Apes or Angels?: Darwin, Dover, Human Nature, and Race [Hardcover]

Cornelius J. Troost (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 13, 2007

APES or ANGELS?: A Summary For many readers this book will be a mind-altering experience. It has a thesis that is a challenge to the conventional thinking of most Christians and their counterparts, the secular humanists. It offends both for very good reasons. It speaks the truth about Darwin's views on human origins and race. Contrary to the beliefs of most academicians and educated readers, Darwin had two dangerous ideas instead of one. Daniel Dennett was perfectly right about the first, which was the notion that natural selection operated in a way that precluded explanatory intrusions from outside the natural world. In other words, metaphysics has no place in biological explanation. Things spiritual, like vitalism and finalism, are simply inapplicable to evolutionary biology. The second idea is rarely mentioned in politically correct America- that the human races are different in sometimes significant ways. Indeed, inequality is a normal condition of nature. Darwin's clash with Christianity is winding down because modern science is a foundation of western culture and it fully accepts the truth of natural selection and the evolution of life(including man). It is ironic that as the struggle with Christianity declines, a new struggle emerges- the battle over racial differences. Liberalism evolved into radical egalitarianism as it swept over America, creating an authoritarian political correctness that contradicts our Constitution. Modern genetics now threatens the liberal myth of human equality. These Darwinian conflicts are playing out amidst our culture wars, a battle that could transform us into another Brazil. Radical egalitarianism and multiculturalism are ideologies aimed at dismantling our great Anglo-European tradition. Forces of erosion are at work which may make our nation's greatness a faint memory. The battle with creationism is essentially over in Europe and it is winding down in the U.S. Science always wins fights over the facts of nature! Eddies of ignorance will persist in American society where fundamentalism exists, but educated elites have long since agreed with Darwin. Liberal relativism erodes our standards of excellence and even undermines our Christian morality, a morality that seems closely connected to our moral instinct. With their power in academia liberals will submit to "white guilt" as they treat blacks as eternal victims, distorting reality to make outcomes equal. Darwin, however, may be vindicated on the matter of real racial differences, causing agony among idealistic liberals who must relinquish their lofty dreams. Scientific humanism has always touted critical thinking as a supreme goal of education, but it is threatened by the irrational side of liberalism that savors post-modern subjectivism. Today we see "diversity training" imposed on young people in a Stalinist manner. Propaganda and groupthink are current weapons of the PC martinets. In reading this survey of how Darwin came to his dangerous ideas, you may appreciate how important science and critical thinking are in a society gripped by wayward versions of liberalism. Both evolution by natural selection and racial differences are discussed in this book in order to illumine Darwin's two "dangerous" ideas-one that threatened Christianity and one that now threatens liberal humanism's egalitarian dream. Social scientists will be exposed as propagandists for radical egalitarianism rather than as true scientists. The movement to eliminate the word "race" is evidence of political motivation rather than scientific honesty. To examine the conflicts related to Darwinism the book includes a brief treatment of Darwin's life and works, the battle against creationism, the case against supernaturalism, a brief survey of human evolution, and a review of current issues bearing upon human nature and race.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dr. Cornelius J. Troost was a professor of science education at UCLA and chair of graduate studies at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. While at Brock he created an MA degree program in environmental education and developed tests of critical thinking for the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Dr. troost has dicussed evolution and education on TV on many occasions and gave four major talks at Harvard's GSE. In addition he taught biology, chemistry, physics, and psychology in Florida. This is his tenth book. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 244 pages
• Publisher: AuthorHouse (March 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1425955215
• ISBN-13: 978-1425955212
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,029,403 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Apes, Angels, or Truth?, June 2, 2008

By 

Steve Sailer (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Apes or Angels?: Darwin, Dover, Human Nature, and Race (Hardcover)

The pioneering German sociologist Max Weber coined a useful term: "status symbol".

This refers not just to the distinctions in clothes and furniture lovingly catalogued by novelists such as Tom Wolfe. There are also status symbols in the realm of ideas.

Perhaps the two doctrines currently most de rigueur for entry into intellectual polite society:

1. That humanity evolved from lower animals according to the process of natural selection outlined by Charles Darwin.

2. That humanity has not evolved any patterns of genetic variation corresponding to geographic ancestry ... well, none other than the obvious ones that we can all see.

These two concepts are directly contradictory, as former UCLA professor of science education Cornelius J. Troost points out in his new book Apes or Angels? Darwin, Dover, Human Nature, and Race. Troost's title refers to how the British politician Benjamin Disraeli wittily rejected the first proposition in his day: "Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels".

Yet, the two doctrines, self-annihilating as they may be, are tests of sanctity among the self-righteous of our day. For example, Christopher Hitchens asserted in the Wall Street Journal on January 18, 2008 in "The Perils of Identity Politics" :

"The number of subjective definitions of 'racist' is almost infinite but the only objective definition of the word is 'one who believes that there are human races.'"

Hitchens' statement works as pure comedy gold on so many levels. Here we have America's most famous atheist making a quasi-religious creed out of a scientific controversy--and he's taking the empirically incorrect side of the debate, at that. And then he defines as a sinner anybody who doubts his dopey dogma!

As a G.K. Chesterton scholar aptly summarized: when a man stops believing in God, he doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything.

