The Failure Of Scientific Review And Of Learning From History

 "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology."  
Rudolph Hess

In checking the statistics of this blog, expecting to see it was bleeding readers as the topic of the Nazi's application of natural selection dominated, I was surprised to see the opposite.

Maybe there is more entertainment value in responding to the idiocy by such as the cacophonously pseudonymned "Skeptic Tank" than I imagined.   While I can't claim it's been hard it hasn't been nearly as much fun as the effort has taken.  Which, since I'd read what he and the others so clearly have not, hasn't been that much effort.  If the topic wasn't such a deadly serious one I wouldn't bother. But eugenics and scientific racism are live malignancies in the human population even now, seventy years after the world saw what it leads to.   In her review of  Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, Marilynne Robinson said

The God Delusion has human history and civilization as its subjects, inevitably, considering the pervasiveness of religion. Dawkins dwells particularly on Christianity, since he is most familiar with it, and because its influence is and has been very great. On the one hand, he professes a lingering fondness for the Church of England and regrets that familiarity with the Bible, a great Literature, is in decline. On the other hand, he finds the Old Testament barbarous and abhorrent and the New Testament mawkish and fairly abhorrent as well. His treatment of these texts depends to a striking degree on a “remarkable paper” by John Hartung, an associate professor of anesthesiology and an anthropologist. The paper, titled “Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In- Group Morality,” originally published in 1995, is available on the Web. Dawkins and his wife are thanked in the acknowledgments. Curious readers can form their own impression of its character. A sympathetic review by Hartung of Kevin MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples is also of interest. These are murky waters, the kind toward which Darwinism has often tended to migrate.

Later in the review she pointed out that Hartung and Dawkins demonstrated their dishonesty on the topic of the character of the Jewish people to take a swipe after two well known Jews, Jesus, foremost and Saul aka. Paul.

Dawkins says, “I need to call attention to one particularly unpalatable aspect of its [the Bible’s] ethical teaching. Christians seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. ‘Love thy neighbor’ didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only ‘Love another Jew.” As for the New Testament interpretation of the text, “Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare: ‘Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.” Pigs being, of course, gentiles.

There are two major objections to be made to this reading. First, the verse quoted here, Leviticus 19:18, does indeed begin, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people,” language that allows a narrow interpretation of the commandment. But Leviticus 19:33—34 says “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. . . . You shall love the alien as yourself.” In light of these verses, it is wrong by Dawkins’s own standards to argue that the ethos of the law does not imply moral consideration for others. (It would be interesting to see the response to a proposal to display this Mosaic law in our courthouses.) Second, Jesus provided a gloss on 19:18, the famous Parable of the Good Samaritan. With specific reference to this verse, a lawyer asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells a story that moves the lawyer to answer that the merciful Samaritan—a non-Jew— embodies the word “neighbor.” That the question would be posed to Jesus, or by Luke, is evidence that the meaning of the law was not obvious or settled in antiquity. In general, Dawkins’s air of genteel familiarity with Scripture, though becoming in one aware as he is of its contributions to the arts, dissipates under the slightest scrutiny.

Though I haven't made anything like as careful a study of where such ideas as Dawkins came from, I strongly suspect, since he cites Hartung, it is reflective of the science of Kevin MacDonald.

You can look up both Kevin MacDonald, former professor of psychology at The University of California, Long Beach, and John Hartung online, I believe you can still read Hartung's paper online, You'll have to do a search for it, I don't give links to things like that.

Kevin MacDonald's CV is interesting because while he was writing books and articles of pretty obvious neo-classical antisemitism (You don't have to trust me on that, you can read what the SPLC says about him) as academic discourse, he held many, many positions as a faculty member at prestigious universities, held the post of editor at journals of evolutionary psychology, etc.   And, while there was notice that Professor MacDonald was publishing antisemitic propaganda as science,  the nature of his science seems to have escaped serious notice until another famous academic, the well-lauded Hitler apologist and Holocaust Denier, David Irving, called him as a witness in his infamous British lawsuit to try to silence the genuine historian, Deborah Lipstadt who had pointed out he was a Holocaust denier.

