Fashionable Nonsense, Fads, and Fallacies in the Name of Logic and Science

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…by Jonas E. Alexis

 

We all know that nonsense rules this world. It is virtually everywhere: in academic circles,[1] in politics,[2] in books that purport to be historical or scientific,[3] in medicine,[4] in journalism,[5] etc. If you take ideas seriously, you’d probably ask: why would the academic world in particular be involved in deliberate forgeries and hoaxes?

Well, keep in mind that no power or force on earth can make a person change his mind about a cherished ideology. As Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin himself put it almost two decades ago, even if a cherished ideology is patently absurd and even if it fails “to fulfill many of its extravagant promises,” it still must be preserved if its alternative is frightening.[6]

So, if a person does not love the truth, he will never change his mind whatsoever. Facts, evidence, logic and consistency sometimes are useless precisely because the person is not open to the possibility that his ideology could be wrong.

Last week, I had a conversation with a dear friend of mine during which he uttered, “I think we should go back to Iraq.” “Whatever for,” I asked. “ISIS,” he said. “We need to bomb ISIS.” “Oh, great,” I responded. But I added:

“But what if I were to show you that Israel has been directly and indirectly supporting ISIS? What if I were to prove to you that Israel has been involved in terrorist activities from time immemorial? What if you were to realize that Israel has also been supporting the Syrian rebels/terrorists?[7] Would you attack Israel? What if I were to tell you that ‘Simon Elliot, aka Al-Baghdadi, is the ‘son of Jewish parents’ and is a Mossad agent?”

He paused for a while and then said jokingly, “Then I’d support ISIS!” I just could not hold my laughter. I gave him a pat on the back and stopped the conversation, since further interaction would be useless. It confirmed by suspicion that some wicked ideologies matter so much to people that they would die defending them.

Remember how the Piltdown forgery became “the most famous and successful hoax in science”? Remember how “by 1915 the British anatomists and paleontologists were generally of one mind” when it came to agreeing that Piltdown proved Darwin right?[8]

Remember how this Piltdown hoax was in textbooks for decades? Remember how the New York Times entitled one of their articles “Darwin Theory Proved True” and used the Piltdown hoax to make their case?[9] Listen what was reported in the article very carefully:

“A race of ape-like and speechless man, inhabiting England hundreds of thousands of years ago, when they had for their neighbors the mastodon and other animals now extinct is the missing link in the chain in man’s evolution, which leading scientists say they have discovered in what is generally described as ‘the Sussex skull.’ To this Dr. Woodward proposes to give the name of ‘eoanthropus,’ or ‘man of dawn.’”

Well, we all know by now that Mr. Piltdown was a colossal forgery. But it was propounded by so-called thinking people—scientists who believed that ideology should trump serious research, logic and ultimately truth.

Nonsense, in other words, knows no boundary. But nonsense will certainly make you angry. And if you were trained in logic and have little or no patience with illogical leaps, nonsequiturs, inconsistency, circular reasoning, red herring, ad hominem, etc., then you will get really frustrated and disappointed when so-called thinking people deliberately use nonsense to propound their ideological weltanschauung. Sometimes they do so for personal or political gains.

Ignorance can be fixed, for we all are ignorant in one way or another. But when people who ought to know better make one preposterous claim after another without even looking at consistency and logic and even constructive criticism, then it is really discouraging.

Sometimes you feel like throwing in the towel when those people repeatedly make the same fundamental mistakes and despite the fact that they know that their worldview is internally contradictory.

As we all know, metaphysical reality takes mental exertion, requires rational thought, logical patterns, and ultimately a love for the truth. However, when truth is not your ultimate guide, then you are setting yourself up for complete failure; you are opening yourself up for nonsense and complete mumbo jumbo.


Some nonsense takes some mental gymnastics to be dismissed and some does not. Perhaps one nonsense that has come to dominate much of our present age, particularly among those who are attempting to combat the Zionist machination of the West, is the idea that Jewish behavior is genetic.[10]

If one follows this argument to its logical conclusions, Lloyd Blankfein is cheating the system because his genes compel him to do so.[11] David Cronenberg and Eli Roth are corrupting the Goyim through pornography in movies because they’ve got bad genes. This argument is relatively recent. It came into existence after the “Darwinian Revolution” began to capture the intellectual climate in England and America.[12]

As we shall see, no serious person has been able to defend that position rationally, consistently and cogently precisely because it is fraught with internal contradictions. Positing one statement after another is quite easy, but defending those statements from a rationally coherent and consistent point of view is quite another story.

