I’m taking standard Darwinian economics—standard economic-evolutionary theory out of Darwin—and applying it to this particular case.
Richard Epstein
I’ve worked on evolutionary theory for forty years in its relationship to law.
Richard Epstein
Last Wednesday, I said, This pandemic has certainly exposed the fact that even as most of us were required to take a Biology class in high school, most people seem to be pretty clueless about even relatively simple facts about viruses and the hygiene that is needed to avoid infection. So much for the highly vaunted emphasis on the STEM subjects - though that was only ever really about the needs of business, not the needs of the common good. I long ago noted one of the results of that was, oddly, a deterioration in the reasoning of such human production bots. But that's for another time.
I was wrong, it's not for another time, it is disastrously timely right now in a way I hadn't suspected before yesterday.
I was only marginally aware of the far-right, pseudo-scientific legal theorist, Richard Epstein before the other day. I had run into his name in the course of my research into Darwinism as the malignant force it has been, especially when it is taken out of the largely speculative world of evolutionary biology and applied to political, legal and other areas of real life.
I have not had the time to research Richard Epstein, to look at his papers in depth, though for a short look the interview Isaac Chotiner did with him for the New Yorker reveals that his mixing of Darwinism in one of its more naively superannuated forms (probably what both "Darwinism" and "evolution" mean to most college-credentialed people who aren't actual biologists who keep up with their field) and right-wing economic and political theories yield the same kind of cold-blooded promotions of racism (his Darwinism reportedly leads to his demand to overturn the 1960s civil rights legislation) and inequality that should be all too familiar to anyone who has read the pieces I've posted here and fact checked the things I have cited from the mainstream of Darwinism from 1859 on.
The scientific validity of this bull shit is nicely expressed in this, from Chotiner's piece:
Look, all it is is it’s a distribution. What you do is you figure out what this toxicity strength is and if it’s X at one point, then it’s going to be some fraction of X down the road. And it’s quite clear that that is what happened with aids. And then, when it comes along and you start getting [the antiretroviral drug] AZT and other conditions, it’s easier to treat them because all of a sudden aids is evolved in much the same path as syphilis. If you go through the history of syphilis, it starts off, it’s essentially a deadly disease and kills most people. And then those who survive have the milder version of it. And so after a while what happens is it becomes a tamer disease.
Syphilis is a bacterial infection, not a viral infection. “One doesn’t have anything to do with the other,” Kuritzkes said. Ko told me, “That’s not something that is based in empirical evidence, so the fallacy in his argument is the over-all lack of scientific rigor in his analysis.”
I will also point out that in the same post a week ago, I said, I wonder if, say, half of the effort that went into the great evolution wars had been spent on those areas of biology that are not controversial and which, unlike evolution, having wrong or even just foggy notions about can get us all killed, where we'd be now.
We are getting a very unwelcomed lesson in how the theory of natural selection gets large numbers of people killed because it is useful to the worst political-legal-economic theories, something that has been obvious since it was forming in Darwin's mind out of the equally homicidal economic theories of Thomas Malthus.
As I said yesterday, I'm too busy with caring for someone who Epstein probably wouldn't think it economically worth while to keep alive. I will look into him and his sources more and I will nail the guy if what I've seen so far looks like what it is.
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