I spent a lot of time revising this post, unable to be satisfied with results. The reason is that I am holding back the central conclusion because I know it is the final taboo to admit what is obvious. But I'm going to say it.
You have to grant this to John Wilkins, in this post he came out and said it, well, he said it kind of back to front. The real reason that Darwin is controversial is his use by atheists in denying the idea that God directs evolution. At least that's what he claims. I'd not deny that is an important consideration, atheists latched onto the fact of evolution and the theory of natural selection from about the second the ink of On The Origin of Species was dry, and I mean the manuscript, not the published book. But the history of the theory of natural selection goes much farther than refuting the first few chapters of Genesis. The use of natural selection to deny equality of people, to assert that racial, ethnic and class inequality were not only perfectly natural but good and a vital necessity to prevent a catastrophic degradation of the human population, began almost as quickly. By 1865, in response to the Emancipation Proclamation, Thomas Huxley, Darwin's closest British colleague wrote his infamous essay, Emancipation - Black and White in which, clearly according to Darwinian doctrine he said:
The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion; emancipation may convert the slave from a well-fed animal into a pauperised man; mankind may even have to do without cotton-shirts; but all these evils must be faced if the moral law, that no human being can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own nature, be, as many think, as readily demonstrable by experiment as any physical truth. If this be true, no slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man
Even more explicitly, he said:
The question is settled; but even those who are most thoroughly convinced that the doom is just, must see good grounds for repudiating half the arguments which have been employed by the winning side; and for doubting whether its ultimate results will embody the hopes of the victors, though they may more than realise the fears of the vanquished. It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest.
If anyone doubts the Darwinian character of that kind of talk, I would recommend you look at passages from Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man dealing with people of African, North and South American and Polynesian and, worst of all, Australian ancestry. Charles Darwin may have attempted to sound more scientific and moderate than his Bull Dog, Huxley, but the content is the same down to the remarks about allegedly characteristic physical traits. And Huxley is mild in comparison with Darwin's other great collaborator for the rest of his life, Ernst Haeckel, who I will deal with in detail next week.
Reading the scientific literature from Darwin, his closest scientific associates and those who had Darwin's explicit endorsement, is to encounter language which would, over the succeeding decades, become increasingly dangerous, increasingly menacing. Freed from what Galton called "all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science," it seems like a contest to see who among them could make the most cold and even depraved assertions dealing with the life and, more often, deaths of people, their utilitarian value, and judging entire populations based on assignment of "fitness" or superiority. Once freed of those "ancient authorities" most definitely the prohibition on murder, on enslaving and turning a cold shoulder to the need of the destitute, the elite members of scientific establishments seem to have competed with each other to see who could be the coldest, most unfeeling and - I have every confidence this is how they saw it - most scientific of all.
That result of Darwin's real innovation, applying the coldness of Malthusian economics to biology, was a far more important reason to criticize the lapses, flaws, baseless assumptions, incomplete explanations, unwarranted assertions, and proposed depravity that came directly from Darwin's natural selection, him, his children, his inner circle and the waves of Darwinism that emanated from those. It is still the most important consideration in the matter, defending whatever religious and moral holdings against that depravity, for equality, economic democracy, of equal distribution of the necessities of life, that is the real problem I have with Darwin and Darwinism.
John Wilkins said:
No, the reason why Darwin was controversial is very, very simple. Darwin argued that complex designs could arise without a mind to guide it. In short, his controversial idea was natural selection (and sexual selection, but even that preceded Darwin). Almost from the day it was published, critics attacked the implication that the living world was not all that special, and that it lacked a Plan or Meaning. Theologians, moralists and even scientists objected to this, and while even most of the Catholic Church accepted common descent and modification of species, it was natural selection they hated.
All the supposed “controversies” of Darwinism (or that phantom, “neo-Darwinism”) are post hoc attacks based on the prior objection to the lack of a guiding hand in biology. Don’t like natural selection? Attack Darwin by calling him a racist or blaming him for the Holocaust. Say he is antiessentialist. Say he is anti-religion. No matter how much evidence one puts forward that these are deliberate lies manufactured by those who hate Darwin for natural selection, it won’t stop the prevarication industry.
