Answering An Old Accusation

"You're against Natural Selection because it contradicts Christianity."

That was something I had said to me a long time ago because I made similar arguments to the one in this morning's post, that I was denying "scientific fact" because I didn't like its moral consequences.

That's true.  But not as the accusation was made.  If natural selection had never had the horrific consequences it did in terms of producing millions of murders, horrific violations of human rights in the forms of eugenics so hypocritically claimed to be some kind of boon to humanity and other such things, I might never have been led to study and think about it as I have.

But that's not a refutation of my criticism of it, all of science is a product of human consideration of human experience in the wider world.  And those things, the murders, the forced and often racially motivated sterilization programs, the horrendous legal and social policy that flowed, explicitly, from the claims of natural selection are as available human experiences to consider as any.  They are far, far more available than most of what the claims made for the existence of natural selection, lost forever in the irretrievably lost past, claimed as its confirmation.

I have made use of this quote by Richard Lewontin, from the excellent introduction to the excellent collection of his essays, "It Ain't Necessarily So" any number of times because it is such a concise and honest statement of that last stated, very real fact about the history and substance of the theory of natural selection.

It is not only in the investigation of human society that the truth is sometimes unavailable.  Natural scientists, in their overweening pride, have come to believe that eventually everything we want to know will be known.  But that is not true.  For some things there is simply not world enough and time.  It may be, given the necessary constraints on time and resources available to the natural sciences, that we will never have more than a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system.  For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them.  In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them.  Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were.  Over and over, in these essays reproduced here, I have tried to give an impression of the limitations on the possibility of our knowledge.  Science is a social activity carried out by a remarkable, but by no means omnipotent species.  Even the Olympians were limited in their powers.

Its admissions of just what Darwinism, the ubiquitous and required framing of natural selection is founded on and the nature of that:

For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them.  In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them. Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were.

are some of the most honest and courageously and responsibly stated facts I've ever read from a scientist.

To that I will add the even more obvious but merely implied truth that the evidence of the 3 billion + years that evolution has been best estimated to include is known in such a vanishingly tiny, almost certainly unrepresentative sample of the billions, probably trillions of organisms and the far vaster range of their life histories as skeletally fixed in the fossil record, makes claims and stories made up about it almost certainly wrong.  The probability that even the most astute scientists can know more than the barest generalization that species appear at different times in the geological record and that the study of DNA and other aspects of cellular chemistry reveal commonly inherited traits makes a belief in evolution of species a reasonable conclusion.

If, as Lewontin said, and I doubt that any biologist of even minimal probity and thoughtfulness would deny it, that the proposed "selective forces are so weak no conceivable technique of observation can measure them" it's entirely possible they were never really there in the actual lives of the organisms they are supposed to have worked on.  I would say that that fact impeaches the right of people to claim natural selection even has a possibility of achieving a legitimate status as a scientific theory.

As I said the other week, since that is true and the case for natural selection rests on such conjectures, it's entirely possible that there are other forces governing the evolution of species which will never be imagined by human beings and which are either stronger  than the surpassingly weak forces claimed to be natural selection or, considering the possibility that what we conceive of as natural selection is just a mistaken bit of lore, that they might be there instead of it.   Such are the claims made for natural selection that I'd guess it is far more probable that nothing of the sort is actually there and it is a product of human imagination such as its most extreme forms in academia, today,  evolutionary psychology, Sociobiology and the hideous neo-Malthusianism of Darwinian economics.  People have been ridiculed for believing in far less on far more evidence.

I think there are good reasons to be more skeptical that natural selection is more than imaginary than to believe in it as a fact or a law of science.   I think, considering its immediate and pervasively powerful results in eugenics and some of the most depraved of classical and neo-classical economics, there's every reason to be skeptical of it.  Better reasons than that without it evolutionary science won't have a single, ruling narrative to explain evolution.  Though there are what far better arguments to support that evolution happened.  There is no law of nature that says biologists have to have something like the same laws that physicists or chemists enjoy.  Especially as there are three billion + reasons as measured in years of unknowable life history to suspect they will never have one that is real, more than the product of imagination that, suspiciously, has had such a role in supporting the all too powerful economic elite that provides so many of the major figures claiming natural selection as an all potent ruler of us all.

Update:  OK.  Imagine this.  Someone digs up the skeleton of one of your great-great-great grandparents, or, more likely, one bone from their skeleton and, from that, they make up a life history of them and their descendants, maybe even including conjectures about how many descendants they left based on their biological fitness.  Imagine the possibility of any of that lore invented out of that bone being accurate and reliably matching the reality of those lives with the tale as told.   And the entire tale of natural selection is based on tales told about billions of organisms for which not so much as a shadow of a bone is available.