I'VE HAD A REQUEST from the estimable rustypickup to go over an article that was in The Guardian a few days ago, unusually for this blog, it was a friendly request. I was thinking of going more into the link between the Darwinism that is the thing behind so much of right-wing as well as left-wing secular ideology, it saturates the Supreme Court's rulings, so much so that it's not always apparent that the stench of natural selection is behind what it does, and it is so pervasive that it saturates the ideology of even much of the anti-Darwinists' agenda.
Though I've got some problems with it, it's a useful article that goes over a lot of what I've shocked people by saying here and elsewhere, starting with the problems the entire field of biology, not to mention psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. have gotten into by the blind faith in what they call "natural selection." Natural selection is to be regarded as a sacred doctrine even as the problems with the theory are so serious that I doubt there really is any such thing except as an object of scientific and secular faith. As can be seen, it holds a place more absolute in modern secular and, especially, atheist piety that I doubt any religious sect's catechism of dogmas and doctrines was more insisted on by those with a vested interest in their imagined solidity.
Stephen Buranyi's article asks, "Do We Need A New Theory of Evolution?" He starts:
Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection.
I can't resist asking why it should sound strange that scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved?
Evolution of life on Earth is probably the single most complex thing that scientists have ever proposed studying with the methods of science invented to study some of the simplest OBSERVABLE phenomena of human experience - only the tiniest fraction of the history of life evolving on Earth is or ever will be available to scientific study and much of that is handled in only a very cursory manner because, individually, those specimens are all enormously complex within themselves. That it should seem strange that evolution is so unknown is an artifact of cultural arrogance and successful overselling, not a product of honestly facing the impossibility of coming up with comprehensive answers to it. Such intellectual and even scientific faking us out is one of the most successful ruses of modernism derived from the culture of science. And it goes entirely past where it is at all justified or even scientific.
You may recall the gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to random mutations, then that tiny bit more vision gives them more chance of survival. The longer they survive, the more chance they have to reproduce and pass on the genes that equipped them with slightly better eyesight. Some of their offspring might, in turn, have better eyesight than their parents, making it likelier that they, too, will reproduce. And so on. Generation by generation, over unfathomably long periods of time, tiny advantages add up. Eventually, after a few hundred million years, you have creatures who can see as well as humans, or cats, or owls.
This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.
For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ. And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”
I will state as a certainty that what he said in his article would already get the high priests of Darwinism such as Jerry Coyne into a lather though what he said is certainly true, nothing about Darwin's theory, as he stated it or as it has been constantly modified and "extended" actually gives an actual origin of species or even an unambiguous origin of parts of species.
I will also state that there are a few things unrelated to natural selection that I believe Darwin was right about, common descent of all known species from earlier ancestors and, though it is impossible to look that far back, it is reasonable to believe it is likely life on Earth today is all part of one long chain of descent from an original living ancestor.
Though that is belief, it is not science, it is not provable even in the lesser standards of scientific provability because none of the evidence supporting that is in hand and it certainly never will be unambiguously in hand, our fossil record of sufficient resolvability will never be had to back it up. When you are talking about life forms, living organisms of particular character, you cannot make the same generalized assumptions you can make about the objects studied by physics or chemistry, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles or about the movements of planets and stars. To know a particular organism or a particular species, you have to have it in front of you to know what can be known about what you can see of it. You can't make the same kinds of generalizations about it that the harder sciences do about much simpler objects or about the most general aspects of more complex objects such as planets and stars. Without that, without even fossils, you are making up monsters and telling stories about them. Darwinism inevitably does that because it makes unknowable assertions about the unknowable past. While much can be known about fossilized organisms, nothing can be known about those you don't have evidence of and little to nothing can be known about even the lives of those you have fossils of if you can't observe them living out your tales told about them.
I used to have more faith that what projections of the currently available DNA record shows about common possession of genetic materials would lead us farther back than the fossil record goes but I now think that gets you only so far. I believe DNA (and RNA) evolved in early life and were not present in earliest life, those. so complex in their structures and so reliant on cellular chemistry, almost certainly could not have been present in the earliest life on Earth. What they evolved out of is unknowable without specimens of sufficient resovability. The physical mechanisms and chemistry in the cells that produce and work those molecules is certainly not something that is rationally believed would have spontaneously assembled themselves out of the available molecules to form a discrete, living, functioning organism which could obtain or produce and concentrate nutrition (energy to live on) to conduct other essential life sustaining functions and, most remarkably of all, to reproduce itself or something else living, reproducing successfully without any knowable motivation and to do what must have been among the most complex things matter ever did in the universe and do it successfully producing another being that could do all of those things. It is reasonable to conclude if it was not successful, the first organism would have been the last one. I doubt, very much, that such an organism could have done all of that without a containing membrane of sufficient character to concentrate the needed molecules, containing the "organs" to do all of that in a sufficent concentration and in proximity to each other to even just sustain life and I am entirely more skeptical that such a membrane and the organism it contained could just happen by random chance events, which leads to:
There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance. But how exactly these processes interact – and whether other forces might also be at work – has become the subject of bitter dispute. “If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now,” the Yale University biologist Günter Wagner told me, “we must find new ways of explaining.”
