Just Read Him You Idiot - Hate Mail

Darwin did two things in On the Origin of Species and, even more so, The Descent of Man. Or, rather, he claimed to.

He claimed that "natural selection" was an explanation of how species evolved from other species, in the most common imagination of that, with the extinction of the parent species which didn't have "traits" that both led to increased numbers of offspring for those who had the biologically inheritable "traits" and, with their descendants increasing dominance in the percentage of the parent species, eventually those "traits" would generate a new species which was not the same as the parent species.

But his entirely imaginary scenario doesn't actually explain the origin of species.  I don't think such an all encompassing explanation of how the present day diversity of life evolved will ever be had, the phenomenon is a. too big with too many diverse numbers of organisms and even "species" involved, all with their own histories, b. those histories, certainly at least a thousand billion* to one, of the organisms comprising evolution are not only unknown, they are forever lost and are unknowable and always will be.  You can't do science on that basis.  Or at least that's the pretense of scientific method as it is taught about in school.

That is true if you take what I was taught as defining "species," as distinct from other species, the ability of members of a species to successfully mate with others and to produce viable, reproducing offspring of the same species.  Those with such "traits" could breed with those who don't have such traits within the parent species, they are members of the same species.  The survival of those members of the species which don't have the Darwinistically imagined "traits" that would, eventually change the species into a new species proves that they weren't members of a different species than those they could mate with which had those "traits".  How those would come to define a new species unable to mate with the members of the parent species is in no way explained by "natural selection".

How that imagined scenario gave rise to new species is as unexplained as it would be if natural selection were never invented.   And that doesn't even begin to present problems for it in the form of such scientific alternative explanations as genetic drift and the mere facts of chance survivals based on luck and not any inheritable biological trait.  Not to mention complications as the recent discovery of epigenetic inheritance, which I don't think anyone really understands as a discrete phenomenon, if it even is all the same thing.

And it certainly doesn't explain anything about that situation within a species as the "traits" of those theorized to be in some way regressive or inferior life - and in many of Darwin's own imaginary scenarios - are warned as having superior reproductive potential than those assigned the category of "superior".   That habit of Darwinist thought is as rampant today as it was at any period after Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, it is why, even with the potent example of the Nazis eugenic murders, post-war scientists maintain a belief in eugenics , including the most eminent of them, R. A. Fischer, James Watson, Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, William Shockley (physicists, ha!), and in numbers constituting ubiquity, the social sciences,  Eugenic thinking is alive and as dangerous as it ever was. 

Eugenics, though not called that or admitted,  is still the common popular "understanding of science" if Darwinism is the topic, or, in a minor tragedy of intellectual life, the common conception of "evolution".   I don't think the science of evolution will ever be free of that until natural selection is relegated to the dustbin of history.  The Malthusian origins of natural selection, founded in the imaginations of the British aristocracy that Malthusianism was whipped up to benefit by suppressing the lower orders of society are its most potent features, no matter what aristocracy of the mind is adopting it.  It's even common among those who, in the imagination of others, are a degenerate class, ethnicity or race.  Among my fellow Irishmen, as well as among members of other groups, I find it grimly amusing when I find out one of us designated as biologically inferior by Charles Darwin are his biggest fan-boys.

I am going to advocate that you do what the Darwin fan club never seems to advocate, read his scientific books, read the things he cites as reliable science, note the people whose ideas he supports, fact check all of them.  Don't cut them any slack, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE GODDAMNED SCIENCE.   That's how I got here.

* I made up that number,  you might as well say "a bazillion to one".  We don't even know that number how can we know something as complex as the lives of those unnumbered organisms?