I was pointing out that when something is produced by intelligent design it merely proves it could be the result of intelligent design. That proof would be as close to an absolute fact as science could produce, the assertion, then made, that such an experiment demonstrates a lack of intelligent design is dishonest and an incomplete and incompetent analysis of what was done. I was challenging anyone to show me why that wasn't the case. I'd have to see the explanation of how an experiment could show a lack of intelligent design in producing an effect or what other proposed means of scientifically showing a lack of design was before I could accept it.
jdf1010August 21, 2015 at 8:09 PM
There's no perfect way to test if something is designed or not, but of course one can try to think up criteria for evidence of intelligent design, and then test to see if these criteria are met. Using human design as an inspiration (naturally), it's possible to come up with a list of aspects that seem to reflect intelligence and intention, such as economy, efficiency, symmetry, etc.
I can think of a number of reasonable objections to this, the first of those is that the attempt would be arbitrary, open to the introduction of intentional - though never admitted to - bias and the results being declared to have a finality and reliability which they, of course, could not have because of the arbitrary and arguably biased criteria chosen.
I think this kind of thing is done all the time in the social sciences and in the invasion of those into the valid scientific study of evolution, especially since the introduction of Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which show all of those defects and some others, including the invention of "evidence" on the basis of absolutely no evidence since no observation or measurement is done before what is invented to substitute for them is then "analyzed" reviewed by people who are engaged in the same faux scientific method, published in journals and declared to have the reliability of genuine science, to be incorporated and held as a scholastic body of knowledge. That such knowledge has, in the past, been shown to be unreliable will not be taken into account.
What would you consider to be some possible indicators of intelligence in design?
As science? For a start anything done by science is absolutely known to be the result of intelligent design, science is an intentional invention of human beings, in the beginning coming up with criteria that would be reasonably certain to keep such biases as discussed in my last paragraph out of a body of knowledge about simple physical phenomena so that the results could be reasonably expected to be universally applicable and reliable in their application to produce effects. Any application of those to produce effects is also absolutely known to be intelligent design, it is the basis of my observation that scientists and others can't, then, claim that the effects produced demonstrate the absence of intelligent design. I don't think science can be used to test the idea of intelligent design.
The idea of human design is imposed metaphorically on nature quite often, and promptly believed to be not a metaphor but an absolute representation of the working of nature. It would seem to be a powerfully seductive habit of thought as can, perhaps, best be seen in the universal adoption of natural selection as an explanatory idea. The idea comes, in part, perhaps originally, from the design of artificial selection in animal and plant breeding which Darwin depends on to provide "evidence" that his mechanism of the creation of species is explained by natural selection. The conventional and required assertion is that natural selection dispells notions of divine intention in the phenomeon of life, which is best shown to be a rather plainly false assertion by how the idea, itself came about and was, from the beginning, used.
Alfred Russell Wallace, Darwin's "co-discoverer" complained that his choice of terms, related to the selection involved in animal breeding, gave rise to the inevitable implication of intentional design*, Wallace was eager to cleanse Natural Selection of any hint of intentional design but I don't think that's possible because it is, in itself, a metaphor of human design. Yet it is constantly cited, conventionally as a "proof" of undesigned, random activity. That assertion, made by the people who made it, Spencer, Galton, Huxley, Haeckel, etc. was always an irrational and ideological dogma which was not supported by the intelligent understanding of the idea but which became a conventionally required statement of materialist faith (see the extract from Wallace below and his whole letter at the link).
I will note in passing that I think Marx was correct in pointing out that Natural Selection was an illogical misapplication of Malthusian economic dogma which was based on the unnatural effects of human culture causing populations to increase whereas the food supply didn't. He pointed out that Darwin, in inverting Malthusian analysis, imposed the British class system on nature**, another metaphor. Marilynne Robinson*** and, more than a century and a half earlier, William Cobbett, pointed out that what Darwin also relied on, Malthus, misrepresented an artificial economic system, as created by the British legal system, as a phenomenon of nature, the aristocracy and the monarchy having artificially created conditions that restricted the growing of food, notably in the theft of common land by the aristocracy for things like sheep farming, because feeding the new textile industry wool was more profitable to them than maintaining farmers which the law made their tenants through the intentions of previous generations of aristocrats instead of free people with access to their own property. The tangle of human design in the entire field of biology can't now be used to deny the possibility of design in nature except by refusing to acknowledge the history of the ideas used that way and the fact that they are entirely reliant on models designed intentionally by human beings.
I think the irrationality of this situation is shown best in evolutionary psychology which proposes the study of behaviors in the remote past where 1. no observation of such behaviors is possible, 2. no comparison of animals exhibiting such behaviors and those which don't is possible, 3. there is no possibility of comparing their life spans, their success in reproduction and a comparison of the numbers of offspring in future generations, etc. What is substituted for actual science (observation, analysis of data, etc.) is the creation of narratives OUT OF THE META-NARRATIVE OF NATURAL SELECTION, which is, in fact, no different from the creation of other creation myths, only, this one being without God, it is called "science" and conventionally required to be accepted as such. Even more absurdly, such stuff, created merely out of a tale created from natural selection is then used to support the validity of natural selection, as so applied. As I recently bragged, I looked at one of the most famous of those fables and found it didn't meet any of the criteria of science, it violated mathematical logic and, though constructed of conventional Darwinian assertion, it managed to turn a the classical Darwinian assertion of the way that eyesight and hearing evolved into a dysgenic feature instead of a positive adaptation. It violated every single thing asserted about natural selection! Yet it has been taught to university students and read by readers as science for more than thirty years. The fudging of the barrier between "real science" and "popular science" has been done as much by figures of science as it has by their scape goats, "science reporters" from what I can see.
I doubt that any attempt such as the one you propose could avoid becoming a similar matter of dogmatic adherence and it would be far better for science to be kept out of such arguments,entirely. That many atheists, materialists, "skeptics" have wanted to and successfully have used the name of science is unfortunate and, as can be seen in the Intelligent Design industry, their efforts are more than matched by those who want to use the name of science to support the opposite. Only the I.D. industry would appear to have more persuasive power than the atheists have, they should have been more careful in what they wished to do. Their design in using biology to promote atheism would have seemed to be a faulty design.
So far, the evidence from biology doesn't seem to support intelligent design, if "intelligent" is to have any meaning.
I just answered that.
The only thing that seems to be supported is horribly unintelligent design, or else no design.
I can point out to you that the entire field of biology as a science would be impossible if that were the case, anatomy, biological systems in organisms wouldn't sustain life, reproduction wouldn't succeed, life would be crushed out of existence by hostile physical forces and random, chance events which are met constantly which endanger and often destroy life. If the systems such an observation would have to rest on were so incompetently designed there would be no such thing as a trait that could be "selected for" no trait would work against such a barrage of constant threat, leading to no possible probability that one over another could be "selected" and no species evolve because the traits they possessed worked in nature. And so it has seemed to most people, so it is asserted even by scientists who are, at the same time, denying that's what they're doing. The position taken by you in that statement is generally hypocritically and conventionally stated by people whose every assertion proves that they don't really believe it, their entire scientific narrative would collapse if their ideological stand were rigorously imposed on it.
Perhaps physics is another story. There's certainly no hard evidence of tampering with the laws as we know them, but the laws are themselves quite elegant.
Please just listen to what you said, "no hard evidence of tampering with the laws as we know them" The question is using science to prove, or at least demonstrate a lack of intelligent design. Such design would be executed on objects through forces, the very thing described in those "laws as we know them". "As we know them," your're admitting it yourself, that the "laws" we talk about are a human attempt to understand the forces as applied to physical objects and entities. If the proposal is that God created the universe as it is, what is stated in the opening sentence of Genesis, then, of course, that includes those forces and objects and whatever relationships involved that we can possibly study with science. God wouldn't be "tampering" with anything, everything science finds, which is the typical operation of those forces on objects, would be part of that design. I didn't bring up the question of "miracles", things that are proposed to violate or happen outside of the normal operation of the universe, but those things are found in science, itself, they are generally thrown out of the data because they don't fit the general trend. But that's not involved in the problem I posed. Science can be used to investigate some, hardly all, claims of miracles but only when there is physical evidence that is relevant to the claim and which is sufficient to test it. Which is often not the way that debunking of claims is carried out. I did say I was a stickler about the valid methodology of science when science is claimed to be present.
