In the my post the other day, I talked about Darwin's description of the genocide of the native people of Tasmania by the British
When Tasmania was first colonised the natives were roughly estimated by some at 7000 and by others at 20,000. Their number was soon greatly reduced, chiefly by fighting with the English and with each other. After the famous hunt by all the colonists, when the remaining natives delivered themselves up to the government, they consisted only of 120 individuals (37. All the statements here given are taken from 'The Last of the Tasmanians,' by J. Bonwick, 1870.), who were in 1832 transported to Flinders Island. This island, situated between Tasmania and Australia, is forty miles long, and from twelve to eighteen miles broad: it seems healthy, and the natives were well treated. Nevertheless, they suffered greatly in health. In 1834 they consisted (Bonwick, p. 250) of forty-seven adult males, forty-eight adult females, and sixteen children, or in all of 111 souls. In 1835 only one hundred were left. As they continued rapidly to decrease, and as they themselves thought that they should not perish so quickly elsewhere, they were removed in 1847 to Oyster Cove in the southern part of Tasmania. They then consisted (Dec. 20th, 1847) of fourteen men, twenty-two women and ten children. (38. This is the statement of the Governor of Tasmania, Sir W. Denison, 'Varieties of Vice-Regal Life,' 1870, vol. i. p. 67.) But the change of site did no good. Disease and death still pursued them, and in 1864 one man (who died in 1869), and three elderly women alone survived. The infertility of the women is even a more remarkable fact than the liability of all to ill-health and death. At the time when only nine women were left at Oyster Cove, they told Mr. Bonwick (p. 386), that only two had ever borne children: and these two had together produced only three children!
As I noted in the first piece I wrote in this series, Galton had not named his science "eugenics" until the year after Darwin's death in 1882 the first line of defense against the association of Charles Darwin with eugenics. While it can be quibbled that Darwin technically didn't support "eugenics," though as well disposed and unimpeachably favorable a Darwinist as his son, Francis, had no problem with calling it that, something far worse is indisputable.
When Darwin was describing this genocide in about as chillingly casual a manner as possible, "the famous hunt by all colonists," he was including it as evidence for natural selection within the human population. He presented it as an example of an "unfavored race" being exterminated by a "favored race." It was far from the only one, as noted in several of these posts. Charles Darwin was the person who made the unbreakable link between natural selection and genocide in his statements in The Descent of Man and with his endorsements of Haeckel, with his misrepresentation of Schaaffhausen. Genocide, extinguishing a population on the basis of some shared trait or traits, will always be an issue in natural selection, which Darwin presented as powering the change of species over time as "favored races" replacing "unfit' races. Darwin included races of people in that progressive increase of fitness through extermination. Its subsequent use, giving scientific support to genocide has been and will be an issue for as long as it is a feature of science.
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The great geneticist, Richard Lewontin, said in his introduction to It Ain't Necessarily So:
It is not only in the investigation of human society that the truth is sometimes unavailable. Natural scientists, in their overweening pride, have come to believe that eventually everything we want to know will be known. But that is not true. For some things there is simply not world enough and time. It may be, given the necessary constraints on time and resources available to the natural sciences, that we will never have more than a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system. For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them. In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them. Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were. Over and over, in these essays reproduced here, I have tried to give an impression of the limitations on the possibility of our knowledge. Science is a social activity carried out by a remarkable, but by no means omnipotent species. Even the Olympians were limited in their powers.
He said it so well that I'm going to repeat part of it over again before its impact can fade.
For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them. In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them. Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were.
Richard Lewontin's admission is that many of the "selective forces," what is supposed to constitute natural selection, cannot be observed or quantified. Not the genetic frequency, which has been being quantified since Mendel, the "selective forces" presumed to be acting on those. Being one of the most philosophically astute of contemporary writers on science, Lewontin must be aware of the problem that those facts he laid out pose for natural selection as a scientific holding, as a law of nature.
Things which can't be observed, never mind observed in the detail that would permit measurement are, typically, rejected as non-existent in the popular presentation of science, these days and even by some of the most otherwise sophisticated scientists. "No conceivable technique of observation can measure them." Which would mean that there is no way to subject them to science, to ascertain even their nature, not to mention their strength or their interaction with and effects on other things certainly present in the individual organisms in which they reside. And that includes the constant changes of which those organisms are both the authors of and those to which they are subjected to by external forces. Without the information provided by observations and measurement, none of that could be definitely discerned by science. And there is much more that is more than merely implied with this admission made with Lewontin's characteristic honesty and frankness.
