I had a busy week so I didn't get to find any new radio or audio dramas to post. I did listen to this talk by Rupert Sheldrake which was posted earlier this morning, he says a lot of things related to what I've written recently. He's always worth listening to.
Anatheism: Rediscovering God In A Secular Age
IF THE NEXT CONGRESS isn't in the hands of the facists, they must conduct a full investigation into the corruption on the Supreme Court. Now that we know that Alito was displaying the flag upside down, a sign of support for the attempted insurrection against the Constitution, he must be the subject of a full investigation into him as a member of the Supreme Court and, especially, into his connection to insurrectionary activities. That he, as well as the known insurrection connected Clarence Thomas, have been actively hearing and giving opinions and decisions related to cases in the insurrection of Trump and the Republican-fascist party, the Congress has the power, the right and the obligation to investigate ALL OF THE "justices" IN REGARD TO THEIR POLITICAL ACTIVITIES AS MEMBERS OF THE MOST OVERTLY POLITICAL COURT, EVEN MORE OVERTLY POLITICAL THAN THE BUSH V GORE COURT.
The Supreme Court under Roberts is the most corrupt branch of the government and that's not apart from the Trump regime and the current Republican-fascist House. Alito and Thomas are legitimately suspected of political corruption in their official capacity as members of that court and who knows what else we don't know due to the self-protection racket that that court runs and which traditional Supreme Court reporting, valuing access more than finding the truth has helped them.
The thing which is handled by the media as if it were a mystical repository of morality and wisdom is a sordid, rigged engine to grab more wealth for the wealthy, protect rich criminals, enforce our traditional form of fascism, white supremacy and that other, universal form of it, male supremacy. Straight white, rich, male supremacy.
If the courts won't clean up the corruption at the top, as the Judicial Conference obviously hasn't much tried, then it is to the political branches to do it, STRIPPING THE SUPREME COURT OF ITS SELF-CREATED VETO POWER OVER LEGISLATIVE REMEDIES TO CLEAN THE FILTHY THING UP.
CERTAINLY THE MOST interesting form of consciousness to most of us is human consciousness, since by "us" I mean whatever human beings there are who go to the bother of thinking about consciousness to start with. Though, perhaps, any non-humans reading this are properly more interested in the consciousness of their own kind in the same way. And you could be forgiven for concentrating on your own consciousness, your own individual consciousness. That is the only consciousness that any of us has direct access to in our own conscious experience, the only consciousness of which we can have any direct knowledge of, the consciousness by which we have any access to any information of any kind, external of or internal to our own bodies, something which the eliminative positivists, eliminative materialists don't want any of us to remember because their hatred of religion and God is their first priority. The denial of the significance of which or even reality of which, which, when pressed to think about it, the materialist fundamentalist will come to in the end. It seems. That is the message of that quote from the hack philosopher, promoter of atheist materialism, Daniel Dennett in one of my posts from last week.
That's what my consciousness has come to conclude after reading and hearing materialists for much of my adolescent and adult life.
For completeness, since I've come out of the closet as someone who takes the methods of science seriously enough that I credit the rigorous, controlled research into parapsychology for supporting that claim with a more than century long program of some the most rigorous science ever conducted, it would seem that we have some access to other consciousnesses on something other than an obvious physical basis or in the direct, visual or audio or tactile information. Which is interesting in the same way that our own direct experience of our own consciousness is properly interesting to us. Though not to the exclusion to being very interested in the lives and experiences of other, living beings.
I've also concluded, considering the consequences of the elimination or severe demotion of consciousness and free thought for the professional, literary and philosophical activities of such materialists that a rather ultimate form of hypocrisy is involved in their public statements of their first priority. That is an inevitable a consequence of their ideological orientation as is their denial of how they actually live their lives under their dogmas and slogans. Their atheism, what I conclude is their driving force, the materialism which seems to be a consequence of their hatred for religion and God, and the scientism which is both a professional advantage and a convenient slogan, lead to them setting up those make-shift gods that I've come to conclude atheists almost inevitably use to replace the God of revelation. The ancient atomists also set up gods to replace the gods of their ambient cultures. I've come up with a partial henothisitic pantheon* of such surrogate gods, science, probability mathematics, "random chance," "trial and error," natural selection, "genes." etc. One such god which governed that intellectual muddle and scientific scandal, CSICOP and to an extent the entirety of such organized "skepticism." is "public relations," though that's more of a religion than the god it serves. Atheism, itself, would seem to be the idol they are ready to serve and sacrifice everything to, including their own minds - or at least those of everyone else - to. The entirety of human culture has to go in the face of that. As I mentioned Nietzsche understood that to be a logical consequence of scientistic materialistic atheism. Though most atheists don't think all that hard about the logical ends of their claims. For many of most famous figures, Sagan, Randi, Shermer, Degrasse Tyson, Nye, etc. their god would seem to be fame gained from show biz and a lucrative side line in making money. Vulgar materialism, the religion of money and stuff, Mammonism, is the most present and widespread form of that religious devotion and the would-be intellectual materialists aren't immune from its attractions in large numbers.
