Todd Wood: Is Evolution Racist?

I’ve never understood those who do this. Because all those people hold to some type of common ancestry. Whether it be progressive creation or YEC post-flood hyperspeciation models. Without Darwin they couldn’t begin to explain how their models work. So I’ve never understood the Darwin hate

It’s called race baiting. YECs aren’t the only ones who do it. It isn’t an appeal to reason, so it doesn’t have to make rational sense. It is an appeal to prejudice.

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A post was split to a new topic: Every Campus: The World is Fallen

And that hate is alive and well. I saw an example of FB just yesterday.

I don’t agree with this. Humans are part of the human environment, and hence we can become part of the natural selective pressures that affect our own evolution. It has analogies to both sexual and artificial selection, both of which are part of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

No, but there also isn’t anything in Darwin’s theory that says which traits nature should select for, or which traits females should find attractive. The theory only describes what happens if there is differential survival and reproduction. In so far as there is differential survival and reproduction, that is manifestly a case of Darwinian evolution. That would make eugenics a manifestation of Darwinian evolution.

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WIldlife management might be a good analogy to use. At times, we humans feel the need to micromanage ecosystems to bring them to a “natural” state when all we should do is just leave it alone and let the ecosystem recover on its own. If there are unfit traits in the human population then they will naturally decrease. We don’t have to do anything about it. If we change the human environment so that these traits are no longer unfit, then those traits are no longer unfit.

At least in my eyes, Social Darwinism and eugenics is an oxymoron. If you truly accepted Darwin’s theory then you wouldn’t do anything to the human population, just let it be.

Well that depends on the efficacy of selection in the human population. If “deleterious” traits are largely compensated for by technology and ingenuity, then they aren’t actually removed by selection. And I’m not saying this to advocate for eugenics.

But of course this raises another problem, which is what exactly we mean by unfit or deleterious? If the traits don’t actually cause people in technologically advanced societies to have lower reproductive success, then strictly speaking they aren’t deleterious in the current human environment. And then I can imagine someone who is a eugenicist say that it’s not actually about reproductive fitness at all, but instead about some other sort of “performance” ideal’(strength, endurance, intelligence bla bla), perhaps imagined to be somewhat related to Darwinian fitness, but in a different environmental context.

But now you can get a bit philosophical about it, and say that in so far as a eugenicist is controlling who gets to reproduce and who does not, the eugenicist has made certain traits be more reproductively fit than others. So in this sense it’s still Darwinian evolution, but from the perspective of an imposed, artificial selective pressure. Selective breeding. That’s de facto Darwinian evolution.

Here I have to disagree because you’re in a way buying into the sort of argument a eugenicist or “social Darwinist” might engage in, by saying that the way Darwinian evolution really works is how we should structure society.
You seem to be saying that if you believe that Darwinian evolution is true, you should “let it run it’s course” so to speak.

But it doesn’t follow that we should do any such thing. Accepting as a fact that evolution in the wild happens according to certain principles(such as Darwinian natural selection) says nothing about how we should organize society, who should get to have children or not, or anything of the sort. It’s essentially the naturalistic fallacy.

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Exactly. Fitness only makes sense within the context of the environment.

A better way to put it is if the eugenicists think humanity should be subject to Darwinian evolution then they don’t need to do anything because humans are already subject to that process.

As discussed earlier, Darwinian evolution does not say which traits humans should strive for, so any traits we select have nothing to do with the theory itself because it would be deriving an Ought from an Is. If they want to invoke the Naturalistic fallacy, then humans deciding which humans should breed is contrary to their claimed goal.

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Exactly how can one make creationism racist? All of humanity was created at one point in time in God’s image.

Racism among Christians is rooted in culture and cultural identity, not creationism, and Christians have tried to read their culture into the Bible to justify their racism. But has there been anyone who makes an appeal to Genesis 1 or 2 to justify their racism?

Racism among white Christians has been horrific. I actually look forward to when “Christianity” is no longer the dominant culture and white Christians are forced to think about their identity and whether it was actually racial and cultural and had nothing or very little to do with the Bible.

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Does the Mormon Church count? Until the 1970’s blacks were were excluded from the priesthood because they bear “the mark of Cain”.

The events described in the “Black 14” occurred in my home town shortly before we moved there.

Not Genesis 1 or 2, and neither is the curse of Ham. This was a very specific requirement, possibly related to questions of the difference between Genesis 1 humans and Genesis 2 Adamites.

Genesis 4.

Sad.

I just found out today that Abraham Lincoln thought all blacks should emigrate to Central America to make everything better and relieve white suffering. :sob:

Some slaves were sent back. That is the origin of the nation of Liberia.