Yet those same people, calling themselves "skeptics" "naturalists" and, most ironically "physicalists" are the first voices raised in angry fury when someone doubts that those "selective forces" might really exist. But even as reasonable a man as Richard Lewontin must believe in them. He is one of the rare voices in evolutionary biology in the past forty years whose honesty keeps him from going way out on any of a large number of limbs.
Such unobservable, unquantifiable, undefinable entities are constantly introduced into science, "natural selection" is often used, undefined, as constituting confirming evidence of all kinds of otherwise unfounded conclusions. Most of the current evolution and gene talk that has a real political force in the world is entirely unrelated to any honest evaluation of its reality. An infamous aspect of that is something that I've been talking about here since the middle of June. As someone who accepts both the fact of evolution and the honestly conducted processes of science, I have to interject that I can't see any good for either coming out of this kind of thing.
Ever honest, even at the cost to his belief, Lewontin goes much farther than that, he admits that, "Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were." Darwinism, natural selection, is based on theoretical forces which cannot be observed in nature, cannot be quantified and theories of which cannot be evaluated for truth or falseness. Its stories cannot be checked against actual events lost in the past which can only be imagined by scientists. The change in species, something which I accept without any doubt, is the one thing in the scenario that is as close to a fact as it could get but any story about how those changes happened only seem to be more scientific than the story of how Jacob's sheep got their spots through cultural habit but are no more verifiable.
And, a third point, note that the ever honest and ever nuanced Lewontin said, "multitude of forces operating are individually so weak." The proposed "forces" especially acting on genes don't appear separate from all of the other "forces" or "traits" and occurrences present in the organism and the external world it exists in. It's hard enough to tease out something you can observe and test, for things that might be there, or might not, teasing them out of the very complex complex in which they may be, or may not be, is impossible. As proposed, selection is discerned as a scenario, those require action, if not actually comprising an act. Natural selection is told in stories. Since these "forces" are so unknowable and their "stories" also being unknowable, whether or not they are selective in any Darwinian sense can't be known. It is entirely possible that an enormous range of other factors which are not only not selective in that sense but also of unknowable nature could be there.
It's possible that such factors negate or are mistaken for natural selection when they are far more subtle and far different in nature and in combination with other factors. It's entirely possible that natural selection is no more there than luminferous aether or ptosis of the organs were, though both were fully established science back in the day, the later one believed in strongly enough that some rather dangerous surgical operations resulted before it was realized that the phenomenon was caused by the observed difference in position of organs in standing x-rays as opposed to prone dissections and drawings of those. If that oversight can happen in actual observation, it's far more likely to happen in imagined bodies and what happened to them in the remote past. It would not be odd for a naturalist imagining the problem Darwin was considering, an English gentleman who had just read Malthus and the good news he brought to Darwin's class and way of life to imagine that good news backwards over the enormous stretches of geological time. And his results would be no less welcome by the gentlemen who had largely taken Malthus to heart, using him to squeeze the poor ever harder to their profit, the same class of men who had control of science. In the case of Darwin, his and his fathers wealth and the leisure and travel opportunities those afforded, the only reason he had a career in science. And science, once established, is remarkably conservative for something that is allegedly subjected to constant questioning.
Even if natural selection is "a thing" as Rachel Maddow might put it, a real force in nature "selective forces" is a rather vague definition for that set of trillions of events and also for the contributing factors in those events that led to the deaths of individuals before they could reproduce, led them to have decreased numbers of offspring or less successful offspring than other individuals that, generally, were almost identical to those individuals. The number and diverse character of those factors, over the course of evolution, over the trillions and trillions of lives of organisms, their reproduction, deaths etc. lead me to doubt that natural selection can be "a thing".
I believe natural selection is a human construct aping the laws of physics and chemistry in the general form of its expression while being nothing like other laws of science due to that extraordinary diversity, not of expression, but in what actually constitutes the proposed law. The universe of events and phenomena that are proposed to comprise natural selection are no less than every aspect of every life in the billions of years of the history of life on earth in excruciating detail surpassing the limits of human ability to observe them. Oh, yes, don't forget that other than the most minuscule number of fossilized examples, practically all of the evidence of those lives and their relevant details are irretrievably lost. And that the acceptable analysis of all of this is constrained by the methods and possible range of conclusions deemed acceptable within the body of trained scientists. Trained (and coerced) to accept natural selection as the ultimate limit of acceptability. I think it is an epiphenomenon of specific and observable economic and political culture combined with radically incomplete knowledge and the deepest and most sincere desires to have the key to creation, or at least of the living realm. And there are no people who more deeply want to believe in that key than old-line materialists who believe it unlocks the final weapon to kill off the God who they so deeply despise.