The atheist-materialists of more intellectual rigor, and they tend to be professional philosophers far more than scientists, resort to the muddle that materialists have made in dealing with what they make into their "hard problem" of consciousness have resorted to panpsychism. Panpsychism, the idea that non-living material has consciousness, inevitably forces questions that science and philosophy will have as hard a time with as it encounters when it is faced with the fact of human or animal consciousness. Where do atoms, subatomic particles, crystals, etc. keep their consciousness? Where is it? How does it combine to form larger units of consciousness in larger objects? And, keeping in mind that if we don't have direct access to the consciousness of any person but our individual self, pretending we can have adequate access to the consciousness of even our nearest and dearest non-verbal pets among animals to make hard and fast assertions about it seems to be fooling mostly ourselves. Scientists have been fooling their readers on such matters since Descartes. And the monstrous consequences started pretty much with his sadistic dissection experiment on his wife's poor dog. Given that what would be the even more exotic and inaccessible "consciousness" of subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, crystals up to the largest aggregates of non-living matter makes saying anything about that entirely a matter of faith, its literary scriptures, Just-so stories and a materialist scripture that turns such lore into dogma. When science or philosophy can't access something for study, belief in it will be exactly that, dogmatic statements. Evolutionary psychology in its fifty years of existence is a good example of such scripture, that of the eliminative materialists is also one, though less readable if far more laughable. Much of it would be a better satire on the decadence of atheist-materialist-scientism than it is science or philosophizing.
I doubt that even if its there we will never be able to imagine what such "consciousness" is like, though imagining it as being like our own experienced consciousness would seem to be a rather ultimate form of that universally committed sin of the ethologists, "anthropomorphism." Charges of "anthropomorphism" were very popular among academics and would-be smarties of my youth, so finding it practiced among them is just another of their hypocrisies. That imaginary act of imposing our idea of ourselves onto other entities is understandable if silly as alleged science. I don't think it's possible to escape anthropomorphism in imaginative thinking because we happen to all be People, antropos because whenever we think about the things the accusation is made in regard to we haven't got any alternative but to think of those things in human terms. Science puts everything in human terms, whether in words or mathematical expressions. And it is impossible to know the relationship of human experience to what would have to be the conscious experience of non-living beings. Short of them articulating or demonstrating that to us and us accurately understanding what they're telling us, we've likely got little to no chance of getting close. We won't even know how close or far we are from that.
On top of that comes the most interesting and important question we might pose about such non-living being consciousness, something already mentioned above. How does that consciousness relate to our own consciousness? Is our consciousness composed of the consciousness of our constituent atoms and molecules and the subatomic molecules those are composed of and the larger physical structures, aqueous, crystalline. lipid, etc. and how do those billions and trillions of consciousnesses produce our unitary experience of our own, one consciousness? Is our consciousness supposed to be some kind of amalgam of all of those bits of consciousness? That's a bigger problem than imagining the eukaryotic cell as being an amalgamation of other organisms to make an integrated cell, at least we can discern those organelles and find out their likely origin. "Out of many one" is a rather huge leap of faith in the United States as a country, one which the founding documents of the country and the law would rather prove to be something the founders and framers didn't really believe in, themselves. And that's nothing compared to the problem that such panpsychism, materialist or non-materialist, faces in trying to come up with anything more coherent than the absurdities that old-line materialists come up with trying to shoe-horn our own experience of consciousness, of our freedom of thought and will into their ideology,
An ideology that can't be made to work, not even when you call it "physicalism" or "natualism."
The problem of how does consciousness interact with matter as defined by science or by materialist ideological definition or where does it reside? How DOES matter have the property of consciousness, whatever that means? Consciousness is an active state, it would seem to require memory in order for it to exist in time. Considering the difficulty of theorizing then "finding" the Higg's boson and its role in the standard model of modern physics, doing the same for consciousness which is even less definable than the physics definition of "mass" when consciousness evades much prodding and definition, doesn't seem to move the issue towards anything like progress, certainly not a definite conclusion. I think all the materialists are doing is restating what for materialism is the "hard problem" of consciousness, moving it to where it cannot be reliably known to exist. I think in doing that they mimic Francis Crick when he proposed to solve the insoluble problem of the origin of living organisms on Earth through a materialist program of moving on that problem by saying maybe some extra-terrestrial intelligence seeded the early Earth with life - leaving aside the problem of where that imagined intelligent life came from as well as whatever the earliest of organism on Earth came from. Crick's problem he left his disciples with is a problem for materialism and atheism it's just a variant of the atheist question of "who created the Creator?" That's not a problem for the Jewish monotheistic tradition which holds that God is uncreated, but it is an inevitable problem for materialism and one which is, in Bertrand Russell's mocking phrase, "Turtles all the way down."
