Burroughs and racism


Pretty good study of Burroughs' views about races as seen in his books. For anyone who bothers to read it through.

At least read the excerpts from the books. He was a man of his time and far from perfect in his views, when those views are seen with modern eyes, but for his time he was downright progressive. He used the racial stereotypes of the time when they fit the story he wanted to tell, but he did not argue that every member of a race was the same, or automatically inferior or superior due just to their race, which, as far as I understand, was not exactly a common view in the early years of 20th century.

And more than once he skirted the idea of marriage between people of different races. Now he did not actually write it very often - if you disregard the Mars series where the marriages are between earth men and red skinned oviparous martian women - but he was writing in order to get paid, not to push an agenda, and at that time crossing that line might have cost him sales. So the Arab girl turned out to be an abducted or adopted European one, and the Apache a white man who had only been raised by the Apaches. But always only after the white part of the couple first had to realize and accept the fact that they truly loved the person they thought was not white.

http://thetarzanfiles.com/2016/07/08/edgar-rice-burroughs-was-not-a-racist-hack/

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Your linked Op-Ed is a perfect example of modern liberal propaganda "revisionist history."

Burroughs indeed was a racist - just a NICE racist rather than today's liberal definition and caricature of all "White" racists as ignorant red-necked Southern trash or Neo-NAZI's.

ERB was a scientific racist whose fiction was full of Evolutionary eugenics theories.

H.G. Wells and his illicit lover, Margaret Sanger, were two more examples.

Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR were but three more. EVERY highly educated individual of that pre-1950's era were TAUGHT to be racist - if they had ANY biological sciences education at all.

Modern liberals and progressives desperately want to hide this shameful history.

Can you blame them? I can only in the sense they STILL believe in such Eugenics and racism - based on how THEY treat racial minorities in the USA for merely political power purposes.

Entertainment wise "Eugenics" is very much alive and well - "Heroes", "X-men", "Agents of Shield" all revolve around people "advanced" over others through DNA manipulation of one kind or another.

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Woodrow Wilson was highly educated, but he went far beyond socially acceptable (at the time) racism. It wasn't enough for Wilson to believe in the superiority of one race over another (the actual definition of racism). Wilson was a virulent bigot who actively despised blacks and removed them from military service during his administration.

ERB was nothing like that. He did buy into the concept of superiority of bloodlines, but class rather than race was where he usually made his distinction. For instance, John Carter considers Xodar to be a great friend and warrior but explicitly states he would discourage Pan Dan Chee from courting Llana of Gathol if Pan Dan Chee were low born.

There are passages we can construe as racist in the books and stories, but ERB is a more multifaceted author than the cliched racist some commentators like to portray him as.

Requiescat in pace, Krystle Papile. I'll always miss you. Justice was finally served.

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Woodrow Wilson was highly educated, but he went far beyond socially acceptable (at the time) racism. It wasn't enough for Wilson to believe in the superiority of one race over another (the actual definition of racism). Wilson was a virulent bigot who actively despised blacks and removed them from military service during his administration.


Why would you think this???

He never hid his racism and was chosen as President of Princeton University, and then Governor of New Jersey, and then President of the USA.

He watched "Birth of a Nation" as the first film to be shown in the White House and declared it a great film.

He was perfectly in tune with what was "socially acceptable" regarding racism in his day. After all is was just "proven science."

And he WAS a Democrat and considered one of the first "progressive" Presidents. But it is possible he only won because Teddy Roosevelt walked out of the Republican National Convention - with his own primary won delegates and formed his OWN "Progressive" Bull Moose Party and garnered significant electoral votes - more than the incumbent Republican President who only received 8 electoral votes in the 1912 election.

And then Wilson got reelected by "keeping us out of war" (WWI) before getting us IN the war in 1917 - gee, right after he was reelected! Sounds just like a Democrat!