One can say that Darwin actually opened the door for ideologues to make risible assertions without serious thinking. As a matter of fact, Darwin has been summoned by a number of strange writers to explain things that they do not understand. Consider the following titles:

Evolutionary Origins of Morality, edited by Leonard D. Katz

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, by Pascal Boyer

Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom, by Paul H. Rubin

Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, by Randolph M. Nesse & George C. Williams

Executive Instinct: Managing the Human Animal in the Information Age, by Nigel Nicholson

Divided Labours: An Evolutionary View of Women at Work, by Kingsley Browne

The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love, by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson

Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, by David M. Buss

Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Evolution of Human Sexuality, by Malcolm Potts and Roger Short

The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes, by Dean Hamer

The list is certainly endless. Virtually everything has been “Darwinized.” The Week published an article a few weeks ago entitled, “This one gene might decide if you vote Republican or Democrat.”[13] The argument goes like this:

“it appears a variation of a gene known as DRD4, which had previously been linked to risk-taking behavior, also makes people more likely to be liberal. But there’s a catch: That’s only the case if they had a lot of friends when they were in high school.”[14]

How does that connection work? Do they mean to tell us that the gene has some subatomic label on it? Or are they putting their own interpretation on the data to fit an ideological worldview? “Democrat” or “Republican” are not physiological entities! (By the way, scientists have been cooking up evidence to fit their data for a long time. Our colleague Gilad Atzmon has indirectly exposed the fallacy of this “gene” thing in his recent article “The Primacy of Jewish Genes.”)

What these people end up saying is that when a person “decides” to cheat and steal, it is actually his genes that force him to do it. Yet those who propound that ideology find themselves in trouble because the same “scientists” who “discover” the gene behavior also tell us that morality does not exist. I have dealt with those people in the past.

Building on the work of Darwin or so-called “evolutionary thinking,” one correspondent once told me a few months ago that bad behavior happens all the time in the animal kingdom, therefore there must be a genetic component to it. He was specifically talking about Jewish behavior. As examples, he summoned animals like cats, dogs, and even birds to prove his point. My response was quite simple:

“Are you seriously comparing those animals with moral agents like you and me? Are you willing to entertain that risible idea? For example, when a lion kills a zebra, can you seriously say that he murders her? When my male hamster forcibly copulates on a female hamster, can you honestly say that he rapes her? Can you say that he did something wrong? If not, then you have to agree with me that the word ‘rape’ or ‘murder’ can only be applied to moral agents and sentient beings who are capable of making free and rational choices.

“Furthermore, aren’t you implicitly saying that it is all right for Goldman Sachs to cheat the system? And aren’t you implicitly and perhaps unintentionally building a case for Zionism? If you are comparing us with cats and dogs and even birds, aren’t you indirectly excluding things like morality, justice, love, and even freedom in your equation? If not, then where did you get that morality? Let me help you out: please do not summon ‘evolutionary thinking’ to explain morality because you will make my job way too easy.”


darwin
Charles Darwin

The argument that animals like cats and dogs do not understand moral choice or real suffering like human beings has been defended by a number of scholars over the past few years. For example, Michael Murray has pointed out that animals, unlike human beings, do not really make moral choices on the basis of what is metaphysically right and wrong and do not have the mental capacity to reason like human beings.[15]

So, the analysis between cats and humans are not going to fly. My correspondent did not know that Charles Darwin, his intellectual father, drew the conclusion that “everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.”[16] One can say that Darwin set the foundation for his children, namely Neo-Darwinists, who now argue that there is no difference between the mind and the brain.

Darwin moved on to unleash his most ideological dissertation in the Descent of Man. Let us quote the early version here:

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment.

“There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.

“It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”[17]

Richard Dawkins, a messiah to some atheists, would have agreed with Darwin here. He argued that it is immoral “not to abort if fetus has Down’s syndrome.”[18]

I wonder what Emmanuel Kant would say to Darwin and Dawkins after he read the works that those guys have produced. I am speculating that he would draw the conclusion that logical consistency and intellectual honesty are foreign to those guys.


Emmanuel Kant
Emmanuel Kant

Darwin implicitly uses human beings as instruments or subjects; Kant argues quite the opposite. Darwin argues that some people deserve to live or die; Kant implicitly postulates that every single person, rich or poor, educated or uneducated, deserves our respect and should be treated with dignity and care. What is the fundamental difference between these two individuals?

