You Know Of Course I Have To Pursue It

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.  

Wish I'd Said That

 "AI is this years Beanie Babies for billionaires."  

I HATED THE BI-CENTENNIAL hype and hoopla fifty years ago.   We'd just come off of a terrible war and a terrible scandal in Watergate, and Ford had pardoned Nixon so the biggest criminal in both was getting off.   His associated criminals were, to some extent, getting some punishment for their part in Watergate though the bigger criminals, such as Kissinger, weren't even in any real danger for their war crimes and genocidal scale killing.   1976 was not a year for celebrating the "American experiment" as it was called.   I already saw the real nature and potential disaster of Buckley v Valeo, one of the landmarks in the destruction of American democracy - after all I'd seen the role that media lies and campaign ads had played in putting Nixon in the presidency in 1968.  That year was my start in understanding the real nature of "free press-free speech" which included media lying for profit with impunity. 

When one of my mother's cousin's housebreaking was breaking up as he went into a nursing home - they had no children and no siblings and my family were the ones they turned to - some odds and ends came my way.  One was a fake leather folder with a $2 bill in it from the bicentennial year - the kind of crap they peddled in the Parade Magazine - they were suckers for such touted investments.   Her mother read the Record American (aka "the little picture paper") after all.  Loved aunt May but she would believe anything.  I looked up the value of it last year,  yeah, it was worth $2 in 2026 dollars so, according to an online calculator of the value of money:

$2 in 2026 is worth $0.34 in 1976

I wish I knew the amount that my mother's cousin paid for postage and handling and the, no doubt as advertised "real leatherette display folder."   I don't know if that enhances the worth of it as an object, though I doubt it. 

About the only good thing I can think of that came from what the surprisingly still active Jeremy Rifkin called "the buy-centennial" was the New World Records lable, which started to put out many fine and some not as fine, LPs of American music, classical, jazz, "experimental."  It somewhat diminishes my pleasure in it that it was started with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation - I don't much trust anything with that name associated with it but it was only a grant.   And they took in the sadly discontinued Composers Recordings Inc, the venerable CRI label which issue many fine and fascinating recordings of American composers.  And some not as fine though interesting in an antiquarian way, if you're interested in now obscure American composers.   Some of that obscure music is very good and would enrich the musical scene if it was played from time to time.   I wonder if any of my old CRI LPs have increased in value.  I took good care of them. 

Update:  I never read Rifkin's controversial book Algeny which apparently got even the leftist Darwinists like Stephen Jay Gould pissed off at him - the Wiki article on Rifkin quotes his scathing review.  I'd be curious to see if his critique of Darwinism has any relevance to mine and how the claims of the scientists who objected to his book match current biology.  Forty years ago they were making all kinds of claims in evolutionary biology that have fallen into a state of desuetude as much as much of the conventional biology in my high school bio textbook - many of those which became the reigning ideology of biology  Gould, himself, was in the business of debunking.   

The Legacy Of Charlie Kirk In One Motormouth Moron

 

An Answer On The Clintonization Of Platner To Get Susan Collins Back In

The corporate media, from the New York Times down through the TV networks, the cabloids and right down to the neo-Nazi online garbage is an engine for inventing Democratic "scandals" of exactly this kind.  And they wonder why fewer and fewer normal People trust them.   Scott Pelley is acting like what Weiss and the Ellisons are doing at CBS is some new outrage - as the more than $100 million dollar, three decades and counting "investigations" of Hillary Clinton WHICH HAVE PRODUCED NOT ONE INDICTMENT OR CONVICTION OF HER proves,  they've ALL been doing it for decades now.   And that case is only one in dozens I could name.