Saturday, June 12, 2021

Hate Mail - Duncan Isn't Going To Pick A Fight With Me He'd Have To Write Something To Do It, He Hates Writing Stuff

HOW RIDICULOUS I've always accepted that evolution is the most scientifically supported explanation for the diversity of species, I've never gone close to denying that.  Nor would I.  If you believe that belief in Darwinism is the same thing as the belief in evolution, that only means you don't know much about it.  But I think, unless you are a biology teacher or otherwise work in a part of the life sciences which requires a knowledge of evolution, the belief in it or failure to believe in it  is relatively unimportant.  I'm not bothered by people who are stupid not believing in evolution, I'm more worried about them not believing that people releasing carbon into the atmosphere is responsible for global warming.  You can't do much about the lost past when species evolved, you can do something about the future which is where many species, likely including our own, will end if we don't stop global warming.   For someone like the typical buffalo butt blog rat at a has-been dive like Eschaton, it's got nothing to do with science and everything about class-status, conformity to  middle-brow college-credentialed common received kulcha.  I'll bet most of them have never read anything ol' Chuck wrote and most of the ones that did, it was probably Voyage of the Beagle, his most engaging book for the scientifically uninterested.   Which reminds me of this passage of Brit aristocratic anthropology-poli-sci babble about the disaster that equality and equal sharing of possessions leads to from that early book.


The perfect equality among the individuals composing the Fuegian tribes must for a long time retard their civilization. As we see those animals, whose instinct compels them to live in society and obey a chief, are most capable of improvement, so is it with the races of mankind. Whether we look at it as a cause or a consequence, the more civilized always have the most artificial governments. For instance, the inhabitants of Otaheite, who, when first discovered, were governed by hereditary kings, had arrived at a far higher grade than another branch of the same people, the New Zealanders,—who, although benefited by being compelled to turn their attention to agriculture, were republicans in the most absolute sense. In Tierra del Fuego, until some chief shall arise with power sufficient to secure any acquired advantage, such as the domesticated animals, it seems scarcely possible that the political state of the country can be improved. At present, even a piece of cloth given to one is torn into shreds and distributed; and no one individual becomes richer than another. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how a chief can arise till there is property of some sort by which he might manifest his superiority and increase his power. 

I'M A HELL OF A LOT MORE WORRIED ABOUT PEOPLE WITH COLLEGE CREDENTIALS WHO BELIEVE CRYPTO-FASCIST STUFF LIKE THAT.   And there are plenty who do, thanks to Chuckie.

It's no wonder that the guy went back to England, read Malthus for his own diversion and came up with a claim that inevitably generated eugenics, new levels of scientific racism and and proto-Nazism among his followers with his most devoted followers and supporters within science with his full knowledge and with his full support.  That he was a rich British aristocrat was the key to everything with him. 

I don't think Duncan was trying to pick some kind of fight with me with that post, I don't think he's stupid enough to want to pick one with me and am confident that he realizes it would be too much like, well, let me spell it out,  w.o.r.k. for him to try it.   I think he was just blowing off steam about Mangy Madge, MTG, though him using an antique Salon  article by a former blogger from Duncan's glory days to do it is rather weird way to do it.  Maybe it's the last thing he read on the topic.  As you can see, I've read more recent things from more challenging writers. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Octavia E. Butler - Kindred Part 1

 

Kindred Part 1

I just started listening to this long and complex four part story, an audio theater version of the novel.   I haven't heard the last two parts yet.  You can jump ahead of me here as well as access other productions from Seeing Ear Theater.  Here are the full credits from the Seeing Ear page at SF Audio.


Provider: OctaviaButler.net / Archive.org
Based on Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 novel.
Cast:
Alfre Woodard as Dana Franklin
Lynn Whitfield as Sarah
Mykel Bath as Young Boy
P.J. Brown as Patroller #1 and male radio announcer
Leo Burmester as Kevin Franklin
Jacqueline Cuscuna as Harriet
Caroline Clay performing Slave Narratives and female radio announcer
Kevin Daniels as Nigel
Elenni Davis-Knight as Slave Girl, Hagar and Young Alice
Mot Filipowski as Patroller #3
Christopher Gardner as Young Nigel
Michelle Hurd as Alice
Marc John Jeffries as Sammy
Ezra Knight as Isaac and Jacob
Thomas Lyons as Rufus Weylin
Saundra McClain as Hannah
Craig McNulty as Blane and Coach Driver
Corliss Preston as Margaret Weylin and the Doctor
Lou Sumrall as Patroller #2 and Wagon Driver
Margot White as Rufus at Six Years Old
Nick Wyman as Tom Weylin
with Ruby Dee performing Slave Narratives
Crew:
Directed by Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna
Produced by Brian Smith and Laurissa James
Original Score Composed by Ohad Talmor
Foley Sound Effects by Sue Zizza and David Shinn
Sound Design by John Colucci
Voice Editing by John Colucci and David Shinn
Casting by Laura Richin and Judy Bowman
Executive Producer, Brian Smith

Time For The Congress To Put The Judges And Lawyer-liars On The Spot

IN THE DEVELOPING REVELATIONS of Trump era surveillance of the electronic communications of members of Congress, their staff and even their minor children, I have yet to see the name of the judge or judges who would have signed off on the dubiously justified subpoenas that allowed the Trump DoJ in the Sessions-Rosenstein-Whitaker-Barr era. 

It's clear that there was at least one judge who OKed the surveillance of Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell and others and their name should be made public as should those of other judges who were as much a part of it as the Trump goons in the Department of Justice.   The nice, polite and stupid treatment of judges and "justices" as if they are not political players is one of the stupidest of conventions in the media, in politics and in the law.  Not when they are some of the baldest and least inhibited of political actors around.

Congress should dump the kid gloves treatment of the Judicial branch which is way out of hand, which has never been the apolitical or non-political entity that it would claim it was even as it has been baldly partisan, never more so in the period when Republican-fascists took complete control of it and, now, especially as Federalist Society fascists are a strong majority of its members.  The lower courts are, if anything, even more dominated by Republican-fascists put there by the Federalist Society and the Republican-fascist domination of the Senate.  

I don't know how far they would dare to go in defying or reigning in the rogue judicial branch but the Congress shouldn't just lie there and take it from them, either.  There should be consequences for judges who issue such subpoenas, even though there is little to no hope that the anti-democratic Senate will remove them by impeachment.  The former practice of removing the worst offenders among the judiciary is something that would not happen now.  But there must be things the Congress can do to the Republican-fascist dominated judiciary and the Department of Justice.  If it doesn't act, if it doesn't let the judges and "justices" understand that it is more than just a co-equal branch, that as a democratically elected branch that it has more legitimacy than the totally non-democratically constituted part of government and that that fact counts for something, we don't need to wonder if the American system is fatally flawed, it will prove to be so. 

I want to see all of them. From Sessions down to Barr hauled in front of House Committees and grilled, not allowing them to have Barr style lapses of memory and pretended ignorance protect them as is their style.  And that includes the judges who signed off on the subpoenas.  I want the Congress to hold them to the same standard that a poor, downtrodden person hauled in front of a judge to answer questions  in court would be held to, including the full skepticism of such convenient lapses of memory.  Hold them all, judges and all, to the same standard they would practice if they had some hapless nobody in their power. 

Friday, June 11, 2021

NAW, I've done enough slumming with stupidity this month.  Short of unanimous audience demand, I'm bored with him. 

Update: Someone tells me they think Duncan banned him for annoying too many of the other regulars with his anti-trans obsession and his baiting of the women of Eschaton.  I don't know but if he's banned there, there's no reason for me to mention him again.  If Duncan had done that when he started libeling me about a decade ago, I'd probably have never mentioned Duncan or his moribund blog here at all. 

Nazism In English Before There Were Nazis In German

OH FOR PETE'S SAKE do you have to have it spelled out to you AGAIN that the eminent British scientist Karl Pearson, on the basis of his entirely conventional reading of Darwin and those who Darwin cited as reliably understanding his theory of natural selection was spouting Nazism before there were Nazis, get a load of this:

What I have said about bad stock seems to me to hold for the lower races of man.  How many centuries, how many thousands of years have the Kaffir and the Negro held large districts of Africa undisturbed by the white man?  Yet their inter-tribal struggles have not yet produced a civilization in the least comparable to the Aryan.  Educated and nurture them as you will, I do not believe that you will succeed in modifying the stock.  History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan’s success depended.

