or, Skepticism The "Skeptics" Will Not Put Up With
OF COURSE I accept that the only theory of how biological diversity arose in the history of life on Earth that makes sense of the evidence is that modern species evolved from what scientists would classify as different species, over millions, tens and hundreds of millions and billions of years. The idea that makes the most sense of the currently available evidence of that evolution - which is only the tiniest fraction of evidence that must have once existed but now is not and never will be available for scientific study - is that all present day life is descended from a single, original organism. Though that last theory, which I assume as a concept that doesn't even really arise to the level of a theory, isn't really based on the soundest of foundations. I fully believe it as I fully admit that it is entirely conjectural because there is no real and direct physical evidence to base it in.
Even the broadest of the fuzzy details in evolutionary theory are based on far less of the necessary evidence than is available to physics or chemistry in the things that they study. Its status as reliably durable and secure knowledge is absurdly less than that of the really hard sciences, especially considering the position it holds in the broader culture and even within the culture of scientists. "Hard" should be understood as in the hardness and durability of the conclusions reached. Much of biology approaches the durability and reliability of physics and chemistry and is based enough on well done observation and quantitative analysis and so deserves to be considered as proper science. Most of what gets said about evolutionary science is more properly seen as one or more of the following, conjecture, lore, wishful-thinking, ideological claims and posturing, in descending order of quality, honesty and deserving of respect as "science." In the inverted morality of modern academia, that order is inverted and the shiftiest of it is granted the highest status. Natural selection was born in and remains one of the sleaziest of ideological claims with the clearest of base motives found embedded in what is, largely, otherwise genuine science or close to it.
I suspect that if you understood what I just said you will be morally outraged and if you were in my presence and heard me say that in a group of your fellow college-credentialed boobs you would be apoplectic and denounce me in what I'd then note is a parody of a Brit-costume-drama Inquisitor. You would want to be seen and heard making that denunciation as gaining you status. You probably would if you didn't understand more than that I had dissed Darwin with that and called into question something that has been, in its second most significant cultural presence,* nothing more than an anti-religious, specifically anti-Christian ideological weapon. A weapon which those who use it can only attack a specifically modern heresy of Biblical fundamentalism which is not held by many, perhaps most of those who are religious or Christian by profession. I grew up as a Catholic with parents who fully believed in evolution and who understood the Bible is not what fundamentalists or their foils, the materialist-atheist-scientistic hold it to be, a science textbook or a modern style history. My mother had a degree in zoology, it never much had a negative effect on her religious belief. We never discussed natural selection or Darwinism, though I have with other members of my family and I've even convinced one of the working biologists I'm related to to admit there were some pretty serious problems with it. They work in an area in which there is little to no need for evolutionary conjecture, lore, wishful thinking or ideological claiming or posturing, there are many, many working biologists who are too busy looking what can be looked at, counting and measuring, etc. to bother with that ideologically polluted stream of their science.
Just why the college-credentialed crowd puts so much moral stock in Darwinism is one of the more entertaining curiosities of the ubiquitous and decadent modernist culture of the college-credentialed. In that, you must rigidly adhere to a belief in natural selection and elevate a rather unattractive and frequently dishonest man, Charles Darwin and his colleagues and heirs, inexplicably in the cases of those like Huxley, Pearson and even (according to Robert Richards and his publisher) the proto-Nazi Haeckel, who are frequently morally atrocious, to positions of sanctity that require lying about them.
Why that area of science? One of the least impressive for the expression of durable, reliable or even practically important ideas is held onto as such a struggle worth our limited and so wasted time and effort and our limited and far from secure credibility? One that is of little to no practical use in trying to save life on this planet from the effects of modern industrial pollution of the planet and from the weapons of mass destruction that science and technology have given us? Those are the pressing questions, not if ol' Chuck Darwin was a saint among men. Which he wasn't.
Why should it matter to anyone who wants to save bio-diversity - Darwin certainly didn't favor the diversity of the human population, read The Descent of Man and you'll see that, by the way - or even the future of the human population waste so much of those on that question? It's as if reality and even the truth of the record of it didn't really matter to them, which, since their conception of "science" is so shoddy as they hold themselves as the great champions of science, isn't surprising, on reflection.