Maybe Crick would leave that that to the ETs to solve. You'd have to be a hell of a lot stupider than Crick was reputed to be to not understand the problems with such a solution, though desperation can make you say some pretty stupid things. Look at the rest of the stuff materialists come up with.
I have no objection to the idea that matter may have some form of consciousness, I have no objection to panpsychism that faces the problems that come with the proposal. I especially have no problem with it if materialists proposing it admit that their indefinable, un-studyable, and unknowable solution will never produce anything like a scientific or even a philosophical resolution of the problem they've made of consciousness. I don't think Western philosophy which has fixated on such things for more than 2500 years can come up with anything like a final answer about that. And if that's true of the philosophical realm, then science is an even less aptly applied method to solving the problem, something scientists, themselves have made a problem because it can't be made consistent with their ideology. And it cannot be credibly denied by fiat because it is the very thing which they've come up with all of that, philosophy to science, to atheist-materialist-fundamentalist ideology. Their very ideology is dependent on the thing it cannot be squared with and those of us who reject their ideology have every right to point that out.
That's not a problem for religion except perhaps to the extent that human notions and limited understanding such as categories of omniscience and omnipotence are imposed on God. Walter Breuggemann has repeatedly noted that the old trio of attributes to God as found in his blue covered childhood catechism, Omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence are not found in the Hebrew religious tradition and are imported into Christianity from Greek pagan philosophy. I believe it was also imported into late medieval and early modern Jewish philosophy, as well. While I suspect God is all knowing and all powerful and imminent I reject any notion that any human conception of that is what God is limited to or by. God as presented in the Moses story cannot be encompassed by human minds. There is a reason that when Moses asked who he was to tell the Children of Israel what God had sent him he was to tell them God was "I Am." Not a proper noun, a pronoun and verb. From the attempt to rigidly fix God to such categories comes the impositions of eternal damnation and predestination which is the cost of doing that. In some of the more radical forms of that a similar denial of free will is sometimes a consequence of that unnecessary forcing of Jewish and Christian scripture into Greek pagan philosophical postures. The idea that God is a living presence instead of an object is a source of freedom unavailable to materialism or a religion of material gods. Eliminative materialism, eliminative positivism, is a road to enslavement.
* They raise up any one of those gods to stand in for God, especially as the Creator as their arguments need them to, only to be put lower on the altar of atheist materialist scientism when the necessity arises. And it inevitably does, none of the atheists material gods is capable of maintaining or explaining it all, which makes the monism of their ideology somewhat atheologically problematic, as well.
MUCH AS I RESPECT him and contrary to what you claim, I don't agree with everything Rupert Sheldrake says, we disagree about at least one major issue. He believes in natural selection and I am a deep skeptic of that theory of evolution. I don't have any doubt that evolution happened and suspect, if human science and technology and greed don't end all life on Earth, will continue as long as our kind of life continues. I am entirely skeptical that natural selection is the explanation of how that happened and am as skeptical that natural selection is a real thing in nature. I think every citation of natural selection I've ever heard of is no more than an unevidenced explanation of things in evidence or the creative basis on which things which are not evidenced or even mathematically coherent (Hamiltonian "altruism", for example) are promoted. And, all too often, those are the product of a desired economic, racial or ideological motive. Sometimes what is desired is merely a scientific seeming explanation of something within science, a "Just-so story" which is not really different from the methods of the ancient and classical era naturalists, crypto-zoologists and proton-scientists. I think that desire in biology was what led to the quick adoption of natural selection in science, controlled by wealthy, white, males of the dominant group wherever they were and other dominant groups later. We can become so used to how an ideological creation is used that we hardly notice when it really isn't explaining how or why anything happens. I haven't yet gotten around to studying the later 19th and early 20th century scientific skepticism of natural selection but I would like to read what its scientific skeptics said about it. There was a crisis of faith in it among scientists who certainly had legitimate questions about it at that time, I just haven't looked into the primary evidence of that, yet.