That was from the book National Life From The Standpoint of Science, in 1901, when Karl Pearson was one of the noted champions of Darwinism in science, which he repeatedly noted was one of the controlling ideas in his work.  The Nazi party wouldn't come into being for eighteen more years, I believe Hitler was 12 at the time, I don't know how old Rudolf Hess was, off hand, the man who said that Nazism was nothing but applied biology in 1934.   Here is a response to speeches given in praise of Karl Pearson the year after his retirement, the same year Hess made that declaration in Germany, at a dinner his former students gave in his honor at the University College London.

Then Weldon succeeded Ray Lankester and brought new inspiration, but alas, left us too soon for Oxford!  I sent the word "Biometry" to Oxford.  The Royal Society Council having passed a resolution that mathematics and biology should not be mixed,  Biometrika was founded with Galton as consultant and  Weldon and myself as joint editors.  Buccaneer expeditions into many fields followed;  fights took place on many seas, but whether we had right or wrong, whether we  lost or won, we did produce some effect.  The climax culminating in Galton's preaching of Eugenics and his foundation of the Eugenics Professorship.  Did I say "culmination"?  No, that lies rather in the future, perhaps with Reichskanzler (sic) Hitler and his proposals to regenerate the German people.  In Germany a vast experiment is in hand, and some of you may live to see its results.  If it fails it will not be for want of enthusiasm, but rather because the Germans are only just starting the study of mathematical statistics in the modern sense.

It is clear from his entire speech that he saw the Nazi eugenics laws, which included the most infamous of the race laws and, included in the "vast experiment in hand" proposals for the murder of people seen as unfit and plans for driving out or expelling Jews from Germany, not to mention the conquest of other parts of Europe for German expansion, that he saw that as a "culmination" of the work in applied Darwinism which was eugenics.   If I had seen this before I saw Leonard Darwin's April, 1939 article in which he tied his father to the same Nazi eugenics I might not have found that as shocking as I did when I saw that.  It's clear that one of the foremost experts in Darwinism of his time made that connection in the applied, as perhaps distinguished from the more theoretical branch of natural selection which eugenics was.  Though as I proved there is no real difference as from the start of it, Darwin advocated his theory of natural selection be applied not only to animal husbandry but to the human population, seeing the human population in the same terms as animals kept for use under animal husbandry and the meat industry.  I have more than amply proven in the past that Pearson's thinking in eugenics as well as Galton's was entirely based on Darwin's theory of natural selection, as both of them repeatedly said over many decades.  He is the inspiration of it all, as HIS own words repeatedly accepted and endorsed.

Thursday, June 10, 2021

Knocking The Gods Of Materialism Off Their Plinths - "Statistics, as a lens through which scientists investigate real-world questions, has always been smudged by the fingerprints of the people holding the lens."

IT WAS THROUGH THE ERECTION OF PROBABILITY AS A CREATOR GOD  within theoretical physics and cosmology that first clued me into the fact that modern, scientistic atheists do, in fact, believe in gods as long as they are mindless, stupid gods of their own creation.   I have, through the witness and testimonials of atheists identified a number of those, probability, perhaps part of an atheist trinity that embodies that one along with random chance and some vague power granted to mathematics by them, in general, father son and holy ghost.  And as I have long suspected biology of adopting natural selection as a rival creator god out of envy for the status of the physics of the 19th century,  I have actually discovered that many atheists assign divine powers to that theoretical "force" and to DNA and, depending on which sect of the biological Lords of Creation they belong to, RNA - disembodied gods which don't seem to be like the real things which are not creators or nearly independent but biologically active molecules which rely on complex cellular chemistry and biology to function.

I came across a note I'd made a long time ago about the slogan that the British journal Annals of Eugenics used,  a quote from Charles Darwin, one that added luster to its claims of "mathematical objectivity," a quote which, given the actual paucity of even the possibility of measurements being made to demonstrate the reality of natural selection in the ancient past, is rather ironic, “I have no Faith in anything short of actual measurement and the rule of three.”   I had, while reading Darwin, noted how little math he seems to have used to make his arguments for natural selection, somewhere, as I mentioned, even Karl Pearson noted that Darwin had little in the way of scientific evidence to back up his claims.   Something which a numbers man like Pearson would have had to have noticed.

In the book The Cult of Statistical Significance, How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives By Deirdre N. McCloskey, Stephen Thomas Ziliak, Steve Ziliak, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, it says:

A century and a half ago Charles Darwin said he had "no Faith in anything short of actual Measurement and the Role of Three,"  by which he appeared to mean the peak of arithmetical accomplishment in a nineteenth-century gentleman, solving of x in "6 is to 3 as 9 is to x."  Some decades later, in the early 1900s, Karl Pearson shifted the meaning of the Rule of Three - "take 3sigma [three standard deviations] as definitely significant" - and claimed it for his new journal of significance testing Biometrika.  Even Darwin late in life seems to have fallen into the confusion, Francis Galton [1822-1911], Darwin's first cousin, mailed Darwin a variety of plants.  Darwin had been thinking about point estimates on the heights of self- and cross-fertilized plants that depart three "probable errors" or more from the assumed hypothesis, a difference in height significant at about the 1 percent level.  

But the gentlemanly faith in the New Rule of Three was misplaced.  A statistically significant difference at the 1 percent level (an estimate departing three or more standard deviations from after Fischer, we call the null) may for purposes of botanically or evolutionary significance be of zero. importance (cf. Fisher 1935, 27-41).  That is, of some cause of natural selection may have a high probability of replicability in additional samples but be trivial.  Yet, on the other hand, a cause may have a low probability of replicability but be important.  This is what we mean when we say a test of significance is neither necessary nor sufficient to a finding of importance.  In significance testing the substantive question of what matters and how much has been translated into a 0 to 1.0 probability, regardless of the nature of the substance, probabilistically measured

The consequences of the atheist, allegedly atheistic faith in probability, divorced from the actual observation and rigorous analysis of not only the numbers but the actual substance and nature of what is allegedly being measured does, indeed, cost lives, as I've argued here on the basis of the use of his clearly antisemtic, racist statistical analysis of clearly racist gathering of data on Polish and Russian Jews in 1920s England, Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul entered themselves and Darwinist science into the trail notes to the Shoah.    It was a faith that denied something else quoted in the book, a short bit after that passage.

 "Statistical 'significance' by itself is not a rational basis for action."  W. Edward Demming

Though as the book shows, science, especially those sciences alleged to deal with matters of life and death, the minds of people, their actions in society, in that particular passage the most unlikely of all such as are allowed to call themselves scientists, economists, other rational bases for action being hard to get and prone to wildly unscientific levels of subjective motivation, pretty much put all their faith in the numbers, nevermind what the alleged data actually show.

I was, perhaps, prepared for that by a discussion I had with a very accomplished, very principled, very honest biologist discussing the Marc Hauser scandal and how scandalized I was to hear that those scientists who reviewed his many dishonest papers and up-voted them before publication never actually looked at the films of tamarin behavior he was allegedly describing to see if they showed what he claimed they did.  She told me that reviewers never look at that kind of thing, they only look at the text of the paper to see if it holds together as a mathematical and reasoned claim.   Which I'd never known before was the . . . um. . . "standard" that scientific review was based on.  Which hardly seems like a realistic standard of review that gets called that.  Perhaps another such god is the integrity of science, itself.  

In the case of Karl Pearson, his teacher and mentor Francis Galton, Charles Darwin and others, their use of the faith in numbers to promote their racism, their bigotry, their class and economic interests through science both natural selection (founded on the economic theories of Malthus which more or less, thus, inserted the political and legal fictions of the British class system as an atavistic natural force, little critiqued by the aristocratic Brits who controlled science) and the consequences of their use of the gods of statistics and probability had far reaching consequences up to and including cutting many people out of the future and their own present. 

I didn't see this 2020 article  "How Eugenics Shaped Statistics
Exposing the damned lies of three science pioneers,"until looking around last night but it would seem that people are finally waking up to some of the things warned  about here for the past dozen and more years in this regard.  

