Was Darwin a Scholar or a Pitchman?

By: Michael Flannery 

You read a great deal about Darwin's scientific method and meticulousness as a student of nature, but that's not exactly scholarship. Good scholarship demonstrates the ability to put all aspects of one's research into a broader context. This usually involves a familiarity with the discipline, its literature, and its historiography, as well as its implications in other areas.

While Darwin was certainly a master rhetorician (see John Angus Campbell's "Theism, Naturalism, and Persuasive Design: A Rhetorical Analysis of Darwin's Origin"), his scholarship seems more suspect. On the few occasions that Darwin's "scholarship" is mentioned, usually with hyperbolic effusions as to his "genius," specific examples are often conspicuously absent. His weaknesses as a scholar, in fact, are seen in a couple of key areas...... he doesn't seem particularly "well read."  On top of that, he seems incapable of seeing the implications of his own arguments or, more tellingly, the implications of other people's arguments.....Darwin had little aptitude as an anthropologist, a serious deficit in one who claimed to know so much about the alleged evolutionary origins and attributes of human beings.

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My Take - As you read the entire article you come to realize this is just one more cannon of the left that's based on few facts, a great deal of speculation and must be considered the beginning of Media Science, where the media carries the message to people of prominence who are clueless or corrupt in their thinking or lives.  In this case it was all three.  Darwin allowed the corrupt to justify anything they did in their lives, and now those in society that clung to traditional values were scorned as unenlightened and stupid, and they had academia supporting them.  Even when there were great intellectuals who can see the insanity - they're outnumbered, out manned and out gunned into silence.  You can fit Rachel Carson and the DDT saga into this paradigm.