I HAVE NEVER UNDERSTOOD why people will insist on there being "cat people" and "dog people" and figure those of us who like both of them should take a side. I've lived among cats and dogs my entire life and I have never felt inclined to see any of them except in terms of their individual characters, they're not types based on their species, they are individual creatures, just like People are. There are those of all three species I like, those I don't like as much and, in rare cases, some I really don't like but I figure that's just how life is and the ones I don't like are no reflection on those I find more congenial. And that I have no right to destroy any of them nor to bother them unless they start behaving in seriously wrong ways.
Our more informed conceptions of biology tend to be as ridiculously reductive to favoring one or the other and, even in many cases of those taken as very sophisticated, other reductive falsifications and classifications as stupid as the example in my previous paragraph. And it's not just individual species - a reductive and ill defined concept - but in theories that allegedly govern evolution and other aspects of biology that are absurdly reductive, absurdly generalized, often not clearly related to observed or lived reality and, in the case of what can't be observed in the long dead past, more honestly considered as lore than as science. Sometimes more honestly considered explanatory fiction, like Genesis is often called. Everything said about the evolution of species and modern biological diversity which either has not or can never be the subject of scientific method, not even the primary components of that, observation and measurement and, so, what is taken as "analysis" of what cannot be had is not analytical, it is making stuff up and getting it published as science. That that is the practice of biologists is not something I have a say in but I can point out that when they make stuff up about imaginary animals and other organisms they neither can see nor have any examples of (not to mention seeing them in terms of their environments and their reproductive success) they are just making stuff up and calling it science. And other scientists (and others) who have a vested interest in pretending that the result is science pretend that it is. Which might account for how much of once boldly, absolutely claimed scientific knowledge in the life sciences proves to be of such temporary sway, much of it quietly being moved to the enormous bone-yard of discontinued science.
It was early in my posts about Darwinism and its obvious causal relation to even the most deadly of eugenics that I realized the side of the 1970s war over neo-eugenics, Sociobiology and its offspring, "evolutionary psychology" that I took, the side of, such scientists as Richard Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould, the term they used for the tales of the neo-eugenicists, "Just-so Stories" was really what the entirety of the theory of natural selection was made of. Virtually everything in it depended on just such lore, including much of the reported "evidence" that Darwin used in his two major books on the topic.*
The longer I looked into it, the longer I read the claims of those regarded as the giants of the field about it and looked to see what they based their claims in, it is literally all made up stuff about unseen organisms which, largely, have left no record of their lives that scientists can really look at. As the article those two posts from the Fourth of July weekend was based in pointed out, one of the scientists on the side I chose, Gould and his colleague Niles Eldredge, working the methods of science of observing many, many fossils and their differences, looking at them in the context of the dates in which they seem to appear in the time line of evolution, directly and, still, controversially challenged one of the core holdings of natural selection, slow, steady, gradual change over time. Yet Gould, and possibly Eldredge, never could bring themselves to admit that they had uncovered a huge problem for the idea of natural selection, especially in the context of other discoveries in the post-WWII period. I can't see but that what they did was undermine the thing that revived the theory of natural selection, the so-called "modern synthesis" which is what virtually everyone who has some conception of "natural selection" means in one form or another, today.
From the start, there had always been dissenters. In 1959, the developmental biologist CH Waddington lamented that the modern synthesis had sidelined valuable theories in favour of “drastic simplifications which are liable to lead us to a false picture of how the evolutionary process works”. Privately, he complained that anyone working outside the new evolutionary “party line” – that is, anyone who didn’t embrace the modern synthesis – was ostracised.
Then came a devastating series of new findings that called into question the theory’s foundations. These discoveries, which began in the late 60s, came from molecular biologists. While the modern synthesists looked at life as if through a telescope, studying the development of huge populations over immense chunks of time, the molecular biologists looked through a microscope, focusing on individual molecules. And when they looked, they found that natural selection was not the all-powerful force that many had assumed it to be.
