NOTE: First the short answer. Mike Johnson is no more of a Christian than Donald Trump is and Donald Trump is a thorough Mammonist and ego maniac, he's the golden-calf of Republican-fascism. The topic of evolution is a mere side-show.
CERTAINLY THOSE BEING MOWED DOWN BY AUTOMATIC WEAPONS IN THE UNITED STATES MOST DAYS, AMONG THOSE MIKE JOHNSON DEEMS EXPENDABLE TO ACHIEVE HIS GOALS
THE ACCUSATION that because I reject Darwinism, the theory of natural selection, that leads me to have something in common with the fascist in sheep's clothing, Mike Johnson, the unanimous choice of the Republican-fascist caucus of the House of Representatives to be Speaker of the House is absurd. I have never in my life not accepted that evolution is the most rational explanation of the diversity of life on Earth as indicated in the fossil and geological record. Later the study of genetics added enormously to that conclusion. Those show that species evolve from earlier no longer extant species at a time later species weren't there. As far as I'm concerned, that somewhat over-rated cultural holding is well seen as being a fact and no longer a theory. Though I think its position in the culture is absurdly elevated due to its role in the ideological struggle between a position I reject, materialistic atheism and scientism on one hand and biblical fundamentalism, which I reject just as much. I hold that much of the clap trap of conjecture and Just-so story telling around the topic of evolution is as absurd as biblical fundamentalism and 6 day creationism and no more scientific, even though much of that is held to be orthodox science and taught in universities around the world.
Having done what you haven't, read widely in the literature of evolution, I know that not only was Darwinism the origin of eugenics - as I proved in those many posts I have written on that topic - but that it is also not a particularly good scientific theory, based as it is in an ideological economic speculation that has little to no demonstration in physical observation or accurate measurement and which included a large component of self-interest among those who originated all of it. That lack of observation and measurement means that scientific method can't be applied to theories about it. On top of that, no human being has ever seen speciation occur which means science cannot actually study speciation, despite the claims to that effect. The act of speciation has left no unambiguous record of how it happened of even that it occurred in the scanty fossil record. All of my belief in that is a conjecture based on the evidence even as the evidence doesn't show that's what happened. No one has even the scantiest knowledge of how it happened and may be happening right now - if science and its products don't kill off all of life before new species can evolve. No one knows if it happens in one way as conventional Darwinists insist on, or in many ways which may mix and combine in who knows how many ways, no one knows what the actual bases on which it happens are or how large that range of bases is.
Darwin's theory was based not on science but on a particularly brutal and obviously self-interested theory of late 18th and early 19th century economics, that of the rather stupid and dishonest Thomas Malthus*, taken up by the aristocratic Charles Darwin and used to make up a story of how speciation is supposed to have happened based on the extremely scanty fossil evidence available to him, the often naive and perhaps as often wrong interpretation of physical observation of living organisms, a complete lack of knowledge of genetics or epigenetics or those most recent discoveries of molecular biology that old-timey biologists get in a lather about when more up to date scientists like Dennis Nobel and James Shapiro insist on talking about them. On top of that Darwin chose as his great demonstration of natural selection the human practice of breeding animals and plants WHICH IS IN NO WAY NATURAL BUT ARTIFICIAL SELECTION AND WHICH HAS NEVER, ONCE, RESULTED IN SPECIATION IN WHICH THE OFFSPRING COMPRISE A NEW SPECIES. There is no demonstrable connection between human, artificial selective breeding and culling and what happens in nature.
Those biologists I've greatly admired, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin and their close colleagues have rightly called the bases of what Gould called "Darwinian fundamentalism," Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, "Just-so Stories" while ignoring that the mother of all Just-so Stories is natural selection, itself. Even as both of them were conventional Darwinists of a less fundamentalist variety.
When you look at the theory of natural selection with open eyes and a critical mind and no professional or ideological motives, the reason it was adopted in mid to late 19th and 20th century science probably had a lot more to do with the class which professional biologists belonged to or sought to join in their professional choice, their race and gender AND THEIR IDEOLOGICAL PREFERENCES AND CLASS ECONOMIC INTERESTS than it did the integrity of the theory as science. You can add the interest that biologists and their allies had in pretending they had a universal theory to explain one of the great mysteries of life such as it was believed physics had and chemistry was developing, I will point out with far greater success, durability and integrity than biology has proved to have.
Its retention in the post-war period is in every way a product of all of those, especially to promote materialist-atheist-scientism, even as science has moved far past that theory being held up as supreme. I think its retention is entirely ideological and self-interested, at this point and I think it is a serious danger, not only to scientific progress but, as the "Darwinian economists" such as advised Trumpian-Republican and Swedish policy demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic , they still are getting people killed in large numbers.
