What all of them shared, though, is the mother of all just-so stories, something I have called the alleged solution to what I've called the mother of all n-factorial problems - which I don't believe for a second science will every find a master key to - evolutionary inheritance and the rising of new species natural selection. And natural selection is just that, a just-so story, an explanatory fable that takes whatever form whatever scientist wants it to take, to be believed by their colleagues of their particular sect of Darwinists. And it all starts in that building block of stories, metaphors.
There is a really bad habit of thought that comes with using the word "metaphor." We seem to feel and so think, of metaphors as innocuous because they're not "real" they're a tool of seeing what's "real" and not the real thing itself.* But that habit of regarding them as innocuous is certainly not evidenced in the history of the use of metaphors. As Richard Lewontin points out in the use of metaphors to talk about genetics and development in biology, people often forget that their own metaphors are just that, tools for creating understanding or a semblance of understanding - if you start believing your own metaphors are what they are not, the thing itself, you are in great danger of making them a lot more real in effect than you may have started out intending to. Or maybe you're just giving into whatever motivated you to come up with the metaphor, unintended or unaware of your own motive.
As I noted in passing, it is a horrific irony that the existence of natural selection is most in evidence, not in nature but in what human beings have made of it, including English language and other eugenics and in the most literal application of that in the Nazi and other genocides which were explained as "applied biology." Nowhere in nature has it been demonstrated as clearly if at all.
In an answer to the first tidal wave of negative reaction to the very first time I wrote on Darwinism, the thing that kicked this whole thing off, I noted the following:
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Darwin used a metaphor to describe the unchecked breeding of the “weaker members” of the human species and the bad results it would have for future generations. He said:
Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
He introduced the idea that it was stupid to allow certain people to have children after lamenting that they would survive to child bearing age. By comparing people to farm animals in this context he was clearly lamenting that people wouldn’t be treated like animals in a commercial breeding operation.
Let me stop here to ask, isn’t that outrageous enough in itself? Not even animals in the wild, but comparing human beings to animals in a commercial breeding operation? Where else have we seen that idea not only posed by carried out?
Darwin’s Defender didn’t seem to realize that animals selected as not to be bred are not kept as pets on a farm but are marked for early slaughter. I’ll point out that this is entirely in keeping with the earlier part of the paragraph where Darwin laments that human beings will survive long enough to breed.
The mechanism to prevent this happening in the human population, the one he approves of, the one he heartily approves of among the ‘savages’ is through the deaths of the “weaker members”. That the gentleman's son, Charles Darwin, would leave the culling to the 'savages' signifies absolutely nothing.
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That metaphorical use of animals in a breeding operation, in which it is an intrinsic part of that use to regularly kill animals in accord with humanly determined economic utility, applying it to the human population directly within science has been strong enough to immediately produce a. the eugenics of Galton and b. Haeckel and, then, Darwin, himself, to assert the "good" that would come from the deaths of the "unfit" or "lower" members of the living human population. They were more than just willing to turn the metaphor real, they were enthusiastic in doing so.
It is notable in my long study of the activity of English language and German language Darwinists who followed the inevitable eugenic interpretation of natural selection, that the "savages" that Darwin and they talked about, those who the Germans running the death camps in East Africa murdered - their "savagery" being part of the reason they were deemed OK to kill - and those who about the same time in polite, elite, educated American and British science, social-science, law and politics talked blithely of the benefits that were to be derived by "civilised" men constructing huge lethal chambers and killing the lame, the sick, the poor and the "unfit" were proposing and practicing savagery of the kind they used to stereotype entire other "races" other than their own, the very savagery often reified into an imagined existence in their own minds to attribute to, mostly, darker skinned people is dwarfed by what they proposed to do in order to mimic the culling they imagined was done by the savages not to mention among animals who they had to contend killed off their own species in ways that I'm pretty sure observation in the wild couldn't support. That is one of the biggest issues that early on led me to doubt that natural selection was anything but a product of the imaginations of self-interested men of science of the British and other European and white North Americans people and not a real thing in the real world.
Among the things that are "odd that" is that no group of people I'm aware of have noted their own "savagery." in that way. Other than some who have cultivated it out of their vestigial post-Rousseau romanticism as found in mid-brow modernism. But that's mostly a PR sales gimmick.
