Nice post, too, with history of the doughnut: “Doughnuts: The Third Rail of American Politics.”
NY Times blog gets in the donuts-for-terrorists scuffle
May 29, 2008
Leave a Comment » | 
Politics, Rampant stupidity, Weblogs | Tagged: Doughnuts, Media, Michelle Malkin, Politics, Rachael Ray | 
Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Double standard
May 28, 2008George W. Bush was famously untravelled as a candidate for the U.S. Presidency. He had spent more time hanging out in bars just over the border in Juarez than hanging with diplomats anywhere. In 2000, conservatives found this lack of care about foreign nations, U.S. interventions, and foreign people to be “charming,” sort of a poke-in-the-eye to the Rhodes scholar-rich Democratic Party who worried about things like peace in Palestine and getting the North Koreans to agree to stop building nuclear devices (who could be afraid of a bad-hair guy like Kim Jong-Il anyway?).
That was then. Now they desperately have to find something about Barack Obama to complain about. Never mind that Obama has spent more time overseas and in Iraq than George W. Bush, still. While John McCain can get his information in a one-day, flack-jacketed, armored personnel-carrier tour of Iraq, Obama’s two days isn’t enough to please Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit nor Jim Geraghty at National Review Online.
Observation: Conservatives are really, really desperate to find mud on a nice guy; Reynolds and others really are losing badly on issues, to make so much of so little. Also, William F. Buckley has been dead for just over three months, and NR has already gone to hell, deteriorating to a barking-dog cutout of its former intellectual heft.
Leave a Comment » | Campaigns, Elections, History, Iraq, Politics, Presidents, Travel, Uncomposted Organic Fertilizer, War on Terrorism, Weblogs, World history | Tagged: Desperation among Conservatives, Iraq, Obama, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Staying competitive: Do the math
May 27, 2008Will Texas ever stack up to California? Do the math, at TexasEd.
Will Texas ever stack up to India? China?
Leave a Comment » | Education, Education spending, Globalization, Higher education, Politics, Texas Lege | Tagged: education funding, Higher education, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Good though: Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73
May 27, 2008Utah Phillips died Friday. He was 73. He died at his home in Nevada City, California.
Wonderful tribute at Fifteen Iguana.
Utah Phillips (publicity photo via Bluegrass Today)
Phillips’s website lists planned tributes, memorials and the funeral in Nevada City, California. KVMR Radio’s site has an obit and links to other tributes.
- Railroading on the Great Divide, from “Legends of Folk” (buy the CD here)
- Origin of the phrase “Good though” from “Good Though” (buy the CD here)
- Sacramento Bee story – excerpted below the fold
4 Comments | A Good Story, Business Ethics, Citizenship, Current History, History, History and art, History audio sources, Humor, Labor and unions, Life, Music | Tagged: Folk Music, History, Labor and unions, Media, Music, Organized Labor, Politics, Railroads, Utah Phillips | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Ghost of Joe McCarthy: LGF/Malkin assault on Rachael Ray
May 26, 2008WARNING: Satirical material ahead.
At long last, Sen. McCarthy Little Green Footballs, have you no decency?
One wonders just how much mob activity these guys can provoke before somebody — perhaps someone at LGF, and Michelle Malkin’s blog — wakes up and stands up to stop the madness.
Rachael Ray wore a black and white patterned scarf at a shoot for a Dunkin’ Donuts ad. As a Blood to a blue bandana or a Crip to a red one, LGF pulled out their rhetorical guns and started firing. ‘Aren’t those the colors of Yassir Arafat’s group, Al Fatah?’ LGF wonders.
You couldn’t make up this kind of craziness if it didn’t exist. Well, almost couldn’t make it up.
I expect that, next, Little Green Footballs will hear that some radio stations are suppressing the news about the invasion of Martians.
