Transcripts of Evo/ID legal battle in Dover, PA

john crawford said:

The neo-Darwinist African Eve Model of modern human ancestry is as genetically racist as Charles Darwin's racial associations of primitive people in Africa with African monkeys and apes. Perhaps you haven't read "Descent of Man."

Time to beam back down to earth, Scotty.

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The ToE as it understood today does not promote racism, and I challenge you to prove otherwise. The ToE today is not the same as Darwin understood it as many more observations and facts have enriched it far beyond what Darwin wrote.

For his day, Darwin was quite enlighted:

[Here Darwin notes the treatment of some Indians in So. America]

"A few days afterwards I saw another troop of these banditti-like soldiers start on an expedition against a tribe of Indians at the small Salinas, who had been betrayed by a prisoner cacique...Two hundred soldiers were sent; and they first discovered the Indians by a cloud of dust from their horses' feet, as they chanced to be travelling...The Indians, men, women, and children, were about one hundred and ten in number, and they were nearly all taken or killed, for the soldiers sabre every man. The Indians are now so terrified that they offer no resistance in a body, but each flies, neglecting even his wife and children; but when overtaken, like wild animals, they fight against any number to the last moment. One dying Indian seized with his teeth the thumb of his adversary, and allowed his own eye to be forced out sooner than relinquish his hold. Another, who was wounded, feigned death, keeping a knife ready to strike one more fatal blow. My informer said, when he was pursuing an Indian, the man cried out for mercy, at the same time that he was covertly loosing the bolas from his waist, meaning to whirl it round his head and so strike his pursuer. "I however struck him with my sabre to the ground, and then got off my horse, and cut his throat with my knife." This is a dark picture; but how much more shocking is the unquestionable fact, that all the women who appear above twenty years old are massacred in cold blood! When I exclaimed that this appeared rather inhuman. he answered, "Why, what can be done? they breed so!"

Every one here is fully convinced that this is the most just war, because it is against barbarians. Who would believe in this age that such atrocities could be committed in a Christian civilized country?"-- Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (1839), Chapter V (emphasis mine)


Darwin on race and slavery

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john crawford said:

It's not an argument if it is true. It's a fact.

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Sorry, but regardless of whether or not it's true, it's still an argument. And it's not true, anyway.

john crawford said:

If a theory about human origins is inherently and inescapably racist though, it shouldn't be taught in US public schools.

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Irrelevant, since the theory of evolution is not racist.

john crawford said:

It's racist regarding the origins of such racial groups as Africans, Arabs, Asians, Caucasians and Jews insofar as their human ancestors are said to have originated from the ancestors of monkeys and apes.

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Nothing in the above is racist.

john crawford said:

All human beings always have been of the same human species and could (if fertile) interbreed, until neo-Darwinist race theorists decided that some human fossils should be downgraded into inferior species that more closely resembled some form of African ape.

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Again, nothing racist there.

john crawford said:

Neo-Darwinist race theorists think their beliefs are superior to those of past generations of the afore-mentioned racial groups.

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No, they don't. Next?

john crawford said:

Neo-Darwinist evolutionary theory is racist regarding its teachings that the ancestral origins of such modern racial groups as Arabs, Asians, Caucasians and Jews are said to be from African people (Homo sapiens) migrating out of Africa and replacing all other indigenous populations around the world.

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Neo-Darwinist evoolutionary theory doesn't teach that "such modern racial groups as Arabs, Asians, Caucasians and Jews are...from African people (Homo sapiens) ...[and migrated] out of Africa and replac[ed] all other indigenous populations around the world." So much for that line.

john crawford said:

To add insult to injury, neo-Darwinist theorists then have the racial audacity to say that those original African people originated from African ape and monkey ancestors.

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There's no injury to add to, and this is no insult. It's simply fact.

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john crawford said:

Neo-Darwinist evolutionary theory is racist regarding its teachings that the ancestral origins of such modern racial groups as Arabs, Asians, Caucasians and Jews are said to be from African people (Homo sapiens) migrating out of Africa and replacing all other indigenous populations around the world.

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Indigenous populations of what? Earthworms? Hippos?

To add insult to injury, neo-Darwinist theorists then have the racial audacity to say that those original African people originated from African ape and monkey ancestors.

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That's what the fossil record and DNA evidence shows. That same record also shows those African people moving out of Africa. We are all Africans, whether we live there now or not.

john crawford said:

Neo-Darwinist evolutionary theory is racist regarding its teachings that the ancestral origins of such modern racial groups as Arabs, Asians, Caucasians and Jews are said to be from African people (Homo sapiens) migrating out of Africa and replacing all other indigenous populations around the world.

To add insult to injury, neo-Darwinist theorists then have the racial audacity to say that those original African people originated from African ape and monkey ancestors.

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If a Jewish man is a good lawyer, or an Asian woman is a great mathematician, is that racist? No, it would be racist to assume the characteristics of a member of a particular race by stereotypes of that race. It is not racist to find that a member of a particular fits one or more stereotypes. Neither is it "racist" to say we descended from the first humans whose happened to arise in Africa, it could have been Australia, or Sweden, but it wasn't.

Neo-Darwinism is nothing more than the synthesis of Darwinian Natural Selection and Mendelian Genetics. Mendel discovered the mechanism by which heritable traits can be stored and passed down to descendants. It has nothing to do with politics, social theories, religion, etc. zip nada.

People can twist evolutionary theory to provide "reasoning" for social theories and political systems but those people are misusing the theory through ignorance or maliciousness.

platzapS said:

I find nothing to be ashamed of in my heritage.

I am a carbon-based life-form.
I am a eukaryote.
I am an animal.
I am a chordate.
I am a vertebrate
I am a mammal.
I am a placental mammal.
I am a primate.
I am an ape.
I am a hominid.
I am a human.

What's wrong with that?

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I like it.

Again, I don't know whether you've answered this yet or not, and I apologize if you have, but is racial to you meaning "different species" or "they're our ancestors so we're better than them"?

john crawford said:

Neo-Darwinist race theorists deny that their 'theories' of human origins are racist,

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They're not.

john crawford said:

yet continue to 'theorize' that all human racial groups are descended from African people who were 'naturally selected' by neo-Darwinist race theorists to have originated from non-human African ape ancestors.

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No, they were naturally selected by nature, of course. And there's nothing racist about anything in the above.

Do you know what racist means? I'm starting to doubt it.

john crawford said:

You're no more African than I am, Loudmouth. My wife is of African descent. What color are your eyes?

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We're ALL of African descent. For some, it's more recent than others.

No, he's not more african than you John, You're both almost equally African. Eye color doesn't matter, the descent of Man does.

platzapS said:

I find nothing to be ashamed of in my heritage.

I am a carbon-based life-form.
I am a eukaryote.
I am an animal.
I am a chordate.
I am a vertebrate
I am a mammal.
I am a placental mammal.
I am a primate.
I am an ape.
I am a hominid.
I am a human.

What's wrong with that?

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How can you be an ape, if humans are not descendents of Apes, but merely of a common ancestor?












*Ahem*
I am a descendent of William Wallace.

We are of the Great Apes.

RightWingGirl said:

How can you be an ape, if humans are not descendents of Apes, but merely of a common ancestor?

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Because all descendents of that ancestor are apes. Reread the list provided by platzapS. Everything is a member of all categories that precede it.

I recommend one of Aron-Ra’s brilliant posts from talkorigins: You Are an Ape.

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/may03.html

We are of the Great Apes.

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How is the distinction made?