ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING THINGS I read and have thought a lot about during my research into natural selection was the prominent geneticist H. Allen Orr's statement that, despite the claims of the neo-atheist philospher of the atheist zeitgeist, Daniel Dennett, natural selection could not work with just any random physical substrate, the physical aspects of what the theory allegedly explains.* He said, back in the 1990s that natural selection could not work outside of a substrate of particulate (classical genetic) biological inheritance. In fact he said it would work with any substrate and that it was his great discovery that it was responsible for practically everything. Orr pointed out he was wrong, which, thinking about it in wake of reading that, makes sense to me in exactly the same way that Dennett is absurd.
Though Orr didn't go into it and it may be because it didn't occur to him, that would mean that Darwin's and the first generation of Darwinists' conception of natural selection couldn't work because, as Darwin's foremost Continental disciple, Ernst Haeckel, said, Darwin believed in Lamarckian inheritance of traits - a statement endorsed by Darwin's son, Francis, among others - in which acquired traits were inherited, something Haeckel (and most) of Darwin's first generations of believers believed in as well. You would have to know the background to understand Haeckle's somewhat snarky dismissial of the alternative proto-genetic theory of his rival German Darwinist, August Wisemann, the guy who experimented to refute Lamarck by cutting the tails off of mice - such was the naive ignorance of those generations in such matters.
I don't know if subsequent to that H. Allen Orr has tried to fit his conception of natural selection to the more recent resurgence of a far more scientifically supported theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, epigenetic inheritance, which is quite well supported and what that does to Darwinism, natural selection. A theory which already had to be massively modified to make it seem to work with the developing and undeniable genetic theory. I don't see how you can accept that current science without it doing serious damage to even the highly altered, quite anti-Darwinist, altered to fit it to the naive and absolutist genetics c. the 1920s and 30s, Darwinism of the post-WWII generation which I grew up in. He may have come up with some way to reconcile those two seemingly incompatible holdings of scientists or, more interestingly, he may have addressed their apparent incompatibility in those terms. I think a far simpler and probably more reliable thing to do would be to scrap natural selection because it doesn't seem to be able to mean the same thing for much more than fifty-years at a time.
I do think his point that sometimes the substrate on which a higher level theory operates can be exclusively possible to that particular type of substrate is interesting in something I care much more deeply about, egalitarian democracy.
I have written a number of times about the statement of the eminent philosopher and political scholar Jurgen Habermas that modernistic egalitarian democracy was an exclusive product of the Jewish ethic of justice and the Christian extension of that in the commandments to love, something which I've defended from the dishonest distortion of what he said by anti-religious, academic liars and as something which, after thinking about it harder than I did what H. Allen Orr said about Darwinism, I think is true, certainly in the history of the conception of egalitarian democracy, where it happened to the extent it ever has, how it happened, how it progresses or fails. I think in this time when "Christianity" as it is generally understood - certainly as it has been defined in the mass media - is not an expression of either justice or love, it is unsurprising that egalitarian democracy is dying.
If that substrate of egalitarian democracy, that level of divinely commanded justice and love, is necessarily restricted to Jewish and Christian monotheism, I don't know, I hope those commandments are written on the hearts of others who may be of a different monotheistic or a reputedly polytheistic tradition or of those allegedly "non-theistic" such as Theravada Buddhism, I've mentioned before that while reading and listening to some North American Native religious elders I think it's very much part of those traditions. I believe some of the Afro-American religious traditions and what is claimed about their African predecessors show that that may not be exclusive to the Jewish monotheistic tradition that Christianity and Islam share in.
I don't believe that it can exist in anything like a strong enough thing to have social, national and international beneficial effects without a substrate of religious belief - AND ONLY THEN IF THOSE TWO THINGS, JUSTICE AND LOVE ARE CONSIDERED TO BE AMONG THE FOREMOST COMMANDS OF THE CREATOR. I have watched atheist regimes during my lifetime and read about those of the past and I find absolutely nothing in them that will tend towards egalitarian democracy, universal justice and personal and social and political and judicial action that is an expression of that in support of love, the purpose of egalitarian democracy. Atheist, materialist governance will always devolve into gangsterism of one degree or another and, when it's that substrate, I'm betting on the worst imaginable and probably worse than that. I first started talking about that more than a decade ago, I am entirely more convinced of it today than I was then. Among the things that leads me to believe that is watching the progress of Communism in China and the ruling thugs in Russia which is inseparable from their positions in the Communist government of the Soviet Union when that was still up and hobbling. I don't buy Putin's corruption of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchy as an expression of religious believe when it is so obvious that it is a convenient fiction, one that the corrupt Patriarchy is willing to go along with just as it did under the Czars. The ones they admitted were Czars. Of course Communism, as Marxism, as an alleged carrier of the ideals that Marx claimed in the Communist Manifesto, is as much as a fiction. Communism, Marxism would seem to lead to fascism under a more organized kind of Victorian capitalism on steroids. In so far as it tried to sell itself on Christian-like ethics and morals and social good, it was bound to turn out the way it did and has.
I really don't think Western egalitarian democracy can survive without a religious belief in the potency of the commandments to do justice and practice love, I think it would probably be easier to try to prune and bend and fit natural selection where it really can't go and fit because it's just theory whereas egalitarian democracy is performance and fulfillment or it is nothing but empty words on paper, in the mouths of politicians and judges and theoreticians but it won't be real. Without that substrate, and our Constitution doesn't provide for that, it's bound to fail even as, like one of Roberts' Supreme Court Rulings, destroying something even as its foetid, carrion carrying skeleton is still held to be intact.
This has been more answers to hate mail.
* Unfortunately, the original article from the Boston Review now seems to be behind a pay-wall. Dennett's whiny and incoherent response is still available online, but without Orr's competent, fascinating refutation of it, so I'm not posting a link.
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