NO ONE is under any obligation to respect the honestly considered experience of their own life as less reliable than the mathematical abstractions of scientists, especially when the claims of scientists are theoretical without an actual physical demonstration of their truth within the material area in which such physical demonstration can be made. When it is a merely theoretical claim without that physical demonstration that can be reproduced or otherwise verified independently, there is absolutely no reason to trust the claim more than someone trusts what their own, direct experience leads them to believe. Scientists who wander outside of the realm of the physically demonstrable are often skating on open water, held up by nothing but what they imagine must be there. Of course they're not on skates, what they are skating on is the credulity of those who listen to them and that is not subject to either gravity or the properties of matter that support a skater on ice. The popular understanding of science is just that sort of thing.
That there are unintelligent or irrational People who will be led astray, sometimes dangerously astray, by trusting their own perceived experience is no reason for otherwise sound thinkers to abandon their own experience to the unfounded speculations of scientists. That is especially true of their own experience of their conscousness about which they are the only possible experts. No scientist, those who produce reliable, rigorously tested and verified information and those who produce no more than untestable theoretical musings, doesn't rely on their own experience to even get started in what they do, after all. And some of the greatest catastrophes in human history were a product of scientific speculation believed by those who took them as reliably reliable.
Materialists who will do everything up to making the ultimate decadent claim that conscious experience is an illusion could never have taken the first step on that road to college-credentialed delusion without trusting their own experience that leads to language, reasoning, basic arithmetic and a perception of science. Such scientists and philosophers who claim that never live their lives as if they really believed it. They certainly don't conduct their professional lives on that basis or they'd never be retained even on the most decadent university faculty. There really is no more decadent ideology than hard core materialism which is rampant among those who have gone to college.
In making these statements I'm certainly not limiting the means of discerning truth about things to science which, actually, has a very limited range of the universe it can be used about which to try to find out what is true. No scientist uses only science to operate in the world, though I've encountered sci-rangers who have made that claim to me online. Claims that generally fall apart as soon as you prod them about what else they've said. They're as stupid and reality denying as Trumpzis. No scientists could only rely on the science they know to navigate through life, even the product of other scientists is something they use on faith or ignore or deny without actually testing it. Scientists have no choice but to depend on their faith in the authority of other scientists outside of their specialty. And much of what they rely on has no possible scientific verification.
Many things outside of science can be known to an effective 100% of reliability. That is proof that not everything that is known can be known through science or that science is necessarily the most reliable means of discerning reality. As an example, in my research of Darwinism and its actual impact on real lives and reality it quickly became obvious to me that what Darwin, Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, Pearson, Baur, Fischer, Lenz, etc. said could be known to within a virtual certainty because of the primary literary record they left, no matter the later claims of writers and even scientists who had obviously never really read them and who certainly never knew them.
That primary literary record can be read with complete comprehension of many statements. For some historical facts a level of certainty is possible about the most complex of entities that is rarely if ever true of most of what scientists have claimed. That's true, especially, of the most complex of entities that science is totally unable to be applied to. Science can't tell you what Darwin said, Darwin's own writing and the reports of those who knew him intimately can tell you that and you can rely on it. Science is useless to tell you that. Which isn't a trivial aspect of the method of science, the literary reporting and interpretation of findings is as relevant to science as the observations and measurements that are only comprehensible through that kind of literary exposition.
In regard to the character of natural selection in the world, that literary record is there and always will be as long as the texts are there and the chain of their transmission is as well known. No future findings of fact or science can overturn that they said what they said. That is especially true for things for which the handwritten manuscripts are extant and some of the most damning statements are contained in the manuscripts and letters. You can deny that was said but that will never change that it was said.
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Biological Determinism IS Material Determinism
But, to repeat my point about the relationship between materialism, vulgar and elite, and the denial of truth or its importance, that didn't keep the ideologues within the professional establishment of science and universities, the media and fiction from mounting the post-WWII, post-revealing of the Nazi genocides white washing of the history of that most infamous of biological determinisms, natural selection. No one I read in the pre-WWII period ever denied that link, including Leonard Darwin, Darwin's last surviving child. That cover up which I had only suspected early in my research of Darwinism became glaringly obvious immediately as I read the primary documentation of the Darwinists,* from Charles to the last years of his last surviving son Leonard Darwin, his grandson Charles Francis Darwin, the Darwinists in science, from Galton and Haeckel and Huxley to Pearson to Watson and Crick to those today, which never once separated Darwinism from the biological determinism which is both the basic assumption of eugenics and its motivation, including from almost the start eugenic murder. Including passive murder through conscious Malthusian neglect and on to outright murder and genocide. And also the selective elimination from the human future through policies to prevent People from having children. The revival of Darwinist eugenics which began in a big way in the 1970s is the strongest evidence of my suspicion that as long as natural selection is the mandatory or even a wide spread ideological holding within biology that eugenics and even the proposal of eugenic murder will recur and, as it has in places like Britain and the United States and Covid-ear Sweden, drive law and public policy. Eugenic sterilization of that kind cannot be separated from genocide because they both have the same end, removing a People from the future. I have posts on virtually all of those topics with citations and full quotes. If I posted links practically the entire post would be red.
