Over at All-Too-Common Dissent, the conversation has turned to Terry Trainor. You've probably never heard of him; he's one of those garden variety self-infatuated creationists who frequented talk.origins some years ago, using the pseudonym "American Patriot" (which does rather tell you a lot about him right there.) He has now retreated to his own little MSN discussion group, to which I will not link—he really doesn't deserve the attention.
However, all the talk lately about Darwin as the source of all racism, and the comments that noted a peculiar tendency of creationists to think very, very literally, combined with the mention of Trainor to remind of a wonderful example of all of those points made in a
talk.origins thread 6 years ago. It was amazing.
Mitchell Coffey had quoted this comment from Darwin to demonstrate that he was a forward thinking and relatively enlightened fellow:
"Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, as
in
colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet
if
their whole structure be taken into consideration they are found
to
resemble each other closely in a multitude of points. Many of
these
are of so unimportant or of so singular a nature, that it is
extremely improbable that they should have been independently
acquired by aboriginally distinct species or races. The same
remark
holds good with equal or greater force with respect to the
numerous
points of mental similarity between the most distinct races of
man.
The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans are as different
from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet
I
was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Feugians on board
the Beagle, with the many little traits of character, shewing how
similar their minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-
blooded
negro with whom I happened once to be intimate."
Normal people read that and see that Darwin was acknowledging the similarity of the minds of people of different races, and mentioning that he found this true of a good friend of his, too. Terry Trainor responded with this:
So he was amazed that the blacks minds were similar to his, and he
had sex with one.If that is the criteria for being NOT racist, most white slave owners
were not racist either.
<SPIT TAKE!> What was that? I responded, suggesting that he was "reading far more into that comment
about having been 'intimate' than it warrants"; all the phrase means is that they were close friends. Trainor came back, confirming that not only was he not making a joke, but digging his hole a little deeper.
Really? And how do you interpret it, in light of the fact that he
talks about 'living' with several of them, and goes into a bit of
detail about how their minds work, but only speaks of being 'intimate'
with one of them? Certainly had to be more than just a conversation,
in view of the relationship he had with others, which he did NOT
consider 'intimate'.…
I doubt very much if Darwin has a secret definition of 'intimate'
somewhere, which you can drag out and 'prove' he could not mean having
sex with her.He certainly does not strike me as the type of man who would use crude
terms for such a relationship, does he you? Besides, I don't think
screwed, bounced on her bones, did the hunka chunka or made the beast
with two backs was in vogue at that place and time in history.But, of course, I could be wrong. I did not mean to cast any
aspersions on anyones hero here, I only took it that the story was to
give PROOF that he was not a racist.
Just to make it weirder, the intimate friend was John Edmonstone, who taught Darwin taxidermy. This creationist was therefore insisting that Charles Darwin, a proper Victorian gentleman, was fondly reminiscing (or perhaps, bragging), about having had gay sex with a black man in his scientific treatise, The Descent of Man. The argument dragged on for a while, and Trainor never backed off of his claim.
If you read that post about Trainor's recent shenanigans, you'll see that he hasn't changed a jot—still clinging to weird and simple-minded ideas, still persisting in remarkably narrow interpretations of the world, still refusing to rethink…or think, for that matter.
Of course, the upside for Trainor is that every book he reads, even the driest academic tome, must be rich with all kinds of juicy, sexy meaning.
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Jeez. I would think it would take nothing more than a passing familiarity with how the English language has evolved since the 19th century to avoid his misunderstanding. Has the guy never read a 19th-century novel?
It's a good thing Darwin didn't say that Edmonstone's pleasant company made him feel gay.
Creationists and fundamentalists have all kinds of prurient fantasies about other people's lives.
Bizarre obsessions with other people's sex lives has to be one of the most fascinating aspects of the fundamentalist mindset.
And this guy has to be not only ignorant of the way the term intimate is used here, he must be a complete dumbass to think Darwin, or anyone writing about science at that time, would so openly discuss a sexual relationship in a book!
Yeah, creationism is really shining these days, isn't it?
Egads! Warren Bergerson ("LifeEngineer") posts there! It's a zoo!
If this Trainor idiot gets the impression that Darwin was a gay nymphomaniac through misinterpretation of archaic word usage, I can only shudder about what goes through his sick little head when he reads Hop On Pop.
This is not an example of literal mindedness, but of simple illiteracy. The notion that this phrase could only imply sexual concourse shows nothing more than an ignorance of Enlish.