No scientist really questioned Eugenics racism until Ashley Montagu wrote "Man's Most Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race" right about 1940 in the USA. Far too late to stop the NAZI Eugenics holocaust. Rockefeller and Ford were all on board with German Eugenics before they realized just what the end game "final solution" was going to be.

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What are you talking about?

I never said Wilson wasn't a racist. Racists believe in the superiority of one race over another. Wilson clearly went beyond this to bigotry.

As applied to race, bigotry is outright hatred of people of other races. One can be both a bigot and a racist. One can also be one or the other.

Wilson was both.

Racism has always been very much a part of society in the United States. Even Abraham Lincoln expressed the racist view that blacks didn't deserve the same legal protections as whites while being associated with the abolition movement to varying degrees.

Whether one considered racism settled science at the time is irrelevant to my point, which was that Wilson actively despised blacks, making him a bigot.

I don't care if society considered racism based on settled science at the time. I was merely pointing out Wilson was not only a racist but also a bigot.

Any discussion of how academia inculcated the idea of racism into learned men is irrelevant to the point I was making.



Requiescat in pace, Krystle Papile. I'll always miss you. Justice was finally served.

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What are YOU talking about? There was absolutely nothing exceptional about Wilson's racial bigotry at that time. Otherwise he wouldn't have kept getting elected. In fact, most African-Americans supported Wilson before his election to POTUS. Again, it all stems from Eugenics scientific racism which did indeed poison race relations for as long as it was taught and fervently believed:

Before Trotter’s confrontation with Wilson in the Oval Office, he was a political supporter of Wilson’s. He had pledged black support for Wilson’s presidential run when the two met face-to-face in July 1912 at the State House in Trenton, New Jersey. Even though then-Governor Wilson offered only vague promises about seeking fairness for all Americans, Trotter apparently came away smitten. “The governor had us draw our chairs right up around him, and shook hands with great cordiality,’’ he wrote a friend later. “When we left he gave me a long handclasp, and used such a pleased tone that I was walking on air.” Trotter viewed Wilson as the lesser of other political evils.

The civil-rights leader was soon having second thoughts. In the fall of 1913, he and other civil-rights leaders, including Ida B. Wells, met with Wilson to express dismay over Jim Crow. Trotter’s wife, Deenie, had even drawn a chart showing which federal offices had begun separating workers by race. Wilson sent them off with vague assurances.

In the next year, segregation did not improve; it worsened. By this time, numerous instances of workplace separation became well publicized. Among them, separate toilets in the U.S. Treasury and the Interior Department, a practice that Wilson’s Treasury secretary, William G. McAdoo, defended: “I am not going to argue the justification of the separate toilets orders, beyond saying that it is difficult to disregard certain feelings and sentiments of white people in a matter of this sort.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/wilson-legacy-racism/417549/

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"Racism has always been part of much of the society of the United States" you forgot to add, just about EVERY OTHER COUNTRY on earth ALSO--Google Aborigine Massacres, here's one: 1920's a white Australian killed 30 Aborigine men women children, his defense? "They wouldn't tell me where the water was", he was never charged!--many more organized massacres previous centuries also, Aussies put heavy metal dog collars on blacks.--
Canada had their own KKK, Canada had slaves, Canada kidnapped hundreds of Indian children, their parents never saw them again. Today, blacks make up 2.9% of Canada's population but 10% of the prison population--
United States only received 7% of the entire black slave trade, Caribbean and South America got the rest.Brazil didn't outlaw slavery til 1888
Cuba: NYTimes reports the Afro-Cubans mostly live in the slummier east end of the country--
Brazil: the darker your skin, the more likely you'll live in the endless squalid shanty-towns--
Britain controlled the world slave trade from Liverpool, but Spain started the black slave trade in the 1400's
King Leopold II of Belgium (1900) had black childrens hands cut off if not enough rubber was produced in the Belgian Congo, genocide eventually resulted, millions died.---
Germany starved to death 100,000 blacks in Africa in 1907--
France: Paris Match magazine reported that 40% of all French people believe there are too many blacks in their country, at that time blacks only made up 2% of the population, compared to 12% in the United States(70% thought there were too many Muslims)--last week, blacks and Muslims rioted in Paris in their 2000 tent shantytown
Italy has had many racist incidents( an Italian politician told a black politician to eat a banana)--Today, there are hundreds of thousands of immigrant blacks in squalid camps and shelters throughout the country--
Britain's black population has doubled in 15 years, a black is 7 times more likely to be in British prison than whites--
Far East countries(Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) won't allow black immigration(and very little whites)--Japan was asked to take in 5000 Refugees, they took just 5--
China--Hong Kong is very racist(youtube videos and comments)China sees blacks as "dumb and apelike", racism so bad that some blacks in a town in China are returning to Africa--
Australia didn't allow black immigrants until 1970, and 75% of Aborigines say Australia is racist, Aborigines are 23 times more likely to be in prison than whites--Eastern Europe won't accept black or Muslim refugees, and neither will Russia--
Google any country and racism--It will open your eyes









