Saturday, December 17, 2022

 What's Really "Different" Is Morality Based On Equal Justice And The Discernment Of The Differences In That - Answer To Hate Mail From Some "christian"

IN MY RECENT CRITICISM of some of the old patriarchs in regard to their enjoyment of sex, I'm told that "that's different". At least in and around the great flagship of gay-bashing, Sodom and Gomorrah.

In that very story story Lott offered to let the men of Sodom gang-rape his virgin daughters to spare two men (angels) who could presumably avoid being gang raped, if, indeed, that was the implied sin of the men of Sodom.  Later Prophets said it was injustice.   From what I read about the customs of that time and place, I would guess they might have been 12 or younger.  Little girls who, no doubt, were seen of little value to their fathers except in so far as he could marry them off for his profit.  Yet Lott is unambiguously presented as a man good enough to save from the destruction of the cities on the plane while his wife got turned into a pillar of salt for being curious enough to look and see what they were running from.  

I should say that I don't believe any of that actually happened, I can tell a tall tale when I see one.

And, according to the fable, after they got away he got drunk, had sex with his virgin daughters and bore children with them - wouldn't you know, the story puts the blame on them, probably in their early puberty, still, he an old goat.

While I'm sure there are Bible professing men today who would act that exactly that way, no doubt some of them prominent ministers of religion,  no one with an ounce of moral discernment would hold that such acts are now or ever were within a course of moral conduct. Anyone of any moral discernment would say such men should be locked up and the key thrown away, and they'd be right.  But the same people would say that sexual morality is unchanging from the time of Lott when it most certainly is when it suits them.  

And then there is his more famous uncle.  In the same section of Genesis we're  told that when Abraham, himself, had Sarah his wife pass herself off as his sister to be taken as a concubine of Pharaoh - an adulteress who was to become the grand mother of Israel - and, if you bring up that inconvenient fact about the text, today's moral absolutists will tell you that that was different, too.  

Also when Abraham had sex with Hagar, his wife's slave at Sarah's suggestion and had a son with him, later, at Sarah's insistence driving her and his own son out to die in the desert - the wealthy Abraham giving them the scantest of supplies - when she became jealous of them.  That was different than if some total scumbags did those things today or in the intervening centuries.  We are told that was different by the same people who tell us that God's moral law is eternal and unchanging.

Well, you can't have it both ways.   Did morality change or didn't it because one or the other would have to be true if there is any such a thing as sexual morality and I think there clearly is.

We're told that it's different because they hadn't been given The Law that made such things immoral, even as they tell us that God's moral law never changes.  It was, they say, set from the beginning with Adam and Eve, though before the fable of Sodom and Gomorrah, there is no record of what they're accused of being set down as evil. Why wasn't their ignorance of unchanging morality as much of an excuse for them as it was for Lott and Abraham and, lest it be forgotten, Sarah?

Not that long into the fables of Genesis we are told that when Abraham's grandson, Judah approached the unknown prostitute (his veiled and much wronged daughter in law, Tamar) and had sex with her with a promise of payment to be made, impregnating her with twins.  If you believe Genesis you have to believe that that was different, too. Though I will admit, when he had the fact that he'd fathered the twins with her thrown into his face by Tamar, he admitted he was the one more in the wrong - he'd called for her to be brutally killed for doing what he, as a john, had participated in. The guys always get off when it comes to having sex, though they'd better not pull out (Onan).  Though I doubt any but the most depraved of those today who would make the same excuse of "it was different" for Judah would fail to see a father-in-law doing something like that, today, as being an immoral scumbag. Kind of like Elon's daddy.

We are told today that "God's law doesn't change" by the very same people who hold that those instances of sexual indulgence which no decent person today would say was anything but deeply sinful but who will make excuses for what the Scripture claims "it was different."  

That line is used to maintain an impossible pretense that that unchangable morality was not presented in Genesis as acts by  difinitively righteous people.  If God was ready to overlook or forgive those creeps and bless them, founding the entire tradition of monotheism on them, then I don't find the use of them and their stories to condemn entirely more moral men who would never have any kind of sex with anyone but other fully consenting and competent adults of later times as credible.  

You can't have it both ways, not anymore.

I could point to a number of other instances of totally screwy and unambiguously unjust, unfair, and wicked instances of sex enjoyed by those presented in Scripture as good and just men who enjoyed God's favor in which, if you question it today, you will be told "that was different" because times and sexual mores were different. And that's not mentioning other kinds of immorality presented as moral in Scripture in one place only to have the same thing condemned elsewhere.

