The New York City Skeptics sent me a t-shirt today, and at last I have the candidate I want.
I know, I know, you’re all thinking that there’s one little problem with the guy — he’s British.* I’m sure we can sneak a little amendment through real fast — we’ll tell everyone it’s to let Schwarzenegger run, and do a quick last minute swap.
*He’s also dead, but he’ll still do a better job than the clown in office right now.
He’ll never win. British, dead, or otherwise, he’s not a conservative Christian.
I’ll vote for him, but only if he does the honourable thing and puts Wallace on his ticket as VEEP.
Darwin can just evolve to be president.
If he can’t do that, evolution isn’t true.
How this is true will all be in the sequel to Expelled.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
But… but… wouldn’t that inevitably lead to Hitler ’12?
He could simply answer any questions about his religion with, “Look-ee here! I married my cousin!”
If you want an openly pro-science, pro-gay rights, pro-evolution candidate then support Mike Gravel.
Don’t even THINK like that! I have to live with the Governator less than 20 miles away; the thought of him as president scares the heebie-jeebies out of me.
Hey PZ, I just launched my godless website:
http://www.godriddance.com
Enjoy!
Those who do not believe in evolution… should not be allowed to participate in it.
Obama runs a close 2nd to Darwin. Make and print out your own poster here…
http://www.pentdego.com/obama.aspx
Dead isn’t such a big issue. Since dead definitely qualifies as “unable to fulfill the duties of his office”, that just means the Vice President would become President.
Darwin & Myers ’08?
@ #2
I do hope you mean Alfred, not this one. ;)
Technically the ’08 president gets sworn in in ’09, which is the 150th anniversery of Origin of Species and Darwin’s 200th birthday.
I like the old Curly quote that I have used a few times
that is more than comical in it’s implication: “I don’t
want to be dead; there’s no future in it!”
But in the case of the late great Darwin, there is a lot
of future in being dead, as witness the never-ending
hullabaloo that is more prevalent now that he is dead than
when he was alive!
…well, that never stopped Jesus from being a world leader…
#12
I thought maybe he meant THIS one.
http://www.michaelhyatt.com/fromwhereisit/braveheart-1.jpg
And personally I pretty sure John Paul II was dead for at least the last four years of his Popeitude. I’ve seen Weekend At Bernie’s, I know what they where doing in the Vatican.
ErikJS and Bride of Shrek,
I think you two are taking this framing idea too far and in the wrong direction.
If we can vote for dead people, can we also support fictional ones? If so I stand by the t-shirt I saw online awhile ago:
Roslin/Airlock ’08!
If we can vote for dead people, can we also support fictional ones? If so I stand by the t-shirt I saw online awhile ago:
Roslin/Airlock ’08!
OT, but I just noticed that “Expelled: The Movie” is the #6 most searched topic on Yahoo. WTF?
Dwimr: I’m guessing here, but yahoo ran a news story on it so it may have started that way.
Brownian
Glad I didn’t think it was THIS Wallace then, that would really have been pushing the boundaries.
http://sra.itc.it/people/serafini/WallaceGromit.jpeg
Very funny. But scientists don’t make good politicians; they’re too honest.
And here I am thinking that McCain is old!
It would be interesting to see Darwin debate Barrack Obama, since Darwin thought that white people were more evolved than black people.
In any case, George Wallace the comedian would also pushing it a bit far.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace_%28comedian%29
Sharon @ 20 begins: “If we can vote for dead people…”
Why Sharon, we certainly can vote for the dead! My proud state, Missouri, managed that as far back as 2000 when we elected our 3-weeks-dead, much-beloved governor, Mel Carnahan, to the US Senate over John Ashcroft. Carnahan’s widow, Jean, served a partial term in his place.
‘Tis a pity that our utter rejection of Ashcroft wasn’t heeded and he was confirmed as US Attorney General anyway. (In Ashcroft’s favor it should be noted that even he wouldn’t go along with the US Attorney purge… see articles on his hospitalization and Gonzalez’s actions at that time.)
Salt
Salt (#27):
I do remember hearing something about that, but much to my embarrassment I couldn’t remember if it was from real life or the subject of an episode of the West Wing (maybe it was both?).
PZ said,
“I know, I know, you’re all thinking that there’s one little problem with the guy — he’s British.* I’m sure we can sneak a little amendment through real fast — we’ll tell everyone it’s to let Schwarzenegger run, and do a quick last minute swap.”
That is, arguably, the funniest thing that he ever wrote. * you know!
You may be interested in the all-honor ticket.
