Note: When I did my long and large number of posts about Darwin's relationship to eugenics, Nazism and neo-Nazism, I started with The Descent of Man and its scientific citations and moved outward and onward from them. At many points I didn't know where to look but found that literally every guess I made as to who would cite natural selection to explain their claims in eugenics, in ethnic supremacy and racism, in fascism and in Nazi and neo-Nazism led to me finding what I guessed would be there. There has literally been no problem in finding what I needed to prove my case. It's lying there in plain site.
Literally no one I found in the period before World War Two and the exposure of the Nazis' crimes denied those links, it is after the crimes of the Nazis were exposed that scientists, writers, academics, those they influenced started denying that there were any such links, a denial they enforced as the required claim for those who wished to be or remain respectable in that milieu. It was left to those who wanted to deny the reality of evolution, the "fundamentalists" etc. to look at the record. It is, in no way, a credit to mainstream science and its supporters that their fundamentalist enemies have told the truth in that matter as they mounted a false PR lie in a campaign that continues especially out of those holding faculty positions at major universities, today. There is a major figure in that continuing lie campaign working out of the Philosophy Department of the University of Chicago who is one of the most outrageous of them. I say that because I know I could defend that in court if I had to, anyone who wants to look into the primary documentary record as I've posted links to here could see it. It's right there in plain sight.
It is shocking how successful that cover up within academia has been, only somewhat less shocking at how successful it has been in the media, the "free press" of the English speaking peoples.
Consider this call for modesty in making claims to understand biology, in its fullest sense and evolution, in particular, made by one of the most philosophically astute (and smartest) of 20th-21st century scientists, Richard Lewontin:
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.
That is the last paragraph of the fine essay he wrote as the introduction to one of the collections of his fine essays, It Ain't Necessarily So. It is his description of "selective forces" and their effects on the evolution of organisms that is of most interest because it is the conventional, nearly universal claim of natural selection, the required and enforced orthodoxy of biological and related sciences and pseudo-sciences.
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.
He is describing "forces" that are too weak to observe, even indirectly - which, among other things, means that real science can't be done about them - and which are so subtle in their effects that they can't be tracked in their effects because those unroll in life over eons of time.
Anyone who doesn't realize that such subtle effects which are claimed to be of this character are quite likely to exist in no place except in the imagination of the scientists or para-scientists or pseudo-scientists or sci-ranger-ignorant-fanboys of the type who, currently, can be exemplified in those dolts who are impressed with Jordan Peterson's bull shit . . . anyone who holds they are known to be real is pulling their own leg, first.
While little definite can be known about such weak, such subtle, very likely imaginary "forces" through science, using logic and mathematics, it is knowable that any other forces which are more evidenced or observable which effect the evolution of organisms must weaken the claim Lewontin made, that "the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by" his subtle and weak force.
Even the modest and informed Richard Lewontin IN A PARAGRAPH IN WHICH HE WARNS ABOUT OVERREACHING IN CLAIMS MADE FOR THE FORCE THAT DARWIN INVENTED TO BE "NATURAL SELECTION" he claims an absurdly ambitious and universal power for them, that they govern evolution.
What is so shocking about that claim is that it was made by a man who, along with his close colleagues, such as Stephen J. Gould, has continually, in his response to E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, etc. who has provided the evidence of those competing forces WHICH LEWONTIN MENTIONS WITHIN THE PARAGRAPH which are known to exist and which are more in evidence than the Darwinian forces which are not.
Gould presented the force of chance and its concomitant vicissitudes, such as contingency, as a major competing force. I do not think there is any way to rationally identify either chance or contingency as being aspects of material existence, I'll add as a claim which, if true, would further weaken Darwinian natural selection, which is, as Haeckel claimed, a claim of materialist monism, something that Lewontin has admitted is his preferred framing of reality and which less philosophically astute materialists just insist JUST IS, DAMMIT!
All such forces in operation must, necessarily, weaken the theorized force of natural selection, in many cases they will totally obliterate natural selection as a force. If such Darwinian forces even exist as a thing, which I doubt.
Whenever chance has an effect on which member of a species, a family, lives and produces any or more offspring than another, any genetic traits or choices that may have been present to potentially provide that winnowing is entirely removed from the mix. It might be useful to compare the difference in rates of reproduction in identical twins and triplets to come to some understanding of the relative strength of chance as opposed to theoretical genetic forces of the kind that Lewontin treats with such rational modesty but which are most typically presented with completely irrational claims. We know that chance is there, it is often entirely observable and entirely potent in its effect in cutting people off from leaving their genes into the future.
And Richard Lewontin has, himself, noted another force that is non-Darwinian and for which is far stronger, genetic drift, though I'm not going to go into a description of that so I can say the following.
