Tuesday, August 14, 2018

"Never Again" Yields To Yet Again

The fact that the theory of natural selection is responsible for producing the entire line of eugenics is absolutely proven in what I laid out, again, in my first post yesterday.  Both eugenics' inventor, Francis Galton named his inspiration for the idea of eugenics, natural selection as set out in On the Origin of Species and his cousin and colleague, Charles Darwin, the inventor of natural selection and the author of On the Origin of Species, authorized his cousin's use of his theory, not only in a published letter to Galton but,  in what is conventionally considered the strongest endorsement one scientist can make of another's work, in his scientific publications, The Descent of Man and, as Galton pointed out was Darwin's first endorsement of his first foray into elucidating his eugenics, in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, Darwin citing his first two articles on the topic published in Macmillan's Magazine in June and August, 1865.

Neither man ever retracted what they said on the topic and that does, actually, constitute absolute proof in the matter.  It is impossible for anyone to come up with a refutation that can overcome what they said on the topic.

The rest of it is merely a long and laborious definition of documenting the depravity of what eugenics as even they conceived of it was, that their inspiration continued in those who, on the basis of their faith in natural selection, developed the theme of inequality, the alleged dysgenic effects of letting those of "lesser fitness" to live long enough to have children or to allow them to have children (both Darwin and Galton explicitly favored the deaths of the "unfit" over the use of birth control, Darwin explicitly endorsing the eugenic effects of genocide) and how the next generations, up to and including Darwinists today, have continued that development, even after its most literal expression in American, Canadian and other eugenics in putative democracies and, inspired by those earlier examples, the Nazi genocides. 

Though not usually an explicit expression of eugenics, I would point out that the evolutionary psychology, published, peer-reviewed science, of such figures as Kevin Macdonald and John Hartung, science endorsed by not only Richard Dawkins, who cited explicitly antisemitic science by Hartung in The God Delusion, but the neo-Nazi David Irving who gave Macdonald perhaps too much exposure outside of the alabaster chamber of science when he called him as a witness in his attempt to silence Deborah Lipstad in the British courts.   Evolutionary psychology is probably the most influential articulation of Darwinism, constructed out of just-so stories of natural selection, in the past half century.   "Never again" would not seem to be a slogan that has penetrated science or the popular understanding of science.   Maybe they think it's too much like something that would come from the humanities to be respectable.   I mean the humanities as in the traditional research and writing of history, not as in the modernistic devolution of the humanities aping the supposed methods of science, "theory".   That's more in line with evo-psy and, as I've come to understand through writing on this topic, the ultimate just-so story of natural selection.

It really does matter because it's happening yet again.  You can read it in the disciples of William L. Pierce and in the neo-liberal and conservative opinion media, Andrew Sullivan, the champion of The Bell Curve and in the endorsements of inequality as expressed in evolutionary psychology as can be read in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and elsewhere.  I hear its secondary echo whenever I hear Rachel Maddow or someone else say "meme".

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