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It's not that liberals want to hide it but that conservatives like to embrace it too much for comfort. That lily white RNC is a good example or The Speaker of the House posing with his 50 white interns. Oh, and then there's that flag from the days of slavery they love so much.

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Modern liberals and progressives desperately want to hide this shameful history.

How is it shameful? Their ideas never cease to be vindicated by reality.

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In The Lad and the Lion, Michael falls in love with and marries a beautiful Arab girl rather than a young French girl. Michael also rejects returning to his kingdom to continue living among the Arabs.

In The Ghostly Script, an unnamed black officer begins a romance with an explicitly white woman.

These may be examples uncommon in his work, but they definitely show ERB had more complex views on race than the caricatured racist and bigot often mentioned in today's discussions.

Edit: In the Apache Duology, Shoz-dijiji is EXPLICITLY stated not to be completely white. Notice the opening sequence where ERB notes Shoz-dijiji's mother is part Cherokee.

Requiescat in pace, Krystle Papile. I'll always miss you. Justice was finally served.

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The way I remember the Apache books - his love interest first thinks he is an Apache, but he thinks he is fully white, only he doesn't like that and the narrator mentions that he would have been happy to know he was part Cherokee, only he never finds that out himself. The main point is that Shoz-dijiji is a good man and that is what matters, not his racial heritage.

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That is correct. The point is that ERB deviates from his usual formula of having the protagonists all be white or noble born after overcoming class or racial tensions. Here, Shoz-dijiji is still the orphan son of a pair of unfortunate settlers, one of whom was part Cherokee. He thinks he's all white and isn't pleased with that incorrect knowledge, still identifying with the Apache rather than the whites. He resolves to tell Wichita Billings about his supposed ancestry but never does in the book, and she's happy to be the wife of a man she thinks is a full-blooded Apache. We never learn if Shoz-dijiji does tell her, but since the revelation never occurs onstage, we can safely assume ERB intended ambiguity and left open the possibility that Shoz-dijiji decided against telling Wichita and continued to identify himself as an Apache.

Requiescat in pace, Krystle Papile. I'll always miss you. Justice was finally served.

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I just posted a reply via a new IMDB assigned user name by mistake, actually. Please only reply to me via this one. ;-)

I haven't seen this movie yet and probably won't until I can just see it at home. My hearing is so bad now I really depend on CC.

One thing about this one is FINALLY a blonde haired blue eyed Jane - just as ERB wrote her.

Tarzan was an idealized "superior" man genetically, White, Germanic (English Anglo-Saxon), perfect physically AND mentally. Smart enough to teach himself, as a child, to read and write English from just a few books, then ALSO smart enough to learn French (speaking) merely from eavesdropping on some French Europeans on safari.

Jane was also an idealized genetically superior woman - blonde, blue-eyed, WASP, of supreme moral character - well, except for that sex out of marriage with Tarzan only excused by how OBVIOUSLY superior individuals they both were!