I doubt very much if Darwin has a secret definition of 'intimate' somewhere, which you can drag out and 'prove' he could not mean having sex with her.
depends on what the definition of "is" is.
*sigh* Is it any wonder there were impeachment proceedings against a pres. who got a bj in the oval office, while our current idiot destroys our economy, foreign policy, public education and govt. funded science organizations all at the same time, and gets not even a scolding?
Irony, thy name is "fundie".
To be fair, this sort of ignorance isn't just limited to Bible-thumpers. Pretty much the whole "Lincoln was gay" meme was generated by similar language usage, plus the typical 19th century habit of sleeping several to a bed.
Max,
But where's the PROOF that languages evolved, huh? Where are all those transitional languages you evilinguists keep talking about? Language didn't EVOLVE!* Languages are the same as they've always been since the tower of Babel!
* OK, all right, so there is _some_ evidence for micro language change, no one denies that, but there is absolutely NO evidence of new languages forming from existing ones!
Trainor clearly has limited experience and an active imagination, which combined with excessive prudery is bound to lead to situations that are awkward and embarrasing to those around him, but leave him blissfully unaware. (Funny, but it seems I've heard of one world leader that has similar issues. . .)
Anyway, I find it infuriating that the (philosophical equivalent of) decendents of the narrow-minded idiots who developed the abomination known as Social Darwinism have turned around and blamed Darwin for some of their evil-minded ideas. I grew up in the South, and have seen some of the cartoonish (and in some cases actual cartoon) publications attempting to establish the "lesser nature of the black man (and the Asian, and the Indian, etc.)." Ideas of greater evil are difficult to find.
I imagine, at times, what Darwin might have to say to the Creationists. I imagine him speaking with quiet conviction, and reasoned thought and respectful tone. After all, he struggled with his logical and religious nature quite a bit. But when I imagine Darwin confronted with Social Darwinists, and the even more reprehensible racists that warped his ideas even further. . . well, I don't know what to think, but I suspect it wouldn't be pretty.
Really, the only appropriately descriptive word I can think of for people like Trainor is perverted.
Oh gods, I do remember that exchange with Terry -- and it was only one among many equally ridiculous readings of sundry bits of literature.
However, I have read similar speculations about Holmes and Watson being gay lovers, based on a similar failure to understand the way language and society has shifted since the late 19th century.
I am compiling a blogroll of atheists and agnostics. Do you consider yourself to be in either of these categories? And if so, would you like to be added to the blogroll?
Moi? A godless, freethinking atheist?
Whatever would give someone that idea?
Well, it would be nice to give Chuck the benefit of the doubt in regard to modern Social Darwinists but he was quite friendly with Herbert Spencer (the original Social Darwinist) and even called him "our great philosopher".
BWAHAHAHA! Funniest thing I've read all day. Thanks.
Latent homosexuality would seem to manifest itself in a hyper-sensitivity to the same thing in others. Otherwise how would you explain the thimbleheads in the anti-gay amendment movement and self-loathing of pinheads like Ken Mehlman?
misinterpretation of archaic word usage
It's archaic? Hell's teeth!
Ah, this puts me in mind of reading one of Shaw's lesser-known plays, The Philanderer, for a college class about 35 years ago. The stage direction for Act I begins: A lady and gentleman are making love to one another in the drawing room of a flat in Ashley Gardens in the Victoria district of London. This caused something of a stir, and the professor felt compelled to explain to the sniggering classroom that idioms can change over time. I daresay Trainor would be unconvinced.
It's a pity that some people cannot penetrate
the simple concept of multiple definitions and meanings.
Indeed, as we have intercourse with each other
on various topics, such misunderstandings seem
to most likely cause those sorts of simple folk
to be rubbed the wrong way.
Why, one could innocently say that someone knew
someone else, and that sort of person will
immediate think that "knew" means "in the Biblical
sense", all protestations and explanations being brushed aside.
One wonders how such a person would respond on being asked if he knew his mother.
Wond what some of these folks would make of the relationship of T. Roosevelt and Taft. If any platonic relationship between heterosexual men could ever be described as a love affair, it was theirs. These nitwits would have a field day with Taft and T.R.'s letters to each other.
One hopes that Trainor's intercourse with scientists was as good for him as it was for the scientists.
Now watch: Trainor will rack his brain trying to remember which scientists he had sex with.
So much ignorance could be cured with a dictionary -- in this case, to whack him on the head and knock some sense into it.
