Apparently in today's intellectual culture, what I propose is a rather radical step. I propose that people read Charles Darwin's full writings on natural selection in relation to human beings, following up his citations, as Darwin, himself recommended. Apparently that is something that Darwin's greatest promoters in the United States haven't done and aren't enthusiastic for other people to do.
Rep. Rush Holt is introducing a bill to make Februrary 12 "Darwin Day" and it's a really bad idea. Bad for democracy, bad for science and really bad for the Democratic Party. I'd forgotten that extremely bad idea in relation to February 12, a day that, in the United States, should be reserved for Abraham Lincoln, a man whose record is a near complete contradiction of the scientific assertions of Charles Darwin.
I will almost guarantee you that, like most of Charles Darwin's fans, Rush Holt has not read both On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin's two most substantial books on the subject of evolution. And even if Holt has read On the Origin of Species, as probably a minority of Darwin's fans have, I will bet he is unfamiliar with facts about it, such as his endorsement of Herbert Spencer's interpretation of natural selection in the later editions of it. And even fewer of Darwin's supporters have read Darwin's letters, especially those to Ernst Haeckel, full of insights into Darwin's political campaign to spread the influence of his natural selection and its eventual expansion along lines Haeckel was already laying out in depraved detail.
In comments to an article Rush Holt had at Huff Post on his Darwin Day bill, I encouraged Holt to read The Descent of Man and follow up the citations of Ernst Haeckel, Francis Galton and W. R. Greg, to see that Darwin fully and enthusiastically endorsed eugenics, Haeckel's expansive and depraved monism, his racism and enthusiasm for both the "beneficial" effects of racial extermination and infanticide, and Greg's extreme bigotry. Holt being a trained scientist, might be impressed, as I was, how much of Charles Darwin's documentation in support of his contentions in that book, utterly fail as science. Much of what he relied on is rightly seen as unsubstantiated, commonly held bigotry.
It was rather odd that the comment moderators at Huff Post held my comments for quite a while last night, until I posted more comments pointing out that I'd encouraged Darwin's fans to do what so few of them have done, read his books and look at his citations. And I do encourage that for everyone who believes they know all about Charles Darwin, that he's the celluloid saint that the Darwin Hagiography Industry has sold to the world. Anyone with training in science should take a rigorous look at his science and see how well it is supported with data.
Especially look at Darwin's more moderate contentions of the dysgenic effects of vaccination, medical care and aid to the poor and destitute to see that it is absolutely not based in data of any kind. Darwin's assertions of the beneficial effects of allowing the "lesser members" of the population die as children, before they can have children, is not supported by any science, whatsoever. It is, though, supported by citations of Ernst Haeckel equally unsupported assertions of that beneficial effect, which he didn't support with data from observation.
Darwin's second major book applying his theory of natural selection to the human population is inadequate as science. I would think that a physicist who looks at it, applying the minimal requirements of scientific verification to it would find that it isn't very good. Holt, as a Democratic representative in Congress should ask himself how he could support any of the Democratic social legislation of the past eighty years if he believed what Charles Darwin said in that book.
Charles Darwin, in the post WWII period, has been the beneficiary of a cover up of the record he, himself, left, there to be seen now that virtually his full record is available to be seen online. Full, accurate online versions of The Descent of Man are available, free, as are editions of Galton's Hereditary Genius and his articles in Macmillan's that Charles Darwin cited enthusiastically as science. Galton's autobiography is also available online. In that Galton, himself, definitively said that his eugenics was directly inspired by his cousin's natural selection and he published Darwin's letter praising "Hereditary Genius" which Galton lists as the seminal book of eugenics.
Even more disturbing and in contradiction to the Darwin industry white wash is Darwin's citation of Ernst Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte , also available online, in both the German original and in the translation made by E Ray Lankester one of Darwin's close associates, six years before Darwin died. Darwin gave that book, full of enthusiasm for infanticide, murder of the disabled, extreme racism and assertions of white supremacy, his highest compliment in the introduction of The Descent of Man and in his numerous citations of it.
Darwin's numerous, extravagantly enthusiastic citations of both books only confirms that he agrees with Galton's eugenics and Haeckel's extreme racism and his generally depraved prescriptions for human society. I have looked, long and hard, for condemnation of those by Charles Darwin and I have not found them. I have only found his encouragement of both as he showed he was completely aware of what they said in those books he gave his highest praise as reliable science.
There is no room in culture for both the real Charles Darwin, as revealed in his full record and the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, a man whose public career contradicts the "science" that Charles Darwin and his closest associates were asserting at the same time.
Several times Charles Darwin issued weak assertions that he didn't really mean the appalling things he just said. If you read the entire book in the context of what Darwin said in letters and, especially, what Haeckel said in Darwin's effusive citations those escape clauses ring as hollow and quite cynical. Darwin often let his disciples articulate the fuller and more depraved things he says in a more politically sanitized form* It is those several, very brief, passages that the Darwin industry latches on to to excuse the impact of the entire book and Darwin's promotion of Haeckel and Galton. The history of Darwinism, as continued by Darwin's closest associates and his own children, during his life and after his death, shows that they were in on the ruse. It is only people who never knew the man who assert that those few paragraphs, often quite misrepresented in secondary and lower presentations of Darwin, represent his legacy.
Read the Darwin record, the entire thing, read the things he promoted as being reliable science, read how the people who knew Darwin understood what he was saying. If you want that to be the public understanding of science, don't be shocked when people who belong to groups Darwin marked for extinction and as inferior don't accept it. Don't be shocked when real liberals reject what is, actually, an exposition of the worst of right wing politics in the guise of science. Anyone who doesn't have a stake in Darwinism as public policy will reject it.
I agree with Rep. Holt on the majority of his positions but, having studied Darwin in detail, from the primary documents from him, his cited associates, his children and others who new him intimately, I have to disagree entirely with his proposal. It would be a disaster for Democrats and political liberals to tie themselves to the millstone that Charles Darwin's record is.
* Darwin's closest British associate and an enthusiastic promoter of Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, wrote one extremely racist "scientific" analysis of Lincoln's greatest act, the emancipation, on thoroughly Darwinian lines.
The question is settled; but even those who are most thoroughly convinced that the doom is just, must see good grounds for repudiating half the arguments which have been employed by the winning side; and for doubting whether its ultimate results will embody the hopes of the victors, though they may more than realize the fears of the vanquished. It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest. But whatever the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforward lie between Nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore. And this, if we look to the bottom of the matter, is the real justification for the abolition policy.
The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion; emancipation may convert the slave from a well fed animal into a pauperised man; mankind may even have to do without cotton shirts; but all these evils must be faced, if the moral law, that no human being can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own nature, be, as many think, as readily demonstrable by experiment as any physical truth. If this be true, no slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
If Rep. Holt reads The Descent of Man, after reading Huxley's essay, he won't find anything in Darwin's second major book to contradict that passage. He will only find assertions of the scientific correctness of Huxley's inverted and perverted concept of Lincoln's greatest act. For example:
- At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18. 'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
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