Well, Darwin, when he left Christianity, fell under the wings of materialism, which the French philosophes were trying to implement during the French Revolution.[19] Biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore tell us that Darwin “embraced a terrifying materialism.” It was a matter of time that Darwin, according to Desmond and Moore, began to postulate that

“the human mind, morality, and even belief in God were artefacts of the brain…He sat on his theory of evolution for twenty years, scarcely mooting his innermost thoughts about ‘monkey-men’ and apes evolving morality, castigating himself as a ‘Devil’s Chaplain.’”[20]

That was just the beginning. Darwin even entertained the idea that “man’s mind had emerged from the worm’s in the first place. This was the crux.”[21] It is no accident that Darwin’s Descent of Man is inexorably materialistic in its orientation.

Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, however, is irreducibly teleological and is inevitably Christian in its approach.

Kant was obviously working with the assumption that morality is not cotangent upon how you and I feel on a given day. Kant calls this categorical imperative, which prohibits contradiction and inconsistency. This categorical imperative binds us all and keeps us all in check, particularly when our desires are telling us to act in a selfish way. As Kant formulated:

“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”[22]

In that sense, there is a symbiotic relationship between morality and rationality, and to separate these two fundamental entities is to commit a categorical mistake. In other words, a rational human being is also a moral person who go by the dictate of the moral law.

To understand the moral law, says Kant, requires theoretical reason, but to submit our choice to the moral law requires practical reason. Reason obviously demands consistency, and if a system of thought is to be taken seriously, then logical consistency ought to be its theoretical and practical foundation.

Put simply, for a system of thought to be rationally coherent and intellectually permissible, it must be examined by all the known laws of logic (most specifically the law of non-contradiction). Sadly, Darwin’s metaphysics fails miserably here.


Morality, Kant continues, logically points to the existence of God. Moreover, moral duty is possible or plausible because there is a super-intellect out there, namely God, who framed it. As a result, the greatest good in this life is possible and desirable when moral duty is pursued in achieved. Kant, like all men, could not get away with morality in his ambitious and intellectual project at all:

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more oftener and the more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”[23]

Kant is not finished. For an action to be good, “it is not enough that it should conform to the moral law—it must also be done for the sake of the moral law.”[24]

In contrast, Darwin (and most specifically his ardent disciple Thomas Huxley) implicitly excluded God as the groundwork and metaphysical basis for morality in his project. Darwin in particular was well versed in Kant’s metaphysics. He once quoted Kant saying:

“Duty! Wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond insinuation, flattery nor by any threat…whence thy original?”[25]

Yet instead of thinking these issues through, Darwin rested on the idea that duty’s metaphysical source is not God but a process which could have emerged

“from animal sources. As he described it, a monkey who voluntarily sacrificed herself for her offspring would not only ensure her children’s survival but also supplied the next generation with the hereditary ‘gemmules’ that favoured such action again…

“Personally, he [Darwin] declared, he would rather be descended from a heroic little monkey that sacrificed her life than from a savage ‘who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and his haunted by the grossest superstitions.’”[26]

Here Darwin is trying to have it both ways. Philosophically and ideologically, he wants to be cruel to the “imbeciles.” Yet practically he was complaining that the “savages” shouldn’t delight in torturing each other. Darwin did not even accept the idea that morality could be “objective and universal”![27]

When all is said and done, Darwin preferred to live in contradiction rather than allowing moral duty to guide his thinking. He posited the claim that the “imbeciles” do not deserve to live, but he repudiated people who put that idea to practice. Objective and universal morality does not exist, but it is bad for savages to practice human sacrifices, and Darwin thought that it was wise to impose that “universal” law upon the savages!