That life is often not to our liking, is often horrible, cruel and short is no proof of a lack of design by someone else. Though that assertion is often angrily made. Our designs on animals are most often all of those to them but the design is there. The Bible, those awful chapters and books that document catastrophes that come to the people of Israel - discounting the ones in which they are making excuses for their conquests of other people, what nationalist literature always has done - generally note that the catastrophes experienced were either due to them not following the design of God or that they found themselves, unwillingly or unpleasantly, in the midst of a larger design. But that's a rather large topic outside of the question at hand, as well. I will point out, though, that the conventional assertions of Natural Selection are based in the deaths, generally through being killed and preyed on, killed in some kind of struggle over food, space, other resources, and in a myriad of other equally horrible ways and, as long as God is not part of it, that's seen by many as being good. The denial of progressive improvement through the deaths of the "unfit" being asserted in conventional biology is a bald-faced lie, it is asserted by the mainstream scientists beginning with Darwin and continuing up to those today. That is something I've looked into in great depth.
In this case, God would be less of a puppet master and more of a computer programmer, setting up the rules of the universe and then watching it unfold (and, significantly, allowing a certain degree of stochasticity in the program).
I have dealt with the frequent mistaking of the human metaphor for the behavior of human thinking that computers were invented to be for a model of the human mind. That mistake proves the incompetence of the person doing it, using a created metaphor, which is necessarily incomplete, arbitrarily defined and hardly comprehensive, as a model for the thing it merely imitates. And I will be harsh because the use of computers as models of human minds is one of the stupidest current superstitions within science, one which would be prevented by such people being taught the very recent history of their field and that models of people and animals aren't the same thing as living beings. The thinking in that kind of "science" is really no different from the thinking of a very young child that their teddy bear has a personality - one that is remarkably human. Once you realize that, it's frightening how influential such thinking is among adults with power.
You, then, impose the whole thing on God who is certainly not a human being and is certainly not bound by the limits of human imagination and conventional expression within the milieu of current culture. Human beings can discern what you, yourself, called "human design" often with absolute confidence, as I said. I think our powers to discern the intentional designs of God are probably entirely inadequate. It reminds me of the criticism that was made of the atheist attempt to come up with a substitute for morality, utilitarianisim. The idea that human beings could discern which choice would produce more happiness for the most people, and so choose a course of action against another, is ridiculous. Leaving aside the impossibility of measuring "happiness" or even defining it, the ultimate consequences of choices made by us are often unforseeable in our own lives, not to mention the lives of those in the future, even, at times, many generations after us. An action taken by someone today might seem to produce moderately good results but in the future might bring utter pain and devastation to enormous numbers. And the happiness of other species is generally left out of such considerations. The human capacity for determining the results of our designs is so limited that the idea that we could see the non-human design of even a limited though far more intelligent being is ridiculous. To think we could discern the subtlety of design which God could make is infinitely absurd, it would have to be made known to us through revelation, if even then, not through the human invention of science which can certainly not even deal with all of human experience. Though so many are thorougly convinced that it can do what it certainly can't do, many of them scientists, many of them even philosophers who should certainly know the absurdity of that idea, even such as Bertrand Russell, who as a mathematician certainly knew that we know things which are not scientifically demonstrable. Mathematics is known with a certainty that no science can be, though it, also, fails to produce total and absolute logical closure.
* I have been so repeatedly struck by the utter inability of numbers of intelligent persons to see clearly or at all, the self acting & necessary effects of Nat Selection, that I am led to conclude that the term itself & your mode of illustrating it, however clear & beautiful to many of us are yet not the best adapted to impress it on the general naturalist public. The two last cases of this misunderstanding are, 1st. The article on “Darwin & his teachings” in the last “Quarterly Journal of Science”, which, though very well written & on the whole appreciative, yet concludes with a charge of something like blindness, in your not seeing that “Natural Selection” requires the constant watching of an intelligent “chooser” like man’s selection to which you so often compare it;—and 2nd., in Janet’s recent work on the “Materialism of the present day”, reviewed in last Saturday’s “Reader”, by an extract from which I see that he considers your weak point to be, that you do not see that “thought & direction are essential to the action of `Nat. Selection’.” The same objection has been made a score of times by your chief opponents, & I have heard it as often stated myself in conversation.
Now I think this arises almost entirely from your choice of the term “Nat. Selection” & so constantly comparing it in its effects, to Man’s selection, and also to your so frequently personifying Nature as “selecting” as “preferring” as “seeking only the good of the species” &c. &c. To the few, this is as clear as daylight, & beautifully suggestive, but to many it is evidently a stumbling block. I wish therefore to suggest to you the possibility of entirely avoiding this source of misconception in your great work, (if not now too late) & also in any future editions of the “Origin”, and I think it may be done without difficulty & very effectually by adopting Spencer’s term (which he generally uses in preference to Nat. Selection) viz. “Survival of the fittest.”
A. R. Wallace: Letter to Charles Darwin, July 2nd, 1866
** I'm amused that Darwin, at whom I've been taking another look, should say that he also applies the ‘Malthusian’ theory to plants and animals, as though in Mr Malthus’s case the whole thing didn’t lie in its not being applied to plants and animals, but only — with its geometric progression — to humans as against plants and animals. It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes and is reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an ‘intellectual animal kingdom’, whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society.
Karl Marx: Letter to Engels, June 18th, 1862
*** See her great and entirely neglected essay, Mother Country, my nomination as the most criminally and tragically suppressed book of the past half century.
"I can think of a number of reasonable objections to this, the first of those is that the attempt would be arbitrary, open to the introduction of intentional - though never admitted to - bias"
ReplyDeleteBias is a real thing. Not just the intentional kind you fear, but the more insidious unconscious kind. And no one experiment can overcome bias. Yet the scientific endeavor itself is not one experiment: it's a process of claims, objections, agreed upon definitions, calls for revision, etc. In short, it's a way for competing parties to try to get at a human-general way of understanding something.
If you yourself have objections to how something is defined, you can voice those objections; you can perform a series of experiments that are designed to address these objections, or your critiques can inspire someone else to go into the lab. Science is meant for everyone. As long as standards of transparency are upheld, the more the merrier, and the more our respective vested interests (and honest blind spots) can be kept in check.
You think that talk about intelligent design is the realm of philosophy, and to some extent you are correct. But a philosopher can make specific claims, and if those claims are made in predictive, operational terms, then the claims can be tested. Freud was more philosopher than scientist, but hypotheses based on his claims can and have been tested to a great extent. Unfortunately, a lot of Freud's claims have not endured scrutiny. There has been no official trial before the scientific Sanhedrin on the validity of Intelligent Design in general (though the very real trials concerning ID education in US schools resulted in a verdict that such efforts are indeed bunk pseudoscience), but most biologists, if asked their informed opinions, will make an argument not far from mine, and cite the bodies of evidence they know to support their claim. People are free to call scientists out as lazy here, or missing something important, but it is the responsibility of those people to communicate their charges according to the standards of the scientific community, so that a constructive dialogue can be had.
I used to have a lot more faith in the intellectual rigor of scientists than I do now and, though I never had much faith in the intellectual rigor of popular science I have absolutely none in it now. What is called science is pretty much whatever scientists say it is and, more popularly, what is asserted to be science. I think that under a program of ideological materialism a lot of real junk is called science by scientists and is retained and built on as science by scientists when there was never any valid reason to consider it science. The social sciences are a model example of that, citing the difficulties and impossibilities of studying what they prose to study with science, they were, still, allowed by universities, science faculties, writers on science and, fairly quickly, law makers, judges and Supreme Courts which used some of the very worst science ever so devised to make laws and strip people of their rights and to even attack their bodily integrity. The infamous Buck vs. Bell case in the United States, issued by a pseudo-liberal hero, Holmes, is a supreme example of that, which was influential among the Nazis as was testified at the Nuremberg trials. That is as plain a history of bad science having a disastrous effect in reality as can be found, yet it is unmentionable in polite society and vehemently and angrily denied to be a fact of history. Quite often historical facts can be known to a degree of absolute reliability which science often fails to achieve.
DeleteFreud's ideas, as well, were science for the entire time they were identified as such by scientists, by clinicians, by the legal system and in the wider society. They are still influential and, though always lacking any valid scientific basis, still believed to have that kind of reliability. You can say the same thing about much else in psychology which is still taught and still practiced, still has sway over judicial and other minds making policy, issuing rulings and having a very real effect in life.
