It really boils down to the Naturalistic Fallacy. If something is natural, does that make it good? Would we apply Social Kochism and purposefully infect people with microbes because that is what happens in nature?
Is that true, though? Or is Weikart trying to muddy the waters in order to convince his audience that Social Darwinism and the biological theory are one in the same? Is it any coincidence that his latest book was published by the Discovery Institute, an organization that has tried to insist that social Darwinism and actual Darwinism are one in the same?
Does Weikart spell this out in any of his books or other works?
How is it that I have not read the book and am overreacting, but you have not read the book and are not overreacting?
The Discovery Institute’s use of “Darwin = Hitler” is definitely not balanced. Perhaps Weikart is entirely innocent here, his writings edited before publication and interpreted by others without consultation. This could be the case, but I don’t think any knowledgeable reader could reach this conclusion based on how it is presented by the DI. Either Weikart is powerless to control how his work is presented (unlikely), or unaware of how his work is presented/perceived (also unlikely), or (by elimination) approves of this use, purposefully or tacitly.
Now you are using the term Social Darwinism more consistently, where much of this discussion was simply Darwinism. I agree there is a difference, but that distinction is not always clear in every usage. If Weikart means Social Darwinism, then he should make that clear. We may have some progress on this point.
It appears that you want him to fill his Discovery articles with lengthy denunciations of the history of European anti-Semitism before you will admit that he is not making any such extreme claim about Darwin and the Holocaust.
It is not asking too much, nor requiring much page space, to be consistent in usage of “Social Darwinism”. A denunciation need not be lengthy. He claims Darwinism is a necessary cause, not Social Darwinism is a necessary cause. I don’t think either of these claims can be supported. People will latch on to anything is justify abhorrent beliefs, even the Bible, and if Darwin had never published Origins then somethings else would have been taken to justify hatred. I’m no historian, but I’m pretty sure history is with me on this part.
We should not tolerate intolerance, and I don’t think it is asking too much for Weikart and the DI to remind readers of that long history of antisemitism, rather than pinning the blame on Darwin. Some writers at ENV are quite eager to pin this on Darwin. At risk of making a slippery-slope argument, it’s not such a big step between omitting history and denying it. I should think that most historians might agree.
I am aware you have a lot of background here, but thank you for expanding.
It would never occur to me to think that, because his scholarly work is focused on spelling out the connection between “social Darwinism” and various social evils (including but not limited to the Holocaust), he would deny the central role of centuries of anti-Semitism in producing the Holocaust.
One would hope so!
And it would never occur to me that any intelligent reader of Weikart’s books would suppose that he is arguing that Darwinian theory alone, without any background condition of vicious anti-Semitism, produced the Holocaust.
Weikart’s books as interpreted by those knowledgeable is not the question in my mind. The average readers of ENV are far less likely to be knowledgeable or interested in the distinction of Social Dawrinism.
It would never occur to me to think that anyone at Discovery would deny that role.
Never? Perhaps you have been reading selectively. Klinghoffer specializes in just this sort of hatchet job. The Sensuous Curmudgeon often documents these attacks.
I find it scarcely credible that you, a well educated person, would take materials from the D (or any source)I at face value, without applying any skepticism. In fact I believe you have stated otherwise in the past, which I want to acknowledge. When you write “It would never occur to me to think that anyone at Discovery would deny that role,” I want to believe that is not what you really meant. Can you clarify?
A quibble: Social Darwinism is an interpretation, not a discovery.
I was not referring to the ribosome as a totality, but to peptidyl transferase, which you went on and on about. It’s an enzyme (an aminoacyltransferase enzyme to be exact), and enzymes are proteins…
That’s not a quibble. Equivocating between Darwinian evolutionary theory, the boogeyman of “DarwinISM,” and then to “social Darwinism” is what both Weikart and Eddie are doing.
I don’t think that either is doing so in good faith.
Read his books and find out. Then offer an opinion on the subject. That’s the normal procedure among intellectually responsible people, even if it’s not the normal procedure among people whose degrees are in the life sciences.
I rarely read the columns on the DI website. I have looked up a few for this discussion, in order to answer people here, but I go weeks at a time without reading ENV. I prefer to read books, where an author sets forth a lengthy, precisely articulated, development argument, marshalling hundreds or thousands of piece of evidence. If I wanted to offer an opinion on the value of Weikart’s books, I would not even look at, say, Klinghoffer’s columns; nor would I read any reviews, positive or negative, of Weikart’s books. I would read Weikart’s books.
The procedure of people here, on the other hand, is quite different, something more like, “Klinghoffer likes Weikart, and Klinghoffer is a dink, so Weikart must be a dink, too.”
What you guys don’t seem to understand about me is that I don’t care what institutional spin is put on something; I’m only concerned about the arguments and the evidence.