They found that the molecules in our cells – and thus the sequences of the genes behind them – were mutating at a very high rate. This was unexpected, but not necessarily a threat to mainstream evolutionary theory. According to the modern synthesis, even if mutations turned out to be common, natural selection would, over time, still be the primary cause of change, preserving the useful mutations and junking the useless ones. But that isn’t what was happening. The genes were changing – that is, evolving – but natural selection wasn’t playing a part. Some genetic changes were being preserved for no reason apart from pure chance. Natural selection seemed to be asleep at the wheel.
Evolutionary biologists were stunned. In 1973, David Attenborough presented a BBC documentary that included an interview with one of the leading modern synthesists, Theodosius Dobzhansky. He was visibly distraught at the “non-Darwinian evolution” that some scientists were now proposing. “If this were so, evolution would have hardly any meaning, and would not be going anywhere in particular,” he said. “This is not simply a quibble among specialists. To a man looking for the meaning of his existence, evolution by natural selection makes sense.” Where once Christians had complained that Darwin’s theory made life meaningless, now Darwinists levelled the same complaint at scientists who contradicted Darwin.
Other assaults on evolutionary orthodoxy followed. The influential palaeontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge argued that the fossil record showed evolution often happened in short, concentrated bursts; it didn’t have to be slow and gradual. Other biologists simply found that the modern synthesis had little relevance to their work. As the study of life increased in complexity, a theory based on which genes were selected in various environments started to seem beside the point. It didn’t help answer questions such as how life emerged from the seas, or how complex organs, such as the placenta, developed. Using the lens of the modern synthesis to explain the latter, says the Yale developmental biologist Günter Wagner, would be “like using thermodynamics to explain how the brain works”. (The laws of thermodynamics, which explain how energy is transferred, do apply to the brain, but they aren’t much help if you want to know how memories are formed or why we experience emotion.)
Just as feared, the field split. In the 70s, molecular biologists in many universities peeled off from biology departments to form their own separate departments and journals. Some in other sub-fields, such as palaeontology and developmental biology, drifted away as well. Yet the biggest field of all, mainstream evolutionary biology, continued much as before. The way the champions of the modern synthesis – who by this point dominated university biology departments – dealt with potentially destabilising new findings was by acknowledging that such processes happen sometimes (subtext: rarely), are useful to some specialists (subtext: obscure ones), but do not fundamentally alter the basic understanding of biology that descends from the modern synthesis (subtext: don’t worry about it, we can continue as before). In short, new discoveries were often dismissed as little more than mildly diverting curiosities.
Today, the modern synthesis “remains, mutatis mutandis, the core of modern evolutionary biology” wrote the evolutionary theorist Douglas Futuyma in a 2017 paper defending the mainstream view. The current version of the theory allows some room for mutation and random chance, but still views evolution as the story of genes surviving in vast populations. Perhaps the biggest change from the theory’s mid-century glory days is that its most ambitious claims – that simply by understanding genes and natural selection, we can understand all life on earth – have been dropped, or now come weighted with caveats and exceptions. This shift has occurred with little fanfare. The theory’s ideas are still deeply embedded in the field, yet no formal reckoning with its failures or schisms has occurred. To its critics, the modern synthesis occupies a position akin to a president reneging on a campaign promise – it failed to satisfy its entire coalition, but remains in office, hands on the levers of power, despite its diminished offer.
I think the main virtue of the article is that it presents a more honest view of the fragmentation of the actual field, even as they will all feel compelled to mouth their fealty to "natural selection" or "Darwin" and not least of all because it is, as the article said about the "ferocity" of the reaction of the reactionary Darwinists in science,
What accounts for the ferocity of this backlash? For one thing, this is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age.