I strongly suspect that the post-WWII cover up of the relationship of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection and the history of eugenics, including Nazi eugenics done by scientists and writers with ideological motives was made possible due to the pervasive materialism and scientism of those who carried off that successful obviously dishonest public relations campaign. No doubt the least depraved of them saw their lying as prophylactic, lying done for a greater purpose, though I'm sure a lot of them didn't realize they propagated a lie because they'd merely relied on previous lies and they never, once, looked at the primary record to check what they claimed.**
Materialism and scientism were also basically at work in the snow job of anti-anti-communism from well before the Second World War as the Soviet Union was forming and the mass murders begun under Lenin and continuing under Stalin were first reported on within and outside of Russia and the lands that came under the oppression of that political regime and denied by the Communists and those on various lefts who were sympathetic to Marxism and those who were merely duped because they thought it was necessary to oppose the various capitalist criminals who held power in other places.
The often as deadly denial of morality under capitalism is a somewhat different phenomenon which is no less in need of exposure as well as the cooperation between capitalists and fascists and Nazis, a particularly evil form of anti-communism. In many cases it was merely a less formal and philosophically based expression of more vulgar materialism. The current Trumpzi anti-Marxism is the same out of the same vulgar materialist motives. I'm certainly no capitalist even as I'm no Marxist. I'm an anti-anti-anti-communist even as I have absolutely no sympathy for communists or other brands of Marxists or for any breed of capitalist. I am anti-materialism on the basis of observation, not ideological choice.
The link of Nazism to materialist determinism you claim isn't there is blatantly there. It should never be forgotten that as he was in prison, one of the foremost science publishers in Germany supplied Hitler with one of the most influential biological textbooks on Darwinian eugenics of the period to inform his political ideology. That is reflected in Mein Kampf as he ranted it out, dictated to Rudolf Hess, the man who said that Nazism was nothing but "applied science" which was the basis of the entire line of Nazi eugenics and genocide as expressed by those who planned and carried those out.
The textbook "Human heredity and Racial Hygiene" by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz went through five editions between 1921 and 1940. In contemporary journals, it received almost only positive review articles and was considered to be the standard textbook on racial hygiene in the Weimar Republic. After Hitler's takeover in 1933, it became the "scientific" basis for eugenic sterilization programs. In that year, the Nazis enacted a law allowing the involuntary sterilization of persons with diseases thought to be hereditary, mostly neurological and psychiatric disorders. Using review articles on the book, the position of neurologists and psychiatrists towards racial hygiene is analyzed. We describe how they prepared and maintained the acceptance of eugenic politics in the medical profession by praising the standard work on racial hygiene.
The influence of American and other eugenics programs which were also directly an application of natural selection is 100% certain by the same reliable textual record mentioned above and that is, as well, a blatant application of Darwinism, look at my archive, I've provided copious links. The scientific basis of Nazism is undeniable in its claims. Natural selection was that science of which Nazism was an application. Hitler's conclusions are not different from the many enthusiasts for eugenics even before Nazism arose, they advocated everything including state murder of those they deemed unfit based on that deterministic theory. Those reluctant to advocate direct state murder often advocated the same by the slower murder of death through neglect of those who needed everything from basic medical care including vaccination and even food and shelter. That literature starts almost immediately, including Darwin in The Descent of Man and his closest colleagues, friends and relatives based on the theory of natural selection whose writings Darwin supported and cited as highly reliable science.
In regard to my criticism of Hossenfelder's unevidenced deterministic claims, natural selection also actually has no possible verification out of the actual evolution of life on Earth. That is a hard fact. No one has ever seen speciation happen once determining that natural selection was what drove it to happen in that one instance. Never mind determine the way in which it happened to account for the uncountable millions of unique species that have lived on the Earth. It is as gross a speculation as Sabine Hossenfelder's faith statement that if some divinely abled supercomputer could do the calculations they could reproduce the mind of a single one of us through mathematical modeling, predicting us entirely, predicting our every mental act. The intervening link that hard core Darwinist-fundamentalists claimed that knowing "the human genome" would be able to make the intervening link, predicting a single human being through knowing their genome is already known to be hopelessly naive and grotesquely simplistic. The wager that Rupert Sheldrake made with Lewis Wolpert, the Darwinist-fundamentalist is interesting mostly for the immediate hedging that Wolpert engaged in after he'd boldly and naively took the bet from a far more experienced researcher on the predictability of one organism from its genome. The aftermath of the over-hyped campaign to map the human genome has shown just how naive the reductionist faith of naive genetics has been, though its claims pervade the popular understanding of science, including among many of the most famous of those who are professional scientists, right now.
