Adam,
You’re pretty quick off the blocks in the race for name calling.

It was clear in my post that I was talking about Darwin’s writings (plural) and not just Origin.

I would agree that we should try to be careful about definitions when it comes to things like races, varieties, species, etc. If you read Caton’s article, himself an evolutionist, you would have read some selections taken from Darwin’s writings in which Darwin reveals some of his thoughts on human races. Why don’t you take up your complaint with Caton?

I’ll repeat that as far as people go, ‘race’ has no biological basis. There is only one race, the human race.

And as Romany alluded earlier, we ought not to be so quick to lay allegations. That is, unless you prefer the discussion’s descent into name calling.

Dear Michael,

Playing the victim by using terms like “name calling” is an act of futility when the charges against you are overwhelmingly substantiated. If I were to call someone a “liar” when in fact they had been caught out lying, their accusations of ‘name calling’ would not nullify the fact that they have lied. It’s a nice attempt at diverting one’s deceitfulness, but others here reading this thread won’t be fooled by it. People are not stupid.

You wrote: "I can easily agree with Kenny when he says that race is a social construct and has no biological basis."

And that is precisely consistent with what evolution shows. We are all one race. Hence the Social Darwinism argument pushed by creationists is null and void.

But then you go on to say: “Yet I don’t see how that squares with Darwin’s writings, ‘Origin of Species: The Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Existence’”

Playing the man and not the ball is an issue that has already been brought up in this thread, and that’s precisely what you do when you attempt to paint evolution as inherently racist in the above. A move that is deceitful.

Darwin probably saw other races as inferior just as many people of his time did. Abraham Lincoln even made some racist comments about Negros and their supposed inferiority to whites despite his objection to slavery.

Yet despite factors like this, and the fact that Darwin knew very little about his own theory compared to modern day scientists, you attempt to make evolution and/or Darwin appear “ugly” by emphasising the racist sounding title of his book as if that nullified the phenomenally large amount of evidence to support it.

Your post was deceitful in more than one way, yet here you are trying to deny it. To top it all off, you acuse me of 'name calling' as if my accusations were unsubstantiated.

It's an absolute disgrace.

Romany, I agree.
In fact, I find it more interesting that people weren't aware of these clay feet. I have had the discussion/argument with several Americans who avowed the American civil war was fought to free the slaves. According to the histories I have read, Lincoln's primary objective was to preserve the Union.
Likewise, Darwin's evolutionary theories implied -at least to people of his day- that within humanity there were more or less evolved peoples, rather like the difference between Neanderthal and Cro Magnon.
Actually, I recall a Social Studies text in primary school, showing the various stages of the evolution of Man.
Australopithicus, 4'0" tall; Neanderthal, 4'6", Cro Magnon 5'0" modern man 5'8", *American 6'0'*... 3 guesses where it was written.
As I mentioned in a recent article, Gandhi is a hero of mine, despite there being some evidence he was a bit of a racist, -at least where African Natives were concerned.
I was first a little shocked, then wryly amused to read in Marx's manifesto, that hero of the working class, these words (inspired perhaps, by Darwin?):

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an
end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has
pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to
his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus
between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash
payment."
As they say, nobody's perfect.

It seems to me that any debate containing the words creation and evolution is destined to stall and degenerate. I think it was Emile Durkheim that suggested of these subjects that “consensus, even for the purpose of study, is rarely, if ever, achieved”.

Were it not for human sapience we would not of course, have any debate, and as far as we know, the millions of other biological forms on this planet are not having this debate.

Can we therefore accept that on the evolutionary side of things, if it does occur, it would occur whether or not it can be debated by humans? On the creation side of things, what purpose does creation have for non-sapient biology?

This leaves us with the question, “is our sapience a product of evolution or creation?” Without getting drawn into the usual destructive philosophical diversions, the evolutionary path if it exists has been in place for hundreds of millions of years. The creation path has been a recent yet indefinable phenomenon, because it can only have relevance or even exist since we became capable of “imagining” it.

Therefore faith based constructs of creation could not exist if there were no humans capable of creating the image, whereas evolution can happily exist without us, it does not even need Charles Darwin. The rest to me is an interesting exercise in human study that cannot, as Emile Durkheim suggests, reach any form of consensus

Yes any post on any board on the web about this subject generally going down the same path. It is important to separate scientific dissent and religiously motivated denial.
I’m only interested in the scientific debate, there is a lot of it within the field. The debate is not however about the fundamentals that Darwin established. Did he get everything right, well clearly no, but the same can be said for Newton, Einstein and Maxwell. It can seem strange to people why Darwin is held in such esteem by lovers of scientific knowledge. For me it’s simple these are ordinary people who have had extraordinary ideas.
It is said that science progress’s on the shoulders of giants, with most working scientists filling in the mortar. Darwin laid the foundation of our understanding of how biology come to be in all its wonder. This insight, this simple but at the same time complicated idea has become biology, It would be a very big shift to overturn the basic principles of evolution, and so far nothing it coming close having that power. There are still gaps in our understanding of the story, and some will never be filled, but nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution.
@ Dan S de Merengue, that’s easy Darwin was simply wrong about these things, scientist throw out ideas that don’t stand up to the evidence and keep ones that do. If his ideas about what drives evolution were not supported by the evidence then we probably wouldn’t even know who he was.
@Running, thanks for yet another mindless contribution.

Grim,

Right - have heard that one about the noble impetus to free the slaves impelling the Northerners many times myself. In fact it permeates many a Dream Machine movie too.

As Kenny says, scientists - and physicists and chemists and mathematicians - make mistakes. Also, though they work in a field of objectivity and empiricism they live/d in a real world which informs their characters and beliefs.

I think there is a need in many of us to elevate those we admire to hero status: this both comforts us when we, as “ordinary” people, fail to achieve great things, and either provides proof of god’s greatness in creating such marvels, or sublimates a need to believe in supernatural heroes…according to our bent.

As my field is the Arts, I find it often increases my appreciation of certain figures to anchor them firmly in their own milieu rather than transposing them to ours. When both Darwin and Lincoln are looked at in the context of their times to me it adds another dimension both to them as people and to their achievements.

Unfortunately, my view of Shakespeare as a bi-sexual philanderer with delusions of grandeur is looked on almost as blasphemy by some of my students