I don't think you can explain things with those "tools" and I don't think any thinking person thinking seriously and honestly about the problems would honestly say you can. A lot of how we talk about them is a product of habit, not deep consideration.
Look at these "core evolutionary principles" and how they are talked about in this paragraph. First, the statement that "everyone agrees" to those playing a role "starts midway through the story," just as much as his criticism of some of the central conventional concepts of Darwinism does.
One of the earliest things I did when I started my criticism of natural selection as the origin of eugenics was to ask several people, some biology teachers in high school, some working, publishing biologists of different concentrations to define natural selection. As I recall I asked six people and I got six entirely different answers. One, probably the most professionally accomplished and very likely the most intelligent of those biologists, included things like the quite non-selective theory of genetic drift in the definition they gave me. Much as I respect that scientist, I don't think that is philosophically coherent. But, then, I don't think classical definitions of natural selection are much more coherent.
I have the strongest feeling that like the word "socialism"* if you asked a host of competent, professional scientists who worked in biology to define "natural selection" that you would get a wide number of often mutually refuting answers as to what it is. I can guarantee you that is something that started immediately upon the publication of the theory of Evolution, as I've pointed out a number of times, Darwin, himself, had to continually explain what his own theory meant and some of that change seems to me to be a basic revision of his theory as first published in 1859 right through to his last edition of On The Origin of Species which he, himself issued. If someone had been able to pin down Darwin in a completely informed review of his own claims, I doubt he, himself could give a fully coherent definition of it. And I'll bet if he did his own closest colleagues would have disagreed with parts of it as his co-inventor. A. R. Wallace did. Things did not become more unanimous after Darwin died.
Yet, as the article has it, natural selection, along with mutation and, most incredibly of all "random chance" are actual "processes" even more so, it is asserted they are "forces" which I doubt is what any of those are. The idea that random chance is a "process" or "force" (and it is essential to conventional Darwinist thought that it be a supreme "proccess" and a supreme "force")** seems to me to be rather strange, implying there is nothing random or chancy about it. How does "random chance" assume the tangible qualities of a process or force without losing its randomness or chance aspects? To me that seems like an extremely important question upon which the actual existence of "natural selection" not only must rest - certainly in its conventional assertion by most Darwinists, especially the ideologues among those Darwinists - but without which its explanatory power is diminished if not entirely illusory.
The idea that "mutation" is a process or force is even more bizarre because that would seem to imply that it necessarily has a predictable outcome and the use of it as an engine of biological change would lead us to believe that it must have a statistically significant and identifiable goal.
I don't think any of those three things are sufficiently knowable in terms of their workings or results so as to justify categorizing them as "processes" or "forces" in the way that physics or chemistry might be able to justifiably use those terms. I think later in the article the reason biologists have mimicked the language and terminology of the hard sciences is given and it has entirely more to do with professional status than philosophical justification.
Behind the current battle over evolution lies a broken dream. In the early 20th century, many biologists longed for a unifying theory that would enable their field to join physics and chemistry in the club of austere, mechanistic sciences that stripped the universe down to a set of elemental rules. Without such a theory, they feared that biology would remain a bundle of fractious sub-fields, from zoology to biochemistry, in which answering any question might require input and argument from scores of warring specialists.
From today’s vantage point, it seems obvious that Darwin’s theory of evolution – a simple, elegant theory that explains how one force, natural selection, came to shape the entire development of life on Earth – would play the role of the great unifier. But at the turn of the 20th century, four decades after the publication of On the Origin of Species and two after his death, Darwin’s ideas were in decline. Scientific collections at the time carried titles such as The Death-bed of Darwinism. Scientists had not lost interest in evolution, but many found Darwin’s account of it unsatisfying. One major problem was that it lacked an explanation of heredity. Darwin had observed that, over time, living things seemed to change to better fit their environment. But he did not understand how these minute changes were passed from one generation to the next.
The trouble is, it was nothing of the sort, it was and is mostly an ideological holding of a. professional scientists who want to maintain their standing and respectability, b. others who would like to be taken as modern, educated people, members of a club with all of the rights and privileges they believe are due them, c. ideological anti-religion atheists who cling to Darwin like a terrorized and tortured monkey in a psych lab will cling to a grotesque chicken wire substitute for a protector mommy, d. scientific racists and others who may well, at the same time, reject evolution in favor of "young earth creationism." It is ironic that even as those YECs cling to the racist, class ridden aspects of natural selection, Darwinism proper, that its cultivated supporters will fell mildly impelled to reject its all too temporarily unfashionable but inherent racism and eugenics. As the post-WWII history of first largely concealed eugenics among the latter day champions of Darwin, Watson and Crick, Jensen and a whole host of other, especially, psychologists, Herrnstein, etc. the racism and eugenics that are an intrinsic aspect of Darwin's Malthusian based theory will always come out of the closet in the end. It is its most potent and enduring aspect in real life as opposed to the ideological wars among the Darwininists within biology that is its most important product.
