On The Necessity Of A Separation Of Darwin And State, Of Telling The Full Truth And Other Things

Further fall out from my posts on the Broadway-Hollywood falsification of history through Inherit the Wind came in but I didn't really want to deal more with it while sick.  Why that one, relatively unimportant aspect of scientific culture, Darwinism, has come to have such a pseudo-moralistic potency among the pseudo-left is quite an interesting irrationality.  I have pointed out before that it was the conventional ultra-Darwinist John Wilkins claimed that the importance of Darwin to the anti-Darwinists was due to the destructive impact of Darwinism on religion. But the reality is far more complicated than ideological academics would ever want to deal with even if they took the time.  The assertions surrounding that have been, on all sides, more characterized by dishonesty and ideology than would lead to academic understanding that overrides extraneous interest.  In my reading of the literature surrounding the origins of that, it would be hard to tease out where the antagonism started but the Darwinists from virtually the first things written about On the Origin of Species used natural selection and evolution to attack religion, especially Christianity.  That was more successful in predominantly Protestant, scripturally centered cultures, such as in large parts of the United States and Germany than it was in places where the relationship of religion to a particular understanding of scripture as literal truth was not followed.  Catholics and even some Protestants without that view of scriptures accepted evolution and even some aspects of Darwinism with little to no damage to their faith while rejecting others.  Given that among the things so rejected by Catholics included eugenics, sometimes that was all to the good.   The extent to which any Christian adopted or accommodated itself to natural selection is probably a good measure of the extent to which they gave up the Gospel, the Torah and the Prophets.  The extent to which they ceased being Christian except in name.

And what you can say about religion, you can also say about the democratic character of political movements, political identities.  Perhaps even more so. 

The cultural map of biology and even science that a lot of us hold isn't unlike that famous cover of The New Yorker which gave a New York City resident's view of the United States in which pretty much everything past the suburbs of New York City is terra incognita until you get to the show-biz capital on the West Coast.  The absurd, obsessive focus on evolution in the popular, mid-even high brow population is quite remarkable considering that even if it did or didn't happen, there's not much we can do about that, now.  The record of Darwinists who have wanted to do something about that now is measurable in tens if not hundreds of millions of bodies of the murdered, bodies of the involuntarily sterilized, the lives of people blighted by assertions of biological determinism, the reinforcement of class and race and gender inequality.    In terms of human culture, Darwinism has been, as Ernst Haeckel said with Darwin's and Thomas Huxley's approval, beneficial to an aristocratic, privileged view of human beings, a promotion of inequality, destructive of democracy and, least of all socialism.  That is if socialism is understood as a means of obtaining economic justice instead of centralized, fascistic control.   Darwinism has proven to be entirely compatible with centralized, fascistic control of an economy.   In the past twenty years of looking into this, I think that will always be the tendency if not result of a strong belief in natural selection.  I think Darwinism, originating in the homicidal, degenerate economic theories of Thomas Malthus, cannot have those anti-democratic, elitist and ultimately homicidal aspects and tendencies removed from it.   It is productive of fascism, the rise of fascism coincides with a developed form of Darwinism becoming the predominant means of understanding life and human societies.  That is not a mere coincidence, Darwinism made a decisive difference in the cultures that bought it, it gave power to some already existing depravities and it created more of its own.  It was, itself, a development from the British class system and the 18th century "enlightenment" desire to be free of moral restraints.*

The accusation of any critic of Darwinism will be that they are anti-evolutionist, a creationist, even a young-Earth-creationist even when the critic has always accepted evolution as a fact.  That accusation is a result of ignorance, frequently, among people who are so ignorant of evolution that they think it was invented by Darwin, presented as the Henry Ford of biology.  That is a view of things which has been promoted by popular science since the magazine of that name was first published by an atheist ideologue to today when the BBC, PBS and the Discovery platform repeat that nonsense ad nauseum.   Darwinism is the predominant fundamentalist faith of the educated class of the English speaking people and many who don't speak English.  The pretense that natural selection is an adequate explanation of evolution, something which has ebbed and flowed and ebbed and flowed in the actual culture of biology has always been more ideological than scientific. 