"You can say the same thing about much else in psychology which is still taught and still practiced, still has sway over judicial and other minds making policy, issuing rulings and having a very real effect in life."
DeleteI should probably divulge here that my education and career are in Psychology research, though specifically visual neuroscience. I can admit that Psychology has a diverse intellectual heritage, with some strains more rigorous than others even to this day. Still, your claim is so sweeping. What are some examples of unfounded or untested assumptions? I might even agree with you on some examples, but I must admit that I don't know what you're thinking of.
Virtually every study that is published is done with invalid methodology, its conclusions based in nothing but conventional assertion. As I recently said, if the professional "skeptics" who had careers in psychology such as Ray Hyman, imposed the same standards they insist invalidates parapsychological research on their own field, its database would largely evaporate immediately.
DeleteI would like someone to point out the precentage of psychology studies which are based in a truly representative sample of the population their results are alleged to be relevant to.
I could write a lot more if I had more time (I've written an awful lot of words already, today). You could google Richard Feynman's well known "Cargo Cult Science" for some other criticism of psychology, though he seemed, in latter years, to revise what he had said about parapsychology. As I recall reading, he addressed the Parapsychological Association praising them for their very high level of internal criticism, noting it was vastly superior to the external criticism of it. For some reason I want to mention the year 1984 in that regard but my memory fades. I wasn't there, by the way, I've never belonged to any group like that.
Well, please by all means go into specifics when you do have the time. Merely claiming that "virtually every study" has invalid methodology is just as sloppy as you say they (we?) are.
DeleteRepresentative samples are extremely important for certain studies, particularly in social psychology. Less so for other studies, such as visual perception and basic cognitive processes. But even within social psychology, there is a back-and-forth in that respect. It's the researchers themselves (competing parties within the larger system) that have been leading that charge, and so further research is done to address those limitations. It takes time, but that's a strength of the system, not a flaw.
It largely depends on what the claims being made are and how large a population they are claimed to cover. I haven't noticed that psychologists and other social sciences are generally modest about the implications of their studies.
DeleteI would like to know what "basic cognitive processes" you are talking about.
I was thinking of stuff like iconic memory, echoic memory, working memory span, etc. But even my own focus, visual perception, can be thought of as basic cognitive processes.
DeleteWhat percentage of papers published under the category "psychology" does that account for? I would suspect nothing like a majority of them.
DeleteI don't know, but unlike the Salon anti-theists who ramble on about Christians and Muslims and "religionists," let's be specific with our criticisms rather than toss them into the wind.
DeleteWell, I will look to see if there is any documentation of the percentage of published papers in psychology those topics represent, I doubt it is anything like a majority of them. The regularity with which they are retained would also be relevant to my contention about the quality of the science done under the category of "psychology". I look at the history of the subject and the first thing that is notable is how enormous towers housing entire schools, even those which, for a time, dominated psychology and imposed their holdings as valid science, regarded as that by scientists, teachers of science, the media, official establishments in schools, prisons, social service agencies, and the law, then, somehow, are not science, anymore, topple and are quietly pushed aside, except for those professional practitioners who still are allowed to peddle "treatments" and to testify as to the dangerousness of criminals, advocating their execution, things like that.
DeleteThat your area of interest hasn't seen fit to distance itself from it is interesting but I can manage only so much research these days.
Well, we do to a certain extent. For instance, from the psychoanalytic practitioners, who have their own history, heroes, and methods. And of course there's some tribalism across areas. Vision scientists often say "cognitive" as shorthand for "stuff that's too complicated for me to even try to study scientifically." But I respect the people who do try, as long as they try responsibly. Biology is a messier discipline than physics, but thank goodness the biologists don't throw up their hands and give up. Similarly, human behavior is even messier to study than biology, but it's worth the effort to try. Reliable knowledge there may be gleaned at a slower pace, but it's better than no knowledge at all.
DeleteAs for my claim about biology going against the idea of a creator, I didn't have Darwin in mind. The theory of natural Selection provides a possible way to explain apparent design without a sentient creator, but the details of anatomy and physiology are what provide us with evidence of economy, efficiency, symmetry, etc. And the evidence overwhelmingly shows that biological organisms, despite their splendid functions, are full of redundancies and haphazard construction. This supports the idea of slow changes to more ancestral systems, but attempts to observe and admire intelligent design in biology ultimately break down, unless one considers the elegant notion of chaotic natural selection as evidence of an intelligent designer (again, as a programmer rather than chiseler).
ReplyDeleteI am puzzled why you bristle at the metaphor of God as programmer. If God exists outside of human perception, this does not change the fact that humans exist within human perception, and we conceptualize and communicate about God using human metaphors. Why bristle at "programmer," but not when invoking a male pronoun for God? Or when people attribute human emotions like jealousy? Or when they call "Him" a "master craftsmen?" Why are you not harsh in these cases? You could say that all are inadequate, but they serve a purpose. The "programmer creator" metaphor gets at a certain idea; the idea of cosmic creation as a set of pre-ordained principles that do not themselves predict all future outcomes. Given, say, the back-to-front construction of the human retina and the blind spot created by the optic nerve---which hint at mutations of earlier ancestral constructions and require a lot of brain power to correct---"intelligent design" only seems like a meaningful metaphor to invoke if the "design" were more distant and unconcerned with the details of every organism or species.
I'm not sure why you included Wallace's appeal for clarification to Darwin on the term "natural selection." Perhaps to "indict" him by association with Spencer. But Wallace made somewhat of a good point: "selection" was a metaphor that Darwin had been invoking to explain his mechanism of evolution, but Wallace felt that people were taking the metaphor too literally. Nowadays, a scientist would describe natural selection as the differential proliferation of genes in a gene pool relative to its alleles across the generations, due to pressures related to survival, mating, domestication, or random drift. So perhaps we should simply say "gene frequency shift" rather than "natural selection." But Mendel's idea of genes hadn't caught on at that point, so Wallace turned to Spencer's term. That term itself is problematic, not just because of its associations with Spencerian social policies; the word "fittest" carries with it emotional, judgmental baggage. And that's not appropriate for the unguided phenomenon of gene frequency shifting.
"The theory of natural Selection provides a possible way to explain apparent design without a sentient creator."
DeleteOnly as an ideological assertion, many religious folk who buy natural selection see that as a more powerful mechanism of God's design than the traditional, and scientifically invalidated, literal interpretation of the Genesis story. Natural selection, though, didn't invalidate that story as a would-be scientific exposition of how it happened, it was the evidence that evolution had happened, that species arose and died out over enormous periods of time that did that. Evolution was well on its way to being accepted as a fact before anyone thought of anything like natural selection. What natural selection did was allegedly provide a mechanism of how it happened, one constructed on the scantest of evidence mixed with Malthusian economics. And, as I explain that act, of mixing in Malthus, already involved human design because the economic system which Malthus based his system on, the conditions he took for granted were not natural phenomena but were, themselves, the product of intentional design by human beings, the British class system. It would be as impossible to tease out that from natural selection as it would be to tease out intelligent design from any scientific experiment to remove that from what the experiment showed.
You don't understand my point in bringing up Wallace's letter. He was pointing out that what I said was problematic for removing a logical inference of intentional design from the idea of natural selection, made so by Darwin's use of artificial selection in animal breeding as evidence supporting his theory. You can't make that connection to support your theory, which is presented as strong evidence, and then turn that off in order to say, well, of course what I've shown demonstrates that there is no possible inference that selection might be at work in natural selection. HE CALLED IT NATURAL AS OPPOSED TO HUMAN SELECTION, AFTER ALL. Even Darwin and all of his many supporters who kept that term for their imagined force driving the creation of species. You are incorrect about me or others trying to tie Darwin and natural selection to Spencer, sullying both in the process, Charles Darwin did that, himself in the 5th and, I believe 6th editions of Origins of Species in which he specifically mentions Wallace's letter and AGREES THAT NATURAL SELECTION IS THE SAME THING AS SPENCER'S' SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. Despite what the post-war historical revisionism of Darwin says, he, himself is the definitive refutation of that attempt to distance natural selection from Social Darwinism.
