Answer To The Same Old Flock of Canards

I have said before, over and over again that the mass murders proposed in English by people like George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill, by the very same scientifically provided means that the Nazis, much later, used, gas, impeach their right to be taken as good and credible people as it did anyone who said those things in German.  And those proposals for salubrious genocide by, other, often unspecified means as scientific fact go right back to the founding generation of Darwinism and, in fact to ol' Chuck Darwin, himself.  His theory of natural selection immediately generated that idea which found expression in him and in his closest friends and scientific colleagues as soon as the theory was published.

That is not surprising because his theory is based on the economic depravity of Malthus who called for the poor to be harried, deprived and starved to death as a means of killing off what he presented as excess population for the benefit of the survivors.  That entire line of thinking grew out of the habits of thought among the British aristocracy, the purveyors and beneficiaries of the British class system, the proto-fascist Poor Laws, made far worse in the early 19th century under the scientific thinking of such people.   The British aristocracy may not have been the only aristocracy to harbor such thoughts but they were uniquely influential in presenting it as scientifically reliable.

I have also told you that I entirely reject their kind of thinking that ranks entire groups of people according to some scheme of valuation.  That is Nazi thinking, it is the thinking of white supremacy, of ethnic bigotry, it is among the origins of this whole thing.  It is entirely in opposition to the Mosaic Law which orders the Hebrew people to treat those of other ethnicity living among them as they treat their relations and people, it is certainly entirely in opposition to the Gospels of Jesus.

It is, though, part and parcel of Darwinism and the kind of thinking which begins in ranking people according to such schemes of "fitness" and value.  It is the legacy of Darwinism to many of the ideologies that took his theory as a fact of nature.

As critical as I can be of Karl Marx, it didn't take him long to figure out that what Darwin actually did was to impose the prejudices of the British class system on nature as a means of framing the evolution of species.  And other men of science, either of his class or aspiring to it, found that entirely congenial.   For all the claims of the post-WWII Darwinists that he wasn't asserting that the survivors of mass killing, active and passive were superior to those who had died, even his own writing is full of that claim, both within other species and as explicitly as could be stated, among people.

To see how Darwin bent that idea every which way to suit his prejudices, you can see that in how he exempted his own aristocratic class from the mass culling, the benefits of which he asserted as a law of nature and how he twisted the recent, repeated culling of the Irish population through famine, that horrific famine in Ireland during his adulthood made far worse by British law and policy, as he asserted those who survived that were inferior to the Brits and Scots who hadn't been starved in their hundreds of thousands, more than a million.  His typical, British aristocratic disdain for the Irish led him to impeach the validity of his own theory in the real-life example closest to hand.

I know that you don't believe that all people are equal and of equal value and so you don't believe that the mass murders and attempted genocides of history are all of equal importance, we've been through that before.  I reject that idea.  All of the mass murders of people are of equal depravity and are all equally deserving of condemnation, those who committed and those who advocated those mass murders or mass murders that didn't manage to come to fruition are all criminals of exactly the type condemned at the Nuremberg trials and at the trial of Eichmann and other Nazis.  They just lacked the opportunities that their fellow advocates of mass murder got.  That some of them spoke and wrote their advocacy in English and that their actual or intended victims were not Europeans or members of groups you hold are more significant than one group or other does nothing to change that.

My research into this topic has led to the pretty shocking fact that German Darwinists such as Eugen Fischer and the German military had performed a trial run for the death camp system in their incarceration and slaughters in Africa in the first decade of the 20th century.   Fischer and others used the science they gathered from conducting Mengele-style experiments on African people, plundering the body parts of the victims of the mass murder they participated in to be shipped back to science departments in Germany and elsewhere for scientific use.  Indeed, the repatriation of those body parts is an ongoing process.   If that mass murder had been condemned and punished, severely, it is possible that the Armenian genocide would not have happened and the Nazis would not have figured they were safe in doing the same on a larger, industrial scale in the 1930s and 40s.  That it was Africans who they first got away with killing that way is certainly something we have no right to ignore.  Letting people get away with mass murder leads to other mass murders of other people.  If the moral atrocity of it doesn't make people give up their chauvinistic dismissal of the importance of those mass murders that don't concern them and "their people" then the danger it is to all groups which might be murdered similarly should give them at least a rational reason to not practice that kind of convenient forgetting through ranking yourself higher in importance.

