonial Canada who call themselves "progressive" would have given so little thought to how knowledge is produced and why some people are given credit for ideas.
The claim is not that Darwin was the first to develop "a" theory of evolution.
The claim is that Darwin was the first to develop and scientifically prove the correct theory of evolution.
Thousands of people may well have come up with wrong theories to explain the origin of species. Darwin was the first to get it right.
I think that some people seem to want to jump to a conclusion about Darwin versus "God" that doesn't make a lot of sense whether they believe in God or not. I took a full year course in logic and discrete math, and I smell something not right here among those who hold the extreme views that they do. They seem to be making this argument in the modus ponens form:
If P, then Q. P. Therefore, Q.
Or in other words, they tend to imply this:
If the bible is ahistorical, then God does not exist. The bible is not historically accurate. Therefore, God does not exist.
It's as if I stated this.
If the US Government's narrative regarding 9/11 is all true, then the US Government is innocent of conspiring to commit mass murder on 9/11.
The above proposition doesn't make sense either. Because the US Government could be lying about 9/11 and still not have conspired to perpetrate 9/11. We can't be sure either way, and so the above proposition does not make logical sense.
In the same way atheists arrive at the conclusion that God must not exist. Because Darwin proved it scientifically? No, he did not. His theory tends to disprove creationism as explained by biblical creationists.
Evidence suggests that the bible was transcribed a number of times, re-copied and edited by various Church scholars. There were a number of Catholic inquisitions and then a Roman inquisition. Early Church views on women in the priesthood and reincarnation were scrapped because it did not conform with religion as an authoritarian tool used to control masses of people. But in the same way, I still can't conclude that God or a number of gods absolutely do not exist somewhere out there and perhaps even exist as a result of universal law of evolution. Perhaps evolution and even physical laws of nature as we understand them do not apply in the same ways in what might be a multiverse reality. I don't know though and will hold off preaching for now.
Personally I don't really care who first discovered that the garden of eden story was actually a trip down the garden path, complete with fairies at the bottom of it. The fact that 'we' were never exposed to the work and observations of other cultures regarding evolutionary science doesn't negate the possibility that they may have arrived at similar conclusions independently and in different eras. On the topic of evolution, I'll take the work of any practitioner of science from any source of knowledge that was able to arrive at the only conclusion possible upon examination of the evidence at hand. The 'credit' belongs to any and all who were able to lift the scales of unprovable mythology and peer out at the facts.
If early creationists drafted the pertinent chapters of the bible instead of it being a literal interpretation as we've been told for centuries, then the entire bible must be suspended as evidence and placed in a cupboard somewhere until further documentary evidence comes along to corroborate its contents. The question then becomes, what else is there to go on if the manuscript is suspected of being a hoax. Do we turn to oral accounts of a supreme being, passed down from antiquity, for accuracy? Do we give other religious texts from other societies a chance to reveal the true word to us? Perhaps anything is possible, because the universe has certainly not revealed all of its knowledge to us. Before evolutionary science came along, most of us in the west believed that giraffes, elephants and tigers piled aboard the ark to get out of the weather. Before Darwin, at least for the population in the European/Western nations, anyone proposing such a concept without a shred of evidence, except for their own writing based primarily on the thoughts in their head would have been laughed out of any forum. A preacher however, holding an unproven book above his head, would have been able to lead the same group in head bowing prayer before any opening address took place.
For the last time, indigenous knowledge is not "mythology". That is a racist, eurocentric notion. You should really read at least one of the books that i posted so you have a basic understanding of what you are talking about.
This is mythology. If you mean Europe when you say "the west" you should know that the story that you are talking about comes from what people call "the middle east". Europeans have not been christian, jewish or muslim for most of their history. The bible was impossed by force on the peasants (and indigenous knowledge holders) in Europe by kings and the roman empire.
Le T wrote:
For the last time, indigenous knowledge is not "mythology".
I don't see where Slumberjack said that indigenous knowledge is mythology.
But how open is your mind, really? Because I find that even people ready to believe that the son of God raised the dead and performed miracles suddenly become skeptics when confronted by His Noodly Appendages. Why, Fidel, if this is all about "what could be"?
Re: Slumberjack's post...Perhaps he isn't. In post #84 he seems to be saying that he doesn't care if Darwin is the sole author of a theory of evolution by natural selection despite the fact that attributing a huge scientific theory to a white, european man is an essential part of cognitive imperialism. I can only then take his preference of "practitioners of science" over "mythology" as a continuation of his Eurocentric thinking.
By Odin, you've convinced me.