In early 2018, officials at University College London were shocked to learn that meetings organized by “race scientists” and neo-Nazis, called the London Conference on Intelligence, had been held at the college the previous four years.

The existence of the conference was surprising, but the choice of location was not. UCL was an epicenter of the early 20th-century eugenics movement—a precursor to Nazi “racial hygiene” programs—due to its ties to Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, and his intellectual descendants and fellow eugenicists Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher. In response to protests over the conference, UCL announced this June that it had stripped Galton’s and Pearson’s names from its buildings and classrooms. After similar outcries about eugenics, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies renamed its annual Fisher Lecture, and the Society for the Study of Evolution did the same for its Fisher Prize. In science, these are the equivalents of toppling a Confederate statue and hurling it into the sea.

Unlike tearing down monuments to white supremacy in the American South, purging statistics of the ghosts of its eugenicist past is not a straightforward proposition. In this version, it’s as if Stonewall Jackson developed quantum physics. What we now understand as statistics comes largely from the work of Galton, Pearson, and Fisher, whose names appear in bread-and-butter terms like “Pearson correlation coefficient” and “Fisher information.” In particular, the beleaguered concept of “statistical significance,” for decades the measure of whether empirical research is publication-worthy, can be traced directly to the trio.

Ideally, statisticians would like to divorce these tools from the lives and times of the people who created them. It would be convenient if statistics existed outside of history, but that’s not the case. Statistics, as a lens through which scientists investigate real-world questions, has always been smudged by the fingerprints of the people holding the lens. Statistical thinking and eugenicist thinking are, in fact, deeply intertwined, and many of the theoretical problems with methods like significance testing—first developed to identify racial differences—are remnants of their original purpose, to support eugenics.

It’s no coincidence that the method of significance testing and the reputations of the people who invented it are crumbling simultaneously. Crumbling alongside them is the image of statistics as a perfectly objective discipline, another legacy of the three eugenicists. Galton, Pearson, and Fisher didn’t just add new tools to the toolbox. In service to their sociopolitical agenda, they established the statistician as an authority figure, a numerical referee who is by nature impartial, they claimed, since statistical analysis is just unbiased number-crunching. Even in their own work, though, they revealed how thin the myth of objectivity always was. The various upheavals happening in statistics today—methodological and symbolic—should properly be understood as parts of a larger story, a reinvention of the discipline and a reckoning with its origins. The buildings and lectures are the monuments to eugenics we can see. The less visible ones are embedded in the language, logic, and philosophy of statistics itself.

I hope that in the near future the actual dangers of the artificial, British class system originating god of natural selection - the god of Galton, Pearson and Fisher (who was, atypically of such guys, a member of the Church of England) becomes more discussed because as long as natural selection is the ruling and controlling ideology of the science of evolution, as long as the religious faith in probability is matched with slack and lazy and opportunistic practices in such loosely identified sciences is around, the history cited in that article will repeat itself.  It is no shock to find it embedding things like racism into science because its own origins were in the self-interested bigotry of the British class system.

----------------

If I'd really wanted to be mean I'd have worked in the endorsement of Marc Hauser from the modern, university-based expert in ersatz morality, Peter Singer who called his work, "a major contribution to an ongoing debate about the nature of ethics.”  Which could be because Hauser's claims backed up Singer's atheist ideology in which "ethics" must be seen as a product of natural selection.   Which doesn't do a single thing to confirm its reality.  Karl Pearson and Francis Galton shared that faith in the degraded status of morality.


Wednesday, June 9, 2021

Idleness Leads To Wickedness

IS IT A PECULIARLY NYC THING that the mere fact of buying a ticket and sitting in an audience is held to be some enormous act of merit on par with the act of creating what is paid to be seen?   Maybe it's having been a musician that I never considered audience membership to be some kind of virtue that elevated my status, I don't think even being a performer left me with that illusion.  What it did was give me the front row seat for when it didn't go the way I wanted it to.

I'll bet if Randy Rainbow read my joke about someone being "cis-y" like a white, affluent, straight male who freaks about trans people saying unconventional things out of their experience of being transsexual or otherwise queer, like Simps did, they would  use it. 

I'll bet any LGBTQ person that neologism occurred to would use it the way I did when I, to the best of my knowledge, was the first person to say it.   I will allow that it was Simps being cis-y and having a cissy-fit at Eschaton that inspired me to say it.

For anyone who didn't guess, this is my response to another comment by Simps which, it being hot and dry, me being despondent and lethargic and giving into temptation, I posted so I could respond to it on a post from yesterday.  It being too hot and dry to be in the garden is bad for my course of conduct.   It rained last night and might again today so maybe I'll get back to more important stuff. 

I have never found anyone who knew Charles Darwin who distanced him from eugenics, I've never found anyone who knew him deny his role in inspiring the eugenics of Francis Galton or in their own eugenics. - That Post-WWII Myth Is A Transparent Lie

IT WAS PREDICTABLE that someone would revive the dodge "the word eugenics didn't exist when Darwin was alive," as if that meant he could not have been guilty of supporting or inspiring eugenics.    That is something I addressed in one of the first posts I did on this topic and disproved as definitively as it is possible for a statement outside of mathematics to be,  disproven through the very words of Charles Darwin presented as reliable science and those of the man who invented eugenics, Francis Galton.  

What they said is definite proof that the entire post-WWII distancing of Darwin from eugenics, from its most deceptively harmless form to the kind that Darwin himself, Ernst Haeckel,  Karl Pearson, etc. advocated as salubrious to the human race, the deaths of not only individuals taken by them to be inferior but even up to and including entire races of people.  That is something I repeatedly proved was said by Darwin, as science, certainly from a book his supporters should have read, The Descent of Man and in other documents, letters, etc. which are available from those who are dedicated to the deification of the man.

I don't consider the many posts I did on this topic to have been major feats of research or reasoning.   After a while of finding exactly the kind of thing I assumed was said by this or that Darwinist scientist was said by them, in their own words turned kind of every-day because of course they would say that.  I expected to find the links from Darwin and his major claim to fame, natural selection, to just about every claim made for and about eugenics INCLUDING THE EUGENICS OF THE NAZIS because they were persuading each other and the public to let them do appalling things to other people, they would have had to use what was considered the highest of scientific authority to persuade the public to let them do it, to encourage themselves to do it with the zeal they all seem to have felt in their mission to cut the "unfit" out of the human future.  The ease with which I found the primary documentation makes the scandal of it being successfully buried AMONG THOSE WITH COLLEGE-CREDENTIALS and others all the more a symptom of the dishonesty of modern, materialist-scientistic-atheist secular culture.  

I knew from the start that I was violating some of the major taboos of the college-credentialed common received culture when I started this, I retained some of its dishonest practices until very recently, such as disclaiming the identification of eugenics as a scientific endeavor - something which would have seemed bizarre to anyone much before the end of WWII.  I have tried to remove things like scare quotes around the word "science"  from this because it is a fact that science includes whatever scientists say it does during the period in which they control science, including ideas that are dropped later. But scientists should not be able to claim that ideas so dropped were not accepted as science nor that such ideas lose their potency once they are dropped within science.  The repute with which science is accepted makes its mistakes have a lingering potency in real life.  As I have also proven in the many posts I did on this topic, scientists have not, in fact, given up eugenics or even much mitigated their most depraved of racist and class based claims out of it.  Scientists in the post war period, SCIENTISTS PUBLISHING AS SCIENTISTS IN SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS WHILE HOLDING FACULTY POSITIONS AND OTHERS WITHIN OFFICIAL SCIENCE have claimed as science everything from the most primitive of racial inequality, antisemitic claims, the necessity of aborting fetuses believed to be disabled, the killing of infants who are born with defects, etc.  

And that's just eugenics within today's science, its position, named or not, in popular culture, in politics, in the law, in the superstition of judges and "justices", among lawyers and members of juries is probably even more insidious and dangerous,  Science still is one of the major props of racism, emerging at times in racism being advocated on the basis of scientific claims, those invented by the racists and, not infrequently, motivated by what some scientist has claimed on the basis of natural selection and its logical consequence, the science of eugenics.   That alone makes me willing to continue to prove my case, though I don't see any reason to reinvent this particular wheel.  That case was closed  the first time I posted this.

 Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Charles Darwin and Francis Galton The Father of Eugenics

As his defenders will point out,  Charles Darwin died before his cousin Francis Galton gave eugenics its name.   That is true,  Darwin died on April 19, 1882,  Galton named his science "eugenics" the next year.  That is the first life preserver that is thrown to the mythical, eugenics-free Charles Darwin.  However, Galton first used the word "eugenics" in his book "Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development".   In his introduction to that book, he says:

Since the publication of my work on Hereditary Genius in 1869, I have written numerous memoirs, of which a list is given in an earlier page, and which are scattered in various publications. They may have appeared desultory when read in the order in which they appeared, but as they had an underlying connection it seems worth while to bring their substance together in logical sequence into a single volume. I have revised, condensed, largely re-written, transposed old matter, and interpolated much that is new; but traces of the fragmentary origin of the work still remain, and I do not regret them.

Clearly, Galton dated the beginning of his science to his book "Hereditary Genius", though he worked the idea in the years before he published "Inquiries into Human Faculty".  That is a vital point in determining what part Charles Darwin played as inspiring eugenics.   In chapter twenty of his Memories of My Life,  Francis Galton explicitly credits Charles Darwin as the inspiration of his research that produced "Hereditary Genius".

THE publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science.

.. I was encouraged by the new views to pursue many inquiries which had long interested me, and which clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race.

Galton goes on to say:

After many months of hard work, I wrote, in I865, two preliminary papers in Macmillan's Magazine, entitled "Hereditary Talent and Character" .  These contain the germs of many of my subsequent memoirs, the contents of which went to the making of the following books: Hereditary Genius, 1869; English Men of Science, 1874; Human Faculty, 1883; Natural Inheritance, 1889; and to my quite recent writings on Eugenics.  On re-reading these articles, I must say that, considering the novel conditions under which they were composed, and notwithstanding some crudeness here and there, I am surprised at their justness and comprehensiveness.

This names "The Origin of Species" as the inspiration of  articles and the book, "Hereditary Genius" in the line that includes "Human Faculty.... "and to my quite recent writings on Eugenics".  There is no possible better authority than Francis Galton on the question of what inspired him to invent eugenics.   And since the book that inspired Galton was written by Charles Darwin, he is named by Galton as inspiring eugenics.   Unless, sometime in the three years remaining to Francis Galton, he retracted that attribution, there could not be more solid evidence tying Charles Darwin to eugenics, nothing else could loosen the knots doing that.

However, there are things that could tighten them.  Francis Galton was only too glad to provide that in the same chapter:

Hereditary Genius made its mark at the time, though subjected to much criticism, no small part of which was captious or shallow, and therefore unimportant. The verdict which I most eagerly waited for was that of Charles Darwin, whom I ranked far above all other authorities on such a matter. His letter, given below, made me most happy.

DOWN, BECKENHAM, KENT, S.E.

3rd December

"MY DEAR GALTON,--I have only read about 50 pages of your book (to Judges), but I must exhale myself, else something will go wrong in my inside. I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original--and how Well and clearly you put every point! George, who has finished the book, and who expressed himself in just the same terms, tells me that the earlier chapters are nothing in interest to the later ones! It will take me some time to get to these latter chapters, as it is read aloud to me by my wife, who is also much interested. You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think this is an eminently important difference. I congratulate you on producing what I am convinced will prove a memorable work. I look forward with intense interest to each reading, but it sets me thinking so much that I find it very hard work; but that is wholly the fault of my brain and not of your beautifully clear style.--Yours most sincerely,

(Signed) "CH. DARWIN"


So, Charles Darwin effusively endorsed "Hereditary Genius" as he was reading it, or rather having it read to him. Did he change his mind after finishing it and reject its quite developed eugenics? No. We know that from the authority of Charles Darwin, himself. In his second major book setting out his account of evolution, The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin repeatedly and enthusiastically cited and endorsed both Hereditary Genius and other articles by Francis Galton, as well as other eugenicists.  Just a sample of Darwin's citations of Galton's eugenics.

- With man we see similar facts in almost every family; and we now know, through the admirable labours of Mr. Galton (10. 'Hereditary Genius: an Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences,' 1869.), that genius which implies a wonderfully complex combination of high faculties, tends to be inherited; and, on the other hand, it is too certain that insanity and deteriorated mental powers likewise run in families. -

- This, as Mr. Galton (49. See his remarkable work on 'Hereditary Genius,' 1869, p. 349.

 -  see 'Anthropological Review,' as before cited. Mr. Galton in 'Macmillan's Magazine,' Aug. 1865*, p. 318; also his great work, 'Hereditary Genius,' 1870.) Most of my remarks are taken from these three authors

 - See, also, Mr. Galton, 'Hereditary Genius,' pp. 352-357, for observations to the above effect.


The connections between Charles Darwin and eugenics begin at the start of it, with the attribution of the man who invented the science and who coined the word. In the very terms that Galton gives as the beginning of eugenics, Charles Darwin confirms that attribution by his letter to Galton and his laudatory citations in what was supposed to be a major science publication.   Short of subsequent retractions from both of them, the charge that Charles Darwin inspired eugenics has to stand as proven.  Not only suggested, not only inferred but proven.

Charles Darwin's son,  Leonard Darwin**, succeeded Francis Galton as the head of  the British Eugenics Society in 1911.  Three of Darwin's other sons,  George (the one he mentions in his letter to Galton), Francis, and Horace Darwin were also active in eugenics, as were numerous other members of Charles Darwin's family.

No one who never met Charles Darwin, no one in the post WWII period when the eugenics-free Charles Darwin seems to have been constructed, knew Charles Darwin better than his own children and those who did what none of us has done, talked with the man, unrecorded.

If any of them believed their eugenics activity was a violation of their father's ideas, I've never found evidence of that.   Other than Charles Darwin, there is no higher authority in this question of what Charles Darwin thought about this science than his own children.  Just as there is no higher authority in what inspired Galton to invent eugenics than Francis Galton,  himself.

In the seven years I've been looking into this question, I have never found anyone who knew Charles Darwin who distanced him from eugenics,  I've never found anyone who knew him deny his role in inspiring the eugenics of Francis Galton or in their own eugenics.  I have never found anyone trying to do that until after the Nazis showed the world what eugenics could turn into, discrediting the science for a generation***.   The events of that time put anyone wanting to keep Charles Darwin as the face of evolutionary science in a difficult position.   Natural selection, in the form of "On the Origin of Species", was cited as the inspiring idea of eugenics by the man who invented eugenics.   Natural selection and the allegation that human civilization impeded it and that with natural selection impeded, the human species would fall into ruin was the foundation of eugenics****, it was the only reason that it developed as a legal and political application of purported science.  It is the scientific basis of all eugenics laws, in the English speaking countries, in other countries, including those adopted by the Nazis in the 1930s. 

The large majority of the evidence confirming that evolution is real has been discovered since Charles Darwin died.   Other explanations of change in organisms have been discovered, sometimes introduced to the opposition and eventually grudging acceptance of those who demand that natural selection is the supreme law of biology.   In the most extreme cases the advocates of natural selection attempt to extend it to areas outside of the origin of species in biology,  even quite irrationally and with absolutely no evidence.  An extreme example of this is the ultra-Darwinist Daniel Dennett.

I don't think evolutionary science needs Charles Darwin in 2012[when I first wrote this], certainly not the phony, eugenics-free Charles Darwin that is the common received POV required to be a respectable member of the "educated class".  Quite frankly,  I think the major use of that Charles Darwin is an entirely non-scientific one, it is an icon of ideology, class status, social acceptability and mutual admiration, permission to disdain anyone who dares to violate the myth. He is an icon of atheism and materialism, as he clearly was in his own time and, by his readings of Galton, Huxley, Haeckel and others, with his full knowledge.

The biggest irony of the cult of Charles Darwin among those who believe themselves to be paragons of intellectual life is that, in the arguments I've had on this issue, I've generally discovered that those who insist on their phony St. Charles Darwin have never read much if anything he wrote.  They couldn't possibly have read him and still maintain that he was not an ardent supporter of Galton's developing eugenics, or of Ernst Haeckel's even more extreme exposition of it within his materialist monist system.

