Besides many simple peoples already had fundamental appreciation for us being a product of Earth and that our welfare was intimately dependent upon her bounty. They were aware of the echoes of us present within other animals and so on. Perhaps they couldn’t enunciate it with the exactitude of western science, but with more book learning they probably could have.
But in the West, evolution was an idea that was simmering within the intellectual atmosphere of the day, after all, Wallace had it figured, with others right on his heels. I suspect had Darwin never been born, only the dates of the scientific milestones of evolutionary would be slightly different.
What the West had was a ferociously exacting attitude, and a sense of superiority and entitlement that beat all, so it collected more, and assimilated more than anyone else who was around.
With the similar threads feature, the new system seems set up to encourage resurrecting old threads. Might be fun. They even thought of warning that, here be ancient topics.
Well taking credit for what other’s had actually discovered could be considered stealing.
Absorbing knowledge from wherever it comes, that is human nature.
In those days everyone was a racist. All societies were racist at one time or another. This goes back 10,000 years all the way to Mesopotamia.
In perusing the FreeTheSlaves website, the first fact that emerges is it was nearly 9,000 years ago that slavery first appeared, in Mesopotamia (6800 B.C.). Enemies captured in war were commonly kept by the conquering country as slaves.
If you want to use the stupidest interpretation of my post, sure. I mean they took it and claimed they thought it up. This led to “European Exceptionalism” and justified conquering and exploiting the nations where they got the knowledge
IMHO, I think Darwin was a product of his time and Evolution isn’t actually racist by nature, just by human interpretation. In other words, for every time he uses a specific ethnic group, like European or white, just replace it with human. I think that’s actually what has happened to his theory.
But, don’t overlook that the society and social structure he belonged to was fundamentally racist, with a deep conviction of its white superiority that infused everything.
And still does infuse our white power structure as the past few years has made painfully clear.
The interesting part is that this is an unnatural selection within same species.
Symbiotic or subservient relationships are abundant in nature, but they are between different species and each species depends on the other for survival. That is how natural selection works.
The human biome is a clear example of human<->bacterial interdependence.
But the human species have employed slavery since ancient times, usually as a result of war and capture of the defeated individuals.
IOW, there was no " all men are created equal". The rule was that the powerful could own and rule the weaker and have authority over life and death.
This was the form practiced in American slavery, until the Civil War. Certain people could be owned and/or disposed of as chattel (movable property). Even today, some people believe they have a god-given right to own slaves, people which are not fully equal to (white) humans.
Agreed. Darwin loved his family and studied the Bible with them. His faith was challenged by the death of his child, but he worried a lot about the reception his work would get due to it going counter to the dominating Christian culture. He said a lot about cooperation in advanced species.
I forget the names of all the players, but Social Darwinism came later. The idea that you could create better humans by selective breeding.
[quote=“lausten, post:32, topic:7474”]
I forget the names of all the players, but Social Darwinism came later. The idea that you could create better humans by selective breeding.
[/quote] Right, but that assumes an inherent superiority over a lesser form of same species. No equality is presumed in that custom.
Right. I’m saying Darwin wasn’t racist. Not in the sense that he felt he was superior to Africans. The theories of evolution and genetics are not racist. It took some other people, in the generation after Darwin, to come up with that twisted logic.
Exactly. They played with Darwin’s theories and came up with a means to say one group of humans were more superior than another. I don’t think that was Darwin’s intent. All they did was changed the words, when the truth is, Darwin was speaking about the human species as a whole.
Well taking credit for what other’s had actually discovered could be considered stealing.
Absorbing knowledge from wherever it comes, that is human nature.
There’s a difference.
{Nothing in that denies that the west invented a bunch, just that they also stole quite a bit, considering it their birthright, perks of being the superior race.}
Let’s not forget that the scientific method has been refined over the last 500 years. There were no official publishers, no standard peer review magazines, sure as heck no board you could go to if you were a woman and your male boss stole your ideas.
