Charles Darwin, Leonard Darwin and Schallmeyer And a Note About George Darwin

Postscript as Preface

Before reposting what I wrote last year I will answer what someone said a number of months ago, that when he wrote his 1939 piece around which this part of the case is based, Leonard Darwin was a very old man and so, according to the implication of the comment, unreliable.  The person making that claim gave no factual refutation of what Leonard Darwin said or of what I said, so the evidence that he was ga-ga rested only on his age.  I'm not surprised that claim is being resorted to.  When I wrote my first piece about The Descent of Man five years ago one of Darwin's defenders said he was an old man when he wrote it.  He was 62 at the time and no one I'm aware of claimed that Charles Darwin was past it then or during the rest of his life.

Leonard Darwin had been talking about his father's eugenics beliefs for far longer than that.  Last year I mentioned the dedication to his father of his book, The Need for Eugenic Reform, in 1926.  In his dedication he does what no one is more qualified to have done, attribute his eugenics beliefs to Charles Darwin.  "For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could toward making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book.”  He was 76 the year he wrote that.  In that he directly states that eugenics was the practical application of Charles Darwin's "life's work" and that he fully believed his own father would have seen his eugenics activism as making Charles Darwin's work "of service to mankind".  No doubt all of the eugenicists saw their work as a "service to mankind" no matter how much their victims might have seen it as decidedly a disservice to them.  Part of eugenics is the assumption that eugenicists, by virtue of their superior minds and supported by Darwinian science, knew better than the "unfit" in judging what was good for them.

But even earlier than that there was the letter Leonard Darwin wrote to his fellow eugenicist, Karl Pearson,

Jan 14 1914 Dear Pearson- I was glad to get your letter, though I am sorry to find that is confirms the impression which I had that you would rather not be asked to dinner. I shall, however, continue to live in hopes that someday we may cooperate in the field of Eugenics, though I agree it is useless to attempt to do so with divergent aims. Thank you for the ticket for the lectures, which I should much like to attend. But I have a committee every afternoon nearly, leaving me weary with the difficult task of dealing with human beings. I should chuck most of it but for a sense of duty and a belief that my Father would have liked me to do what little in me lies as regards Eugenics. Yours sincerely Leonard Darwin

"I should chuck most of it but for a sense of duty and a belief that my Father would have liked me to do what little in me lies as regards Eugenics."

Which was written the day before Leonard Darwin's 64th birthday.  No doubt he felt he was honoring his father's memory on that occasion.   So, agreeing with every other member of the Darwin family, every other colleague of his father, every eugenicist I've ever read addressing this subject, Leonard Darwin's connection of his father to eugenics wasn't merely the product of his alleged senility in 1939.  And even if that is to be asserted, I have found no evidence that the factual matters in that article demonstrate dementia, everything he said that I was able to verify was accurate. That is other than that Leonard Darwin is oblivious to the malignancy of the Nazi government who he clearly believed had turned German thought "in the right direction".  Before the Nazis instituted their eugenics laws, Leonard Darwin was bemoaning in 1922 that Germans were too "conservative" in such matters and he doubted they would institute eugenics.  But that changed.   Clearly, even up till April, 1939,  he believed the Nazis' eugenics laws had turned in "the right direction".   There is nothing else I can see, in the context of his article, that he would have considered to have constituted that "right direction" but the Nazi eugenics laws.

Since last summer I've had a chance to read more of Leonard Darwin's book.  It is very disturbing, comparisons of people to animals in a stockyard -his fable of eugenic sheep a million years from now telling the tale of human dysgenesis due to the breeding of inferior stock - and a very breezy discussion of how to "eliminate" undesirables, including a discussion of the "lethal chamber" as a means and a claim that capital punishment has a decided, though "small" effect in improving the human stock.  I will probably write more about that after I've had a chance to study it more.  As I noted before and in this piece, at every point in which Leonard Darwin claimed his father would have approved of eugenics as he saw it.  Leonard Darwin was almost uniquely qualified to make that claim by 1926, as a person who knew Charles Darwin as no one who has distanced him from eugenics has or ever will.  Other than his brother and fellow eugenicist, Horace and his sister Elizabeth, Leonard was the only one alive who had grown up under Charles Darwin's care.  He was the only one of Darwin's children left by 1939, he was first among the few people who would have even met the man.  His authority to speak for his father, supported by the substance of his father's own, published words is insurmountable. In light of the facts, it is impossible for any honest defense of the man to stand against the claims made by his own son.

No one speaking today has the ability to overcome the testimony of Charles Darwins' sons and family.  No one today has the authority to speak against what they said about him.  No merely academic expert today, no matter how highly regarded, can credibly overcome what they say about their own father.  Their authority on that point is superior to his would be defenders, they heard the man at his most candid and unrecorded.

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The difficulty in this post is that there are few  of Schallmeyer's works available in English translations. I am reluctant to translate any quotes myself due to the fact that I'm not a translator and quibbling about whether or not a translation is accurate is one of the avenues that Darwin's defenders habitually take to deflect attention from the fact that German eugenicists and  scientific- racists have attributed their inspiration to Darwinism.   I've read long, tortured brawls over single words in that.   Few people reading this would be able to deal with  his unusually opaque, technical German. To fill the void left by being unable to provide much of Schallmeyer's text,  I have leaned on a secondary source to help with the case, the online version of Sheila Faith Weiss's book,  Race Hygiene and National Efficiency:The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer,  University of California Press, 1987,  I have provided a link to the Google-book of Schallmeyer's most well known work,  in the original German, as well.