Creationists, both in their primitive form and in those who pursue the idea of intelligent design as a scientific proposition, have done that, they've poured over the record left by Charles Darwin, his family and associates and his followers, and have discovered the same quotes, the same absolutely solid case that Charles Darwin is absolutely tied to eugenics and its legacy only means that that record has been there and always will be.   They are nothing if not dedicated to discovering any ammunition that is provided to them by Darwin and his friends. There is nothing illegitimate or unfair in their honest use of that record, though some have distorted it, a sin they share with many of his supporters.  Charles Darwin's own words are there for anyone to read, to understand and to comment on.  Having read him, fully, on this charge, that Darwin was a eugenicist, there is no doubt as to his guilt.  There isn't even a reasonable doubt that he might not have been.

To the extent that evolutionary science keeps Charles Darwin as its figure head, it will find he's a political liability. The denial of his record in regard to eugenics is a lie, it is unworthy of people pretending to uphold science and the truth, the result of denying that record is a failed PR campaign, a trade mark that doesn't work with most people.  The best the Darwin Fan Club can hope for is a slight mitigation to what that record shows.   If they continue to deny that record, they certainly don't do anything for evolutionary science,  I'd guess the Darwin cult is more likely to impede progress than to help it.  To the extent they insist on keeping their artificial Darwin,  it is a good indication of how much more they value ideology instead of science.

Note:  I have not discussed Charles Darwin saying that Emma Darwin, his wife, read him Hereditary Genius, probably during one of Darwin's many bouts of illness, and that she seems, according to her husband, to be interested in Galton's earliest eugenics as well [Why wouldn't she, much of the substance of the book glories in the "hereditary genius" of the Darwin-Wedgewood family which both of the Darwins and Galton came from.] I haven't looked at her diaries to see if she said anything about that, herself.   I have never read anyone taking note of her in relation to eugenics in the last six years of looking into this question.


*  Perhaps the same article that Galton cites as early eugenics material in his Memoir.

**  I will be citing Leonard Darwin in the next part of this series.  Leonard Darwin's repeated statement that in his eugenics promotion he is carrying on his father's work is probably the strongest witness up to and into the period of WWII linking his father to Nazi eugenics.  In nothing I have read by anyone else is that claim denied, especially not in any of the things I read from others, certainly not many by that date, who knew Charles Darwin in the flesh and as closely as his own son would have.  His authority to make that connection is unsurpassed and can never be overcome by the claims of those who never knew the man or talked with him.

***  I will contend that eugenics is gaining traction in a future post.  That is what makes this important.

****  This will also figure importantly later in this series.  It is important to note that Alfred Russell Wallace, the man who is considered the co-discoverer, I would say co-inventor, of the theory of natural selection, vehemently denounced eugenics as pseudo-scientific and the meddling of "an arrogant scientific priestcraft".   So, the idea that natural selection necessarily leads to eugenics is clearly false, though it seems to more often than not.  I am unaware of anyone of the authority of Wallace on this topic who was not a full-blown eugenics supporter who did not consider it scientifically factual.  He is, decidedly, an outlier on this topic.  I might get around to giving my theory of why Wallace's thought on that question developed so differently than did the Darwin side, almost unanimous in the pre-WWII period of eugenics and biology.   I will repeat, I have never found anyone from before the end of WWII and the exposure of the eugenic crimes of the Nazis who claimed that eugenics had nothing to do with natural selection, Darwinism or Charles Darwin.

Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Real Hate Mail

IF YOU WANTED ME TO BELIEVE your way too stereotypical tale of woe, which I don't believe, you shouldn't have proven to me over well over a decade that you are such a pathological liar.  Look in the mirror.  If I knew you were honest, I might withhold my skepticism but it sounds too much like some speech you vaguely remember from a movie.  

And it would still be irrelevant in the issue of the Darwinian motives of the Nazis and their own explanation of why they committed their crimes.  Maybe your bigger problem is egomania, you figure it's all really all about you when it isn't. 

I can well imagine you being the target for bullying, though it's probably due to you being such a putz who is too stupid to keep your mouth shut around them.   Your big mouth and stupidity getting you into hot water?   Hey, I can imagine if they could get to you some of the Eschatots you aggravate would give you a wedgie, right now. 

Update:  Oh, sorry, I don't remember not everyone would know.  "Eschatots" is what I call the rump of regulars who still frequent the blog "Eschaton."  I started calling them that because so many of them in a display of Freudian-slip Freudianism call the owner of the blog "Dad."  Even when I wasted too much time there I thought there was something kinda creepy about that, as most of them are older than Duncan Black is.   Simps is one of the regulars who likes to fight with the women there by being a sexist pig and who, apparently, recently has been really OC about trans people, offending a lot of the other regulars.  He whines about being called "cis" while constantly being quintessentially a cis-y.  He's taken to championing some racist show biz routines, too. 

 

Update 2:  Randy Rainbow would use it. Cis-gendered straight men don't get LGBTQ humor.  It's what's so cis-y about them.


No, I Don't Believe I Have Ever Considered Daniel Okrent On This Topic - Not Exactly Hate Mail That Can't Wait

PRIMARY DOCUMENTATION of what people said is always preferable to going with secondary texts and even more so the tertiary and lesser texts that are largely based on anything but the primary documentation that comes directly from the sources of ideas and issues.  I have not read Daniel Okrent's 2019 book allegedly dealing with eugenics because it was not close to primary documentation.  I listened to his interview with Terri Gross and found it contained enormous distortions of the fact that Darwin, himself, in the first edition of On the Origin of Species not only inspired Francis Galton's eugenics, as Galton himself said he did but that Darwin almost immediately began to endorse Galton's developing eugenics starting with the letter he sent Galton when his wife read Galton's Hereditary  Genius to the typically ailing Darwin (his son George had read it earlier and encouraged him to read it) and he continued to endorse it and the even more extreme eugenics of Ernst Haeckel as sound science in his second most important book on the topic of evolution, The Descent of Man.  In the Descent of Man, Darwin began to claim that due to natural selection superior races of people would naturally wipe out "lesser races" and inhabit the land they had once lived in and that it was biologically disastrous to provide medical care and other aid to those he deemed inferior, not infrequently based on the totally artificial class differences within a group.  Darwin's thinking was as proto-Nazi as the writings of Ernst Haeckel which he endorsed as good science and was certainly as eugenic as the thinking of Galton which he endorsed as science in his second most important book.

Okrent also lied when he claimed that eugenics is not science, it was taken as science BY EMINENT SCIENTISTS SUCH AS DARWIN, GALTON, HAECKEL ALL WERE from the start.  The history of eugenics was and still is an idea held by professional scientists and claimed to be true based on Darwin's theory of natural selection, there isn't much else to base a scientific claim of eugenics on.  Eugenics hardly left science with the exposure of the crimes of the Nazis, it may have kept its head down for a while but it was always there, even espressed by scientists such as Darwin's grandson, Charles Galton Darwin, reemerging publicly out of scientists in the 1970s and gaining influence and power as a political force since then.  Virtually every neo-Darwinist that I'm aware of holds eugenic beliefs based on their belief in natural selection,  you hardly ever find a strong holder of the belief in natural selection which is far removed from assertions of eugenics.  Eugenics, not so called has been casually expressed among the lay public for the entire period, even during the all too brief eclipse after its consequences in Nazism were exposed.

Eugenics is alive, newly politically and legally influential,  and still part of science today, science is whatever scientists say it is in the period in which they control science, eugenics started out as science, it continues as science, even as the scientific basis of it is not only flawed but a mistaken insertion of class-interest and ideology into science in language that makes it hardly noticeable to scientists that that's what it is, even as it cannot do the first thing that science requires, observe the actual evolution of species and what led to the divergence of species, never mind coming up with actual data that would be necessary to demonstrate that natural selection was the reason for that.  It is bad science which, nevertheless, is the controlling ideology of biological science and a required belief in most of the respectable educated population. It can hardly be a shock that the bigotry against Muslims and Latin Americans which Okrent and Gross discussed has risen in ways that now leads to the the revival of antisemtism in the Republican-fascist right follows on the popularization of neo-eugenics as best exemplified in The Bell Curve by Herrenstein and Murray, as popularized in publications like The New Republic in the period of the racist Andrew Sullivan and the other noted racist, Marty Perez.  That follows on the assertions of other social scientists like Arthur Jensen with the behind the scenes support of as eminent a scientist as the "Twentieth-Century Darwin" Francis Crick and others.

