More examples in a from a comment, yet if you ask what trajectory of adaptation has been predicted based on the "theory of evolution" and verified or falsified suddenly it seems that it's not just like the theory of gravity anymore and so on. Apparently the theory isn't even defined enough to have an edge so critics are left to search for an edge to poorly defined goo while proponents obfuscate, apparently because the possibility of verifiability doesn't overcome their fear of empirical falsifiability.

Check this out: Griffin, A. S.,West, S. A. & Buckling, A. Nature 430, 1024"“1027
(2004).

Your comment was reasonable because you're talking about something besides my main point. If the arguments of association were actually true then a trajectory of adaptation could be predicted and defined/verified/falsified based on empirical evidence. If that cannot be done then the original bit of associative propaganda typical to biology teachers is false.

This happened because Darwin introduced two errors about heredity into biology, errors that were absorbed by both scientists and the public. These two errors made eugenics far more attractive than it was in the time prior to Darwin. These errors have never been expunged from biology. They are still with us, and, if you keep your eyes peeled, you can identify countless examples of them in the writings of modern Darwinians.

1. Under selection, organisms are indefinitely malleable, to any degree, in any direction.

2. Any characteristic is inheritable.

What unbearable pomposity. I will donate $100 to your favorite charity if you can find a single (that is, at least one) academic evolutionary biologist who endorses this laughable strawman. Citing an equivalent passage from a modern evolutionary biology textbook will qualify as well. Good luck.

If there is to be a future eugenics it will be pharmacological, not reproductive.

I've been following this thread, and commend your knowledge of the facts involved. Impressive, and surprising that no one discusses this much. (Then again, a lot of things go suspiciously unsaid.)

But this stood out to me, as I've had similar thoughts. I suppose as effort improves in such fields, it will yield the ultimate blow to any still harboring thoughts such views. Arguments of ethics and morality clearly don't have much pull with many. But making reproductive eugenics obsolete? The prospect alone would be enough to shatter many.

Any time a Darwinian says a moral, intellectual, cultural, or religious precept is an "adaptation" (or however they wish to phrase it) arising from selection (natural, sexual, or whatever), he is saying it is genetic.

You know, the sheer irrationality of Darwinian/NDS thinking is dizzying. Not to mention the blatant idiocy of eugenics as it has been practiced by these self-made morons. If indeed our moral, intellectual, cultural and/or religious precepts are genetic, they'd know for a fact that no amount of artificial selection could ever change the situation.

Worse, recent decades of biological research have established that there is NOT "a gene for this, a gene for that" (despite reiteration of that error daily in the science press), there are expression suites of genes affecting many diverse traits, and often modified post-transcription or frame-shifted to serve diverse vital functions. Adding just that much more reality that belies eugenic notions.

If there is to be a future eugenics it will be pharmacological, not reproductive. There is no "music gene," there is an expression of a suite of genes scattered through the genome that could be associated with the presence of musical talent and compositional inspiration. They could make a pill of it, and simply give it to their children before their music lessons. No need to tamper with their DNA prior to gestation.

Though in truth, a far more useful (and morally defensible) magic potion would be one that activates the expression suite associated with spontaneous remission of advanced diseases. Last I checked, though, no one was researching the nature of such 'Miracles'. To do that it's probably necessary to admit that miracles occur.

Eugenists have argued that education is actually a waste of time, because education does not "sink in" to the genetic material. Education is an aquired characteristic. No amount of education can do people any good in the long run if they are simply genetically unfit to begin with.

Then there's no excuse for NCSE and no reason at all for a legal protection racket for enforced childhood indoctrination in Neodarwinian Orthodoxy. Of course, we know better than to expect logical consistency from irrational metaphysics disguised as biological science.

…great scientists like R.A. Fisher believed not only pauperism to be genetic, but wealthy upperclass-twitness to be so as well.

Then the notorious infertility of upperclass twits is nature's way of ensuring their power is generationally limited and forever subject to the equalizing effects of popular revolution. Conversely, the famous fertility of the underprivileged merely demonstrates their natural biological fitness. Thus eugenics could never really have been a moral imperative or an "improvement" to the human species. Once again demonstrating the essential dishonesty of the project and the pseudoscience used to justify it.

That's a very good question. In Organic Evolution, the Duke of Argyll examines this very issue…

What, then, is the great reform which these new verbal forms are intended to effect in our conception of the factors in organic evolution? The popular and accepted idea of them has been largely founded on the language of Darwin and of Mr. Spencer himself. But that language has been deceptive. The needed reform consists in the more complete expulsion of every element that is "anthropocentric." In order to interpret Nature we must stand outside ourselves. The eye with which we look upon her phenomena must be cut off, as it were, from the brain behind it. The correspondences which we see, or think we see, between the system of things outside of us and that system of things inside of us which is the structure of our own intelligence, are to be discarded. This is the luminous conception of the new philosophy. Science has hitherto been conceived to be the reduction of natural phenomena to an intelligible order. But the reformed idea is now to be that our own intelligence is the one abounding fountain of error and deception. It is not merely to be disciplined and corrected, but it is to be eliminated altogether. It is to be hounded off and shouted down.