In terms of what Darwin, his inner circle such as Thomas Huxley, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel and such as W. R. Gregg claimed and were taken seriously on with often horrendous legal and political consequences, many a modern day Darwinist would have never been born if they'd had their way because their science claimed our ancestors were degenerate, either on a class basis or on a basis of their ethnicity or on their health. I know some of mine were driven to the verge of death by Malthusian class policy and held to be degenerate, presented by Darwin as that in his books. If one of my great-great-great grandmothers had died in the British death camps, the work house she was interned in, I wouldn't' be here to annoy you. Which would be a shame. And mine were all Northern Europeans living in Britain and its occupied lands. Entire races of humans were on their death lists. We don't know if those who may have been born to those killed or forcibly sterilized in the name of Darwinian fitness as Darwin and those others advocated may have bought into the theory that marked them as fated to be biologically dysgenic and a danger to the human species as a whole, once they'd had a chance at education and entering into the profession of science. We don't know if others who were shunted off into inferior educations on the later day applications of Darwinism may have, even though they didn't get cut off from the future in the same way, depriving Darwinism of many a true believer. Many People of Color, Turks, Russian and Polish Jews, the Irish, the poor in general were all held by Darwin and mainstream Darwinism to have been biologically inferior and their removal from the human species desirable along with those whose only crimes were to be malnourished, ill-housed and sick. I'm not exaggerating in that, read The Descent of Man and mainstream Darwinist science by those accepted to have constituted official science if you think I am.
Mike Johnson is clearly a dishonest, pseudo-Christian, Republican-fascist and liar. He is a white-collar anti-democrat who participated in the soft-handed side of the most serious putsch against American government in its history, one which attempted to put not only the former Confederate states under an anti-democratic government but the entire country. His statements blaming mass gun murder on the teaching of evolution is entirely a product of that ideological struggle between materialist-atheism and his own brand of vulgar materialism, oddly coming out in the same place, in the end.
That it is an irrational lie peddled in the same dishonesty as TV advertising and hate-talk radio is to absolutely be expected. His voting record in the House is eugenic, Darwinist in its consequences just as that of the "white evangelicals" generally is. Other than in mere words, it is in no way in opposition to the atheist materialism of Darwinism, it is just as Malthusian even if it doesn't care much about evolution -which has no practical utility that interests them - and so has no problem denying that EVOLUTION (as distinguished from natural selection) is the best explanation for the diversity of life on Earth, a diversity which he and his policy have every intention of sacrificing to the profits of the rich, the white, the male and the privileged, the very basis of Malthusianism and, so, Darwinism after it. Johnson may not be so crude or impolitic, or scientific as to draw up explicit death lists, but he has them, CERTAINLY THOSE BEING MOWED DOWN BY AUTOMATIC WEAPONS IN THE UNITED STATES MOST DAYS, AMONG THOSE HE DEEMS EXPENDABLE TO ACHIEVE HIS GOALS. His actions demonstrate that whereas his lying mouth doesn't say it.
While I find it somewhat interesting what archeologists and paleontologists dig up and, sometimes, their story-telling about that, am even conditionally convinced of some of it, I don't think the topic of evolution is really nearly as important as a good self-righteous, college-graduate is supposed to. I don't think it is central to most of the biological science and much of the most important of that. I don't think there's any particular virtue to be found in the topic and am skeptical of its practical utility.
The claim that knowing we are a product of evolution makes People more humane to other living beings and appreciative of the diversity of nature and the environment is absurd. That is best seen by those who are bound by that belief the most strongly. Biologists are among the most brutal People I've ever encountered, certainly within academia. The hundreds of millions, probably billions of animals and plants sacrificed by professional "life" scientists in the most dubious of commercial testing, often pseudo-scientific scientific studies, the casual brutality of scientists who kill and often maim before killing sentient animals proves that Darwinism and even a more up-to-date and honest biological education doesn't make them more humane. The recently demonstrated folly of believing that mammals are an effective and accurate model of human physiology and biology, sometimes leading to very misleading claims about the efficacy and safety of commercial products and industrial action may indicate that all of that killing and torturing of animals to have been as pseudo-scientific as anything in the annals of modern historical snark.
I cannot recall, once, in their breezy talk about all of this killing, which they presented as an inevitable consequences of "the law of nature," that is the theory of natural selection, that they advocated as science NOT KILLING PEOPLE. Darwin, once, after Frances Cobbe presented her essay pointing out the moral consequences of a belief in natural selection gave one double-speaking passage in regard to that in The Descent of Man, the rest of the book scientifically arguing against any such preservation of life and repeatedly arguing for the boon for the survivors that the deaths of those deemed inferior as solid science. It's clear from the history of Darwinism in science and in public policy and law that no one took his disingenuous ass-covering remark seriously.
The belief in evolution certainly didn't make Thomas Huxley more humane as he eagerly anticipated what he predited would be the genocidal extermination of American Black People by what he held were the superior white population, once emancipation supposedly eliminated their economic utility to their "superiors." It didn't make Darwin more humane as he made similar claims about the melioristic effects of genocidal extermination of entire races around the world in The Descent of Man and their replacement by Northern White Europeans. It didn't make perhaps Darwin's favorite supporting scientist, the German Ernst Haeckel any less inclined to call for the murder of a whole list of People he held to be both biologically inferior and dysgenic to the population as a whole. As I mentioned Stephen Jay Gould rightly called his published and widely influential science, proto-Nazi. Nazi racial, social and military theory was entirely based on a Darwinian view of evolution.