Next week: Little Green cake pans filmed flying across LGF’s yard, and LGF leads a new dig at the old quarry in Piltdown. How long before Nebraska Man shows up in the credits to Michelle Malkin’s blog, and they start rooting for the Cardiff Giant during the Hall of Fame Game in Cooperstown? Is it true that Michelle Malkin has an interview with Judge Crater set up for later this week?
Barnum’s ghost is tired.
What Michelle Malkin and LGF claimed to see:
What everyone else saw:
Dunkin’ Donuts pulled the ad rather than risk offending anyone. The scarf had a paisley design, a company spokesman told LGF — and no one disputes that.
Does anyone else see the irony of Little Green Footballs complaining about this and inciting a mob? What will they do when they realize that green was Mohammed’s favorite color, and is almost an official color of Islam?
And when the truth comes out, will it be that LGF was mainstreaming terrorism to sell Little Green Footballs — like mob action against a donut shop — occasionally outing one of their friends or some innocent person to avoid suspicion themselves?
Santayana was right. What do you know about Herb Philbrick’s dip into communism double agentry, in I Led Three Lives? What do you remember about Robespierre and the Summer of Terror? What do you remember about Stalin’s installation of terror in the Soviet Union?
Why aren’t Malkin and LGF going after Rev. Moon, or some real threat to something — whooping cough, measles, something really dangerous?
Whose side is Little Green Footballs on, anyway?
Tip of the old scrub brush to Dispatches from the Culture Wars.
Other Resources:
- Crooks and Liars gets closer to the facts
- Michelle Malkin, coming apart at the seams
- Pandagon keeps feet on the ground: “I had to double check the URL to make sure this isn’t a Malkin parody site, because this is hard to swallow as written by a sincere human being. The paranoid wingnuttery is too pitch perfect.”
Update: Greater, sadder irony: Rachael Ray’s site today featured a nice tribute to our troops, with recipes.
7 Comments | Accuracy, Business Ethics, Current History, Debunking, Ethics, Hoaxes, Lessons of history, Palestine, Paranoia, Rampant stupidity, Santayana's ghost | Tagged: hoax, Mobs, Politics, Rampant stupidity, Witchhunts | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
More on McLeroy’s war on Texas English students
May 25, 2008The Houston Chronicle’s coverage of the Texas State Board of Education meetings this week is not well indexed on the web. Following a couple of odd links I found Gary Sharrar’s article (he’s the Chronicle’s education reporter), though the Associated Press Story shows up for the paper’s main article on most indices I found.
Sharrar adds a few details of Kommissar McLeroy’s war on English education, but the significant thing about the story is in the comments, I think. One poster appears to have details that are unavailable even from TEA. Partisans in the fight have details that Texas law requires to be made public in advance of the meetings, while the state officials who need to advise on the regulations and carry them out, do not.
TEA has an expensive website with full capabilities of publishing these documents within moments of their passage. As of Sunday morning, TEA’s website still shows the documents from last March. Surely Texas is not getting its value from TEA on this stuff.
Sharrar wrote:
Two different outside groups offered opposite reactions. The Texas Public Policy Foundation, a free-market think tank, favored the board’s action.
“It is obvious that too many Texas public school students aren’t learning the basics with our current curriculum,” said Foundation education policy analyst Brooke Terry. “We are glad the new curriculum will emphasize grammar and writing skills.”
Texas public schools fail to adequately prepare many students for college or the workplace, she said, citing a 2006 survey by the Conference Board found that 81 percent of employers viewed recent high school graduates as “deficient in written communications” needed for letters, memos, formal reports and technical reports.
But the Texas Freedom Network, which promotes public education, religious freedom and individual liberties, called the board divisive and dysfunctional.
“College ready” generally means reading well, and reading broadly in literature. From a pedagogical standpoint, emphasizing “grammar and writing skills” over the reading that is proven to improve grammar and writing skills will be a losing battle. I hope the details of the plan will show something different when TEA ever makes them available to the taxpaying/education consuming public and English teachers. NCLB asks that such changes be backed by solid research — it will be fascinating to see whether there is any research to support the Texas plan (not that it matters; this section of NCLB has been ignored by the right wing from the moment NCLB was signed).