That "natural selection" has undergone huge and fundamental and continuing changes is certainly something that would point to problems with the idea as a complete force or mechanism of evolution. I started out, about nine years ago, a totally conventional Darwinist, accepting natural selection out of having been taught that for my entire schooling. It wasn't until I looked at it, very hard, its history, its meaning(s) etc. talking with conventional biologists who will define it in many ways, one of the more intelligent of those, somehow, including genetic drift into the mix, that I started to think that natural selection, far from a theory, was more of a dogmatic holding, a required framing of issues and statements, one which contained so many internal contradictions (of the kind I've talked about here today) and which forced so many disastrous conclusions, eugenics, scientific racism, etc. with such horrible results in human history, that I think it is one of the worst ideas generated in the history of human culture.
DeleteI don't know if Mendel sent his paper to Wallace, I have read that it was sent to Darwin and, though Darwin could read German - as his citations of Haeckel and his correspondence with Haeckel and other Germans prove - he didn't read it. I wonder if that could be because the author was a Catholic priest, one of the reasons I think its acceptance was so slow in Darwin's circle. Which is interesting in itself because with out particulate inheritance natural selection could not possibly work, something that none of the Darwin inner-circle seemed to notice as they pushed other schemes of inheritance. Rupert Sheldrake has recently pointed out that the emergence of epigentic inheritance as a factor overturns a lot of the biological dogma as taught to our age cohort (I'm almost his age). I would like to read some competent analysis of what it does to classical natural selection. Even before then Lynn Margulis and others declared the end of the Darwinian Synthesis which had kept natural selection alive and was sort of its (perhaps prematurely declared) final triumph. I think things are a lot less settled than people are allowed to admit. Which does nothing to the fact that evolution is a fact, it does, though, make anything said about it in detail far more open to considered contingent and likely to be overturned. Which should lead to the opposite of the dogmatic confidence and arrogance of so many of those within science, Jerry Coyne, perhaps, being the most extreme of examples of that.
But, as I said, I don't think the question of intelligent design of the universe, of life, etc. can be a question of science, I don't think science can honestly have anything to say about it for or against. Scientists should keep their atheism out of science even as religious folk who are scientists honestly keep their religion out of it. Only atheism has been repeatedly inserted into science with total, though, often, temporary success.
I apologize for missing the asterisk indicating that your tangent concerning Wallace was a footnote to an earlier passage. Still, your comment here does not really address what I wrote.
DeleteDarwin was one individual. He turned the world on to the possibility of some particular mechanism to explain evolution, but it's the test of time and much more extensive investigation that shapes how we understand evolution today. He and Wallace are lauded because much of what they suggested still holds true. Still, they missed many details, and their ideas were refined and expanded by others well after they had died. I prefer to talk about evolution as it is understood today, rather than how Darwin understood it. As I said, it's best described as a shift within a gene pool in the frequency of a gene relative to its alleles across generations, due to particular ecological constraints (which themselves shift over time and place). Darwin could not possibly have explained it like that, and so he did the best that he could. For him, domestication offered a wonderfully metaphor for his mechanism, while also serving as a sort of experimental way to carry on what he found tends to go on in the natural world.
Darwin did not propose this idea in order to counter the claim of divine creation, though his ideas do go against certain specific interpretations of the created world: the seven day creation, for instance. It's not science itself that attacks religion; instead, it's certain religious people who do not want to adapt their specific religious vision in to new evidence that goes against certain claims and assumptions (Or, it's certain scientists who have either grown cocky and condescending or frustrated beyond reason toward the more dogmatic and ignorant religious). I'm all for religious interpretations of the world, as long as the interpretations aren't afraid of new information and new discoveries forcing us to change how we understand the world.
To redefine natural selection in the way you want to is hardly a new thing, it's been being redefined since the first decade after it was published, as Wallace's objection and Darwin's response to it shows. It has had so many variant interpretations, so many conflicting and contradictory shadings and even framings that I think it must be one of the most unstable major ideas ever held to be "the greatest idea ever". That's an actual phrase I've heard for decades. To try to include things like genetic drift, which isn't "selection" of any trait but a mere result of random conditions that are unrelated to what survives but which determines what predominates as a percentage is something of an ultimate in absurdity. Either "selection" means something or the term is merely a empty slogan. It is, obviously, entirely removed from the concept as held by Charles Darwin and every one of his inner circle, not to mention generations of Darwinists up to and including today's ultra-adaptationists who believe they can create a history and even genes and the products of genes out of nothing, whatsoever, except tales of natural selection.
DeleteDarwin may not have explicitly said that his idea counters the idea of divine creation but his earliest followers, those he, himself, endorsed more highly than any other exponents of his ideas did, especially Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel, both of whom explicitly cited natural selection as an inspiration in that area (Galton) and as the "final triumph" of materialist monism (Haeckel). In both cases they set in motion two streams of eugenic activity which had the most appalling results which were totally in line with the expression of those two writers. Galton, immediately, used Natural Selection to crown his ethnicity and his class as the peak of natural selection and, not so tacitly, the rightful holders of power and wealth. Haeckel declared that it entirely overturned all previous holdings of morality and began advocating the killing of those he deemed "unfit" and began marking specific, named, ethinic groups for death, an idea which, by the way, Darwin endorsed, specifically, in The Descent of Man citing Haeckel and Galton with the highest of praise.
I have to say that I am ever more skeptical that natural selection has, actually, had the remarkable endurance credited to it, I see it, ever more, as a dogmatically required framing, something which must be asserted or the person will not be able to sustain a career in science or any kind of reputation. I strongly suspect it has inhibited more ideas than it has produced. The extent to which it is a merely conventional framing is, as well, shown by the success of such totally bogus innovations as evolutionary psychology, which violate the very foundations of science in the creation of myth in place of observation.
"Natural selection" is term used to denote the means by which evolution occurs across the generations. This is the non-random proliferation (statistically speaking) of certain genes within a gene pool given certain environmental constraints. Darwin focused on the instances that are easier to observe and understand, those related to survival, mating, etc. But scientists have since discovered that gene proliferation can also sometimes occur without relating to environmental constraints. The mutations of course would not be maladaptive, but they don't alter the phenotype relative to its alleles. Yet, due to chance, it sometimes happens that they proliferate. It's not a common phenomenon, but across deep geological time, such statistical anomalies should be expected.
ReplyDeleteI should also stress that, with the exception of random drift, natural selection (i.e., gene frequency shifts) is not a random process. Hopefully you are familiar with dynamical systems, and chaos theory. These are very useful models to understand various natural phenomena, such as weather, crystallization processes. Chaotic dynamical systems are not random; they are deterministic, but at the same time, they are not predictable. Natural selection is often thought of as a chaotic system; far from random, but unguided and unpredictable as they progress.
I have heard your accusations of Darwin's support of eugenics before, and before I asked you to cite one historian who has not been discredited who holds such a view. Sure, he praised Galton and Haeckel; they had some good ideas. That does not mean that he endorsed eugenics policies. Please point me to a mainstream scholar who holds your view there.
I gave more than enough evidence from Darwin's own published words, his letters, the testimony of those who knew him, including his own children to support my contention that he supported eugenics. Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel credited him as the inspiration of their works, WHICH DARWIN CITED AS SCIENCE OF THE HIGHEST RELIABILITY. I documented that he endorsed others such as W. R. Gregg, sometimes called the co-founder of eugenics. There is no question but that he supported the early eugenic writings of his own son George Darwin who he, himself, credited with recommending Galton's first book of eugenic theory, Hereditary Genius, to him in a letter to Galton, which Galton published in his memoir.
DeleteNo historian who tries to distance Darwin from eugenics has the standing of those people who tied him to it, Galton citing him as his inspiration and documenting Darwin's support for his eugenics, Leonard Darwin who, repeatedly, over at least three decades, said that he was carrying on his father's work through his involvement with eugenics and who, in April 1939 credited his father with inspiring the founder of formal eugenics in Germany, Wilhelm Schallmayer. Francis Darwin notes his fathers' support for his brother George's eugenics and, also, the fact that his father endorsed Haeckel's interpretation of natural selection. No historian has the standing of any of those people who knew Charles Darwin as a scientist, as a colleague, as a friend and as a father. I would like you to cite a single person who knew Charles Darwin who distanced him from eugenics. I have made that challenge for at least the past five years, here and elsewhere, to people who claimed expertise in the matter and not a single one of them has been able to produce one person who knew him who did that. Not to mention someone who knew him as intimately as his own children.
