Darwin wasn't all that influential if you think about it. I'm not saying he wasn't important -- I'm not saying that I don't respect the guy, and that he didn't set science on its way. But I have the feeling that some scientists already believed what he articulated, and that more would have come to that opinion if he hadn't.
Moreover, there are a lot of people who still don't believe him. Darwin only rocked the worlds of the uber-religious.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't look at, for example, Vietnam and say "Darwin at work!" in the same way that I say "reminds me of the Russian Revolution, and the American response is very Jack the Ripper." I don't look at the race riots and say "natural selection!" so much as "Russian Revolution again -- the class struggle!" With computers, I don't say "origins of the species!" I say "ah, Freud's theories on how the mind works led to this."
To be fair, though, I do think that natural selection did have a certain influence -- just look at the eugenics movement, and the justification for keeping certain races/genders down. But since that had been going on for centuries prior, I simply look at Darwin as a new justification, not a crucible.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2001-10-22 10:26 am (UTC)Moreover, there are a lot of people who still don't believe him. Darwin only rocked the worlds of the uber-religious.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't look at, for example, Vietnam and say "Darwin at work!" in the same way that I say "reminds me of the Russian Revolution, and the American response is very Jack the Ripper." I don't look at the race riots and say "natural selection!" so much as "Russian Revolution again -- the class struggle!" With computers, I don't say "origins of the species!" I say "ah, Freud's theories on how the mind works led to this."
To be fair, though, I do think that natural selection did have a certain influence -- just look at the eugenics movement, and the justification for keeping certain races/genders down. But since that had been going on for centuries prior, I simply look at Darwin as a new justification, not a crucible.