Darwin the Man of His Times | Hacker News Reader

Darwin the Man of His Times

aethermug.com

33 pointsmrcgnc13 comments

> All of this reeks of the entrenched (pre-) Victorian British worldview, where it is natural and appropriate for the "more civilized" to look down on the "savages" of "lower order", as if a moral ladder like that were as clear as daylight.

For a long time that literally was the dominant philosophy in the west: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being

This is what the Chinese thought too.

Of course such ideas never explain gun powder or Genghis Khan but nobody ever said racists are smart.

> I cringed while reading his many comparisons between people of different regions, as if they were species of finches

Only because we know better now. It must have seemed self evident at the time and we can forgive Darwin for making that mistake. He was a scientist and I'm sure he'd have accepted the evidence that all the so-called races are embarrassingly alike.

Not a fan of these retrospective moralistic takes.

> I cringed while reading his many comparisons between people of different regions, as if they were species of finches

Wasn't exactly that one of the most revolutionary insights of his theory? That humans evolved and are governed by the same forces of natural selection as other animals? It is amusing that, 166 years after On the Origin of Species, that part is still controversial.

Between species, not within species.

The concept of 'species' only exists within the human mind [1]. In nature, there are only slowly accumulating mutations, until two populations become differentiated enough that we arbitrarily assign them different taxa. In fact, that is the central thesis of the aptly-named On the Origin of Species.

[1] And there are plenty of species that we consider distinct, that can and do interbreed and bear fertile offspring.

The quote you are responding to is a reaction to scientific racism. Forgive me if I'm misinterpreting you, but you said that you find it amusing that this is still controversial.

> The quote you are responding to is a reaction to scientific racism.

No, it is a reaction to treating humans the same as finches. You give the thing he does a label and then attack the label, instead of attacking the thing itself.

Isolated populations "drift" genetically, which is how species form in the first place. Discriminating against people based on those differences sucks, sure, but it's still the ground truth.

It does suck, but the differences on which discrimination happen do not map to actual genetic variation.[0]

[0] https://bioanth.org/about/aaba-statement-on-race-racism/

Pretty sure there are genetic clustering algorithms which show that perceived race groups approximately correspond to measured race clusters. For example, random East Asians are more closely related to each other than to random West Europeans.

> The concept of 'species' only exists within the human mind [1].

That's a theory, anyway. Yes, biologists (and presumably botanists and all those who study the other kingdoms) have made errors in judgment, and yes, the current definition is very poor (often broken, sometimes unprovable in a practical sense).

It does not follow, however, that all life exists on some continuous spectrum of mutations. Members of Equus caballus have distinct genetic traits that do not occur in Equus asinus.

The reality we see about us is that life seems to group itself into channels or pools of limited genetic variation. But that variation doesn't mean the channels/pools aren't real.

There are approximately 3 different human species, if you use the same distance measures that give us dog, wolf, and coyote (which can all interbreed).

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