I have read a LOT of the ERB books and after a while the whole Eugenics thing started making sense AFTER I read some real good history books about Eugenics.

"Summer for the Gods" about the Scopes Monkey trial is a good place to start.

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1) Tarzan learns French from a French officer named D'Arnot.

2) Although Tarzan and Jane have what we would have called when I was growing up a "heavy petting session" in Return of Tarzan, they never have sex till after their marriage.

3) Jane is a typical damsel in distress in the first few novels before becoming a competent solo adventurer later in the series. Both the unnamed Arab girl who rescues Tarzan at the beginning of The Return of Tarzan and La of Opar (literally a product of miscegenation between man and ape) are superior to Jane in her effeminate weakness in the first couple of books.

Requiescat in pace, Krystle Papile. I'll always miss you. Justice was finally served.

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I admit it's been a LONG time since I read any of the Tarzan books - like close to 40 years. I'm 68 years old now.

But I'll stick with "effeminate weakness" for women as just "so what?" in the Eugenics racist world. Women acting "just like men" was a mark against them back then.

You are overlaying modern feminist idealism about the PHYSICAL equality of men and women. Eugenicists of Burroughs era had no such ideas at all.

Many of the ERB books had strange societies with "degenerate, almost apelike" males and yet beautiful long and straight-limbed women which one intrepid modern White male or another would come to rescue.

See "The Mucker" and "The Cave Girl" for further examples.

Part of "Eugenics" was also a reverence for "Nobility" and "breeding true" concepts - Tarzan is ACTUALLY Lord Greystroke - as an explanation for his "inherent nobility" and not just the plot device of economic clout do to his inherited wealth.

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That ignores the fact that Jane is quite capable of taking care of herself in all but the most extreme circumstances in later novels--precisely because of what Tarzan teaches her rather than because of her background as a lower middle-class former Baltimore belle. In fact, ERB explicitly compares her to the Roman goddess Diana in one book while in another, Jane is the head of an expedition through the jungle. Only once does Tarzan have to save her. In every other instance in that novel (Tarzan's Quest), Jane is quite capable of taking care of herself and others. If Burroughs intended Jane to be a typical woman of her time, she certainly was not that in her last major appearance in the series.

She is never equal to Tarzan because she lacks his upbringing in the wild. Rather, long association with him teaches her much-needed survival skills that transform her from the classic damsel in distress into a fitting mate for Tarzan. That's a far cry from modern idealized feminist ideals where women are equal to or superior to men simply by rote. Astoundingly ERB, Inc., did authorize the writing of a leftist-feminist novel about Jane in 2012. It was beyond horrible and betrayed its author's complete lack of knowledge of the source material quite clearly.

As far as The Cave Girl and The Mucker, I think you might want to re-read those.

In The Cave Girl, Nadara is the European daughter of castaways. There are two tribes of Cro-Magnon-like people on the island. Nadara lives with one and is clearly different from them. The other is even more savage and brutal and seems to have no women at all, thus explaining why the men of that tribe abduct women from the other tribe.

In The Mucker, the oddball bunch is a group of descendants of Japanese men shipwrecked on an island. The women are not different from them except the way women are different from men in regular society. Barbara Harding is the only person significantly different from them. She's a wealthy American shipwrecked on their island along with the hero. Billy Byrne--the Mucker of the title--isn't an intrepid white explorer either. He's a lowbrow street thug from Chicago with few redeeming qualities that early in the story. Only later does he become a more typical Burroughs hero. He isn't high born nor superior because of genetics. He becomes superior by a concerted effort to better himself.

That's a nowhere close to John Carter or Tarzan, whose aristocratic blood is heavily implied to be a key factor in their status as effective supermen on Barsoom and in Africa respectively.

Requiescat in pace, Krystle Papile. I'll always miss you. Justice was finally served.

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So, Jane WAS genetically exceptional after all?