As we shall see, G. K. Chesterton would have blown Darwin’s head off. The sad part is that Darwin’s intellectual children have been infected by his virus. Like Calvin’s followers, Darwin’s intellectual children still haven’t been able to solve the moral equation and are still living in contradiction. What is even more interesting is that his children has gotten more aggressive than he was. Listen to George Gaylord Simpson:

“Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”[28]

Jacques Monod added that “the mechanism of Darwinism is at last securely founded” and therefore “man has to understand that he is a mere accident.”[29]


Social Darwinists who later picked up Darwin’s view were more consistent than Darwin himself. They understood that ideas have consequences. They took Darwin’s ideas to their logical conclusions by eliminating the weak of society.[30] Charles Davenport for example declared that “Man is an organism—an animal—and the laws of the improvement of corn and of race horses hold true for him also.”[31] Davenport added elsewhere that human beings should be “under a mechanical law instead of being conceived of as controlled by demons or by a ‘free’ will.”[32]

If there is no free will, which is what Darwin’s intellectual children categorically tell us, and which is quite contrary to what Kant argues, then there are no such things as moral agents responsible for moral actions. If there are no moral agents, then men are just robots, a piece of machine which can be manipulated by outside forces. As Darwin’s apologist Daniel Dennett writes,

“We are each made of mindless robots and nothing else, no non-physical, non-robotic ingredients at all.”[33]

Why, then, should we listen to a robot like Dennett? And who programmed him to utter this worthless assertion?

Dennett, however, is far from alone. Both Richard Dawkins and Francis Crick would agree with him here.[34] Crick would go so far as to say that

“The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”[35]

I hope that Crick never told his wife this fable. The sad thing is that this “Astonishing Hypothesis” had a long history. As suggested earlier, it showed up among the French philosophes and spread its wings all across Europe and America. For example, La Mettrie’s L’Homme MachineMan: a Machine—was based on the premise that man is just matter and chemistry.[36] D’Holbach’s System de la Nature was based on the same premise.[37]

D’Holbach started with his materialistic idea and forced it upon reason and science. Other philosophes did the same thing. Aldous Huxley later wrote that the reason La Mettrie formulated his materialistic worldview was not primarily because of intellectual reasons, but because his “predominantly erotic” desires compelled him to do so, as indicated at the end of L’Homme Machine.[38]

Now Darwin’s intellectual children are pushing the ideological envelope even further by saying that the brain can not only create our “mental world” but can think as well![39] These people cannot understand that the brain cannot think and that the real person inside does the thinking and tells the brain what to do. Hence the old saying “Use your brain,” not “Let your brain use you.”


Once again, if Darwin is right in the Descent of Man, then we certainly cannot condemn Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who went into their high school and murdered 12 students and a teacher in cold blood in April of 1999. Eric wrote specifically:

“Natural SELECTION!!!!!!!!!! God damn it’s the best thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms. I wish the government would just take off every warning label. So then all the dumbasses would either severely hurt themselves or DIE!”[40]

Eric, biographer Dave Cullen writes,

actively hated inferiors, and passively hoped for human extension….Humans were pathetic fu$kheads too dense to perceive their lifeless existence.”[41]

Eric continued,

“Isn’t America supposed to be a land of the free? How come if I’m free, I can’t deprive a stupid fu$king dumbshit from his possessions? If he leaves them sitting in the front seat of his fu$king van out in plain sight and in the middle of fu$king nowhere on a Frifu$king day night. NATURAL SELECTION. Fucker should be shot.”[42]

On a different occasion, Eric did not hesitate to write,

“A person’s mind is always splattered….Cut old people and other losers into rags…Ninth graders are required to burn and die.”[43]

One of their victims was Rachel Scott, who happened to be a devout Christian.[44]

Right after Eric put those ideas to work, he and his killing partner shot themselves. 


The big question again is this: Did Harris and Klebold’s bad behavior have a genetic basis? If not, how does one come to that conclusion? If the claim is that Harris and Klebold had to make moral choices, then doesn’t that deconstruct the Neo-Darwinian ideology which says that we are just “mindless robots”? Do robots make decision on the basis of free will? Do they have a conscience, emotion, and can they think rationally?

Frankly, this Neo-Darwinian ideology, which has been embraced by so-called thinking people, lacks intellectual strength and is inevitably morally worthless. As G K. Chesterton implicitly predicted, people need to start taking this moral issue seriously precisely because failing to do so has serious consequences. Chesterton argued that those people always end undermining their own mines:

“As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is a waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself.

“A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble.

“The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts.

In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt.”[45]


[1] See for example Gerhard Falk, Fraud: Deceit Among Scientists, Academics, Writers, and Philanthropists (Lanham: University Press of America, 2007).

[2] See for example Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001).

[3] See for example Melissa Katsoulis, Literary Hoaxes: An Eye-Opening History of Famous Frauds (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2009); Horace Freelance Judson, The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science (Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2004).