If times changed in the centuries when the Scriptures were being written, well, times continued to change. Today is different from then, though in so far as it comes to men of privilege and power using and abusing others for their own sexual pleasure and profit (Abraham is presented as having greatly profited from pimping his wife in Egypt, twice) I have no problem with acknowledging many active same-sex couples entirely surpass them in the "by their fruits you will know them" test for judging moral conduct than many of the most illustrious of the patriarchs or their spouses.  Or many of the most prominent gay-basher sex-hypocrites of now.

Jesus, in one of his most famous and best parables presents Abraham in a paradisaical state, though I'm sure he must have noticed the deep moral ambiguity of his sex life and conduct.  Jesus, though, perhaps uniquely of all of the figures of Scripture, seems to have been remarkably unobsessed with sexual morality except when it came to the faithful fulfillment of vows of marital fidelity.  And there I think his motive was to forbid the abandonment of unwanted wives and children by men who had all the power in a divorce.   The extent to which that injustice is a part of divorce now, it is as relevant to judging its morality as it was when he forbade it.  He certainly wouldn't have condemned Tamar to death like Judah was ready to, at least according to one of the most famous stories in the Gospel of John.  He would have had a thing or two to say about the use of his innocent daughters that he proposed to his fellow Sodomites (who would have seemed not to have been gay, at all, according to the story).

I have come to have absolutely no patience with those who slam even the most morally responsible LGBTQ people but who are entirely good with the most blatant of sexual injustice and harm when it's hetero-sexual in nature.  And that is the history of such double-speak on sex, from the start of it.

Times are different now than they were even a century ago. For better and for worse, and I'll take the better of our times over what is presented as sexual morality then and for the entirety of recorded human history.  In fact, in just about every case I would take today's best understanding of sexual morality over the legal and official moral teachings on it from then.   If they were different for hetro-sexual sex then when such treatment of women and girls by men presented as virtuous is to be accepted, now we know better today/  It's time to admit that the times to changed in the human understanding of same-sex sex.  I'd say, if anything, the problem with sex is that the times haven't changed nearly enough from the times of inequality and injustice, even when it comes to gay sex.  It's certainly too much like it was in the time of Lott and Abraham and Jacob when it comes to hetero-sexuality.

Reading Genesis more closely than I ever have before, really paying attention to what it says, it is a deeply ambiguous, deeply muddled and pasted together book and, as a foundation for moral discernment in many matters, it will not produce the best of the Jewish monotheistic tradition.   I don't think the understanding of morality even in the Jewish tradition of previous centuries was anywhere near as developed or discerning as the best of that of now.  Creation continues for a reason, if it were to have stayed in the same state it was when Abraham was around, it would have ended then.

That better moral discernment is all about justice and equal treatment for the least among us.  In keeping earlier legends and fables as Scripture, they made a huge mistake.  Many of those older stories are nothing less than an indictment of the moral character of God, no doubt such stories would not be seen that way in a time and place when patriarchy, familial tribalism and the ownership of other people by such male strong-men produced a morality more closely allied to an American crime-family than they would that grew out of the Prophets.  There is a deep and impossible to travel gulf between the best and the worst of the First Testament, you can't choose both without doing deep harm to the best of it.  I think it's the same choice as the choice of serving God or serving Mammon, or serving those with power and those without it, in the most obvious facts of human life, patriarchal power as opposed to justice for Women is at the heart of that impossible to heal breach.  You have to choose one or the other because if you try to choose both, you can't get the better choice.

You cannot coherently hold that all of the Bible is true unless you say God's morality is not unchanging over time or unless you admit that human understanding of that is always inadequate and that all of Scripture which is the product of human thought shares in the defects and limitations of our understanding.  

I have also been reading what are considered the genuine Pauline letters and have come to believe that Paul was a deeply troubled and self-hating gay man, part of the reason for him being so troubled was because his culture and religious tradition gave him no possibility of understanding his own sexual desires in any but a damaging, obsessive, you might say hysterical way.  I read his letters - full of some of the most incredible insights into the meaning of Jesus - and find that whenever he had to deal with sexual issues he has a deep fear and disgust of it.  Though in his case he did have the moral insight that it is better to marry than to "burn" in so far as straight sex was concerned. It is unfortunate that Catholicism didn't take that seriously as having an unmarried clergy (and so power-structure) has been responsible for some of the worst aspects of that huge tradition even now.  As an insight into the morality of sex, Paul has several steps over Genesis and even The Law, though he had no ability to imagine a good, faithful, equal, same-sex marriage. He seems to have not had an ability to imagine gay sex outside of the rape of those kept as pagan temple prostitutes or other such victims of the same slavery-based patriarchy which forms the same twisted sexual morality of Genesis.  He imagining all gay sex as sharing the evils that most take for granted in hetero-sexual sex, even today,  without any moral qualms, at all.