It's telling, to me that Sabine Hossenfelder - who is no biologist or researcher into questions of consciousness anymore than I am - can so clearly see the problem of such rank speculation on the subatomic down to the Planck scale that her professional life makes her consider all important but she cannot see the problem of similar speculation to the scale she talks about in her claims about free will, imagining an enormous bridge linking the scale of particle physics and the scale of complex life in which our minds exist. A bridge she, herself, knows will not be built so there is no way to scientifically verify her chosen ideological speculation. But she so much wants that, to be there that she imagines it, she wills it into something she and her fellow ideologues can choose to believe must be there, even as there is absolutely no evidence that there is.
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Anyone who is skeptical of claims of ideological and unfounded science and materialist-ideologue scientists has ample justification in not only the words that scientists spoke and wrote down but, more so, in their advocacy and encouragement of laws and policies that have tried to wipe out entire groups of People, whether by preventing them having children or by murdering them or, somewhat less tidily, by laws and policies of neglect of those in need or under oppression. In the formal literature I've pointed to, that takes the form of denying vaccination or food or shelter to actually advocating the salubrious effects of mass killing [See the Descent of Man] to bemoaning the practice of delivering babies by cesarian section on the speculation that the survival of the mother and baby will drive down the biological fitness of the human species, Karl Pearson said so as science. And those are only a few of the depravities as reliable science that are contained in the actual history of material determinism. Anyone who has read history from ancient to current closely is within reason to conclude that materialist-determinism has the most disastrous of consequences when it gains power. That is a basic truth of the history of scientific biological determinism, whether it is expressed in biological terms such as the eugenicists still do or whether it is those who claim that particle physics proves that free thought is impossible. The other major direct mass murdering entity of the 20th century, Marxism, was a thoroughly deterministic system based on even more general assumptions of materialist ideology. Both Nazism and Communism with political power commissioned scientists to come up with science in support of those ideologies just as capitalist governments also commission scientists to do the same. Scientists, ever on the look out for money and connections to power, oblige.
I am impressed with how often high-priced science makes claims that go through the pose of peer review and official publication and gains professional and, at times, even legal power because of that only to be shown to be everything from mistaken to an intentional fraud. As I always suggest, go through Retraction Watch blog. It makes me wonder how much of what is retained as science and built on but which is never really tested is there at any given time.
Much of the skepticism that scientists whine about is well earned by the scientists themselves, both those who are guilty of shoddy to dishonest practice and their colleagues who do nothing to clean up the entire thing. Sometimes its merely through overselling and over-hyping an applied extension of what they have published. Such as I criticized in Hossenfelder's application of the mathematics of particle physics to the experience of human consciousness.
I certainly take science seriously, only an idiot or screw ball wouldn't, especially when it is about things of such vital exigency as HIV or Covid-19 research and public health to the even more urgent science around preventing things such as climate change from killing us all. Such scientists seldom have the luxury of wallowing in ideologically constructing ways to get rid of God that those who get paid to make such speculations as that do little to nothing to save or improve lives and are held in an insanely irrational esteem that academia and the media give abstract speculation over saving lives. I think the motive for that is the general vulgar materialism with pretenses of elite materialism which is the base ideology of many of those with college credentials. It is an absurdity that the most speculative theory removed from reality is esteemed most highly while the most practical and necessary is held in less esteem.
In the United States a lot of that is media driven by the scribbling, producing and directing classes among People, college-grad or not, who have little actual knowledge of science. Current American culture being what it is, a large percentage of that ideological transmission comes in the way of entertainment, including much of the "science" and "documentary" junk of it. That kind of thing is what constitutes what "science" is for most of them, and that's the high end of it. I would bet that for everyone who watches only the best of PBS, there are thousands who get all they know from sci-fy and things like The Big Bang Theory. I would bet you that not five percent of those college-credentialed folk - including those outside of science faculties at universities - who have substituted a crude and "popular understanding of science" for revealed religion could pass a high school course of basic algebra or statistics, without which they literally have to take everything on faith. A lot of them are just annoyed when they're told they shouldn't sexually harass students or actors or those lower on the pay-scale or otherwise annoyed with some antiquated Protestant or Catholic scolding. Some of it is just to fit in with the posher class in hopes of gain or peer approval. There's really not much more to it than that.
No wonder largely college-credentialed driven American TV and pop culture and the presstituted New York City media created the cult of Trump. The pushing of STEM subjects in schools didn't prevent it, neither did the prep-Ivy equivalent schooling they had. The college credentialed were a major part of his support in the 2016 election and among the January 6th insurrectionists. The elite materialism isn't really that far removed from vulgar materialism. So many of those on the college-credentialed left merely chose a different and equally depraved political cult, especially those who were white, male, straight and affluent.