To the extent which the orthodox view of evolution has only permitted Darwinist explanations is truly amazing when viewed from the outside.   It has meant that natural selection, always more of a vague assertion than a coherently defined "thing", has had to be made to mean anything as required by the facts.  To someone reading Darwin and the scientific colleagues whose view of Darwinism he, himself, endorsed, the assertions made about what he thought are incredible in their dishonesty.   The frequently encountered claim that he was anti-Lamarckian is a bald lie that is best shown as such by citing Darwin's own assertions of inheritance of acquired characteristics.   I have not studied, in detail, what Darwin's own most favorably cited Darwinists, Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel well after Darwin's death had to make of that sea change in natural selection as Mendel's work in genetics was rediscovered and they could not deny it basically altered the status of Darwin's thinking but I do know that in the 1890s Haeckel derisively asserted that his friend Charles Darwin agreed with him that to accept the idea that acquired traits weren't inherited was no better than a Biblical literalist conception of creation. 

That reintroduction of Mendel's conception of genetics was, in fact, a crisis in Darwinism that had to wait till the 1930s and the neo-Darwinian synthesis which, today, is, itself, in crisis.  So much so that a not inconsiderable number of eminent biologists have attacked it and even declared it dead.  But through it all, the idol that is Charles Darwin has maintained its place as the focus of popular faith in science and the pious genuflection of all manner of scientists. 

Mine is an outsider view of these thing but an interested outsider who knows the extreme danger that mixing Darwinism and state has proven to be.  The death toll of Darwinist assertion in politics and the military in the 20th century is enormous.  Considering the genocidal consequences of natural selection imagined by Darwin, Huxley, Galton, Haeckel, Greg, and others whose view of his theory were supported by Darwin,  - all of which is easily read, in their own words, in full readings of their documentary legacy as published by Darwinists - to expect anything else from it was always absurd.  In one of his screeds John Wilkins makes resort to a citation of Kropotkin's pathetic band-aid to cover up that characteristic of Darwinist thinking "mutual aid".   That concept was always, from the start, a pathetically impotent attempt to deny the basic characteristics of natural selection, if that was the view of Darwinism asserted, it was a denial of the very basis of Darwinism in the struggle for existence which would leave many dead and which, contrary to claims, asserted the superiority of those who did the killing and survived the violence.  I can only think that those who made that claim wanted to keep the anti-religious potential of Darwinism or even to not ruffle the feathers of the rising academic consensus while being troubled by the very essence of the theory in violence and murder, social and economic and political inequality and the salubrious effects of continual violence and war.  Well, the history of the 20th century proved their patch up job was pudding-headed. 

I have become increasingly interested in the use of lies in academia and popular science and history, lies such as the one that denied the documentary record left by St. Darwin and those colleagues he cited with total support.  Wilkins is a good example to study because so much of his online writing contains those conventional lies, such as the denial that Darwin, himself, said that Spencer's Survival of the Fittest - the aphoristic definition of social Darwinism - was identical to Natural Selection - the very definition of Darwinism.  But he is only emblematic of that effort, the popular and even much of the academic writing on the topic is full of such lies.  And in this the academic-media Darwin industry is typical of a wider trend of lying, by both commission and omission and always in the interest of bending academic assertions to benefit ideological or merely conventional interests.  That kind of thing is as true of stuff in what gets called "science" especially in the life sciences and the pseudo-social sciences as it is in things put under the umbrella of the humanities.  In fact, I'm more impressed with the rigor and honesty of much of what is written as history than I am in much of what gets written as science, these days.  But you can never count on any of it being free of ideological motivation and the fear of peer pressure.  I think I see some signs of that cracking in regard to criticisms of Darwinism but it's just at the start and it will meet with the most severe of ultra-Darwinist backlash. 

I doubt that biology will really advance in a non-ideological conception of evolution until the theory of natural selection is declared dead.  It is hardly what Darwin conceived of now, if Margulis and Shapiro and their fellow critics of the neo-Darwinian synthesis are right, it's ever more remote from even a mid-20th century conception of it was.  I doubt there will ever be one, overarching explanatory theory of the enormous, enormously complex, enormously varied phenomenon of the evolution of species, I think the effect of natural selection will turn out to have been a tragic distraction from the fact of that enormous complexity and the even greater fact that only the tiniest fraction of evidence of the events and conditions which produced the fact of evolution will ever be available for human study and understanding.  The rest of it is making up stories which turn out to be mostly about the people who make up the stories, not the animals and other organisms they make up those stories about.   That isn't science, it's the creation of lore and creation mythology.  It turns out that doing that in denial of God can produce bad results that kill lots of people, just as they claim that doing it while believing in God can.