Longtime readers of this blog will be the opposite of surprised at what I said about natural selection being the basis of every form of eugenic depravity, be it the involuntary sterilization of Women of Color in the Republican-for-profit ICE-DHS prisons in Georgia and, I have every confidence we will find, elsewhere to Scott Atlas's Hoover Institute- Richard Epstein's "Darwinian Economics" promotion of "herd immunity" which is a. a totally unproven theory based in the very badly documented and double-speaking assumptions of natural selection b. casually, even breezily assumes that for it to be the means selected to deal with a pandemic, that millions will have to die for the promised benefit to the survivors.
That is an idea that Darwin inserted directly into the heart of, first, evolutionary biology and from there and with the active ideological intent and self-intrest of Darwinists,* the entirety of biology. And from there into the very faulty public understanding of science and even into the ever daffier regions of modern materialist philosophy, Daniel Dennett would impose it on the entirety of the universe, even when such an imposition is made totally illogical through the lack of a biological physical basis for it. It is not an idea that you have to believe in to accept the truth of evolution, though why that rather interesting though hardly vital issue has come to hold such a stranglehold on the emotions of those in favor of and against it when we are facing climate change, environmental devestation, the rise of dictatorship over egalitarian democracy is a far more important question.
* R. A. Fischer was financially and morally supported by Leonard Darwin as he invented the "modern synthesis" pasting together the hardly very advanced 1930s conceptions of genetics with a radically modified, though still extremely dangerous conception of natural selection. That his own scientific racism was supported by Darwinism certainly wouldn't have predisposed him to look hard at the validity of the theory. Every single time I looked deeply into, especially, the pre-WWII literature of Darwinism I found there was absoulutely no denial that eugenics is a logical conclusion of a belief in natural selection, including the eugenics that the Nazis made the law of Germany. Leonard Darwin had complained bitterly that until the Nazis "turned things in a better direction" (his words in a revelatory 1939 article) they would not institute eugenic laws, including forced sterilization and other measures that led directly to the industrial machine of death that so many genteel Darwinists, especially in American and Britain, advocated starting in the late 19th century, well before Nazism came into being.
Darwinism, natural selection, as long as it is orthodoxy within science and in the public imagination - put there by ideological science and its vulgar popular versions - is going to lead to people being discriminated against, being coerced or forced to be sterilized, and killed, either by passive irresponsibility as in Sweden, the United States and elsewhere where this latest "herd immunity" fantasy became public policy or by the most extreme form, mass murder. That has been its logical conclusion from the early 1860s as Darwin's closest colleagues, friends and relations, from Thomas Huxley gleefully anticipating the violent genocide of American Black People as they no longer had, in his ignorant assessment, economic utility to the (in his racist mind) "superior" whites, to Darwin's cousin Francis Galton formally founding the science of eugenics to his own son George Darwin, with his support, writing an article in an influential magazine calling for legislation to legally, involuntarily and permanently dissolve marriages of those who, according to Victorian concepts of psychology, were mentally ill. All of that was done with Darwin's knowledge and support based on his theory of natural selection which, after all, in the fifth and sixth editions of On The Origin of Species, at the encouragement and with the support of his co-inventor of natural selection, he said it was exactly identical to Herbert Spencer's Survival of the Fittest.
For anyone who is interested in reading some of my research into that, I have posted two, hardly up-to-date indexes of posts on the topic, this one covering a lot of what I've found out about the relationship between natural selection and eugenics and scientific racism and mass murder up to WWII, this one covering recent and current domestic American fascist and neo-Nazi citation of natural selection and Charles Darwin. I have since then written extensively on the topic of the Nazi use of natural selection and the cooperative collaboration of American and British scientists, Charles Davenport, Karl Pearson, in not only providing their own Darwinist establishments with what was identical to Nazi racism and eugenics, WHICH WAS WIDELY ACCEPTED WITHIN CONVENTIONAL SCIENCE AS VALID SCIENCE, but which the Nazis, themselves cited as their reasons for the policies they instituted, including their infamous mass murders. Karl Pearson the British Socialist and a deeply respected geneticist was one of the most overt in providing British bigots and, also, Nazi eugenics with a view of Jews from Poland and Russia as being a danger to the "Aryan" or British population. He used the race science of exactly the same German Darwinists in constructing an anti-semetic paper cited by the Nazis.
If anyone thinks that kind of thing has gone away with the end of WWII, they should search my archieves for the American evolutionary psychologists Kevin MacDonald and John Hartung whose as antsemetic science was as acceptable within academic science and science publication up to MacDonald testifying for the Holocaust denier David Irving, exposing his scientific racism to a wider public, as Karl Pearson's was in the 1920s. It was positively cited as valid science by the ultra-Darwinist Richard Dawkins even after that. Darwinian science didn't seem to have any problem with it up till then.
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