Ray's Views On Darwin As Imperialist Racist

aquaman

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For anyone who has read Darwin, do you know where this part that Ray refers to would be found?

Ray Peat said:
you can see that tendency in Darwin, the way he considered that even botanical species from England were going to displace native species in New Zealand for example or why white people were displacing the brown people, just real imperialistic racist.

Do you think he's referring to the "naturalization hypothesis"?

eg "Darwin's naturalization hypothesis predicts that invasive species should perform better in their novel range in the absence of close relatives in the native flora due to reduced competition. " from A phylogenetic analysis of the British flora sheds light on the evolutionary and ecological factors driving plant invasions

or "“The Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin wrote that we shouldn’t be surprised by native species “being beaten and supplanted by the naturalised productions from another land.”

Darwin reasoned that these victories were inevitable. Different species might adapt to a particular ecological niche in different parts of the world. Put them in the same place, in the same niche, and one might well outcompete the other because it has evolved superior attributes." from Turning to Darwin to Solve the Mystery of Invasive Species

Mainly wondering whether/where Darwin specifically said English species would beat out foreign ones.

Thanks
 

lvysaur

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I don't remember anything like that, but I haven't read much of his writings.

If racism weren't the default state in that time, then Europe wouldn't be a continent.
 

DaveFoster

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I don't remember anything like that, but I haven't read much of his writings.

If racism weren't the default state in that time, then Europe wouldn't be a continent.
That's racist.
HairyGoodnaturedGoldeneye-mobile.jpg
 

managing

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Darwin had a tendency to assume that survival of the fittest meant that people and things that resembled him and his highly valued things were the fittest and therefore would take over. Also inherent in his writings is that evolution would lead to a reduction in diversity, while its easily demonstrable that in the long view its homeostatic.

I would call Darwin "hopelessly ethnocentric and anthropomorphic". But that's really just a euphemism for "imperialistic racist". The latter implies intentionality.

People struggle with this because it seems like a condemnation of the person. In fact, I think a lot of people's struggles to accept that things are "racist" or "imperialistic" taken separately or together, springs from this notion of intentionality. Because with intentionality comes blame and accountability. Yet most people can see how easy it is to fall into ethnocentric assumptions without bad intentions.

Blame creates defensiveness. One defends ideas and actions that are ultimately indefensible. This is how escalation happens. However, the flipside is, without "blame" there can be no accountability. And without accountability, racist ideas and actions are free to go unexamined. Which stymies social evolution. Which appears superficially to take us back to Darwin, but isn't Darwinistic at all.
 

Prosper

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What is the context of that quote? It begins by "you can see that tendency in Darwin", what does the "that" refer to?
 

Ledo

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Darwin had a tendency to assume that survival of the fittest meant that people and things that resembled him and his highly valued things were the fittest and therefore would take over. Also inherent in his writings is that evolution would lead to a reduction in diversity, while its easily demonstrable that in the long view its homeostatic.

I would call Darwin "hopelessly ethnocentric and anthropomorphic". But that's really just a euphemism for "imperialistic racist". The latter implies intentionality.

People struggle with this because it seems like a condemnation of the person. In fact, I think a lot of people's struggles to accept that things are "racist" or "imperialistic" taken separately or together, springs from this notion of intentionality. Because with intentionality comes blame and accountability. Yet most people can see how easy it is to fall into ethnocentric assumptions without bad intentions.

