I’m leaving this thread open as per my statement on the HSS site but see little point in any further engagement along the lines of the current discussion.

Life is too short to be spent engaging with a someone who fails to see that historical inaccuracy does undermine claims being made, just as factual inaccuracy undermines any scientific claims about reality. This viewpoint is unsurprising given Fuller’s advocated rhetorical method and his published record of inaccuracy in the call of polemic.

No doubt Fuller will declare some sort of victory in his mind. So be it.

Frankly, you had better hope you don’t get what you wish for here. I doubt that any gung-ho Darwinism of the sort displayed by you and your pals would survive the kind of complex accounts of evolution that professional historians tend to give. This is why they generally shy away from the public debates that you’re drawing attention to. The very nature of public debates about science is to take forward certain aspects of the history but not others. To historians that’s always bound to look ’simplistic’. The problem with you and your pals is that you’re really polemicists in historian’s drag.

(You can thank me for outing you later.)

Again, you too do that cut-and-paste thing which gets rid of part of what I said that puts my claim in context. I hope you do this deliberately to score cheap points rather than unwittingly because of ADD.

One admits the errors, when they are genuine,

So you are claiming that your errors are not genuine, since you refuse to admit them. Once again you show what a nonchalant attitude to accuracy you have.

My point here is that historical accuracy matters, depending on what it is you’re trying to do in your text … if you are writing a polemical treatise about the overall influence of a train of thought in politics and society, then a reader can spot inaccuracies but that would not necessarily affect the basic argument.

You state that accuracy can be jettisoned depending on the goal of a text and that we historians should let this happen when the likes of West do so because the “evidence” he presents is not essential to his “basic argument”. Even if we grant that his readers would not care whether his “basic argument” is simplistic and erroneous, what you fail to see is that he is claiming to do historical analysis. Since it is apparent that you don’t particularly care about such analysis in theory or practice, it is clear that this exchange can – and will – go nowhere.

As for Tyler, I agree that a theory cannot be established independent of the facts used to support it. Why you’d think I would hold otherwise is a mystery, especially if you put the quote back in context. It’s times like this that I think the cut-and-paste function has induced mass attention deficit disorder.

You seem to be claiming that a theory can be established independently of the facts used to support it. Call me a positivist, but I doubt that’s the case.

As for my attitudes towards historical accuracy, well, I’d like you to apply that same sense of rigour vis-a-vis my use of ‘Lamarckian’ to the use that others make of ‘Darwinian’ (and I don’t mean just creationist uses — most philosophers of science, including ones you’d like, use the term pretty liberally as well). The question in both cases is whether there is anything deeper at stake than correcting ’student errors’. One admits the errors, when they are genuine, but more often than not it’s still possible to reformulate one’s main claim with the corrections in place.

For example, one reason I’m not very impressed by what Borrello has done to West’s text is that West can still score his points even in amended form. So, even just to show that a significant number of Darwinians were eugenicists is likely to appear pretty damning to West’s target audience and help make his overall argument. The fact that not all Darwinists were eugenicists, or that their views on eugenics varied, etc., is not likely to matter much.

My point here is that historical accuracy matters, depending on what it is you’re trying to do in your text. If you claim to be writing a professional historian’s account of who exactly was and was not a eugenicist in the first half of the 20th century, then West’s account would certainly fail. However, if you are writing a polemical treatise about the overall influence of a train of thought in politics and society, then a reader can spot inaccuracies but that would not necessarily affect the basic argument.

I’m sorry for being obtuse here, but I am really trying to figure out where you guys are coming from. Saying that you’re ‘pro-science’ isn’t particularly helpful because even creationists/IDists say they are ‘pro-science’. It might be that you believe that simply by pointing out historical inaccuracies, you are able to cast doubt on their motives. As it were, you believe that creationists are so committed to their point of view that they are ‘blind to the facts’. That would be an epistemologically interesting claim — certainly recognisable but one I find far-fetched. However, if you want to pursue that claim, then you need to establish a standard of accuracy for historical work, below which it cannot be counted as history. Otherwise, your targeting of guys like West looks arbitrary, as well as the standard to which you’re holding him accountable.

They aren’t just “try[img] to turn the history of science to their advantage and commit[ing] errors in the process.” They are distorting the history and using the tools of history to advance political agendas, not history. John’s article doesn’t claim that they merely have an agenda and make mistakes. He’s claiming that they are abusing history for a political purpose. That’s very different.