There are a number of problems within those two paragraphs, the one I commented on was the assertion that Darwin wasn't an obvious racist. You can only say that if you either haven't read him or you change the meaning of racism to pretend to make Darwin's flagrant racism go away, a form of special pleading, That is unless you include lying about it. There is no way to pretend he was not a racist except to violate the most basic rules of serious intellectual discourse. I am quite certain that wouldn't be done for William Jennings Bryan or another religious figure on an atheist blog, nor should it there or anywhere else. Intellectual honesty is not a matter of desired outcome or even fairness, though practicing a double standard will result in dishonesty.
Using the Holocaust As A Red Herring Is a Two-Edged Sword
The comment about the Holocaust is only somewhat more justifiable, Darwin didn't know anything about Nazis, Hitler having been born well after he died. But there are the strongest of links from Darwin and natural selection to eugenics and Haeckel's monism and those do have a direct link to Naziism. His son, stating plainly that his eugenics activities are the continuation of his father's life's work, is another direct line between Charles Darwin and the Nazis. Leonard Darwin was in direct contact with figures involved with the Nazi eugenics program and figures such as the infamous Charles Davenport who were even more involved with Nazis. With the 1939 piece I wrote about the other day, it is undeniable that Leonard Darwin explicitly approved of Nazi eugenics up till the point that World War Two began. I cannot trace him saying anything about it after Britain entered the war. As I noted in an earlier piece in this series, he tied his father to German eugenics at a time when that had to mean Nazi eugenics, Leonard Darwin also complaining at the lack of German eugenics laws before then. No one denying that link has the authority of Leonard Darwin in the matter. No one can erase what he said in the absence of someone else as closely related to Charles Darwin to deny it. You have to lie about the history of eugenics and that species of materialist monism to deny that. Which is commonly done by Darwin's fans when you point those links out.
One thing that can't be denied, a belief in natural selection did not effectively inhibit early 20th century fascism and Nazism, both of which based large parts of their ideology on the assumptions growing out of the theory.
This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature constitutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin.
Ernst Haeckel, Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte
Haeckel, throughout that work and in subsequent works also known to Darwin, said, in terrible detail, just what his monistic conception of nature and what he asserted were inescapable truths about the human species because of that "triumph". Including murder of those deemed "unfit", of the deaths of groups considered as lower on the ladder of human evolution. Darwin knew that, he cited Haeckel saying that, accepting and in a few cases extending what he said, presenting it as being reliable science the entire time.
It is undeniable that the Nazi eugenics laws and the American eugenics laws cited as their inspiration were based in the concept of natural selection. Perhaps someday I will look and try to compile a list of Darwinists who effectively argued against those on the basis of natural selection. I don't believe I've stumbled across any of those among the most prominent of those, even among the rare Darwinian Marxists.
Design Is Not An Idea Vulnerable To Science
But Wilkins' main point also has problems. The holding that evolution is not designed or is designed isn't science, it is an ideological assertion in one case and a religious one in the other*. Both are expressions of faith. Science can come up with a description of physical evidence and generate analyses of that in scientific terms, it can't deal with whether or not what it describes and what it makes assertions about is designed by a designer. You don't have to believe either one way or the other but your belief will not be a scientific finding.
The use of Darwin as an atheist oracle was asserted from shortly after On the Origin of Species was published, in books Darwin endorsed and cited as science. As early as the original German edition of Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, a book which Charles Darwin had thanked Haeckel for, had read and which he praised in the highest terms in his Descent of Man, he claimed Darwin's theory as the final triumph of his materialist monism. In that book, Darwin's theory of natural selection was claimed for atheism and materialism and for an extensive campaign plan to destroy the most basic concepts of morality. It is a claim and an attribution that Darwin never denied or even complained about. He never, among all of his extensive citations of the Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte and other works by Haeckel, so much as distanced himself from those books and what Haeckel said in them. On the contrary, he supported their assertions as comprising the highest scientific thinking
You can add to that statements by Galton, Huxley, Spenser, and many other Darwinists who immediately turned his theory of natural selection, common descent, etc. into a tool of extra-scientific, anti-religious polemics. And it has been very effective as a weapon against those whose faith rests on Biblical literalism, though is far less effective among those who don't depend on that. Which is why latter day Darwinists are always pretending that Biblical fundamentalism is an attribute of all religious believers. They can't deal with anything but that with their favorite weapon.