Blame creates defensiveness. One defends ideas and actions that are ultimately indefensible. This is how escalation happens. However, the flipside is, without "blame" there can be no accountability. And without accountability, racist ideas and actions are free to go unexamined. Which stymies social evolution. Which appears superficially to take us back to Darwin, but isn't Darwinistic at all.
I blame babble like this for the reason there are so many shi*teholes in liberal dominated American cities.
 

x-ray peat

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Here is the full context. I would like to see the actual Darwin quotation that supports it but I agree with RP that there were a lot of political machinations behind Darwin in his time and since.
Politics & Science: William Blake And Art's Relationship To Science
Ray Peat said:
Dr. Ray Peat: Yes, the man who succeeded him at the French institution denounced him and said that basically he was an anti-Christian with his ideas contradicting the Bible. And so there was a lot of Christian theological attack during the 19th century, and the current issue tries to put evolution on the side of progress on science and put religion against all of that which they were indication to Lamarck but with Darwin, Darwin became the imperialist philosopher, the strong winning is the direction of progress. So at the time I started graduate school, Konrad Lorenz was about to get the Noble Prize. There was whole current in science justifying militarism, and Konrad Lorenz was the ideologist of the racial hygiene institute justify genocide in Germany and that was really made my genetic thinking in America and Germany in 20s, 30s, and 40s, but the defeat of the Nazis made it embarrassing for the Americans to keep using those terms of genocide and so on, but by the 60s Lorenz was being rehabilitated and they were talking about his Nazi beginnings and my professors were all basically committed to the same genetic determinism and that – you can see that tendency in Darwin, the way he considered that even botanical species from England were going to displace native species in New Zealand for example of why white people were displacing the brown people, just real imperialistic racist. And during the 19th century, a lot of the Christians were \ going on to Darwin’s cycle on with imperialism but the Protestant traditions that the same ones that supported the American Revolution, the Great Awakening had a lot of Democratic impulses, equality, antislavery and in the 19th century feminism and social equality and so on were part of the Protestant or Christian revival. And William Jennings Bryan against Clarence Darrow was sort of the backwardness of people who opposed Darwinism but that the trial, the Monkey Trial occurred at the height of the eugenics domination of biological thinking and William Jennings Bryan represented the public common person and anti- racial thinking with Clarence Darrow citing with the imperialist and racist and Bryan citing with the common person against racism and genocide. And he didn't put it in the proper political language, and so he has been ridiculed ever since as an ignorant person opposing progress. But when you look at it in the context of who the geneticists really were, people who set up Hitler's genocide and you see that Bryan and the Christians were really on the right side..
 

Ledo

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LOL. Drive-By mindless liberal potshot . . .
Managing wrote :
"But if I understand your comment, you are suggesting that the very belief that racism exists and needs to be confronted . . . creates urban blight?"

Yes, goes something like this; racism exists, powerful agenda driven political entities exploit racial differences - real or imagined, in the guise of social justice activism and identity politics(your "confrontation"), leading to a divided, exploited, disenfranchised identity group i.e. black Americans many of whom are abject wards of the state sitting powerless and wholly dependant in sh*teholes across the land.

I suspect you knew this though so when you speak of accountability;

managing wrote: "And without accountability, racist ideas and actions are free to go unexamined. Which stymies social evolution.",

one must wonder how serious you are about that accountability.

Regarding MLK...we in America of any adult age were raised on his belief that racism was an illusion, the real test of a man was the content of his character. That got thrown out without a vote during the leftist takeover by the globalists of the United States and EU. As ray said they killed him for it when he made class the issue instead of race.

The sh*teholes are a participation prize and not to be confused with "social evolution".
 

Ledo

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Anyways, Trump's sh*tehole comment was so welcome in conjunction with MLK day, in my excitement I couldn't help myself taking a potshot at race baiting virtue signalers, my apologies for going off topic.
 

Ledo

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All together now...

Racism baaaad.
Using it to divide and conquer a country, goood.
 

Sunny Jack

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I think Peat was probably referring to the passage from Chapter 10 of 'The Origin of Species' where Darwin says:

"From the extraordinary manner in which European productions have recently spread over New Zealand, and have seized on places which must have been previously occupied, we may believe, if all the animals and plants of Great Britain were set free in New Zealand, that in the course of time a multitude of British forms would become thoroughly naturalised there, and would exterminate many of the natives. On the other hand, from what we see now occurring in New Zealand, and from hardly a single inhabitant of the southern hemisphere having become wild in any part of Europe, we may doubt, if all the productions of New Zealand were set free in Great Britain, whether any considerable number would be enabled to seize on places now occupied by our native plants and animals. Under this point of view, the productions of Great Britain may be said to be higher than those of New Zealand."