As I said, Galton and Haeckel both had some good ideas. The idea that human traits could have hereditary roots is accepted by every biologist today. True, Darwin spoke frankly about the weak and ill of society as working against the workings of natural selection, which would surely weed out the weaker individuals. But on the actual support of interventionist policies for human procreation, Darwin stated that he was not for this, because of the importance he held for human compassion and charity.
DeleteI note that you can't produce a single person who knew Darwin who contradicts his sons, Leonard and Francis who both said that their father supported eugenics and that their involvement with it was a continuation of his work. You don't produce anyone who contradicts Francis Darwin when he said his father supported the eugenics writings of George Darwin. You don't produce anyone to counter Francis Galton who knew Darwin and who both credited natural selection as his inspiration and who, as well, noted and documented Charles Darwin's support of his first major work in eugenics, Hereditary Genius. You don't produce anyone who can explain away the many passages of eugenic assertion in Charles Darwin's own The Descent of Man, praising the earliest book and magazine articles which Galton said were the first in his line of eugenics works as reliable science, the massively eugenic and quite depraved Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte of Ernst Haeckel, which he praised in even higher terms, endorsing ideas contained in it for the killing of the disabled, infanticide, and the anticipation of the extinction of entire racial groups as a boon for the surviving human population. If you doubt that's true, I dare you to read it.
DeleteI am entirely familiar with the oft quote-mined passage from the Descent of Man you refer to, which is about as pure a specimen of hypocritical double speak as has ever been penned. Here is where I analyzed it.
http://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/2013/02/darwins-self-provided-escape-clause-in.html
Well, this is nothing I can add without taking some time for research. I should note that your blog entry above seems to take umbrage at Darwin's language, but you seem to use a modern standard without thinking about the time of writing. Victorian writing sometimes sounds, well, "savage" to our ears, but Darwin's writing was not special in that respect. Just as the scriptures of the Bible are marked by the limits of antiquity, so Darwin's outlook and language reflect the limits of his culture. This does not in any sense mean that he endorsed the implementation of eugenic reproduction policies. Just because he read and cited Galton, and just because the early eugenicists were directly inspired by Darwin, does not mean that Darwin himself endorsed those policies. This is guilt by association. Where is the actual evidence that he endorsed the policies?
DeleteNo. You don't get to do what you just did. Darwin's "language" isn't what is at issue, what he said is at issue. His assertion that allowing "weaker members", human beings to live long enough to parent children would lead to catastrophe for the entire human species was stated repeatedly in the same book as the passage his champions always cherry pick and almost as frequently edit to cover up what he actually said and elsewhere in the book, in his letters and apparently, if his own children are to be believed, held in his personal life, as well. The sentences from the full paragraph which I gave in the post referenced above, immediately before the passage cherry picked by his supporters, "No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed." were, beyond doubt, the inspiration of his son, Leonard Darwin, asserting that in the future sheep, the beneficiaries of artificial selection, would rightly pity the pathetic remnant of the human species that allowed its "worst animals" to breed which would fall to the scientifically asserted results of allowing them to live. What is left out, of course, is that in a breeding operation animals selected to not breed were marked for early slaughter, something which Charles Darwin and almost certainly Leonard would know as Charles Darwin was a country squire's son who had a scientific interest in animal breeding, as his Origin of Species proves. Those ideas are what are a problem, their assertion as reliable science are a problem, Darwin's contention that outright killing, such as in infanticide and the wiping out of entire, named, racial groups would benefit the species, in general, in the same book as that paragraph is clipped by his champions, those are the problem, not that he wrote like a Victorian. Other Victorians noticed and were horrified by those ideas, Francis Cobbe, named by Darwin in the book, only one of them. She wrote in Victorian English as well, perhaps better than Darwin did.
DeleteOh, sorry, make that Frances Cobbe.
DeleteI really don't find anything wrong with the full passage, unless one is sensitive to certain words like "injurious." Imagine that all humans societies collapsed and all survivors had to return to a very basic hunter-gatherer state without the technology we have now. How well would someone with severe autism do at surviving? Downs Syndrome? Even someone like me, with sensitive skin and almost no athletic prowess? Many people who benefit from modern medicine, technology, and healthcare policies would be wiped out if we returned to "nature red in tooth and claw." Those who would survive would tend to be more robust physically (as well as have certain skills, including social skills). This is what Darwin means by injurious. If traits are only surviving due to certain social conditions (which he actually supports, those of charity), then it wouldn't take much calamity to wipe those traits out via natural selection. His comparison to domesticated animals is a little off, because even robust domesticated animals are shielded from natural selection (what I would call survival related gene frequency shifts) in many ways. Race horses, for instance, can't survive without an extremely rich diet provided by human domesticators. So despite their robustness in certain areas, domestication has brought injurious traits to horses as well.
DeleteIt may be *distasteful* to read Darwin consider human stock as if we were racehorses, but these observations are in fact important for biology. It is actual science. While progressives have been right to point out the importance of environmental factors and opportunities on human development, they minimize the role of heredity. E.O. Wilson has largely been vindicated, and so has Darwin. Humans are living organisms, and the laws of heredity apply to us just as much as they apply to horses.
So which words are the problem? Again, Darwin does not actually endorse policies that were in any way close to the slaughter of invalid racehorses, or the prevention of others from procreating. He merely points out the trade off that civilized society presents: elevated morals and standards of living versus a weakened stock. Surely the soft and pasty Darwin could appreciate that his charge applied to him as well, and less so to the hunter-gatherer tribes he visited across the globe (who he describes as more robust than civilized man)?
There's a difference between writing about a topic that many people find uncomfortable (comparison of inherited traits in humans; breeding trends) and advocating policies that seek to control the bodies of others. You have offered nothing but guilt by association so far.
So many points that could be made, so little time to make them.
DeleteDarwin was making those comments to an audience in Great Britain at the height of the worst of Victorian law concerning the poor, he specifically mentions Work Houses which were, in fact, death houses with food rations that had fewer calories per day than those which were given in prisons. If you look at the lists of deaths of inmates of poor houses, it was not uncommon to find "starvation" as a cause of death, clearly starvation on the diet provided to the inmates as so many of them died of starvation months and even years after they entered the institutions. And that was what Darwin said was a level of charitable aid that left too many of the inmates alive until they were able to produce children. Not to mention he was making those statements in a world where the worst of imperialism was practiced by his "civilised" nations which he, as well, in the same book and elsewhere, he documented including active genocide of those "savages". In his letter to Gaskell I mention, he was obviously rather enthsiastic for that imperialism and what he stated was the inevitable consequence, Brits wiping out the "savages" and replacing them. What he said about named ethnic groups in that regard is ignored in one of the most dishonest acts of post-war historical revisionism. Considering that our reading of The Descent of Man comes after the revelations of the results of German eugenics, that someone could not find what was wrong with it is rather astounding and, I would point out, impeaches the credibility of the ideological background from which that reading is made.
I would point out that E. O. Wilson hasn't exactly been consistent in his assertions, upsetting a large number of others in his Darwinian-fundamentalist circle with his more recent stands, the last time I looked. Assuming the perpetual duration of his "vindication" doesn't look that good of a bet to me. I might repost some pieces I wrote about that in the future, I should go through the long process of indexing my pieces, I suppose.
That anyone who has lived on a farm and seen a breeding operation who would not be disturbed by Darwin's comparison of those animals bred and reared to be used like objects on the basis of utility and monetary value should be entirely discredited, certainly after the history of Darwinism applied to the human species in the first half (and later) in the 20th century. Both in American-Canadian, etc. eugenics and German eugenics and eugenics in other countries. I find your comment to be amazing, though not uncommon among atheists and materialists, a pretty shocking number of whom still endorse eugenics with that history.
You need not be amazed. All I am doing is separating facts from my own preferences. Reading those passages in Descent of course makes me a little queasy, and of course I can acknowledge that ideologues soon jumped on them to justify their poisonous agendas. But I can also recognize that Darwin was merely making observations, and that they were good observations. Not perfect observations, mind you: Galton's ideas of intelligence are now thought to be highly flawed and largely discredited. But they were honest attempts at non-ideological observations on Darwin's part.
