Thanks to some help from a campus student group, Michigan State University's campus in East Lansing gets to host a great big Creationism conference, not that the university itself is particularly excited about the prospect of bringing in a bunch of goofballs to argue that Darwin = Hitler.
Social Darwinism was inspired as much by Lamarckism (which held that characteristics acquired by one generation during its lifetime are passed on to its descendants) as it was by the theory of natural selection. Eugenics was one extremist movement that was inspired by, but not a logical consequence of, Darwin&#039;s theories. The Nazi&#039;s eugenics policies were in turn a rather extremist version of eugenics. One of eugenics&#039; biggest <i>logical</i> weaknesses (it had appalling moral and ethical problems as well) was the problem of deciding what was &quot;desirable&quot; and what was &quot;undesirable.&quot; The Nazis sorted people into these two categories using extremely nationalistic and nativistic definitions. Natural selection accomplishes this sorting based on simple survival in a given environment. Social Darwinism tried to do the same thing according to arbitrary socially-defined criteria.
Nazi racial theorists weren&#039;t that interested in promoting the advancement of the &quot;more capable&quot; and preventing the perpetuation of the &quot;less capable&quot; which was the nominal aim of most theorists of what was eventually termed &quot;social Darwinism.&quot; They concentrated on two things: purifying the &quot;German race&quot; and cleansing the German nation of non-German &quot;races,&quot; all of which they classified as &quot;inferior.&quot; Their intellectual basis for this was derived from the writings of German nationalists of the 19th century such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the v&ouml;lkisch movement. They had negligible influence from and little regard for the Christian fundamentalism of American religious revivalists, but they derived some ideas and were influenced by white supremacist theorists from European countries such as French theorist Arthur de Gobineau.
And the chances of life evolving by random chance are so small it&#039;s utterly impossible, unless you have for example, living things actually existing and subject to environmental and population pressures. Then it seems safe to change your starting assumptions.
&quot;challenge evolution and all such theories predicated on chance&quot;...which evolution is in no way at all, whatsoever, by any plausible interpretation even of the very earliest of evolutionary writing.
But at least they have a possibly-defeasible straw man as whipping boy, or they&#039;d have a pretty tough time with Lenski&#039;s experiments and several others along similar lines, showing clear and non-reversible speciation in a real-time, controlled environment. (no researchers I&#039;ve contacted so far have devised an experiment where the expected outcome is a crocoduck, however, so Kirk Cameron may have us there)
Somebody spotted him with Sharon Micucci.*
*H/t to Garfunkel &amp; Oates
Obviously, Earth was created for ebolavirus. At least, judging from the media coverage.
Liberal punctuation?
Okay fine, except I don&#039;t think there is anything thicker than Coco&#039;s ass.
Oh, well done.
Social Darwinism was inspired as much by Lamarckism (which held that characteristics acquired by one generation during its lifetime are passed on to its descendants) as it was by the theory of natural selection. Eugenics was one extremist movement that was inspired by, but not a logical consequence of, Darwin&#039;s theories. The Nazi&#039;s eugenics policies were in turn a rather extremist version of eugenics. One of eugenics&#039; biggest <i>logical</i> weaknesses (it had appalling moral and ethical problems as well) was the problem of deciding what was &quot;desirable&quot; and what was &quot;undesirable.&quot; The Nazis sorted people into these two categories using extremely nationalistic and nativistic definitions. Natural selection accomplishes this sorting based on simple survival in a given environment. Social Darwinism tried to do the same thing according to arbitrary socially-defined criteria.
Nazi racial theorists weren&#039;t that interested in promoting the advancement of the &quot;more capable&quot; and preventing the perpetuation of the &quot;less capable&quot; which was the nominal aim of most theorists of what was eventually termed &quot;social Darwinism.&quot; They concentrated on two things: purifying the &quot;German race&quot; and cleansing the German nation of non-German &quot;races,&quot; all of which they classified as &quot;inferior.&quot; Their intellectual basis for this was derived from the writings of German nationalists of the 19th century such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the v&ouml;lkisch movement. They had negligible influence from and little regard for the Christian fundamentalism of American religious revivalists, but they derived some ideas and were influenced by white supremacist theorists from European countries such as French theorist Arthur de Gobineau.
And the chances of life evolving by random chance are so small it&#039;s utterly impossible, unless you have for example, living things actually existing and subject to environmental and population pressures. Then it seems safe to change your starting assumptions.
There&#039;s a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram.
mmm, I&#039;m nominating Miami, Ohio for producing this loser... <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wik..." target="_blank">" rel="nofollow noopener" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ryan">http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
That&#039;s my great-uncle you&#039;re talking about there!
A human is just a DNA molecule&#039;s means of transportation.
<i>no researchers I&#039;ve contacted so far have devised an experiment where the expected outcome is a crocoduck</i>
But... but... what about Dinocroc? And Piranhaconda? Do you mean SyFy has been lying to me?
&quot;Degeneration&quot; is how MSU describes Michigan sportsball this season.
<em>There&rsquo;s no doubt Adolph Hitler believed in evolution</em>
Say, do you know <em>who else</em> believed in ... Oh wait. Never mind ...
&quot;challenge evolution and all such theories predicated on chance&quot;...which evolution is in no way at all, whatsoever, by any plausible interpretation even of the very earliest of evolutionary writing.
But at least they have a possibly-defeasible straw man as whipping boy, or they&#039;d have a pretty tough time with Lenski&#039;s experiments and several others along similar lines, showing clear and non-reversible speciation in a real-time, controlled environment. (no researchers I&#039;ve contacted so far have devised an experiment where the expected outcome is a crocoduck, however, so Kirk Cameron may have us there)
Was Earth created as a place for humans, or did humans evolve to survive on Earth? Or was Earth created for bacteria, as the numbers suggest?