Stephen E. Jones

Creation/Evolution Quotes: Classified quotes: History

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The following are previously unclassified quotes about History, now classified under that heading, as a temporary intermediate step towards integrating them into my quotes pages proper.

History

1. Darwin
• Darwin ... had the luck to please everybody who had an axe to grind"

"The Humanitarians were not alone among the agitators in their welcome to Darwin. He had the luck to please everybody who had an axe to grind. The Militarists were as enthusiastic as the Humanitarians, the Socialists as the Capitalists. The Socialists were specially encouraged by Darwin's insistence on the influence of environment. Perhaps the strongest moral bulwark of Capitalism Is the belief in the efficacy of individual righteousness. .... There was no more effective retort to the Socialist than to tell him to reform himself before he pretends to reform society. If you were rich, how pleasant it was to feel that you owed your riches to the superiority of your own character! The industrial revolution had turned numbers of greedy dullards into monstrously rich men. Nothing could be more humiliating and threatening to them than the view that the falling of a shower of gold into their pockets was as pure an accident as the falling of a shower of hail on their umbrellas, and happened alike to the just and unjust. Nothing could be more flattering and fortifying to them than the assumption that they were rich because they were virtuous. Now Darwinism made a clean sweep of all such self-righteousness." (Shaw G.B., "Back To Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch," [1921], Penguin Books: Harmondsworth Middlesex UK, 1939, p.xlv)

2. Darwin's Origin of Species
• Speculative
• "Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypotheses based on hypotheses"

"This general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of the categories Nature presents to us, is the inheritance of biology from The Origin of Species. To establish the continuity required by theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypotheses based on hypotheses, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion. That these constructions correspond to a natural appetite, there can be no doubt. It is certain also that in the Origin Darwin established what may be called the classical method of satisfying this appetite. We are beginning to realize now that the method is unsound and the satisfaction illusory." (Thompson W.R.*, F.R.S., [entomologist and Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control, Ottawa, Canada], "Introduction," in Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," [1872], Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 6th Edition, 1967, reprint, p.xxiv)

3. Darwin's theory of evolution
• Denied purpose
• "This denial of purpose is Darwin's distinctive contention"

"Contrary to popular belief, Darwin's distinctive contribution to this movement is not the theory of evolution as a whole, but a theory which explains evolution by natural selection from accidental variations. The entire phrase and not merely the words Natural Selection is important, for the denial of purpose in the universe is carried in the second half of the formulaaccidental variation. This denial of purpose is Darwin's distinctive contention. By an automatic or natural selection, variations favoring survival would be preserved. The sum total of the accidents of life acting upon the sum total of the accidents of variation thus provided a completely mechanical and material system by which to account for the changes in living forms. In this way the notion of a Deity or Providence or Life Force having a tendency of its own, or even of a single individual having a purpose other than survival or reproduction, was ruled out." (Barzun, Jacques [Provost and Dean of the Graduate Faculties, Columbia University], "Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage," [1941], Revised Second Edition, Doubleday Anchor: Garden City NY, 1958, pp.10-11)

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