So which words *would* Darwin have used to describe a sexual encounter, if it had been socially acceptable to write about it? :)
(ok, maybe it's not just the creationists who have dirty minds...)
And now a word from Sherlock Holmes:
There you have it, proof positive that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote gay porno.
"So which words *would* Darwin have used to describe a sexual encounter, if it had been socially acceptable to write about it? :)"
If Darwin lived in Elizabethan times, then, I think the term "fatally intimate" would have been appropriate.
The heck with 19th century novels! Try 20th century too!
Edgar Rice Burroughs used such terms in his writing. (Try the Tarzan or Barsoom novels!) Of course he made his characters often speak in a bombastic style, but the characters would say that they were intimate with someone, or two people were intimates.
Owlmirror, I also wonder how such a person would react to being invited to take part in intercourse.
If I said that creationists were trying to create pedagogical change in the raising of America's children, would Trainor demand that I stop calling him a child-molestor?
eric,
My mind went straight to Sherlock Holmes, too.
And it would matter how if Darwin was actually 'intimate' in that sense with the person he was talking about? Most slaveholders didn't seem to be in the kind of relationship whereby they cared a great deal about their slaves' minds. Is it more or less racist to have an admittedly cerebral relationship with a person of another race also extend to the sexual?
Jonathan: Spencer as "Our great philosopher" - Darwin could be wry. I don't have the source at hand, but I've seen discussions of Darwin's reading Spencer - everyone did in the 1850+ generation, since he was prolific with SOCIAL STATICS and then his FIRST PRINCIPLES, and even a PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGY (1864, which included discussion of Darwin, but clearly didn't comprehend him). No one reads Spencer now. Darwin acknowledged Spencer's logic and cleverness (Spencer had been an engineer ... vaguely like George Gilder today) but went on to dryly point out that "his 'science' leads to no testable hypotheses". This attitude was shared by Huxley: when Spencer announced that he'd written a tragedy (late in life), Huxley responded that he guessed its plot: "a beatiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly little fact".
And Darwin's use of Spencer's phrase "survival of the fittest" was urged upon him by Wallace, who saw it as more vivid than Darwin's own "natural selection". As for "Social Darwinism" - that was nearly all Spencer, zero Darwin.
Maria: proof that languages didn't evolve is easy: there are still PIDGINS+BABBLERS! (linguistic equivalents, roughly, of PYGMIES + DWARVES!)
My. Trainor is/was displaying the opposite of what he and others of his ilk would term "moral relativism". It makes sense to me (only so far as an analyses of like minds is concerned) that he would make such a false and chronologically erroneous distinction, because people like him believe that society's morals have always been A, and thus anything that appears to be moving toward B is automagically one of the many forces of Satan. It's the psychological tyranny of black-n-white moral absolutism. It's tempting because it's SOOO easy...
That said, there's got to be a way to take people publicly to task for professing their undying love for their own ignorance. Sometimes I wish stupidity was taxable, because then the right-wing would pay all our bills off over night.
"And thus did Charles know his friend, and have relations with him"...oh, sorry, that's the Bible's way of describing a sexual encounter. ;-)
Maria: Besides, if languages evolve, why is there still a Latin America?
I went and searched some of Jane Austens fine works.
Emma:
"They were a family of the name of Martin, whom Emma well knew by character, as renting a large farm of Mr. Knightley, and residing in the parish of Donwell--very creditably, she believed--she knew Mr. Knightley thought highly of them--but they must be coarse and unpolished, and very unfit to be the intimates of a girl who wanted only a little more knowledge and elegance to be quite perfect."
Clearly ms Austen imagined the Martins bumbing uglies with the young girl!
Later Harriet says to Emma:
"That would have been too dreadful!--What an escape!--Dear Miss Woodhouse, I would not give up the pleasure and honour of being intimate with you for any thing in the world."
Wooh victorian Girl on Girl Action!
There many more examples form Emma alone. And remember it was written in 1816, well before the Descent of Man
"the intimate friend was John Edmonstone, who taught Darwin taxidermy."
Uh-oh! I hope the fundies doesn't regress to think afroamericans caused racism.
"Maria: proof that languages didn't evolve is easy: there are still PIDGINS+BABBLERS!"
So are you saying that if words come from grunts, why are there still grunts?
Well, we all know that variation and selection explain the evolution of languages, and that they can split if they are isolated in groups. Lingogenesis isn't part of evolinguistic theory, but it isn't hard to envision that spontaneous production of distinctive and robust phonemes sooner or later lead to the creation of reproducible words.
