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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2005
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Claim CA002.2:

Marx sent a personally inscribed copy of the second edition of Das Kapital to Darwin and wanted to dedicate it to him, but Darwin wrote a letter politely declining.

Source:

Humber, Paul G. 1987. Stalin's brutal faith. Impact 172. http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=276

Response:

  1. Darwin wrote a letter declining the dedication of an unnamed book on atheism, but he wrote it to Edward Aveling. Aveling's common-law wife was Elanor Marx, Karl's daughter, and she inherited his papers. They got mixed up with Karl Marx's papers, and the letter was assumed to have been to Marx. This view found ideological favor in Russia, so it was widely repeated. Later, a letter from Aveling, requesting permission to dedicate his book The Student's Darwin to Darwin, was found among Darwin's papers. Darwin declined permission and argued that science should not address religious matters directly (Colp 1982; Carter 2000).

  2. Darwin did have a copy of Das Kapital, but its pages were unseparated when he died, so he never read it.

  3. None of this matters to the science of evolution.

References:

  1. Carter, Richard. 2000. Marx of Respect. http://www.gruts.com/darwin/articles/2000/marx/index.htm
  2. Colp, Ralph Jr. 1982. The myth of the Darwin-Marx letter. History of Political Economy 14(4): 461-482.

Further Reading:

Colp, Ralph Jr. 1982. The myth of the Darwin-Marx letter. History of Political Economy 14(4): 461-482.

Dawkins, Richard. 2000. There's more to books than titles. http://archive.workersliberty.org/wlmags/wl61/dawkins.htm
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created 2001-2-17, modified 2004-6-28