A couple of months ago I came across an encomium to  Friedrich Wilhelm Schallmeyer written by Leonard Darwin, published in the April 1939 edition of Eugenics Review.   It was one of the most shocking things I've come across in researching this issue.  Among other things, Leonard Darwin notes that Schallmeyer cited his reading of On the Origin of Species and Charles Darwin as the inspiration of his eugenics while noting that Schallmeyer is the founder of German eugenics. To English speaking readers this might be a complete surprise because Schallmeyer isn't as well known to us as Francis Galton  the inventor of British eugenics.  But Schallmeyer is a famous name in German eugenics, as Leonard Darwin said he is widely considered the founder of German eugenics, presumably as an organized movement.  I have not read anyone who doesn't grant him that status.  And Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin's own son, who was a major figure in eugenics, himself, has more than enough credibility to make the connection between his father and Schallmeyer.   With what else he said and when he said it, Leonard Darwin's tribute to Schallmeyer is explosive for other reasons as well, but first things first.

There is some indication that some of  Schallmeyer's  Darwinian influence might have been through August Weismann*, who was, himself,inspired by Darwin.   Ernst Haeckel, who is credited as the foremost representative of Darwinism in Germany during its first decades is also considered an important influence on Schallmeyer**.   But in each case,  the influence through others is based in their Darwinism.  And, as we will see, the influence wasn't only indirect.  Schallmeyer, himself, said that his reading of Darwin was independent and his eugenics were attributable to his reading of On the Origin of Species.

Schallmeyer is often said to be a kind of moderate eugenicist,  unusual among eugenicists of all countries by being relatively free of racism.  Relativly.  I would reject,  the idea that any eugenics can be considered "moderate", certainly not after 1945.  Alfred Ploetz, who Leonard Darwin also discusses as Schallmeyer's possible competition for what he believed was the honor of founding German eugenics, was a racist and far more by that time,  not that Leonard Darwin mentions racism in his presentation of priority to Schallmeyer.

Which of these two pioneers [Schallmyer and Ploetz] had a greater influence in changing German thought in the right direction is not for a non-German to attempt to decide.  Schallmeyer, was anyhow first in the field. 

Leonard Darwin's language in that passage is amazing - "changing German thought in the right direction" -  he said that in  April of 1939, months before the Nazis invaded Poland,  six years after the Nazis had already started their eugenics program in 1933. Five months after Kristallnacht and the laws outlawing Jews from civil life.   In September 1939,  they would start killing "those who are not fit to live".  There is every reason for Leonard Darwin to know that's where German eugenics was headed in April of that year.   Leonard Darwin had far more than just ample reason to distance his father from eugenics, if he thought there was any way that could be done.   But he did the opposite.

Leonard Darwin explicitly attributed the direct inspiration of German eugenics to Schallmeyer reading "On the Origin of Species", specifically saying that Schallmeyer did so before he had read Galton.  And he bases that claim on Schallmeyer, himself.    Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin's son, attributed the inspiration of German eugenics, through Schallmeyer, to his father's most famous book, On the Origin of Species*. [ I will point out, again,  that Francis Galton also said that it was his reading of On the Origin of Species that inspired his eugenics.]

... He [Schallmeyer] advocated the medical registration of all citizens and the state control of the medical profession. He was greatly influenced in his writings by the “Origin of Species,” and he was at that time like the author of that work, [Charles Darwin, of course]  a believer in the inheritance of acquired characters, a belief he subsequently abandoned. His ideas were formed in the first instance before he had studied Galton's writings. Indeed it was his desire to study that author's works which led him to learn English, a task perhaps facilitated by his wide knowledge of other languages.  He started his eugenic campaign in Germany uninfluenced by Galton.

It's hard to know what part of that is most disturbing.  Beginning by pointing out that Schallmeyer advocated the medical registration of all citizens and the state control of the medical profession came shortly after Leonard Darwin noted that Schallmeyer's main area of interest.

That medical care by preserving those of weak constitution contributes to the deterioration of the race.

He wrote that right before he attributed German eugenics to his father's influence, in a period when Germany was doing exactly what Schallmeyer advocated as well as things many other, even more infamous, eugenicists advocated.

It is shocking that Leonard Darwin wouldn't try to distance his father from that idea, and not only that idea but Schallmeyer's direct advocacy that government policy be instituted in light of that.  And remember, this is in 1939, the year that Hitler invaded Poland and led Britain into WWII.  A point it's impossible to get used to.   And coming from Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin's son, a man who devoted his retirement from the military to eugenics whose interest in German eugenics over the previous two decades is documented in his own words.  That his son was honoring Schallmeyer's work as "changing German thought in the right direction" six years into the Nazi eugenics law being in effect, months before they would begin murdering the disabled -  and only a few weeks after that they would incite the beginning of World War II by invading Poland, is nothing short of devastating to the case of saving Charles Darwin from his role in eugenics and even of his indirect responsibility for its most criminal application.   By that time there were very few people who even knew Charles Darwin who were still alive and Leonard Darwin certainly knew him better than anyone else alive in 1939.   Charles Darwin had raised him.  We can only wonder at Leonard Darwin's motivation to have written what he did that, particular, year.