The Hebrew tradition changed its sexual morality drastically in the course of Scripture, I think what changes with further moral discernment in the human species is that there is a possibility of some progress in appreciating the real moral law of God in which equality, equal justice, and the end of such privilege as patriarchy is based in.  I think in the last century several enormous steps toward the real morality of God have been taken by many people, though there are those who are no closer to that than those who called those patriarchs good.  

I base my conclusion firmly on Scripture, judging that by the results of those steps as taken by those who have tried the hardest to be honest and equally and faithfully married to another man or another woman. Putting their voluntarily made moral commitments above even that god of modernism, their own changing desires.  There is nothing ambiguous about the results of that just as the evils committed by Lott and Abraham and Judah and David and Solomon etc. are obvious.  That is despite what the Temple establishment scribes and priests wrote about that.  I'm with the Prophets on the moral authority of the Temple scribes and priests.   I'm not going to deny what's right there in front of me, no more than I would the sins and crimes of those who do what those ancient patriarchs are said to have done in Scripture and other enormous injustices to the least among us.

In so far as the various churches and individuals refuse to see what is right there before them because of their insistence that Genesis and other Scripture is set in stone, as, in fact, it never was, those are a hindrance of the progress of human beings in living according to the real Law, which is written on the heart not on paper, or so Scripture tells us. I think maybe in the current turn away from the churches, we are seeing a necessary abandonment of that use of scripture, necessary to admit what's bad in it and to stop allowing it to destroy progress towards equal justice under the Law of God.  If that's the case, then let the churches change with the times or die.  The real Law, the real Gospel will survive it as will those who follow those.

Given the choice between the injustice, the patriarchy, the inequality, the abusive use of other people, especially women (remember Tamar), especially children (remember Lott's daughters) especially those held in slavery (remember Hagar) or those who were not in the favored family or nation (remember Ishmael), I choose to judge the morality of sexuality on the different ideas of now, at least those ideas of now which hold all People are equal, have equal rights, and no one has a right to hurt, harm, abuse and enslave them.  Compared to the "different times" and the sexual morality of the Bible I'll take the current development of that which takes such equality seriously and which elevates loving relationships over ancient legalisms. I'll take the examples that more moral gay men than Paul could imagine as my instructors in sexual morality even as I take the examples of those who use sex to harm, to hurt, to oppress, to enslave and to destroy as the real measure of sexual immorality, even when it is civilly legal (the goddamned First Amendment) or excused by corrupt religionists.

May God help us all to discern the truth and to live by it.

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Not Something You'll See Everyday: The Thought Criminal Recommends Gum Shoe Movies. Made for TV ones

A FRIEND OF MINE lent me the four Don Strachey detective movies as a distraction while I was ill, I didn't get round to watching them till this week.  

Movies mostly make me wish I hadn't watched them and made for TV movies more than most but I'm glad to say that I liked them very much. All four of them.  

Chad Allen who I'd never seen before and who, I read, has retired from acting to become a clinical psychologist was very good.  He was entirely more convincing as Don Strachey than I ever found Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, or, for that matter, most of the other actors who became well known for playing such roles as well. I don't find Hollywood acting of that vintage interesting to watch, anymore.  Even more so hearing the writing. Especially the gratuitous anti-gay stereotyping of Hammett and, more ironically, Chandler. And of their copiers. I am sick to death of it.

In the movies, Sebastian Spence as his husband Tim Callahan was really good, too.  I've seen him in other things and always liked his acting which is quite varied according to character.  I like that the movies give them a sex life that is believable while not centering either of their lives entirely around that.  The best thing about that is that they are faithful to each other.

The relationship between them in the movies left me wishing I was 40 again.

Various other Canadian actors such as Daryl Shuttleworth whose work I'm familiar with from TV shows etc. were good in it too. It was fun to try to remember who had played in what and trying to remember what their names are. I generally like Canadian actors better than either Brits or Americans.   

