Thursday, May 25, 2017

Not The Friggin' Darwin Wars Again! - Someone's Been Reading My Eugenics Posts And Is Pissed

"Why do you lie about Charles Darwin.   You must be a creationist"

Nothing I've said about Charles Darwin has been a lie.  Every single thing I've said about Charles Darwin has been based on

a. HIS OWN WORDS, IN FULL CONTEXT.

b. On what his children and his professional associates WHO, UNLIKE YOU AND THE REST OF TODAY'S DARWIN CULT, KNEW HIM, PERSONALLY have said about what he said and thought.

c. About what his entirely conventional followers said about their understanding of what he said, especially in the pre-WWII period when they felt no inhibition to be honest about that.

I look at the entire paragraphs, sections of his books, and the entire book in judging the meaning of what he said.  Sometimes, as in On The Origin of Species, I judge it on the entire range of editions that were produced under his supervision, during his lifetime.  Especially the last two editions of his work, the fifth and sixth (which some consider his final words on the subject) often expose a fuller context of what he said than merely looking at the first edition - which I've noticed is favored by the Darwin industry in its distortions and propaganda.

I also look at the closest we are going to get to his candid thought, his letters which often show that the guy presented by BBC costume dramas and the rest of the Darwin industry was not the real man. He was a rather cold-blooded British landed aristocratic type, with a its disdain and callous indifference to the suffering of those who he considered "lesser" "weaker" in any way inferior.  I have, through my long review of him and the milieu within which he lived and operated, come to believe that informs the content of natural selection far more than a rigorous, scientific analysis of data and evidence.  I think it is maintained primarily for political, not scientific reasons.  I think it is probably a frame through which things are required to be viewed out of professional-academic-political enforcement and received habit, not a real thing.

I think it is telling that when people with even slightly different differences in today's far more scientific and data based view of evolution are warring, academically, the accusation of apostasy to, not the evidence at hand, but Darwin is frequently made.   I wonder, did anyone have to face an accusation of infidelity to Newton in the same way as physics developed?   Off hand, I can't think of a similar figure in chemistry to form a similar analog.  Of course, the pseudo-science of psychology has had many such figures but the intellectual effect has never been the same due to that diffusion.

As I've pointed out, I began this about twelve years ago a fully conventional believer in the St. Darwin cult figure.  I naively went looking for the primary evidence, from Charles Darwin's own words, to exonerate him in an argument that he is responsible for eugenics only to find, IMMEDIATELY AT LOOKING AT WHAT HE SAID that he was guilty as charged.  That was entirely confirmed by looking at what Francis Galton, the inventor of eugenics said inspired him, he unambiguously said that it was his reading of On the Origin of Species that inspired him to invent eugenics and he documented his cousin, Charles Darwin's enthusiasm for his first publications in that line, Charles Darwin noting that it was his own son, George Darwin, who had first encouraged him to read it and whose own early eugenics were supported by his father.  But you can read that, yourself because I documented it, exhaustively, in my posts on the subject.

There is no question about that, at all, it is a case absolutely proven in the words of Charles Darwin and every other relevant figure who provided the primary documentation of it.  Few other figures in history has ever had a more massive series of public relations lies told on their behalf, outside of some of the more notorious despots.  The existence of that propaganda effort as an academic trade is one of the major intellectual scandals of the post-war period.

I wrote what I did about that because it's the truth.   Evolutionary science is a pathetic botch if if can't stand up to a truth which will be there forever because that record I cite will always be there, online, it is fully available for free in easily studied form.  You should face that fact and dump the plaster puppet.

I fully believe in evolution, though I now am entirely skeptical of natural selection.  I believe in evolution based on the evidence of it.  But I also know, in a far more direct and complete way, what Darwin and the rest in my list above said.  History and a review of the literary record can often produce far more certain answers to questions, with a far higher degree of certainty on the far more complex matters that those studies deal with than science sometimes can.  There is no room for any rational or honest doubt about what Galton said was his inspiration and what all of them said on the topic, as well.   I looked and never found retractions by Galton or Darwin or any of the others that took back what they'd said.  My view of Darwin is practically the same as the one his own children and friends articulated, it is based on what they said about a man they knew, intimately, modified only by what the man, himself, said.

