Hate Mail

"Watching him (Richard Dawkins) doing philosophy is like watching a dolphin tap dance." 

David Bentley Hart quoting an agnostic friend on how incompetent The God Delusion is.

Funny, you don't hear much on the play-lefty blogs and mags and websites holding up Dawkins as a great genius and expert these days - I remember a bunch of the gals at Baby Blue swoooning over how dreamy he was as the guys drooled over Lala -  though I think that's because he exposed himself to be a massive bigot and misogynist a-hole - something I could have guessed he was from his biological determinism and Darwinian fundamentalism (Stephen J. Gould's spot-on term for it, not mine).  Those guys always end up supporting biological determinism and its most racist, sexist and economic class-based features - things built into natural selection from the start BECAUSE IT WAS IN THE ECONOMIC, ETHNIC AND FINANCIAL INTEREST OF THE SCIENTISTS WHO PUT THOSE THERE.   Natural selection is based on pseudo-science, Malthusian economics, and a wild inversion of it, as Karl Marx correctly and astutely observed, they imposed the form of the British class system on all of nature.   It has had to be constantly modified, constantly patched up for its entire history, as some from those eminent biologists who shocked their colleagues by declaring the neo-Darwinian synthesis over (the major patch-up job done in the 1930s, the biological orthodoxy we were all educated in and which is still taught, though it doesn't work) to the philosopher Thomas Nagel who stunned the already stunned by declaring in the title of a book:  Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.
   

In my long review of the literature of Darwinism - depending mostly on what the Darwinists, themselves claimed but, also, reading their scientific and philosophical critics seriously,  I'm kind of shocked that something so badly founded in evidence, to start with, and so obviously an imposed framing instead of a properly evidenced scientific law based in evidence ever became the required and viciously enforced orthodoxy of what is, in many other aspects, a well founded science.  

The paleological evidence of evolution is quite solid, as long as they don't get carried away with claims for their discoveries, so is much of the genetic support of cladistics, both among living species and those which are extinct for which there is evidence.  Natural selection is unnecessary to someone who accepts that evolution is as close to a proven fact as can be had about something so large and known from such a tiny percentage of the phenomenon of the history of life on Earth.  I think its going to remain as the enforced orthodox language of evolution but I think it's probably an illusion and one which has a history, from the start of generating political and economic theories that oppress people and has gotten millions murdered.   

Nazism was one of the largest and most significant products of Darwin's theory of natural selection, its explicit use by neo-Nazis is explict, its unadmitted use by American-fascists is evidenced though not explicitly admitted, Republican economic theory is exactly in line with the worst parts of The Descent of Man and the political activities that sprang from natural selection as soon as Thomas Huxley's repulsive essay Emancipation in Black and White (1865) in which he gleefully endorses the idea that Black People, now that they don't have economic utility to those who enslaved them would be obliterated by White People in a fight of "brains and not bites" and his colleague Francis Galton told the good news that Darwinism was for the economic elite who he awarded the prize of the most fit as he invented eugenics, a scientific endeavor which was a direct cause of The Final Solution and the other intended genocides of the Nazis.  I have documented that rather exhaustively here over the past seven or so years.  

George Darwin, Charles' son, with his endorsement, based on his father's and Galton's work derived from it,  started campaigning for laws involuntarily annulling marriages for those diagnosed by Victorian medicine as mentally ill,  Leonard Darwin campaigned for a riding in Parliament on an anti-vaxxer platform ( but only against the poor) because, as his father complained in The Descent of Man vaccination was keeping too many poor people alive,* etc. etc. etc.  Luckily, the voters thought he was a putz and didn't elect him.  Another low light was the eminent student of Galton, Karl Pearson who,in the 1925 produced "evidence" that Polish and Russian Jews were biologically inferior and should be excluded from emigrating to Britain - no doubt good news for the Nazis.  Pearson also railed against such things as the use of Cesarean section to save the lives of infants and mothers who would have died without it, he theorized that the genetics of such people would become more common and drive down the "fitness" of the general human population. 

These people are monsters who talk nice, some of them might hide it for a while, some permanently, but you can't hold with natural selection and not share in that because it's built into the theory from its Malthusian roots.   Malthus called for the poor to be left to die without help because they were excess population, which was directly what inspired this well-known seasonal passage. 

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

Dickens got that in 1843, sixteen years before On the Origin of Species was published, twenty-nine before The Descent of Man endorsed such thinking as scientific fact.   Of course, Dickens' book was a fantasy and even if it wasn't, these guys don't believe in ghosts, never mind learning a life changing lesson from them.  I think that's got more than a little to do with their determination to uphold the most monstrous of materialistic explanations as science, so they don't have to think about God and those pesky commandments to give to the poor, the widow, the orphan and to treat the stranger among them as they would themselves.   The Golden Rule cannot be true if Darwinism is.  Darwinism is the direct negation of it as the Parson Malthus's delusion was. 

*  I should mention that during my research, based on Darwin's whining about vaccination keeping too many of those he deemed to be unfit alive, to see if Charles Darwin or, indeed, his descendants took advantage of the kind of weeding out by smallpox  for the Darwin family and have to conclude they were probably all vaccinated against it.  Why he and his eugenicist sons and grandchildren didn't benefit their own families by the weeding out they called for in the poor, is a rather obviously solved puzzle.  They never intended natural selection to apply to the likes of them.  I can review what I said about that as long as nine years ago if you insist.