Hate Mail - The Quick Answer

BARBARA EHRENREICH'S 1997 essay The New Creationism provides a good specimen of the kind of dishonesty I referred to when I noted that the common received wisdom about Darwin and Darwinism is full to the top of easily corrected lies.  I use it only because it was recently thrown at me in accusation and ignorance, accusing me of the over-the-top kind of stuff that Ehrenreich cherry-picked to ridicule humanities-faculty-lefty style, politically based rejection of science when I've not only never done that but never entertained that stuff as more informed than what I have, in fact, rejected.  My criticism of Darwinism begins in its support of eugenics, scientific racism, etc. for which it provides its modern basis.  But my criticism also includes my contention that it is not a particularly good example of following scientific methodology.   I think it's a good example of the incorporation of class, ethnic, etc. bigotry into science through a combination of sloppy use of language, reification, the misidentification of artificial, man-made law as laws of nature,  self-interest and plain old bullying.

The paragraph I chose from Ehrenreich begins with a disarmingly generous admission, that those who she held up to ridicule had a point.

The new secular creationism emerged as an understandable reaction to excess. 

But she quickly starts to distort the record of conventional Darwinism, pretending that the mainstream of Darwinism, to which Ernst Haeckel, Francis Galton, W. R. Gregg, Thomas Huxley, and the entirety of what she dismisses as Social Darwinism were not the actual, published, taught and built on scientific tradition that started with Charles Darwin,  the man who cited all of the above, as not only producing valid science but, in the cases of two of the worst, Haeckel and Galton, lavishly praising exactly their worst eugenic, scientific racist, sexist and even genocidal content. 

Since the nineteenth century, conservatives have routinely deployed supposed biological differences as immutable barriers to the achievement of a more egalitarian social order. Darwinism was quickly appropriated as social Darwinism -- a handy defense of economic inequality and colonialism. 

Starting with the fact that Charles Darwin explicitly based his theory of natural selection on the political-economic theories of Thomas Malthus, based entirely on the British class system as if it were a product of "natural law" instead of human made, aristocratically made, ROYALLY MADE law by probably the most extreme of imperialist powers, you would have to overlook that glaring fact to assert there was a difference.  Of course, for those who were part of the British upper class, such as Malthus, such as Darwin, such as Galton and most of the other British men of science, the British establishment right up to the Queen all had a vested economic and social interest in mistaking man-made class systems as aspects of the natural order.  As did other elites in other places who pretty much ran and, to some extent, still do run science.

Natural selection is inherently and immutably an assertion of biological inequality and so, to materialists and biological determinists,  complete inequality among individuals and entire groupings of organisms within species and among different species.  As soon as his theory was published, its imagined application to the human species was made by Darwin and his closest colleagues including all of those named above and many others I could mention if you want me to. 

There is an ideological interest that shields it from real criticism as well as the fact that like any basic critique of the American Constitution legal system that forced basic reform would make  those holding professional expertise in those,  in science and the law need to learn a lot of new tricks very fast.  Never discount the force of professional interest among the professional class to resist that kind of criticism of what gets them their upper class lifestyle.

No number or character of add-ons like "mutual aid" can change that about the theory.  That aspect of natural selection is the very definition of what it claims to be a law of nature, what even as charitable and egalitarian a biologist as Stephen Jay Gould claimed was the most impressive of those human science has discovered. 

And whenever the theory has been applied to the human population it has been used to draw up rankings of human groups in terms of their valuation, or quality, or ability,  and everything up to and including what is, in effect, the right to have their lives preserved or ended.  All of that was known to Charles Darwin, he participated in that call and rather looked forward to the extermination of entire groups of People, especially when it was his anticipated British colonial extermination of the native populations of countries they had invaded and controlled.

In the twentieth century, from the early eugenicists to The Bell Curve, pseudo-biology has served the cause of white supremacy.

I'm sure it would be a surprise to a long list of academic, university based, published, peer-reviewed, taught, cited, built on Zoologist, Physiologist, Ethologist,  Evolutionary Psychologist white supremacists . . . not a few of whom were given Nobels and other highly sought after awards, including various ones named after Charles Darwin, that their eugenics and other work ranking "white people" over, typically, Africans and Native Americans but pretty much anyone they wanted to include as inferior to white, especially North-Western Europeans were not practicing biologists as they did their professional work.  