My skepticism of natural selection is not the same kind of thing as the "skeptics" pseudo-skepticism over the existence of psychic phenomena. What first led to my study of natural selection, Darwinism, was its role in inspiring eugenics. What I read in the primary literature and beyond that is what led to my skepticism that it was even a real thing, It only started in understanding the consequences of the faith in natural selection, eugenics, the most extreme though logically inevitable consequence of a belief in natural selection, the "eugenic" genocides of the Nazis and others motivated by a belief in natural selection. As I've noted here a number of times, I was hardly the first to notice those consequences of a belief in natural selection. The early British feminist, antivivisectionist, and radical Frances Cobbe wrote a remarkably informed and insightful essay on the moral depravity and atrocity that was likely going to come from a belief in natural selection soon after Darwin's On The Origin of Species was published. Darwin himself, in The Descent of Man, condescendingly and patronizingly pooh-poohed her fears which turned out to be entirely justified and impressively insightful. Darwin and his wife knew Cobbe, it's reported that Emma Darwin was especially impressed with her. As with the closing speech that William Jennings Bryan prepared for the Scopes trial, the history of the dogma of natural selection in application proved its critics far more right than its champions in that regard, both Darwin and Clarence Darrow in those cases. Considering the depravity of the Nazi period, first and foremost the Shoah, the Holocaust and other eugenic genocides, but the rest of it, up to and including the Lebensborn breeding program and the degrading of human life in terms of economic and military utility, Cobbe's prediction that a belief in natural selection could lead to a level of amorality such as Mandeville imagined was born out in a very real test of time. Exactly in the way that natural selection, itself has never been observed in real life. She said that if natural selection were a proven scientific fact that we would have to deal with that but it has not been proven as a scientific fact.
When a scientist comes up with a theory about a complex phenomenon in nature they cannot come up with anything like an exact discription of how it happens in nature, you have to actually see it happening IN NATURE to really understand that. Making stuff up, theorizing, is no substitute though that has not kept the neo-Darwinists from making up the most ludicrous, irrational and even mathematically incoherent and contradictory claims and having those believed as science.
And that's were my disbelief in the existence of natural selection starts, in the fact that no one has ever seen, never mind documented an instance of even one, single species coming about through natural selection. No one has ever seen individuals of any species having greater reproductive success due to passing on specific "traits" through many generations, their line of life coming to dominate within that species, eventually giving rise to a new species which is different from and reproductively incompatible with members of the original species. I am deeply skeptical of theories of complex phenomena that are accepted without actual, visual evidence in nature sufficient to demonstrate what that theory claims. In the case of what is claimed of natural selection producing new species, sufficient evidence would comprise a massive and verifiable line of fossil remains of direct descendants to prove that it was natural selection that accounted for a line within a species dominating and swamping other lines in the same species, producing a new species. But that would not be enough because natural selection would require life histories and environmental knowledge sufficient to show that outside forces killed, prevented from leaving offspring of other individuals set up as their competition in a "struggle for existence" and no such evidence will ever be had because it leaves no physical evidence in the fossil record. No such evidence has ever been produced, nor is it even a plausible claim that such a line of evidence could ever be had. Such information is irretrievably lost to the normal course of of time, organic decay and geological grinding. The genetic evidence of relationship that impressively shows just that, relationship, does not prove that natural selection is the engine that produced the separate species that are demonstrated to be related. It cannot demonstrate that any "struggle for existence" produced the different species that are demonstrated to be related instead of just biological change in species over time. The idea that long "extinct species" "died out" when every present day species is the direct descendant of myriads of "extinct species" is illogical in the extreme. There's all the difference in the world between human activity destroying all of the individuals of a species, cutting them off from the future, leaving no descendants and those species of which all present day species are their living descendants. I do not believe that absent actual observational evidence of a complex theory that we can have any actual knowledge of what such a thing would be like in reality instead of conjecture. The more complex the proposed theory and phenomenon, the harder it is to accurately predict the actual results in nature. Yet natural selection is the required framing within biology of probably the most complex phenomenon that science has ever claimed to deal with.
As of now there is no theory of how the evolution of new species happened which has that kind of evidence and it would seem that none ever will, which may make evolutionary scientists unhappy but that's just too bad. There doesn't seem to be any kind of air-tight or even less air-tight scientific verification of many ideas, cultural, ideological, religious, scientific, even mathematical and it doesn't seem that human beings as we presently are will have such verification, ever. If you choose to make claims about the forever lost past then you had better be prepared to be disappointed if you want to have the same verification of those as is had about readily checked ideas about present day phenomena.
My skepticism continues through the reading of Darwin and his disciples and seeing how they presented merely seemingly plausible evidence for it in things like animal husbandry giving rise to named varieties of plants and animals, in the case of dogs, for example, having enormously varied "traits" which might appear to mimic what appears to our eyes as different species in nature. But dogs, for all their variety and difference are still members of the same species. I'd question the idea that they are even a different species from the wolves they were selected from BY HUMAN INTENTION, with whom dogs can breed and have very viable, successfully reproducing offspring.