Schallmeyer, who died twenty years before that, can't be expected to understand how subsequent German history would make his ideas so extremely disturbing to read after the Nazis were defeated.  He certainly knew what his colleagues in German eugenics were talking about, beginning with others who influenced him,  Weisman,  Haeckel, and his rival for priority in organizing eugenics, Ploetz.   He continued,  despite his somewhat less vicious version of eugenics, knowing what a larger number of his more famous colleagues were proposing, including things such as infanticide, by that period.

Schallmeyer is an author who doesn't seem to be much available in English.  I've read some of him in German, it's hard going but his inspiration in Charles Darwin is stated in his own words,  his Darwinism is one of the things that won him the Krupp Prize. The book  was  Vererbung und Auslese,  Inheritance and selection, a title whose most troubling associations would have been unknown to Schallmeyer, perhaps.   Schallmeyer won the prize by fulfilling the requirements, which include:

"What can we learn from the theory of evolution about internal political development and state legislation?"

[Translation from :  S. F. Weiss:  Race Hygiene and National Efficiency  The eugenics of  Wilhelm Schallmeyer]

That sentence, read in the knowledge of what that line of German political development and state legislation would take within the next four decades is chilling.

I haven't found an English translation of Vererbung und Auslese and Schallmeyer's Germanis  unusually difficult, taking a great time to read, neverminnd translate.   But it is possible even for someone who reads no German to look through his text to see how much Schallmeyer mentioned Darwin and cited his ideas,  Look for "Darwin.  Darwinismus" etc.  For example,  in the first chapter, in a brief historical survey of the history of evolution,  there is this:

Ein solche stellte Ch. Darwin(1) auf.  Von ihm stammt der Geschichtspunkt der Selektion oder Auslese,  mit dem er und gleichzeitig  A. R. Wallace den Begriff der Entwicklung bereicherte. 

(1) On the Origin of Species 1858 (sic).... 

And even more so:

Umgestaltung unserer gesellschaftlichen Einrichtungen und der sittlichen Anschauungen, fuhren die Grundsatze der Darwinschen Theorie. 

In subsequent pages,  Schallmeyer attributes Darwin's inspiration for the line of German thinking, through Weismann and Haeckel, as well as others, up to himself.

So, we have Leonard Darwin attributing German eugenics to his own father's inspiration, independent of Galton and the testimony of others confirming that.

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Leonard Darwin, himself,   seems to be reluctant to talk about his father in most of the things I've read from him.  He leaves me feeling that he didn't want to name drop his own father, beyond doubt,  a big name in the world and eugenics.  I've never seen him deny that his own, extensive, involvement with eugenics was inspired by his father, as I never have from his three brothers who were, as well, active in eugenics.  He said his father was just that, explicitly, in his book The Need for Eugenics Reform:

“Dedicated to the memory of MY FATHER. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could toward making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book.”

Today,  Darwin's four sons involved in eugenics, especially Leonard, are about the largest hurdle for the  campaign to distance Charles Darwin from eugenics.   As is clear to just about anyone who will admit it,  they knew him better than anyone else, except, perhaps Emma Darwin,  their mother, Charles' wife. And as we saw in the letter Charles Darwin sent to Galton, she was the one who read Hereditary Genius to the chronically ill Darwin and he said she liked it, as well.  The case depending on the idea that someone writing after the Second World War would know what Charles Darwin thought and said better than they did can't be sustained except through obvious and total intellectual dishonesty.

Note.  George Darwin, Leonard's brother, Charles Darwin's son, who is named in his effusive letter to Francis Galton praising "Hereditary Genius", was an even earlier active eugenicist, quickly progressing from his father's and Francis Galton's work to suggest legal policies based on their assumptions. George Darwin published " On the Beneficial Restrictions to Liberty of Marriage." in 1873, two years after  The Descent of Man.    

In this article, from The International Journal of Epidemiology, it is clear that Charles Darwin was well aware of George's researches and what he was up to aiding him in the effort, even underhandedly.  

I haven't had the chance, yet, to go far into George Darwin's eugenics but it's clear that he was active during his father's life and with his knowledge and support.   I will not go so far as to say, as some have, that Charles Darwin was acting through third parties, perhaps including his own son,  when it came to more controversial aspects of proto-eugenics but it would seem a search for fingerprints is justified.  

* Leonard Darwin had been in contact with German eugenicists for decades at this point,  there are letters between him and the notorious American eugenicist, Charles Davenport, in which he is nervous that the Germans are too "conservative" to support eugenics.

I have not yet sent the invitation to Germany, because Sir A. Schuster says he believes that all the leading scientific societies in Germany are so conservative they will not recognize Eugenics.

There is also direct correspondence to Leonard Darwin from German eugenicists.

