Answer to an Old and Rejected Comment

Apparently someone has found evidence that my many posts dealing with the relationship of Darwin with eugenics in England, North America and Germany have been used by people pushing creationism.   They ask me if I am not thoroughly ashamed to have given them information that they then use to attack science.   The question is based on several false assumptions.

First, I didn't give them any information that wasn't available and already known to them, or, at least, not much of it.  There were several points I didn't find in other places, but those were mostly conclusions I drew from reading what Darwin, his sons, and the other key figures in the early and later history of eugenics and natural selection had said.  Most of what I presented was information that is freely available in the public domain, has been available for the past century and longer and which, indeed has been cited in arguments about these issues beginning in the 1870s.   Only someone profoundly ignorant of the literature of this discussion, as, indeed, just about every one of the champions of Darwin I've encountered are, could think I'd "given creationists arguments" that they can then use for their ideological purposes.   The Darwins, Charles, Leonard, Francis, George,  their cousin Francis Galton, their friend Ernst Haeckel and many others are the ones who provided them with the material with which to make their pitch to the public. Before the Second World War mainstream Darwinists had no shame in crowing about what their heirs are now so eager to cover up.  Only that information is out there and it cannot be covered up now that it is available from reputable online sources, in fact much of the material I used is published by pro-Darwin sources.

Secondly, I am under no obligations as an educated person to lie about that record. If anything, having bought the post-war mythologized St. Darwin,  having, in the past,  asserted the historical lies of that cult, I am under an obligation to reveal the truth about it now.  That the truth is inconvenient to one side in an ideological war does nothing to change that truth.

To assert that evolution happened is to give the most common, general scientific interpretation of what the mute and inarticulate geological record and genetic evidence indicate.  It is to assert an indirect meaning for that record.  I am so convinced by that evidence that it is my position that evolution, itself, is a fact.   To assert that Charles Darwin was the inspiration of and the most important early supporter of eugenics is to point out what he and his cousin Francis Galton, the inventor of eugenics, said in no uncertain terms.  You don't have to go out on any limb to repeat what they said, WHAT THEY PRESENTED AS HAVING THE ENHANCED RELIABILITY OF SCIENCE, in order to state the truth of that matter.  There is no comparison as to which is the more certain assertion of historical truth, the documentary record removes any rational ambiguity as to what these two men of science said about the matter.  If you want to impeach Darwin as an unreliable reporter of his own ideas and thoughts in the matter of eugenics, you cannot be allowed to then present his far more attenuated presentation of natural selection to be more reliable.

In my researches into the allegedly scientific assertion of atheism I have come to the conclusion that science, per se, has been hijacked and turned to an ideological campaign.  In no branch of science has that been more the case or the motives of those involved more explicitly stated than in the matter of evolution.  Beginning with the earliest readers of On the Origin of Species, indeed, even preceding that far from original assertion of evolution, its usefulness to an assertion of atheism was announced to the world.  Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, etc. are the ones who opened up the Darwinist front in a war that had been ongoing for more than a generation.

And, it has to be remembered, those men weren't only the generals in an ideological war, they were the ones writing and determining the direction that evolutionary biology was taking.  Given the nature of that early science, given the clearly announced ideological, political and economic motives of those involved, given that they constituted the winning party in the body of scientists who would provide the acceptance of further ideas in the matter, is it not a reasonable thing to believe that their ideology was not crucially influential in determining the intellectual culture of the field but influential in what was alleged to be objective science?  As Marx pointed out,  Darwin, himself, gave an eccentric twist to Malthus, whose entire premise was based on the dissimilarity between human society and nature, in that human society was effective in keeping poor and disadvantaged members of the society alive in numbers that nature couldn't sustain.  Darwin, on the other hand, asserted that the British class system was the very basis of the natural order in which the "favoured" crushed the less "favoured" and the survivors were biologically superior to those that didn't survive.  And also those among the living who Darwin asserted, AS A MATTER OF SCIENCE, constituted less "favored" individuals and groups.    The sainted Darwin put a scientific hit on named ethnic and economic groups, as anyone who has read his second major book, his other writings and his letters to his scientific colleagues could not possibly deny.  He advocated, in somewhat sanitized language, the deaths of individual members of those groups and, in no uncertain terms, entire ethnic groups.   That he said it in English instead of Haeckel's German, doesn't make that, somehow, nicer.

That the men who determined the course of evolutionary biology either came from the elite class of Britains and other nation or they aspired to join that class is certainly relevant to why that particular breed of biologists were "favoured" in the academic struggle for dominance.  Darwinism was the good news, the gospel, that the economic elite had longed for, that due to their superiority, familial, national, racial, etc. they were the rightful winners in economic and all other struggles and the system of laws that their ancestors had set up to take the labor and property of the less "favoured" as their own, were a human expression of laws of nature, what the self-appointed modern men asserted in lieu of the biblical law which was no where near as convenient to their self-regard and contented affluence.  I think that the present day assertion of latter day Darwinism over the disdainfully mocked underclass of creationists is not uninfluenced by that cultural baggage.

That, these days, in the United States, at least, an even more unscrupulous group of oligarchs make use of those who reject Darwin, is a rather curious situation.  The economic elite has no fixed use for something as ultimately esoteric as evolutionary biology, their interest is primarily in the system of laws permitting them to steal the property of those whose labor produces all wealth.  However, it is also an interesting situation that, as it suits their purpose, they will make neo-Darwinian arguments to support their superiority to poor people,  members of other ethnic groups and women.   The lapse of integrity in this ideological struggle is not confined to any group.   Or maybe it is that the terms of the argument have lost so much of their meaning as they cease to be about anything except as indicators of group loyalty.  There is entirely more of that in this argument, from the creationists BUT ALSO from the side which pretends that it's all about what the evidence shows for them.  Anyone who had looked at the most articulate, the most conclusive evidence relevant to this intellectual brawl would not be able to support the Darwin fan club just as those who look at the non-ideologically interpreted geological and genetic evidence would see a convincing, though far more indirect case supporting evolution.   I'm not ashamed to present any relevant evidence.  What other people do with that isn't my responsibility.