That widespread substitute for evidence of natural selection has some real problems as serving as evidence for it and the scientific support the theory in general. Especially as that is ideologically defined in the present day para-scientific manner. A partial summary of my reasons include:
1. What is done in human husbandry is not natural, it is an example of choices made by human beings, often for intentional purposes towards intended or hoped for ends. Nothing could be farther from how Darwin and his disciples claimed natural selection works, especially those materialist-atheists who reject the idea that there is teleology in nature. I haven't come across a single one of those in or out of science who has done what they are always ready to do when they suspect someones motives is to imply intelligent design and teleological ends of God in evolution, notice that those forbidden motives such as assigning teleology and intelligent intent to nature are rampant in Darwinist literature. Rupert Sheldrake correctly identifies such claims in the just-so stories of genes by the atheist-fundamentalist Richard Dawkins. Yet nothing could be more obvious in that use of animal husbandry in arguments for natural selection from the time that Darwin introduced it as an ersatz substitute for evidence of natural selection in nature. Since, as I've also pointed out before, Darwin, himself cited his inspiration of Malthusian economic dogma as giving him the idea of natural selection, the matter of human choices of the most artificial kind with obvious self-interested ends embedded into them came into the theory of natural selection at its inception, attributing those to supposedly non-interested, non-teleological nature. The intentionality of human beings cannot be removed from the results gained by human action.
2. None of those substitutes for natural selection has produced a new species. Not those done by plant and animal breeders, not by those done by equally intelligently designing biologists and geneticists with equally teleological motives in labs. There are such intelligently designed experiments that have produced hybrids but hybrids are notorious for their inability to reproduce their own kind or to maintain their stability when subjected to the possibility of interbreeding with other plants. They are hardly a substitute for what Darwinists claim to have happened during evolution to produce the who knows how many millions or billions or more species that arose without intelligence and intention. In fact, if you insist that those are evidence for natural selection you'd have to conclude that human type intelligence and intention may well HAVE HAD TO BE part of it.
3. And there is the fact that the concept of "biological fitness" from the start, through examples of plant and animal breeding by humans is so deeply entwined in human concepts of economic utility when economic utility is hardly the same thing as the ability to survive in a wild environment and to produce reproductively successful offspring. Many of the artificially produced varieties in the Darwinists' "evidence" have a hard time surviving, never mind leaving a thriving line of offspring in their close image in the wild. The concept of economic utility saturates all Darwinist thinking through its inspiration in Malthusian economics, especially in the Malthusian assignment of economic value to human beings, lives and bodies. It's no wonder the early adopters of the theory of natural selection turned so immediately to eugenics putting their own aristocratic class at the top in such schemes of worth.
4. So many of the terms involved in the theory of natural selection have such vague and inspecific and often illogical definitions. I doubt that one of those among the most vague and inspecific and illogically used terms "traits" has any meaning specific enough to stand up to real testing (except in a few very specific genetic abnormalities or disabilities) or to be made accountable for the reproductive success or failure of any line of life producing a new species. No surviving "trait" of genetic disabilities within a species can be demonstrated to be an engine of speciation. Don't forget, natural selection is supposed to have speciation as its consequence, what must be demonstrated to happen to verify its validity, something which just about every Darwinist loses sight of.
One of the most troublesome aspects of identifying and telling tales about "traits" is that they are treated as if they are separate from the many other "traits" held in different combinations by differing individuals in the same species who might be said to possess or not possess such a "trait." "Traits" don't reproduce, organisms do. Many such "traits" specified in lines of lore promoting a belief in natural selection can hardly be said to exist alone within whatever species they're found in, well after speciation occurred. Setting up some other "trait" as being opposed to it in Darwin's imaginary "struggle for existence" is a pretty dodgy thing. I doubt they could find "traits" that would render individuals exhibiting the opposing "trait" unwilling or unable to have offspring with the imagined retrograde individual. The schemes of reproduction imagined by those imagining natural selection so often seem to be peculiarly aristocratically choosy in that regard. Dogs, for example, don't seem to be unwilling to reproduce across the most incredibly varied body forms and appearances. I recall on campus in my first year of college, there was a huge unnutered St. Bernard-whatever else cross who tried to breed with a pure bred basset hound. The irresponsible student keepers of the two animals allowed them to make a real spectacle of themselves outside of my dorm to much puerile commentary.
I will not go again into such tripe cited as support for natural selection as the ubiquitously repeated "speckled moth evidence" which was such a dodgy and scientifically invalid "study" that it was long ago debunked as scientific evidence. Though, as is typical of the scientific lore and just-so style propaganda of natural selection, that skeptical critique of it is simply ignored by the theories supporters especially in their propaganda to the general public. The "study" was so much the result of manipulation to get the results wanted that it could stand as a very real life example of what the "skeptics" accuse others of without any evidence of wrong doing, at all. It was science theater, not science. And no new species resulted from the alleged phenomenon it purported to explain. That kind of fakery is hardly absent from the science supporting natural selection.
5, I have a real problem with the identification of "traits" deemed to be either salubrious or dysgenic and as to whether or not they matter in what the theory of natural selection claims, that many or even any of those produce an inherent reproductive advantage or disadvantage in regard to the numbers of decedents having them.