The writing was good, based on the books by Richard Stevenson, the directing was good and, for once, the music was good and added to instead of distracted from the experience. I didn't wish they'd fired the composer once in all four movies.   That's rare.

It's natural to wish they'd made more of them but maybe stopping at four avoided running down the quality, something that generally happens when they do too many in a series.  It's hard to keep up high quality over a long run. 
It's rare enough to make a single movie that isn't shit.  

I've only read one of the novels the characters come from, I might try to get hold of the rest of them to read.  I really do like the idea of having a detective series in an underused town like Albany New York and having a well done series about gay men in a faithful marriage is especially welcomed. If I thought I had the ability maybe I'd write a detective and his husband who were faithful and didn't drink, trying hard not to copy what's been done better, already.    Though the drinking in the movies was believable, not like the absurd quantities that would kill anyone in Raymond Chandler's junk.  A totally sober detective.  Now, wouldn't that be a novelty.   I loathe Chandler's writing.

The only extensive experience I'd had before with gay detective fiction are reading some of the Dave Brandstetter series by the late, under-rated writer Joseph Hansen whose centenary is next year.  Which is kind of shocking though not if you consider the first of those came out more than fifty years ago and the difficulty he had getting gay fiction published before then.  I might read more of those, maybe it's time to try the genre again.  I have to say that I enjoy reading about LGBTQ characters in ways I don't generally get in books about straight people any more.  Considering easily 499 out of 500 fiction works I've read have no LGBTQ characters in them or if they do presenting us in negative stereotypes, maybe I'm just tired of stories made up about straight,white, men.  I suspect that's one of the reasons I'm not especially interested in fiction right now.  Maybe I should read more LGBTQ fiction and see if it interests me.

Monday, December 12, 2022

Going To Put This Down Till After The New Year - Follow Up

THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN article of snappy refutations for sci-guys to pull out when creationists bring up embarrassing questions that I linked to had this to say about the observation that no one has seen the evolution of a species.  With a few comments:

12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.

Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species. 

"During a formative stage" is doing a lot of work here.  I wonder exactly how you define  the "formative stage" of the evolution of a new species.  Just what does it mean? 

I wonder exactly what is meant by "speciation is probably fairly rare" in that, as I readily pointed out, every single known species alive today and those of the past almost certainly evolved from previous species.  That's a hell of a lot of speciation.  If it means that it doesn't reliably happen within the lifetime of anyone who's watching for it,  I said that.   

If "recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species," then that certainly is a good excuse for anyone skeptical of such a claim to doubt it. That is unless it is clear, unambiguous and widely acknowledged as being that. 

The most widely used definition, Mayr's Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations—sets of organisms that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community. In practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain or to plants (and, of course, fossils do not breed). Biologists therefore usually use organisms' physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership.

I would certainly accept that an inability to interbreed with its close biological relatives is a pretty good part of what would define a new species,  though in many cases animals recognized as of different species can interbreed and some of the hybrid animals of that mating can parent offspring.  Lions and tigers, horses and donkeys, etc.   So the definition isn't exactly definitive.  I really have to wonder how wide the range of variation among the enormous numbers of different species that this definition is known to be true for.   If the definition of what a species is is that inspecific, it only points to part of that enormous complexity of life which I mentioned but which evolutionary biologists like to figure they can figure out by making up stories about animals, plants, etc. in the lost past which they will never be able to study.   The idea that Darwin figured it all out in 1859 with the information he had at his fingertips based on the political-economic theory of Malthus becomes more absurd than less absurd.

Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection—for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits—and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the University of California, Davis, demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.

"Apparent" does a lot of work in that paragraph.  

I wonder a number of things about that, not having read the literature on that experiment.  One question I'd have to ask since what I'm interested in is NATURAL selection is whether or not their "new species" could survive as a distinct species in the wild, if all members of the "new species" refused to mate with all members of different populations (species?) and that's just the beginning.  I would also wonder how universally their colleagues agree with the idea that they have created new species.  I'd also wonder how long this "new species" persists as an isolated population if it doesn't breed with other fruit flies.   How many individuals was it?  Did that difference persist if the two populations were kept together for 35 generations?

Note that this is exactly what I pointed out about the claim that scientists could "create new species" as a means of supporting "NATURAL SELECTION" and as a refutation of intelligent design.  I would admit that the design of such an experiment would involve the intelligence of the scientist doing it, though I'd wonder about the wisdom of trying to invent artificial species which, if they could breed in the wild, might be a catastrophe.  I don't trust biology labs to keep their created creatures isolated because I know what screw-ups grad students, lab assistants and college profs are.   As someone who is having a lot of trouble with an introduced Asian fruit fly in my fall fruit crops, we don't need a lab created one too.

