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Which Beloved Public Figures Do You Most Despise?
On Tuesday, Google celebrated Rachel Louise Carson, arguably the mother of modern environmentalism, and, in the remarkable way modernism has with irony, murderess of tens of millions. I despise Carson, her almost single-handed fabrication of the DDT scare, and especially the “savior of the world” conceit of environmentalists resulting in the deaths of millions of, dare I say it, black African children. If I hadn’t already been told so many times that leftist and environmentalists are genetically immune to it, I might believe the ban on DDT was a racist ethnic cleansing program.
It’s positively scandalous that there are schools named after Carson — schools! With children attending! In Chicago! And other urban centers with large populations of African-Americans. Pagan “Earth Day” celebrations including Carson-worship are part of nearly every public school curriculum. Can you imagine sending your kid to Adolf Hitler Elementary? Well, he killed fewer people than Rachel Carson and her genocidal movement. By some estimates over 50 million people have died from malaria since the DDT ban took effect, and counting.
My fantasy is to see the face of every DDT-banning environmentalist just before we send him to live permanently (however long that may be) and DEET-free, into malaria mosquito infested villages with only a mosquito net as defense. “Have a nice life! You might want to reconsider sleeping, so you can make sure you don’t accidentally expose some juicy body part in the middle of the night.” Insert smiley face here.
The difference between the racism of Cliven Bundy and Rachel Carson is, Cliven Bundy’s bigotry never killed anyone. Carson has the blood of millions on her hands. Would that we never see her like again.
How about you? Who’s your most despised celebrated public figure?
Published in General
Totally. He was such a bully. Maybe a bully is a good thing when you’re fighting a world war, but other than that, ugh!
Gandhi’s obsession with bowel movements is left out of most histories and dramatizations. Everyone knows Hitler was an artist and Pol Pot studied in Paris, but(t) who knew of the scatological peculiarities of the G-Man (as I call him).
Agree with all those previously mentioned. I’ll add Desmond Tutu.
I have limited time here, but I would have to pick Darwin. Not for his theory of evolution and the like, but because of what his theory has spawned in terms of the faithful of science ever since being in a state of war against Christianity. Without the theory proffered by Darwin making human life merely just another life form on the planet, and therefore insignificant, there would be no Sanger or Carson. So it’s Darwin by a mile for me.
Well done! Thanks for the contribution. I would only add that while Darwin is in this toxic polygamous marriage with Sanger and Carson devaluing human life, he’s also done a lot of damage to the philosophy of science itself. Vast throngs of publicly educated people make all kinds of claims about “what evolution tells us” which are antithetical to the basic claims of science and in gross violation of the scientific method. Grosseteste rolls in his grave.
We cannot blame Darwin for publishing his observations. First, he was not the only one. Alfred Russel Wallace observed the same and was co-publishing papers with Darwin before Darwin came out with On the Origin of Species. (In fact, Wallace’s also having a similar idea got Darwin off the edge and got him to finish writing and to publish his book.) If not Darwin, somebody else would have come up with and published the same theory.
Second, Darwin did not believe one-third of that which is attributed to his name. To tar him with what others do in his name is no different from blaming Jesus for the Crusades. I don’t remember where Jesus said to do that. In fact, when Peter drew a sword in Gethsemane, Jesus stayed his hand. Likewise, I don’t remember where Darwin said, “It’s obvious that we should go from natural selection to unnatural selection to build the Master Race!” One of the tenets of natural selection is that those who best fit a particular environment survive to breed the most. That’s “fit the environment,” not fit some artificial ideal like a dog at Westminster Kennel Show.
I agree with Arahant. I’ve never understood why Darwin himself is vilified. Maybe people imagine he was like Richard Dawkins. I think Thomas Huxley was probably a lot like Dawkins, but not Darwin. He sounds like a very thoughtful and humble man to me.
I’d like to do another post on evolution sometime after the election. Right not I want to focus my energy on defeating Democrats.
Well, alright, you two killjoys. I’ll grant that Darwin may not be the devil himself. It’d be especially helpful if you’d find the quote from his writings wherein he describes the conditions for falsification of his theory (lack of intermediate forms?).
But what, in his theory, was counter-intuitive and correct, like, say, Galileo’s understanding of falling bodies? Survival of the fittest hardly seems like an earth-shattering concept. It’s more of a tautology. Also “random mutation” as a field of research seems less interesting than whatever natural mechanism provides for “adaptive mutation.” I’m asking, because I don’t really know the history of Darwin’s “breakthrough” scientific discovery. I’ve mostly experienced the misapplication of his theory to try to disprove God.
First, what made it groundbreaking, and why Darwin only finished it up and published The Origin of Species under the duress of Wallace’s findings was that it went against the two schools of thought of the day. To vastly over-simplify and without refreshing through re-reading, the two schools of the day were the Biblical Framework of God creating the species on whichever day that was (and no change since), or the Lamarckian Adaptation Theory. (Short and cynical version, animals adapted because they really wanted to adapt.) So, it was a break from the science of the day in that it suggested speciation was still happening, but happened because of random variability.
