From what I've heard from the ones I know, they still believe in the phenomenon of radioactivity, so that nuclear reactors and such work just fine. They just think that radiometric dating methods fail, because they think that the speed of light has changed over time.

Most of these people have heard most of the obvious objections to their crackpottery, and have put in a lot of time and effort to counter them. The BS they've come up with to support their beliefs can be quite elaborate, and it can actually take a lot of effort to debunk it.

Probably the same reason I don't see too many architects, civil engineers, bank tellers or riverboat captains on the list: the list only includes famous people and there aren't very many famous evolutionary biologists.

But why is a list of famous people be relevant to the supposed link between eugenics and evolution in the first place? Wouldn't a list of actual evolutionists, famous or not, be more relevant? What does ``famous'' have to do with it?

I do see people try to link Christianity with anti-semitism. The problem is that while there are examples of Christianity being implicated, there are so many counter-examples including the tenets of the religion itself which makes it difficult to call a violent anti-semite "Christian".

It's not at all difficult to call some violent anti-semites ``Christian;'' to say otherwise is to play the game of No True Scotsman. And why raise the bar to ``violent?'' Most anti-semites aren't violent, just as most advocates of Eugenics didn't forcibly sterilize people themselves. And non-violent anti-semitism was the norm among practicing Christians for centuries. But of course, Christianity isn't inherently anti-semitic any more than evolution is inherently pro-eugenics. My point, of course, was that both supposed linkages are unsound.

Also, the most successful anti-semites (Stalin and Hitler) were also anti-Christian.

Hitler was Catholic; he often invoked God in his speeches as well. Not that it really matters. The question would be the role of Christians; the role played by unbelievers is irrelevant. If Stalin's atheism is relevant, the beliefs of your famous non-evolutionists should be relevant to the other question, but they in fact are not.

With evolutionary biology, it may be possible to show a link between beliefe an the theory and belief in eugenics, etc., but I suspect it will be very difficult to find counter-examples of anti-eugenics activism that is motivated by a belief in evolutionary biology.

It's not necessary to find such a counterexample, as biology may be neutral on the matter. Likewise, Christianity doesn't become more anti-semitic if counter-examples of Christian pro-semitic activism are ``hard to find.''

That would be an interesting assignment - Compare and contrast suspected links between evolutionary biology and eugenics with suspected links between Christianity and anti-semism.

More interesting, but I don't think it's a game worth playing in either case.

I don't see too many evolutionary biologists on that list. Why do you suppose that is? Eugenicists may have relied evolutionary theory to support their claims, but Eugenics has fallen out of favor, and yet evolutionary biology has continued unfazed. Darwin was not a Eugenicist. Neither are modern evolutionary biologists (generally -- I'm sure there's an exception out there somewhere).

One can't condemn an idea -- or in this case a whole body of knowledge -- because it may lead people to bad conclusions. One can't appeal to consequences. By appealing to consequences, one can evade the question of ``is the theory of evolution (whatever that means) actually true?''

Christianity led many to embrace anti-semitism, (e.g. Jews as the ``killers of Christ'') but I can't imagine that the students will be asked to ``trace the connections between Christianity, anti-semitism, the inquisition, pogroms, and death camps. Why are believers so ready to embrace these as a package deal? What view of humanity and reality is required to resist them?'' Yeah, such a link could be made, but the built-in implications of both sets of questions are dishonest: that Christianity [or Evolution] is a ''package deal'' with anti-semitism [or Eugenics].

I got OpenLinux with a book about that time, too. The quality of the packages was very high; I found quite a few packages with minor bugs with Redhat's stuff, having switched in 2000 or so. Every OpenLinux package seemed to come preconfigured with intelligent defaults so that it "just worked." The huge book was really the selling point for me -- I knew practically nothing about computers, so the struggle to install and configure Linux was a teaching exercise for me. I'll always have a warm fuzzy feeling about Caldera's OpenLinux -- it was my first OS on my very first computer. I remember when I thought of Caldera as the "good guys."

I wonder how many people here got their first Linux CDs from a book.