** Darwin's views on the importance of natural selection for organic and social evolution, as well as his casual remarks about the desirability of human breeding, did not fall on deaf ears in Germany. In the two decades following the prompt translation of the Origin into German in 1860, numerous scientific books and articles were published that touched on the great English naturalist's evolutionary theory. Although the overall reaction of the German biological community was mixed, many notable scientists such as Matthias Schleichen, Fritz Müller, Carl Gegenbauer, Ernst Haeckel, and August Weismann quickly became active supporters of evolution by means of natural selection. But of all the above-named scientists, Weismann stands out as especially important in the history of German eugenics. Not only did his "modified" version of Darwin's theory give the selection principle an even greater role in organic and social evolution than did the author of Origin himself, but Weismann's views also provided the biological underpinning of the mature eugenic doctrine of Schallmayer and other German race hygienists.

Sheila Faith Weiss: Race Hygiene and National Efficiency:The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer,  University of California Press 1987 p. 30

One of the best known German popularizers of Darwin, and the most significant for Schallmayer's intellectual development, was the combative and controversial Jena marine biologist, Ernst Haeckel. In his address to the annual conference of the Association of German Scientists and Physicians in 1863 at Stettin, a speech viewed by Kelly as "the public debut of German Darwinism," Haeckel went far beyond the usually cautious Darwin in discussing the broader implications of the new theory. Unlike Darwin, who, in his Origin , did not discuss human evolution for fear of criticism, Haeckel immediately included human beings as the end point of a long evolutionary chain connecting protozoan to people. Throughout his life—in his numerous popular texts and public lectures—Haeckel never tired of fleshing out the larger philosophical and social meaning of Darwinism. The Jena zoologist's rather dubious philosophical system, monism, was a direct outgrowth of his Darwinian outlook,   [Weiss p. 33]   

N.B. I will deal with Haeckel and Darwin in another part of this series.  In the years and decades after Haeckel's bold exposition of Darwinism made him its foremost representative in Germany, Charles Darwin thanked him and encouraged his version of Darwinism.  Charles Darwin's and Thomas Huxley's repeated endorsement of Haeckel and the translations, citations and endorsements of him that came from Darwin's inner circle prevent any honest case being made that Haeckel was some kind of rogue Darwinist.  

Charles Darwin and Francis Galton The Father of Eugenics

As his defenders will point out,  Charles Darwin died before his cousin Francis Galton gave eugenics its name.   That is true,  Darwin died on April 19, 1882,  Galton named his "science" "eugenics" the next year.  That is the first life preserver that is thrown to the mythical, eugenics-free Charles Darwin.  However, Galton first used the word "eugenics" in his book "Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development".   In his introduction to that book, he says:

Since the publication of my work on Hereditary Genius in 1869, I have written numerous memoirs, of which a list is given in an earlier page, and which are scattered in various publications. They may have appeared desultory when read in the order in which they appeared, but as they had an underlying connection it seems worth while to bring their substance together in logical sequence into a single volume. I have revised, condensed, largely re-written, transposed old matter, and interpolated much that is new; but traces of the fragmentary origin of the work still remain, and I do not regret them. 

Clearly, Galton dated the beginning of his "science" to his book "Hereditary Genius", though he worked the idea in the years before he published "Inquiries into Human Faculty".  That is a vital point in determining what part Charles Darwin played as inspiring eugenics.   In chapter twenty of his Memories of My Life,  Francis Galton explicitly credits Charles Darwin as the inspiration of his research that produced "Hereditary Genius".

THE publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science...






... I was encouraged by the new views to pursue many inquiries which had long interested me, and which clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race.

Galton goes on to say:

After many months of hard work, I wrote, in I865, two preliminary papers in Macmillan's Magazine, entitled "Hereditary Talent and Character" .  These contain the germs of many of my subsequent memoirs, the contents of which went to the making of the following books: Hereditary Genius, 1869; English Men of Science, 1874; Human Faculty, 1883; Natural Inheritance, 1889; and to my quite recent writings on Eugenics.  On re-reading these articles, I must say that, considering the novel conditions under which they were composed, and notwithstanding some crudeness here and there, I am surprised at their justness and comprehensiveness.

This names "The Origin of Species" as the inspiration of  articles and the book, "Hereditary Genius" in the line that includes "Human Faculty.... "and to my quite recent writings on Eugenics".  There is no possible better authority than Francis Galton on the question of what inspired him to invent eugenics.   And since the book that inspired Galton was written by Charles Darwin, he is named by Galton as inspiring eugenics.   Unless, sometime in the three years remaining to Francis Galton, he retracted that attribution, there could not be more solid evidence tying Charles Darwin to eugenics, nothing else could loosen the knots doing that.

However, there are things that could tighten them.  Francis Galton was only too glad to provide that in the same chapter:


Hereditary Genius made its mark at the time, though subjected to much criticism, no small part of which was captious or shallow, and therefore unimportant. The verdict which I most eagerly waited for was that of Charles Darwin, whom I ranked far above all other authorities on such a matter. His letter, given below, made me most happy. 

DOWN, BECKENHAM, KENT, S.E.