But remember that a childs development of language doesn't fully parallel linguistic development. That is the debunked theory of a heckler.
The idea that a Victorian Gentleman would admit to his infidelities publicly and in print is hilarious.
BTW, some say that words are irreducible complex, since if you take out a phoneme it doesn't work. But there is ample evidence that words evolve effortlessly from a language to another. And exaptation or social scaffolding explains nicely seemingly sudden largescale mutational words.
I too immediately thought of Austin -- Pride and Prejudice:
Kinky!
What a terrifying illness to suffer. So frightened of being wrong they must lock into a complete fabrication of a world that NEVER changes and is literally set in stone.
i swear on the , er, ah, the bible, that jesus was gay, or at least bi-sexual. i can't wait for the truth to come out and throw the fundies into mass confusion.
geeze, haven't been here for a while as somehow lost the link on my site to you. t'will be corrrected!!!
as for 'race', here's an interesting link
http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02.htm
make what you will of it :)
I don't get it. Let's assume for a moment that 'being intimate' WAS Darwin's way of saying he had sex, how does that diminish the strength of the argument that this passage illustrates his lack of racism?
He realizes negroes and whites are basically the same and he has sex with a negro. Good for him. If anything, it strengthens the argument.
If Darwin lived in Elizabethan times, then, I think the term "fatally intimate" would have been appropriate.
Of the top of my head, I remember "making the two-backed beast" from Othello. There's a lot of rather racy stuff in Shakespeare (and earlier, lest anyone *hasn't* read Chaucer), but the Elizabethans weren't particularly shy about such things.
Darwin was certainly no racist, if you actually read him, instead of the quote-mines.
Even Spencer was way more liberal than the people who were influenced by his theories. As far as I know, Spencer never advocated eugenics and was no more racist than the average educated man in Victorian England.
But then again, Marx never advocated man-made starvation, either, so it could be a usual case of intellectual ideology vs. dominant ideology.
Thanks to Project Gutenberg, I have infused myself with enough Victorian novels, good and bad, to feel that I can come up with a phrase or two that a theoretical Victorian gentleman might come up with. Of course, as others have pointed out, the likelihood of a Victorian gentleman speaking of such things openly would be a scandal at best.
Let's see (holds quill pen contemplatively to lips)... "had carnal relations with," yes, that would do; simply "had relations with" would work in context, as in, "I know you had relations with that loose woman!" "Bedded," while a little bit cruder, might also work. A "rakehell" might admit to the possession of a beautiful "mistress" of another race. Mostly these things appear to have been hinted around to the extent that you can mostly tell their presence by the labored effort to render them absent.
I'm currently reading my daughters Pollyanna, from the 1910's, and everyone is ejaculating every other page. Also, some bloggers had fun with some of the contemporary British idioms that "had to" be changed for the American edition of the latest Harry Potter - they PROVED Harry was gay!
Proof of concept quote?
If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!
MA Ferguson
Governor of Texas (circa 1920)
klk, was that where the twins were talking about keeping their peckers up? The book that I had left it in but the recording (I do both, Jim Dale does a wonderful job) it got changed, I can't remember to what, noses or spirits or something like that.
klk, was that where the twins were talking about keeping their peckers up? The book that I had left it in but the recording (I do both, Jim Dale does a wonderful job) it got changed, I can't remember to what, noses or spirits or something like that.
After all, even Oscar Wilde never admitted to anything like that in public. It was the indiscretion of the young Marquess de Queensberry and the wrath of his dad (Yes, *that* Marquess de Queenseberry) that got Oscar in trouble.
After all, you could go to *jail* for admitting to gay sex. Why didn't any of Darwin's enemies turn him in?
I believe the common Victorian euphemism for a male homosexual encounter was to say, "I schooled him in controversy."
Adding to the making love count: no doubt many of us read Lewis's The Silver Chair as children, and thus read about young Jill making love to multiple giants.
Zappa was right.
I don't think Darwin was being wry or ironic; the phrase was used to introduce a section of the Descent of Man in which the moral nature of Man was being discussed and Darwin was agreeing with Spencer's views (which seemed to be an early form of evolutionary psychology).
Yes, like Darwin did for biology, Spencer was describing how he believed society developed. Of course, Darwin's ideas on biology seem to have held up more than Spencer's sociology.
