THAT QUOTE FROM THOMAS HUXLEY published two years before Darwin's death that I cited in the comments yesterday is a perfect illustration that Darwnism, the theory of natural selection carries more than just the germ of Nazi eugenics theory, it carries the fully formed monster.
"The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals."
That was something he said in an essay, The Coming of Age of "The Origin of Species" about fifteen years after, by the doctrine of natural selection, he gleefully anticipated the extermination of the recently emancipated slaves of the United States in a struggle for existence by their former enslavers on the basis that they were of no economic utility to the, he said, superior white people and so would have to go. If you doubt the cheerfulness that he said it, you can read that essay for yourself, too.
The question is settled; but even those who are most thoroughly convinced that the doom is just, must see good grounds for repudiating half the arguments which have been employed by the winning side; and for doubting whether its ultimate results will embody the hopes of the victors, though they may more than realise the fears of the vanquished. It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest.
But whatever the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforward lie between nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore. And this, if we look to the bottom of the matter, is the real justification for the abolition policy.
The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion; emancipation may convert the slave from a well-fed animal into a pauperised man; mankind may even have to do without cotton-shirts; but all these evils must be faced if the moral law, that no human being can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own nature, be, as many think, as readily demonstrable by experiment as any physical truth. If this be true, no slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
He certainly held that the anticipated extinction of the newly emancipated slaves at the hands of the former slave owners comprised exactly the same kind of "right to exist" which, because he believed they would be rendered extinct, did not belong to Black People. I think this must be about the most morally depraved view of slavery and abolition that I've ever seen or could imagine. If you changed the nouns and adjectives, it would be as cold-blooded a statement of Nazi racism and economic utility as could have been published as science during the worst of the Nazi period.
If you doubt that Darwin, himself held such ideas and considered them to be a species of biological progress, you can read all through The Descent of Man, his second major book after "The Origin of Species" he not only repeatedly praising the even more depraved enthusiasm for declaring entire groups of human beings as inferior and bound to be exterminated from Ernst Haeckel and a more genteel line that essentially means the same thing from Francis Galton, W. R. Greg and, I believe on the basis of my research, inventing a statement from at least one other scientist to support the idea - or maybe he just got his notes mixed up. Darwin, himself, said in his correspondence that he liked the idea that Brits would displace entire races of people all over the world and that the human species would be better off for the extinction of those he held were inferior and he was explicit that he held that his own "race" was if not THE superior "race" then among the top of them.
Natural selection is the foundation of modern scientific racism, economic caste, white supremacy and the most putrid modern forms of that, Nazism and neo-Nazism.
In that 1880 essay Thomas Huxley said a number of things that could be devloped on, in that particular quote used to support Richard Dawkin's stupid tautological invention of "memes," a fuller reading of the text and putting his invention into the context in which Huxley said that might have warned Dawkins off of doing it.
History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions; and, as matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the "Origin of Species," with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them.
Against any such a consummation let us all devoutly pray; for the scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and rationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. Now the essence of the scientific spirit is criticism. It tells us that whenever a doctrine claims our assent we should reply, Take it if you can compel it. The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.
It's too bad Huxley couldn't imagine the discrediting of a theory based on the defects of its offspring.
The latter day history of the theory of natural selection is full to the top of superstitions, most of modern pseudo-science, from Freud through the entire range of Nazi science to the theories of William L. Pierce of The Turner Diaries and, yes, those of such credentialed, peer reviewed published science as the Nazi curious if not friendly Kevin MacDonald was belatedly exposed for is based entirely on the theory of natural selection. On the way there are many, many others that could be listed. [You can do a search of my archives, if I linked to all of the things I've posted on this most of the text of this would be red.]
I think the inherent weakness of the theory includes one about which Huxley made a snarky comment:
Adverse criticism made merry over such suggestions as these. Of course it was easy to get out of the difficulty by supposing extinction; but where was the slightest evidence that such intermediate forms between birds and reptiles as the hypothesis required ever existed? And then probably followed a tirade upon this terrible forsaking of the paths of "Baconian induction."
The greatest defect in the theory of natural selection, the theory of "The Origin of Species" is that there is absolutely no way to go back in time and do the kind of detailed observation of organisms, the identification and observation of "traits" and their relationship to the number and success of those organisms, the persistence and loss of those studied "traits" in the offspring and, in a theorized enormous length of time, new species arising out of that theoretical, never witnessed process. The information needed to really come up with how, in one way or, as seems likely now, several or many ways that different species arise is forever lost in sufficient quantity to really make that study into a solid science and a reliable general theory. That is the simple truth of it.
The, in many ways, wonderful biologist Stephen Jay Gould and his allies within biology rightly criticized Richard Dawkins and his allies for the creation of "Just-so stories" to replace real science based on the kind of thing Thomas Huxley ridiculed as a necessity of actually doing science. But the problem for Darwinists such as Gould was is that the entire theory of natural selection is a long series of Just-so stories because it is impossible to make the necessary observations and mathematical analysis to make such claims have the same status as science that can do that.
Huxley should have taken Bacon's method more seriously, as Bacon noted one of the reasons he invented it was to guard against exactly what Darwinism became, a conventionalized, required habit of thought, not outside of science but inside it. From the Novum Organum by Francis Bacon:
XXXVIII. The idols and false notions which have already preoccupied the human understanding, and are deeply rooted in it, not only so beset men’s minds that they become difficult of access, but even when access is obtained will again meet and trouble us in the instauration of the sciences, unless mankind when forewarned guard themselves with all possible care against them.
XXXIX. Four species of idols beset the human mind, to which (for distinction’s sake) we have assigned names, calling the first Idols of the Tribe, the second Idols of the Den, the third Idols of the Market, the fourth Idols of the Theatre.
XL. The formation of notions and axioms on the foundation of true induction is the only fitting remedy by which we can ward off and expel these idols. It is, however, of great service to point them out; for the doctrine of idols bears the same relation to the interpretation of nature as that of the confutation of sophisms does to common logic.
I have noted that modern science has, through the introduction of ideology, such as the Malthusianism on which Darwin based his theory, through the attempt to support scientism, atheism and materialism, science became the stomping grounds of many an idol maker and worshiper. It seems to me that science could do with more Baconian induction, not less of it. It's no wonder that Huxley, arrogant at the successful sale of Darwinism in his day, figured they could bypass that process. No doubt he liked it because of its support for his preferred ideologies.
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