That's the area of what you want to defend in which you have the strongest case, the attack on psychology, sociology, economics, etc. as pseudo-science is far easier to make.
Economics is never sufficiently honest in what its claims are and is never done without being thoroughly enmeshed in ideology and self-interest and greed. That Darwin based his theory of natural selection on a murderous economic theory that elevated the British class system and the artificial, human made, very teleologically motivated laws that created it to the status of a natural phenomenon is a line of attack on natural selection I have made and which does nothing to elevate it. The embedded teleology of most if not all of the supporting arguments Darwin made for his allegedly non-teleological theory is an area I should go into more, someday.
Psychology alleges to study things that can't be observed, measured or analyzed, and when they can't and that incapacity is raised as a challenge, pretends that those things it can't do don't exist or don't matter. Behavioral psychology and the psychology that demotes human consciousness to unimportance or even non-existence in the alleged study of psychology is something of an ultimate academic absurdity. That it could stand as an acceptable stand to take in a university impeaches the seriousness or integrity of modern academia. Its history feeds off of the same roots that Darwinism does and it shares in every defect that the theory of natural selection has and adds myriads of others.
Sociology is based on a superstition that you can pretend to gather data which can never really be guaranteed to be accurately reported or accurately representative of a diversity within human populations and to figure out by statistical analysis something about the group allegedly described, usually presenting a numerical abstraction as "typical" of the population and, inevitably, presenting that as being good or at least some aspect of underlying natural conditions. That superstition was also adopted by psychology.
It was all part of the more general superstition that I laid out when I criticized the superstition of the "enlightenment" which took the validity of physics and science and turned it into the absurd belief that a parody of the same methodology that produced their discoveries was generalizeable to areas of far greater complexity in which that methodology would neither work nor the conjectures and substitutions required to pretend to apply them produce anything like reliable knowledge, replacing ideological claims for the reliable and testable conclusions that physics and chemistry and even biology could achieve when they were honest and diligent.
That ideology gained social status, probably most so through the economic, wealth and power enhancing utility of science, and, so, became more generalized in the culture of educated people and those who wished to be taken as such. If I had a dollar for every academic or scribbling, babbling "champion of science and reason" who probably couldn't balance an algebraic equation of one variable I'd probably be rich enough to be as obnoxious as a tech billionaire. I could go into the shared ideological interests among them which had far more to do with economics and class than it did a real respect for the physical sciences. That's ultimately why the boobs who wrote the First Amendment didn't make a distinction between The People having a right to the truth and that there was never and is not still any right to lie. Why they rejected the moral basis of any decent government that could ever be established in favor of the oligarchy favoring amoral, scientistic, secularist pose they took. Rich people, those who aspire to be rich, most of all want to be relieved from moral responsibilities to the least among them, they don't like Jesus and the Prophets telling them to. They're who get power in non-egalitarian government and other centers of might, wisdom and wealth. Academics also don't like being told not to screw their students, that accounts for part of it in that milieu.
If you want me to post your comment, drop the invective and deal with what I said. I'm not required to post anything I don't choose to. If it amused me to fight with you as it sometimes does, I might do that too but I'm not in a mood to do much playing right now. Global warming and the drought we're having is leaving me with little time for that. The science behind global warming, the necessity of changing human activity drastically or it will end much of biological diversity and maybe finish us off is infinitely more important that re-fighting the fucking Darwin wars or defending the amoral and so immoral, indefensible pseudo-sciences or the cultural hegemony of materialist-atheist-scientism.
* Its most significant cultural presence is as the origin of eugenics, modern scientific racism and the modern biological genocides of the Nazis and others. In the United States, now, it is the basis of the "Bell Curve" style attack on equality and the struggle to right the wrongs of American apartheid. It is basic to those who are pushing hard to reestablish Jim Crow, many of them with full academic credentialing and even many who sit or sat on eminent faculties. I doubt one of them would agree with anything I said about this and I'm glad to disagree with them. I don't want to be any part of that cultural milieu.
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