As I have demonstrated here, the anti-semitism that the Nazis put into their "final solution" and their earlier expression of it as the biological necessity of expelling "eastern Jews" not to mention Slavic people from Germany and where they asserted Germans had a right to replace other people, was being published as science by as eminent a Darwinist scientist as Karl Pearson, and that the Nazis quoted his paper in which he claimed to have demonstrated that scientifically.

As for Okrent having priority over me, hardly.  I wrote the first posts I did on this subject in 2008 at Echidne of the Snakes and I always give credit for my sources.    From what I've read and heard of him I doubt Okrent has looked much at the primary documentation.  Having looked at the primary documentation, from the pre-Origin of Species period till the seemingly passing neo-Darwinist hegemony of the post-war period, I don't think natural selection is anything but that ideological insertion into science, I don't think it's even logically coherent.  One of the things I find most remarkable is how people can assert that Darwin was opposed to the concept of Lamarckian inheritance when he was the author of a theory of Lamarckian inheritance and all of the first generation of Darwinists seems to have believed in it, as well.  Haeckel certainly did, noting that Darwin and he agreed on the topic as documented by Francis Darwin, Darwin's son.  I have never heard someone as philosophically astute - atypical of modern scientists - as the geneticist H. Allen Orr address that fact in light of his claim that unblending genetic inheritance is an absolute necessity for the claim of natural selection to work - especially in light of the scientific support of epigenetic inheritance in the last couple of decades, but I'd love to have an explanation as to how that can be true without it fatally damaging the fragile belief in natural selection already demoted by other non-adaptationist concepts such as genetic drift.   But as a political blogger, that's not exactly central to my theme.

"when the white man and the dark shall share the soil between them, and each till it as he lists. But, believe me, when that day comes mankind will no longer progress; there will be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock" - Nazism In English Science Before There Were Nazis

TUESDAYS are to me what Mondays are to to other people.  Traditionally it's my busiest day of the week.  I'll post something later.   Until then, here's a piece I posted on another Tuesday, though I'm sure I wrote it before it was posted.  It was from before I went sans serif and blew things up to be easier on the eyes, my eyes, actually.  But I decided not to risk screwing around with the HTML by changing it.  I have also added a few links to previous posts I did about Karl Pearson's Darwinism as proto-Nazism referred to in this post.  There were more, which you can find by using the search window in the side bar. 

 

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

"Masterful Human progress following an inter-racial struggle" How Much More Obvious Can The Relationship of Darwinism To Nazism Get?

If the excerpt of the British Fabian socialist, undisputed expert in Darwinism in his day and still regarded as a great figure of science,  Karl Pearson, given here yesterday didn't convince you that his entirely orthodox pre-war vision of Darwinism, which he got from one of Darwin's closest and most valued colleagues,  Francis Galton, was indistinguishable from Nazism and the current thinking of neo-Nazis, you can complete that by his vision of what the genocides he advocated and promoted would lead to.   He didn't think they should lead to any kind of peaceful millennium, such as that pointed out here a few days back the British utilitarians theoretically mused might be bought by the genocide of Jews.  No, what would be bought by the genocides he advocated of the inhabitants of the Americas, Africa, Australia, etc. was a continued culling through violent struggle among groups and a program within a group of selective culling through the violence that is the basis of the class system and direct selection of who would get to leave children. 

Continuing immediately after where I left off in the main contents of National Life From The Standpoint of Science, page 25, Karl Pearson makes that claim to an absolute certainty.

But America is but one case in which we have to mark a masterful human progress following an inter-racial struggle.  The Australian nation is another case of great civilization supplanting a lower race unable to work to the full the land and its resources.  Further back in history you find the same tale with almost every European nation.  Sometimes when the conquering race is not too diverse in civilization and in type of energy there is an amalgamation of races, as when Norman and Anglo-Saxon ultimately blended;  at other times the inferior race is driven out before the superior,  as the Celt drove out the Iberian.  The struggle means suffering, intense suffering, while it is in progress;  but that struggle and that suffering have been the stages by which the white man has reached his present stage of development, and they account for the fact that he no longer lives in caves and feeds on roots and nuts.  This dependence of progress on the survival of the fitter race, terribly black as it may seem to some of you, gives the struggle for existence its redeeming features;  it is the fiery crucible out of which comes the finer metal.   You may hope for a time when the sword shall be turned into the ploughshare, when American and German and English traders shall no longer compete in the markets of the world for their raw material and for their food supply,  when the white man and the dark shall share the soil between them, and each till it as he lists.   But, believe me,  when that day comes mankind will no longer progress;  there will be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock;  the relentless law of heredity will not be controlled and guided by natural selection.  May will stagnate;  and unless he ceases to multiply, the catastrophe will come again;  famine and pestilence, as we see them in the East, physical selection instead of the struggle of race against race, will do the work more relentlessly, and to judge from India and China, far less efficiently than of old.

Remember, this was Karl Pearson, eminent man of science, respected member of the Fabian socialist ranting like Hitler in 1900 as he said exactly the same things Hitler would begin saying two decades after Pearson gave this as a lecture, this was what he said was a fact of science, that science being what he regarded the glory of British Science, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, he was saying it in cultured English to a society of the nicest of British audiences, many of them members of the ruling aristocratic class. 

It was a result of his scientific, materialist, atheist faith that Darwin had found the key to what they took as the central question of the life sciences, what the conventional - I would say enforced - hegemony of Darwinism in science still holds up as the central idea in biology, including, as can be seen in the revival of eugenics under Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology, still generates assertions of eugenics. 

I don't know if there was ever a German translation of Karl Pearson's speech but, as with the translations of Darwinian scientific literature back and forth between English and German, the very terms that sound so deranged and morally repugnant when they come out of a Hitler, an Eichmann, a Goebbels, can be said in English through elegant prose, you can imagine hearing it in a refined, received British or an educated American voice, quite often in easily seen cognates.

I have known some American and British socialists of today,  mostly Marxist, who, seeing the "socialist" label on a Karl Pearson or some other British scientist figure that they are the same kind of socialists they are.  But there can be no question that the socialism of Karl Pearson, a development of his scientism, his atheism and his materialism when filtered through his Darwinism is an almost exact match for the National Socialism of the Nazis.  The belief in natural selection - and given the impossibility of really observing Darwinian natural selection,* the production of new species, even the development of new traits that become a universal feature of species, it is a belief - inevitably leads to the same conclusions. 

Darwin turned murder into a creative force when he posited a "struggle for existence" HIS WORDS, NOT MINE, as the engine of progress in evolution.   The subsequent claim of post-war neo-Darwinists that Darwin's natural selection was not presented as a progressive force is a lie, as can be seen from reading the claims of conventional Darwinists of indisputable authority to make such claims such as Karl Pearson, indeed, going right back to Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, in the fifth and sixth editions he prepared of On the Origin of Species, in his first and confirmed generation of his followers named by him,  Francis Galton and, foremost, according to his own introduction in The Descent of Man,  Ernst Haeckel whose authorized elucidation of Darwin's natural selection was so influential in German science, in German intellectual life and, in the next generation, in politics and the law.**   That was already happening during Charles Darwin's life, he corresponded with, not only German scientists, but German intellectuals and legal scholars on the application of his theory in legal policy, including the imposition of execution, the implication of state killing in improving the human stock.

It is not only in the investigation of human society that the truth is sometimes unavailable.  Natural scientists, in their overweening pride, have come to believe that eventually everything we want to know will be known.  But that is not true.  For some things there is simply not world enough and time.  It may be, given the necessary constraints on time and resources available to the natural sciences, that we will never have more than a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system.  For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them.  In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them.  Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were.  Over and over, in these essays reproduced here, I have tried to give an impression of the limitations on the possibility of our knowledge.  Science is a social activity carried out by a remarkable, but by no means omnipotent species.  Even the Olympians were limited in their powers.

Richard Lewontin:  Introduction:  It Ain't Necessarily So

Lewontin is an honest enough person to admit that the belief that those "selective forces operating on most genes" can't either be observed or measured.  In case no one missed that, it really means, there's no way to know if those things are there or even if they are real and not an imagined construct. 