Steve replies:

Yes, you can fact-check these accounts to death. But at the end of his statement, John seemed to be suggesting that the discipline should also be in the business of providing its own canonical narrative account of Darwin and his aftermath.

Perhaps you are all taking for granted something that is by no means obvious to me – namely, that once you correct the errors of the creationist accounts, you’ll be left with accounts of the history of evolution that conform to how evolutionary scientists understand their own history.

You are still avoiding the central point here. This is not about merely fact-checking and correcting errors. No one here is claiming that the creationists have an axe to grind and are merely mistaken. People have been saying this over and over.

Wiker, Stein and the others are being deliberately disingenuous and distorting history to their own purposes. To anyone who isn’t completely blinded by postmodernist argle-bargle, this is very different from merely having a “different narrative”.

After all, there is more to doing the history of science than simply checking the historical accuracy of other people’s politically motivated statements.

The irony of you lecturing on how to do history given your track record with basic accuracy should give any reader of these comments reason for pause. I mean seriously, you defend your claim regarding Lamarck by admitting that he never said what you said he did, but some others whom you claim to be Lamarckian over 100 years later did, so that’s the same as Lamarck having said it. You mention Pierre de Chardin but he was not a Lamarckian. Lamarck never believed that “lower organisms literally strove to become higher organisms” and to claim so is to exhibit ignorance that if a student made the claim, they’d be rightly failed. Unable to admit your error, you conflate it at a venue (Uncommon Descent) where you are unlikely to get corrected by the sycophants.

[O]nce you correct the errors of the creationist accounts, you’ll be left with accounts of the history of evolution that conform to how evolutionary scientists understand their own history.

Quite the leap of logic there in imagining that is what we take for granted, eh? There is no reason why that should be the case and if you actually think that is either our assumption or something we’d find desirable then you are even more confused about history than you appear to be.

Stick to defending your “social epistemology” because you are on very slippery ground when trying to defend your ideas on history. I don’t expect to see any historians of science rallying to your defense … then again, you would no doubt attribute that to us being fascist Darwinists (as your ID fellow travelers do).

Perhaps you are all taking for granted something that is by no means obvious to me – namely, that once you correct the errors of the creationist accounts, you’ll be left with accounts of the history of evolution that conform to how evolutionary scientists understand their own history.

As for Sarkar’s review of my book, I would suggest you read my reply, if you are at all interested in the fairness of his criticism: http://www.uncommondescent.com/education/in-the-face-of-an-aspiring-baboon/. However, I am here not to defend myself. I am here to see if there is anything positive in what John is proposing or if it’s just a politically motivated attempt to enroll HSS in the cause of creationism-bashing. The latter is quite boring, and if that’s all you’re about, I’ll happily leave this forum.

Wes, I was respondng to John’s HSS Newsletter article as reprinted here, not to your intervention.

And I was highlighting an aspect of John’s article which you avoided.

Look at what I originally wrote. My interest is solely in the larger significance for the history of science profession that John has claimed for correcting creationist histories.

If history of science is evaluated as a discipline, and the creationist histories are perceived as an abuse of the tools of that discipline, how is this not significant for the history of science profession? Regardless of whether or not you agree with John’s conclusions, it’s silly to ask why he thinks it’s significant to history of science. He states very plainly why he thinks it’s significant.

I have yet to be told what that is. I am perfectly happy to admit that politically motivated people — not least creationists — are likely to try to turn the history of science to their advantage and commit errors in the process. Why or how this is supposed to be turned into a major issue for the history of science profession has yet to be explained, though John’s post sugggests as much.

They aren’t just “try[img] to turn the history of science to their advantage and commit[ing] errors in the process.” They are distorting the history and using the tools of history to advance political agendas, not history. John’s article doesn’t claim that they merely have an agenda and make mistakes. He’s claiming that they are abusing history for a political purpose. That’s very different.

You are attempting to portray this as a non-issue, but in doing so you are ignoring the actual issue which John brought up. You still haven’t engaged with one of John’s central points: That books like “From Darwin to Hitler” and movies like “Expelled” are propaganda pieces, not legitimate historical work, and that historians need to find some way to counteract this abuse of the discipline.

If you disagree that these are abuses of the discipline, then provide an argument for why they’re legitimate. But don’t accuse John of raising a non-issue when you haven’t even addressed the real point he’s making. John isn’t saying that creationists make mistakes and historians need to correct these (as you keep trying to construe him). He’s claiming that creationists are misusing the tools of historical analysis in order to achieve goals which have nothing to do with history.