I CONDUCTED AN UNSCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT last night. I was in a small group of completely vaccinated, boosted distanced people, at my insistence distanced farther than the CDC ever recommended, and I decided to voice some of my skepticism about the wisdom of focusing biological education on the topic of evolution and it quickly developed in several interesting ways, including those who seemed to be panicked over my apostasy on that quickly bringing up the behavioral alleged sciences.
I asked them what practical use anything they believed they knew about evolution has been in their lives or professional careers - one of them is a working though not usually teaching biologist - and if they wouldn't rather, especially in this pandemic, preferred it if the People they encounter had a more accurate and realistic view of public health, immunology, virology and how to avoid catching and spreading the disease.
The discussion that followed showed how anxious these college-credentialed people were with the idea that a perhaps interesting but otherwise practically useless topic in biology was of lesser importance to the list of practical biological issues of daily life, like how to avoid and deal with illness, the entirely related issue of sexual responsibility and the practical morality of not hurting anyone, giving them an STD, doing physical damage, THE UNWANTED PREGNANCIES THAT I KNOW SOME OF THEM HAVE HAD TO DEAL WITH, EITHER DIRECTLY OR THROUGH THEIR CHILDREN, etc. None of which is helped by spending much time in the one high school biology class and/or the Intro class that they might take if they go to college on what is essentially a topic of only ideological value, such value as such junk generally is. Less than an hour, five times a week, if that, approximately 185 days of their lives are probably as much time as most people spend on the topic of biology - what they would have needed to have even a basic, accurate view of viruses, the diseases they cause, how those develop, how to avoid them, etc. is a life and death matter.
Is it any wonder that so many of the American People were such suckers for the shit they got sold online and over the cabloid venue of FOX? Even the elderly now, among the most vulnerable of those who got suckered, mostly took a biology or other science class in school where they could have been sucker-proofed to a larger extent, but, no, that didn't happen.
The panic that they felt was entirely related to the enormous weight that the mostly ideologically emphasis that the topic of evolution has in intellectual and class coercion and conformity to the common received block-thought and the unusual idea that someone like me might challenge its all-consuming importance.
Other than the professional biologist, I may have known as much as any others in the group on the topic, having read so much of it in my own ideological war against eugenics and scientific racism and it became obvious how deeply it has been embedded in the thought of the college-credentialed - the biologist admitted he'd never read either On the Origin of Species or The Descent of Man, no one else in the group had, either. Though one of them had read the Voyage of the Beagle. Of course I had to diss Darwin and Huxley (they didn't know the names of Haeckel or any of the others) which really shocked some of them. None of them had read Huxley either but they remembered him as the costume drama cum BBC-PBS presentation of the topic. I wish there had been time for me to go into the lies about the Huxley-Wilberforce encounter but there wasn't. I think the BBC and PBS have been largely responsible for the ideological propagandistic indoctrination on this topic among the TV watching credentialed public, and they sold us all a bunch of badly documented bull shit along the way. Even a practical and accurate in-school education would have had to counter that concerted campaign that inflated the importance of this largely unimportant topic.
If I had another 20 years to devote to it I'd track down some of the other idols of the culture of the college credentialed. I've noticed there are loads of things about which people of that credentialing and of even the more modest class of them are not only expected to hold with but are required to believe and uphold if they are to retain their respectability. Respectability isn't something that I much care about anymore, it costs too much and once you see through it you lose your desire to have it.
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