Chesterton himself wrote in 1922 in Eugenics and Other Evils:

"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal."

As Troost notes, the second of these two status shibboleths asserts that Darwinian evolution suddenly--magically!--stopped at the exact the moment when Darwinian logic says it should have sped up: when the ancestors of modern humans first left Africa for new climates. (Indeed, a major paper last month by Gregory Cochran and four other leading scientists demonstrated that the latest genome data suggests that humans have been diversifying genetically at ever faster rates over the last 50,000 years).

The second statement would be logical if you rejected the first, which Creationists do. Nevertheless, fashionable opinion today is all on the side of the apes.

Or you could accept the first and reject the second statement--that is, 1) evolution occurred, but also 2) it's still occurring--as most honest scientists who have thought hard about the subject have done.

The personal costs of dissent, though, are high. Confessing a disbelief in the second status symbol can lead to immediate expulsion from respectability, as we saw last October with the instant degradation of James Watson from being America's most prestigious senior scientist to being a pariah for uttering a few heretical remarks. (Interestingly, although hardly surprisingly, Watson's senior partner in discovering the structure of DNA, Francis Crick, held exactly the same dissident views, which he expressed in numerous private letters to other famous scientists.)

Troost follows Occam's Razor in assuming both that humans evolved and are continuing to evolve. So he avoids the self-hobbling of more popular authors on evolution, who must avoid violating contemporary taboos. Troost's book provides a compact (only 214 pages) but well-integrated tour de force of the current state of the human sciences. (In reading this, please be aware that he includes some extremely generous praise of my writing.)

Troost takes aim at the two varieties of Creationism--Fundamentalist Protestant and Secular Liberal a.k.a. Race Denial--and shows how they both undermine science education in America.

Fundamentalist Protestant Creationism seems to be evolving in a more strident direction. The Catholic Church has always warned against fundamentalist interpretations of scripture. For example, St. Augustine wrote in late Roman times:

"We must be on guard against giving interpretations of Scripture that are far-fetched or opposed to science, and so exposing the Word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers."

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Apes or Angles?, March 1, 2008

By 

D. Darwin "Friend of Science" (Western USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Apes or Angels?: Darwin, Dover, Human Nature, and Race (Hardcover)

The book is fascinating. It tells the truth about a massive cover up of essential facts about the scientific study of evolution and human intelligence, or "g". The PC, Diversity, and Multicultural movement, mostly university inspired, has organized to deny and muddle the reality of scientific truth about this vital subject. This is a vanity publication and the author needs some help from a good editor. However, this is a minor criticism. Also, this is definitely not a racist book, even though it will rile the PC folks to a fairly well. It is understandable that it had to be published as vanity publication ... what publishing house would risk the condemnation of printing it.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Current State of Evolution, May 26, 2008

By 

E. Gartman (Rockville, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Apes or Angels?: Darwin, Dover, Human Nature, and Race (Paperback)

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution has been calling a dangerous idea by many philosophers. Dangerous, but essential to our understanding of what we are. In the words of science Professor Cornelius Troost evolution means that "man had no soul and mankind consisted of races that varied both trivially and significantly." How Darwin and his successors came upon the theory of evolution and how it is still being attacked is the theme of this book. According to Troost, evolution faces threats from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. The right refuses to accept that man is descended from apes and not created by God himself, (thus Apes or Angels). The left, obsessed with equality of all mankind defined as being the exact same, refuses to accept that evolution created any significant differences between the races. Troost believes that latter poses the larger threat to evolutionary theory.

After reviewing Darwin's theory and the improvements made to it by his successors, Troost dives straight into what will surely be most controversial part of this book. Troost describes humans as the "variable species," meaning that humans, like all species, vary to a certain degree, including between races. Troost points to many scientific studies that bear this out. Differences do not mean inequality, however, since equality refers to "fair treatment and not human biology." But "for a society based upon freedom and equality biological inequality is an almost indigestible truth. Somehow we must learn to accept unequal outcomes." Troost is right, but at this point in time we seem very far from that goal. I only hope that Troost is not pilloried for taking such a stance.

Although the sections on race will receive the most attention, there is far more to this book. Troost takes us through the intelligent design debate and shows that intelligent design is simply another creationist attack on evolution, albeit a more sophisticated one, using scientific arguments to argue that an intelligent being must have been involved in evolution and biology. So far, all ID efforts to change curricula have failed. ID may the last stand of the creationists. There is also a section on religion and reason.

Yet while evolutionists continue to fight these battles against Darwin's enemies, the field itself is far from finished refining the theory. The issue of the interaction of culture and biological interaction is complex and has not been resolved, because some genes express themselves through interaction with the environment, while others do not. We don't know which do and which do not, or why. It is clear that Troost hopes that we can continue to examine this interaction while settling on the fact of evolution, both as our descent from apes and the differences that exist in humans.

It is unlikely that any reader will agree with everything in this book, even if the reader is one of the few people who are willing to accept that we are both apes and a varied species. For example, I disagree with the author's assertions that high birth rates from lower socio-economic Hispanic immigrants will degrade our culture, since birth rates tend to drop with increased economic stature. However, my disagreement is a respectful one. I will not condemn the author for taking such a position, although based on the normal response to works like this, many others probably will. What a shame.