But as an example of why science cannot be used to "disprove intelligent design" as a force in nature, it works pretty well.  That so many professional scientists would seem to not be able to navigate the pretty straight forward impossibility of what they try to do is a pretty good indication that a lot of them aren't the most intelligent of thinkers when it's a matter of their pet ideologies.

Sunday, December 11, 2022

Stupidly Grasping On To Intelligent Design To Abolish Intelligent Design - Stupid Darwinist Hate Mail

IT IS A FACT that the actual evolution of a new species has never been observed, not in the wild, certainly, and not in a lab under artificial conditions.  Even in the most obvious apologetic and polemical claims about that, such claims have to be couched in special definitions and blatantly conditional statements.  And that's when those who make such statements are trying to be responsible.   Darwin's theory of natural selection carries within it claims that make that evolution in nature impossible to observe but I'll get to that after pointing out a problem with your accusation against me of "intelligent design" with fantastic claims about what "science has done" even as you witlessly grasp onto intelligent design to "prove natural selection" and "disprove intelligent design".

I will start by pointing out about your claim of scientists working in a lab could actually  produce a new species, claiming that that was evidence for the reality of natural selection has the insurmountable obstacle that the new species would not have been produced by nature but by the intelligent design of the scientists. You cannot filter out the design of that experiment from the results that you got from it.

They would not "prove" nature did something without intelligent design, they would have proven that they did it with their intelligent design.  They'd certainly want that to be the conclusion of anyone who read the paper they'd proudly publish with the intelligent review of their most likely "intelligent design" disdaining colleagues. Though that inconvenient fact about the whole operation would probably be discretely not mentioned.

The idea that any scientist or any group of scientists or even the whole world wide body of scientists could experimentally "prove that intelligent design is unnecessary" for whatever aspect of nature they want to claim is demonstrated by the results they got is a logical impossibility.

While a claim that "intelligent design" is proven in nature from that is problematic, intelligent design having produced the result, it's far less problematic than claiming that what is known to be the crucial component in experimental science is not there and not a crucial consideration in what is known about it.  

To reinforce the point, it is possible that, as in human science, intelligent design is present in nature, it is impossible to claim that it is absent from what scientists produce through their designed experiments and from the extension of those into claims of what happens in nature.

As to its presence in evolution, that's almost certainly not a claim that is testable by science, though I have come to the conclusion there is nothing unrespectable about that conclusion as a product of the logical consideration of the complexity of life especially thinking about how complex even the most primitive theorized "first organism" in the line of life on earth would have had to be, the stupendously seeming improbability if it, its survival, probably most of all its entirely unprecedented act of reproduction and the survival of more than one organism in the act so as to increase the number of living organisms on Earth. But that is not a scientific conclusion though many of the conclusions put directly into the professional substance of science by materialists and atheists are not, either, so used are they to getting away with inserting their ideology into science that they don't even notice when they do it.  

It is probably as unwise to try to use human science to introduce intelligent design into science as it is unwise to try to dispel it from nature by the same means and for exactly the same reasons. That the culture of Western science has made that folly repeatedly over the past several centuries in a number of ways is something to marvel at but nothing to pretend is an honest practice.

To my point made in a previous paragraph about the impossibility of observing the rise of a new species, a theoretical lab created "new species" produced in a few months or years could no more be reliable evidence of what would happen over many thousands of years in nature than the production of new varieties of cattle or show dogs by human design - in many cases rather cruel and stupid design - under entirely artificial conditions.* I doubt there will ever be a scientific project, with funding, with a reliable line of conduct and reporting as to last as long as that. The longest lines of human culture, such as Hebrew monotheism, pottery making aren't long enough to match it.

That is, by the way, such an obvious flaw in Darwin's presented "evidence" of natural selection in On the Origin of Species, that no new species were produced by animal husbandry and animal husbandry is not natural but intentional human choice that it is a major scandal that he and his disciples got away and still get away with pretending it "proves" to do what it doesn't do at all. What they were observing was the manipulation of existing lines of genetics WITHIN A SPECIES but they either didn't know or didn't take Mendel seriously so they never corrected themselves even after his paper was published. Not that the geneticist Darwinists of the next generations seemed to care to correct it, either.