3rd December

"MY DEAR GALTON,--I have only read about 50 pages of your book (to Judges), but I must exhale myself, else something will go wrong in my inside. I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original--and how Well and clearly you put every point! George, who has finished the book, and who expressed himself in just the same terms, tells me that the earlier chapters are nothing in interest to the later ones! It will take me some time to get to these latter chapters, as it is read aloud to me by my wife, who is also much interested. You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think this is an eminently important difference. I congratulate you on producing what I am convinced will prove a memorable work. I look forward with intense interest to each reading, but it sets me thinking so much that I find it very hard work; but that is wholly the fault of my brain and not of your beautifully clear style.--Yours most sincerely,

(Signed) "CH. DARWIN"


So, Charles Darwin effusively endorsed "Hereditary Genius" as he was reading it, or rather having it read to him. Did he change his mind after finishing it and reject its quite developed eugenics? No. We know that from the authority of Charles Darwin, himself. In his second major book setting out his account of evolution, The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin repeatedly and enthusiastically cited and endorsed both Hereditary Genius and other articles by Francis Galton, as well as other eugenicists.  Just a sample of Darwin's citations of Galton's eugenics.

- With man we see similar facts in almost every family; and we now know, through the admirable labours of Mr. Galton (10. 'Hereditary Genius: an Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences,' 1869.), that genius which implies a wonderfully complex combination of high faculties, tends to be inherited; and, on the other hand, it is too certain that insanity and deteriorated mental powers likewise run in families. -

- This, as Mr. Galton (49. See his remarkable work on 'Hereditary Genius,' 1869, p. 349.

 -  see 'Anthropological Review,' as before cited. Mr. Galton in 'Macmillan's Magazine,' Aug. 1865*, p. 318; also his great work, 'Hereditary Genius,' 1870.) Most of my remarks are taken from these three authors

 - See, also, Mr. Galton, 'Hereditary Genius,' pp. 352-357, for observations to the above effect.

The connections between Charles Darwin and eugenics begin at the start of it, with the attribution of the man who invented the "science" and who coined the word. In the very terms that Galton gives as the beginning of eugenics, Charles Darwin confirms that attribution by his letter to Galton and his laudatory citations in what was supposed to be a major science publication.   Short of subsequent retractions from both of them, the charge that Charles Darwin inspired eugenics has to stand as proven.  Not only suggested, not only inferred but proven.

Charles Darwin's son,  Leonard Darwin**, succeeded Francis Galton as the head of  the British Eugenics Society in 1911.  Three of Darwin's other sons,  George (the one he mentions in his letter to Galton), Francis, and Horace Darwin were also active in eugenics, as were numerous other members of Charles Darwin's family.

No one who never met Charles Darwin, no one in the post WWII period when the eugenics-free Charles Darwin seems to have been constructed, knew Charles Darwin better than his own children and those who did what none of us has done, talked with the man, unrecorded.

If any of them believed their eugenics activity was a violation of their father's ideas, I've never found evidence of that.   Other than Charles Darwin, there is no higher authority in this question of what Charles Darwin thought about this "science" than his own children.  Just as there is no higher authority in what inspired Galton to invent eugenics than Francis Galton,  himself.

In the seven years I've been looking into this question, I have never found anyone who knew Charles Darwin who distanced him from eugenics,  I've never found anyone who knew him deny his role in inspiring the eugenics of Francis Galton or in their own eugenics.  I have never found anyone trying to do that until after the Nazis showed the world what eugenics could turn into, discrediting the "science" for a generation***.   The events of that time put anyone wanting to keep Charles Darwin as the face of evolutionary science in a difficult position.   Natural selection, in the form of "On the Origin of Species", was cited as the inspiring idea of eugenics by the man who invented eugenics.   Natural selection and the allegation that human civilization impeded it and that with natural selection impeded, the human species would fall into ruin was the foundation of eugenics****, it was the only reason that it developed as a legal and political application of purported science.

The large majority of the evidence confirming that evolution is real has been discovered since Charles Darwin died.   Other explanations of change in organisms have been discovered, sometimes introduced to the opposition and eventually grudging acceptance of those who demand that natural selection is the supreme law of biology.   In the most extreme cases the advocates of natural selection attempt to extend it to areas outside of the origin of species in biology,  even quite irrationally and with absolutely no evidence.

I don't think evolutionary science needs Charles Darwin in 2012, certainly not the phony, eugenics-free Charles Darwin that is the common received POV required to be a respectable member of the "educated class".  Quite frankly,  I think the major use of that Charles Darwin is an entirely non-scientific one, it is an icon of ideology, class status, social acceptability and mutual admiration, permission to disdain anyone who dares to violate the myth. He is an icon of atheism and materialism, as he clearly was in his own time and, by his readings of Galton, Huxley, Haeckel and others, with his full knowledge.

The biggest irony of the cult of Charles Darwin among those who believe themselves to be paragons of intellectual life is that, in the arguments I've had on this issue, I've generally discovered that those who insist on their phony St. Charles Darwin have never read much if anything he wrote.  They couldn't possibly have read him and still maintain that he was not an ardent supporter of Galton's developing eugenics, or of Ernst Haeckel's even more extreme exposition of it within his materialist monist system. 

Creationists, both in their primitive form and in the ID industry, have done that, they've poured over the record left by Charles Darwin, his family and associates and his followers, and have discovered the same quotes, the same absolutely solid case that Charles Darwin is absolutely tied to eugenics and its legacy only means that that record has been there and always will be.   They are nothing if not dedicated to discovering any ammunition that is provided to them by Darwin and his friends. There is nothing illegitimate or unfair of their honest use of that record, though some have distorted it, a sin they share with many of his supporters.  Charles Darwin's own words are there for anyone to read, to understand and to comment on.  Having read him, fully, on this charge, that Darwin was a eugenicist, there is no doubt as to his guilt.  There isn't even a reasonable doubt that he might not have been.