My long series of investigations into natural selection has led to me believing there really is no such thing, that such a thing would be swamped as a force that powers the evolution of species and subspecies, genuses, families, classes, etc. I think there are probably many, perhaps an effective infinity of forces that have made things as they are now. I don't think there is any way to identify any over-arching "force" of the kind that you can discern in physics and chemistry which can account for biological evolution. In the same essay Lewontin notes there are things which biology has no handle on at all.
Two major domains remain to be satisfactorily included within the mechanistic program [the materialist-monist framing of reality, something which has been in trouble in physics since the start of the 20th century] One, ironically, is the very problem that nineteenth-century biology took to be the major challenge for a mechanistic science of life, the problem of the development of form. A great deal is known about the genes that encode various chemical signals in development and about how the network of signals is hooked up, but we do not have the faintest idea about how all of this is turned into the shape of my nose. We do not even know how to ask the question in a useful way, although some interesting models have been made to show how chemical signals must affect the arrangement of cells. The other field of immense ignorance and conceptional poverty is the problem of understanding the central nervous system. What is the mapping between the physical states and connections of bran cells and mental states? It is not even clear that the same mental states are mapped into the same brain locations in different individuals or even in the same individual at different times. . . .
I will begin with that by noting that, though Lewontin doesn't care to address his theories, his fellow biologist Rupert Sheldrake had, by that time and rather infamously, come up with a scientific explanation of the development of form, which is not congenial with Lewontin's materialism.* But that's not directly relevant to my point here.
His noting that materialistic science was, in 2000, when he wrote that, and today, immensely ignorant and conceptually impoverished as to what the relationship between the central nervous system and mental states are. I have address that with questions as to how a brain would know how to make a new physical structure to be a new idea and how it would know how and what to make and to test what it made to BE the right idea in the total absence of the material structure to be that idea, maybe I should pose those questions monthly, again, in the coming year.
I will note that since behavior of animals which behave has such a role in survival and leaving offspring that it can't possibly not be an enormous problem for any proposed over-arching theory about evolution, that total lack of knowledge AND ANY INTERIM CLAIMS MADE ABOUT BEHAVIOR MADE IN OUR IGNORANCE is totally unscientific and logically absurd. Yet such have been made by scientists about behaviors and the minds of organisms, not only today but in the remote, lost past when even the existence of the organisms so discussed cannot be known. Lewontin has, in other places, made astute observations about the folly of theorizing organisms without the possibility of observation of them and study of them, yet Darwinism is made of exactly that kind of stuff, even in his modest, generally honest, philosophically astute form of it.
One of the things we know about this is that it it has produced not only absurdly outrageous claims which when looked at turn out to be bull shit, we know that a lot of that bull shit has been extremely dangerous and lots of people have had their rights destroyed or have been murdered.
Starting with Haeckel and Darwin and Galton and many others from the 1860s calling for laws to harry the poor out of existence, to starve them, to leave them without vaccination and other medical care, for imperial policy that would kill entire populations (Darwin in Descent and in letters, at least several times glowingly asserted that the wiping out of inferior populations in advance of, especially, British imperialism would lead to a glorious future) through eugenic sterilization, restrictions on marriage, restrictions on immigration, and other things, including what I can only conclude is people like Karl Pearson opposing the use of Cesarean section to save the lives of babies and mothers, all of which we know the Nazis studied and took as scientifically valid BECAUSE NOT ONLY DID THE NAZIS KEEP RECORDS, WE HAVE THE CORRESPONDENCE AND WRITING OF AMERICAN, BRITISH, ETC. BIOLOGISTS WHO WORKED HAND IN GLOVE WITH THE NAZIS RIGHT UP TILL WAR WAS DECLARED TO DOCUMENT IT.
The weak, subtle force, natural selection, which Lewontin, a man I respect very much, notes has had its most real effect in its conscious use by human beings to remove people from the present and if not that than any possible, contingent, children they may have had from the future. It is one of the hugest ironies of Darwinism that a thing which was invented and celebrated to remove teleology from biology and, by not only implication but declaration MADE AS SCIENCE, God from reality, turns out to have its most knowable existence in the intentional acts done by people in the name of science. As I've noted, no less a figure in Nazism than Rudolph Hess said that "Nazism is nothing but applied biology."
* As Sheldrake and his theory of morphogenesis were viciously and intemperately attacked in Nature magazine by the editor, the materialist hack, John Maddox in the 1980s, I would be surprised if Lewontin wasn't aware of it.
I will note that Sheldrake relies more than I'd think is warranted on natural selection in explaining his own theories, though I, as well, respect him and agree with a lot of what he's said. Perhaps that has something to do with him knowing more math than their common enemies such as Dawkins seem to.
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