Charles Davenport, Harvard professor of Zoology and those who worked at the Cold Springs Harbor Lab he more or less founded would have been surprised that he was a "pseudo-biologist."  That is a trend in biology which, though he didn't start it, included Charles Darwin - and Thomas Huxley and Ernst Haeckel, etc.  It continues up till today among some of the most lauded and influential biologists of Ehrenreich's and my era, such as both James Watson and Francis Crick.

Most recently, evolutionary psychology has become, in some hands, a font of patriarchal social prescriptions. 

Which has been the mainstream practice of conventional Darwinist biology from its start.  Before the crimes of the Nazis TEMPORARILY put a lid on that it was, all of it, mainstream biology.   I have pointed out that the biology book mandated by the Tennessee legislature be used to teach biology in the 1920s when the Scopes Trial publicity stunt was mounted was uncontroversially full of Darwinism in that it included some of the most blatant of scientific racism and eugenics and, as my memory of actually reading through it tells me, patriarchal notions that are presented as valid science.*  In that its author was a entirely in the academic, scientific mainstream of his time, a time which started coming back in a big way with the reviving of scientific racism in the 1960s and 70s, Sociobiology and its spawn, evolutionary psychology were among the earliest successes of that reversion to type.

Alas, in the past few years such simplistic biological reductionism has tapped a media nerve, with the result that, among many Americans, schlock genetics has become the default explanation for every aspect of human behavior from homosexuality to male promiscuity, from depression to "criminality." 

Again, that is simplistic biological reductionism which was engaged in by the mainstream of academically credentialed, scientifically-mainstream science for the entire history of the science and, especially, in the wake of the publication of On the Origin of Species.   It is hard to make an honest case that something which was supported by Karl Pearson,  R. A . Fisher,  Watson and Crick, and literally hundreds of others high and low in the history and current profession of biology who could be named represent anything but the mainstream of biology.

Ehrenreich is close enough to my age cohort so that I think she was a child of the same post-WWII era media and educational practices I was, in which the actual pre-WWII nature of biological science was successfully covered-up because it was so intimately tied in with German and, so, Nazi eugenics and genocide.   You can hardly look at any, even the most cluelessly innocuous study-aids online and not see all kinds of lies such as the claim that Darwin believed in genetic inheritance and rejected Lamarckian inheritance of acquired traits when he, himself, supported Lamarckian inheritance and came up with a theory of that, himself.  The claim that such "default explanation for every aspect of human behavior," up to and including criminality was not mainstream Darwinist science could only be made in either complete ignorance of what Darwin, Haeckel, Galton, Pearson . . . up till today have claimed OR THROUGH KNOWING LIES. 

All you have to do is do what almost no one who makes such statements, ESPECIALLY IN THE MEDIA OF WHICH EHRENREICH HAS BEEN A PART, read Darwin and his conventionally acknowledged descendants who had and have mainstream careers in biology to see what a huge and successful lie that post-war cover-up of the consequences of believing in natural selection will always lead to.  Like the terrible lessons of the exposure of the crimes of the Nazis, the all-too-temporary eclipse of eugenics and scientific racism were already receding when she wrote that dishonest essay.   It will always return as long as natural selection is the required framing of thinking about evolution.

*  I have, years ago, here noted that it is ironic that the "evangelical" opponents of "Darwinism" as they imagine it to mean the teaching of evolution have rather fully adopted either passive or active eugenics pretty much as Darwin laid those out in The Descent of Man.  Darwin and his eugenicist sons and grandsons would not be that out of the mainstream of American Republican-fascism in 2022.  Including their opposition to universal vaccination, though they would almost certainly have supported it for the rich, the white, the socially prominent and academically credentialed as they sought to limit its availability to the underclass.  So much for claims that it's conservatives who are misrepresenting the legacy of Darwin.

If you want to fight about any of what I've said, I've got the citations and quotations to back all of that up. 

Even if you don't, if I get the time I will link to the posts I've written on these topics with their full citations and, when available, links to primary sources but I suspect most of the words will appear red if I do that.  This is the quick version of my answer.