To the extent that evolutionary science keeps Charles Darwin as its figure head, it will find he's a political liability. The denial of his record in regard to eugenics is a lie, it is unworthy of people pretending to uphold science and the truth, the result of denying that record is a failed PR campaign, a trade mark that doesn't work with most people.  The best the Darwin Fan Club can hope for is a slight mitigation to what that record shows.   If they continue to deny that record, they certainly don't do anything for evolutionary science,  I'd guess the Darwin cult is more likely to impede progress than to help it.  To the extent they insist on keeping their artificial Darwin,  it is a good indication of how much more they value ideology instead of science.

Note:  I have not discussed Charles Darwin saying that Emma Darwin, his wife, read him Hereditary Genius, probably during one of Darwin's many bouts of illness, and that she seems, according to her husband, to be interested in Galton's earliest eugenics as well.  I haven't looked at her diaries to see if she said anything about that, herself.   I have never read anyone taking note of her in relation to eugenics in the last six years of looking into this question.


*  Perhaps the same article that Galton cites as early eugenics material in his Memoir.

**  I will be citing Leonard Darwin in the next part of this series.

***  I will contend that eugenics is gaining traction in a future post.  That is what makes this important.

****  This will also figure importantly later in this series.  It is important to note that Alfred Russell Wallace, the man who is considered the co-discoverer, I would say co-inventor, of the theory of natural selection, vehemently denounced eugenics as pseudo-scientific and the meddling of "an arrogant scientific priestcraft".   So, the idea that natural selection necessarily leads to eugenics is clearly false, though it seems to more often than not.  I might get around to giving my theory of why Wallace's thought on that question developed so differently than the Darwin side of it did.

A Note about Documentary Evidence and Primary Sources

Having written several posts on Darwin's place in the history of eugenics, Social Darwinism and related matters during the past six years, one of the most common dodges his champions will make is that you've provided "no evidence".  That, even as entire paragraphs and sections of books, citations and links to books and letters BY CHARLES DARWIN, the same from Galton, Haeckel, Leonard Darwin, Francis Darwin, and others are right there on the post attached to where the automatic dodge of "no evidence" is made.  That, along with the recently invented phrase "quote mining" are the first line of defense of the Darwin myth among those who can't argue his record*.

As I mention in my response to that charge in the comments last year,  documentary evidence is not the same as the physical evidence that science is based on.  That difference isn't because the evidence of science is superior, in some ways documentary evidence could be considered better.  One of the most important of those ways is that documentary evidence of the kind I'm using has little of the ambiguity of physical evidence.   A written document is made to transmit information, it is made intentionally to inform the reader of what the writer intended to say.  That is not something that can be said about physical evidence which must be interpreted to achieve even part of that level of meaning.

That Charles Darwin said something in a book or letter can be known to within the range of absolute certainty.  That he said it more than once can be as well and that magnifies the level of certainty that what was said was what he meant.  And there is a very good reason to go farther than that.   That he said so in scientific citations in a book he intended to be taken as having the reliability of science is about as strong a proof as possible that he agrees with what is said, especially when he cited it with gushing enthusiasm, as he did with both Galton and Haeckel.  A scientist, speaking as a scientist,  must be accountable for an even greater level of certainty.  That must be held as the price for the, at times inflated, reputation science  and scientists enjoy**.   That Charles Darwin said those things and that his approval is approval, is known to within a much narrower range of possible error than almost anything that he ever used to support natural selection.

What Darwin said constitutes the primary record about his career and his thinking.  What Galton said, what Schallmeyer and Haeckel said about their work is the primary source information relevant to knowing what they said, what they wrote and what they thought and, most importantly, advocated through those texts.  Anything honest said about that will have to be based, at the first instance, on their own words.  Secondary material doesn't carry the same evidentiary power as the primary material and, in this matter, it is frequently polluted with ideological and professional twisting and, I strongly suspect, the knowledge that whenever Charles Darwin's eugenics, racism, class consciousness, sexism etc. are mentioned the Darwin Industry machine will attack.

That said, I don't think historians are nearly assertive enough in supporting the validity of their best work, the work in which they report with as little bias as possible, what the documentary record shows.   I think the best of history has to stand as at least as good as the best of science in the representation of reality.  That history deals with an entirely more complicated range of  life and phenomena than science makes it extremely important, especially in regard to human conduct, individually and collectively.  That makes history extremely important.  Something I think historians should remember in their relationship with science, which is not able to address the same range of things.  Especially with arrogant scientists.  I don't think historians need to be cowed by the prestige of science.  The entirely reputation of science is based in its ability to, sometimes, give us information of great reliability about the physical universe.   But history can produce at least the same level of reliability.   There are things in the historical record that can be settled to a certainty rare in science.  If historians are met with scientific arrogance, that should be their answer.

