It is asserted that I'm against Darwinism "because you blame it for the Holocaust," that my objections are founded in "politics" and not science and, therefore my arguments against the existence or validity of natural selection are to be rejected.
Starting by noting that you don't refute a single point I made, in a number of different lines of argument to attack natural selection, and I've made a number of those, I wonder why it is you would not attack my arguments by refuting them. Perhaps that would be because you can't.
Among those arguments is the fact that natural selection, founded by Charles Darwin's own declaration on his reading of the political-economic theories of Thomas Malthus, is a theory of science which partakes of political-economics, which, alone, invalidates your argument.
If my political preferences can be cited to refute my points, the clear preference of Charles Darwin, a member of the British elite, in choosing to believe Thomas Malthus's unfounded and rather sloppy political-economic theory which favors Darwin's class interest is certainly a definitive disqualification of natural selection as a valid theory having the status of reliable science.
You don't get to claim that such a type of argument is valid when you like the result and, then, make use of its claimed disqualification to invalidate a result that you don't like. Though that is a basic rule of logic that gets disposed of quite often in the cultural reality of science through scientists proclaiming that they are above such uses of personal preference, personal economic interest, personal class interest, ideological preference, political ideology, etc. Science, as it exists in the real world, instead of in the imaginary non-reality of theoretical purity, is as full of such lapses as any other human field of thought.
Being a somewhat informal student of the literature of biological dispute, I will note that I have seen your tactic used against scientists whose political preferences are defined - however that is done at any time - as "left of center". It was the tactic used to attack the early 20th century anthropologist Franz Boas in regard to what were asserted was his insufficient hewing to the Darwinist line that the one making the accusation asserted was the true one, a use of Boas that continued into fairly recent times, decades after his death. It was the one used by E. O. Wilson and other scientists who supported, first, his 1970s Darwinian fundamentalism, Sociobiology, and the form of that popularized by Richard Dawkins soon after, Evolutionary Psychology against their critics, especially the eminent geneticist Richard Lewontin and the eminent palentologist, Stephen Jay Gould, who were held to be discredited due to an accusation made in the case of Boas, that they were "Marxists". If I had to choose sides, I'd not hesitate to prefer Lewontin, Gould and Boas, but I really don't see any need to. As a personal aside, I always saw that line of Darwinist fundamentalist invective as having a distinct odor of antisemitism to it. The use of the most crass forms of dirty politics has never been absent from the culture of science, no matter how much scientists pretend to be above that by virtue of their higher sciencyness.
It is, of course also invalidated by the glaring fact that Darwinists, from the time of Charles Darwin have made claims in regard to politics, the law, economic policy, social policy, educational policy, generally on the side of favoring permitted or even enforced inequality in all of them on the basis of the theory of natural selection. It is inevitable that a theory of science based on the class-interested political-economic theories of the British aristocratic Malthus would have that as an essential component of it.
That was something that began immediately, on the testimony of Francis Galton who proclaimed that his eugenics sprang from his reading of On The Origin of Species and whose experience was clearly matched by that of Wilhelm Schallmeyer (on his own testimony) that of Ernst Haeckel, George Darwin, Leonard Darwin, etc. and of the entire line of eugenicists who based their eugenics on the theory of natural selection. During his lifetime we have Darwin, himself making claims about economics, the law, social policy, medical policy, even in matters such as capital punishment based on his own theory.
If the claim is made that sullying the purity of science with the distasteful thing that politics is held to be, by comparison, is to invalidate arguments made, then Darwinism would have to pretty much all go because from the start and continuing on till today, it had its origin in political ideology and it continues to insert itself directly into politics and economics, etc. You can hardly read a magazine, listen to the radio or TV without Darwinism being used to advocate political, economic, or social policy, to reinforce racial and ethnic inequality, economic class inequality, even - with complete irrationality - gender inequality, something that ol' Chuck and his bulldog, Thomas Huxley did when it was totally incoherent in terms of what they claimed.
I have to say my first reaction to the comment was that the Shoah and all of the the biologically motivated murders of the Nazis is about the most valid test of a biological theory that it is possible for an idea to be given in human culture and in human history. It is certainly relevant to cite in testing the effect of that theory in reality as opposed to in imaginary conjecture and false, post-WWII PR.
If we are not to learn lessons from such a thing so recent, so documented, so explained in the stated motives of those who did it, the totally imagined natural history, the "just-so stories" which may well not exist anywhere except within the imaginations of those who like natural selection that comprise the entirety of assertions made about natural selection in the lost, unobservable past and, by a gargantuan proportion the "evidence" used to support its existence are certainly not valid in coming to conclusions about its existence. Only, I'd point out, we know the biological murders were motivated by the belief in natural selection by the Nazis and, before them, the general culture of the German elite, many of whom became Nazis. That is fully documented, the just-so stories of the lost past aren't. Which one would you say was more valid in using to come to a conclusion as to what is supportable and what isn't?
Update: I have never been a Marxist though I think Marx's critique of capitalism is one of the most brilliant things ever called "economics," He was a great diagnostician but his prescription was one of the most catastrophically bad ones made in human history.
I have called myself a "socialist" in the past though, as I've written here, I think the word has been so distorted and twisted and shattered as to meaning that I think the word and most of what has been called "socialism" should be scrapped. Seeing how they are behaving since 2015 in American politics and British politics, I would include that variety that goes by the name "democratic socialism" as well. They're going to help no one but Republican-fascism and Brit-fascism. Socialism, take your pick as to which one, doesn't do it for me anymore. It's not egalitarian, or just or radical enough.
I have, also, since reading the essays of Marilynne Robinson on the topic, come to understand that the economics of The Law, the Prophets and the Gospel is far, far more radical and just than any secular political economics. That's where I'm coming from, now.
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