Month: May 2007
John West and the Darwin-Eugenics Link
In speeches in Washington and Philadelphia this week, Discovery Institute senior fellow and former political science professor John West has begun his program to describe the way Darwinism gave birth to the eugenics movement, and he is getting some attention. Protests are expected, but it won’t do any good for Darwinists to huff and puff about West’s linkage of Darwinism and the eugenics movement that sterilized scores of thousands of Americans deemed unfit in the early decades of the last century, the concurrent rise of the abortion movement and the extermination of hundreds of thousands of supposed social undesirables by the Nazis in Germany. Indeed, the replies given by the Darwinists in the Crosswalk article were anticipated–and rebutted–by West in Read More ›
Neanderthals: Are They Us, or Are We Them (or Both)? Overcoming the Icons of Evolution
Who were the Neanderthals? Were they ape-like primitives with low intelligence, or were they more like us–perhaps nearly identical to modern humans in both body and mind? Biology textbooks often portray Neanderthals as unintelligent versions of modern humans. For example, this graphic from Biology: The Dynamics of Life (pg. 483, 2000 ed.) portrays Neanderthals as stooped primitives struggling kill a giant bear using clubs, spears, and incompetently, a burning stick: But according to a recent article in the Washington Post, Neanderthals may have been virtually indistinguishable from modern humans in terms of both their appearance and intelligence. A lead author on the study declared that “we would understand both to be human. There’s good reason to think that they did Read More ›