You guys also seem to vastly overrate the social influence of ENV columns. Who reads ENV regularly? People already inclined to support the views of its columnists. It’s not as if the vast majority of Americans have even heard of ENV or are even aware that Discovery has a website. In fact, when I talk to people on the street about these issues, even those sympathetic with ideas of design, and who are regular churchgoers, most of them have never heard of the Discovery Institute. Most of them have never heard of Behe or Dembski, either. Or Weikart. So the idea that there are legions of people out there being misled by Discovery to equate Darwin’s scientific theory with social Darwinism is preposterous.
Yes, there are millions of Americans quite willing to make such conflations, but they were already inclined to do that even before Discovery existed. And if those with such biases read Klinghoffer’s columns and admire them, so what? It’s a conversation between the converted.
How many otherwise sane individuals do you know, who, say, a year or two years or five years ago thought Darwin’s theory was sound science, and then started reading Discovery columns about Weikart or Hitler etc., and decided that evolution must be false because Darwin justified the Holocaust? I doubt you know many such people.
You know, I’ve often, from fundamentalists, heard the rumor that Darwin, on his deathbed, recanted his theory of evolution as Godless and wrong. Of course the rumor has no historical basis. But the rumor teaches us that there are Bible-thumpers out there who are willing to believe things on slight or no evidence, if it fits in with their view of the world. Now I have no doubt that people like that sometimes read Discovery columns, and are persuaded by them. I have no doubt that people like that sometimes read, say, Klinghoffer on Weikart, and decide (often going beyond anything that even Klinghoffer explicitly claims) that Darwin caused the Holocaust and that Weikart actually claims this in his books. But people like that are never going to listen to objective evidence for biological evolution in the first place, and they are never going study the history of the Holocaust seriously, so what are you worried about?
You might as well worry about people who read astrology columns and believe in them. The sort of person who believes what an astrology column says is not the sort of person who thinks independently and critically about stars, planets, biology, etc., and you’ll never wean that sort of person off astrology; and the sort of person who would rely on an ENV column to learn the thought of Weikart is not the sort of person to read serious academic books about European history and is, culturally speaking, a non-factor. You would have more cause to worry if members of the History faculty at major universities were reading ENV columns and then expressing the view that Darwin caused the Holocaust. You would have more to worry about if widely used high school history textbooks covering WWII taught that Darwin caused the Holocaust, and cited the Discovery website in their bibliographies. But this isn’t happening.
The kind of person who really wants to know the historical truth about the relation between, say, evolutionary thought and the Holocaust, is the kind of person who will first read serious scholarly works in the area and only afterward read various reviews and reactions to those works. The kind of person who wants to confirm a pre-established leaning will content himself with reviews and opinions about those works, choosing to side with the reviews and opinions that are in line with his prior opinions, and will opt never to read the works themselves, to find out if the reviews and opinions are in fact justified. I suspect that a good number of ENV readers fall into the second group, and that’s sad, but that’s not a good reason for anyone here to imitate their faulty intellectual procedure.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but an opinion formed on that limited basis would not carry any weight with academic historians. They would expect a detailed engagement with the arguments of the book before they would pay any attention to anything you said.
I had always thought that one of the main purposes of book reviews, and particularly expert book reviews was to tell us if a book is worth reading. When a consensus of the reviews is that the book is badly flawed, it would therefore be considered reasonable (and in no way a slight on our integrity) to avoid reading the book and accept the expert opinion (in this case that of academic historians) as prima facie evidence of the criticism.
Likewise it would generally be considered reasonable to take the tone of a book’s introduction as symptomatic of the book’s general tone, and reject a book on this basis. Yes, it is possible that the rest of the book follows a very different tone – but that inconsistency is likely to render the book more problematical, not less. Thus (without losing integrity) one can consider a poor introduction to be prima facie evidence of a poor book, and elect not to continue with it.
And will having read the book give us much more certainty? None of us on this thread have any particular depth of knowledge of European history. How, lacking a deep familiarity with the “rich primary material”, are we meant to determine for ourselves that Weikart is “selectively viewing his rich primary material”? How, lacking a deep familiarity with the “political, social, psychological, and economic factors” in question, can we determine if he is “ignoring political, social, psychological, and economic factors that may have played key roles in the post-Darwinian development of Nazi eugenics and racism”?
Also, we are expected to defer to Weikart simply because he is “an academically trained European historian”, but likewise accept the rejection of academics trained to a similar level, based on nothing more than a scurrilous ad hominem.
There seems to be a double-standard here.