OT but close. Coral Ridge used the Argumentium ad Hitlerium first and Expelled cloned it. Apparently the Jews weren’t too happy about the blame Darwin lie. It will be interesting to see if they speak up this time around.
They should. The Expelled liars are just using an atrocity to further their own ends. Which is another and potentially much larger atrocity.
It also looks like they PZed/Dawkinsed Francis Collins.
Yup, Salt – though I was no fan of Ashcroft’s positions, he did have at least one honorable bone in his body. Perhaps many.
This just in on the Ethernet :
Re1
Humbug Sir! Though he never took Orders, Mister Darwin has studied divinity at Cambridge, and is every inch a Christian gentleman, and though not a Tory, a very high Whig, or as I believe Americans call them a ‘republican’.
C.Lyell ( deceased)
Oh, yeah, let’s just sneak in a little Constitutional amendment to elect a foreigner as president. Then we could have Gorge Soros as president and he, like Hillary, would turn the governance of the USA over to the UN. Good idea!!!
bigjohn, look alive. I think I hear black helicopters.
bigjohn, look alive. I think I hear black helicopters
Oh, shit, it’s ZOG!
Hey, Kim Il Sung is dead and it hasn’t stopped him from being president-tard in chief for life and afterlife.
Careful what you wish for about fictional characters, #20. Somebody might want to vote for Jesus.
#38: Curses, foiled!
There’s nothing in the constitution that says you have to be alive to be president. You have to be at least 35 (Darwin’s 150-ish, so we’re good), have lived in the US for at least 14 years (if we re-bury him on US soil and vote 14 years later, does that count?), and be natural-born citizen (no way around that. But to be fair, McCain was born in Panama.)
But, again, it never says you must ALIVE to run for President.
Yeah, you have to be careful what you wish for.
danielgolfs:
Darwin would never have used a phrase like “more evolved”, which connotes a gross misunderstanding of evolution.
As for his views on race, I think we should compare him to his contemporaries; by which standard he was very progressive.
Coral Ridge used the Argumentium ad Hitlerium first and Expelled cloned it.
speaking of name swapping and framing…
thank god Kennedy* is dead.
*that’s D. James Kennedy
Nemo, indeed.
Then we could have Gorge Soros as president and he, like Hillary, would turn the governance of the USA over to the UN.
*sigh*
Funny, I don’t recall any of the current crop of candidates including a “turn the governance of the US over to the UN” platform.
take your irrational fears elsewhere, little boy.
Darwin lost his battle with God and is now roasting in HELL.
ID is the only true science. Evolutionists are simply LUCK theorists whose stranglehold on the corridors of power sadly conflicts with scientific method. There is only one truth, but they ignore it and condemn themselves to an eternity of unpleasantries. Jesus Christ is the Savior, the Son of God. He is seated at the Right Hand of the Father and offers forgiveness and absolution to those who ask for it. Remember the Commandments. Remember the Trinity. Remember Jesus. ID is in perfect agreement with his Holy Will, and no Satan-inspired trickery or evil-born data can stand the light of His Name. Evolution is for the Unbeliever. Cry until you cannot cry any more – you will not change His Truth. Repent and be Forgiven. He will not Expel you, for He loves you.
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is coming! It is only 11 days away! It will be a revelation to those of you who focus on restricting academic freedom. 11 days and it will sweep the nation.
Stop the Suppression!
LA! MO! FL! These states will lead the way.
…11…
Mark Witt
Intelligent Design,
Institute of Theory
New Haven, CT
LA! MO! FL! These states will lead the way.
LA MO FL
rearranging and condensing:
LMFAO
…and that’s exactly what I’m doing whenever I see you post, Mark.
(thats: Laughing My Fucking Ass Off, for those unfamiliar with internet acronyms)
An obsession with Soros is one of the criteria for the Paranoid Wingnut diagnosis in the DSM-IV.
Speaking of acronyms….
Intelligent Design, Institute of Theory
More subtle than Landover Baptist or Edward Current.
More subtle than Landover Baptist or Edward Current.
and that name…
Mark Witt…
reminds me of Mark Twain.
Is that what he thinks he’s doing?
Measuring out wit?
If he’s parody, he’s buffoonery style parody, not much wit involved.
more like a court jester than a Shakespeare, that’s for sure.
Yea verily, I have seen the LIGHT, and it is Mark Witt’s blog. I have abandoned reason and through faith, accept that a creater designed each and every hundreds of billions of astrnimical objects and the zillions of thingies hear on the erth. Thru faith we is smarter So u hetherns must renounse yer logic and impircle evudense and big sience an know the truth that is THEBIBLE. my brain hurtz
Darwin is 199. He and Abraham Lincoln (a Republican I would have actually voted for, if I had been voting age in 1860) were born on the same day, February 12, 1809.