Prior to this week’s series of meetings, Commissar McLeroy expressed what sounds like disdain for reading in the English curriculum to the El Paso Times:
But chairman McLeroy said he would fight against some of the measures the educators want, especially the comprehension and fluency portion.
Their suggestions, he said, would have students waste time on repetitive comprehension strategies instead of actually practicing reading by taking in a rich variety of literature.
“I think that time is going to be lost because they’ll be reading some story, and they’ll just overanalyze,” he said.
By the way, calling the Texas Public Policy Foundation a “free market think tank” is misleading. The group is quite hostile to public education, and features on its board several people who have led fights to gut funding for public schools and impose bleed-the-schools voucher programs. The Foundation appears to endorse preaching in public schools and gutting science standards, among other problems.
If it’s good work, why is it done in secret? Remember that I spent years in right wing spin work in Washington. Here’s what I see: Either McLeroy’s administration at the state board is incredibly incompetent and can’t even get the good news right, and out on time, or there is another, darker and probably illegal agenda at work.
Below the fold, the full text of the comment from “WG1” at the Chronicle’s website.
Other resources:
- Earlier coverage of the meetings, a story by Gary Sharrar in the Houston Chronicle
- “Who decides what children learn in school?” Texas Cable News Network
- Chairman McLeroy to Texas Hispanics: “Drop dead!”
- Be sure to see the Pharyngula post, “Fire Don McLeroy”
- Even the stargazers are worried; see Phil Plait’s comments at Bad Astronomy, “That’s it. Texas Really Is Doomed”
9 Comments | Books, Curricula, Education, Freedom of Information, Literature, No Child Left Behind Act, Politics, Public education, State school boards, TAKS, Teaching, TEKS, Texas, Texas Freedom Network | Tagged: Education, English standards, Open Meetings Act, Politics, state board of education, Texas, War on Education | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Texas education board turns authoritarian
May 24, 2008Nobody can recall the ceremony, but Don McLeroy made it clear yesterday that he thinks he’s been designated Kommissar of Education, ramming through a proposal altering English standards for the next decade — without debate, without even a chance to read the proposal.
It’s probably not so bad a pig in a poke as it might be — of course, no one had the chance to review it, so no one knows, really — but the processes used, worthy of Napoleon or Kruschev on a bad day, should give cause for concern.
Gotta think about this one for a while.
15 Comments | Education, Education quality, Government, History, State school boards, TAKS, Teaching, TEKS, Texas, War on Education | Tagged: Education, education standards, English, Politics, state board of education, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Good teachers make the difference
May 19, 2008A New York Times editorial last week came very close to getting it right on teachers, teacher hiring, teacher retention, and teacher pay.
To maintain its standing as an economic power, the United States must encourage programs that help students achieve the highest levels in math and science, especially in poor communities where the teacher corps is typically weak.
The National Academies, the country’s leading science advisory group, has called for an ambitious program to retrain current teachers in these disciplines and attract 10,000 new ones each year for the foreseeable future. These are worthy goals. But a new study from a federal research center based at the Urban Institute in Washington suggests that the country might raise student performance through programs like Teach for America, a nonprofit group that places high-achieving college graduates in schools that are hard to staff.
Recruiting high-achievers, across the board and not just with the help of a flagship do-gooder program, will require that starting salaries be competitive with those jobs where people of high caliber flock. Education competes with accounting, law, medicine and other high-paying professions for the best people.
If Milton Friedman and Adam Smith were right, that most people act rather rationally in their own interests, economically, which jobs will get the best people?
Teaching is the only profession I can think of where the administrators and other leaders threaten to fire the current teachers, work to keep working conditions low and unsatisfactory, and say that more money will come only after championship performance.