Before you argued Jane was merely "weakly effeminate", didn't you?

Look, ERB wrote so many things we could each find all kinds of examples for our own viewpoints, undoubtedly.

ERB, like Teddy Roosevelt, was almost a fanatic about the positive benefits of clean living and outdoor exercise. That ALSO runs through a whole lot of his stories. But the Eugenics part is as clear as glass - once you really do understand just how prevalent that idea had spread through "learned society."

Rudyard Kipling and the whole "White man's burden" is yet another example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden

Also read these excerpts from Hunter's "A Civic Biology" - the biology textbook at the center of the Scope's trial:

At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.
....
Hunter was also a proponent of eugenics. "[T]he science of being well born," his text instructed, is an imperative for sophisticated society. "When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand," he wrote, arguing that tuberculosis, epilepsy, and even "feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity." "If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading," Hunter lamented in Civic Biology. "Humanity will not allow this but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race."[emphasis mine]
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/07/an_uncivic_biology003899.html


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Talk about not knowing what the flying *beep* you're talking about.

I suggest actually reading Burroughs in the present day before trying to speak with authority on his writing.

Yes, I did say Jane was weakly effeminate in the early books in the series. There's a reason for that:

That's exactly what she is. Jane becomes a better rounded, more competent character throughout the course of the series, but she's really a bland damsel in distress and nothing more in Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan.

As for your contention that Jane is genetically superior to anyone in ERB's books, that's probably the most laughable statement I've read about the series since some idiot told me Tarzan was a slaver.

Anyway, Burroughs believed in superior blood lines based on class rather than race. Jane is a lower middle-class preacher's daughter. She is not an upper-class person as Dejah Thoris from the Barsoom books is. Nowhere in the books does ERB--who didn't like Jane as a character and killed her off in an early draft of one of the books before reader outrage forced a retcon--imply Jane is genetically superior to anyone. She's a rags to riches type who escapes her lower middle-class upbringing by marrying Tarzan. She becomes a competent jungle adventuress because she lives part time in the jungle with Tarzan, who teaches her much of his jungle craft to ensure her ability to survive on her own if necessary while he's away.

I must say you are becoming insufferable in your slobbering defense of racism and your complete lack of even basic knowledge of Edgar Rice Burroughs' life and work while pretending to speak with authority on both.

Requiescat in pace, Krystle Papile. I'll always miss you. Justice was finally served.

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Defense of racism?

Ah...I think I understand. My defense of REAL HISTORY and explaining such a culture of racism is seen by you as "defending" it.

It was what it was. Good people CAN believe false things with ultimately bad or even dire consequences. As part of the Eugenics craze and culture, some homosexuals had forced frontal lobotomies in California State asylums to "cure" them of their genetic defect - being/acting homosexual. Hell, both major psychiatric associations in the USA considered "homosexualism" a mental disease until the 1970's - holdovers from that Eugenics science era.

http://www.davidmixner.com/2010/07/lgbt-history-the-decade-of-lobotomies-castration-and-institutions.html

Eugenics went beyond racism but the idea of "scientific" racism was believed and espoused by ALL those great Enlightenment philosophers, Locke, Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Jefferson, etc. etc. etc. even BEFORE Darwin and Galton.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/why-has-race-survived/?_r=0


Have you read any other books from that era? Not just Burroughs but E.E. "Doc" Smith and his Lensmen series? Huge Eugenics subplot in that SF saga.

How about James Oliver Curwood? Another best selling author and more mainstream than Burroughs. Again, the superiority of "white people" was just a given - like "The River's End" when a criminal assumes the identity of a Mounty who has chased him into "the far North" for years. And where Eskimo and Amer-Indian women aren't even considered "women" to him. Only white women are. ANY intelligent white man of that time would have felt the same. There was also a sneaky, evil "lesser" Chinaman who brought down a white woman via Opium. This was the 4th best selling book in 1912.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Oliver_Curwood

And try to catch the 1942 Johnny Weismuller "Tarzan's New York Adventure." There is a really cringe worthy scene where Cheetah outsmarts a Black hotel porter. It's not the least bit "good natured" fun. It's pure racism showcasing the mental inferiority of Blacks. I'm sure most white audiences loved it at the time.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035419/

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Charles Darwin and Dickens were racist too.