Darwin's own theory and the geological evidence of how long it takes for species to arise out of parent species makes it obvious that science can never see it happen except, perhaps, in very rapidly reproducing things like viruses which I doubt could have the same mechanisms of evolution that large multi-cellular species of plants and animals can be said to have. That it could happen rapidly enough for scientists to observe it would make the claim that it happened by the same mechanism that requires many thousands or more years in even single-celled species entirely far fetched.

The reproduction of viruses within the cells of other species is certainly not like the reproduction in entire kingdoms of life with entirely different means of reproduction. To believe the same, single mechanistic theory could explain both of those seems to me to require pretending things that are entirely and obviously unlike are like each other.  I don't think anyone is required to believe that without conclusive evidence which will never be had.

I have the greatest objection to something which is claimed to take many, many times longer than the longest recorded human lifetime, certainly longer than the history of science and the existence of human culture being claimed to be "observable."  Especially if it is claimed that it can be done with the observational rigor and measurement that is required to produce valid science and its reliable knowledge.  The means with which the aftereffects of long ago events in physics can be observed and reliable conjectures about those being made - with observable predictions in many cases - would certainly not work in the study of life because living organisms are far, far more complex and far, far more variable than generalizable aspects of non-living objects. But that's a side-track.

To repeat, the many examples of variations within a species grasped onto by scientists as an example demonstrating Darwin's theory of natural selection or, in fact, any other scheme of the origin of species in nature has the added and rather profoundly stupid problem that such new varieties are not new species but merely variants of existing species.  I think that in many if not virtually all cases that might be true for every single generation within the evolution of new species. New species don't evolve from long ago parent species, they evolve in the many generations of life which don't remain static but change in every generation, no generation of an existing line can be held to be "unfit" for the time and place they lived and reproduced.

The theory of gradual change over time, and even the already old updated version of that in punctuated equilibrium both of which are theorized to produce new species merely support my contention that scientists and, in fact, human beings have never witnessed the evolution of new species in nature, never mind studied even one incident of natural speciation to be able to reliably describe it from the observation and measurement required to identify things so subtle as mechanisms that work themselves out over tens of thousands of years.

Though I think it's quite probable that what we imagine as a "mechanism" to do that may be nothing like a mechanism at all.  To repeat a point just made, the most typical presentation of that as a new species arising and its parent species "going extinct" is likely wrong because what probably happens in many if not most cases is an entire branch of a species changes over many generations, the changes incorporated into that branch of the species every step of the way. No one "trait" defines a new species, even as they might be a stunningly noticeable feature of later fossils as compared to far older ones. Organisms come as a complete package, and in living organisms, especially those that behave, that package is stupendously complex. And evolutionary scientist have a decided tendency to grasp onto one "trait" and ignore the rest of the organisms and their varied lives. If they consider those at all, they make up a cartoonish story about them most often with absolutely no evidence at all.

You might as well say that the ancient ancestors of a continuing family line all go extinct even as their progeny successfully continue into the future.  To claim they lost in a "struggle for life" is only true in the sense that everyone eventually loses that struggle as we all die.  That claim made from fossils of what seem to be closely related species separated by thousands of years makes as little sense. That is assuming the younger fossils are of the same line as those of an the older species which I wonder how you can tell in most cases, so many intervening generations being lost, probably none of the later examples being from direct descents of the far earlier ones they are compared to.  You might be able to make claims in a far more general sense in lines of genetic inheritance among closely or even enormously remotely related species but that doesn't do much of anything to tell you how those changes happened.

As it is usually presented, both in the vulgar understanding and the alleged valid ones,  we are to imagine the unchanged "parent" species existing at the same time as the new species and it losing in what got the rather whimpish hypochondriac, Malthusian Brit aristocrat Darwin all hot, imagined stories of them dying in a violent "struggle for life" when by the time the new species is called a new species, probably most if not all of the descendants of the parent species have changed in one or many branches into other species. Most of the individuals of any generation and many entire generations leaving no fossil evidence of their existence including their reproductive success or failure.

If there were identifiable members of the parent species around at the time the new species had changed, the individuals of that species could certainly not be held to be less fit for the environment they were in, I'd guess they probably interbred with the branch of the "new species" all along as we have discovered some of our "extinct cousin" humanoids have with branches of modern humans.  I don't get how Neanderthals which have living human descendants can be said to have "gone extinct" anymore than the homo sapiens they had children with can be held to have.  If they survived under changed conditions that allegedly caused the rise of the "new species" they must have adapted to such new conditions, their great grand kids may have not looked much like their fossil remains lead us to think they looked but the same is true within modern human families with no neanderthal genes.  