There isn’t a person alive who hasn’t cursed George Steinbrenner and said that he or she could run the Yankees better. Whenever he opens his checkbook, the nation howls. And yet, year in an year out, the Yankees win.
Is there any fool alive who thinks Steinbrenner could do what he does by cutting pay, not cleaning the locker room, and drafting the cheapest players he could find? Were we to assume Steinbrenner the world’s most famous lousy boss, there are a million education administrators who would need to step it up to get to Steinbrenner’s level.
As Utah Phillips famously said, graduates are about to be told they are the nation’s greatest natural resource — but have you seen how this nation treats its natural resources?
Oh, I miss Molly Ivins.
6 Comments | Business, Business Ethics, Economics, Education, Education quality, Education spending, Free market economics, History, Leadership, Molly Ivins' Ghost, Politics, Public education, Teacher Pay, Teaching | Tagged: Education, Education reform, Molly Ivins, Politics, Teacher Pay | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Any McCain defenders out there?
May 19, 2008Stumbled into this post, “McCain’s YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare.”
To now, I’ve just had policy differences with McCain, and much admiration for his having gone through his prison experiences while maintaining a high degree of balance. The video is damning. Is it accurate?
Any McCain defenders out there who can make the case against what the video seems to say?
1 Comment | Campaigns, Elections, Ethics, Politics, Presidents | Tagged: 2008, McCain, Politics, presidential campaign, Veracity Issues | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Rewrite the government and civics texts
May 16, 2008Government teachers, can you find this in the textbooks you use in your classes?
Nat Hentoff reports:
The Bush administration believes, he said, “that the president could ignore or modify existing executive orders that he and other presidents have issued without disclosing the new interpretation.”
I noted before, these are exciting times to be teaching, with all these examples of Constitutional law, and Constitution abuses, and President Bush’s War on the Constitution in the headlines, or buried on page 14, every day.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Nat Hentoff’s original column is at WorldNet Daily (!!!). The Constitution with comments, and also here.
Other resources:
- Computer and Defense Department security issues, from Washington Post
- Federal Times report on new Bush classification schemes
- Complete text of Steven Aftergood’s prepared testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution, April 30, 2008
- Complete list of witnesses, link to webcast, for the April 30 hearing of the Subcommittee on the Constitution (the complete, 2-hour hearing is available, courtesy of C-SPAN)
- Various impeachment petitions can be found with a Google search
Leave a Comment » | 9/11, Bill of Rights, Capturing history, Checks and Balances, Democracy in action, Ethics, Freedom - Political, Freedom of Information, Freedom of the Press, Government, History, Law, Patriotism, Politics, Presidents, Totalitarianism, U.S. Constitution, War on Terrorism, War on the Constitution | Tagged: Dictatorship, Government Secrecy, Homeland Security, Politics, Totalitarian Regimes, War on the Constitution | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Oh, that explains it
May 16, 2008Adnan Oktar ‘s conviction on charges of profiting from what amounts to a sex slave operation was a set up, he said.
Who would do such a dastardly thing? The communists and the Freemasons!
This interview is from last September, but so far it’s perfectly in line with what his PR flacks are saying since the sentencing: Video, selected transcripts.
I’m sure that’s what he tells his wife, Morgan Fairchild.
How can you keep from thinking this stuff is parody? It looks and sounds like slightly amateurish “David Letterman” or “Saturday Night Live” routines.
Leave a Comment » | Adnan Oktar, Creationism, Politics, Religion, Scandals, Science, Uncomposted Organic Fertilizer | Tagged: Adnan Oktar, Creationism, Politics, Religion, scandal, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Presidents in advertising
May 14, 2008Franklin Pierce and Millard Fillmore to sell Japanese cars.
Ulysses S Grant has gotten in on the trend to former presidents making ad pitches.
Ad from the Pew Charitable Trust’s campaign for mine law reform.
