I made a crucial error in the second of my posts from yesterday, in this paragraph, I mistakenly typed the word "inferior" when it should have been "superior" as given in blue, below.
And it certainly doesn't explain anything about that situation within a species as the "traits" of those theorized to be in some way regressive or inferior life - and in many of Darwin's own imaginary scenarios - are warned as having superior reproductive potential than those assigned the category of "superior". That habit of Darwinist thought is as rampant today as it was at any period after Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, it is why, even with the potent example of the Nazis eugenic murders, post-war scientists maintain a belief in eugenics , including the most eminent of them, R. A. Fischer, James Watson, Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, William Shockley (physicists, ha!), and in numbers constituting ubiquity, the social sciences, Eugenic thinking is alive and as dangerous as it ever was.
I could have noted that that very basis of eugenics, based in the most notably Malthusian feature of Darwinism, is one of the most basic of absurdities in his theory of natural selection. You will often hear it claimed that natural selection is not a claim of progressivity or teleology attributed to nature when that assertion is present all through the entire scientific literature of Darwinism from beginning to today, though not admitted to. When, as they disclaim their own assertions of progress and purpose in natural selection, they will say that it is merely based on reproductive advantage. Well, if those people categorized as "inferior" have superior reproductive capability, that should mark them as those who have won the "struggle for life" that Darwin sets up, regardless of whatever "traits" they carry. I first noted that when I realized that in the contradictions between his claims about "savages" as opposed to "civilised men" in which he praised the superiority of the winners of "savages" culling their inferior members and bemoaning the failure of "civilised men" to do the same, which he said was bound to lead to dysgenic catastrophe, but he nevertheless held that "civilised men" were the superiors of those very "savages" that he claimed were the winners in a "struggle for existence". The doublespeak in Darwin is ubiquitous.
As I've mentioned over and over again, when I started this about twelve years ago, now, I was a conventional though relatively passive believer in natural selection in the typical college-credentialed manner. I started this looking for Darwin's rejection of eugenics I'd been assured were there but, as soon as I started reading him, literally all there was was his acceptance of and support for eugenics.
The more I looked at it the worse I realized it was, not only as what Marx criticized* it as being in his own reconsideration of it, Darwin imposing the British class system on all of nature, but its absurdity as a logical structure and scientific theory became ever more apparent. I am at a loss to explain how anyone could believe that it was a real thing without having an aristocratic motive in maintaining its assertions of inequality in the human population. I do believe that and its use as an attack on the traditional Protestant literal reading of the Bible story of creation - a feature of not only the naive faith of the imagined ignorant masses but as much of religion as even most college credentialed people comprehend - are the entire reason it was kept even as its acceptance among biologists was very shaky around the beginning of the 20th century. I haven't read Vernon Kellogg's contemporary account of that period**, yet, though I've skimmed passages of it.
I think for most people, it's no different from being a fan of a sports team only it's a team in the great struggle of atheism vs. religion, anti-Christianity vs. Christianity, college-credentialed vs. non-college credentialed, modernism vs. tradition, etc. Not to mention the features of regional resentment and the class-interest that was such a big part of how it took the affluent establishment by storm even from the start. It was always the good news to the affluent and those who hoped to become affluent, Darwin's assurance that nature had crowned them as the superiors they always felt themselves to be. I certainly haven't found that Darwin's greatest fans have ever so much as read him or his disciples. Not even those with PhDs. They're often as ignorant as anyone in the brawl.
* As someone who rejects Marx's prescription for politics, I will admit he was one of the most astute and brilliant critics in the history of Western thought. Einstein said about Eddington's failed Fundamental Theory that for all his brilliance, his critical faculty failed in that case. I think the same is true of Marx whose critical brilliance nailed the worst feature of natural selection as a scientific theory but couldn't see the problems in his own theory of history. I think that's often what happens when they try to extend science past where science can actually make the necessary observations to find reliable knowledge. That seems to be a general defect in science when their ambitions exceed their observational abilities. You can't make that up by adopting an ideological foundation and pretending it can make up for that.
** Darwinism To-day; a discussion of present-day scientific criticism of the Darwinian selection theories, together with a brief account of the principal other proposed auxiliary and alternative theories of species-forming
Update Hate: Um, from what I've read Wilhelm Marr was an atheist who detested Christianity and he was also heavily influenced by Darwin's own named chief disciple in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, as well an atheist who despised Christianity.
Darwin, himself, said that Haeckel's theories concerning natural selection within the human population, including such things as his racist classification of human groups, his claims of severe inferiority for named groups, his assertion that such groups would be inevitably wiped out and that that murder would be benefical for the surviving (murdering) human population, etc. were so in line with his own that if he had known Haeckel was putting them into a book Darwin wouldn't have written The Descent of Man. So, yeah, there was everything in common with the two parts of that post.
I do think it's remarkable that the current push to come up with an, if I recall correctly, eleven part definition of "antisemitism" includes, for obvious ideological reasons, everything that makes the word so problematic without that push for such a definition. It's obviously a project that floundered in ideological interest even if it didn't start that way. It's bound to fail. I think they should come up with different words to mean different things, many of which are not like the others.
I have read that very late in life Marr repented of his antisemitism because he was already disturbed at the direction his own organized antisemitic group was going. Too little, too late. His legacy, as can be seen from it being reprinted by Kevin Macdonald, is still used to promote the hatred of Jews.
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