An important part of survival of the fittest was fittest for the immediate environment, not fittest for everything. Again, going from memory, one of Darwin’s prime examples was the Galapagos finches.
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(Cont.) Because a finch was one of the few bird species that had ever made it to the Galapagos Islands, there were many environmental niches that were open due to the lack of other bird species that usually fill those environmental niches. Darwin’s theory was that over time, there were random variations to the finches, as there are in all populations. If one of those random variations, such as a stronger bill, allowed for a particular bird to compete for resources on the islands that the other finches couldn’t secure, such as a nut that needed a harder beak to crack, then that bird tended to survive longer to breed more and pass on it’s random mutation. Its offspring, with stronger beaks, could also process the otherwise unattainable food source, so they also survived and prospered until the niche was filled.
So, over time and many mutations, the finches speciated into a whole group of hundreds of species that covered different ecological niches. Darwin did not know the mechanism for this, but knew there had to be one. Of course, it was not discovered until about a hundred years after The Origin of Species: DNA.
I know that some see Natural Selection as somehow disproving G-d or the Bible accounts, but I certainly don’t agree. Who is to say this isn’t how G-d did it all? The Bible was text introduced into a tribal society. Does one expect it to speak of DNA or advanced organic chemistry? If I remember rightly, the terms used that we translate as “day” were a bit more loose in the original language. Can we say that G-d’s day equals ours? Can we say that it did before G-d created the Sun and Moon and Earth? In other words, I don’t see that the Bible limits what mechanism G-d may have put in place before, during, or after the Creation, nor does the Bible claim to give the whole story of G-d and all His activities. It is the story of man, not the whole story of G-d.
It has been a very long time, as in multiple decades, since I read The Origin of Species, so excuse me if my answer on this one is approached obliquely. As I stated above, one of the things that was counter-intuitive to many was that new species could and did arise and are still branching off. Some thought it all stable, even though there was mounting evidence that changes had occurred in the past.
Another thing was that it was mechanistic in nature and that it was a set process that could start with a single single-celled organism and through random variation explode over time into the diversity of life that we know. While he did not know the mechanism of inheritance, he knew there was one. But what he saw was the mechanism for speciation, and it was as simple as variation with natural selection. Parsimony is important in science. There did not have to be a will directing the change, just the particular environment in which the organism lived.
Let me address this in particular. Darwin’s idea was that Natural Selection (the survival of the fittest for the (or an) environmental niche for long enough to breed and pass on their genes to their offspring) was all that was needed to drive adaptation through random variation. There is nothing else driving adaptation. If a mutation helps a particular organism survive to breed, then the mutation survives. If the mutation inhibits survival, then it becomes less likely the particular organism will survive long enough to breed. All mutations are random. They become adaptive if in some way they allow the individual with that mutation to pass on the mutation successfully. That may be by being stronger to compete for food. It may be by having less muscle mass so the individual needs less food. Different strategies succeed in different environments and in different niches in the same environment.
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Why are the genes for sickle-cell anemia more prevalent in tropical areas? Because having the gene-set on only one side is “adaptive” against malaria. Having it on both sides is less adaptive. Having it on neither side is less adaptive in a malarial environment. But for those with the genes on one side, if they marry, on average half their children will be protected against malaria. Sure, one-quarter will die young with sickle-cell anemia. Sure, one-quarter may be more likely to die of malaria, but 50% is better than nothing.
At some point, only one person had the genes for sickle-cell anemia, and probably only on one side, not both. But in tropical areas where there was malaria, it was so adaptive that “The carrier frequency ranges between 10% and 40% across equatorial Africa, decreasing to 1–2% on the north African coast and <1% in South Africa.” Wait another few thousand years without using DDT or something like it, and I would bet the Equatorial carrier frequencies go up.
One more thing on the idea of “Adaptive Mutation” and “Progress:” natural selection has no innate direction. As I just said, an individual may be better suited to its environment by contradictory changes. If it helps the individual exploit an unexploited niche, or if it helps the individual survive to pass on genes in a changing environment, then the mutation is “adaptive.” We often see the progression of man depicted as growing taller, straighter, with larger brains, but that is not how it was. Mankind’s family tree was a huge bush with many side paths. We sometimes had five or six closely-related species in our family at a time. It so happens that we are currently the only hominid left. The horses have seven extant species. Which is more successful? Obviously, the direction to go is towards four legs and a mane. Oh, wait, fungi might have as many as five million species. This is obviously the direction “evolution” is “progressing” towards. Or maybe there is no fixed direction of evolution. Maybe it really is random mutations that may or may not suit an organism to an environmental niche.
I could go on with examples of explosive levels of speciation after mass die-offs, reasons behind “punctuated equilibrium,” etc., but I’ve probably droned on enough in the thread for now.
Not badly conveyed for thirty-year old memories, eh? Maybe we should start a “What Darwin Really Said” thread.