Saturday, March 16, 2019

Another Instance.

Here's an important example of where the paper goes wrong through inadequate research: 

Shortly after the publication of Origin, the question of how these theories might apply to human populations arose. Historically, in contexts ranging from European imperialism to eugenics, this tendency to apply Darwin’s core theories to society has extended to justifications of racial violence and genocide. In an attempt to defend Darwin’s theory in his 1893 essay “Evolution and Ethics,” Huxley pointed out that the idea that evolution was directly connected to morality had “risen out of the unfortunate ambiguity of the phrase ‘survival of fittest’. ‘Fittest’ has a connotation of ‘best’; and about ‘best’ there hangs a moral favour” (501), pointing to the influence Spencer and his book Principles of Biology were to have on the reception and future human applications of Darwin’s work.

You can contrast this passage in which she cites Thomas Huxley in 1893 attributing "ambiguity" to the use of "survival of the fittest" in association with "evolution" when by doing so Huxley would have to have known if he wanted to honestly blame some misunderstanding on that phrase he would have had to blame no one other than Charles Darwin who, in that 5th edition of On the Origin of Species, Chapter IV  Natural Selection; Or The Survival Of The Fittest, said:

"This preservation of favourable variations, and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest."

As he also explained in an important letter to his co-inventor of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace:

Natural selection, is, when understood, so necessary & self evident a principle, that it is a pity it should be in any way obscured; & it therefore occurs to me, that the free use of “survival of the fittest”,—which is a compact & accurate definition of it,—would tend much to its being more widely accepted and prevent its being so much misrepresented & misunderstood.

Which would rather contradict Thomas Huxley's claims about Spencer's famous phrase being responsible for sowing confusion.  If anyone reads The Descent of Man or his many letters, they will see that any claim that even Darwin, as he was inventing the idea really separated questions of assigning comparative ranking of value on people and other organisms in terms of superiority or inferiority from some fictitious "objective" view of natural selection, is total crap.  Darwin continually assigned such categories, no doubt included in Huxley's British materialistic Victorian notions of "morality,"to people as individuals, members of classes, societies, ethnicities and what we would call races.  Even according to gender, which, given what natural selection claims is totally irrational. 

I haven't researched the Thomas Huxley - Herbert Spencer falling out other than to have read there was one late in their lives.  I know Huxley, not at all immune from the habit of lying for his own purposes*  might have been taking a jab at Spencer in that claim.   You shouldn't let the Victorian language fool you, these guys were as able to get down and dirty as Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer were though I don't know if there were every any drunken fist fights involved. 

*  The often repeated, costume-drama presented accounts of his "debate" with Bishop Wilberforce is not only unreliable, it's discredited by the contemporary record.  Even Darwin said that Wilberforce understood the weaknesses in his theory.  

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