THE QUOTE FROM FRANCIS BACON, from his Novum Organum quoted here the other day was an essential and irreplaceable part of the foundation of modern, empirical science. The method of close and accurate observation and measurement and quantifying were a means of eliminating wishful thinking and prejudice and irrational belief from the logical analysis of the natural world and claims made about that.
It showed that modern science is only to be reliably believed the extent to which it does that. What's true for the most rigorously controlled modern science as what gets called "science" which preceded Bacon's method and the forms of science today, the one that follows scientific method closely and those that don't, often because it is impossible to study what they claim to through observation and the measurement and quantitative analysis that are foundational to modern scientific method is impossible.
But as science developed as a profession, with large numbers of people in it, wanting to make science go where no science had gone before, they had a professional interest in allowing fudging and pretending that substitutes for those methods were adequate. Substitutes which did nothing much to prevent prejudices and self-interests from entering and, indeed, allowed it, the results have been less than reliably removed from those.*
That is impossible to observe the objects of a number of attempted and alleged scientific studies is as solid a reality as can be had. Human and animal minds, the mysteries of societies and cultures - anything that resides primarily in minds which are totally hidden from observation and rely on the hardly reliable reporting of human beings about their own hidden experience.
I have to wonder what Bacon would have made of the earliest attempts (and all of those today) at scientific psychology which attempted to bypass his method when, as he explicitly said in that passage, the whole problem of physical science was that human minds unassisted by that filtering method were apt to produce unreliable results. The self-interested prejudices of those attempting to do it, everything from the pet ideas they nourished to their basest economic interests were bound to produce unreliable results of unknowable validity. Any so-called sciences that relies on human reports of their internal experience are a direct means of introducing every evil Bacon sought to exclude with his methods. Those that rely on third-party observations of behavior are probably even worse.
When the geological and other evidence securely established that there were many extinct species of animals and that those fossils extended into a far, far distant past when most of the species that ever existed lived and died and many of those alive today didn't, it should have been clear that the evidence available for description and study through an attempt at scientific method was scanty to the point that rendered a general theory of evolution as science absurd, it should have shown that any attempt to describe it scientifically was impossible. Natural selection is not founded in observation and measurement, it is ideological lore.
But the ambition of scientists in the Victorian period till today would not let that little problem of impossibility keep them from making such claims and dangerously applying those claimed big-picture theories to the living human population through contemporary laws and politics.
What would actually be needed, the observations of the organisms through their lives and reproductive successes and failures, the actual identification of reasons for that over the huge range of time that they would need to make those observations and data collection is impossible to do. There is no adequate natural substitution for that which would securely show how and what made those changes happen.
That Darwin used artificial, human husbandry, which, for a start, didn't produce new species as a substitute for that has so many defects in it, it's hard to know where to start. It claimed that an intentional, human act done with human intelligence for human purposes to human ends could prove that nature did the same thing only without intention, without intelligence and to no given end. The primary motive of Darwinism's adoption and persistence to deny "intelligent design" is, if anything, refuted by what is presented as its most secure primary evidence.
I have called the problems with the theory of natural selection "the mother of all n-factorial problems" a number of years ago and I think that was, if anything, an understatement. Looking online for an alleged answer to the question of how many different species have lived on Earth, I found this in an article:
Current estimates for the number of species on Earth range between 5.3 million and 1 trillion.
That’s a massive degree of uncertainty. It’s like getting a bank statement that says you have between $5.30 and $1 million in your account.
So why don’t we know the answer to this fundamental question?
It’s hard to count life
Part of the problem is that we cannot simply count the number of life forms. Many live in inaccessible habitats (such as the deep sea), are too small to see, are hard to find, or live inside other living things.
If there is that range of uncertainty about the most basic question of how many species of life there are on Earth today, which could, theoretically, be counted, the preliminary question of the alleged scientific study of evolution, of how many there have been, any trace of which is lost or rendered uninterpretable in the wastes of geology and time must be a staggeringly unknowable thing.
Not to mention that figuring out how evolution happened would have involved even more impossible to know details of their biology, their physiology their environments, SHEER CHANCE EVENTS HAVING LITTLE TO NOTHING TO DO WITH THEIR BIOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS, etc. The time with which it took for a new species to arise would certainly have included many, many generations of human scientists doing superb science all of whom would have had to know the detailed work of their predecessors going through hundreds of generations. It is absurd to think that that could be done for one species, never mind ALL OF THEM.