You can safely include the anti-religious atheist-materialist aspect of modernism as well as the affection for anti-democratic dictatorship which is one of the unadmitted undersides of modernism as it was of older ideological framings of reality, only this time with "science." And you don't even have to go into the naive-pop-science conceptions that most of us maintain as our "knowledge of science" to go quickly astray from the straight-and-narrow of evidenced thinking.
When I was trying to follow the war between one of those old-guard reactionaries, the neo-atheist angry-child as geezer, Jerry Coyne and his University of Chicago colleague and adult, James Shapiro, I immediately found that I was not equipped to follow them into the morass of molecular genetics that their war was conducted in. The little of it I could understand made me suspect that Shapiro raised some things that Coyne could not answer - though that might have more to do with my antipathy toward Coyne than it does with anything I suspected I might understand. The same is true for virtually everyone who reads anything about this, there is so much of such enormous technical detail, requiring years of mastering prerequisites, that I doubt even many of the most sophisticated of their colleagues in separate but related evolutionary biological specialties can follow them. As Coyne's teacher Richard Lewontin pointed out.
First, no one can know and understand everything. Even individual
scientists are ignorant about most of the body of scientific knowledge,
and it is not simply that biologists do not understand quantum
mechanics. If I were to ask my colleagues in the Museum of Comparative
Zoology at Harvard to explain the evolutionary importance of RNA editing
in trypanosomes, they would be just as mystified by the question as the
typical well-educated reader of this review.
One of the things that I also early-on realized is that in addition to virtually everything about the evolution of life on Earth being unavailable to observe, measure and honestly analyze, it is, literally, the most stupendously complex and huge problem that scientists have ever pretended they could use with methods developed to describe the movement of non-living objects and the combination of chemicals which had to be observed and measured to subject even the simplest of them to the methods of science.
I called evolution, natural selection or whatever other theory you want to pretend you understand it with "the mother of all n-factorial problems" because the number of variables you might pretend to abstract from what you observe (not to mention those you can't) is so huge that I doubt anyone could ever really have any kind of an accurate general view of it. I am virtually certain that the solution to it was not to be had with the specimens and lore that Charles Darwin had available to him in 1859 when he published his theory based on the non-science of Malthus nor when he gave his full-throated endorsement to its eugenic, genocidal extension in the human population in The Descent of Man, when he endorsed the so-called eugenic science of Francis Galton, the genocidal eugenics of Ernst Haeckel, the bigotry of W. R. Greg and others. I even pointed out that when he didn't have that, in the case of Herman Schaaffhausen, he seems to have made it up to support his contention that the eventual extermination by Europeans of Black People would be salubrious to the presumably white survivors.
There is nothing in Nazi eugenics, including the beneficial, species enhancing effects of one group murdering another group of people, including the idea of the genocidal colonization of new territories by those who regard themselves as their biological superiors which was not both present and endorsed by Darwin in 1872 in The Descent of Man. The named groups of those held as inferior may have changed but not the idea of the benefits of mass murder. I have pointed out that the most commonly identified victims of Nazism, Jews, were targeted by the scientific grandson of Charles Darwin, Karl Pearson in his 1925 paper about the impending disaster to the British People of having Russian and Polish Jews living among and, no doubt in the minds of many of his readers, mixing with the Aryans, who were more popularly known there as Anglo-Saxons. If Darwin didn't put a target on the Jews of Germany, the most conventional of Darwinists in the succeeding generations did what Darwin had done to Maoris, Tasmanians, more generally all dark-skinned People. As I mentioned, anyone in any of the groups targeted for extinction by Darwin, by his closest colleagues during his life and his second and later generations of disciples, who mindlessly accept the idolization of Darwin and his theory of natural selection can only do so out of utter ignorance or by the kind of scatter-brained thinking that that would require. Especially those within the very fields of science which maintain that foetid Victorian monstrosity as the required faith of not only scientists but of all respectable college-credentialed modern folk.