DeleteThe fact that you can write a line like "That anyone who has lived on a farm and seen a breeding operation who would not be disturbed by Darwin's comparison of those animals bred and reared to be used like objects on the basis of utility and monetary value should be entirely discredited" shows that you are having difficulty separating facts from ideology. In several ways, actually. You are attributing links to Darwin that he did not actually make (e.g., "we should use humans like objects on the basis of utility and monetary value"), and using the presence of absence of disgust to discredit the factual reliability of a passage. How about this: I am disgusted by Darwin's passage (not his intentions), and yet I find them to be sound observations. They are uncomfortable observations, and they were easily twisted by nationalist ideologues, but that does not make the science less true.
Now, I can agree that I find Darwin's acceptance of imperial "civilized" England as unfortunate, as it glorified exploitation and masked privilege as right. But that was very much the tenor of his day. He wasn't as advanced as William Blake, who wrote almost a hundred years before him, but Darwin was actually ahead of his pack on race relations. Even though he thought of primitive man as not as advanced as civilized man, he endorsed the idea of common humanity (rather than Africans being pre- or sub-human), and pointed out trait advantages savages had that civilized men did not. His link of the exalted white man not just to uncivilized folk but to apes and monkeys scandalized Victorian sensibilities (and continues to scandalize humans today). Though he had a worldview shaped by the elite of imperial England, and educational privileges that stemmed directly from his country's exploitation of weaker nations, Darwin's scientific observations were not ideological.
Basically you're saying: "he was wrong because evil was directly inspired by that line of thinking."
I say he was right, even if evil was directly inspired (in a biased ideological way) by his writings.
"You are attributing links to Darwin that he did not actually make."
DeleteOK, now you're just being dishonest, I quoted just one place where Darwin made that link with no ambiguity or honest denial of that being possible, to repeat what I quoted in the comment above
"No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."
If you doubt that is accurate, go get a copy of The Descent of Man and look it up. As I mention Leonard Darwin, his son, made essentially the same claim in "The Need for Eugenic Reform" the dedication of the book saying of his father what no post-war Darwin revisionist could credibly refute, "For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could toward making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book.”
Neither you nor anyone else who wants to distance Charles Darwin from eugenics has the credibility of his own sons, Leonard, Francis, George, Horace, other members of the Darwin family who actually knew and spoke with Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin's cousin and colleague, the inventor of eugenics, Francis Galton, his other professional friends and colleagues, all of whom did what no one who denied that link ever did do, talk to the man on a continuing and intimate basis. None of you have the credibility to undo what they and Charles Darwin did in endorsing eugenics from his letter congratulating Francis Galton for Hereditary Genius, through his support for George Darwin's early proposals to apply eugenics to human beings through law, his support for the eugenics of W. R. Greg and Ernst Haeckel and his letters and SCIENTIFIC citations of others, as well as in his own statements presented as science.
The entire post-war attempts to separate Charles Darwin from the application of natural selection that eugenics was, in both English speaking and other countries and, especially, in Germany, is a total and absolutely bald-faced lie which is easily disproved by doing something which almost no one who buys that lie has done, read him and his citations, what his children and others who knew him said about the matter. I have probably encouraged more people to read Charles Darwin, in full, along with his citations than almost anyone who has complained about what I've said about the matter. Apparently reading what someone says to find out what he means is too radical an act for the current culture of English language to sustain.
I will answer more of what you said when you retract that statement.
I don't have time to answer fully, but I must note that I did not dispute the link to domesticated animals. I disputed the subsequent interpolation: "therefore Darwin supports a view that we should use humans like objects on the basis of utility and monetary value." That link is your own creation.
DeleteHere is what I actually said:
Delete"That anyone who has lived on a farm and seen a breeding operation who would not be disturbed by Darwin's comparison of those animals bred and reared to be used like objects on the basis of utility and monetary value should be entirely discredited, certainly after the history of Darwinism applied to the human species in the first half (and later) in the 20th century. Both in American-Canadian, etc. eugenics and German eugenics and eugenics in other countries."
Darwin, a country guy who made money out of farming, certainly understood what you clearly don't, animals raised on farms, especially when they are raised for sale as well as for direct use, are evaluated in terms of utility and monetary value, bred and managed, selected for breeding or slaughter, on the basis of maximization of utility and monetary value. He certainly knew that, as I believe is reflected in his own business practices - he considered himself a better investor than he did a scientist - and in his explicit citation of animal breeding, in detail, in his scientific work.
So, again, I didn't make a "subsequent interpolation" I cited the explicit meaning of what Darwin said and the only rational conclusions that someone who, like him, was familiar with life on a farm, would understand as being included in what he said. If you doubt the habits of thought of Victorian British intellectuals in thinking of the poor, the ill, the lame and even the merely unfortunate in terms of utility and monetary value, you've never read much about them. The easiest and most reliable way to inform yourself about that would be to read Mother Country by Marilynne Robinson and then to read what she cites to see that even the most allegedly progressive and even "socialist" of those continually talked of managing the poor in the most appalling manner putting economic efficency over all else, including their dignity and rights, which don't figure at all in most of it. The work houses, the poor-law were considered, in his time, to be progressive, even liberal means of dealing with those people. Just as in the 1920s Leonard Darwin complained that Germans in the Weimar period were too "conservative" to implement eugenics in Germany. That had to wait for the events of 1933 which he claimed six years later had turned German thinking "in the right direction" in the same article I already mentioned. Here it is.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2962339/pdf/eugenrev00235-0042.pdf
Here is the piece I wrote about it, with links to much of what I've mentioned in this comment.
http://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/2013/06/charles-darwin-leonard-darwin-and.html
As it stands, the evidence you have presented is not very incriminating. Did Darwin know eugenicists? Yes. Did he cite them in his work? Yes. Did he praise some of their work? Yes. Were they inspired by him? Yes. Yet none of that means that he supported the enforcement of eugenics policies.
DeleteIt's totally possible that he respected the work of those who became eugenicists, but didn't agree with their zeal to apply their work to policy. Perhaps there is evidence that I'm missing.
Can we at least find agreement on something for the sake of calibration? I hope you're not one of those people who thinks that eugenics is not just horrifically inhumane, but also complete bunk. Say the Nazis had won the war, and they decided to leave some prisoners around for selective breeding experiments. Nightmarish, yes. But do you think that 50 years of selective breeding would not affect the phenotype of this sample in drastic ways? Environment is important for outcome in development, but genes heavily bias an organism toward certain outcomes more than others, and this is true for humans as well as orchids. As creepy as eugenics is, part of its creepiness is that fact that selective breeding for human traits is almost certainly possible, at least for particular traits, and with certain unforeseen trade-offs (due to genes being linked to several traits). The role of heredity in making human beings is an uncomfortable truth, but it is a truth nevertheless. Blank slate theory is more ideologically satisfying for liberals, but the evidence doesn't support it.
Given that Darwin had spent most of his adult life trying to figure out the great puzzle of species (and when his work was combined with Mendel's, I'd say the puzzle was largely solved), it's unsurprising that his focus would eventually turn on implications for the human species. How does heredity affect human nature? Human variation? Since this was largely uncharted territory even when Darwin was 60, it's unsurprising that he would praise and encourage efforts by Galton, Haeckel, and his son to chart the waters. Let's not forget that scientists are still indebted to Galton's statistical techniques. I haven't read Hereditary Genius (and Galton fell prey to the correlation=causation fallacy), but it likely was a joy to read simply for its pioneering descriptive statistics. And it was trying to answer the notion of how heredity affected human nature. If someone had written a pioneering treatise about how Galton underestimated the role of nurture in his reported outcomes, I see no reason why Darwin wouldn't have praised that work too. So far you have not presented any evidence that Darwin's conclusions were ideological, rather than simply curious.
"...through his support for George Darwin's early proposals to apply eugenics to human beings through law."
I must say that this sounds potentially more incriminating than your others forms of evidence. I did a search for this, and I could not find this letter. Do you mind guiding me to a link, or providing what you think are the most damning passages of support?
Okay, so you couched your unfounded interpolation as "the only rational conclusion" someone like Darwin could have made. That's still an unsupported interpolation. Evidence please.
DeleteAre you saying that people raised on farms can't accept Darwin's theory of evolution, can't accept that it applies to humans as well---unless they are eugenicists? Or just Victorian farmers, because they lived in a morally harsher time?