I don't doubt that species evolved and changed over time, that's among the most established of biological facts, though one I don't think is especially important for any practical human concern facing us, despite its incredible magnification in importance due to its ideological use in human culture. It is an absurd thing to be obsessed with as we have been. We'd have been better off if science education since the 1950s had been more focused on virology, immunology, environmental preservation, sexual responsibility and contraception and such matters.
The claim that a British aristocrat in the 1850s discovered the one and only or even the major mechanism that was the engine of the evolution of new species based on the information he used to make his claim, actual examples that might yield some valid scientific evidence and what today is certainly rejected as unscientific, today, is absolutely not something that is the product of rigorous scientific method. It is an ideological claim, not a scientific one. I say that even when it is someone I liked and admired as much as I still do Stephen Jay Gould who said it. He was wrong.
While every point I've made could be developed into a very long post full of citations, I'm a political blogger so I will go to another thing that Darwin substituted for the impossible to perform acts of "Baconian induction" observing and quantifying the actual phenomenon Darwinists claim he described.
To review, the information and evidence of the more than three billion years of the evolution of life on Earth, the arising of new species different from the species they developed in and from is either completely obliterated through the decay and deterioration of time and chemical, physical, geological and other facts of life that the theory of natural selection, Darwinism, is a huge speculation not based on that but on the political-economic theories of Thomas Malthus, which presented the very human, very purposeful artificial laws that erected the British class system, not on any real analysis of the real relationship of the human population, economic class - caste, really, in Britian of the time and largely today - and the scarcity which was a planned reality in the time of Malthus, something that was done to benefit the remnant feudalism of Britain and the newly rich who, as well, benefited from the grinding oppression of the poor and destitute under British law, custom and habits of thought.
Darwin and Darwinism is thoroughly saturated with the totally artificial assumptions and beliefs of the wealthy who not only benefited from the British class system but who constituted those who ran science there. The same is true for the educated population elsewhere who either came from the economic elites of their countries and societies or who, through education, aspired to join the upper class.
In every country and society in which the theory of natural selection became the reigning ideology of biological science it has brought with it the economic class assumptions that are there, often explicitly but even when covered up with something like the incompatible romanticism of Kropotkin's mutual aid or the equally incompatible utilitarianism, that atheist substitution for revealed morality that seems these days to mostly be obsessed with drawing up lists of who it's OK to kill, that class system is still there.
As well, in every country and society where the theory of natural selection was adopted it has become the natural ally of the resident prejudices and racism, those other bulwarks to a rigid social, political and economic class system.
Eugenics is an absolute guarantee that will always come along with natural selection. The real history of that is absolutely and clearly traceable to the publication of the Origin of Species as the inventors of eugenics as a formal science, Francis Galton in Britain and Wilhelm Schallmeyer in Germany both said that it was their reading of On the Origin of Species which gave them the idea of applying it in that way to the human species. And, in the case of Galton, we know for an absolute fact that Charles Darwin glowingly approved of his earliest eugenics writings, two articles in and the early book Human Genius. Charles Darwin's approval of not only Galton's eugenics but the far more explicitly murderous and racist form of it found in his foremost German representative, Ernst Haeckel's writings of the 1860s and 70s because he cited them with glowing recommendations as to their scientific validity in The Descent of Man. Any Darwinist, from the Nazi scientists who developed their theories of "racial hygiene" which included the murder and disposal of millions of people to the leftists of the generation of Gould and Lewontin who had read The Descent of Man would know for a fact that Darwin not only supported eugenics, he used it to support his rickety theory. The weaknesses of which were clearly apparent from at least 1880 even within Darwinism, thus that quote from Thomas Huxley I wrote about the other day, the one with which he, with a sniff and sneer, derides the necessity of "Baconian induction" as a scientific necessity.
* Update: I should add a lot of the motive to push science into places it couldn't see or count was done because of the ideological belief in materialism came with an assumption that all of existence, even consciousness, was part of the world matter and material causation and, so, the assumption was that you could pretend to treat them with the methods science developed to observe physical objects, their movements and interactions. The entirety of sociology is based on that entirely undemonstrated assumption. And it is hardly alone, psychology, anthropology, even, FOR PETES SAKE, ECONOMICS is called a science through that materialist superstition that pervades the world of academic life.
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