I think the utility of natural selection which Marx wrote to in his first mention of it to Engels, that it was a useful tool to attack the Jewish-Christian religions was as strong a motive among Marxists and atheist-materialist socialists and anarchists and others on the left. That motive was something they shared with the proto-Nazi Darwinists such as Haeckel and the British version of that in Huxley, a confluence that met in the British Fabian socialist Karl Pearson who I wrote about so much over the past week. There is a long passage in Baur, Fischer, Lenz discussing that thing which they, Nazis and a fellow traveler of Nazis, noted they and their political rivals in German Marxism shared a common interest in promoting natural selection.
The desire in the post-war period to distance this intellectual movement from the genocidal murders of the Nazis while still retaining a useful ideological construct without which science cannot pretend that it has "the key" to the massive phenomenon of evolution is dishonest. Evolution, to put the metaphor as a simile, is like an iceberg in which only the tiniest fraction of one percent of it it will ever be seen because it involves so many unknowable lives of trillions and trillions of organisms which have left absolutely no observable, recognizable or measurable traces. Pretending science can ever have one key to it is an attractive delusion.
Knowing its history and its indelible character, knowing what it has produced and it will always produced because of what it is, knowing how flimsy its character and its definition are, what its stated origin is in the British class interests that the putrid flower of the most degenerate anti-Christian period of Anglicanism, Malthus, provided to Darwin, I am an implacable enemy of that metaphor who will never stop attacking it because it is as dangerous as it has ever been.
Note: Through looking at the vile Fritz Lenz I have become more interested in the bizarre habit of thought that seems to regard the molecules that genes are as if they were not material objects. The misconception of the anti-Lamarckian stream of Darwinism that arose with August Weismann's naive experiments to attack, within the framing of natural selection, the Lamarckian beliefs shared by Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel and Herbert Spencer (who, contrary to the post-war lie, was part of Darwin's inner circle). I had thought it bizarre that in 1899 Haeckel attacked Weismann's developing genetics as if genes were not material objects, as material as any other molecules. I think a lot of that was out of sheer professional-political opportunism, religion having the cooties back then in such circles as it does now. A lot of it may have been because the molecules of genetics were the carriers of information which cannot fit into he vulgar conception that materialism is. Genes, as they are carriers of semiotic meaning are not entirely material, no more than paper and ink which carry information are merely material, susceptible to purely material analysis. You need more than that to describe, fully, what words on a page are.
But, alas, I wasted my youth reading a lot of materialist crap and I'm not going to ever have the time to read everything I'll need to to come to any understanding of that.
I write this because I came across a book which has a long passage about Fritz Lenz which brings up these issues - alas, recent enough to not be in the public domain - and this article by Herbert Spencer attacking Weismann - I'll note he begins so by quoting some of the conceptual and observational difficulties with natural selection that August Weismann admitted to as early as the 1890s, difficulties that I think are more true today, because, as Spencer put it, in controversy "Each proposition becomes the parent of half a dozen." and there has been no alleged and asserted scientific theory like natural selection for giving birth to mutually controverting versions of it. It continues to produce so many that I think the reasons for keeping it are irrational veering into the lunatic.
I have, however, produced the Nazi Fritz Lenz proclaiming that his professional product was a product growing out of Darwinian natural selection. No matter what species of that many headed hydra he claimed as real.
* A similar point could be made about the word "allegory" though when it's science, "allegory" is far less often admitted to than outside of science.
Note: August Weismann's scientific writing on the topic of music interested me because it proves that Aaron Copland's skepticism about what comes of a literary man writing on the topic would seem to be in evidence when it's a scientist who does. His descriptions about the music of "savages" coming from a guy who lived in a "civilized" Europe that produced Wagner, German military bands and the operetta is pretty absurd.
I will note that Weismann's son Julius was a composer, though I didn't know his music. I read with interest that one of his musical achievements was writing incidental music to A Midsummer Nights' Dream for a state-funded Nazi music group, to replace the well-known music of Mendelssohn. I don't know it but from what I read, it was considered something of a flop. I did listen to some of his music on Youtube, it has technical competence but it's not very interesting. Apparently he was in the same Nazi friendly musical circle as Wagner's grandson Wieland Wagner. I'd much rather listen to the music of the people his father found so "savage."
Update: The html is wonky again, I've tried every fix I know and can't get the font size to behave.
Update 2: Make that "German and ESPECIALLY British military bands".
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