On Piling it on

I have been looking at some new material in this case and I'm finding it important enough for me to understand it before I post more updated versions of what I wrote last year.  I'll be posting the rest of that every few days instead of every day.  Our mother is out of the hospital and I won't be tied to my computer quite as much as I have been this past week.  She's in better shape than I am this morning, though we'll have to stay with her overnight again, for a time.

When I first posted this series, it was longer than what I'm presenting here, this is sort of the concentrated version,  stronger because I've had nearly a year of added research and it's made me realize that the case is even stronger, the exculpation attempt more dishonest and the need to expose Darwin's dark side even more serious.

This series has two major hurdles to overcome, other than finding and assembling the evidence to make the case.  There is the extremity of the anti-evolution use of the same material from Darwin's record that I'm using here, sometimes, though not always, distorting the evidence and fabricating other factoids.  And that doesn't get to the totally dishonest pop version of that case which frequently does without real evidence at all.  Evolution is a fact established independently of Charles Darwin's great claim to fame, which is natural selection, not evolution.  Even the total demolition of the myth of Charles Darwin will not demolish the scientific evidence of evolution.

The other hurdle is the c. 60 year old effort on the pro-evolution side to fabricate the phony, eugenics free, Haeckelless Charles Darwin who has no relation to some of the greatest crimes of the 20th century.   That side is, frequently, more dishonest about the facts of what Darwin said, though it is often, generally, right about one thing, that evolution happened.  A small part of the Darwin Industry is a well meaning but misguided effort to promote science and to keep science teaching in public schools behind the wall of separation of church and state.  Their goals are good, though their means often lead them into folly and even, on occasion, into falsification and fabrication of factoids as much as their political opponents.

Allied with the pro-evolution side is the larger, ideological, anti-religious campaign that has turned Darwin into an atheist saint as phony as any of those dropped from the Catholic calendar due to their never having existed.  That  ideological effort is the primary strength behind the Darwin Industry and cult.  The plain, anti-religious content of it betrays that fact at every turn.

As someone who accepts both evolution and the definitive power of the historical record as left by Darwin, his family and closest associates, there is an enormous mountain of built up lore and mythology to overcome.  The facts must be revealed without ideological, political or opportunistic distortion.   Not to mention active, intentional and ideologically motivated lying and smearing which has accompanied this effort.  That is necessary to pretend that record isn't there and what it is.

Before the Second World War the pro-Darwin side hardly ever tried to cover up what he said.  Back when eugenics was respectable within the affluent, political, legal and academic establishments, no one seems to have tried to distance Charles Darwin from his role in its origins and early history.  Eugenicists openly claimed to be the upholders of his legacy and neo-eugenicists still do, in the form of natural selection when not explicitly owning Darwin for their cause .  Natural selection is the absolutely required base of eugenics, eugenics couldn't exist without the assumption of the beneficial effects of natural selection and the belief that keeping those deemed "unfit" alive so they can have children will cause a disaster.  And Charles Darwin is inseparable from natural selection.  He would have been an obscure 19th century quasi-dilettante natural philosopher without it, such as so many of those you could see in that collection of the Anthropological Review I linked to below.

If the case seems repititious, I can't be sure people are reading all of the posts in this case.  A blog is not a book, people seldom read all of the pages of a blog.   Repeating important points is also essential to make what I'm saying clear.  Repetition is also needed because the same material supports several different points that need to be made.  The malignant effects of what Darwin said are rather large.  Considering that essentially everything all of them said is a repetition of the two ideas that are the basis of eugenics, you can't avoid repetition in presenting this topic.

In the end, I'd like people to leave Charles Darwin in the past just as they have most other figures in science.  His usefulness in non-scientific, ideological matters has prevented that natural progression as his ideas, many of which have been abandoned within science, are superseded by other ones.   Natural selection as it is constructed in 2013 is far, far removed from what Charles Darwin published in 1859, not to mention in later editions which were already modifying that.  I look at it and see a strong case for evolution and a far weaker one for natural selection.  In researching this issue, I've come to conclude that natural selection is not a real force of nature or even particularly good as a law of science.  I've come to conclude that natural selection is, at its most basic level, a habit of thought, a paint-by-number that people fit evidence into.  It is vague enough, with blurry outlines so that many things can be fit into that frame.  Quite often natural selection is an article of faith, as required of biologists and of respectable members of the so-called intelligentsia just as surely as mouthing belief in  the 39 Articles used to be required of faculty members in English universities.

I would like to see evolutionary science look at physical evidence and evaluate it without the need to uphold an idea of that sort.  I would like to see public school science classrooms concentrate on a practical curriculum that gives the general run of students important information to maintain their and their families' health and to make intelligent, informed, responsible decisions as citizens and as decent human beings.  I would like to see both sides in the Darwin Wars shunted to the side and segregated from science and public life, I would like Charles Darwin to be a moot point in political and civic life.

I will post again on Tuesday or Wednesday, the topic will be Democracy.