It is absolutely certain that Darwin said what he said in The Descent of Man, taking account changing material in different editions.  He is responsible for the editions of his work that were made under his care, he said what he said in them, he said what he said in letters that exist in his hand.  When he says something more than once, the primary record confirms itself.  When Darwin said something and he didn't retract it, it stays said for as long as anyone can read what he said.

* The traditional practice of objecting to dishonest and incomplete quotation used to be to present fuller quotes or a larger context.  That, though, requires familiarity with the subject matter being disputed.  Habitually reciting the term "quote mining" as is done on so many science blogs, should be seen for what it is, a lazy, ill informed shortcut that as easily distorts the  actual record as it does even identifying an actual act of dishonest quotation.   After having seen how it is used I never see or hear it without suspecting the person saying it is too ignorant to be discussing the topic.  As I noted in my post linked to at the beginning of this piece, it is something that Darwin seems to have done, himself and that the Wikipedia article on "quote mining", itself, contains a major instance of it. [Or, considering the frequent ideologically motivated "editing" of Wikipedia, it was at the time I first wrote this.  I haven't bothered to go back and look at it and anyone who reads this who wanted to could "edit" it before you read this.]

** Anyone who is held to be a representative of the truth, anyone who takes that on as a profession, must be held to that level of honesty and sincerity.  Judges, prosecutors, clergy.... all of them should be held to that standard of honesty because they present their positions as being that honest.

On The Origin of Charles Darwin's Eugenics and Haeckel's Monism Redux

You have asked me a number of times to repost the series I did about the relationship of Charles Darwin with eugenics and with his foremost German disciple, Ernst Haeckel.  That topic is about the most controversial one I've written about because it violates a widely held but totally false line of propaganda that arose after World War Two exonerating Charles Darwin from involvement with eugenics and Haeckel.  There is no more enduring and potent lie in modern life and in the culture of what is considered to be the educated class of the English Speaking Peoples.  It is a lie which, being untrue, deserves to be exposed on that basis alone.  No one should ever be faulted for telling the truth or of refuting a lie.  That the ideas of eugenics and of Haeckel have had the most horrible consequences, destroying many people, blighting the lives of many makes exposing the lie all the more important.  As I hope to show later this year, it is a legacy that didn't die in 1945 and is most unfortunately resurgent today.  If there is a better reason to write anything, I'd like someone to tell me what it is.

That the absolutely required belief in and recitation of the myth that Darwin was entirely innocent in regard to those hot topics is best refuted by a full reading of the record that Darwin left in his own words, in his books, especially The Descent of Man, later editions of On the Origin of Species, his numerous letters to Haeckel and others.   The record of what Darwin, himself, said endorsing Francis Galton's eugenics and Ernst Haeckel's even more extreme developments of Darwin's theory of natural selection has to be covered up or lied about to pretend he was innocent of saying what he did.  He endorsed both of those men and their books in which they presented the ideas that have made them infamous, repeatedly, beginning in the 1860s and continuously until Darwin died in 1882.

Most seriously of all, Darwin promoted both the eugenics of Galton and the far more extreme ideas of Haeckel as representing scientific knowledge.  For one of the most famous scientists in all of history to have endorsed those as being reliable scientific knowledge must bind him, his professional reputation and moral character to what he said.   The enormous confidence that is demanded as the rightful property of what is published as science, with the enormous confidence in the word of scientists, individually and as a whole, with the enormous potential for harm as well as good coming from what scientists say, binding them to their own words and the results of those words is the lowest price that scientists must be charged in exchange for that privilege. 

I have searched long and in vain for any kind of retraction or change of mind on the part of Darwin on these topics and have found that he never changed his mind in those endorsements.  That record, in the absence of any clear retraction by Darwin in as public and formal a manner as he made those endorsements, must stand as what he really intended to say.  

Almost as important in judging these questions is the testimony of those closest to Charles Darwin, his children, several of whom had their own careers in science.   As I have had to point out, repeatedly,  they knew Charles Darwin more intimately than anyone alive today or, indeed, anyone I have encountered who has tried to distance Darwin from eugenics and Haeckel.  I have never read an assertion by a single person who knew Charles Darwin, in person, which has done anything but repeat what a reading of Darwin's record shows, that he supported both those and others in eugenics.
Indeed, four of Darwin's sons were active in the eugenics movement, especially Leonard Darwin who was a major figure in its promotion up to and even during the Second World War.  As I discovered while researching my series, his brother, George Darwin, was one of the earliest enthusiasts for their cousin Galton's ideas.  Charles Darwin names him as recommending Galton's first book developing eugenics before his father read it*.  George Darwin's early articles denoted as "eugenics" by none less than his brother Francis Darwin, the author of the earliest collection of their father's letters and, perhaps, his earliest biographer.   Francis Darwin notes their father's full support for those articles.  

My series dealt with all of those issues, making what I believe is an irrefutable case proving that Darwin was not the eugenic-free figure of modern mythology and that, even more troubling, Ernst Haeckel was not a rogue Darwin distorter but a man whose work had Darwin's full praise, endorsement and promotion.   You can look at the citations included and judge for yourself.   I don't know if I will go back to finish the pieces I began as part of that series, making the case into the generations up to the war and up to today.  Even the most recent advocates for eugenics, Francis Crick,  James Watson,  W. D. Hamilton, and well known Darwinists still living, all base their eugenics on Charles Darwin in the form of his natural selection.   If Darwin had never given any of his myriad endorsements of Galton's, Greg's, Haeckel's, Fick's, and others' eugenics  ideas, any of them who cited him as their inspiration would cement that part of the case that he inspired eugenics, and all of them did.  