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There's a difference between acknowledging unsavory history and going out of one's way to defend it as you do. ERB grew up in a time when intellectual people often regarded whites as the epitome of human perfection. Even Abraham Lincoln despite his support of the abolition movement didn't think blacks deserved the same legal protections as whites.

Eugenicists claimed whites were the superior race at the time, and this bled over into popular culture--which overwhelmingly catered to the majority white audience of the time. For example, Bret Harte portrayed black slaves as fun loving comic relief characters inevitably contented to live on the plantations. Some were indeed less slaves than hired help treated well by their putative masters. Others were not at all content with their lot and actively sought to end their bondage. See Dred Scott as an example.

In another more egregious example, Jack London explicitly advocated the genocide of the Chinese and the repopulation of China by the West. Decades later, Robert Howard would say a European man is a more advanced type of human being than an African bushman, though elsewhere Howard would punish a white man in one of his stories for the brutal drunken murder of a black couple.

Racism at the time may have been de rigeur among the educated classes, but it was a flawed idea based on crackpot science. In many ways, it exists today in reverse. For instance, many blacks believe whites are inherently racist by simple virtue of being white or claim blacks can't be racist because whites have all the power--whatever the hell that means. That is every bit as dangerous a mentality as that which led to the Democrat takeover of North Carolina politics during the McKinley Administration and to Jim Crow across the South.

Real history is far more complex than the sanitized version in history books. Your eager defense of a flawed mentality couched in pseudoscience is no less appalling than the outrage a news anchor expressed to former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal--himself the victim of racist attacks during his 2003 race for Governor--for suggesting not just black lives but all lives matter.

Requiescat in pace, Krystle Papile. I'll always miss you. Justice was finally served.

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Wow.

Just, WOW!

I guess we're having a failure to communicate.

Me explaining a certain form of historical racism is NOT "defending it."

I can and will defend G.K. Chesterton's brilliant "Eugenics and Other Evils" published in 1922 and available to read online now for free:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25308/25308-h/25308-h.htm

I can also debate and criticize the now almost blind faith in overall "Evolution" - not just original Darwinism but "the new Synthesis" - as just "settled science" as well and proselytized by so many politicized scientists. The same way Eugenics was once proselytized AND the very same way "anthropogenic global climate change" is now politicized and proselytized.

And the whole modern "racism" question in all facets like reverse racism, reparations, racial quotas, liberal views vs. conservative, etc. etc. etc. is best understood through the prism of Howard Bloom and his "Lucifer Principle". Just human nature and the constant conflict ALL humans are always involved in as "social beings" fitting in with others, social status pecking order and "stroking" wants and needs.

The Lucifer Principle book by Howard Bloom, sees social groups, not individuals, as the primary "unit of selection," on genes and human psychological development. It states that both competition between groups and competition between individuals shape the evolution of the genome. The Lucifer Principle "explores the intricate relationships among genetics, human behavior, and culture" and argues that "evil is a by-product of nature's strategies for creation and that it is woven into our most basic biological fabric".[1] It sees selection (i.e. through violent competition) as central to the creation of the 'superorganism'[2] of society. It also focuses on competition between individuals for position in the 'pecking order' and competition between groups for standing in pecking orders of groups. The Lucifer Principle shows how ideas are vital in creating cohesion and cooperation in these pecking order battles. Says The Lucifer Principle: “Superorganism, ideas and the pecking order…these are the primary forces behind much of human creativity and earthly good.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucifer_Principle


This is a book well worth reading.