I'm a political blogger, I am a Christian and an egalitarian democrat as well as a Democrat. I don't think we have time for the Darwin wars among the biologists to work their way out. All of the pretenses aside, they never will, the topic is too big for them to even get their hands on more than the tiniest fraction of it, never mind get them round the whole thing. And there is ever so much more reason to think they will work out to the most malignant of ends because that's what they have so far produced when applied to the human population. Much as their professional advantage makes them pretend to understand more fully even as their reliable discoveries point to how much bigger the problem is than ol' Chuck and his ilk could have imagined. We know through its history in politics, in law, in the instruction of the minds of jurists, etc. the belief in natural selection with its insistence on inequality carries with it a guarantee of discrimination (the friggin' Bell Curve and related "Darwinist economics" is a product of the faith in natural selection) and, in the fullness of time, genocide. The author of the American Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, was and virtually all neo-Nazis are full believers in Darwinism, as I pointed out even many of the Republican-fascists who will pretend they reject the idea of evolution are all-in on the scientific racism and other aspects of inequality that are the main component of the theory of natural selection. That is what is important in the real world as the ideological atheists cling to the theory as one of the bulwarks in their war against Christian egalitarianism and that as may be expressed in other religious traditions. I think things have progressed to the point where that is the real issue in the continuation of life, whatever evolution continues and the diversity of life on Earth right now. We cannot continue with that thread-bare theory being the thing that instructs the imaginations of large numbers of People, especially those who hold power and can influence the lives of millions.
I think the advantage to British, American and other rich people in rejecting the Jewish, Christian, Islamic, etc. insistence on them distributing their wealth to the least among us was the primary motive in the adoption of and insistence on the theory of natural selection being the required ideology of biology just as its foundation, Malthusian economic theory was founded on pretending the British class system was a force of nature and charity was a disastrous practice. I think the ideological usefulness of especially snobbish atheist ideologues is the primary motive in its retention in addition to its reinforcement of class and racial inequality. That is certainly what it means now. It relieves those who are accidentally or legally privileged of any concern for those who are not. It puts off onto nature the moral atrocities of inequality and, so, relieves them of any moral responsibility. For most of its adherents, it's even more base than that, it is merely an attitude to maintain or an empty item of allegiance that will keep them from being rejected by those they want to be identified with. Probably what Nazism was for most of those who identified as Nazis because it was to their temporary advantage, even those who would avoid killing anyone and who, as soon as the Nazis fell, changed their identity.
* I could go at enormous length into how much of totally artificial and intentional human manipulation to achieve desired ends, such as the practices of animal husbandry and plant breeding, that Darwin and his disciples used as a model of the allegedly unconcious-mindless-probabilistic actions of nature is used to support the most irrational of conclusions. Among those that what they claim happens in nature by analogy to what are a product of intelligent manipulation towards an end is reliably taken to demonstrate that nature is unplanned and not to an end. That strikes me as philosophically absurd as is the contention that anything that scientists do by way of experiment, with intelligence, with intentionality, can demonstrate that similar things happen without the intelligence and intention that are essential components to the the production of the results that can be seen in a lab. There is literally no way to experimentally support the contention that "intelligent design" is an invalid proposition because no scientist can ever remove their intelligence and intent from what they do. I don't think it's even separable from the observation, measurement and analysis that is the very stuff of scientific method all of which depend on intelligent intent and design.
The very motive for that ideological use of science is refuted by the actual thing that science is done with. I don't see any way out for the would be materialist-atheist-scientistic enemy of belief from that self-created maze. You're stuck with it, kids.
I am intending to post more this week, though it's still busy here. If it rains, probably more. Watering my garden is taking a lot of my time. I don't swear as much when I use watering cans as when I haul hoses around but it still takes a hell of a lot of time. I take it as a miracle that the myriad of idiots setting off fireworks didn't burn the entire town down now that the damned Republicans have made them legal here next to damned New Hampshire which is the North Carolina of New England.
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