Darwin/Hutton 08!
Darwin/Hutton 08?
I don’t think I’m on board with it now, but I might come to it gradually.
@Zach Miller: “He’ll never win. British, dead, or otherwise, he’s not a conservative Christian.”
Surely he was a conservative christian by modern secular/liberal standards, though? As much of a debt as we all owe Darwin, I would hate to see anyone born 199 years ago be the president today. Venerating his memory like this, even playfully, lends superficial credibility to the dismissal of a rational, scientific belief in evolution as “Darwinism.”
I would much rather see a modern rationalist in the white house than an an ancient, if brilliant figurehead.
Yea verily, I have seen the LIGHT, and it is Mark Witt’s blog.
Yea verily, you have seen the value of dancing around in colored tights with bells on your feet?
On the one hand, it’s cute (anyone remember Bill and Opus for president?); on the other, it does reinforce the notion of Darwin himself being some kind of figure of reverence. Yes, I know; it’s supposed to be cheeky. Darwin here is a stand-in for Science, or secular reason, or some other wonderful thing, not Whiggish politics.
Recall that scene in The Last Temptation of Christ where Saul says to Jesus “I’m glad I met you – now I can forget all about you.” (Or something like that.) Then there is that Buddhist saying “If you see the Buddha by the side of the road, kill him.” Then there’s The Stranglers: “No More Heroes.”
Evolutionary biology has assimilated Darwinism, but it doesn’t need Darwin himself.
Well, yes, blind worship of heroes is bad…
But Darwin is, along with Galileo, an exemplar for the scientific spirit. Despite having trained as a vicar in college, despite having a deeply religious wife, he stuck with the truth and followed the evidence and made enormous contributions to our body of knowledge, particularly about barnacles. Oh, and evolution.
What would be the point of a debate? On almost any factual subject, Obama knows either a lot more or a lot less than Darwin did, and I doubt they’d have many huge political/philosophical disagreements; a committed liberal in Victorian Britain isn’t too far from a centrist Democrat in modern America.
If you’re implying that Darwin would be surprised by Obama’s intellect, it’s unlikely. Darwin had several acquaintances of African descent–one of them taught him taxidermy–and he had nothing but praise for their intelligence.
Just because Colugo mentioned one of my favorite songs.
What ever happened to Leon Trotsky?
Evolutionary biology has assimilated Darwinism, but it doesn’t need Darwin himself.
Is evolutionary biology the Cybermen and is Darwin now just an other Cyberman?
Nope, Darwin was agnostic in later life, as were most of his close friends. And, so far as I can see, he was socially more liberal than the average modern American. (The Wedgwoods and Darwins were a very progressive clan.)
Victorian intellectuals were often remarkably liberal. So far as I can see, that’s why we have so much writing about conservative and repressed Victorians–it’s the other Victorians who were writing it!
Of course, he probably believed that homosexuality was a mental disease, but that was a fairly common position at that time.
Darwin’s various social and political views are of historical interest, but are irrelevant to modern evolutionary biology.
To be sure, Darwin was something of a progressive – in the context of his era and social class. Not so much in our era.
Darwin, letter to Heinrich Fick, Zurich law professor, 1872:
“I much wish that you would sometimes take occasion to discuss an allied point, if it holds good on the continent,-namely the rule insisted on by all our Trades-Unions, that all workmen,-the good and bad, the strong and weak,-sh[oul]d all work for the same number of hours and receive the same wages. The unions are also opposed to piece-work,-in short to all competition. I fear that Cooperative Societies, which many look at as the main hope for the future, likewise exclude competition. This seems to me a great evil for the future progress of mankind. – Nevertheless under any system, temperate and frugal workmen will have an advantage and leave more offspring than the drunken and reckless.”
Discussed in Diane B. Paul, ‘Darwin, social Darwinism, and eugenics’ in Cambridge Companion To Darwin, 1983.
(Searchable on The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online – I don’t want this to end up in a filter black hole.)
Alfred Russel Wallace, The Eclectic Magazine, October 1890:
“In one of my last conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligence, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the upper and middle classes.”
(Try a Google Book search.)
If Darwin were resurrected and presented with the current evidence, he might well be pleased to admit that he was wrong about these and certain other matters. (Unfortunately, even today there are those who believe that he was right about these issues.) But as admirable a figure as he is overall, the views of Charles Darwin on any given matter have no more weight than those his fellow member of the Choir Invisible, Jerry Falwell – unless they are supported by evidence.
typo in above: should be “no means the best or the most intelligent”
They’d never vote for that socialist hippy! And he wouldn’t exactly be “Tough on Terror”, would he? First sign of trouble, he gets himself nailed to a cross! What use is that in a crisis?