He goes on to present the problem in a way which directly shows the fact that natural selection must be believed and can't be known,  "there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were."   Anyone who reads any of the stories, the scenarios, the very substance that Darwinian natural selection is made of who doesn't see the truth of what Lewontin said isn't thinking about it very hard because it is obvious.  In many of his writings on natural selection and, especially, his claims derived from it,  Karl Pearson will admit that there is "little data" to support his claims, at one point I remember he even admitted that Darwin had no actual data to support what he said in Descent of Man, but then he claimed to see trends in other data or in life that support his Darwinian interpretation of them.  What he was doing was imposing his ideological preferences on his observations, something which is rampant when even the biggest figures in science make up stories about fossilized remains and ALWAYS IS THE CASE WHEN THEY DO SO ON THE BASIS OF NO PHYSICAL EVIDENCE AT ALL.   And as Richard Lewontin says, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces invented in those stories, they are a matter of preference.    That is inevitably a practice under Darwinism because there is no way to discern what really happened in the past because it can't be observed, it can't be measured and any analysis that is done to retrospectively create the simulations of observations is no different from the stories told in the first chapters of Genesis or any ancient creation myth.  The difference is that what the scientists are doing is sold as science and the amoral atrocities such as those Karl Pearson developed out of Darwinism are generally more viciously murderous and sold as having a scientific reliability they most certainly don't have.  Darwin, Karl Pearson, today's Evolutionary Psychologists, all of them claim to have those powers which the Olympians weren't claimed to have had.   Sometimes they are used to authorized mass murder and genocide.  That's as clear as the words of Karl Pearson.

**  In fact, Ernst Haeckel had considerable influence in British and American intellectual circles through translation of his works, some by the foremost British atheist of his day,  Joseph McCabe - some of which, proto-Nazi depravity and all,  was reprinted by the American atheist publishing firm Prometheus not that long ago.  And, for those with a more modest budget and less of an attention span, in the famous series of Little Blue Books, that came from the foremost American atheist propagandist of his day, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius.  To read the history of eugenics and what would develop into fascism and its relationship with, not only the expected secular right but the secular left was quite an eye opener to me as to what materialism inevitably does to would-be leftism.  It was one of the keys to my understanding of why the American left failed, catastrophically, continuing into today, as the likes of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. were succeeded by "secularists" and atheists.

Update:  If you are still in denial due to the fact that the Nazis concentrated on European populations for wholesale slaughter instead of People of color, first, you should be ashamed of yourself for thinking like a Nazi, second, Karl Pearson practically gave them the very words in which the Nazis elucidated their plan to "cleanse" the German, the ARYAN population of "Asiatic" (the very word often used by the Nazis) pollution of them, Jews being foremost but only one of the groups they figured they needed to get rid of.  I gave you that passage yesterday:

Frequently they intercross, and if the bad stock be raised the good is lowered.  Even in the case of Eurasians, of whom I have met mentally and physically fine specimens, I have felt how much better they would have been had they been pure Asiatics or pure Europeans.  Thus it comes about that when the struggle for existence between races is suspended, the solution of great problems may be unnaturally postponed;  instead of the slow, stern processes of evolution, cataclysmal solutions are prepared for the future.

The word "final" in "final solution" was used because the Nazis found the Brits weren't going to let them deport Jews to Palestine or other places - no doubt, eventually in the continued culling of the sort both Pearson and they believed was necessary to "improve" the human species, they'd have gotten around to killing them in Palestine too.   The "final solution" would certainly fall into the "cataclysmal solutions" to achieve his end that, in 1900, Pearson said were "prepared for the future"   That Karl Pearson was presenting this as scientific fact in 1900 certainly gives him priority for such ideas over Hitler who was eleven at the time he said this.

Monday, June 7, 2021

An Aphorism

 THE WIT OF THE STUPID is as witty 

as the wisdom of the stupid is wise. 

Update:  Until I encountered him at Eschaton, I was unaware of ever finding someone with college-credentials who clearly didn't understand how time works. In my experience, that's something that if a child didn't master the concepts of before and after with their various everyday vicissitudes you'd think he was feeble-minded.  And that idiot worked on the fringes of commercial journalism his entire life.  He's literally incapable of understanding that things that came after other things didn't cause the things that came before them.  Either he doesn't understand that or he's stupid in the stupidest possible way, figuring it's clever.  Not that his fellow Eschatots seem to care, either. 

This Is A Problem Of The Degrading Of The Truth To Having The Same Status As Fictions And Other Lies

APPARENTLY my most obsessive compulsive troll doesn't consider the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel whose mother and sister were murdered  at Auschwitz, who, along with his father was used as slave labor by the Nazis until his father died, beaten severely at Buchenwald and  who died there before it was liberated doesn't count as a survivor who had family members who died under the Nazi's genocide program and who did, AS I'VE POINTED OUT MORE THAN ONCE WHEN HE'S MADE THE CHALLENGE to name such a survivor who noted the Darwinian nature of the German eugenics-genocide program.  He's upped it to naming five now, so I guess if I named five he'd insist on a hundred.  That's the never-to-be-met shifting goalposts that is typical of any milieu in which the value of the truth is degraded - materialism is one of the surest routes to that abyss, scientism, since it must be dishonest as it does it, only slightly harder.  As I've let through filtering to be posted, temporarily, for anyone who wants to find him challenging it in the comment on an yesterday's post.

As I've recently repeated here, since it was the Nazis who committed the crime, they are the only ones who you can read to find out what their motives were AND I PROVED THAT THE VERY NOTES OF THE MEETING TO PLAN THE EXTERMINATION OF JEWS GAVE THEIR MOTIVES ON AN INTERPRETATION OF NATURAL SELECTION, his demand is incompetent as it is dishonest.  You would have to be a total idiot or totally dishonest to demand the victim of a crime explain the motives of the one who beat or killed them, ignoring what the criminal said about that.  But, then, he figures Hamilton is historically accurate because, being a putz, he finds the songs catchy and the dancing and the costumes.  That would seem to be the primary motive of those who defend that shit.  I wish I could say he's at the extreme low end of college-credentialed people in the United States and elsewhere among the English Speaking Peoples, but he's merely typical of those trained in everything by TV and movies and the mass media.  Is it any wonder that those without those credentials who fall for the Republican-fascist lies fall for them when our allegedly educated class are so superficial and stupid?   I mean, it's show-biz that informs and so deforms all of their minds.  Even if they didn't fall for the Trump so created.

Continuing On With Walter Bruggemann On The Book of Jeremiah

IN HIS DISCUSSION of the historical-political context of the Book of Jeremiah, in the context of the turbulent three decades of the last five kings of Jerusalem (though the ones before were generally pretty turbulent, too)  before the pivotal and shattering event of the destruction of the kingdom of Judah at the hands of the Babylonians and the exile of the royals and elites of Jerusalem, Walter Brueggemann drew a number of parallels between that ancient event and the United States of our time

Well, I read a book review this week, it's called "When The Money Runs Out."  And the thesis of the book is that Western affluence will never come back and he names five things that will never happen again that produced our affluence. So what we get in the body politic is denial, despair, anger, fear - I think that our current unworkable political situation is probably a lot like that [gestures at his timeline of the last kings and other events] So I think reading the Book of Jeremiah works pretty well.  

And with that Brueggemann makes the turn to analyzing the book not as history, not as reportage or even theology but as literature, even though the book as it comes down to us contains all of those.  He stresses that it is artistic imagination as all of those (and science) are, anyway.

Brueggemann mentions the Jesus Seminar, which claimed to come up with a more historically accurate picture of who Jesus was and, I'd guess on their reconstruction and little else, what he was supposed to have said and what they didn't like him saying as a critique of that method of reading this literature.  His major criticism of that effort at modern textual criticism of Scripture is that it didn't understand the nature of the literature which is not a pure, first-hand narrative, a would-be objective listing of events and quotes, but Gospels with other ends than those. Even Luke, the Gospel that starts out asserting something closer to a modern notion of what a prose text is supposed to be for is from start to finish a theological presentation that puts other things ahead of the reportage.  I have mentioned that the work of one of the scholars who was a co-founder of the Jesus Seminar was important to my reconnecting with monotheism, John Dominic Crossan, whose work, especially in the historical and social context in which Jesus and his first followers lived and what we might understand of their point of view I still find very valuable, though I think far less of his reconstructed list of sayings than I once did.  And he was far from the most presumptuous of them.  