It is very clear what all this must end in. The demand made upon us in its literal fulness is a demand impossible and absurd. We cannot stand outside ourselves. We cannot look with eyes other than our own. We cannot think except with the faculties of our own intellectual nature. It is impossible, and if it were possible, it would be absurd. We are ourselves a part of nature born in it, and born of it. The analogies which the disciplined intellect sees in external nature are therefore not presumably false, but presumably true, or at the least substantially representative of the truth.

But the new veto on anthropocentric thought, although helpless to expel it, is quite competent to cripple and degrade it. It cannot exclude our own faculties, but it may select and favour the lowest, the humblest, the most elementary, the most blunt, the least perceptive. It may silence the highest, the acutest, the most penetrating, the most intuitive, those most in harmony with the highest energies in the world around us. All this the new doctrine may do, and does.

Accordingly the very first instance given to us of the new philosophy is a striking illustration of its effects. It fixes the attention on mere outward and external things. It seeks for the first and best explanation of organic beings in the mere mechanical effects of their surroundings…

But presently we see in another form the work of " natural selection" by a mind deliberately divesting itself of its own higher faculties, and choosing in consequence to exert only those which are simple and almost infantile. The question naturally arises what is the most universal peculiarity and distinction of organic forms ? When we get rid of ourselves, when we stand outside of our own anthropocentric position and consult only the faculties which are most purely physical, we shall be compelled to reply that the great speciality of organic forms is the "differentiation of their outside from their inside."*

* Spencer.

Darwinism that teaches this. Eugenics follows along. Any time a Darwinian says a moral, intellectual, cultural, or religious precept is an "adaptation" (or however they wish to phrase it) arising from selection (natural, sexual, or whatever), he is saying it is genetic. There used to be a professor who posted here, I don't recall his name. He was into the evolution of religion. He gave lectures on it. If you recall him, go to his website and see how many strange things he is actually asserting to be hereditary. Propositions (1) and (2) are alive and well. And what Darwinian does not believe in (1)? They all believe that selection can turn an amoeba into a chess-master, don't they? Then it should be child's play for us to generate musical geniuses that surpass Bach, no? So the eugenists reason.

[Joy] It's the selling of eugenics "to promote moral and physical progress" that is the greatest lie and the most glaring conceptual failure of eugenics.

Some of the scariest and most disturbing eugenical reasoning is on the subject of education. Eugenists have argued that education is actually a waste of time, because education does not "sink in" to the genetic material. Education is an aquired characteristic. No amount of education can do people any good in the long run if they are simply genetically unfit to begin with. No amount of effort on the part of a person matters if that person is intellectually inferior by reason of heredity - at best it's a band-aid or patch that hides the problem. No matter what he accomplishes in this life, he will pass on his intellectual inferiority to later generations.

[Joy] The poor will always be with us.

It is hard to imagine a more cynical line than the one Julian Huxley used to throw in the face of poverty - they should "limit their numbers."

Of course eugenists believe that poverty is genetic. Why wouldn't they, when great scientists like R.A. Fisher believed not only pauperism to be genetic, but wealthy upperclass-twitness to be so as well. His book, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, fantastic tome of rubber science that it is, examines the evolutionary "problem" of infertility among upperclass twits versus the fertility of the lower class. You should examine it. To this book we can apply mynym's citation of Max Weinreich:

If the products of their research work, even apart from their rude tone, strike us as unconvincing and hollow, this weakness is due not to inferior training but to the mendacity inherent in any scholarship that overlooks or openly repudiates all moral and spiritual values and, by standing order, knows exactly its ultimate conclusions well in advance.

"As an agency making for progress, conscious selection must replace the blind forces of natural selection; and men must utilize all the knowledge acquired by studying the process of evolution in the past in order to promote moral and physical progress in the future.

It's the selling of eugenics "to promote moral and physical progress" that is the greatest lie and the most glaring conceptual failure of eugenics. First, it presumes that moral precepts (culturally derived) are genetic. We know this to be false. Second, those who suffer serious mental/physical handicaps, the sick, the "wards of the state" (including prisoners, which these days count more pot smokers than murderers and rapists), are the least likely people to breed - borne out by statistics from institutions that any breeding is usually the result of rape by caregivers who supposedly ARE NOT eugenically "unfit." Where is THEIR morality?

Secondly, if you kill all the poor, handicapped, elderly, sick, orphaned, etc. one day, tomorrow there will be more. The whole idea boils down to nothing more than a perpetual mass murder machine. Economics determines who (and how many) occupy the lowest rungs, and so long as some amass great wealth, many will be reduced to poverty. And the eugenicists' dream of a population "immune" to disease, crippling accidents, developmental malformations and old age is patently ridiculous on its face. You can NEVER kill all the humans who make greedy rich people uncomfortable. The poor will always be with us.

