IT'S ONE OF THOSE TEMPTATIONS I hope to resist to always answer Darwin's defenders, it's too easy once you've done the basic research of READING WHAT DARWIN ACTUALLY SAID IN DETAIL and what his contemporary and succeeding generations of disciples said. THEY are the ones who give the evidence of having supported depravity, they are the ones who, no matter how much they might deny it or even make the attempt cannot filter out the eugenic aspects of the intellectual history of Darwinism from their current thinking.
They are the ones who introduce story-telling as a replacement for actual observation and measurement as the essential antecedent actions leading to rigorous analysis - they have no choice as their claims are that they have found one of if not THE thing that explains the evolution of species and the enormous diversity of life on Earth when they cannot ever make those observations and measurements of populations and reproductive success in the forever lost past. When you are making believe you can do science around what cannot be observed or measured, you've got nothing left but to make stuff up and peddle it on its seeming plausibility, in which case those aspects of habit and culture which make it plausible enters directly into the conditions of its success. Natural selection was especially plausible among the English speaking upper class which Darwin belonged to BECAUSE IT IS BASED IN THOMAS MALTHUS' BRITISH CLASS-BASED ECONOMIC THEORY. That Darwin had to invert the theory to apply to all of nature what Malthus said was a crisis of allowing the poor to survive and have children due to human civilization and, though he didn't put it that way, the kind of morality that Christianity is rightly based in leads to an internal contradiction and discrepancy that, both favoring the rich and powerful and those who aspire to be such, hasn't bothered them much.
I will point out that in my criticism of Michael Behe's own breaking of the rules for doing science, that he would have to get them to change the rule against considering the plausibility of intelligent design as within the bounds of science first, I admitted that he's asking for what has been granted to the Darwinists from the start, peddling science on the basis of seeming plausibility instead of physical evidence. If Darwinists from Darwin to Dawkins and beyond can peddle their claims based on their plausibility (some of those entirely implausible if you look at them with even moderate rigor) then I don't think Behe is asking for anything his opponents don't take as their own privilege.
Me? I'd rather all of them would admit that they're just making up stories, peddling fiction as scientific fact. There will never be a scientific explanation of the evolution of the diversity of life, there will never be any scientific support for eugenics that isn't based on that peddling of stories made up and sold to the willing believers of them. I think Michael Behe would be far more honest and on far firmer ground if he made his arguments and claims as being outside of the rules of physical science, attacking Darwinism because it, in fact, is based in exactly what he is doing making claims that can only have more or less plausibility. And, I will say as one, I hope, more rigorously predisposed to skepticism about it than some others, SOME of his arguments seem to me more plausible than his critics.
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Going down my own memory lane, I found that one of my favorite magazines of the 1970s, Science For The People, started by and run by a number of those who were part of the enormously important and largely forgotten Sociobiology Study Group, has revived and has an archive of a lot of their publications from back then.
In it I found out looking at it, just now, that one of the people who had the most influence on me in thinking about those areas of biology Richard Lewontin died on July 4th at the ripe old age of 92, something of an irony considering his political radicalism and his critique of, not only American but all other injustices, racism, imperialism and economic injustice. I get behind on my reading during the gardening season. But I'm sure he'd want me to continue as I think he would have instead of dwelling on him.
Back when I read the magazine in the 1970s, I read this article, Racism at Harvard, which discussed the quest of Dr. Bernard D. Davis, one of those spearheading the scientific racist campaign of the time by lying about admissions to his college, the Harvard Medical School. I read it in light of my research into the history of Darwinian eugenics - ALL of the arguments of the scientific racists are based on natural selection - and could only shake my head at how Davis, who was Jewish, was making the same kinds of arguments in 1976 that Nazi doctors and scientists were making against the intellectual abilities of Eastern European Jews that they were provided by the British genticist champion of Darwinian eugenics, Karl Pearson and his colleague Margaret Moul in 1925. Davis' parents were Jews from Lithuania, he was born in 1916, if he had lived in Britain instead of Massachusetts, HE may have been one of those "measured" by Pearson and Moul's team to argue about the danger of having Eastern European Jews allowed into Britain. If their measurements found him to be intellectually sub-normal, it wouldn't surprise me one bit, such research tends to find what the researchers want it to find as so much less than rigorous observation does. So you can imagine what happens in making up sciency narratives when observation is impossible
The obvious racism of Davis and those he supported, the co-author of The Bell Curve, Harvard psychologist Richard Herrenstein but also Arthur Jensen (who Francis Crick campaigned among their fellow scientists to support in his eugenics) and the physicist William Schockley*. I will note in the response of the Harvard Medical School faculty, for a Harvard based scientist, Davis was remarkably lax with his own fact checking as he made a number of false claims against the admission of Black students to Harvard Medical School.
I wanted very much to research that and write it up because it's my observation in reading a large number of scientific racists, Darwinists all, that those who are Jewish, Irish, etc. very likely are members of so-called ethnic or racial groups who other Darwinist eugenicists claimed were genetically disposed to intellectual inferiority and, so, should not be granted equality, their own families and nationalities and so-called ethnicities so judged by some other, equally or even better credentialed racist.
There are many such posts I wish I had the time to research and post because the history of Darwinism and its immediate parentage in scientific racism and its entirely legitimate offspring, eugenics are full to the top with such ironies and hypocrisies. And it would be fairly easy for me to predict what I could find there because, as I've studied this a long time now, the trails laid in the primary documentation by those peddling their plausible ideas are almost certain to be there.
In the years since I started researching Darwin's connections to eugenics, English language and other, including Nazi eugenics, I have followed a couple of other dissident academic brawls unrelated to biology and I have noted that in both of those the unorthodox view points seem to be available in the paper trail left in primary documentation in pretty much the same way. I'd say if you find after a number of years of studying something that it's easier and easier to find the primary documentary evidence that's a good sign that you're on the right path no matter how strong the orthodox viewpoint is. Sometimes it's matched by a total absence of actual, primary documentation that supports the orthodox POV. But this is enough writing for one morning.
* I remember a relatively young Richard Lewontin was on a talk show arguing against the scientific-racist-eugenicist William Shockley when Shockley was in the news promoting his Nobel laureate stud farm project, in which the physicist whose claim to fame wasn't genetics but as a co-inventor of the transistor, wanted to raise a generation of geniuses like Hitler wanted blondes with blue eyes. At one point the geneticist Lewontin noted that at the typical age of a Nobel laureate, very old, their sperm was far more likely to contain DNA that was damaged than the sperm of a much younger man and that instead of using them for breeding Shockley's race of super geniuses, their sperm should be "obliterated" by the same line of reasoning. I don't recall Shockley having a scientifically based response.
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