I doubt there is any such thing as natural selection except in the human imagination as much as I doubt there is or ever will be any one sufficient explanation of how and why species changed over time.  There are apparent and well evidenced events that wiped out many species, such as the impact of a large meteorite that is the current best idea of what led to the end of the big dinosaurs and, certainly, many other species but that has nothing to do with Darwinism.  Darwin's imagined Hobbsian (perhaps typically British) mechanism had nothing to do with that. The relationship of that catastrophe and the gradual change of the surviving lines of life are in no way "explained" by the fact of that mass extinction event.  I don't understand why you mentioned it.   

I think there are probably a myriad of causes in how species change and even how they die out rapidly. The rise of a new strain of viruses, especially in gregarious species such as humans have become, is probably much more to do with it in many cases than Darwin's titillating "struggle for existence" the stuff that fuels the imagination of so many pasty, soft-handed male aristocrats and milquetoast academics and, no doubt, motivates their fantasies and which leads more ambitious Darwinists of action they inspire to commit genocide.

I think a lot of what is interpreted from the geological record of old species "dying out" is actually just entire species evolving over time and changing the general appearance of the scanty fossils of organisms within that continuing line of life. I think the old habits of reading the fossil evidence and telling ripping yarns about it has become one of the most obvious unscientific habits of scientists.  One engaged in even by scientists who criticize the telling of "Just-so stories".  

It has occurred to me that the habit of story-telling out of our lived human experience or even our imaginations of the several thousand years of highly biased and selective and self-contradicting articulated human history carries a huge danger when it comes to making up stuff about far longer epochs of time, especially those extending into tens, thousands and billions of years, especially in other, especially quite unrelated species.  Telling stories, making up scenarios from lived human experience or reading recorded human history as if the ill-understood aspects of that can be made to extend throughout hundreds of thousands of years is certainly an unreliable means of understanding what happened on that far longer scale of time.

Almost a century ago A. S. Eddington rather stunningly suggested there may be realms of physical law that entirely escape human comprehension and which we will never understand (and may well never even notice). I think it's possible there are aspects of long stretches of the history of life on Earth that are, as well, beyond our comprehension.  If any of those aspects impinged on speciation, we would never be able to put those into our Just-so stories.  The stories might seem plausible because we judge them on the basis of our experience but that resort to familiar human experience could be, I'd say could probably be what makes them unreliable.  Or at least of questionable reliability without rigorously tested evidence of which very little to none is available in either the fossil or genetic records. There are things which we could never understand even if the evidence was looking us right in the face. If some hegemonic ideology stood between us and that evidence, as it does in evolutionary biology, I'd say we probably wouldn't be able to see it.

I think if we have a future, the hundred and sixty years and more of Darwinist hegemony of science and the imagination of western culture will probably be looked on as more of a quaint or more honestly called disastrous ancient folly than classical cosmology and such things as alchemy are considered today. Though none of those classical and medieval theories come down to us with such a huge mountain of murders motivated by them so fast. Those kinds of things ruled the culture and intellectual class of their times as much as Darwinism has in its period of hegemonic domination.  I think it's long shown signs of being problematic and, really, is just not a very good theory - a theory of science which is not capable of being observed in nature has no more than a fadingly, improbably narrow chance of being the right one - and I think now it is ever less credible as the one and only explanation of what it claims to explain.  

That there is no other universally accepted explanatory theory that has taken its place may well be due to the fact that there is no one way in which species arise and, if any are proposed, they also have the problem of not being observable in nature for the reasons I've mentioned above.

I hold that the ideological hold that natural selection has on science makes the requirements placed on any proposed rival or superseding theory entirely higher than natural selection was ever subjected to.

The domination of Darwinist storytelling, as mentioned, will limit the imaginations of most people, the coercive bullying not to criticize natural selection probably even more so. I don't think there will ever be a real, secure, validly scientifically identified mechanism of speciation in nature because the needed evidence is forever lost in the millennia and epochs of the irretrievable past.  That one or more will never finally tip the bust of Darwin into the embarrassing boneyard of discontinued science, however; is not anything like certain, even at that.