3 Comments | Campaigns, Environmental protection, History, Natural resources, Politics | Tagged: advertising, Environmental protection, Media, Mining Law Reform, Politics, Presidents | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Olympic history FAIL!, or great PhotoShop
May 11, 2008
Do you think the sign maker was jesting? Or do you think the sign maker genuinely didn’t know? (See: 1936 Olympics in Berlin)
While we wait to see whether someone will confess to PhotoShopping this picture, we teachers might consider using this photo as a hook for a lesson on the differences between the rising totalitarian state of Nazi Germany in 1936, and the rising, increasingly economically free state of the People’s Democratic Republic of China today.
One more lesson plan for this year — it’s reusable next fall, with the added bonus then that by then you’ll have the headlines of the actual Olympics to add to the discussion.
Update: The photo is said to have been was taken by Rowan Benum at a California site (see Mr. Benum’s comment). Since it’s all the rage on conservative sites, where the history ignorance is condemned but the conservative bloggers can’t quite bring themselves to endorse the Communist Chinese, I strongly suspect wondered about a PhotoShop origin. The torch was run through San Francisco; there are few palms in San Francisco (Californians: Can you identify the location?).
Update 5-13-2008: The photographer kindly dropped by comments to note the authenticity of the photo. I agree, the Tibetan prayer flags suggest authenticity; would a hoaxer think of such details?
Discussion questions for the classroom:
Students should look at the photo, and read coverage of the torch relay, such as CNN’s story about the San Francisco relay where Mr. Benum took the photo. Students should have access to information about the International Olympic Committee and its organization, especially the tradition of Olympic Truce. The Charter of the Olympics is probably too long for practical classroom use, but Paragraph 2 can be copied for the students, or perhaps the full page of the “Fundamental Principles of Olympism”:
“Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.”
Olympic Charter, Fundamental principles, paragraph 2
There is a wealth of information for classroom use at the website of the IOC. If you’re particularly adventurous, or deep into this topic, check out the podcasts of Olympic history from amateur historian Eli Hunt.
Students should also have some information about Tibet, and the Dalai Lama and Tibet’s government in exile, about the history of Tibet and China’s actions since World War II. Students should have some history of the 1936 Olympics, and they should be familiar with the stories of Jesse Owens’ accomplishments there and his return to a segregated U.S. You may want to provide an article about the U.S. protest of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, and the Soviet protest of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and other Cold War moments of Olympic tension.
- Since the International Olympics Committee (IOC) is an avowedly non-political international agency, is it fair or rational to protest the siting of an Olympics on political grounds?
- What do the protesters ask the IOC to do? What do the protesters ask others to do?
- Under international law, what are the rights and duties of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC)?
- Did the IOC ask anything of the government of the Peoples Republic of China of a political nature? Would such requests be fair, or rational?
- Other international organizations function in other nations where governments do not have good records on human rights, such as the Red Cross/Red Crescent, Scouting, UNICEF, and others (can you add to this list?). What considerations must such organizations give to local politics where human rights are at issue?
- Compare and contrast the issues surrounding the Beijing Olympics with issues surrounding the Myanmar relief efforts after Cyclone Nargis (2008).
- Look at other protests involving the Olympics, especially in 1980 and 1984. Did those protests achieve what the protesters had hoped? Does the success or failure of past protests augur well for current protests?
- The creator of the protest sign in the photograph appears to have not known about the 1936 Olympics, which were hosted in Berlin, then under the control of the Nazi government of Germany. The Olympics were sited in Berlin prior to the rise of the Nazi government. Does the protester’s ignorance of history affect the message of the sign? Does it reflect well on the cause the protester advocates?
- What other famous or notorious examples of ignorance of history can you find?
- Do you ever get embarrassed for the people captured in Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” segments?
- Georges Santayana (1863-1952) famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Do you find that statement to be true? Does this affect the course of history? (Students may want to explore the history of invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler, or the history of invasions of Afghanistan by Britain, the Soviet Union, and the U.S.)
