Word: darwin
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What all this comes down to, though, is Emmerich's last three paragraphs. This whole debate is shaping up into one more in the "man is the center of the universe" series. Copernicus got it, Galileo got it, Darwin got it. Anyone who dares to suggest that the universe is not divided into three parts--matter, life, and Man, with Man at the top--is accused of the most dreadful heresy...
...Dawkins distorts the truth when in fact Dawkins, under the watchful eye of such biologists as John Maynard Smith and Robert Trivers, is careful to qualify his statements to keep them honest. Is it not Emmerich who is distorting the truth when he asks, "and didn't distortions of Darwin's theory of 'survival of the fittest' and belief in inherent genetic inferiority lead once to the death of six million Jews?" (Dawkins never mentions race.) Does Emmerich suggest Darwin should not have published his theory, because it could be so abused? If distortions of the little hard knowledge...
...part of the process which ultimately leads to the truth and a more accurate conception of the universe. Maybe so. But academics also have a responsibility to avoid abusing the faith people put in them. They should not intentionally distort knowledge. And didn't distortions of Darwin's theory of "survival of the fittest" and belief in inherent genetic inferiority lead once to the death of six million Jews...
...Updating Darwin. Pieczenik believes there is further significance in the DNA patterns he discovered. In his view, the constraints suggest that a process of natural selection occurs at the molecular level long before organisms develop. If this is true, some additions will have to be made to the Darwinian theory that natural selection takes place only after the organism is formed and begins adapting to the world around it. That notion does not seem to bother Pieczenik. "What this means," he says, "is that the DNA sequences exist to protect themselves and their own information...
...author animates dreary economics lessons with did-you-know facts. For example it was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest." The assembly line was not invented by Henry Ford but by an anonymous Frenchman who increased pin production tenfold by instituting the division of labor at his factory. Paper money is of pure Yankee lineage. When Massachusetts soldiers returned from action in the French and Indian War in 1690 they were paid not in coin but in promissory notes that could be traded for goods. The perverse alchemy by which governments turned gold...