Evolution: hybridization is relatively common (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, August 28, 2017, 13:19 (2426 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: As for Darwin this Times essay is very damning about Darwin's scientific and intuative abilities:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/darwin-s-greatness-is-founded-on-a-myth-r0563g83q?sh...

DAVID: I won't bother to quote from the essay. You can read it for yourself if you can tolerate the point of view expressed.

You had already quoted another article by A.N. Wilson, who is plugging his biography of Darwin (to be published in September). Here are two quotes which exemplify the tone of his polemic:

QUOTE: Darwin effectively told the Victorians: “Rather than trouble yourself by the gross selfishness of living with vast accumulated unearned wealth, carriage drives, servants and villas, tell yourself that the differences between rich and poor are just the way nature organised things.”

Did he really? So if we observe that animals fight and kill each other for food, mates or territory, are we effectively saying it’s OK for humans to fight and kill each other for food, mates or territory? What a wonderful new approach to biography. Let’s not quote the subject. Let’s make up our own quotes instead.

QUOTE: Webb, in common with HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill, shared the view that middle-class women would be “shirking in their duty” if they did not have families to outnumber those of the feckless poor. Less than 30 years would elapse between boring little Sidney Webb expressing the fear that his country would fall to the Irish and the Jews, and another European country, Germany, enacting the Reich Citizenship Law, the Marital Health Law and the Nuremberg Laws for racial segregation.
All were based on bogus Victorian science, much of which had started life in the gentle setting of Darwin’s study at Down House, near Bromley in Kent.

The principle is on the same intellectual level as blaming Jesus Christ for the Crusades and the Inquisition, Muhammed for ISIS terrorism, and God for all the evil that men do. No, I am not comparing Darwin to these religious figures. He was simply a scientist trying to unravel the mystery of how life on earth developed, and he put together a theory much of which is still valid 150 years after he wrote it. If the theory of common descent is true, and if it’s true that in most cases those organisms best suited for survival will survive, then why attack the person who promulgated the truth just because other people used it for their own purposes? As for “bogus Victorian science” and the other spiteful ad hominems, no doubt there will be responses from people who know a lot more than I do, and last time I promised to report on any reviews. They obviously won’t be available till later next month.