Recent comments in /f/todayilearned

Spank86 t1_ja95aik wrote

Probably because it's not massively relevant to the spanish. It's definitely taught in the uk and not as some sort of accident. When i was at school it was fairly bluntly explained that english landowners exported grain while the irish starved.

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0ttr t1_ja94jlm wrote

However, it was very popular at the time, and no doubt evolution reinforced it and was used as a justification for it, hence the presence of it in a high school biology text. Many, many highly educated people supported eugenic ideas all the way up to US Supreme Court justices. It was not just racism--it was any kind of character or physical flaw.
And of course, the understanding of evolution, in an era prior to understanding gene encoding, chromosomes, and DNA, was considerably less sophisticated than it is now, again, certainly down at the level of a high school text.

You are arguing about what we know now, and what we know in hindsight, and that's fine, but that's not what they "knew" then. Your statements literally contradict the text quoted out of the book used in the case.

Clearly that was not the only reason evolution was being objected to, but it was definitely a reason, and convoluting creationism with the teaching of Christian morality is certainly a mishmash of theology, but it is clashing with a mishmash of science and pseudoscience that was in a mainstream accepted high school biology text at the time.

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0ttr t1_ja92vxn wrote

Research shows that any group of people that identifies around a common ideology becomes more insular and exclusive over time. That includes religious groups, but atheists as well. It's a human trait. Only individual curiosity and humility overcomes that--again, proven by research.

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Mountain_Sweet_5703 t1_ja92qis wrote

Uhh, wrongo, Tanner did anything but grow out of his racist shitty ways in that movie. Maybe in the later ones idk, but he was an unrepentant shithead as are most naughty children.

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0ttr t1_ja92ed2 wrote

It was not *the* reason, but it was *a* reason. You can read Bryan's own writings and see it quite clearly. It's in the source notes for the podcast. His moral arguments were quite valid. And in this case, the science on eugenics was wrong.

The lesson to be learned here is: things are almost always more complicated than history makes them out to be, and not everyone was the moron and genius that they seemed to be.

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