I HAVEN'T BEEN ABLE to find the late Stephen Jay Gould's review of Jeremy Rifkin's book Algeny, I've got some of Gould's books but the one in which that review is reprinted, Urchins In The Storm, I read my brother's copy of. He's not sure if he still has it, if he does it's in some box of books somewhere. I couldn't find it online.
The thing I saw in the Wiki article on Rifkin yesterday that set off my curiosity was this:
Rifkin's work is controversial due to a purported lack of scientific rigor in his claims as well as some of the tactics he has used to promote his views. These include claims that the theory of evolution is a product of "19th century industrial capitalism" . . .
I don't know if Gould's criticism of Rifkin has anything to do with that but if you clean up the all too common confusion which conflates "evolution" with Darwinism* (and I'd bet you easily 95% of evolutionary scientists regularly conflate them) there can't be any case made that Darwinism, that is the theory of natural selection IS NOT a product of 19th century capitalism. Darwin, himself made the connection as strongly as possible by saying
"I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed."
From his Autobiography
As can be seen all through Darwin's and his disciples' scientific writings, the notions of what is "favourable" and what "unfavourable" is everywhere tied in their imaginations to human ideas of economic utility, often mistaking that as everything to do with nature. Darwinism, natural selection, is inescapably a product of a very specific kind of human imagination since its working and presence and even existence is entirely invisible. It has not, once, been seen to be at work in the divergence into a new species in nature (nor could it, the time that would take) apart from some story made up by some scientist or popular writer or the like. There is a reason Gould accurately criticized his scientific and ideological opponent's Sociobiology and, worse, evo-psy as "Just-so stories." though those he favored did that all the time, too.
Malthus, who gave the good news to the aristocracy that they were favored by nature, was one of the most influential economists in early capitalism, both in academic scribblage and babbleage and in the fomenting of some of the worst law and policy ever since, and one whose theory, which was based entirely on the artificiality of human made laws and not on the observation of nature, couldn't be more tied to the creation of the theory of natural selection. Though it is reported online that Darwin's co-inventor of natural selection, A.R. Wallace was influenced by Malthus' theory in HIS line of evolutionary theory, at least at the end of his life he was decidedly not a Malthusian nor was he a eugenicist. If you read the interview with him, The Last Great Victorian, you'll see that his line of theory was entirely swamped by the Malthusian-Darwinist line of it. No doubt Darwinists would see that as natural selection at work, no matter how artificial it is in reality.
The Malthusian nature of most of the dominating strains of evolutionary science, all the various "Darwinisms" that have risen, briefly flourished and then been carted off to the boneyard of discontinued science, is deniable only if you're determined to be willfully ignorant of that fact. I will pursue trying to find out if Gould was at times that willfully ignorant. He was certainly a vigorous critic of the consequences of that fact being a dominant one in his own science but the idea that it wasn't the dominating factor in all Darwinian theory and its application in eugenics - even today in the putrid and absurd recapitulation of it in "Darwinian economic" theory that got lots of People killed during the Covid pandemic - was as wrong when he wrote that passage in the 1980s as it has been ever since Darwin wrote his On The Origin of Species.
I'm loathe to buy a copy of Algeny and would bet any copies that were in any of the public libraries I have access to would have probably gone where even such important books do, into a book sale. I used to love to find little circulated books that didn't have a return date stamped on them for a century while looking in the stacks but that's not how modern libraries are run these days. You want a book to be available, put it in Archive.org or Project Gutenberg or some such online source.
* What is pretty securely certain is that modern species and untold numbers of species in the past evolved from other species, though what is and what isn't a closely related "specie" is hardly well defined, though those farther separated in "evolutionary time" are very well defined as at least different species. Evolution is as firm a fact as exists in science, natural selection is not, at all, a fact nor even securely defined as a theory. I have come to believe it is entirely a product of human imagination, one based, in fact, on late 18th and early 19th British aristocratic economic theory.
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