[4] See for example Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients (New York: Nation Books, 2005); John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Peter R. Breggin, Your Drug May Be Your Problem (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000); Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the “New Psychiatry” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); David Healy, Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression (New York: New York University Press, 2006); The Antidepressant Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

[5] Ragnar Levi, Medical Journalism: Exposing Fact, Fiction, Fraud (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2001).

[6] Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” NY Times Book Reviews, January 9, 1997.

[7] See for example Johnlee Varghese, “UN Report: Israel in Regular Contact with Syrian Rebels including ISIS,” International Business Times, December 7, 2014; “Syrian in Israeli hospital: ‘Most fighters know they will get good care here,’” Jerusalem Post, September 15, 2013; Elhanan Miller, “Syrian rebel commander says he collaborated with Israel,” Times of Israel, August 13, 2014; Gordon Thomas, Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995 and 2015); Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars (New York: Levant Books, 2014); Victor Ostrovsky, By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Ian Black and Benny Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars: A History of Israel’s Intelligence Services (New York: Grove Press, 1992); Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, Jewish Terrorism in Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

[8] J. S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery: The Classic Account of the Most Famous and Successful Hoax in Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955 and 2009), 12; For other historical accounts, see Frank Spencer, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

[9] “Darwin Proved True,” NY Times, September 22, 1912.

[10] To see how genes work and how it can be manipulated for political reasons, see for example Francis S. Collins, The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine (New York: HarperCollins, 2010). Collins was the head of the Human Genome Project and is now the director of the National Institute of Health.

[11] To see how Goldman Sachs has cheated the system, see for example Greg Smith, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” NY Times, March 14, 2012; Matt Taibi, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone, April 5, 2010.

[12] For a decent history of this, see for example Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1959).

[13] Bonnie Kristian, “This one gene might decide if you vote Republican or Democrat,” The Week, August 5, 2015.

[14] Rob Stein, “Is there a gene for liberals?,” Washington Post, October 18, 2010.

[15] Michael Murray, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[16] Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809-1882 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), 87.

[17] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1896), 1: 168.

[18] “Richard Dawkins: ‘immoral’ not to abort if fetus has Down’s syndrome,” Guardian, August 21, 2014. This is the guy who complains about the God of the Old Testament being a malicious bully! It gets worse: “I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.” Quoted in Trevor Grundy, “Richard Dawkins Pedophilia Remarks Provoke Outrage,” Huffington Post, September 9, 2013. If Dawkins believes, then he better starts refunding millions of dollars to the people who bought his book The God Delusion.

[19] I have pursued this issue in great details in Christianity & Rabbinic Judaism, Vol. II (Bloomington: WestBow Press, 2013), chapter 0.1.

[20] Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), xvii.

[21] Ibid., 239.

[22] Emmanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 39.

[23] Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (New York: Classic Books International, 2010), 163.

[24] Emmanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Torchbooks, 1964), 390.

[25] Quoted in Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: A Biography, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 342.

[26] Ibid., 342-343.

[27] Ibid., 392.

[28] George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 345.

[29] Quoted in Horace Freeland Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 217.

[30] For further study on this, see for example Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Decline of Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002); Paul A. Lombardo, ed., A Century of Eugenics in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

[31]Quoted in Edwin Black, War Against the Weak (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003), 74.

[32] Quoted in John G. West, Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007), 131.

[33] Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Penguin, 2003), 2-3.

[34] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989 and 2006); River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

[35] Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Simon

Schuster, 1994), 3.

[36] See Julien Offray de la Mettrie, Machine Man and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

[37] See Max Pearson Cushing, Baron D’Holbach: A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France (New York: Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation, 1914).

[38] Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for their Realization (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946), 272.

[39] Chris Frith, Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007); William H. Calvin, How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now (New York: Basic Books, 1996). For counter-arguments on these issues, see Edward Kelly and Emily Williams Kelly, Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007); Mario Beauregard, Brain Wars: The Scientific Battle Over the Existence of the Mind and the Proof That Will Change the Way We Live Our Lives (New York: HarperOne, 12012); Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (New York: HarperOne, 2008); Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[40] Quoted in Dave Cullen, Columbine (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2009), 184; emphasis in original.

[41] Ibid, 184, 234.

[42] Ibid., 260.

[43] Ibid.

[44] See for example Rob Merritt and Brooks Brown, No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), 148-155; Beth Nimmo, The Journals of Rachel Scott (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001).

[45] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), 52-53.

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Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.