From here, Brueggemann goes on to considering the literary aspects of the text. I find listening to him, going over parts of the lecture a few times before going on can help enormously in understanding what he's saying and what he is saying is very useful for reading and considering other people on the same text.  I will be going over that section of this first lecture in the coming days.   

I find it very helpful to keep an outline of what he said in the earlier section on the history handy very useful to understanding what he said.  The list of the kings and some of the commentary about them, their dates and other dates important to understanding the chronology as well as on the geography, Bruggemann's comments and insights on various aspects of that.  Stopping the video to write those down and typing them into place on a listed timeline has helped to understand his points.   Typing out passages where important and interesting things were said.  Having it recorded you get so much more out of it than if you're sitting in the room hearing it go by in real time as you miss the next thing said while writing it down has led to me believing that this might be a far better way to take in a lecture or a sermon.  You get a lot of the benefit of reading a text from it, this way.

Anyone Who Lets Broadway Musicals Govern Their Thinking Is Bound To End Up Being As Much Of A Dangerous Idiot As People Who Mistake The Movies As Historically Accurate - Hate Mail

AS I WILL NEVER STOP POINTING OUT THE MUSICAL HAMILTON is a propaganda campaign peddling the lie that at least Alexander Hamilton, probably  the most anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian of the "founders" was better than the more overt hypocrites who wrote the Constitution and pushed for its adoption, Madison, John Jay, etc. and the hypocrite advising them, Jefferson.  The fact is that Hamilton was actively involved in the slave holding of the family he married into - the holders of the largest number of those held in slavery in New York state - and the arguments he made in favor of the adoption of the Constitution included the economic benefits of slavery to the Northern economy, especially to people of means who were the primary audience for his, Madison's and Jay's propaganda.  The actual adoption of the Constitution included limiting the numbers of those who would get a say in its adoption as certainly as Republican-fascists in 2021 are preparing to limit all elections to the extent possible and to which the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court and lower courts will use the Constitution to allow it.

While Lin Manuel Miranda might have had better intentions, based on his ignorant dependence on a hagiographic popular biography written by a right-wing political hack, his musical is a lie which was championed by the New York Times and other props of the anti-egalitarian establishment that has an easy relationship with the more genteel side of Republican-fasiscism that promoted the knee-britches off of that piece of lying crap, his musical is typical of the propaganda that lies people into retaining the worst parts of what Hamilton, Madison, et al intentionally wrote to thwart democracy for the benefit of the intellectual, economic and, in many cases, biological descendants of their own slave-owning, wealth accumulating and expanding class.  

The Electoral College that installed George W. Bush and then Trump, and, lest anyone forget, the President who ushered in the Jim Crow era through the corrupt deal he made with slave-holding interests in the South, Rutherford Hayes, the anti-democratically constituted Senate which prevents democracy, the mechanisms that early on and still allow the minority to thwart the majority through congressional redistricting along with the Constitutional language used by anti-democratic "justices" on the least democratic of all parts of the government, the Supreme Court to allow that to continue were put there for those purposes, explicitly or in potential and retained there through the efforts of Hamilton as well as Madison and the rest.

Our 18th century Constitution has been the major impediment to equality, to democracy and the rigging and manipulation of it is worse now than it has been at any period since the Jim Crow era - Republican-fascists in 2021 are giving white people a small taste of what life under Hamilton's Constitution has always been for Black People and People of Color, so many of us too stupid to see what is going on.  Hamilton, the musical, is one of the biggest lies told on Broadway, its creator too stupid to understand the role he plays in propping up Republican-fascism by peddling pretty stories about "the founders" or at least one of the worst of them, someone who even his fellow aristocrats understood to be a monarchist thug who was extremely dangerous even to their freedoms, who stupidly challenged Aaron Burr to a duel and who was, thankfully, removed from the scene by his own stupidity and, perhaps, through having his rigging of the pistols backfire on him.  

So, no, I'm no fan of the black-facing of America's white-supremacist history as stupidly rapped and boogied to, lying us out of finally scrapping the 18th century vehicle for the empowerment of white supremacists and anti-equality fascists for something which is not a tool for the enforcement of inequality favoring the rich over the poor, the few over the many,  white people over People of Color, men over Women, and in so many other ways.   There is no Equal Rights Amendment that is going to be adopted and overturn the inequality baked into the Constitution, the mechanisms that favor the few over the many - even that inclusion of an actual and slight majority of the population as legal-equals is impossible to adopt under the rules rigged by Hamilton et al - imagine one that tried to give People of Color the full protection of the law and how it would fail even as a majority might favor it. 

No, the lie will have to be overcome, the document will have to be radically altered, the mechanisms of government will have to be made democratic and equality will have to be held in high enough regard to win over the "freedom" of the privileged and the few to damage the unprivileged and the many which is something Hamilton put into the Constitution along with Madison and the rest.  Jefferson may have developed into a political enemy of Hamilton because Hamilton was an even more radically anti-egalitarian than Jefferson was, but that's 18th century politics.  We don't have to take one side or the other because the issues we face have moved on entirely from there.  Real equality was never anything they were really interested in having, even Jefferson never practiced that as was in his power to do so. 

Sunday, June 6, 2021

Hate Mail - I Would Hope That Anyone Who Has Read What I Wrote On The Subject of Darwinism Would Know Better Than To Accuse Me Of "showing no evidence"

FROM AN UPDATE TO A POST I DID proving that the Nazi's scientific basis of their murder of Jews had the the fingerprints of Darwinism all over it.  From a quick update of that post:

I had a few minutes as the Republicans were lying in the House Impeachment debate, so I looked up online to find out if I could find Nazi science citing Karl Pearson's 1925 paper in which, using Darwinian arguments, he claimed the scientific determination of the inferiority of Polish and Russian Jews and the catastrophic results if they were allowed to live in Britain,  and, wouldn't you know, I found it cited by no other than the trio of scientists who wrote the one book on biology we know Hitler was reading as he was codifying his theory. 

 I don't have time to find my program for easily typing out German and doing it so I'm copying from the automated text generation at Archive.org for Menschliche Auslese und Rassenhygiene - Band 2 (1932)

Die Einwanderung fremder Rassenelemente nach England 
sucht man natürlich möglichst zu verhindern. In Betracht kommt 
hier hauptsächlich die Einwanderung von Ostjuden; man scheut 
sich aber, diese bloß wegen ihrer Rassenfremdheit als uner- 
wünscht zu bezeichnen. Pearson 1 ) hat daher versucht, durch 
Untersuchungen an ostjüdischen Kindern zu zeigen, daß diese un- 
günstiger veranlagt seien als die Kinder angelsächsischer Abstam- 
mung; die Judenmädchen sollen danach auch intellektuell unter 
dem Durchschnitt der englischen Bevölkerung stehen, was indes- 
sen nicht gerade überzeugend ist. Jedenfalls aber hat Pearson 
recht, wenn er sich auf den Standpunkt stellt, daß nur die Zu- 
lassung von solchen Einwanderern in ein dichtbevölkertes Land 
ratsam sei, die im Vergleich mit der eingesessenen Bevölkerung 
überdurchschnittlich veranlagt seien. 

Für Deutschland ist das Problem der östlichen Einwanderung  . . noch brennender.

*) Pearson, K. und Moul, M. The problem of allen Immigration 

into Great Britain etc. Annais of Eugenics. Bd. i. H. i. und 2. 1925. S. 5 ff

Imperfect as the transfer may be, if you can read that without being chilled, you are a Nazi. 

I'll warn you that the Google translation of this is likely deceptive, though if you continue with it onto the next page, it confirms that the conventional British Darwinism of Karl Pearson, seven short years later,  directly informed Nazi eugenics on the "Jewish Question" especially in regard to the Jews the Nazis first targeted for genocide, as part of their "Problem der östlichen Einwanderung," that they considered "noch brennender"  their elucidation of their scientific conclusions dragging in exported American anti-Black racism as well as "eastern Jews".   I wouldn't make too much of their claim that their warning off allowing them to "mix" with native German Jews as exculpation.  The SS and the Einsaztz Gruppen found that their trained mass murderers found it easier to murder Jews who didn't appear to be too German, but they overcame that feeling rather fast.