I think both the people who are claiming he was a vile racist and those who claim he was a saintly precursor of post civil-rights era leftists are quote mining. Darwin was a complicated man. A complicated Victorian man, at that.
I guess when he goes to Intercourse, PA, he assumes the founders of the town were establishing a sex colony.
I can't recall seeing anyone claiming the latter. According to my understanding, by today's enlightened (or politically correct, if you prefer) standards, Darwin was indeed a racist: specifically, a cultural imperialist who believed in the superiority of European civilization. However much his ideas contributed to the final overthrow of the traditional Chain of Being, the notion of "scales of value" seems persistent and pervasive in Western culture, and I don't think Darwin was entirely free of it (though I'm happy to be educated on the issue). But the fact remains, by the standards of his own time he was indeed a liberal who opposed slavery and (unlike some of his contemporaries) did not AFAIK conflate cultural with biological superiority.
Badger: Spencer indeed had little interest in eugenics or racism (nor Evo Psych) ; his 'social darwinism' was more about social progress on its own terms (whatever those were) with no strict relation to biology. That these are confusing concepts and histories is apparent in wikipedia's three articles on 'social evolution' topics and their background controversies on the first (1 2 3 background ).
And Darwin's relation to Spencer? My surmise of wryness finds equivocal support from the textual context alone, I see on reviewing the Gutenberg text of the DESCENT. But I believe Darwin read Spencer critically and quoted him mostly for audience familiarity - everyone else was reading him. An example of critical comment: further in the DESCENT, we find Darwin writing about human music (itself a fascinating analysis, updated lately by Geoffrey Miller):
___
John: Latin America - heh. Latin is a very adaptable living fossil. It's even regained a foothold in its continent of origin:
___
Torbjörn: I was grasping for analogies, I concede. But children's babbling is evolutionarily at least as interesting as adults' grunting - Terrance Deacon's theory has it that language parasitizes human children specifically. The whole field 'lingogenesis' (new term to me) is still a quagmire, though I'm happy that evolutionary origins of language can again be discussed in scientific fora, incorporating the new data since 1870's when it was banned.
Got another book this clown shouldn't read:
Chapter 1 - The Last of the Mohicans
Dang those British women and their constantly going around with "obviously", nothing one but a belly dancers veils and no undergarments... I mean, by Trainor's logic, this "must" be what it means right? lol
The world these people live in must be really seriously insane. They don't just occationally visit the gutter for a good laugh, they sit in the gutter and view everything that passes by as merely something that might fall into it next to them.
It's a good thing Darwin didn't say that Edmonstone's pleasant company made him feel gay.
I'm fairly sure he admitted, on more than one occasion, that he'd had intercourse with many of his correspondents.
JackGoff, is Intercourse, PA anywhere near Blue Ball, PA? ;^)
(Ah, the Amish, it's always the quiet ones...)
Darwin was indeed a racist: specifically, a cultural imperialist who believed in the superiority of European civilization.
Actually he thought the black slaves in South America to be morally superior to the Europeans that enslaved them.
Certainly a complicated man, and not free from the prejudices of his time. But while not "saintly", he certainly was a precursor of the modern liberal in many ways.
As a test, I just got the text of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice from the Gutenberg Project. Trainor would be amazed at the amount of sex in that book; the word 'intimate' is used quite a few times!
What a maroon...
Why, yes, Mena, yes, it is.
Funny how one simple mistake on my part is still being hashed years after the fact, while the other issues on talk.origins, such as the OEE claim that Races are NOT genetic, go absolutely without comment.
Remember the idiot that continued to ask me to show him the Jewish Gene?
Or the discussion with Gould, in which he conceeded the point that MtDNA could not be relied on for accurate dating.
Ah well -
with such a paucity of evidence on their side, the OEE's must grab every slightest win and hold it close -
Terry Trainor
Still an American Patriot.
2 year old thread.
Way to stick up for yourself terry.
And it's not one simple mistake. Creationism is one giant mistake.
2 year old thread.
Entertaining one.
Do I want to click on his name?
Why is it creobots and godbots keep trying to resurrect old threads? Their ideas were worthless then, and are just as worthless now. Creationism will never be scientific. It can't be, unless the rules of science change. Since science has worked so well for several hundred years, guess the chance of that happening during Terry's lifetime is zero.
It's nothing great. It's a site about the fauna of Quail Ridge TN.
And not a good one.
Thanks, Rev. (and sorry for asking you to act as a canary in a troll mine).
I thrive on the stupidity of creationists so I'm willing to play the role.