Darwinism In Recent Respectable Newspaper Scribblege Brought To My Attention

In the November 15th  NYT Review of an early book about the current pandemic by one David Quamman from earlier this month ended with the bizarre statement

"It is still too early to know" Christakis [the author of the book] writes how the Covid-19 virus might mutate. It is indeed early, and many more books will offer to help us understand the pandemic. But "Apollo's Arrow" is a good start. Another volume, a useful addition to the same shelf, was published in 1859, "On the Origin of Species." Infectious disease is all about evolution. If you don't believe in that you may as well not hold your breath for rescue by modern medicine. And there will always be another virus going around.

What Christakis is quoted as saying isn't bizarre, we have no idea which if any of a myriad of possible assumptions now floating around might be a prediction of how the virus will mutate, which variants will become prevalent, which might become a stable form for which human beings and other living creatures might develop some measure of biological resistance or immunity, etc. To expect there will be one possible storyline that this will follow is probably more evidence of the limits of human culture to encompass even a relatively limited issue in the natural world than it does the naive belief that nature will accommodate our limits by limiting the actual course of events.  

What is bizarre is, of course, the idea that the first edition of "On the Origin of Species" would have anything much to tell us about the evolution of viruses which, of course, Darwin knew nothing about. My suspicion is that Quamman, like most of those who invoke Darwin's most famous book, has not actually read it, it is like most pious evocations of "The Bible" as imagined by someone who has made little time for it in their reading and study. 

 Considering the difficulty with which the 1930s "neo-Darwinian synthesis"  temporarily pasted the real substance of On The Origin of Species, the ideology of natural selection to the then very new and, by today's standards, quite naive conception of genes and genetic inheritance, it is likely to have less to tell us in this regard than Darwin's rough contemporary, Louis Pasteur who theorized them and who, I seem to recall, lived into the period when they were actually confirmed to exist. Darwin was dead for ten years by then. When the path of those two eminent men of science, if you want to call Darwinism that, crossed, neither seems to have made much of an effort to encounter the other that I've been able to find.  

 

As to the evolution of viruses happening in accord with natural selection, I doubt that very, very much. I suspect assertions about that are probably more of the construction of an analogy than an accurate and full description of how that happens.  But, then, I think natural selection is an ideology that says more about the economic, social and legal privilege of the man and men who invented and spread the idea and made it the enforced ideology of first biology, then all of respectably educated culture.

It is especially ironic for Darwin to be invoked in this pandemic considering the foremost use of him has been in the idiotic, old fashioned Darwinian idea that letting the virus kill off millions would have the jolly good benefit of making the survivors "more fit" with a nifty new, totally presumed, at this point, immunity to the disease. Scott Atlas and the meat-heads who formulated the Swedish government's policy on the diseaase is directly attributable to what Darwin claimed about natural selection, the work of the virologists and epidemiologists who are trying to stop the disease and limit the death count are working against the gale of ignorance that is founded in the ideology of natural selection.

Looking him up, Quamman is an English lit guy with an academic specialization in Faulkner who has branched out to writing about science on a popular level. I'm not familiar with his writing but it's clear he latched onto the Darwin gravy train like they all seem to these days. Too bad he, as they, don't bother much to actually read him and the legacy of his theory which isn't "evolution" but an alleged mechanism of death through which evolution happens. The irony is that the most demonstrable effect of Darwinism on the course of evolution is in those who Darwinian programs of death have cut off from the future, both through the actual eugenic sterilization of people and the many times more murdered by genocidal "scientific" regimes and, with supreme irony in this case, through the resistance to such things as universal vaccinations. Leonard Darwin who with far more justification and authority than a late 20th, early 21st century scribbler like Quammen could ever muster, fully believed his eugenics work was a continuation of his father's work. Among his proposals and life long concerns was that vaccination to prevent infectious diseases was a long-term disaster for the "fitness" of the human species. When his, thankfully, abortive attempt at a political career was in the campaign phase, he campaigned against universal small pox vaccination as keeping the unfit alive so they could have children.  Even as he was praising the Nazi eugenics programs in the late 1930s, he praised those in Nazi Germany and their immediate Darwinist predecessors like Wilhelm Schallmeyer were concerned about the dysgenic effects of medical care being available to the human species.  I have yet to find a contemporary advocate for or authority in Darwinian natural selection who vocally and publicly or even in published correspondence disagreed with him about the Darwinian character of any of that. 

 

Scott Atlas is the Darwinian side of this pandemic, not the virologists and epidemiologists who are trying to stop it and save lives.  There is nothing Darwinist in the race to find vaccines to stop the disease, there is nothing "natural" about it, it is entirely a product of human artifice, it is not in any way a natural selection, it is the effort of human intent and human choice and its goal is the opposite of that proposed engine of evolution which Darwin invented and successfully marketed.  I think Darwinism has more in common with Ford's automobile or modern propaganda than it does that effort.  And it was marketed most successfully to the respectable and college credentialed such as write reviews for the New York Review of Books.  It narrows the focus it doesn't take the full range of reality into account. 

Update:  The NYT times print shop putting out what it does, I read the on-paper review through a Fresnel lens, the resolution isn't good enough for me to always see an "e" instead of an "a".  If I misspelled the guys name and it matters to anyone, sorry.  I read a lot of things through the thing, including online, sometimes. It's the best I've got until things get so bad I have to project things on the wall in the dark.  Which is coming.