* The original challenge to what I said on one of the Science Blogs, to prove the link between natural selection and eugenics was solved immediately when I cited chapter 20 of Francis Galton's memoir in which he not only stated, flatly that his eugenics was a product of his reading of On the Origin of Species but he also reproduced Charles Darwin's letter approving of his first major work on eugenics, Hereditary Genius. The case was absolutely nailed down by citing Darwin's citations of that book and even more extreme statements of Darwinist eugenics in the work of the notorious proto-Nazi Ernst Haeckel in The Descent of Man. No one who had read Darwin's second major worn on natural selection could possibly honestly hold that Darwin wasn't a eugenicist on the basis of natural selection and that eugenics arose immediately from those who understood Darwin's claims the best, including Darwin, himself.
I will point out that the many claims that those Darwin, Galton, Haeckel et al made about those who were "unfit" having a higher birth rate and, so, dominating the human species was a direct contradiction of the claims that natural selection are based in that superior traits led to higher birth rates and successful lines. What they feared were the effects of morality and civilization caused that to happen, though they used the results of morality and civilization to make their claims that Western Europeans, particularly Northern Europeans in the West were the crown of creation. That is apart from the Irish who Darwin irrationally held were degenerate in a scientific work, though they had been subjected to the most brutal of "selections" through two major famines within the century before Darwin wrote his first major work. You would expect that such a selection would have led the Irish who survived to have been "fitter" than the English aristocracy who Darwin and Galton held were among the fittest of the human species. The claims of natural selection are riddled with self-contradictions from the start, it is truly one of the worst major scientific theories in the history of science.
** Just the other day as I was re-reading Alfie Kohn's book No Contest: The Case Against Competition I read
For many years, though, some biologists and ethologists have encouraged the widespread conception that natural selection is tantamount to competition. "Survival of the fittest" (to use the term coined not by Darwin but by Herbert Spencer) seemed to connote a struggle. Winners live to fight another day.
I have noted that Darwin, himself, in the fifth and sixth editions of On the Origin of Species said that when he said "Natural Selection" he meant exactly the same thing that Spencer meant by "Survival of the Fittest" and that he had been encouraged to settle that question by his co-"discoverer" of natural selection. A.R. Wallace. Though anyone who read the first edition of OTOoS or his subsequent exposition of natural selection in The Descent of Man could possibly have missed that those who said what Kohn denies were right about what Darwin and those he cited to support him claimed. Though perhaps Alfie Kohn could be forgiven for not knowing that, the man he quotes to support his point had no excuse not to know it.
In fact, there is no necessary relationship between natural selection and competitive struggle. As Stephen Jay Gould put it recently
"The equation of competition with success in natural selection is merely a cultural prejudice . . . Success defined as leaving more offspring can . . . be attained by a large variety of strategies - including mutation and symbiosis - that we could call competitive. There is no a priori preference in the general statement of natural selection for either competitive or cooperative behavior."
Gould's point is that there is nothing about evolution that requires competition. And indeed Darwin himself made clear that he was using the term "struggle for existence" in a "large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being upon another."
The first thing to notice is that Kohn and, clearly Gould were shifting the meaning of the terms they were defending, as, in fact, Darwin did himself. To conflate "natural selection" with the word "evolution" is a common folly, when it's not an obvious con-job tactic.
What Gould said, in and among those ellipses that arouse my suspicion, (always give complete quotes when they can be had), shifted the meaning of "natural selection" entirely away from what Darwin, himself, said it meant. Though Darwin was well rehearsed in playing fast and loose with the denotation of words, too. He was a master at dancing a two step of saying, as factual science, truly terrible things, immediately denying he meant what he said and then shortly after showing he meant exactly the worst thing despite his denial. It worked for him on some of the most terrible things he said that were believed and acted on. In his correspondence to Haeckel he recommended the practice. The entire exposition of natural selection is saturated with it. When I found that one of my favorite authors on these topics, Gould, practiced it he went down considerably in my esteem.
After more of such stuff Kohn expressed the pious and double-talking faith of that post-WWII con job.
Natural selection does not require competition; on the contrary, it discourages it.
The literature of natural selection from its beginning till today puts a lie to that, both the most definitive definers of it to its most vulgar exposition in he-man fiction and, yes, Nazi propaganda. It would have been far better if Kohn had left that mess alone in making his well stated case that competition was often an irrational, counterproductive and destructive framing of human activity, though like any pious college-credentialed writer on such subjects, he must have felt he had to deal with the human consuming monster created by science, natural selection. Its graveyard is too big to whistle past in that way.
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