Abraham & Charles

A Happy Darwin Day to those observing it, and Happy Lincoln's Birthday to those observing it. There is an official website for Darwin Day, which notes concerning February 12, 1809:

On this date, two great men were born — Abraham Lincoln, Emancipator of American Slaves and Charles Darwin, Emancipator of the Human Mind Their Positive Legacies Still Endure

Ironically, Darwin's theory about the survival of the fittest did inspire eugenics, which Hitler seemed to love, as well as various racial theories, such as the one in the biology textbook that figured in the Scopes trial, a theory about the superiority of the white race over the black race (which Hitler refined down to the Aryan Race). I wouldn't blame anyone celebrating Black History Month wanting to take a pass on Darwin Day, though Abraham Lincoln's Birthday should be fine.

On the Darwin Day website you can find this file for Understanding Darwinian Evolution, which explains it:

1) Common Descent—All of life on earth emerged from a few common ancestors. This controversial claim put humans on a level plane with other living species.

2) Gradualism--The change of a species takes more than several generations (the notion of evolution put forth by Jean Baptiste Lamarck).  This controversial claim suggested that the earth was much older than initially suspected. 

3) Population Speciation--Change in a species is fragmented and not ubiquitous to that species.  While Lamarck claimed that all giraffes living under tall trees would develop long necks-Darwin suggested that only some giraffes would randomly be born with these traits. 

4) Natural selection—Certain randomly acquired traits are beneficial.  Giraffes with longer necks can reach more food, and are therefore more well-nourished and healthy. These giraffes are better equipped to survive, and thus are more likely to mate, and to pass the long neck trait on to their offspring.

While two three and four are not all that remarkable (didn't dog breeders already know most of this--not about giraffes, I mean, but about improving traits for various advantages, over generations?), I still have to salute Darwin as an accomplished naturalist: his 5-year Beagle voyage and collections and notes are an impressive acheivement.

But as to item number 1 above, I see it says "several common ancestors," plural, when I thought there was supposed to be a Universal Common Ancestor. And it says humans and animals are "on a level playing field." (Does that mean the New England Patriots could have used an 800-pound gorilla for nose tackle?)

Darwin also knew diddly about the construction of the simplest living cell. That wasn't his fault; but the "simple" cell turns out to be more pre-packaged with software programming than any computer you can take home from your super-computer store. Where did all that programming come from?

So, Darwin liberator? Kinsey the pervert sex-researcher, by the way, was quite taken with Darwinism, too. More of that level playing field with animals, see. One man's fetish is just another specie's advantage? Why, I've even read that rape has an evolutionary explanation. Clarence Darrow, behind-the-scenes hero of "Inherit the Wind," defend the imfamous Leopold and Loeb murderers as unfortunate victims of their long evolutionary history.

I've been to Lincoln's tomb. He's buried there, too. I wish they'd leave Charles Darwin buried, as well, in the sense of giving him credit for what he did as a naturalist for Victorian-era science, but not bringing out his corpse, like Lenin in a labcoat, as the one who has liberated us from tyrannical notions about human uniqueness and ultimately the sanctity of human life. That level playing field is simply a broad way that leads back to a form of slavery for many under the bright supervision of superior intellects.

Two men, one birthday, both liberators?

Comments

[labrialumn]

Darwin's "Preservation of the Favored Races" Such a work of a liberator. Such a level plane. . .

[Joe Long]

"If mankind was not created equally, he most assuredly evolved unequally" - Chesterton (paraphrase from memory).

The Great Emancipator was not, however, a great believer in equality - beyond the spiritual sort. Black history activists are beginning to perceive, and sometimes to reject, Abe Lincoln as a man of his time.

Darwin thought he observed, and proposed to explain, a world of group differences; the church looked beyond them, to the equal spiritual worth of men in the eyes of God.

Those Christians who tried to defend slavery theologically found themselves in a situation fraught with paradox - but not nearly such an untenable position, as any secular believer in racial equality who ALSO espouses Darwinian evolution!

Happy birthday to Lincoln, and Darwin - grand and tragic players, both; and both misremembered. "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."

[JRM]

"any secular believer in racial equality who ALSO espouses Darwinian evolution"

This is just false. It can't be left unchallenged.

Recent genetic studies demonstrate there are essentially no differences in human beings.

"Most important from the standpoint of the biological meaning of these racial categories, however, most human genetic variation does not show such "race" clustering. For the vast majority of human genetic variations, classical racial categories as defined by a combination of geography, skin color, nose and hair shape, an occasional blood type or selected microsatellites make no useful prediction of genetic differences."

http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Lewontin/

Evolutionary genetics demonstrates that human "race" is mostly an artifical construct with no biological significance.

[Nick Milne]

I have always found it significant that John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis died on the same day.

Darwin's and Lincoln's birthday, not so much.

[DGP]

>>I have always found it significant that John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis died on the same day.

Camelot, Narnia, and the Brave New World are mutually constitutive?

[Michael D. Harmon]

Have you read Peter Kreeft's imagined meeting of the three of them in the afterlife?

[Nick Milne]

I have not, though I have heard of it and have pined after it at the various moments it has happened to enter my active memory.

And I think DGP just blew this one wide open.

[Joe Long]

"Recent genetic studies demonstrate there are essentially no differences in human beings."

Good to hear it. That settles THAT, then. Certainly simplifies life!

(Be sure to let Tay-Sachs and Sickle-Cell sufferers know.)