One time when I presented my thoughts on this, an angry - teetering on the unhinged - Darwinist spat an accusation in the form of a question, "What do you have that's a better explanation for evolution." The idea is that you have to accept Darwinism because there isn't any other all-inclusive explanation, no other proposed and competing "theory of everything" in regard to how the FACT of evolution happened.
But there isn't any need to accept anything on that basis. Genesis contains an all inclusive explanation of how species came about, how the diversity of life on Earth, or at least in the ancient middle-east came about and it accounts for large parts of that life dying in the waters and silts of The Flood. It was quite sufficient an explanation for the knowledge available at that time. That doesn't mean that's how it happened, that doesn't mean, despite its widespread acceptance, that that is how it happened, Scientists are jealous of their status in society, their presumed claims to respect and their assumed right to the belief of the general public but that doesn't make their pronouncements about things that can't be observed, measured and adequately matched with physical evidence any more right than those could possibly be. Given the enormous range of variety in evolutionary speculations, dwarfed only by those alleged to govern that other enormous target wildly and unreliably shot at in the the unseeable and unmeasurable, thoughts, it's clear as possible that natural selection is far from being A thing or at least a natural thing. I am certain that, just as with evolution supplanting the literal interpretation of the account in Genesis, the progression from natural selection to its successor explanations will be an occasion of the most angry and enraged resistance by biologists who will resist any questioning of natural selection, they do now in the most vehement of terms. It will take generations and the political aspects of Darwinism will impede progress in biology.
Given all of that and the ease with which Darwinists began, almost immediately, to come up with proposed applications in the human population, including the frankly stated benefits of lots of people dying, either through neglect of their needs, active infanticide and murder (I will not call it euthanasia since the proposals were far from freely chosen by competent and fully informed recipients) and the extinction of entire racial groups and classes, killed by conquering exemplars of superior "fitness", the whole idea of natural selection begs for a lot more skeptical examination than one is allowed to give it within science and in the general population of educated folk. Death is an intrinsic aspect of natural selection, whenever people propose to help it along, death will usually figure into it, eventually*.
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All Too Real A Thing
But Natural Selection did become a real thing, indisputably real, though far from natural. Through the warnings of human dysgenesis, the fear that created, beginning with Darwin, natural selection turned as real as it could possibly be. It became a manufactured algorithm to both prevent people from having children and in its most infamous reality of all, biological and racial genocide, a reality that, rightfully, deserves to be always called the most decisive phenomenon of science in the past century. Its consideration is most solemnly owed to its millions of victims.
Eugenics is applied natural selection, peoples' judgement replacing the proposed force of nature to move on the development of the human species or, at least, to prevent it sliding backwards. Scientists, science writers, other writers who liked the idea, aristocrats, lawyers, lawmakers, judges, university faculties, etc. all turned themselves into selective factors which were not too weak to observe and quantify, their effects numerated and made as real as possible.
They became a real selective factor in deciding who got to not reproduce, who got to have their line of inheritance cut off. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and the legal, political and medical establishments of Virginia were a real selective force in the life of Carrie Buck, both through the legal prevention of her having a second child, her eugenically motivated incarceration in a home for the feeble minded (her life after her release showed she clearly was not), the placement of Vivian, her daughter outside of her care where she died a quite normal, not-feeble minded, elementary school student at age eight, That Vivian died in foster care is a 100% certainty, if she had been left in her mother's care the range of possible outcomes is not known but it is within the realm of possibility that she may have survived to adulthood and escaped attack by the scientific-legal establishment in Virginia to have had children, grandchildren... Applied natural selection cut off Carrie Buck's biological inheritance as it did for millions of others and, as reported, still is in much the same way in California. In exactly the same way those and other establishments, all of them peopled by members of various elites which exercised selective forces, cutting of lines of individuals and, as in the case of the Abenaki's of Vermont and the Denes and Metis in Alberta, of decimating the future of entire ethnic groups, in the name of science, with victims still alive to eloquently testify about how their lives were ruined by it. In the case of Leilani Muir, who successfully sued and faced a member of the Alberta Eugenics Board who had sterlized her.
