AiG’s Gould quote

Lets say the ToE made some people think that their racism was justified. So what? Does that change any of the evidence?

Personally I consider the "chain of being" concept that many early naturalists still held on too far more influential behind justifying racism, after all the ToE posits that we are all just as evolved.

I found the quote without attribution here. If they are the original authors of it, it would seem AIG misattributed an idea to lend it more credence. Oddly, this is also exactly what the broader quote is talking about. As the concept of evolution became better and better supported, more people began trying to tie their preconceived notions to it. The quote doesn't say that there were more racists after Darwin, only that a specific argument popped up more.

I don’t think they’re the original authors. I’ve found a lot of other websites that use this quote, some of which are older than AiG’s museum, and they all attribute this quote to the same book from Gould as well as the same page number from it. If AiG has it wrong, these sites all would have had to get it wrong in exactly the same way.

Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory. The litany is familiar: cold, dispassionate, objective, modern science shows us that races can be ranked on a scale of superiority. If this offends Christian morality or a sentimental belief in human unity, so be it; science must be free to proclaim unpleasant truths. But the data were worthless. We never have had, and still do not have, any unambiguous data on the innate mental capacities of different human groups—a meaningless notion

anyway since environments cannot be standardized. If the chorus of racist arguments did not follow a constraint of data, it must have reflected social prejudice pure and simple—anything from an a priori belief in universal progress among apolitical but chauvinistic scientists to an explicit desire to construct a rationale for imperialism.

The reason may have been just that he was cladistically closer to humans’ ancestral state, even if those specific terms weren’t in use yet at that point.

This is, without question, one of the epiccest thread concepts of the year.

Seriously it seems you're trying to go RAMBO by stirring up schmidt and then running in guns blazing to defend DA TRUFF and DA LOGIKK. Not cool.

Also, I asked for Richard Dawkins Pseudoscience the be deleted for a reason.

No, he was but in there because some donkey-headgarb thought he looked funny.

Ota Benga ... is a normal specimen of his race or tribe, with a brain as much developed as are those of its other members. Whether they are held to be illustrations of arrested development, and really closer to the anthropoid apes than the other African savages, or whether they are viewed as the degenerate descendants of ordinary negroes, they are of equal interest to the student of ethnology, and can be studied with profit.... As for Benga himself, he is probably enjoying himself as well -as he could anywhere in this country, and it is absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation he is suffering. The pygmies are a fairly efficient people in their native forests....but they are very low in the human scale, and the suggestion that Benga should be in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place of torture to him and one from which he could draw no advantage whatever. The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date. With training carefully adapted to his mental limitations, this pygmy would doubtless be taught many things. . .but there is no chance that he could learn anything in an ordinary school. (September 11, 1906, p. 6).

I don't mean to be a cock again or anything, but can you really say that Benga was closer to apes due to his basal-ness? He was definitely closer to the common ancestor of humans than many other people, but that common ancestor was a Homo sapiens sapiens and had been so for thousands of years.

Also, can you confidently say he was less intelligent than Europeans? Even if Pygmies are on avreage less intelligent that others, a point which I've yet to concede, we've seen often that individual variation is as stong a factor in determining IQ as is a "race's" average.

When I was looking through a photo gallery from the Creation Museum, I noticed that one of their exhibits contains the following quote from Stephen Jay Gould:



This is from Gould’s 1977 book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny.

It seems to be a fairly common creationist claim that the theory of evolution has led to racism, and most of the supporters of evolution at this board tend to deny that it has. I was wondering whether AiG is quote-mining here, but I can’t find the entire quote online anywhere, and I don’t own a copy of this book. Is Gould saying something here other than what it looks like he is, or has the theory of evolution actually caused racism to become more common?

If he’s saying what it sounds like he’s saying, I think I understand the reason why this would have been the case. The same sorts of cladistic techniques that are used to determine which groups of animals are more derived than others can also be applied to humans, in order to show which ethnic groups have changed the least from humans’ apelike ancestors. In the past this has usually involved measurements of things such as skull proportions, which is one of the most common measurements used in modern cladistics, but it seems that other measurements such as ethnic differences in intelligence can also be used for the same thing.

This idea isn’t racist per se, but it can definitely lead to some unusual conclusions. While Googling this quote from Gould in order to try and find it in its proper context, I found an explanation of one of these analyses that was conducted on Aboriginals, leading to the conclusion that they were a “missing link” between humans and other primates. In the early 20th century, the evidence that some groups of humans were cladistically closer than others to our ancestors (although not using those words, since cladistics weren’t invented until much later) was used as a justification to display an African pygmy in the Bronx zoo. According to the New York Times, most scientists at that place and time thought this was a reasonable thing to do.

If this is what Gould is talking about, why do the supporters of evolution at this board deny that there’s been any connection between evolution and racism? It only lends credence to creationism when evolution’s supporters deny something that’s supported by evidence.