And there is the frequently made nonsensical claim that natural selection isn't progressive, that it doesn't assign value to one trait or another or, more to the point, individuals AND GROUPS OF INDIVIDUALS when Darwininsts' themselves, do that continually, either explicitly or by implication and through their claimed evidence. Their denial that they're doing that is one of their most obvious examples of dishonesty. Some of the most brutal and bigoted expressions of that can be found in what Darwin wrote and what those of his most ardent and orthodox disciples said and still say. Today some of the worst of that is found among those who practice "evolutionary psychology" the specialty which reintroduced levels of antisemitism and racism into published, taught science which had been somewhat suppressed since the crimes of the Nazis and their allies in World War II made it impolitic to say such things.
6. There is so much double-speak among the Darwinists. I first noticed that when I noticed Darwin, himself, would attribute reproductive advantage to what he claimed were dysgenic traits among human beings in The Descent of Man. Claiming that poor people (who he clearly held to be biologically inferior to the rich) had more children than the aristocrats who he said, specifically, were their superiors, fretting that the poor unless starved and deprived and unvaccinated into early deaths, were a reproductive drag on the human species. And that was the British poor he specifically complained were being kept alive by the notoriously cruel and homicidal standards of Victorian British public "charity." Including the British death camps, the work houses, the murderous New Poor Law, the incredibly stingy provision of food and medical care.
And as well claiming that the Irish, who he declared biologically inferior and morally depraved as compared to their close biological cousins, the Scots, had more children than the "virtuous" Scots and would quickly out-breed Scots. In that case he produced an unwitting and astoundingly unconsidered refutation of his claims of natural selection because, unlike the Scots, the Irish population had been subjected to the most harsh and cruel and murderous culling under the potato famine during Darwin's adulthood. By his own theory, such culling should have produced biological superiority among the survivors. Darwin, himself, was involved in potato breeding experiments at the time to produce strains of blight resistant potatoes. He may well have known that famine had been preceded by another such famine in the 18th century which killed many Irish, entire families as that of the 1840s. Only the one in the 1840s was made far worse by the "enlightenment" British government under the influences of "science" allowing the export of grain and other food from Ireland during the famine for the profit of Darwin's fellow aristocrats and to keep food prices lower in England and, I'd guess, Scotland. If there was any population that should have been made "superior" through the kind of culling that Darwinism excitedly imagines is the engine of improvement of a species, the Irish in the 1870s was just such a population during the period in which Darwin assigned them inferiority. It is an interesting thing to notice that Darwin's assignment of biological inferiority to any number of groups, such as the "Turks" has so much to do with the imperial and economic interests of the British upper classes. And his list of those who were doomed to extinction due to their assigned biological "inferiority."
Darwin made the explicit argument that while the children of the poor were dangerous to the future of the human species, those he identified as the "useless drones" bred by the aristocracy were held by him to be no danger at all. Which you can imagine an aristocratic Brit who was a hypochondriac who, never the less, had many children WITH HIS COUSIN, exempting his own class from his "struggle for existence" in that manner. Nor did he believe that the very things he said were a terrible danger to the human species when done for the poor, the providing of food, clothing, housing, health care, etc. when given in such meagerness as it was to the British poor, the same and more when provided in grotesque abundance to the British rich and aristocracy produced the crown of creation. Despite his own hypochondria, he never failed to exempt his own reproduction of offspring from his own declarations of hard science, nor have I ever seen that in his great wealth he failed to have his children vaccinated or provided healthcare or food or clothing or housing. Nor himself nor his wife. I've never seen a true believing advocate of natural selection or its logical conclusion, eugenics, subject themselves their loved ones, or those in their class and above to the forces of culling they advocated for those they targeted for removal from the human future. I have never read anyone within science, especially an advocate of natural selection point out that grotesque inconsistency in Darwin's reasoning about his ersatz examples of natural selection.