Besides, wouldn’t Darwin be a monarchist?
He probably did, but AFAIK, we have no record of his opinion on the matter. Darwin certainly had no problem admiring male beauty–he rhapsodized on the physiques and adornment of Tahitian men, for instance, and lamented that the women weren’t anywhere near as hot. There are lots of Darwin quotes that would make good slashfic fodder, e.g. “A naked man on a naked horse is a fine spectacle; I had no idea how well the two animals suited each other.”
He did consider promiscuity immoral, at least when he was young; on the other hand, he wrote of polygamy without any great indignation, didn’t object to habitual nudity, and considered celibacy “senseless.”
Overall, Darwin didn’t seem to care much about the sex lives of other people, except as matters of anthropological or evolutionary interest. The only “sin” that really seemed to tick him off was that of cruelty to people or animals.
Personally, if I were to hang out with a Darwin, I have to say I’d quite like to meet his grandfather Erasmus. He sounds far more my kind of guy.
Though Charles comes a close second.
Re #42 “Darwin would never have used a phrase like “more evolved”, which connotes a gross misunderstanding of evolution.
As for his views on race, I think we should compare him to his contemporaries; by which standard he was very progressive.”
Yes, but by no means as much as Wallace, who seems to have believed in the innate equality of races. Unfortunately, since he couldn’t see why “savages” would need the kind of intelligence a civilized Englishman did, this led him to conclude that human brain evolution was divinely directed. (For any theistic evolutionists present, the answer is almost certainly that humans are pre-eminently social, intelligence is an advantage in dealing with other people, hence intelligence among our ancestors rose over evolutionary time until the anatomical and physiological costs of the brain became too great.)
Plenty of liberal Americans would object to converting all businesses into co-ops and establishing equal pay for all workers in a given profession, though. You have to go pretty far left on the US political spectrum before you get to people who don’t think competition is, within limits, a good thing.
The explicit claim that the upper classes are smarter or harder-working than the lower classes is certainly well to the right of the liberal mainstream in the US today, but I think most liberals would enthusiastically agree that “Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent.” Hell, that torpedoes social Darwinism right there.
Sortakinda. Charles was a devout Whig, like the rest of his family, and strongly supported the Reform Act of 1832; in that era the Whig party was the main force pushing to transfer more power from the monarchy to Parliament. It never demanded the outright abolition of the monarchy, but by the time of Darwin’s death, Queen Victoria had little practical power.
OTOH, Darwin may well have agreed with Hooker (whom he quotes on the subject in letters to Asa Gray) that a constitutional democracy was dangerously unstable. Darwin commented that the American Civil War had made most upper-class English more leery of democracy.
Well, Wallace certainly agreed that races differed in their innate moral and mental qualities, and contrasted and ranked them accordingly. Like Darwin, he thought that different races were much closer intellectually than was commonly believed…but like Darwin, he didn’t consider them exactly equal. I think the two men were biological racists in a roughly similar degree.
Their disagreement seems to stem from the fact that Darwin thought sexual selection could produce near-European intelligence even in “savages,” whereas Wallace did not.
Re #73 (Wallace on race). I was relying on S.J. Gould’s essay “Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs Wallace”, reprinted in “The Panda’s Thumb”. Gould says: “Wallace was one of the few nonracists of the nineteenth century. He really believed that all human groups had innately equal capacities of intellect.” However, I admit that on re-examining the essay, Gould’s actual quotations from Wallace are at most ambiguous, and it sounds like you know more about this than I do.
Death? Pfft. That’s just a technicality. Let’s just hire some voodoo zombie maker.
from Mark Witt’s blog (from the second of his 30 sequential posts lampooning Jesus/God/Ben Stein &/or ‘Expelled’):
“Furthermore, Dawkins in his role as the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada is more than willing to apply hammer and tongs to the soft flesh of the truth that is the theory of ID. Who can question that ID must be responsible for triple-point states of evolution or multiple-point states of evolution? What random pressures could lead to this superposition? One would think that random processes would be driven by temperature! How ridiculous!”
Hat’s off, Mark. You’re book-marked, even (in my book).
he was probably a monarchist, but might have changed his mind had he learned that Queen Vic personally vetoed his proposed knighthood on the advice of her bishops, against the wishes of Prince Albert (no sniggering at the back there) who was a big science fan.
