Holy Cow McGrath! That Darwin is certainly a find! What until Steve sees that. Of course,the real issue is the positivist model for social science research. That is what gave the idea that we could apply the methodology of natural science to human affairs. The reason the positivists won out over idealists like Max Weber was that there was a desire for social control. They wanted power over "the masses." Statistics were originally called "political arithmetic." Always the economy. God awful stuff.
Little Hawk, very nice.
Steve, you have read all the Gnostic Gospels? How exciting! Listen, the one you should read is this one:
McGrath, you should read "In Search of the Primitive" by anthropologist Stanley Diamond. Mr. Diamond discusses the western notion of progress in great detail and does not shy away from ethics.
From Wikipedia:
In memoriam in the journal which he founded, his legacy was recognized thus: "Diamond was one of the first anthropologists to insist that researchers both acknowledge and confront power relations, often colonial and neocolonial, that form the context of their work. His sympathetic portrayal of the Arab mountain villages, and analysis of psychodynamics on the Israeli kibbutz — as stemming from an incomplete critique of stetl life — was as much against the grain of contemporary research then as it is today. His concern for countering racism found its way into a number of trenchant popular and scholarly writings and, always, in his teaching" (Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 16, p. 105, 1991).