And if we are talking “third-rate also-rans”, I would have to ask which prominent ID advocates have any substantial prominence for their academic pursuits, as opposed to their promotion of ID. Do we have any h-indices on prominent ID advocates? And how do they compare with those of ID’s more prominent critics? (Recent discussion of citation-counts on this thread got me thinking about empirical data on an academic’s prominence – noting of course that any such indices are, at best, an imperfect measure.)
Addendum:
Given that the topic of “Social Darwinism” has been raised several times on this thread, I would also note a quote that I recently gave on another thread demonstrating that Darwin explicitly rejected the viewpoint that would later be labeled “Social Darwinism”.
No, @Eddie, you care about definitions, sometimes about arguments - but you don’t discuss evidence.
This thread is a perfect example - thousands of words in dozens of posts about what Weikart might say in books you haven’t read, but almost nothing about what Weikart says about the evidence (which you don’t know anyway), and absolutely nothing about the evidence itself.
If you were concerned about the evidence you’d be looking at the evidence, not prattling on about ‘scholarship’.
It’s fine for someone to use a review for that purpose. But the people here attacking Weikart’s book(s) are going beyond saying, “I found some negative book reviews by people who don’t think the book is very good, so I’ve decided not to invest the time reading it”; they are stating in declaratory fashion that the book is not worth reading, as if they know that themselves.
Further, it’s very clear that several people here had already decided (on grounds having nothing to do with Weikart’s books in particular) that anything by a Discovery Fellow, whether published by Discovery or just partly funded by Discovery and put out by another publisher, would be rubbish. But stated that baldly, the prejudicial nature of the judgment would be obvious, so they could not leave it at that. (Though one person did come pretty close to leaving it at that.) There was therefore a strong motive to find outside confirmations for the worthlessness of Weikart, and not to be too scrupulous about presenting positive reviewers’ comments as well as negative ones.
On the last point, I looked at a number of reviews myself, and while each of them pointed out certain weaknesses in the book(s), most of them had several points of praise as well, including the indication that Weikart’s research was “painstaking”, for example. And even those who made negative comments almost all concluded that the book(s) was worth reading. Needless to say, no one here has made an effort to indicate the positive comments in the reviews.
There is no double-standard in my reaction. Yes, it is perfectly appropriate to point out bad reviews as well as good ones. But no one here is in a position to render judgment on the books themselves, unless they have read them. Without having read the books, one cannot know whether or not the reviewers, pro or con, have done justice to the books. My protest is not against anyone here pointing out that there are some negative reviews of the books; my protest is against the implicit claim that merely reading the reviews, even if there is a preponderance of negative opinion, is sufficient to enable one to render judgment on the books.
How, indeed? And those very questions, if thought about for more than five minutes, ought to caution the non-humanities-trained people here from issuing firm-sounding judgments about Weikart’s books unless they have read them.
But there is nothing new here. The confidence of the science-trained people here that they can render decisive judgments, not only in fields of science outside their own – it’s amazing, for instance, how biologists here think they know enough to pronounce decisively on the validity of certain claims about global warming, to the point of not merely citing expert opinion, but trying to make arguments from the data themselves – but also in non-scientific fields. I can still remember trying to explain to people here how hiring worked in university arts departments, and two people, both with zero university training in arts subjects, challenged me, saying they knew that hiring didn’t work that way, based on, in one case, the reading of university calendar course offerings and program descriptions, and in another case, based on occasional meetings with arts professors at various university functions. Neither had ever sat on a review committee of applicants for an arts position. Neither had ever sat on a committee that drafted the job descriptions for arts positions. Neither knew anything about the subtle details of how factions inside arts department can maneuver things to get their candidates hired, or block the hiring of candidates they don’t want. But they told me decisively that I, who have been on the inside of these processes (at both ends, as applicant and on selection committees), was all wrong and that they knew better. For some reason, science-only-trained atheist internet commenters are under the impression that they know everything about just about everything, or, if they don’t, they can easily figure out what they don’t know after ten minutes of quick Googling to pull up some proof-texts or an unbalanced set of reviews that they can quickly skim. The swaggering gets a bit wearying.
I never said Weikart’s books were entirely correct or even very good. They may be good, or bad, or somewhere in between. I said only that the means being used here to determine their contents were superficial and inadequate, and that the pretense of knowing enough to judge the books has been presumptuous. And it’s quite obvious that both the skimpiness of the research and the willingness to state very firm opinions based on a very selective set of comments by reviewers are both connected with the fact that there is already a very strong predisposition to find fault with anyone connected with Discovery.
