Evolutionary Psychology: Checkered Past, Checkered Present

boys, Casey Luskin, Charles Darwin, Culture & Ethics, Darwin critics, Evolution, evolutionary psychology, girls, human behavior, ID The Future, materialism, natural selection, Podcast, sexual selection, Social Darwinism, sociobiology, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, The Descent of Man, The Spiritual Brain, Victorian England, World War II
If we want to effectively explain human behavior in all its messy richness, we would do well to look beyond this box of just-so stories. Source
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The Casual Racism of Charles Darwin

Abraham Joshua Heschel, Abraham Lincoln, Adrian Desmond, Africa, Allison Hopper, anti-racism, Charles Darwin, Culture & Ethics, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Descent of Man, Edinburgh, Emma Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, Evolution, Great Emancipator, Harriet Martineau, Human Origins, James Moore, N-word, Racism, slavery, slaves, Victorian England
It is certainly startling to see the N-word cropping up in Darwin’s letters, but this is not the only place. Source
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Charles Darwin in Light of Black History Month

African Americans, Alfred Russel Wallace, Black History Month, Charles Darwin, Culture & Ethics, Darwinism, Darwinists, eugenics, Europeans, Evolution, Francis Galton, ID The Future, indigenous races, Intelligent Design, Jay Richards, Martin Luther King Jr., materialism, scientific racism, sterilization, theology, Victorian England
Was Darwin’s racism purely a function of his time and place, Victorian England? Historian Michael Flannery says no. Source
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Shaw, Scientism, and Darwinism

Androcles and the Lion, Aristophanes, Arms and the Man, Back to Methuselah, Barbara Undershaft, Candida, Charles Dickens, Culture & Ethics, Darwinism, G. K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, Great Britain, Hard Times, Jacques Barzun, John P. Gluck, London, Ludwig van Beethoven, Malcolm Muggeridge, Manchester Guardian, Pygmalion, Russia, Salvation Army, scientism, Shaw Chesterton series, St. Joan, The Restoration of Man, Tom Stoppard, Victorian England
George Bernard Shaw’s positive criterion by which to measure and ridicule folly and vice was fatally ambiguous, eclectic, and inconstant. Source
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Himmelfarb and Her Haters

10 Books That Screwed Up the World, Adrian Desmond, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrew Dickson White, Bea Kristol, Benjamin Wiker, Borneo, Bridgewater Treatises, Charles Darwin, Charles Gillispie, Charles Kingsley, City University of New York, Cornell University, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, Darwinists, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Dyak headhunters, Edward T. Oakes, Encounter (journal), Ernst Mayr, Eugenics Record Office, Evolution, Francis Galton, George Will, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Harry Bruinius, history, Jacques Barzun, James D. Watson, James Moore, Jeffrey Shallit, Jewish Women, John William Draper, Julian Huxley, Leo Strauss, Mein Kampf, P.Z. Myers, Panda's Thumb, Uaupés River Valley, Victorian England
Editor’s note: Historian and Darwin skeptic Gertrude Himmelfarb died on Monday, December 30, 2019. While mourning the passing of this great scholar, we are pleased to republish Professor Flannery’s 2009 essay, below. See also Flannery’s tribute, ‘Farewell to Gertrude Himmelfarb, Brutally Honest Historian of the “Darwinian Revolution.’” “If you have no enemies, it is a sign fortune has forgot you.” — Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732  Noted physician Thomas Fuller was an expert on “eruptive fevers,” and so it seems fitting to open this essay with his wry but telling observation on enemies in public life, for perhaps no contemporary historian has spawned more “eruptive fever” over an analysis of the reigning secular creation myth demigod, Charles Darwin, than has the present subject of this essay. If Fuller is any judge,…
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