7. Related to that is the extreme absurdity of his citation of items in human proto-history, myth and anthropological lore, such as what he alleges to have been the biological superiority of the classical era Spartans due to their reproductive habits, but most of all to their practice of infanticide. The alleged superiority of the Spartans in war making, while it can be expected to excite the imagination of a whimpy Brit aristocrat and supporter of British imperialism of the 19th century, educated in the concepts and methods of British imperialism and racism (Darwin was enthusiastic about both) and the class system, is not scientifically established. If that were true then you would have expected a different history of the Spartans under their quite artificial regime of military despotism and "superior breeding" than what history shows. You would have seen them come to dominate all others who didn't practice their same way of life. But that's not what the history of the Spartans in regard to the ones Darwin's scheme would set up as their rivals in a "struggle for existence." It would be interesting to see if Darwin ever expressed himself on the biological ranking of the Athenians or other more cultured political and economic rivals of the Spartans and how he explained where their superiority came from. Though, since the practice of infanticide was widespread throughout the classical Mediterranean, it would be hard to pin that down as a producer of reproductive success. I think he, as well as his closest disciple and colleague in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, used legend and lore as phony scientific evidence in their promotion of a devaluation of human life. What else is a reasonable reader to conclude is their intention? In the case of those like the Spartans, I would guess that the helots, the many slaves held by the Spartan aristocracy. who, no doubt, as the poor are, would be held as the inferiors of the warrior-aristocrat class, were not infrequently raped by their enslavers, such as seems to be the habit wherever People are held in slavery, and had more than a bit of the biological heritage of what Darwin imagines as a separate and superior people, in them. The example of how Darwin uses the lore and legend of the Spartans to promote a belief in natural selection among People is hardly the only such example and none of them has any validity as scientific evidence. Not that that has been pointed out by any more modern Darwinist I've ever come across in the two decades I've been studying Darwinism and the consequences of its promotion and belief. I doubt that there was all that much biological dissimilarity among the various competing groups in the Eastern Mediterranean region to enable any real scientific validation of natural selection to come from arguments made of them. I doubt that can be demonstrated across the entire human population of the Earth.
And, since what he said about natural selection in the human species was, according to him, supportive of his theory in general as imposed on all of life, the defects in his thinking in The Descent of Man must be assumed to be present in his theory in general. The history of the science of eugenics* proves that to be the case.
I could go on numbering the reasons I am skeptical that natural selection is a real thing and was the sole or even a major driver of speciation in evolution. But I think I've established that my criteria of how to do it are more exacting that what the "skeptics" do and make money off of.
That's an entirely different form of skepticism from that practiced by the "skeptics" in regard to the scientific demonstration of psychic abilities under the most rigorous regime of testing and replication of testing I'm aware of, not only in the alleged behavioral science but in pretty much the rest of science. The "skeptics" start from an ideological position of declaring it impossible and they either disregard the experimental evidence or they deny its rigorous methodologies or make up reasons that the very same mathematical analysis of data they like is, magically, invalid when it comes to data they don't like or, like James Randi and C. E. M Hansel, and, Martin Gardner, they lie about how the experiments were done or in other ways. I'm skeptical of natural selection BECAUSE OF THE FAILURE OF SCIENCE ON BEHALF OF NATURAL SELECTION, they're refusal to acknowledge the validity of the rigorously produced evidence is done despite the scientific evidence produced and a double standard of judgment, I prefer a single standard and admission when the rules are followed and when those are not followed. They rely on ideological conformity and coercion to maintain an appearance of agreement with their ideology, I rely on the legitimate standards of critical analysis to make my arguments.
One of the most eminent statisticians in the country, Jessica Utts, long ago pointed out that those conducting the controlled research into psychic phenomena had long before surpassed the standards of having the validity of what they were researching admitted. She followed on Dr. Burton H. Camp, President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics predecessor decades before, who, when asked to look into the statistical methods used by J. B. Rhine said that there was nothing wrong with his analysis of his data. Rhine was one of those who very early on followed rigorous methods to prevent any kind of intentional or unintentional cheating or "information leakage" in his various experiments, one who was faced with critics of his method and, instead of resisting their criticisms, included them in his further experimental designs. His critics, faced with his scientific rigor slandered him and lied about the methods of him and his colleagues. Their lies are what you'll find repeated even today, though those lies were long ago exposed to be lies. Dishonesty lies at the heart of the ideology, the habits and lore of "skepticism" as that word is misapplied to those who have no skepticism in regard to what they want everyone to believe. They refuse to look at the evidence or, as in the case of one of the less dishonest among that clique, Ray Hyman, be reduced to making inspecific criticisms of the impossibility of the validity of what was shown, even though he couldn't even define what was wrong with the procedures or analysis. Hyman was a psychologist, a member of the psychology faculty of a university, no doubt one who upheld the scientific validity of myriads of claims in psychology which were never, once subjected to the level of rigorous scientific experiment which he rejects in that one specific area of research. He clearly practices a double standard in such matters, he's even been known to try to suppress mathematical analysis when it doesn't serve his ideological purposes. And he's one of the more honest of the "skeptics." Most of them find nothing wrong with the lying, slander and misrepresentation of the likes of a James Randi. Some of them do the same thing, as can be seen in the "skeptics" cover-up of the "sTARBABY" scandal.