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I can also debate and criticize the now almost blind faith in overall "Evolution" - not just original Darwinism but "the new Synthesis"

Perhaps you could expand on this as I was rather under the impression that evolution was indeed settled science even if the understanding of the mechanisms is still itself evolving. As far as I know, few biologists would claim to have a perfect understanding of these mechanisms and few if any seriously claim there is no need for further research or that our current understanding might change. In other words, just like the rest of science. Except Climate Change which, as we all know, is almost completely understood and can only be addressed by lowering our standards of living and giving Big Government more control over our lives.

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Wesson's "Beyond Natural Selection" is a good place to start.

https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Natural-Selection-MIT-Press/dp/0262731029/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1469473280&sr=8-1&keywords=beyond+natural+selection

Why do insects have 6 legs? They just do - "Natural Selection!"

Why has evolution led to "more complex" organisms? Consider that at least half the Earth's total biomass is STILL nothing but one celled organisms - so, what led to ever increasing complexity? So many one celled organisms just seem to do fine as they are...

Why do most mammal species only last about 1 million years before going extinct? While crocodiles and alligators have been around pretty much unchanged for 50 million years or more?

How did life start? (evolutionists just say "that's not part of the theory of Evolution!" but why isn't it? Shouldn't it be?)

Evolution is a nice tautological worldview, principally useful to attack merely "religious" mythology. Instead of saying "God made all these creatures." An evolutionist just says to every question - "Natural selection made all these creatures. Amazing, eh?"

Ask any evolutionist - "what's the NEXT species that's going to evolve?"

Aren't good scientific theories supposed to be predictive?

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Firstly, you are more than a little behind the times with regard to evolutionary theory. Natural selection alone is not considered the only way evolution happens. Mutation and Mendelian inheritance also play key roles.

Secondly, there is no such discipline or ideology as "evolutionism". There is a science called biology. Biologists are scientists who specialize in biology. They universally accept evolution as fact. The evidence of DNA and fossils has no other reasonable explanation. Like most sciences, they recognize that there are questions to which we do not yet know the answer and may never know. The origin of life and the prediction of random events are some of those questions.

This is how science differs from religion.

Most modern religious faiths accept that religion and science complement each other while referring to different things and if God's word as written and understood by humans differs from the universe, which is the direct work of God, then it's humans understanding of the Word that is in error, not God.

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OK - which biologist predicts the next naturally evolved species, using mutations and Mendelian inheritance? How do you - or anyone - know just how such mutations occur, naturally?

I certainly know many biologists and geneticists are striving to improve on current species and maybe even create new ones - but that's merely a form of Intelligent Design, isn't it? :-)

I am sorry but you don't have a clue what I know or don't know in this whole vastly complex arena.

Anything I post in these short exchanges you can so easily and blithely refute with the same old same old.

I am also beyond aware just how much Catholics and then Protestants have embraced and expanded science. Gregor Mendel himself was an Augustinian Friar working as a scientist. Seismology is commonly known AS "The Jesuit Science" because so many Jesuits have studied the Earth.

Merely google "Catholic scientists" and read of the thousands down though the ages, from even before Pope Sylvester II. Who was perhaps the very first acclaimed "scientist Pope."

Darwin himself was rather a firm believing Christian before his own unproven conclusions sadly caused him to doubt and turn away from that faith. And ever since militant anti-religionists have used "Darwinism" as a blunt instrument club against Christianity, especially. That is NOT a proud record, at all, IMHO. Not any prouder than using Evolution to "prove" Eugenics and scientific racial classifications into superior and inferior individual human beings but also entire races. And easily ignoring all Christian scholars who argued otherwise.

Just based on this history alone I'd be real careful just "accepting" Evolution as "settled science."

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OK - which biologist predicts the next naturally evolved species, using mutations and Mendelian inheritance? How do you - or anyone - know just how such mutations occur, naturally?


