Re: [Phys-l] "To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler, " said the group's late founder, D. James Kennedy.

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

Well, doesn't this just confirm the idea that the philosophy of science is
not well taught in schools.  The idea of racial superiority predated Darwin
by quite a bit.  Actually perhaps Adam Smith could be also blamed.  I doubt
that the Southern slave owners believed in Darwinism, but they certainly
believed in white racial superiority, and even cloaked some of this belief
in religious rhetoric.

And if the Piellas school board does what he requested, they will probably
be in for an expensive and probably losing legal battle.  This is just a
tempest in a teapot at this time.  But if elementary and secondary school
teachers do not learn the philosophy of science, this sort of battle will
continue.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> LEADING CANDIDATE FOR FLORIDA MAYOR THINKS EVOLUTION IS NAZI IDEA
> [Not a correct headline.]
>
> ST PETERSBURG TIMES - Darwin's theory of evolution helped fuel the
> rise of Hitler and contributed to the school-shooting massacre at
> Columbine, a former St. Petersburg City Council member wrote in a
> letter urging the Pinellas County School Board to expose students to
> alternative theories.
>
> "Evolution gives our kids an excuse to believe in natural selection
> and survival of the fittest, which leads to a belief that they are
> superior over the weak," Bill Foster wrote board members in a letter
> received this week. "This is a slippery slope."
>
> He continued: "One of the Columbine shooters wrote on his Web site,
> 'You know what I love? Natural selection! It's the best thing that
> ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak
> organisms.'"
>
> Foster, who recently stepped down after being term-limited from
> office, is widely considered to be a leading contender to be St.
> Petersburg's next mayor in 2009. He said Friday he wrote the letter,
> which appears on his law firm's stationery, as the concerned parent
> of a high school student. . .
>
> Foster isn't the first Darwin critic to attempt to link evolutionary
> theory to violence and racism, but he is the first public figure in
> the Florida debate to do so.
>
> After the Columbine shooting in 1999, then-U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay cited
> Darwin's theory as a contributing factor, reading a letter into the
> Congressional Record that said public schools "teach the children
> that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out
> of some primordial soup of mud." This summer, Fort Lauderdale's Coral
> Ridge Ministries aired a TV special on Christian cable called
> Darwin's Deadly Legacy. "To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler,"
> said the group's late founder, D. James Kennedy.
>
> Foster echoed those words in his letter: "Adolf Hitler duped an
> entire generation using Darwin's evolution," he wrote. "He sought to
> preserve the 'favored' race in the struggle for survival."
>
> http://www.sptimes.com/2008/01/12/Southpinellas/
> Foster_links_Darwin__.shtml
> ----------------------------------
> The creationist ministry Answers in Genesis is especially known for
> some of these claims[11][12]. [Hitler and Darwin] The most respected
> academic who advocates such views is Richard Weikart, a historian at
> California State University, Stanislaus and a fellow at the Discovery
> Institute; the main organization trying to incorporate Intelligent
> Design into science classrooms in the US and elsewhere.