[DGP]

>>"Recent genetic studies demonstrate there are essentially no differences in human beings." >>Good to hear it. That settles THAT, then. Certainly simplifies life!

It leaves open the question of whom they consider human. I hear, for example, that men and women have a chromosome difference. Are women therefore not human? (Or men, for that matter?)

Don't answer that. :)

[Nick]

They are super human according to my wife. I believe this is wild propaganda by the aliens amongst us.

[DGP]

Perhaps neither men nor women are human. Come to think of it, that would explain a lot.

[Mairnéalach]

I read somewhere that Christians also contributed to misanthropy, by insisting that populations in the New World could not be humans because they could not have been descended from Adam.

I think we are past that particular problem, but I don't think we are past the philosophical hubris which creates those sorts of problems.

[DGP]

>>I don't think we are past the philosophical hubris which creates those sorts of problems.

No, not at all. There is an ongoing war over what constitutes humanity, with grave implications for who "deserves" the protection of the law, medical care, etc.

We all know this is the case with respect to abortion and embryonic stem cell research. To these ends, folks have attempted to define the human person as something other than a living human being. Instead, we hear talk of self-consciousness, intelligence, etc.

Otheer putative definitions have also appeared. I once read in my city's leading newspaper a "scientific" remark, unchalleneged by the journalist, that "walking upright is what makes us human." Just imagine the implications for infanticide or the euthanization of the disabled and elderly!

[Joe Long]

"I read somewhere that Christians also contributed to misanthropy, by insisting that populations in the New World could not be humans because they could not have been descended from Adam."

Ah, but technically, misanthropy requires humans. (A guilty pleasure: Florence King's essays and her book, "With Charity Towards None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy".)

Defining "humans" is scary business and often undertaken for ulterior motives. I suspect few Christians ever bought into the 'not descended from Adam' ploy, based on the droves of missionaries who headed to the New World; sounds more like a desperately-rationalizing guilty man defending himself with a novel argument. I'd like to see the original statement and learn who - if anyone - bought into it enough to make policy decisions based on it.

In my opinion, the use of Darwinism by race-supremecy boosters in the twentieth century, led to a new - and very well-intentioned - secular piety of denial of all genetic group differences. It's a very shaky framework, and Darwinian theory undermines it badly - and presents one more case in which the so-called "scientist" must make faith-based assertions and occasionally suppress dissent. (Recent studies claiming human evolution - and differentiation - has been especially swift over the past 10,000 years, threaten to ignite quite a scientific/ideological donnybrook...)

If you want a foundation for equality, start with an assertion of the equal spiritual worth of men - an appropriate subject for faith-based assertion, which science can neither confirm nor deny, and which no conceivable study could undermine. But if you start with a militantly secular evolutionary process and then later deny its implications to assert equality among all human groups - well, as hypocrisies go, it's certainly a benevolent one.

[Mairnéalach]

Joe- I suggest you read a little about the history of the New World. Those droves of missionaries brought a lot more than just the gospel to the native populations. They needed the former; they didn't need all the other baggage which the missionaries brought.

The point, whether it be unbelieving misuse of evolutionary theory, or believing misrepresentation of science by well-meaning Christians, is that all errors and sins, whether committed by heathen or Christian, begin with bad theology-- as you aptly described.

[Mike-2]

Celebrating Abraham Lincoln is OK as long as one does not look too close at him, and accepts the common image, however distorted.

Many people in the Atlantic states believe that slavery of blacks was strickly a feature of the American South whereas it was common in the British Empire in the 18th century. It was dying a slow death after about 1800 almost everywhere because it was becoming too much of a social problem. It ended without a horrific war in the British Empire fairly easily because most of the slaves were not in England. It probably would have been phased out in the American South in the late 1800's without a war if some plans and agreement were available about what would replace it and what would be the fate of the freed slaves.

The American Civil war was at least as much about tariffs and centralization of government as it was about slavery.

[Joe Long]

"Joe- I suggest you read a little about the history of the New World. Those droves of missionaries brought a lot more than just the gospel to the native populations. They needed the former; they didn't need all the other baggage which the missionaries brought."

I'm fortunate enough to make my living in history; I've read a bit.

What baggage the missionaries brought, or didn't, has no bearing on my point: that evidently New World natives were seen by them, and the folks who sent them, as people in need of conversion, NOT sub-human "unconvertibles" undescended from Adam.

[Mairnéalach]

Joe- obviously, Christendom came to see New World natives as people bearing the image of God. However, the speculative theological traditions of man did indeed obfuscate this project. You know about the antipodal controversies, and Tostatus.

As a historian, it's surprising you would argue that human baggage is irrelevant. History *is* baggage.

[Joe Long]

"...it's surprising you would argue that human baggage is irrelevant..."

Irrelevant to my previous point. Certainly not irrelevant to history.

The metaphor is tenuous; is history the "baggage" or the cargo, or the passenger himself - or the road, or the assortment of roadblocks - or the conveyance ridden on, or its motive force? Or is it "bunk" - or, one of my favorites, as that reformed Yankee Ambrose Bierce defined it: "the record (mostly false) of events (mostly unimportant) brought about by rulers (mostly knaves) and soldiers (mostly fools)" ?

Anyway - it's my contention that religion has often been blamed as a motivator in various injustices which occured for economic or other "mundane" reasons - but were then frantically rationalized after the fact in religious terms, often by fringe figures nowhere near the decision-making centers.

We like to think ideas have been more central to history than they often have; I suspect that we hate to admit how they have frequently just swirled about a non-ideological fait accompli, confusing our view of it in retrospect.