That is where I got into it, I first looked at Darwinism because I did what almost no Darwinists ever do, I read what he said and I read what those he glowingly cited as supporting his theory said and it totally refuted the post-WWII lie that Darwinism and eugenics, including the murderous eugenics of the Nazis, were totally unconnected and I was gauche enough to point that out on some of the Scienceblogs - as funded by Jeffrey Epstein and his pimpess, Ghislaine Maxwell - and other places online. I mention that because no matter how clean and well manicured the hands of the Darwinists look, they are never far from the filth that the theory of natural selection was born in and which is its motivation for existence as well as its continuing use in the world. When it is married to the pseudo-sciences, especially those that veer close to the pseudo-science of economics, it has had some of the more devastating effects even within lived life experience. "Herd immunity" is a thoroughly Darwininan concept, something which united the secularist pseudo-socialists of Sweden with the pillage and plunder Republican-fascists of Trump world. And it's probably even more dangerous when political scientists and law-scribblers have it as the foundation of their thought. We know it had that effect when Holmes wrote the Buck v. Bell decision because he was a thorough Darwinist who believed he got nearest the heart of a legal issue in playing biologist in a black robe. He did on the Supreme Court what the Nazis did in Germany not long after. It is certainly not dainty or nice to admit that, though I am gauche enough to have just done that. I have no doubt that the six Republican-fascists on the court in other parts of government will make resort to its worst features repeatedly, maintaining them as the an intellectual foundation to their thought, knowingly or, as so many seem to, unknowingly. Given their ideological and professional service to the rich, their concurrence with Darwinism is far deeper than even natural selection.
I will probably go farther into this article because it does lay out the problems of current biology which has this in common with what I found in looking hard at Darwin's theory [natural selection, not evolution] that the more I read about it from its proponents the less I found it made any sense at all and the more obvious its malignant motivations became.
And that was true from almost as soon as the first edition of On The Origin of Species was published, Darwin's own scientific champions, those whose support he bathed in as he cited their claims to support his scientific assertions. They started in the early 1860s imagining it in not only passive eugenic terms but in drawing up lists of groups of those who should be excluded from the future, including, entire races of People, something Darwin joined such followers as Huxley and Haeckle in listing and in classes of People as his cousin and colleague, the official inventor of eugenics, Francis Galton did.
I have demonstrated with full citations, links and long quoted passages in scores of posts that conventional Darwinism from the start, through the early decades of the 20th century, among some of the most famous and accepted names in science such as Karl Pearson and many English speaking scientists, their German colleagues, others in other countries, through the post war period, to today's neo-Darwinist racists prove its eugenic and scientific racist features are inevitable. And there is no reason for anyone to uncritically accept it as established fact. There is every reason for it to die the death it should have before racists such as Fischer revived it by pasting it awkwardly to the naive conception of genetics available in the immediate pre-WWII years. It is an ongoing and active evil among us as its origins in the artificially constructed Brit-class system ravings of the murderous degenerate Thomas Malthus guaranteed it would be.
* No word that covers everything from the most egalitarian democratic assertions of socialism, through the myriad of other "socialisms" down through the various Marxists, anarchists, democrats-republicans, down through the vile Fabians and further down to the state-socialism of the Nazis has any useful coherence today. "Socialism" like "natural selection" is so discredited by its use that I'd advocate any person of good will or even basic honesty should scrap it and junk most of its historical associations. I don't think AOC does herself or her agenda any favor by keeping the word, no one that young should still have to have the skeletons in socialism's closet holding her down.
** I have repeatedly pointed out that conventional materialist-atheist-scientism substitute all of those, especially "random chance" for God the Creator, attributing to all of them exactly the same powers that the book of Genesis attributes to God. Atheists have their gods, they just don't admit that's what they are. I have found that "natural selection," "DNA," "random chance" and occasionally things such as "quantum vacuum" are all attributed divine powers by college-credentialed atheists.
That the problems of the origin of life present enormous problems for materialist-atheist-scientism while they don't present those problems to those who believe that God created life as an intentional act does nothing to diminish the insurmountable difficulties for the SAM would be faith-less faithful. The problems for them seem to me to be of the same kind as the problems for those who insist on a literal belief in the early chapters of Genesis as if those were stating history or science. Which strikes me as rather satisfyingly ironic.