Since the advent of the new atheist fad of the first decade of this century, the 00's as I call it, I've had the opportunity to do what you'd never have had a chance to do before the internet, read the unfiltered, unselected thinking of a lot of different people identifying themselves as belonging to this or that ideological group. One of the consequences of that is that I've had to face the fact that people having college-credentials is no guarantee that they are really educated. Another is that even those with a graduate degree in the sciences seldom practice scientific methods in their thinking, the amount of sheer prejudice among them seems to me to be about the same as that of the general population. But most of all I've had to come to the conclusion that those who don't believe in sin or that sinning is consequential for the one doing it will have little hesitation to lie. That's true of those who claim to be religious, especially those who claim to be Christians who certainly should believe that lying is a sin and bearing false witness is highly consequential for the one doing it. But if even what Scripture says in that regard is a weak inhibition to lying when someone doesn't believe that it's morally prohibited and consequential, there's nothing to keep them from telling any lie they feel like telling except, perhaps, a residual cultural remnant of a a previously religious habit of regarding lies as wrong. Atheist-materialism has no such inhibition to lying in it and I have noticed that self-declared atheists have at least as high a propensity to lie as Trumpian "Christians" do when it suits them. And among those the ones who I've noticed are most prone to lie are what Rupert Sheldrake calls "militant atheists." The self-identified "skeptics" are among those who are most prone to lying of any group I've interacted with online for the last twenty years. And along with that there is a decided laxity about self-questioning ideas and statements and would-be facts among such people with such a casual regard for the truth. They don't tend to be at all rigorous in trying to find out what is true. I think that's reflected in the various crises that science is in these days, the replicability crisis, the rampant fraud and lack of rigor in even formally submitted scientific papers which pass the review of their colleagues in the same field, what I will not call a "discipline" because a lot of them show no discipline at all.
Your personal beliefs really do matter in whether or not you will be bothered with trying to tell the truth after finding out what the truth really is. AND SCIENCE AS IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE ABSOLUTELY DEPENDS ON TELLING THE TRUTH. I think that's been a problem at least since Darwin started cutting corners in support of his theory of natural selection, it got far worse among his would-be disciples in pseudo-scientific things such as the alleged behavioral sciences. With such innovations as "evolutionary psychology" the combined dishonesties of two of those mated and produced some of the most dishonest claims as science ever made. Such stuff, taught as science, gains currency in the mainstream of even honestly attempted science and it can't but help to make that less honest. One of the most honest biologists I ever knew admitted to me that he made use of evolutionary psychological claims in his quite unrelated field-work. I couldn't help but be astonished that he'd fall for that stuff when he was so careful with his work. And with such dependency comes defensiveness and a suspension of skepticism. The results aren't good for much but telling just-so stories and promoting such things as scientific bigotry and things like eugenics.
Post Script: Reading this over for a last edit before I post it, I decided to change the term in that last sentence from "scientific racism" to "scientific bigotry." If there has been something rampant in psychology it has been a general attack on religion and those who are religious, turning religious belief into a pathological condition such as eugenics turns belonging to different races, ethnicities, economic classes into pathologies to be eradicated. The science among the "four horsemen" of new atheism certainly did that, there has been a general attempt to do that within the framing of "evolutionary psychology." And religion is hardly the only thing about human beings which has been subject to that kind of united effort by the pseudo-scientific within the set of those considered to be scientists. That doesn't include the refutation of things like six-day creationism or its more wrong and extreme form of "young earth" creationism, but that's far more the work of actual physical science with physical evidence doing that. That's entirely legitimate. The imagining up "religion genes" and plausible sounding natural selection claims of how religion arose and persists among people is entirely not scientifically legitimate, it is motivated in an ideological agenda by atheists as so much in such other non-evidentiary sciences is. That is it's not legitimate if the claimed methods and purposes of science mean anything to anyone anymore.
Sociologically, those who practice religion are said to generally exhibit a healthier life, more happiness, and a longer life. Rupert Sheldrake has pointed out that if the statistical research on a new medicine or medical treatment was found to have the same results it would be lauded around the world as a wonder-drug. I'm the one who is skeptical of sociology but if you're going to use that make arguments when you like its results, you can't discount its results when it produces supports a point of view you don't like. As I said last week, I support a single standard, not one that accomodates the likes and dislikes of those who allege to apply it.
* As Marylin Robinson pointed out, if religion in general is answerable for bad religion then science has to be answerable for bad science, especially in that science is far more powerful economically and, so, politically, socially and legally than religion is or long has been. The fact that eugenics never was suppressed by science, it has been present under the radar for the entire post WWII period, having its isolated advocates advocating eugenics measures even during that period, such as Francis Crick and James Watson. It has been resurgent since the late 1960s in overt forms, from Arthur Jensen's and William Schockley's scientific racism and eugenics, gaining enormous strength through the already mentioned innovation in "evolutionary psychology" and in its politically effective and hugely damaging form through the publication of The Bell Curve and other neo-eugenic, scientific racist publications that were hugely promoted and influential in the backlash against the Civil Rights era progress towards equality. Darwinism inevitably gives rise to scientific bigotry and racism and attacks on those with less money because that's baked into it from the start.