Darwin seems to have reasoned that the British/European species were more recently evolved than the more ancient New Zealand ones, and therefore the tendency of evolution towards continual improvement had given them a superiority over those plants and animals which had evolved in a more isolated, less competitive environment. As he says elsewhere in the same book:

"Natural selection tends only to make each organic being as perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitants of the same country with which it has to struggle for existence... The endemic productions of New Zealand, for instance, are perfect one compared with another; but they are now rapidly yielding before the advancing legions of plants and animals introduced from Europe."
 

sladerunner69

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For anyone who has read Darwin, do you know where this part that Ray refers to would be found?



Do you think he's referring to the "naturalization hypothesis"?

eg "Darwin's naturalization hypothesis predicts that invasive species should perform better in their novel range in the absence of close relatives in the native flora due to reduced competition. " from A phylogenetic analysis of the British flora sheds light on the evolutionary and ecological factors driving plant invasions

or "“The Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin wrote that we shouldn’t be surprised by native species “being beaten and supplanted by the naturalised productions from another land.”

Darwin reasoned that these victories were inevitable. Different species might adapt to a particular ecological niche in different parts of the world. Put them in the same place, in the same niche, and one might well outcompete the other because it has evolved superior attributes." from Turning to Darwin to Solve the Mystery of Invasive Species

Mainly wondering whether/where Darwin specifically said English species would beat out foreign ones.

Thanks

Well, Darwin's last book became the root of the political idea of "Social Darwinism" because it argued that some races and people had created more successful civilizations through a process of evolutionary traits similar to natural selection. I don't think he meant any harm by it, and most of what he described in the book is accurate enough, but it is definitely racist by today's standards.
 

achillea

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Figure this one out!

Full title of Darwins book;

The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.
 

burtlancast

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As ray said they killed MLK for it when he made class the issue instead of race.

What many communists, Ray included, forgets to mention is MLK wasn't the man he portrayed himself to be: rather, he was an opportunist using religion to further his personal lust for power.

He changed his name ( real name Mike King: no Luther here), plagiarized his PHD, adopted communist tactics of street violence, had his speeches written by the KGB paymaster agent in USA (Stanley Levison) and liked to party with prostitutes, which he would often beat up.

Not exactly Gandhi-like.

After his tactics became common knowledge, communists got rid of this hot potato.

His widow went to court to lock away his FBI file until 2027.

Truth is just about everything regarding MLK is a fraud perpetuated by the medias.

Which begs the question : for what reason ?
 
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Atman

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99% of great thinkers pre 1945 are racist in regards to modern standards.
Charles Darwin is no exception. His cousin Francis Galton, the father of eugenics is also a bad guy under the current liberal worldview.
Thank god we are far more progressive and enlightened today.
 

postman

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funny because if anything whites are being replaced with brown people, at the hands of the social engineers
 

schultz

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What many communists, Ray included

Ray strikes me as someone who would not like state enforced communism. He seems to value freedom. As far as I can tell he doesn't seem to want to have to pay for "health care for all" since he said he'd rather pay the fine than pay for the insurance...

"And I would avoid insurance except that the state requires car insurance and now they’re requiring health insurance but as far as possible I would rather pay the fine."

I suppose he no longer has to pay that fine, if I am not mistaken? I am Canadian so I don't follow US politics as much as Americans probably do, but I thought the Republican party got rid of the fine?

He may like some communist ideas, but to say he's a communist flat-out seems misleading to me.
 

burtlancast

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I don't believe either Ray's a communist per se, but for some reason he has chosen to defend communist themes, most probably because he perceives his audience as the left leaning type, and he needs to pander to it.

Got to pay these bills.
 

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