If you were to dig him up (subject of a piece coming up on Science Creative Quarterly shortly) it’d be from Westminster Abbey (London’s main Anglican church) where Huxley insisted he be planted to vengefully thumb his nose at the establishment and in defiance of Darwin’s wishes. This is, of course, the month of his death – the 19th.
A couple of weeks ago, I said that Mark Witt’s name was a misnomer. I was mistaken. Quoting Spinal Tap; It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.
It’s tempting, but then what do I do with my Stewart/Colbert ’08 T-shirt?
@jimmyraybob (#54):
Hutton is a good choice! Not only did he, a self-taught geologist and agriculturist, expound the radical notion that the earth is OLD (based on extensive observation and an unbreakable chain of reasoning), but he’s also the source of this profound epigram:
“Science is founded upon the seeing of truth”.
Mark Witt has it right – Darwin is burning, along with every meteorologist. The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.
You fools!
Kyle R. I am afraid you are mistaken about the origin of rain. It comes from the tears of the perpetually weeping Statue Of Liberty. I know this for Kelly shows us.
And the weathermen shrugged!
^
OMG!
No!
It’s a lie! And it’s dangerous! Our children shouldn’t even know that the Statue of Liberty exists!
Compare the Governator to Huckabee.
Now compare the Governator to McCain.
Is he really more conservative than Kerry?
http://www.amendforarnold.com
Compare the Governator to Huckabee.
Now compare the Governator to McCain.
Is he really more conservative than Kerry?
http://www.amendforarnold.com
I completely forgot to add this link.
I completely forgot to add this link.
I love that essay, but I think Gould’s simply wrong on that particular point. Of course, he didn’t have access to the wonderful Alfred Russel Wallace page and its collection of works by and about Wallace. Praise Nyarlathotep for the internet!
In text S93 from that page, Wallace writes:
Again, in text S95, a third-party recounting of Wallace’s remarks on an anthropological paper,
Still, I can’t think of any of Wallace and Darwin’s contemporaries who were less biologically racist than they were. Indeed, it would have been unscientific for an anthropologist to assert mental equality between human races, since almost all the available data (incomplete, indirect and biased as it was) appeared to refute that claim. Darwin–more so than Wallace–readily praised the intelligence of almost all the nonwhite ethnic groups he personally interacted with, but other researchers’ observations “proved” that Europeans were bigger-brained, individually smarter, and collectively capable of greater accomplishments, and he could hardly ignore that.
Following up on the first excerpt cited by Anton Mates (Alfred Russel Wallace, ‘The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced From the Theory of “Natural Selection”‘ 1864), later in the paper Wallace indulges in proto-transhumanist utopianism.
“In concluding this brief sketch of a great subject, I would point out its bearing upon the future of the human race. If my conclusions are just, it must inevitably follow that the higher–the more intellectual and moral–must displace the lower and more degraded races; and the power of “natural selection”, still acting on his mental organisation, must ever lead to the more perfect adaptation of man’s higher faculties to the conditions of surrounding nature, and to the exigencies of the social state. … (H)is mental constitution may continue to advance and improve till the world is again inhabited by a single homogeneous race, no individual of which will be inferior to the noblest specimens of existing humanity. … (E)ach man will be guided by the best of laws; a thorough appreciation of the rights, and a perfect sympathy with the feelings, of all about him … (M)ankind will have at length discovered that it was only required of them to develope the capacities of their higher nature, in order to convert this earth … into as bright a paradise as ever haunted the dreams of seer or poet.”
Whatever his foibles, Wallace was essentially motivated by compassion, as the conclusion of another paper shows. ‘How to Civilize Savages’ (1865):
“Unfortunately, the practices of European settlers are too often so diametrically opposed to the precepts of Christianity, and so deficient in humanity, justice, and charity, that the poor savage must be sorely puzzled to understand why this new faith, which is to do him so much good, should have had so little effect on his teacher’s own countrymen. The white men in our Colonies are too frequently the true savages, and require to be taught and Christianized quite as much as the natives. … The general practice of Christian virtues by the Europeans around them would, we feel assured, be a most powerful instrument for the general improvement of savage races, and is, perhaps, the only mode of teaching that would produce a real and lasting effect.”
Re #86, 87 Yes, pretty conclusive!
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
I must not rely on secondary sources.
p.s. Anton, thanks for the Wallace link.
No problem. Anyway, there’s no shame in reliance on secondary sources; you kind of have to do so for most of your knowledge unless you have several thousand library cards and Wally West-class superspeed.
The internet’s slowly changing that, though. Fun times.