That usefulness for atheists has been the real reason that atheists have been so eager to assert an extravagantly over the top cult of Darwin, his greatness and goodness and uncanny predictive abilities, a phony Darwin separate from his own literary record, his letters, his citations and associations and against which any contradiction will not be brooked. Anyone who dares cite, fully, at length, with confirmatory citations from Darwin, himself..., anything to do with Darwin's racism, his sexism, the class interest that so clearly pollutes his scientific claim to fame, his endorsement of Galton's and Haeckel's eugenics, their racism, the depravity of Haeckel's monism.... will be shunned and cast out of the fellowship of educated people. Or at least banned from the blogs of atheists who claim to be led to their conclusions by the evidence and an objective, disinterested, evaluation of it.
Is There Nothing Special About The Theory of Evolution?
Wilkins' post states
Sensible philosophical critics of Darwin focus on selection for that reason. It undercuts our prior belief that We Are Special. Human mentation, cognition, language, morality, religion or economics is somehow privileged in the universe. Bullshit. We are an animal and we arose without the universe seeking us (although, as I have argued, a deity might choose this universe because we evolve in it). The human exceptionalism which critics like Fodor, Fuller, Plantinga and the rest presume but do not argue for unfairly places the onus on Darwinians. It is time to stop taking them seriously.
I'm unprepared to discuss Fodor, Fuller or Plantinga but I can say that the frequent claims that Darwin didn't believe "We Are Special" and, in fact, that some of us were more special than others is complete and utter nonsense refuted all through his writing on natural selection. First, he believed in the superiority of those survivors who weren't selected out by death in the form of natural selection. He states that all through his work, that the surviving populations were more vigorous as a result of others being selected out, that concept, STATED POSITIVELY, is incorporated even into the full title of On the Origin of Species
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
It's no wonder that Wilkins' fellow atheist demagogue, Richard Dawkins' memory failed him so embarrassingly when challenged to state the title several years ago [Hear it here]. Darwinism, as stated by Darwin, from the beginning, held that we, the survivors of hundreds of millions of years of presumed natural selection are "FAVORED RACES."
All through his second major book on the topic covering the human species, The Descent of Man, Darwin asserts that superiority in terms of individuals but also in terms of ethnicity, race and economic class in the modern human population, anticipating the extinction of entire races of people he deems less "favored in the struggle for life" than others by reason of their inferiority. Especially and, for the purpose of this post, their alleged intellectual inferiority.
As Ernst Haeckel does, he explicitly puts Northern European populations at the head of the merit list, his own Anglo-Saxons among the most favored, though, as I noted in my last post in this revised series, not the Irish. Those groups which Haeckel places at the bottom of the heap of humanity, Darwin also marks as inferior and to be weeded out, as will be seen here next week when Darwin's extremely close relationship with Haeckel will be the topic.
Furthermore, Darwin clearly considered human beings as superior to even our closest living relatives, the magnificent great apes which he, likewise, marked for extinction in a struggle for life along with those races he designated as doomed by their inferiority. Darwin's theory, as he presented it and as it was clearly understood by his disciples, produced successive improvements in the surviving populations and that human beings were made different from each other by their cultures, their technology and science, in short, by the product of human reason, logic, mathematics and science. None of which exists in any other known species. Eugenics was based on that and the assertion that human culture, anything that helps to preserve human life, any material or cultural factors, and, in particular, selfless generosity, would induce a backwards motion, a devolution dragging the presently favored parts of the human species back from where it has arisen. If that were not the case, I wouldn't be writing this series and no one would be reading it.