5 Comments | China, Dissent, Education, Free press, Free speech, Freedom - Political, History, Lesson plans, Politics, Santayana's ghost, World history | Tagged: History, Lesson plans, Olympics, Politics, protest, Santayana's ghost | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Schadenfreude alert: Turkish creationist gets three-year sentence
May 10, 2008Tape up your face to keep from smiling too broadly, schadenfreude being a sin or close to it.
You remember Oktar: He’s the guy who publishes all those nasty anti-evolution and anti-science books, steals photos for his high-cost, low-information “atlas” of creationism, and successfully sued to shut down this blog’s availability in Turkey (Well, this blog and two million others on WordPress).
Reuters has a story on the affair:
A spokeswoman for his Science Research Foundation (BAV) confirmed to Reuters that Oktar had been sentenced but said the judge was influenced by political and religious pressure groups.
Oktar had been tried with 17 other defendants in an Istanbul court. The verdict and sentence came after a previous trial that began in 2000 after Oktar, along with 50 members of his foundation, was arrested in 1999.
In that court case, Oktar had been charged with using threats for personal benefit and creating an organization with the intent to commit a crime. The charges were dropped but another court picked them up resulting in the latest case.
Oktar planned to appeal the sentence, a BAV spokeswoman said. No further details were immediately available.
Oh, yeah — those political and religious pressure groups. And Oktar’s high dollar bullying of government authorities — what is that?
European, and Turkey, laws against political views may trouble one, justly. In a perfect world, there would be no need for such things, with good and true ideas having a good shot at winning in a fair fight. Oktar specializes in the sort of thuggery that makes a fight for ideas unfair. We might hope this latest action will simply help keep the playing field even, level and fair.
Resources:
- The World (from BBC, PRI and WGBH) audio story on collaboration between Discovery Institute figures and Oktar in Turkey, promoting Islamic creationism
- Oktar gets a ban on Google groups
- National Center for Science Education story
- Adnan Oktar’s entry in Wikipedia
- Die Zeit blog story on Oktar’s WordPress ban
The news is oddly silent about this otherwise.
3 Comments | Academic freedom, Adnan Oktar, Biology, Bogus history, Books, Censorship, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Darwin, Justice, Law, Science | Tagged: Adnan Oktar, Creationism, Freedom of Speech, Islam, Politics, Religion, Science, Turkey | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
The Wrong Stuff, on purpose: Weikart misquotes Darwin
May 10, 2008Richard Weikart is an arm of the Discovery Institute’s disinformation brigade. A couple of years ago he published a book attempting to link Darwin to the Holocaust in a blame-sharing arrangement. This book and some of its arguments appear to be the foundation of the text used to write the script for the mockumentary movie “Expelled!” featuring Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein.
Which is to say, the basis for the movie is dubious. Weikart’s scholarship creating links between Darwin, science and Hitler is quite creative. It is also based on arguments created from Darwin’s writings that mislead the innocent about evolution, science and history, or which get Darwin and evolution exactly wrong.
Michael Ruse published an op-ed in a Florida paper in February — a piece which is no longer available there (anybody got a copy? Nebraska Citizens for Science preserved a copy) — and Weikart responded, restating his creative claims. Alas for the truth, Weikart’s canards are still available at the Discovery Institute website, putting an interesting twist on Twain’s old line: The truth will go to bed at night while a falsehood will travel twice around the world as the truth kicks off its slippers.
Looking for Ruse’s piece, I found Weikart’s response here and here. I composed a quick response pointing out the problems, which I would like to posit here for the record — partly because I doubt Darwiniana gets much traffic, partly because the censor-happy folks at Discovery Institute don’t allow free discussion at their site, and partly so I can control it to make sure it’s not butchered as Weikart butchers Darwin’s text.
