Talk:Darwin and women

Contested deletion

we are still working on it. we can can completely take out whatever is seen as a copyright infringement if we're given time — Preceding unsigned comment added by Reigneth (talk • contribs) 00:25, 8 December 2015

Wikipedia has very strong policies regarding copyvios and plagiarism—sorry but it's one of the very few areas where no allowances are made. If an aggressive approach were not taken, Wikipedia would be quickly overrun with problems, and would be known as merely a (probably illegal) copy of other people's work. Text can be developed off-wiki, but anything in public view has to be free from copyvio problems. See WP:TP for information about signing comments on talk pages (add a space then four tilde characters to the end of the last line of the comment). Johnuniq (talk) 00:52, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Reliable sources needed

Source policy requires verifiability from published sources with a reputation for fact checking and accuracy, Jerry Bergman at the Institute for Creation Research doesn't meet that standard and is at best a source for his minority views about Darwin. Policy is that we don't give undue weight to such minority views, which can come under pseudoscience policy. On Bergman's reliability, consider A Nobelist Misrepresented in Texas, Reports of the National Center for Science Education, 2009. Regrettably, it's likely that Bergman has similarly misrepresented Darwin. . dave souza, talk 13:03, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

The Origin of Species

I've removed this for discussion:

"He believed that because men had to prove themselves, both intellectually and physically by competing with other men, whereas women only had to prove themselves in the area of looks, then all the weak men did not get to reproduce and weak women did. Therefore, the genes passed on from men to future generations were successful or "champion" genes compared to those of women."Darwin, Charles (1859). The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1897 Edition ed.). New York: D. Appleton and Company. p. 108. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)"

This clearly doesn't come from On the Origin of Species, the 6th edition p. 108 is about a different topic. Can the editor involved please use that external link to find what text they had in mind? . . dave souza, talk 13:03, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

This would appear to be partly paraphrased from the following text from the first of the articles of Jerry Bergman's whose citations you removed from the article:

"Darwin taught that the differences between men and women were due partly, or even largely, to sexual selection. A male must prove himself physically and intellectually superior to other males in the competition for females to pass his genes on, whereas a woman must only be superior in sexual attraction. Darwin also concluded that 'sexual selection depended on two different intraspecific activities: the male struggle with males for possession of females; and female choice of a mate.' ²⁶"

The reference Bergman cites is not On the Origin of Species, but p.69 of Darwin, a 1982 popular biography by Wilma George in the Fontana Past Masters series. Presumably the quotation marks around the words 'sexual selection ... of a mate.' indicate that they are a direct quotation from p.69 of George's book. The key to the identification of the passage removed from the article as a paraphrase of Bergman, however, is the latter's very next sentence:

" In Darwin’s words, evolution depended on ‘a struggle of individuals of one sex, generally males, for the possession of the other sex.' ²⁷"

Here, Bergman's reference is the following:

"27. Darwin, C., The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1897 edition, D. Appleton and Company, New York, p. 108, 1859."

i.e. precisely the same one to which the passage removed from the article was cited. The words quoted by Bergman in this sentence do in fact appear in the 6th edition of On the Origin of Species (p.69 of the 1872 John Murray edition), but because he has replaced the subject of Darwin's sentence (namely, "sexual selection") with one of his own devising (namely, "evolution"), his introductory phrase, "In Darwin's words", is a blatant misrepresentation. Here's what Darwin actually wrote:

"This leads me to say a few words on what I have called Sexual Selection. This form of selection depends, not on a struggle for existence in relation to other organic beings or to external conditions, but on a struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex."

Bergman has also taken Darwin's words somewhat out of context, since he implies they are referring specifically to human males and females, whereas the passage in On the Origin of Species from which Bergman has lifted them is dealing with sexual selection in animals in general, and humans are not amongst any of the examples Darwin there cited.

So, what appears to have happened here is that the editor responsible for adding this passage to the article has mistakenly assumed that Bergman's citation of On the Origin of Species would provide support for the whole of the paragraph where it was cited (whereas, in fact, it supports none of it) and had thus cited it as support for his or her paraphrase, presumably without ever checking it.

David Wilson (talk · cont) 11:51, 9 December 2015 (UTC)