The term "selection" achieved its most blatantly Darwinist manifestations such as the infamous one made at the train siding by Dr. Mengele. He did that as definitely as the British murderers did in Tasmania, only he was German and most of those he chose to die were Europeans. There is no difference in the act, only in the identity of the people involved. He chose those to die immediately on the basis of "fitness," on the basis of peoples' utility for labor and also in the name of science their usefulness to him and his colleagues the only thing delaying their eventual murder. It has recently been revealed he chose subjects at the request of researchers, to be subjected to experiments and dissected like lab rats, as well as for his own, scientific use. That was all in the name of science. Before my research and consideration of what I've learned, I would have avoided making that point but with what I've learned about what Darwin HAD TO HAVE MEANT in The Descent of Man, of his saying that the British Poor Law was dangerous because it kept too many poor people alive, I have decided that to put it any other way would be to misrepresent him. I'm sure he'd find the Nazis vulgar and blatant and Mengele crude he would be reminded of Disraeli by their anti-Semitism, I'm sure. And, just as he had worried to Haeckel, he would be concerned that they were certainly bound to have a negative effect in the acceptance of natural selection. But to say that what he said in The Descent of Man wasn't a breezy anticipation of genocides, of the deaths of those unfit WHOSE EXISTENCE WAS A DANGER TO THE FIT, is to tell the largest and most dangerous of lies**.
I began looking for the refutation of Charles Darwin's connection to eugenics. Looking at what he said and the widest possible context of what that could have meant to Darwin, at each and every step all I can find is that Darwin's natural selection was every bit as bad as it could possibly have been considered. The last bit of the plaster St. Darwin to fall came with me looking at what he must have known about the Poor Law because it was generally known in Britain and it was resisted on the basis of its entire depravity, its setting up workhouses as death camps where inmates were used and starved and subjected to intentional cruelty and murderously unhygienic deprivation, to sadistic destruction of families, brutalizing of children. And that institution, that early precursor to the most infamous of work camps and death camps was explicitly warned against by Darwin because it wouldn't kill enough of them. That was the final straw for me. Darwin fully deserves that association with Nazism due to that.
* As early a eugenicist as G. A. Gaskell, a who exchanged letters with Darwin on that topic, realized that people killing people was an intrinsic aspect of Darwin's natural selection.
In conclusion, I submit, the birth of the fittest offers a much milder solution of the population difficulty, than the survival of the fittest and the destruction of the weak.
"Destruction," means death of the weak, which Gaskell and anyone else who read The Descent of Man understood was the means Darwin presented as both the mechanism for both increasing the "fitness" of survivors and as the mechanism of the general welfare of the entire species. Darwin, however, disapproved of birth control because he was sure it would lead to promiscuity in women (I haven't found him worrying about promiscuity in men). That the alternative was the violent, deadly struggle in which many people would be killed seemed less bad to Darwin than contraception. He said as much in his letter to Gaskell, in which he also talks up British imperialism and domination, regretting that some kind of unspecified selection hadn't already produced even superior British dominators.
Suppose that such checks had been in action during the last two or three centuries, or even for a shorter time in Britain, what a difference it would have made in the world, when we consider America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa ! No words can exaggerate the importance, in my opinion, of our colonization for the future history of the world.
Anyone who doubts that Darwin expected his British conquerors, around the world, to kill off lots of native people should go back to the beginning of this piece and re-read how he presented that British colonial genocide in Tasmania which occurred in his lifetime.
** I hope to write about Darwinian promotion of eugenics and scientific racism from 1945 to now later this year.
Update: The habit of talking about "events" "traits" "acts" in natural selection hides the fact that we are reducing continuous events and aspects of the lives and bodies of living beings in their environment by taking them outside of the context in which those exist. As I note in another post, our definition of "traits" which may have some validity when considering them in a context of genetics, is fraught with the possibility of error and inaccuracy when put into the context of a story of natural selection. In no where is that more true than when the action, the "selection" is made by a conscious actor. An animal selects which other animal it will mate with, it chooses which animal from a herd to attack and kill, removing it from the breeding population. Why it chooses is often presented as being on the basis of some "trait" or other, in the worse cases, those "traits" being created for the purpose of creating a story. One of those which I've written on at length is the avian altruism of what might be Richard Darwkins' most famous fable, The First Bird To Call Out. In that case his "trait" which has proven to be so plausible to so many gullible and educated folks couldn't possibly exist as a positive adaptation in the context of Darwinism on the basis of not only its negation of a far better established "trait" one which is clearly there, accurate eyesight, but also due to its mathematical impossibility.
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