LATE LAST night I remembered reading this in Rupert Sheldrake's book Science Set Free, it also supports my use of Denis Noble's talk in discussing politics.
The belief that genes are the basis of almost all inheritance is not just an intellectual theory but has had enormous economic and political consequences. It has resulted in the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in genome and biotechnology projects. If genes are the keys to life, then people want to own them and exploit them. But if genes are grossly overrated, genomics will never live up to the high hopes it once engendered. A few companies make useful products, but many make promises that never come true.
The gene-centered view of life has dominated science since the 1960s with baleful effects on our general culture. Jeffrey Skilling, the CEO of Enron, a corporation noted for its greed and predatory behavior, said that his favorite book was The Selfish Gene, and the selfish-gene theory was a major part of Enron's corporate culture until the company collapsed in 2001. Skilling, who is serving a long jail sentence, interpreted neo-Darwinism to mean that selfishness was ultimately good even for its victims, because it weeded out losers and forced survivors to become strong.
Genes are not individualistic and selfish, despite the rhetoric suggesting they are. As parts of larger wholes, they work cooperatively in the development and functioning of organisms. If they have any moral message for humans, it is that life depends on working together and not on ruthless competition.
A broader understanding of heredity that includes genes, gene modifications and morphic resonance opens up many new questions, and helps free the life sciences from the tunnel vision of molecular biology. It makes a big difference scientifically. For a start, the word "hereditary" is no longer synonymous with "genetic." Genes are part of heredity, not all of it. . .
Which gives only one of so many possible examples of how neo-Darwinism has had a malignant effect on the general culture of the modern period, businessmen making use of it goes back into the gilded age robber barons, John D. Rockefeller brought his understanding of natural selection into the infamous YMCA lecture he gave.
The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest. … The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.
Anticipating the repetition of the common received lie that "survival of the fittest" isn't the same thing as natural selection, Darwin, himself said they were identical in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, something which I never seem to have to stop pointing out.* But even if Darwin had not said that is irrelevant because what matters is how such people as Charles Sumner, Rockefeller or Skillings reads Darwin, or how Galton, for that matter reads and uses his ideas and how anyone uses the ideas of neo-Darwinism as popularized by those such as O. E. Wilson and Richard Dawkins.
Earlier in the same chapter Sheldrake said after a brief mention of John Stuart Mill's ideas about modifying the society to change "human nature" for the better:
On the other hand, Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, made a strong scientific case for the predominance of heredity which is often taken to support a more conservative philosophy. In his book Hereditary Genius (1869), he argued that the prominence of Britian's most distinguished families depended more on nature than on nurture. Galton was a pioneering advocate of eugenics, a word he coined. He also realized that the question of nature and nurture could be studied with the help of identical twins. He argued that identical twins had a similar hereditary constitution, while non-identical twins were no more similar than ordinary brothers and sisters. And, sure enough, he found remarkable similarities between identical twins in a wide range of characteristics including the onset of disease and even time of death.
Some political philosophers used Galton's ideas on heredity to justify the British class system, and Galton himself proposed that the state should regulate the fertility of the population in such a way to favor the improvement of human nature through selective breeding. The eugenics movement had a large following in the United States and reached its apogee in Nazi Germany. Not surprisingly, Nazi scientists were very interested in twins who were kept in special barracks. Mengele told one of his colleagues, "It would be a sin, a crime . . . not to utilize the possibilities that Auschwitz had for twin research. There would never be another chance like it."
Sheldrake gives ample citations, as he always does even in his more popular writing such as Science Set Free, If you haven't read the book, it's very interesting and provocative reading and you can check out his footnotes and citations.
I would fault him for missing several points that I made, that Darwin's theory of natural selection was the absolute inspiration and basis for Galton's eugenics, Galton said so in his Memoir in which he published Darwin's letter praising Hereditary Genius and we know that Darwin used Galton's eugenics writings to support his theory of natural selection in his later The Descent of Man (1871), rather an instance of circular reasoning, using an application of the theory in the theories support. And, his point about the use of Galton's eugenics to support the British class system is a wider instance of circular reasoning because Darwin, himself, said that one of his greatest inspirations in inventing natural selection was his reading of Thomas Malthus on Population, in which Malthus props up the British class system and the laws that produced it and the extreme economic inequality that Darwin and Galton, as well as Malthus got the better end of the stick of that inequality. As I recently pointed out you cannot possibly disassociate the British class system (and the self-interest of those who benefited from it) from natural selection because its intellectual inspiration is utterly saturated with it, supports it and identifies its inequality with the way of "nature" when it is entirely man-made, artificial and the result of intentionally pursued self-interest. The fact that the basis of that unholy trinity is based, not on natural conditions but the artifice of the English crown and aristocracy during the Tudor period and then expanded during the British period plays no small part in my complete skepticism in regard to the theory of natural selection, that and the fact that no instance of natural selection or even an artificial selection experiment has produced a new species in line with the entire stated motive of coming up with the theory to start with, to explain how the present diversity of life came about with myriads of "favored races" surviving as "unfavored" ones died out or, quite graphically in Darwinian fantasy as a result of a struggle for life or death.
He could also, in line with what I added, have noted that through Galton's eugenics, Nazism was a direct consequence of a belief in Darwin's natural selection theory because what he abbreviated in a line I've shown in a long series of posts with citations, long passages given and often links to online publications of original documents.
So, I'm hardly the only one who has noticed that this particular line of science has a strong dramatic and often extremely dangerous impact on politics and laws. I could go on at length, but I already have, many times. There's some difference between someone who knows the territory who accepts that evolution has happened and someone who is a "young earth creationist" who does or doesn't. And there's a complete difference between anyone who is familiar with the primary literature and those who are too lazy or cowardly to look at it and admit what it says.
* I should point out that in looking for material for this post I ran into several online sources (here, for example) that repeat the lie that Darwin never intended his theory to be applied to the human species when his second major book on the topic, The Descent of Man had exactly that application as its theme and motivation. I've come to believe that just about everything in that regard is either Darwinists who have never actually read what Darwin wrote or Darwinists who have read it and who are blatantly lying about it.
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