And, as Darwin himself warned, if we go down that road we sacrifice the very thing that separates us from brute nature, thereby turning ourselves back into animalistic barbarians. As history shows graphically.

The nation which first takes this great work thoroughly in hand will surely not only win in all matters of international competition, but will be given a place of honour in the history of the world."

Oh, I dunno. The place in history reserved for Adolph Hitler and his gangsters isn't all that "honourable." Looks like Leonard got this one wrong too.

Vladimir Krondan: Darwin introduced two errors about heredity into biology, errors that were absorbed by both scientists and the public…

1. Under selection, organisms are indefinitely malleable, to any degree, in any direction.

2. Any characteristic is inheritable.

Cite please.

Darwinism and eugenics rest on the same principle: Selection. If one is false, erroneous, or impossible, so is the other. A consistent Darwinian has no choice but to admit that eugenics is a legitimate science, despite what he may feel about the moral implications. All the great Darwinians knew this. That is why they were all eugenists. Richard Dawkins knows this. Some Darwinians in this thread know this too, and adopt a consistent position.

However they wish to worm their way around the issue by playing games with words like 'selection', 'proscriptive', 'descriptive' and so on, the Darwinians who deny the validity of eugenics as a science are simply being inconsistent. They affirm Darwinism, but condemn eugenics as an erroneous pseudo-science. They elect to live with the inconsistency.

How has this situation come about?

Eugenics didn't have much of a history prior to Darwin. After Darwin, it quickly became a powerful national and international movement, supported by scientists. This happened because Darwin introduced two errors about heredity into biology, errors that were absorbed by both scientists and the public. These two errors made eugenics far more attractive than it was in the time prior to Darwin. These errors have never been expunged from biology. They are still with us, and, if you keep your eyes peeled, you can identify countless examples of them in the writings of modern Darwinians.

1. Under selection, organisms are indefinitely malleable, to any degree, in any direction.

2. Any characteristic is inheritable.

There is no use in denying that these are Darwinian propositions. An immense, crushing machinery of historical evidence can be made to bear against anyone who denies that these are Darwinian teachings. The entire field of evolutionary psychology is based on (2).

When a Darwinian says characteristic C arose by selection, he is saying it is hereditary. Natural selection acts on C if and only if C is hereditary. If a Darwinian says characteristics X, Y, and Z are due to natural selection, then according to him, X, Y, Z are hereditary. If a Darwinian says that characteristic C can be eliminated by selection, he is saying that C is hereditary. Turn to Descent of Man, chapter 5, to see some of the characteristics Darwin said were hereditary: moral sense, emotions, courage, the character of the american people, the progress of the United States, etc. Yes, according to him, these things are inheritable variations, or, in modern language, genetic traits.

It would not be hard to take the writings of Darwinians and compile a list of a hundred or so factors and characteristics which they assert are genetic traits: pauperism, prostitution, chronic unemployment, belief in God, morality, religion, superior mentality, the character of the american people, inferior mentality, mathematical ability, musical ability, intelligence, bird-songs, altruism, selfishness, feeble-mindedness, human worth, criminality, and so on multiplied many times over. And why shouldn't they make such assertions? If, as Dawkins believes, musical ability arose by natural selection, then there is no need to prove that musical ability is hereditary: it is so merely by virtue of being a product of natural selection. Therefore by eugenics we can generate musical geniuses, can we not? Which is what Dawkins also believes, because he is consistent on this point. He firmly believes errors (1) and (2) and, consistently, believes we can make musical geniuses by eugenics.

Let us exit the world of the Darwinian and return to reality. The truth is, propositions (1) and (2) are false, and so eugenics is a pseudo-science, and along with it, Darwinism. What keeps eugenics alive is the iron determination of Darwinians: they will not let go of (1) and (2). They will persist in introducing (1) and (2) wherever they can, and continue to teach them. V. Kellog and H. Newman, for example, admitted that Darwin was wrong about (2), but continued to use (2) whenever it suited them anyway. They were members of the American Eugenics Society.

[Joy] History seems to be a lost cause as well.

Many are taking up a comfortable know-nothing position toward history. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if a historical know-nothing came along and denied that (1) and (2) are Darwinian propositions.

"As an agency making for progress, conscious selection must replace the blind forces of natural selection; and men must utilize all the knowledge acquired by studying the process of evolution in the past in order to promote moral and physical progress in the future. The nation which first takes this great work thoroughly in hand will surely not only win in all matters of international competition, but will be given a place of honour in the history of the world." - Leonard Darwin, Presidential address, First International Eugenics Congress, 1912.

"…it is unlikely that the world will ever see another great religious inquisition, or that in applying to man the newly found laws of heredity there will ever be undertaken an equally deplorable eugenic inquisition." - Herbert Walter, Human Conservation, c1910.