Every group which was listed by Darwin as those who should die under his natural selection for the benefit of the survivors, the poor, the disabled, the merely disadvantaged, as well as entire racial and ethnic groups, are the same groups that later generations of his followers and those influenced by his and their thinking advocated should die.  Probably the group most favored by most people to die were and are the disabled.  Calls for their murder presented as a "mercy" go back right to the start.  Another group of people who were, in fact, murdered in large number were the infants and children of poor people.  Victorian society, the British law absorbed the fact of massive infanticide being practiced to the extent that it was alluded to in musical comedy, the bodies of murdered infants left in the street were a common sight in some cities.

I am extremely skeptical as to the scientific validity of natural selection.  I've come to think that the phenomenon of evolution, the succession of life in all of its diversity is such a vast and complicated phenomenon that any proposed explanatory mechanism(s) devised by scientists will at the very best be partial of some of it, likely irrelevant to some if not most of it.  That was a conclusion I reached while reading the back and forth between the conventional neo-Darwinist ideologue, Jerry Coyne and his fellow geneticist at the University of Chicago, James Shapiro.   While I, unsurprisingly, think James Shapiro and others are almost certainly right in their conclusions about the neo-Darwinian synthesis being, if not over then in need of basic revision, I also doubt that they, in the extreme complexity they are uncovering are likely to find a replacement for the nearly universally imposed and insisted on framing of Darwinism.

I doubt any proposed universal explanation of evolution, facilely presented on TV or in a magazine article or in the few paragraphs in an intro to biology course will maintain that status as more is learned.   To present any one explanation as the final step, the last nail in the coffin of..., or any other final solution to that problem is more likely to be useful to those who want to deny evolution than to scientific progress.

My conclusions are that they have taken on a massively complex phenomenon of enormously varying and different circumstances for different organisms at different times and that there is probably no one universal framing that will cover everything that was involved in producing the enormous biological diversity that exists and has existed throughout the billions of years of evolution.  Oh, and, yes, the fact is that any direct, physical evidence of even just the physical characteristics of most of the organisms that have been part of evolution is lost for all times, not to mention the events of those lives which will remain unknown no matter how many Just-so stories can be made up about them.  Evolution is an enormous "thing" which will be known only through the tiniest of percentage of what it was and is.  Even calling it "a thing" is probably entirely inadequate, it is mostly known through acts of imagination.

To further insist that any framing of the fact of evolution is of discernible and reliable relevance for figuring out such policy as whose death will be beneficial, the kind of thing that Darwinists and their ideological descendants still do is utter and complete pseudo-science, it is inserting the worst and basest desires of those who do so into the very heart of what is asserted to be science.   That will be more than just a potential, it will be a danger as long as natural selection is the required ideological framing to explain evolution, anyone in any group which could become the target of such efforts had better understand that they can be held to be less fit than some other group and targeted for either passive or active eradication. 

I don't even think it much matters in reality that the BBC has turned Churchill into a plaster saint when he was a pretty awful person or that George B. Shaw inspired that Lerner and Lowe musical and said some witty things even as he repeatedly and publicly advocated the mass gassing of those he considered inferior.  I know what you've seen on TV is the sum of your knowledge of them, that's what most English language college-educated people are likely to hold in their heads about them at any given moment, unless they've read something that presents their own words that wouldn't be considered as crowd-pleasing in the lying, hagiographic, PR style biography of that sort.   There is little risk that the entertainment industry is going to present the real history of these issues.   I'm not interested in show-biz myth.