Any atheist claiming intellectual distinction for their thinking, aspiring to scientific methods, and to discerning a knowledge of nature superior to that held by the common lot of humanity - not to mention that held by every single animal, bacterium, plant, fungus ... which has ever lived - is lying to themselves if they don't admit that they believe human beings are Special, that our peculiar methods of thought, our peculiar intellectual tools have a unique position on the Earth, aspects of a peculiarly human culture. There is no other species on Earth which has ever elucidated a theory of evolution or of natural selection. Which would seem to be as SPECIAL as it could possibly be to the Darwin cult. They certainly hold that those who accept it are to be considered favorably and are, so, special.
To deny that is to deny that the intellectual product of human and academic life is different from the thought of any animal demonstrating a reaction to their environment or any plant that inclines to the sun.
That claim, that the belief that "We Are Special" is a superstition that atheists have left behind by virtue of their Darwinian enlightenment is one of the most ludicrous and obviously false beliefs among atheists today. It is a belief that is contradicted even in the terms that it is claimed, Even Darwin, himself, couldn't escape it in propounding his theory. Anyone who denies that human beings are unique in their effects on everything they touch, among all other species should be considered a willful denier of one of our most obvious realities.
Any intellectual movement that requires lies to stand is an intellectual movement that will come to no good as it is up to no good. Any intellectual stand that disallows the introduction of evidence, while requiring words to mean something other than their common meanings, is also rotten to the core. Darwinism used to not deny the links to race "science", "racial hygiene", eugenics, class division and other things that Charles Darwin endorsed and asserted to be science. With the horrific history of the 20th century the social and intellectual milieu that made mentioning those things acceptable has changed. And with the post-war rehabilitation of Charles Darwin** you have to lie about the real Charles Darwin and suppress anything in his record that contradicts that phony, intellectually cleansed figurehead.
It being forbidden to mention that record - if you happen to do what most Darwinists don't do these days, read him and his citations and find out that he asserted things to be science which are either discredited as science or discredited by history - you risk becoming a pariah. For the most part, the only people who talk about that are the enemies of evolutionary science.
Well, brace yourselves, it isn't a violation of intellectual life to tell the truth about Darwin's record, especially his own recorded words. There isn't any legitimate rule of logic or scholarship that prevents that, only enforced social convention. If anti-evolutionists support what they say about Charles Darwin to the normal standards of intellectual life then they are correct about that much of it. If they go overboard, distort or falsely ascribe things to him, as they often do, that is intellectually dishonest. But their fabrications and distortions are no more dishonest than those regularly practiced by the Darwin industry and fan club. Only the pro-Darwin side asserts they are all about evidence and intellectual honesty and the highest integrity. As anyone who has read Darwin, refusing to constantly make excuses for the purely rotten things he said, the frequent assertions that are not supported by data or evidence, etc, will know that PR image of the culture of atheism is largely a myth, as well.
* I won't go into the interesting idea that it might be designed but not by a conscious designer because I haven't waded through the very complex, very technical arguments and can, therefore, have nothing valuable to say on the topic.
** Evolution in 2012 doesn't require Charles Darwin to be the great and powerful figure of the Darwin cult, it only requires the truth be told about him and his ideas be subjected to physical evidence and the common rules of reason and logic. Evolution's confirmation is far, far bigger than Darwin or natural selection, you don't need those in the face of an enormous mass of fossil and genetic evidence, though I doubt biologists indoctrinated in natural selection will give up that habit of thought for a number of generations.
As I said, John Wilkins was honest enough to admit the real need for Darwin and natural selection is in extra-scientific assertions of materialism and, ultimately, atheism. And that is the real reason for the phony, post-War Darwin and the cult that has grown up around that idol. That materialism and atheism seem to need to lie about him should become more of an issue among those of us who are interested in the integrity of science and intellectual discourse.
No comments:
Post a Comment