I did not want to get back into the habit of responding to hate comments that I won't post but you brought up one of the most dishonest aspects of natural selection, Darwinism, that I don't recall addressing.
The claim that eugenics is "pseudo-science" lets science and the scientists upon whose common agreement science exists off the hook, far too easily.
The scientists who accepted eugenics starts, by its official inventor, Francis Galton's testimony with Charles Darwin, the iconic scientist and idol of it who endorsed Galton's and Haeckels and Gregg's, etc eugenic claims, Thomas Huxley, his main lieutenant in the Darwin Wars, and a long, long, long list of eminent scientists who were never driven out of the profession and were and are still esteemed in science. Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, Karl Pearson, Alfred Ploetz, . . . . Linus Pauling, William Shockley, right up to the last generation, figures such as Francis Crick, James Watson, the entire field of evolutionary psychology who regularly perform a little verbal dance around the issue even as their writing is the most widespread manifestation of Darwinist eugenics and those such as that formerly idolized figure of popular scientism, Richard Dawkins, who was more explicit in bemoaning that Nazism had discredited eugenics.
Science exists nowhere except in the minds of scientists, scientists whose scientific credibility and credentials rely on their acceptance by those same scientists, what gets called "science" in any generation is what science is, that is as true for science which is retained as well as science which is either dropped or discredited. Only in the case of eugenics, so discredited in the post-WWII period as the crimes of the Nazis forced facing just what those scientists and their teachers had said had to logically lead to, as can be seen in both the quasi-eugenics claims and those such as those of Francis Crick who lobbied his scientific colleagues privately to rehabilitate the scientific racism of the scientists Arthur Jensen, the kind of behind the privacy screen of private lobbying that is apparently far more extensive when the issue is eugenics. The same kind of science which the Harvard scientist Richard Herrnstein joined up with the political hack Charles Murray to reintroduce directly into American politics and the legal profession through their book The Bell Curve. And, as I pointed out, through both the forced, coerced eugenic sterilization of Women of Color under detention by ICE and through the scientific hackery of Dr. Scott Atlas and Richard Epstein which is so influential in killing us off through the "passive eugenics" of "herd immunity."
No, until science definitively and by a clear and effective and enduring majority reject eugenics and the guarantee of its perpetuation, the theory of natural selection, they wear it, it's clearly not "pseudo-science" if it can be part of the understanding of science of Oxford University's emeritus chair for "The Public Understanding of Science" and the science faculties of equally prestigious university science departments.
If it were up to me, I'd make it a lot easier for them by science getting shut of psychology, sociology, anthropology and a host of other obviously deficient areas of academic activity called "science". I'd definitely make sure that such associated pretenders as economics get kicked out of the club. But, then, I'd get rid of the theory of natural selection altogether. If you want to see why, read what I wrote on that topic years ago. But I'm not a scientist, I don't get a vote on that. If scientists want to get shut of eugenics, its up to them. But no one should let them off the hook for all of the reasons above and some I haven't mentioned.
If eugenics is "pseudo-science" then Darwin and his disciples were guilty of practicing pseudo-science. Address that and maybe, maybe, if you keep it polite I'll post your comment.
No comments:
Post a Comment