For anyone who isn't familiar with the incident, even with the massively favorable British libel law on his side, Irving lost the case spectacularly, was called a Holocaust denier by the judge in the case, from the bench, and the subsequent fact checking of his previously well received books purportedly on the history of the Nazi era revealed he'd been pretty much falsifying the history to whitewash Hitler and the Nazi era.   Last I heard he was conducting tours for neo-Nazis and white supremacists of Auschwitz, telling them that the site was a primitive forgery instead of the location of among the most enormous crimes in the history of the world.  Which, I will point out, has been much discussed as a failure of historical review among historians, though I'm not certain that it's led to an enhanced level of review and fact checking.   Considering some of the big name British historians who had given him good reviews, I'd think it would force the question if celebrity academic book reviewers shouldn't be held responsible for the glaring falsification of history they endorse, sometimes.

For some reason, all of those people who had been reading MacDonald's antisemitic science, publishing it, giving him academic status based on it, making him the editor of scientific journals, suddenly, realized that the guy had been promoting some of the most primitive and vicious sterotypes about Jews as evolutionary science for the entire time.  Belatedly the faculty at his university, in the twilight years of his career said:

"While the academic senate defends Dr. Kevin MacDonald’s academic freedom and freedom of speech, as it does for all faculty, it firmly and unequivocally disassociates itself from the anti-Semitic and white ethnocentric views he has expressed."

Well, after all of his professional honors and privileges had been bestowed, after his work had passed scientific muster, isn't that nice for them to have noticed.

Let me put this in large print because if anyone failed to notice, the nature of MacDonald's antisemitic science had, for years, successfully escaped being caught in review by what is purported to be the most rigorous field of rigorous academic research and careful fact checking, science.  

Evolutionary science has clearly not cleaned up its act, it has not learned anything much from the history of scientific racism, eugenics social Darwinism, it has certainly not considered the role that its most lauded of theories, Natural Selection played in all of them.  As Marilynne Robinson noted, Richard Dawkins was pushing John Hartung's quite similar material as reliable science to the a popular audience.  And at the time  Darwkins held a chair at Oxford for the Public Understanding of Science. Apparently such eminent figures in science as Dawkins and and many of his colleagues, reading fairly obvious antisemitic propaganda, Protocols of The Elders of Zion content with language not to jar post-war sensibilities too strongly, and accepting it as science.  They clearly either were too ignorant of modern history to notice that or they didn't care that's what they were promoting.

I am not the only one to say that, by the way.

A review praising MacDonald's first book appeared in the journal Ethology and Sociobiology four years ago (the publication was in the process of being taken over by HBES at the time); the author, John Hartung, a professor at the State University of New York and a former secretary of HBES, concluded that the Holocaust, "the most enormous act of reactive racism ever perpetrated," had been misrepresented as an unjustified evil so as to cow non-Jews into looking the other way while Jews "purloin" land in Israel. According to Lingua Franca, which covered the incident, the only public reaction to Hartung's review was a "tepid" letter by the journal's editor saying he didn't realize that it could be offensive, and an outright defense of Hartung by HBES's then-president, Dick Alexander. As for MacDonald, the author of the book that inspired these remarks, there was little visible effort at the time to refute him or to challenge the appropriateness of having him serve in so many key positions.

At the foundation of all of this is the idea of natural selection, evolutionary psychology is based on making up stories and narratives about largely unrecorded and verified eras in the past, characterizing them in order to find traits that provide an evolutionary advantage.  That absolutely none of that talk about the unrecorded past is even verified to have happened, never mind being identified in people who produce more instead of fewer children who lived to produce children, seems not to count as long as they can come up with a plausible story which is deemed sufficiently Darwinian to be accepted as science.

I don't have time to really go into detail about this, though I could, I will just say that this is hardly a dead issue.   It won't be for as long as natural selection is the dominant required framing through which evolutionary science is seen and understood.  The history of natural selection has produced eugenics, neo-Malthusian economics which call for the further destitution of the destitute and poor, the Nazi understanding of science which led to their mass murders and in the post-war period, neo-eugenics and, as seen in the Evolutionary Psychology of such people as MacDonald and Hartung, a recapitulation of some of its earlier products.   I would call that a pretty seriously damning history of an idea.