Darwinism has led to a situation in the humanities in which the philosophical specialty of "ethics" has become a contest in drawing up lists of who it's OK to kill or let die of neglect. That is humanism as practiced by those among such humanists who are conventional Darwinist evolutionists. In that they are recapitulating the work of Haeckel, Galton, Huxley, Pearson, and others in a continuous list of names that gets you right up into those of the Nazi scientific establishment. I've brought that list right up to today in many posts, names of living credentialed scientists who are quoted by American and British right-wing scribblers and politicians to support their brutal policy choices and as published in mainstream magazines. As noted in many of those posts, including the one I reposted the other day, natural selection, Darwinism, identifies DEATH as a supreme engine of human progress, whether by neglect or by outright murder. That the enormous expansion of the acceptance of evolution led to the scientific field** of eugenics WHICH IS ALWAYS PRESENTED AS A HUMAN BENEFIT FOR THE SURVIVORS OF THE HURD CULLING! is certainly due to the theory of natural selection which still dominates the science of biology and every other field that attached itself to it.
That wasn't inevitable, it is quite possible that a theory of evolution not based in a melioristic and brutal Malthusian economic ranking of differential financial value may not have produced eugenics. Though I doubt that such a theory would have been so quickly accepted by the class of men who ruled science, those who accepted Darwinism. Some such theories, today, are most stridently resisted by today's Darwinists. The overarching framing of evolution and the holding that all life is related certainly didn't produce a more humane and moral view of life, not even human life. But, bypassing the topic of biological evolution, the Malthusianism, the capitalism, the wealthy class basis of Republican-fascism, even when it falsely claims that it is consonant with Christianity - WHICH IT CERTAINLY IS NOT - is no better. They having the same power now that eugenicists had before, they are far more of a danger today. That is built on the indigenous form of American fascism, white supremacy which Thomas Huxley believed was an expression of Darwinian biological superiority. They are merely a different branch of the same amoral and cultural evolution that materialist-atheism is, Darwinism being a major part of that in the most recent part of the modern period. The fact that species evolve did absolutely nothing to make that better, you need far more than science to lead you to something better than that. Science is incapable of that just as economics and secular legalism are.
Mike Johnson is no more of a Christian than Donald Trump is and Donald Trump is a thorough Mammonist and ego maniac. Both believe entirely in the economic and financial ranking of lives instead of Gospel equality. Jesus Christ said it, you cannot serve both God and Mammon. Despite what he claims, Mike Johnson serves Mammon. Every member of the House Republican Caucus does, their voting record proves it, their Christianity is a fraud right down to the last one. I believe the Gospel of Jesus and take the Epistles and Acts seriously. That results in the most radical thing there is, no materialistic ideological category can come close and the vulgar materialism of a Mike Johnson doesn't even try to. I'm sure he would hold it is heretical and, if he could, he would violently suppress it.
* Decades before Darwin used Malthus to invent natural selection the radical English democrat William Cobbett pointed out that Malthus advocating that the poor be left to starve away under "the law of nature" instead of helped proved how stupid he was because if the "law of nature" instead of the artificial laws of England and Britain ruled the poor would have dispossessed the British wealthy class of their wealth in a matter of hours and the entire basis of Malthus's economics would be obliterated. That has always been an underlying fear of those with wealth going back to when Pharaoh was having his nightmares at the end of Genesis, it is the fear of those with wealth or the fantasy they will become wealthy which leads to all of the degrees of gangster rule as opposed to egalitarian democracy in which all are truly equal.
** Science is whatever scientists of any time accept as science. The inventor of eugenics, Francis Galton was certainly one of the most eminent scientists of his time and the innovator of many fields still embedded into science today. Eugenics is still promoted within science, though not generally admitted to be that. It's as current in science as 6-day creationism is in religion, though with far more dangerous effects. If religion is answerable for bad religion - as it certainly does answer for it, I doubt there is more exigent criticism of biblical fundamentalism than within religion - then science can't get off the hook for bad science. Both are human activities founded in the choices that People make, science claims for itself a heightened ability to discern the truth from falsity, yet scientists and those who will claim, for themselves, a heightened "public understanding of science" insist that it be exempted from even that level of internal responsibility. The often naive faith we outsiders have in science, the power given to it because it is sometimes efficacious and quite profitable makes it far more dangerous than any religion. I have never seen a credentialed scientist kicked out of science for pushing climate-change denial for pay any more than its weaponeers and promoters of white supremacy have been. Science is a mess as "religion" falsely considered as a coherent category is a mess. Only science is pretended to be a unified whole as religion is mocked for its enormous diversity. A lot of that is due to the dishonesty of academic credentialing, which is a different but related topic. Education is a total mess, too. Elite universities are really fucked up.
No comments:
Post a Comment