Yes, I guess I am accusing the four authors of that paper, Does Science Education Need the History of Science?, Graeme Gooday, John M. Lynch, Kenneth G. Wilson, and Constance K. Barsky of either complete incompetence or outright lying. If it is the first they were incompetent to make their arguments by not having read The Descent of Man, other writings of Charles Darwin in which he explicitly states, endorses and promotes the idea of the deaths of individuals and even entire ethnic groups, through violence, even, as beneficial for the murdering survivors. No one who read him on that topic could possibly miss those claims made in that book and elsewhere by Charles Darwin, doing so on the basis of his theory of Natural Selection. They also would have had to be incompetent through their not checking his many glowing citations of Ernst Haeckel who, even more explicitly, made the same arguments, cited by Darwin in Descent of Man, and other Germans who were either in contact with Darwin or who it is known - BY HIS OWN CITATIONS - that Darwin read. I still believe he invented a citation of Hermann Schaaffhausen, claiming him in support of the idea that the extinction of a large number of human groups - certainly in the minds of Darwin's Victorian readers, groups of dark skinned people - would be a boon for the survivors. I have had the challenge out for several years, for someone to point out what Schaaffhausen said that constitutes that infamous citation in The Descent of Man and no one has been able to refute my conclusion that Darwin made it up.
Either those four scholars, published in the reviewed journal Focus-ISIS 99:2 (2008) were ignorant of the very material that constitutes the basis of any argument for the relationship of Darwinism to the particularly murderous Nazi eugenics- indeed all of eugenics - or they would have had to be lying about what they knew. They would certainly have had to be ignorant of his short correspondence with the eugenicist and advocate of birth-control G. A. Gaskell in which Gaskell proves he has understood what Darwin said in The Descent of Man and points out that the only alternative to birth control for those they both deemed a threat to the human species through their having children was their violent destruction as explicitly stated by Darwin and Haeckel in passages Darwin cited.
The weak in body or mind may be cared for and protected so long as they conform to the social mandate not to continue their race. They may, to use Professor Mantegazza's* words, "love, but must not have offspring."
In conclusion, I submit, the birth of the fittest offers a much milder solution of the population difficulty, than the survival of the fittest and the destruction of the weak.
Even with that explicitly being pointed out to him, Darwin not only rejected birth control because he believed it would lead to women enjoying sex outside of marriage, he also explicitly articulated essentially the idea that the future of the world belonged to the biologically superior Brits and those closely related to them.
Suppose that such checks had been in action during the last two or three centuries, or even for a shorter time in Britain, what a difference it would have made in the world, when we consider America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa ! No words can exaggerate the importance, in my opinion, of our colonization for the future history of the world.
If it were universally known that the birth of children could be prevented, and this was not thought immoral by married persons, would there not be great danger of extreme profligacy amongst unmarried women, and might we not become like to "arreois" societies in the Pacific?
In the course of a century, France will tell us the result in many ways. We can already see that the French nation does not spread or increase much.
Those who have read what he had to say in Descent of Man about such things as the extermination by the British of the inhabitants of Tasmania and other islands and even continents, it is inescapable that he was saying he was in favor of the white Brits wiping out entire ethnic groups through violence instead of even doing it by preventing them from having children. How exactly that is supposed to differ from the Nazi idea of Lebensraum, versions of which were already, by that time, circulating among German speaking Darwinists, using arguments derived from Natural Selection, would have to be based on the fact that Darwin's succeeding populations would speak English instead of German. Otherwise, it's essentially the same claim. He would, apparently, exclude the French who were insufficiently imperialistic to suit him. I would suspect that Belgium under Leopold II in central Africa would be more in line with his idea of biological progress, though perhaps not, since they spoke French as they murdered millions. How the crimes of the Belgians in Africa would differ from what Darwin explicitly envisioned as a mechanism of biological progress for the human species is something I'd love to hear his apologists explain.
That the claims made in that paper could be made by four academics at credible universities and could pass peer review is, to me, incredible. That is especially true if they had read those two papers by Richard Weikart that I cited yesterday, both of which were written before that article was written. To conflate his work with the controversy over Haeckel's embryo picture is an act of either complete ignorance of Weikart's writing or outright misrepresentation of it. Weikart may have provided me with reasons to disagree with him but it's not on the basis of his scholarship in his own area of expertise. Though that area which he has chosen was bound to earn him that kind of dishonest misrepresentation because the Darwin constructed after the crimes of the Nazis were revealed is a widely agreed to fraud which has become a required article of faith among the academic community.
You don't have to be a creationist* to not lie about what Darwin, Haeckel, Muller, Fick, Ploetz, Shallmeyer, Fischer, Lenz, etc. said. You can be someone who accepts the reality of evolution, though, as I have found, the more I read about it, not necessarily believing that Natural Selection is a particularly good explanation of how evolution happened. I started out reading about this more than a decade ago convinced of the reality of Natural Selection, I don't even believe it exits, now. Whatever explanations there are for the enormous phenomenon we define as being evolution, I doubt there will ever be one real overriding "thing" that will explain it. While I disagree with Karl Marx on much, almost everything, in fact, I do agree with his observation that, though he deemed it useful for promoting materialism, what Darwin had done is impose the British class system as a law of nature.
* Note: I think it's really unfortunate that the idea of "intelligent design" has been conflated with Creationism. You can be totally convinced of the reality of evolution while believing in intelligent design, The entirely conventional believer in evolution and natural selection, Theodosius Dobzhansky, with credentials as good as any, declared
It is wrong to hold creation and evolution as mutually exclusive alternatives. I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way.
The conflation of that belief with the naive faith in the literal truth of the King James translation of the beginning of Genesis isn't especially honest or useful, except to those who want to make science into an ideological weapon of atheism.
I got into this for other reasons, I've gone into that over and over again. I started looking for the refutation that Darwin would have provided to show he was not responsible for eugenics and found, immediately upon reading what he said on the topic, that article of faith I'd been sold during my entire education was a flat out and obvious lie. That it was a lie became more obvious the more I followed up on Darwin's citations in The Descent of Man and began reading entire letters in his correspondence instead of the Darwin industry cherry-picked and distorted excerpts. The fact that Darwin was in eugenics of the worst sort up to the top of his head and over was confirmed by what his children, his friends and associates said about him and his thinking, it was confirmed by the arguments made by eugenicists in English AND IN GERMAN who all, unsurprisingly, gave natural selection as the basis of their advocacy for everything from coerced and then forced sterilization and, as a final resort, killing people. As seen in the correspondence mentioned above, Darwin obviously rejected the more "moderate" means of doing that, even when the only alternative he, himself, gave was violent and deadly and genocidal struggle for existence.
I got into this as a supporter of American style liberalism and a conventional believer in evolution, I remain a believer in evolution, though a total skeptic of Natural Selection and an even more convinced and, I think, clearer advocate of American liberalism. Darwin and his inner circle were certainly not liberals in the traditional American use of the word. You can't be a believer in egalitarian democracy and a eugenicist and you can't be an American liberal without believing in egalitarian democracy. Any confusion on that point can only end up discrediting liberals.
The language of the Darwinists, beginning with Darwin and immediately after through Thomas Huxley, Ernst Haeckle and others and the language of Nazism is remarkably similar. Struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, There really is no room in a belief that Natural Selection is a vitally relevant force at work on the human species for any other kind of talk. It will always end up with someone's elimination being proposed and, when it will, "moderate" means fail, their murder will be the only alternative. That's what history shows happens in real life as opposed to academic abstraction.
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