Last Hate Mail Of The Year Maybe?

AH, yes, the never-ending need of uncovering the cover story as ass-covering given to Darwinism, starting with ol' Chuck, himself "Social Darwinism". 

When I started my investigation of the question as to whether or not the post-WWII line I'd been taught in school were true, that Darwin was neither responsible for nor guilty of eugenics, as soon as I looked into the actual words of Darwin, in On the Origin of Species, especially the fifth and sixth editions prepared by Darwin and published before his death and even more so in The Descent of Man, I saw that far from being distanced from the eugenics that his cousin and colleague Francis Galton was formalizing into the trappings of science, he was Galton's most desired and definitive champion in that effort.   I know that because a. Francis Galton in his memoir SAID THAT HIS INSPIRATION IN INVENTING EUGENICS WAS HIS READING OF ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES,  b. Galton said that his cousin, Charles Darwin's approval was the thing he most sought and c. he published his cousin's letter lavishly praising and approving of Galton's eugenics in his memoir.

The most important aspect of that isn't Galton's definitive proof that Charles Darwin approved of eugenics it is the confirmation that he approved of it by Darwin citing Galton's earliest journal articles and the first book laying out eugenic theory,  Hereditary Genius, as reliable science INCLUDING THE APPLICATION OF THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION AS APPLIED TO PRESUMED INEQUALITY WITHIN THE HUMAN SPECIES.  

As to the dodge that it was the putrid English philosopher Herbert Spencer who corrupted Darwinism with "Social Darwinism" through his slogan "survival of the fittest,"  in his fifth edition of Origin of Species, Darwin, at the urging of A. R. Wallace, his co-inventor of natural selection, came right out and admitted that when he used the term "natural selection" he meant the exact same thing as Spencer did when he said "survival of the fittest".  Nothing I have seen, whether published by Darwin in the remainder of his life nor in letters that have since been published did I see a single thing that repudiated that statement, every single word that I read by him or idea attributed to him by his children, his scientific colleagues reinforced the fact that he was a total and complete supporter of even extreme eugenic proposals, though he did hold the line at advocating contraception which he felt was icky and might lead women to enjoy sex too much.   I'm not making that up, he actually said that in a letter to the eugenicist Gaskell (look it up in my archive).  In that letter he also advocated that Britain, around the world, practice what Hitler would a few decades after he died called "Lebensraum" in which Brits would replace the inhabitants of other countries and continents through the elimination of the native population.

Anyone who had done the first thing necessary to find out the truth of the matter only had to honesty read the words of Charles Darwin presented as valid science in his two major works on the topic to see that Darwin not only approved of Galton's eugenics, he also approved of the even more extreme advocacy of applying natural selection to the human species found in his foremost German friend, colleague and disciple, Ernst Haeckel who included rigid rankings of human fitness along racial lines and everything up to and including advocating murder to correct the inhibition of natural selection in the human species of those "scientifically" deemed to be inferior, whether due to their class ranking within racial and national groups or, indeed, among so-called racial and national groupings.   That was something that Darwin approved to the extent that he said in his introductory section of On The Descent of Man that if he had known Haeckel was writing The History of Creation before he had gotten much of Descent of Man finished, he would not have finished his book because he approved of what Haeckel said in it so highly.

I have been pointing these things out here, on this blog for the past eight years and in other places since 2006.  I don't see any evidence that most college credentialed Americans or Brits are really interested in reading Darwin anymore than they're really interested in reading much else by way of primary documentation, preferring to get the condensed con-dunced versions of it whether in print or as seen on cable TV and, alas the BBC and PBS.   

The eugenics-free Darwin is a post-WWII myth invented as the world had the consequences of a belief in natural selection, eugenics, put in front of their eyes and their consciences in the death camps of the Nazis.   I found absolutely no one who knew Darwin or who called themselves Darwinists in the pre-WWII period who distanced Darwin and natural selection from eugenics.  I concluded from my years of study of the matter that it is impossible to maintain a belief in the ideology of natural selection and prevent eugenics at the same time and, I'm happy to say, that the more I read and studied the claims of natural selection the less and less I believed it was a plausible scientific theory.  I think if the eugenicist and scientific racist R. A. Fischer had not trimmed natural selection and rudely glued it to the now rather quaint notions of genetics current in the 1920s and 30s, it would have been totally obliterated in the discrediting of its far more fastly affixed form, eugenics in 1945.  The post-war lie of the non-eugenics Darwin was a salvage operation, one which I think was primarily motivated by ideological, not scientific necessity.  It depended on the primary sources not being read, something that was more likely to not happen in an ink on paper intellectual environment, one which the primary documentation being easily available from non-ideological sources online, much of it in easily searchable form, less likely.  I suspect that many of us curious about the actual status of many of these bits of common intellectual lore find our job of looking at the primary material far more possible.  The sources I've looked at are now available to anyone with an internet hook up.  I'd never have found even many of the most important ones proving the link of natural selection to the Nazi genocides, in both English and German if I had to rely on a library of books.  The protection of paper for that and other lies is over, it now merely relies on the laziness and dishonesty of the allegedly educated.

I'm not a geneticist nor even an evolutionary biologist but I can read with some comprehension and I do find the statements of a number of eminent biologists who are challenging the neo-Darwinian synthesis of Fisher et al even to the extent that several of them have declared it dead convincing.  I think it's time for them to get ready to leave natural selection on that enormous bone yard of discontinued science, one which is already rather full due to past attempts of the social sciences to mimic Darwinism, extending his natural selection to ever stupider applications.  In this pandemic we have seen several economists claiming the mantle of Darwinism as they advised the disastrous policies that have led the Trump regime to get many tens if not hundreds of thousands of Americans and many Swedes killed.   I have no doubt that Darwin was responsible for peddling the idea of beneficial deaths, certainly by passively doing nothing to provide for those who were deprived of sustenance and medical care (he said that universal vaccination and medical care kept too many of the "unfit" alive) an idea that English, German and other exponents of natural selection have adopted and championed.   It was something his theory was criticized for almost from the beginning, something he condescendingly and sexistly brushed aside when the astute Frances Cobbe pointed out would lead to terrible consequences.  Well, the next hundred and fifty years would prove her right and Darwin wrong on that account.  Something Darwin certainly knew at the time since he advocated men of science who advocated exactly the things that Frances Cobbe said were the consequence of believing in natural selection. 

Look at my archive, I've written all of this up with links and citations to primary source materials.   But I know you won't read it.  You guys aren't really interested in the historical record, you're just interested in your preferred story line.