Regarding your addendum: Even from the fragments of Weikart that I have read, I can see all kinds of careful qualifications in his claims about various things. He is surely aware of the statements where Darwin rejects social Darwinism (since even I am aware of those statements, and I have made nowhere near the close study of Darwin’s words on this topic that Weikart has), but Darwin also says other things that make the picture less clear, and Weikart as a scholar is trying to paint a full picture of Darwin’s thought, not merely to find convenient proof-texts. If one honestly wants to know what Weikart’s interpretation of Darwin is, and his justification for that interpretation, one has to follow Weikart through his discussion of Darwin passages – and that again means reading what Weikart wrote. You don’t refute the careful study of a scholar who has been working in area for many years merely by providing “a quote.” If you want to refute a scholar’s interpretation of an author or a historical event, you have provide research of equal thoroughness. That’s how things are done in the humanities subjects.
I normally try to avoid interacting with @Eddie, as I find his unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks on anti-ID academics contemptible, and his conversation less than felicitous for a wide variety of reasons that others have commented on (most recently, his “peculiarly narrow Bataan-style definitions of certain terms”).
However, I seem to have poked the bear, so he probably deserves a reply. Please everybody hit me in the head with a baseball bat if I start to make a habit of it however.
Who is this “they”? Your accusation lacks specificity. @Puck_Mendleson has read (a substantial portion of) it, just can’t remember if he finished it (which, given the negative reviews, would not be surprising if he didn’t).
Additionally, a reasonable logical extension of an expert opinion stating flaws in a book to the extent that we might conclude that it is “not worth reading” is that “the book’s conclusions should probably not be relied upon”.
Are you still flogging that dead horse Eddie? Theistic Evolution is a DI book. That it was not self-published by the DI is in no way probative, as many, and I dare say most, books of any substance aren’t self-published. It is a DI book because three of the five editors are DI Fellows, and a fourth is (or was) a member of the DI’s UK offshoot C4ID (which is presumably why he’s on the list, as his specialty, Drug Discovery, would not appear to be directly relevant to either Theism or Evolution).
I would suggest that this distrust is entirely self-inflicted by the DI. They have a well-earned reputation for deceit, dishonesty, and mendacity. It is not unreasonable that, having found out that somebody works there, people will tend to lower their Bayesian Prior Probability for them turning out to be honest or reliable, in an analogous fashion to how people might have reacted to finding out that somebody worked in Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda.
Beyond that, although I don’t claim to have knowledge of all Fellows of the DI, those who I do have knowledge of have not given me any reason to revise upwards my impression of their honesty.
Did a significant proportion of these mixed reviews give praise that were in any way indicative of support for Weikart’s central thesis?
Ah … Eddie, I was talking about “reviews” in my first paragraph. When I talked about “double standards” I was clearly talking about this, immediately prior, paragraph:
This sort of mendacity is one of the reasons I avoid interacting with you.
I would point out Eddie, that the lack of any substantiation offered for your purported expertise is a running joke on this forum.
That being so, we have no evidence that you are any less “non-humanities-trained people” than anybody else here.
The obvious answer to the original question is to rely on the consensus opinions, contained in their reviews, of academic historians who, even when they do seem to find something nice to say about the book, are not supportive of his central thesis.
I did a quick keyword search through FDtH for “social darwin” (picking up both the “social darwinism” and “social darwinist” forms). Weikart uses those phrases a lot. At no point did I find any mention of Darwin’s explicit opposition to the idea. In a book titled From Darwin to Hitler, that is lying by omission.
Another double standard is that “Eddie” is here insisting that the discussion be in terms of what is given weight by “academic historians.” Whereas in another discussion that is going on simultaneously on this forum he takes the position that the definition of “creationist” should reflect how the term is used by the lay public, rather than how it is employed in academic science and philosophy. Strange.
The DI’s house press, to be clear, has an extremely bad reputation. Some of this stuff is downright strange, including the recent Taking Leave of Darwin, of which a summary that “Darwin stole all his ideas from Lucretius” would be only partially inaccurate, and a good deal kinder than a more substantive review such as the one I have posted at Amazon.
Other books include Marcos Eberlin’s Foresight, full of useful proposals like how it would be hard to get the “first-ever human baby” without a functioning cervix in the mother; Tom Bethell’s Darwin’s House of Cards, where Bethell mostly makes it obvious that, despite interviewing many influential biologists, he was unable to understand anything they said; Matti Leisola’s Heretic, in which it becomes evident that if you keep trying to trick your academic colleagues into hosting IDC events, they resent it and, after a series of such tricks, eventually don’t like you; and Jonathan Wells’ reprise of his Icons of Evolution dishonesty, Zombie Science.
Now, who knows? It is always possible that when the next great American novel comes along, it will be published by a notorious seller of violent pornography. Did I say “possible”? It is not only possible, but substantially more probable than the notion that the DI’s house press will ever publish anything worthwhile. And the paper is very scratchy, by the way, so don’t buy these for any other uses, however appropriate those might seem.
Would it be reasonably accurate then to suggest that the DI only publishes on their house press material that no legitimate publisher would touch with a ten-foot barge pole?