Update:  No, Actually I'm not interested in going over what has already been proven to an absolute certainty.  I've done that as have others, it's proven beyond any honest doubt.

I'm more interested in the legacy of natural selection.   I had started on the very difficult task, building off of what I learned of through Darwin's son, Leonard Darwin, the entirely, conventional Darwinian legacy of the German co-inventor of eugenics, Wilhelm Schallmeyer.  I found not a single contemporary denial of the Darwinian character of Schallmeyers' eugenics and through him, especially his book Vererbung und Auslese im Lebenslauf der Völker and his essays, the direct connection to Nazi eugenics.   His enormous influence on that is undeniable, you can find that through the citations of such infamous figures as Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, both who joined the Nazi party and who were part of the scientific support structure for the Nazis genocide.  Their book, written with Erwin Baur, Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene, explicitly built on Schallmeyer's writing and it is also an absolute certainty that Hitler was given and read the book while in prision.  If anything informed his thinking that led to the mass murders, it was that thinking.

But the citations are mostly in German and very hard going for someone who isn't fluent.  Also, too, there is the necessity of concentrating on history not repeating itself, translated into English with Las Vegas, Hollywood, TV "reality" sets right now.

Speaking of translation.  I will warn you, if you read the relevant topics as treated by Wikipedia, the English articles are sanitized and falsified, the German ones are far more explicit about that relationships of scientific eugenics and the Nazi murders.  I don't know the extent to which that's related to the English language pseudo-skeptical ideological twisting of Susan Gerbic style atheist distortion and, perhaps, its absence in the German language but I wouldn't trust anything in the English Wikipedia of relevance to not be touched by it.

4 comments:

  1. Obviously if you critique Darwin, you must be a creationist. There can be no middle ground.

    Binary thinking deserves its own Darwin Award.

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    1. It's a monistic, fundamentalist faith.

      It really is shocking, when you think of it, how often eminent biologists will go at it like comic book cavemen wacking each other over the head with a Darwin shaped club. 130+ years after he croaked. Even after they've had to patch and remake his famous theory over and over again to keep it standing up.

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  2. The interesting point in your update is that Nazi eugenics laws were modeled on American eugenics laws, and the clear strain of Darwin runs through those laws. America is a racist country (that's not a wild accusation, merely an observation. You can't build a country on slave labor justified by the idea they were an inferior form of human deserving of slavery without being racist to your core. The idea started with Columbus, who enslaved natives here the minute he landed. He regretted setting the pattern, later, but by then it was too late. Importation just worked out better than enslaving the natives, who after all lived here, and could just run away. But I digress....). The clear purpose of the American eugenics laws was to "improve the stock." You can't read Holmes on Carrie Bell and not understand that. Honestly, his argument in that case is physically disgusting today, but was upheld as the highest and best reasoning in its day.

    And it was Darwinism, through and through. Still shows up now in the words of Ben Carson, who recently said poverty is a "state of mind," meaning some people are born to be poor, some to be successful, and clearly the latter are meritorious, while the former need to be 'educated' into success. But they can't help it, they were born that way.

    Which really isn't yet any different than "Who sinned, that this man was born blind?" The difference is only in how we justify abusing others, or neglecting them; or just disdaining them.

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    1. The current Republican discourse on medical care, even food aid to the poor and destitute, in turn, is like a translation of what the Nazis were saying in the Weimar period and in their propaganda in those years and up through the end of the war. Their original arguments for eugenics was based on the expense of treating, caring for and feeding "useless eaters" and the Republicans in 2017 are making some of their less extreme arguments.

      I have done more research than I've written from, it's worth remembering that the very book Hitler was using as he ranted Mein Kampf, dictating it to Rudolph Hess in Landsburg prison, by Fischer, Baur and Lenz, was considered to be a MODERATE form of German eugenics, a scientific one. It is as notable that Hess, himself, defined Nazism as "applied biology". Just as so much of today's Republican ideology is based on evolutionary psychological claims and their extensions into academic economics and journalism.

      Unfortunately, I'm far from through with this topic, though the foundation of it is, as I said this morning, proven beyond any honest doubt.

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