Biologists might not like that because they use natural selection as if it explained things that it can't be demonstrated to explain and things which, other than by claims of "natural selection," they may not be able to present any evidence for at all. They can pretend they understand a lot of things which they really don't. That habit expanded from story-telling of merely seeming plausibility to fill in the enormous voids in the study of evolution through natural selection's imaginary universal explanatory power into a whole host of rank pseudo-sciences, starting with eugenics and modern scientific racism and the allied pseudo-scientific field of psychology. As mentioned, Darwinism has reaped a body-count already numbering in the millions.  It's deeply embedded in the culture and the professional interest of scientists but so were those antique mechanisms of cosmology and chemistry mentioned above.

I have no doubt that all known existing species evolved from earlier species of life, I am certain that the general theory of evolution is true but the longer I look into and think about scientific claims about that other than the most general ones, the dodgier those generally are. I don't think there is any one dodgier than natural selection nor any one which is more stupidly held to be a required article of scientific faith or respectability in the college-credentialed world. And few such follies, other than things like the denial of human-made climate change, are more dangerously maintained.

* Reading through this, I think it's not a surprise that Darwin's use of human breeding to get results human beings wanted from the plants and animals they breed led him to believe that evolution weeded out the "unfit" so the survivors would be "the fittest" even though the resulting varieties of plants and animals human breeding produced very often were quite to entirely unsuited for life in the wild. Making his use of that to make claims about what happened in nature, even more logically inept.   No incident of human breeding can ever be reliably claimed to represent what happens over far longer periods in nature, especially if it is claimed that that natural progression happened without the intelligent intent the human act is saturated with.

The folly of mistaking what was held to be economically more beneficial or merely desired from a human standpoint to be a demonstration of "fitness" in terms of the natural world is not surprising as the theory of natural selection starts with Malthus's absurd notion that the entirely artificial  consequences of intentionally and interestedly invented English and then British law, which is largely centered around the construction and support of a brutal and unjust economic and social caste system and even more brutally gangsterish imperialism, was a model of how "the law of nature" he proposed leaving the British poor to worked.  

That was such a stupid aristocratic idea of nature that not long before Darwin started the production of his theory the British radical William Cobbett correctly noted that if the British poor were left to "the law of nature" as Malthus called for, the poor would quickly strip the rich of what they'd stolen and hoarded from them as nature knows no legal rights to property of the kind Malthus, Darwin and virtually every one of their supporters had as the foundation of their thoughts.

If there is one thing that is obvious in the study of evolution it is the substitution of narrative fiction for actual observation and quantification due to the fact that

a. all but a vanishingly small and almost certainly non-representative sample of evidence of past life is now and forever lost and that evidence tells us little to nothing about the actual lives of the fossilized organisms and their reproductive success or failure,

b. the time scale of the evolution of species is so long that scientific observation of it is impossible in the resolution that would make the identification of the mechanism(s) of evolution nothing but guess work,

c. the actual complexity of organisms, their lives, their reproduction individually and of a species makes any claims as to that absurd,

means that every and all of the stories told by humans about evolution will be intrinsically wrapped up in such cultural and ideological and habitual artifacts of human imagination. There is every reason to believe those stories tell us a lot more about the minds of the tellers of such tales than they do about nature. Other than some very general conclusions based on fossil records and the inheritance of genes, virtually all of the lore of evolutionary science is of unknowable reliability but each item of that lore is of very highly improbable reliability. The shelf-life of claims about evolution as compared to those of experimentally verified physics and chemistry is not impressive.  The more elaborate and so attractive the claim is, the quicker it rots. That is especially true of the violent and self-interested theory of natural selection, I doubt much of any of its true believers believes themselves to be an example of a degenerate biological type worthy of weeding out of the future such as they readily consider those they don't like to be.

I think biologists should spend the time they waste on telling Just-so stories that are frequently pretty dangerous on studying aspects of biology that can actually be seen and measured. Those are dauntingly complex enough to be getting on with and may well be extremely important, little to nothing said about evolution matters in the same way. That is assuming the Just-so story tellers had the chops to do important science of that kind. A number of the most famous ones, I doubt could.  They should leave telling lies about cavemen to pop-novelists and trashy made-for-TV pseudo-scientific with nauseating-background-music, nauseating video-game-zoomily edited "documentaries."  They shouldn't appear on those.  Appearing often on TV is a contra-indication of good scholarship or science.  TV is intellectually dysgenic.

I hate TV. It makes people stupider.

Note: Still having consequences of Covid, still feel like crap, I'm feeling ranty.