Is it true Darwin thought Australia's Aboriginal people were the missing link?

Question

Is it true? Could he have been wrong about evolution as well?

Answer 1

The question could be easily answered by simply reading his book "On The Origin of Species."  (which you obviously have not bothered to do.)

Answer 2

That web sit looked very informative! ( dripping sarcasm )

Darwin was a man of his time and may have thought many things not directly impinging on evolutionary theory. He even had a very mistaken idea on heredity called panspermia.

Still ,all in all, evolutionary theory has weathered almost 150 years of scrutiny by the scientific community and has held up.

Do you think your weak nut-bar attack, which is seriously confused about what a scientific theory entails, will overthrow evolutionary theory.

No, Darwin was not wrong about his theory of evolution by natural selection. The theory just keeps getting stronger.

Answer 3

What we have is a creationist, Carl Wieland, writing about evolution. There's more then a bit of bias in how he presents things.

A search shows no other links between Darwin and Australian Aborigines. My memory is Darwin never claimed we were "descended from apes" hence he didn't use the term 'missing link."

However, creationists are very happy to toss the "missing link" around and then add that evolution is wrong because it can't produce any.

What you have is one biased opinion from a creationist. Further, he has no credentials in anthropology and is a non-practicing physician.

Answer 4

That guy even states that natural selection is true.  He even talks about Neanderthal. He himself is starting to understand.  You realize that Jesus said that there are errors in the religion and is the reason why you have a whole new Bible. Peter said that God's day is longer than a day so then how do reconcile with that.  There is evidence on this earth that can speak God's word that doesn't have to be filtered thru the mind of man.

Answer 5

Interesting!

He might have been right to a certain extent.

Not that aboriginals lack the capacity to understand, but their features are quite ape-like and remind me of representations , by artists, of homo erectus.

Since it's a continent that's been seperated from the rest of the world for 100'000 years +, maybe they're our past.

I hadn't thought of this before and that's very interesting!!

Answer 6

It took me a while to figure out that the website has a creationist slant.  Leaving that aside for the moment, Darwin actually was horrified by what had happened to the Maori and Aboriginal people as a result of European colonization.  He also was shocked at the slaves he saw in South America  (this is from E. Janet Browne's 2002 biography on Darwin).  He also disagreed with social Darwinism, believing that social policy should be informed by more than the concept of survival of the fittest and that sympathy should be extended to people of all races.

As to how the aboriginal people were treated, in Australia this is called the "History Wars."  I can find lots of websites with widely divergent opinions.  Estimates are that 90% of aboriginal people were killed by smallpox.  Settlers were allowed to shoot them, at least until the 1870s.  I can't find anything reliable that indicates that Darwin even believed in the "missing link," let alone that he thought he found it in Australia.

Finally, no, he wasn't wrong about evolution.  Look around.  Evolution and the theories of Gregor Mendel are the basis of modern biology.  Yes, it's called the theory of evolution, but theory has a different meaning in science than it does in everyday usage.  It's because of the atomic theory that we have nuclear weapons.