I agree that Darwin's morality was very likely harsher than my own, and that this was largely due to his upbringing in Victorian England. But to jump from there to assuming that he supported eugenic policies does not make sense.
What is weak is your attempt to dismiss responsibility for eugenics to Charles Darwin. I have already given you one enormous reason your present attempt to exonerate him of what I have said cannot stand, his sons. 1. George Darwin's article "On benefical restriction to liberty of marriage," which Charles Darwin supported WAS a call for the implementation of eugenics through the law, requiring the annulling of marriages if one of the spouses was declared insane, no matter what the couple wanted. It went so far as to say that if the person recovered the marriage couldn't be resumed. 2. Haeckel's book.Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte, which Darwin repeatedly endorsed in The Descent of Man was full of calls to implement the most extreme of eugenics provisions, including assertions that practicing infanticide and the murder of the disabled would have beneficial and even "humane" effects, 3. The very passage in The Descent of Man which is always pulled out of context by Darwin's defenders is immediately preceded by complains that everything that keeps alive the "weaker members" of the human population risks biological catastrophe, mentioning a number of public policies, including, as I mentioned the policies of the harshest version of the Poor Laws, after they were revised to the New Poor Law and the work houses, to such things as the provision of medical aid and vaccination. 4. Leonard Darwin and Darwin's other children who were involved in organized eugenics all saw their agitation for eugenics laws as continuing their fathers work, as I pointed out Leonard Darwin, on at least three occasions said exactly that. Your attempt at exoneration of THEIR FATHER from being associated with eugenics is nothing compared to that testimony. That is a tie which binds as absolutely as can be.
DeleteThe affair over George Darwin's eugenics proposals shows an especially unattractive side of his father, who mostly went after George's critics, working through others, such as Thomas Huxley - his attack dog - and others.
Darwin's revisions to the Origin eventually compromised it, so keen was he to respond to critics. Not only did he defend, he attacked. It is hard to know which to admire more, the skill with which he and his band of disciples went about preparing the ground for the Origin (shrewdly distributing advance copies to potential opponents, for example) or the zeal with which they all, after publication, set about savaging (not always fairly) the critics. Although we are familiar with Huxley's role as Darwin's bulldog, Darwin was quite capable of being his own rottweiler. When a paper by his son Francis was rejected by the Royal Society, Darwin ruthlessly counterattacked in Nature. In 1873, St. George Mivart got into a spat with Darwin's son George over a sort of proto-eugenics. Darwin nearly went to court on behalf of George (who was in the wrong) and later blackballed Mivart for membership in the Athenaeum.
Keith Thomson: American Scientist, Jan.-Feb., 2003
I found St. George Mivert a bit interesting in that he, as I was, was convinced of natural selection, one of its earliest converts. He attended a series of lectures that Thomas Huxley gave on it and found, as I did, that the more he learned about it, the less convincing it was to him. I doubt that the basis of our doubts would be the same, a lot of history happened between the two, but I could understand how that could happen.
DeleteHad Darwin not said that things like the work houses, vaccination, providing medical care. etc to the underclass were keeping too many of them alive, if he had not been enthusiastic for the salubrious effects of infanticide, the deaths of the disabled, the anticipated extinction of entire ethnic and racial groups, if he had not fully endorsed Haeckel's book, Galtons book, his son's article, and if he had, once, expressed reservations over any of them, you might have something of a case - though it would still fail due to the testimony of his own children. But that's not what happened. As it is, every single aspect of applied eugenics cited natural selection as the reasoning behind it, his reading of Darwin supplied Holmes with his reason for issuing the Buck vs. Bell decision, he was repeatedly cited by such eugenics activists as Paul Popenoe, in textbooks written by people like him, and, as Leonard Darwin pointed out, by German eugenicists, up to and including Lenz, Baur and Fischer who Hitler read as he was writing Mein Kampf,
The entire post-war eugenics-free Charles Darwin is one of the biggest and most successful campaigns of selling a purposefully false history of the man and eugenics. I could find not a single denial of his role in eugenics or his ties to it made by anyone before World War Two. Even after that, his grandson, George's son, Charles Galton Darwin was writing in favor of eugenics, predicting the same disasters his grandfather was.
I didn't have to construct the case that ties Darwin to eugenics, absolutely, his family did that, starting with those who knew him best, his own children.
Okay, so you couched your unfounded interpolation as "the only rational conclusion" someone like Darwin could have made. That's still an unsupported interpolation. Evidence please.
DeleteAre you saying that people raised on farms can't accept Darwin's theory of evolution, can't accept that it applies to humans as well---unless they are eugenicists? Or just Victorian farmers, because they lived in a morally harsher time?
That's a ridiculous spin to put on what I said. You are getting down to the stage of desperately clutching at straws, one that I'm very familiar with as it is generally reached by the bitter enders for the phony post-war, eugenics-free Charles Darwin. That no one could rationally not understand what he was saying when he predicted allowing the "weaker members" of the human species to live long enough to have children would be a disaster, when he decried aid being given to them that would keep them alive long enough to have children, IN A BOOK PURPORTED TO HAVE THE RELIABILITY OF SCIENCE is made obvious in the fact that others cited what he said in support of eugenics policies, from the most extreme down to advocating compulsory use of birth control such as Gaskell's proposal. That Charles Darwin explicitly rejected birth control, in the face of Gaskell pointing out that Darwin's own alternative was the deaths of those "weaker members" in a struggle for existence is as plain as his own words in his response to Gaskell. I believe I provided a link to that, if not I will post the index to those pieces tomorrow.
I will repeat, that though I looked for a single case of anyone who knew the man denying his support for eugenics I never found one, I never found anyone in the pre-WWII period who did and only found those who distanced him from eugenics in the post-war period, none of whom had ever met the man or known him. Of course, if any had denied that in the pre-war period, their assertion would have had to meet that of people who did know him, such as his own son, Leonard Darwin who lived into the war years. And, then, there is his grandson who I just mentioned who lived till well after the war, I believe making those predictions reflecting his grandfathers into the 1960s. By that time a new generation of post-war eugenicists was coming into its own, such figures as William Shockley, Arthur Jensen and Francis Crick. It's remarkable how, even as people assert that everyone believes eugenics to be pseudo-science, how many scientists still support the idea, always based in assertions of natural selection being impeded by civilization and undesirables having children.
If you were to make the case/charge that Charles Darwin did not properly distance himself from eugenics, did not admonish those he knew who advanced those policies, I can agree with that. His sympathy for the unfortunate was not deep enough to be strongly disgusted with such talk and endeavors. On this we can agree.
DeleteBut this is different from making a case that Darwin actively advocated those policies. Tolerating is very different from advocating. Praising those who advocate something is different from advocating that thing yourself, especially when you include a word of caution against actually implementing the policies (what you call his "life jacket"). Perhaps he can be damned for his indifference, yet even this is much less egregious than, say, Carl Jung's fearful silence while his Jewish colleagues were taken away by the Nazis. At that time, there was a clear and present danger. In Darwin's time, they were new ideas being proposed. And as the article you quoted indicates, Darwin's reasoning was perhaps at a disadvantage due to his seclusion in the countryside. Worthy of note, especially because it's wrong to deify (i.e, whitewash) even an admirable human. But not damning in the way you seem to think.
However, the leap from Darwin and Wallace's work on natural selection to this concerted effort to shape national gene pools should serve as a general warning about quickly taking scientific findings into policies, particularly when there's a clear ideological motivation to do so. It was a scary time. Darwin's word of caution about compassion and the noblest parts of our nature still ring true.
You're refusing to face the fact that Darwin endorsed Haeckel, fully, repeatedly and endowed what he said with the highest endorsement and credibility, the same with Galton's writings, his son Georges'. He carried on correspondence with all or the originators of eugenics and a number of others in the earliest generation to promote the idea. He and his theory of natural selection was, known to him, to be the central idea of eugenics, he, himself stated the premise of eugenics as a hard fact of science in The Descent of Man. Also in The Descent of Man he acknowledged the implications of natural selection for the policies of societies and governments. He discussed the organized genocide of the Tasmanian population by the British in his time in the most disgustingly dispassionate of terms, as if it were an event of nature instead of an matter of official policy. He was enthusiastic for British imperialism discussed in passages in which he presented the extermination of native populations as an expression of natural selection in real life. Those were things that he noted were happening as he was writing his science.
