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31st December 2007, 12:15 PM
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Reps: 19,183,710,574,649,584 (power: 19,183,710,574,664) | | Originally Posted by Nitron  Duly noted.
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. The only way for that to work would be for the ancestor to be an ape. 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.
I have a cuppa more friendly questions for you, but i'll keep them on hold until your reply.
Another way to look at is that he is a true human and the rest of us are mutants. 
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31st December 2007, 02:28 PM
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Reps: 7,991 (power: 14) | | Originally Posted by Aggie The “human scale” referred to here is an outdated term for what I described in post #11. Since back then most people believed in evolution as a “chain of being”, most things that are now described in terms of cladistics were described in those terms instead, but the basic concept of certain populations being genetically closer to their ancestral state than others is still part of evolution.
Except that the "Great Chain of Being", and the value judgement that equates "basal" with "inferior" that come with it, came long before the Theory of Evolution. While evolution can indeed identify certain populations as more or less 'derived' from a common ancestor, it is the "Great Chain of Being", enthusiastically promoted by creationists for centuries, that imposes a value judgement on that distinction.
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1st January 2008, 06:17 AM
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Reps: 6,241 (power: 12) | | Originally Posted by MrGoodBytes I agree that the ToE was used to justify scientific racism in the past. Its influence on Hitler's philosophy and the Nazi ideology in general is undeniable.
Having said this, nobody has ever correctly used the ToE to justify racism. There is no evidence to suggest that Jews are somehow biologically inferior to Aryans (as if the concept of Aryans as used by the Nazis made any sense, anyway). No study has ever found a genetic preposition to immorality in Jews, like the Nazis claimed.
Did Hitler actually accept the ToE? I've heard that he denied a common ancestor between Aryans and Jews, but I may be mistaken.
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