At Darwiniana I said:
Weikart’s strip quoting of Darwin is most disappointing. [Weikart wrote:]
Darwin claimed in chapter two of The Descent of Man that there were great differences in moral disposition and intellect between the “highest races” and the “lowest savages.” Later in Descent he declared, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” Racial inegalitarianism was built into Darwin’s analysis from the start.
Darwin argued the differences in intellect and manners between the “highest” of men and the “lowest” of men did NOT change the fact that we are are all related — legally, Darwin’s argument would evidence a claim absolutely the opposite of what Weikart claims. Here are Darwin’s words from Chapter II of Descent of Man, as Darwin wrote them, without Weikart’s creative editing:
Nor is the difference slight in moral disposition between a barbarian, such as the man described by the old navigator Byron, who dashed his child on the rocks for dropping a basket of sea-urchins, and a Howard or Clarkson; and in intellect, between a savage who uses hardly any abstract terms, and a Newton or Shakespeare. Differences of this kind between the highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages, are connected by the finest gradations. Therefore it is possible that they might pass and be developed into each other. [emphasis added]
That’s not inegalitarianism at all — Darwin’s saying they are the same species, related closer than the poets allow. If we stick to the evidence, and [do] not wander off into poetic philosophy, we must acknowledge that Darwin’s own egalitarian spirit shows here in the science, too. It would be an odd kettle of fish indeed that a crabby guy like Hitler, who shared the antiscience bias of Weikart’s organization, would suddenly accept the science of a hated Englishman that ran contrary to his other philosophies. Who makes the error here, Hitler or Weikart? If they both think Darwin endorsed racism, they both do — but there is not an iota of evidence that Hitler based his patent racism on science, let alone the science of an Englishman.
As to the second quote, Weikart leaves the context out, and the context is everything. Darwin is not arguing that “savages” (the 19th century word for “aboriginals”) were less human, nor that they are a different species. He was arguing that in some future time there would appear creationists like Dr. Weikart’s colleagues at the Discovery Institute who will deny evolution because, once Europeans and others with guns conduct an unholy genocide (which Darwin writes against in the next chapter), and once humans wipe out chimpanzees, orangs and gorillas, the other great apes, the creationists can [then] dishonestly look around, blink their eyes and say, “Where are the links? There cannot be evolution between (Animal X) and humans!”
Darwin wrote:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18. ‘Anthropological Review,’ April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, [emphasis added] and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
In the end, Darwin wrote against genocide, against racism, and in favor of the higher thinking abilities of all dark-skinned people. He wrote in favor of Christian morality. Darwin himself remained a faithful, tithing Christian to the end of his life.
Such a man, and such amazing science, deserve accurate history, not the fantastic, cowardly and scurrilous inventions Dr. Weikart has given them. We should rise to be “man in a more civilized state” as Darwin had hoped.
Update, July 24, 2008, nota bene: To anyone venturing here from the Blogcatalog discussion on intelligent design: Get over to the site of Donald Johanson’s Institute for Human Origins, and especially look at the presentation “On Becoming Human.” Also check out the Evolution Gateway site at Berkeley, especially this page which explains what evolution is, and this page which offers some introduction for what the evidence for evolution really is. One quick answer to a question someone asked there: Between H. erectus and modern humans, H. sapiens, in the time sequence we have fossils of H. heidelbergensis and H. neanderthalensis. It’s pretty clear that Neandertal is not ancestral to modern humans, but instead lived alongside modern humans for 50,000 years or so from the Middle East through Southern Europe. To the question of actual transitional fossils, you’d need to hit the paleontology journals — there are a lot. You may also benefit from taking a look at the articles at this special Nature site.
10 Comments | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Darwin, Education, Ethics, Evolution, Famous quotes, Genocide, History, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Junk science, Lessons of history, Natural history, Quotes, Racism, Rampant stupidity, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science, World War II | Tagged: Ben Stein, Darwin, Education, Expelled!, Politics, Religion, Richard Weikart, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 