DeleteGiven the rest of his words, his words about compassion and the noblest parts of our nature ring empty and hollow. Which you would know if you bothered to read them, I encourage you to do so, fully and completely and to look at the things he endorses which fully support my reading of Darwin, not your assertions.
You're refusing to face the fact that Darwin endorsed Haeckel, fully, repeatedly and endowed what he said with the highest endorsement and credibility, the same with Galton's writings, his son Georges'. He carried on correspondence with all or the originators of eugenics and a number of others in the earliest generation to promote the idea. He and his theory of natural selection was, known to him, to be the central idea of eugenics, he, himself stated the premise of eugenics as a hard fact of science in The Descent of Man. Also in The Descent of Man he acknowledged the implications of natural selection for the policies of societies and governments. He discussed the organized genocide of the Tasmanian population by the British in his time in the most disgustingly dispassionate of terms, as if it were an event of nature instead of an matter of official policy. He was enthusiastic for British imperialism discussed in passages in which he presented the extermination of native populations as an expression of natural selection in real life. Those were things that he noted were happening as he was writing his science.
DeleteGiven the rest of his words, his words about compassion and the noblest parts of our nature ring empty and hollow. Which you would know if you bothered to read them, I encourage you to do so, fully and completely and to look at the things he endorses which fully support my reading of Darwin, not your assertions.
I have read The Descent of Man. Just because I disagree with your conclusions, you assume the worst of me: ignorant, dishonest, or possibly actually endorsing evil policies. No, I just disagree with your conclusions. I also note that you again cite as evil Darwin's "dispassionate of terms," which you find disgusting. Reading about this stuff in dispassionate terms can be hard for us to do, but it's not evidence that he supported eugenic policies. For one, it's expected to be dispassionate in scientific writings. Actually, this "talking about difficult topics in an insufficiently sympathetic tone" charge has recently been leveled against a Planned Parenthood worker, which is another example of professional talk being interpreted as callous and psychopathic. Not only was he trying to write dispassionate observations, he was also a product of his time. I can agree that he probably had less sympathy toward colonial atrocities than I do, but I can't say that he was evil because of it. And I certainly can't leap to the conclusion that he supported certain policies, even if he praised the works of certain people who did.
DeleteSorry. Despite your charges and insults. We simply disagree here.
No one who honestly read The Descent of Man could possibly have the interpretation of it you have made. Darwin was writing a book which he and his readers would take as having the reliability of science, quoting Haeckel, Galton, Greg, and others as having the reliability of science, hard science, it is impossible to believe that he ever meant what he said in it wasn't to be taken as hard science.
DeleteYour comment about Planned Parenthood is rendered ironic because Charles Darwin was an opponent of birth control. When Charles Bradlaugh. the foremost atheist in Britain and Annie Besant were arrested for distributing birth control information, Bradlaugh asked Darwin to testify in their defense, his answer included:
"I have not seen the book in question but for notices in the newspaper. I suppose that it refers to means to prevent conception. If so I should be forced to express in court a very decided opinion in opposition to you & Mrs. Besant…I believe that any such practices would in time lead to unsournd women & would destroy chastity, on which the family bond depends; & the weakening of this bond would be the greatest of all possible evils to mankind."
[To Charles Bradlaugh, 6 June 1877, Darwin manuscript collection, #202, partly printed in Charles Bradlaugh: a record of his life and work, by Hypatia B. Bradlaugh, 2nd ed. 2 vols. London, 1894.
Everyone is a product of their time. Including the theorists of Nazi racial theory, even the people who level those accusations against Planned Parenthood, today. But that's one of the claims of those who support science, that scientific method is supposed to limit the extent to which those kinds of biases are introduced into the content of science. It is especially ironic in the context of this discussion because trying to admit the presence of such bias in science as a way to not misunderstand what it produces was where this began. If you remember I was the one who pointed out that natural selection was, beyond any question, the product of such biases based in both the introduction of the assumptions of the British class system into evolutionary science as well as the general fact that it was impossible to separate out the fact that science is done by intentional design.
Perhaps science should stop being pretended to have achieved the level of objective reality that it is generally asserted to have, though I think, outside of conventional physics and chemistry that was always way oversold. Physics, since the early 20th century has had to admit that such factors were an inescapable consideration, though the old-fashioned, 19th century habits of thought are neither abandoned nor refused even by scientists who should know better. The pleasures of that kind of unrealistic ideal view of science and scientists have been too seductive to most scientists. The myth of St. Charles Darwin is built on such junk.
You distorted the intent of my comment. I did not say that the science of Descent of Man was compromised by the bias of the time; I said that the dispassionate tone that you find disgusting reflected to some extent a bias of the time. The Descent of Man is to a large extent speculative, and not all of its speculation has endured the test of time, but it is nevertheless still considered by scientists to be a serious work of science.
DeleteIt is you who seems to hold an unrealistic ideal for science, for natural selection, and for Charles Darwin. Ideals that simply cannot exist, and so are easy to attack. Even a zealot like Richard Dawkins is happy to go into complications, complexities, or unknowns with regard to evolutionary biology, or the limitations of the scientific method. No one thinks that any scientific theory, no matter how lauded or well supported, is some immutable Platonic entity. Gray areas and complications should be expected. And while many people look up to Darwin, I certainly do, most of us can admit and appreciate that he was a fallible human who had quirks, flaws, and limitations that complicate any hagiography one might make of him (though perhaps Dawkins would not go there).
I should add that I fully agree with Wallace that the term "natural selection" should be abandoned for something with less metaphorical baggage. The fact that you can say "either selection means something or it does not" suggests to me that the metaphor is a stumbling block rather than something that illuminates. If the mechanism of evolution is instead understood as a statistical tendency for certain genes in a gene to proliferate across generations relative to its alleles given certain environmental constraints, then the occasional instance of random genetic drift doesn't sound as surprising.
ReplyDeleteWell, that damage was well and truly done by 1870 and I wonder if natural selection would have had the persuasive power it did if he hadn't used that term.
DeleteI suspect that just as genetic drift was discovered and, as I've heard asserted a number of times, it is actually a very powerful driver of change instead of a mere afterthought, there are probably many, many other factors other than natural selection that are part of the way in which species come about and other species die off. If those might be discovered faster if the hegemony that natural selection has held over biology can't be known, though I suspect that's the case. Suzanna Varmuza wrote an interesting paper about that a number of years back, I don't know if it's still available online.
You distorted the intent of my comment. I did not say that the science of Descent of Man was compromised by the bias of the time; I said that the dispassionate tone that you find disgusting reflected to some extent a bias of the time. The Descent of Man is to a large extent speculative, and not all of its speculation has endured the test of time, but it is nevertheless still considered by scientists to be a serious work of science.
ReplyDeleteHis presentation of the intentional genocide of an entire population in dispassionate terms, presenting it as if it were an act of nature instead of human intention doesn't really lend itself to being excused as a matter of Victorian British conventional expression. He certainly didn't use a pose of objective removal when he was discussing the danger that the underclass living till they were of child bearing age in describing what he contended would be a disaster.
It is you who seems to hold an unrealistic ideal for science, for natural selection, and for Charles Darwin. Ideals that simply cannot exist, and so are easy to attack.
Give me a break, you try saying what I have here and see how easy it is to say it. You will be attacked, repeatedly, what you said lied about, you will be vilified as being a creationist and have implications that you are everything from a Republican to an enemy of Planned Parenthood made against you. I did it because I don't have anything to lose, I'm self-employed in a field outside of science which isn't reliant on observing the ban on saying these things in polite university educated society.
Even a zealot like Richard Dawkins is happy to go into complications, complexities, or unknowns with regard to evolutionary biology, or the limitations of the scientific method. No one thinks that any scientific theory, no matter how lauded or well supported, is some immutable Platonic entity. Gray areas and complications should be expected. And while many people look up to Darwin, I certainly do, most of us can admit and appreciate that he was a fallible human who had quirks, flaws, and limitations that complicate any hagiography one might make of him (though perhaps Dawkins would not go there).
Nonsense.
Well, while I thoroughly disagree with your take here, I do have at least have some understanding for your situation, because that's exactly how I feel about New Testament (but not Old Testament) scholarship. Make of that what you will.
ReplyDeleteThe field of New Testament scholarship is a rather large one, you'd have to be more specific before I'd know what you meant.
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