Uh, no, I didn't misrepresent Charles Darwin, as anyone who bothered to read what he said would know. Darwin was a firm believer in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, he was far more Lamarckian than anyone taught from many if not all English language biology textbooks in the post-war era would have been led to believe. He repeatedly advanced a belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, something which those studying the relatively recent advances in the study of epigenetic inheritance are both coming to realize and to promote. In his The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication Darwin, later editions of Origin of Species, The Descent of man, he expanded, greatly on his promotion of the idea of inherited characteristics. He made no secret of that belief. So many of his major promoters and their dupes, today, believe firmly that he shared their post-1930s faith in the neo-Darwinian synthesis that, among other things, depends on knowledge that Darwin never had or probably could imagine. A reading of him which included more than the first edition of On the Origin of Species and Voyage of the Beagle would have disabused them of their foolish belief in a neo-synthesis Darwin as well as a eugenics-free Darwin. I strongly suspect that at least a few of Darwin's greatest popular promoters among academics may not have even read that much of his work, including at least one or two names that would be on the tongue of virtually every one of you true believers in the cult of St. Charles Darwin.
The extreme view of the universal explanatory power of the natural selection of genetically inherited traits that is the common currency in the college educated American and, I would imagine Brit, Canadian, Australian... and which also is the common belief of journalism, is a product of ideological faith and wishful thinking in the completeness of their knowledge among some rapidly aging scientists and the power of the popular presentation of science by the publishing industry and science journalism. It's not something that even someone as critical of ol' Chuck and as skeptical of his version of natural selection as I am would honestly blame on him.
The truth is that Charles Darwin not only didn't hold with the current commonly held model of natural selection, the latest model of the neo-Darwinian synthesis of natural selection with genetics, he couldn't have because he didn't have major portions of the substance of it. No one did during his lifetime, that is the product of the information available to later generations of Darwinists. Natural selection - which is his real claim to fame - not as some of you seem to believe as "the discoverer of evolution" - has had to be propped up continually and modified into forms which I doubt he could recognize.
Natural Selection is really not much like the laws of physics or even chemistry, I don't think it is a good idea to promote it as if it were. At best it is a conventional and agreed to framing of phenomena that don't fit into it without constantly bending the theory to fit them in. Quite often, and worst of all, it has been a rule for the creation of stories and lore and even myths to promote both the theory and the desires of those making up those fictions. That is why as conventional a Darwinist Stephen Jay Gould called what they produced "Just-so stories". The fact is that is what virtually all of natural selection is, the invention of scenarios of past events which not only haven't been but never will be observed at even the crudest levels of resolution.
As I noted in the series of pieces I wrote, previous generations of Darwinists, including his closest scientific colleagues, his children, etc. who actually knew the man had a far different view of him than that which is permitted to be articulated among the college educated English speaking people. Their view of him included his eugenics promotion and advocacy, the only difference between those who knew him and many of us, today, was their full belief in and liking of the ideas of class, ethnic and racial superiority which he incorporated into his science and which are, in fact, the basis of his adoption of Malthusian explanations of life and death and their effects on the changes in species over time. Eugenics was a product of class prejudice far more than it was a dispassionate and disinterested investigation into possible means by which species evolved. I believe the reason it was so extensively adopted was because it was the product of a shared faith in the merited superiority of the rich and privileged as a natural instead of an entirely artificial phenomenon. That is the class which has had control of science, the law, government and virtually every other organ of power in even quasi-democratic countries. That is the class which determines which ideas will be supported and made reputable, no matter how ill-considered or ill-founded or not.
Science, no more than most other human institutions, has not been removed from that fact of life. You have to go to the few institutions and entities which resist those class based economic interests to even begin to escape that kind of control and they are not the ones held to be estimable by those who enjoy the results of inequality. And they will be found more among individual entities than among institutions, most of them quite free of the burden of high esteem among the rich, the powerful and those who aspire after that status. But I'm trying to limit the number of posts relying on Walter Brueggemann, James Cone, etc. and the prophetic tradition to no more than three a week. As I've also learned in the past ten years, a radical-liberal political blogger could post about them seven days a week and never run out of relevant material. It's no wonder that the most dishonest and extreme of neo-Darwinists have played such a major role in lying about religion and it's got a whole lot more to do with class and social ranking than it does with science.
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