Which part of "random" did you not understand? It's also clear you don;t understand when I explained that the phenomenon was quite well proven, the explanation for it was still a work in progress - as is normally the case in science.

But do keep on trying to dispute data with sophistries. It's probably amusing to someone.

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Is random proved - or merely an assumption?

Have you ever heard of entropy? Generally complex things naturally DECAY somewhat randomly from more ordered to less ordered states. Don't they? When a living thing dies doesn't it ALWAYS decay this way? Only in fantasy and fiction - like Zombies - does this NOT happen.

Yet life itself seems to counter this basic all the time - and actually produces ever more ordered and complicated information states via this same supposed "randomness" at work in "evolution."

Amazing eh? (Read up on information=energy as it applies to the laws of thermodynamics including entropy.)

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Ah, the "evolution violates thermodynamics" fallacy. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics doesn't mean what you think it does. Read this:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html#thermo

It was just the first of many hits when one Googles "thermodynamics" and "evolution" together saying more-or-less the same thing.


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I am well aware of the talkorigins site and have already read just about everything there.

Yet I still manage to think for myself a tad.

Have YOU read "Beyond Natural Selection" yet?

Wesson is definitely on the side of "science" vs. any mysticism like supernatural "Intelligent Design" yet he still manages to poke a LOT of holes in the Evolution orthodoxy.

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Life is basically one step backwards to take three steps forward for the process of entropy. In a space with lots of energy some of that energy will become orderly, but always in the service of releasing yet more useless energy than before.i.e, highly useful UV becomes more useless IR in exponential fashion. Stars do the same thing; gravity based thermonuclear reaction giving off UV energy and non fuel elements

"what is your major malfunction numbnuts?!!"

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We are all products of our time.

I am tired of modern/current society putting our morality on historical figures.

Things evolve
People evolve
Who knows what we'll be judged for in a century


This isn't Wall Street-this is Hell. We have a little something called integrity-Crowley

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I am tired of modern/current society putting our morality on historical figures.
This is an attempt to justify current attitudes, using (generally) made-up "history" for support. Modern people are only slightly less bigoted (and hardly less stupid) than human beings have been for the last 10,000 years. (Whoops! I just offended the Bible thumpers.)

This is especially noticeable in TV Westerns, the very worst of which is the show MAD dubbed Doctor Quack, Modern Woman. You can see my review on IMDb.

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I read the first two Tarzan books several years ago. ERB was appallingly racist -- but not as you might think. Jane's black servant is a horrifying caricature of the way whites thought blacks talked and acted. The native people are treated with relative respect.

As for liberals trying to cover up their racism... That's nothing compared to modern conservatives trying to convince people that liberals "invented" racism, by making otherwise-happy minorities believe they were being discriminated against.

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ERB also wrote a short story where a black man had a romance with a white woman, had Ethiopia (Abyssinia) and China become the dominant powers in the Old World after European civilization collapsed, penned an excellent duology pining for the Apache to be free after their forced movement to a reservation, and in his letters praised regiments of black soldiers he knew.

Anyone can find examples of racism anywhere in a person's writings. Just watch any TV dealing with racism. The racists and bigots are always white. Never once is a non-white person portrayed as capable of prejudicial thoughts. I would say it's racist to portray things that way because quite clearly in real life such things are not strictly attributable to white people, yet no fictional universe on TV treats the subject as a problem shared by all races and ethnicities.

Requiescat in pace, Krystle Papile. I'll always miss you. Justice was finally served.

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"Jane's black servant is a horrifying caricature of the way whites thought blacks talked and acted"

What an appallingly racist thing to say.

Jane's black servant, Esmeralda, was an exaggeration. She was comic relief. She did not represent the black race; she represented Esmeralda.

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.......Amen to that.....You'll always find an indignant wanker throwing the race card around on IMDB......it must be mandatory by now...

Deputy Davo's Pig Squeezing Country and Western Comedy Show.

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[deleted]

Beware of this mook's leftist idiocy. It is boring too.

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