I will repost the pieces from last summer over the next few weeks, revising them and adding to them as seems fit. 

* Or rather had it read to him by Emma Darwin, his wife.  Charles Darwin said she also liked Galton's book, though I haven't read anything by Emma Darwin on the subject.  

Family Emergency Will Not Be Posting The Rest of the Week

I'm typing this while sitting in the emergency room waiting area waiting for word on what is up with our very old mother.  It could be serious or it could be another time when the doctors can't decide something is wrong.  Either way, I will not be doing any writing this week.  

Update:  The hospital has wi-fi so I might get a bit done, though no extensive research on new material.  I have decided to post some of my old research into Darwin's eugenics and his relation to Haeckel's monism.  

Mercedes Sosa: Gracias a la Vida

Asking Stupid Questions Will Get You Published In The Right Peer Reviewed Journals

Here is the first item in the questionnaire, the "Consequentialist Thinking Scale",  behind a study being commented on among the atheist chorus online:

Consequentialist Thinking Scale

Which of the following statements best characterizes your position on killing? (Select one)

It is never morally permissible to kill someone. 

If killing someone will produce greater good than bad consequences, then it is morally permissible to kill that person.

If killing someone will produce greater good then bad consequences, then it is morally obligatory to kill that person.  

The several atheists I've seen citing the news stories (I doubt any of the have read the study or even this questionnaire, I doubt they've read the abstract in large number) are crowing that the results show conservatives and religious people are "deontological" thinkers as opposed to liberals who the authors, reportedly, say are "consequentialist" thinkers.  Well as a religious person who is very liberal and who has written on this in the past, that result doesn't cover my thinking.   I am just about 100% certain that nothing about this "scientific" study tells us a thing about how anyone really thinks or acts, though it might tell us something about how people like to think they think or act or, which I believe is often the case, how people believe they're supposed to say they think.

If you, as I did, asked who got to decide what the "greater good" and "bad consequences" are in deciding whether or not to go with the second or third option, that information doesn't seem to be provided.  If you, as I did, saw some problem with both the way the answers were structured and the range of possible responses restricted you are, apparently, thinking too hard for a study published in a reviewed psychological journal.  Since they state, at the bottom of the "Scale" the form of citation they want, I'll give that the way they asked.

Piazza, J., & Sousa, P. (in press).  Religiosity, Political Orientation, and Consequentialist Moral Thinking.  Social Psychological and Personality Science. 

Also useful to know is what they claim for their survey,  here is that section of the "Scale" document.

Scores for each action range from 1 (Deontological response) to 2 (Weak Consequentialist response) to 3 (Strong Consequentialist response).  Aggregate scores to form an overall index of consequentialist thinking style; higher scores represent increasing sensitivity to consequences in moral decision making

Following the one about killing, a number of other issues, including torture, abortion, lying, stealing, committing incest, cannibalism, betrayal (whatever that means) deception, malicious gossip, breaking promises, breaking the law, committing treason (betrayal of your country or defying governing authorities), posed in virtually identical form with the first one.  I'll point out, to start with that in the United States treason has a quite specific legal definition which I don't think this one is consistent with. And "betrayal" isn't defined so that it would be impossible to come to any real answer to the question that honestly means anything.   I'll add that anyone who says that it is always wrong to lie, as if that were the way they would govern their lives in each and every possible situation should be suspected as either lying or not thinking very hard about the question.

Frankly, if someone gave me this survey I'd have to hand it back saying that it was impossible to come to any kind of honest response in the way that they ask the question.  For example, it's possible to believe that abortion is always or virtually always wrong but to 1. admit that the state shouldn't be able to tell women that they have to carry a pregnancy to term, 2. admit that women who need abortions will get them and that the only alternative to legal, safe abortions are illegal ones or, in many cases, infanticide. 3. etc.

In one of my favorite passages about statistical analysis and how the correct form of it can produce stupid, often predetermined results is, " if you pick a stupid prior, you can get a stupid posterior."  Or, in this case, ask a stupid question you'll get a stupid answer.  And a question can be stupid because it won't come up with an answer nuanced enough to tell you anything.  This is one of the many examples of that kind of stupid question.  There is no way for this questionare to tell you anything about 1. how people really think about these questions, 2. how they would behave in a real life situation.   Anyone who doesn't admit that they would lie to the Nazis to save Jews is a moral moron who is probably lying or too stupid to tell you what they'd do in real life.  If they betrayed Jews to Nazis knowing they would likely be tortured and murdered, the motive is unlikely to be true to a strong sense of moral dictates against lying.

Update:  Since I'm feeling guilty about not doing what I should do and weeding because the temperature is too close to 90 degrees, I'll point out a few other problems.

1. The "deontologicalist" option is a simple black and white one with no alternative to the thing "always" being wrong.  Few, if any, people would deny the possibility that it is moral to take the chance of killing someone who is trying to kill someone else.  The alleged "consequentialist" option comes in a grey and a black and white option.

2.  I doubt anyone really takes the extreme "consequentialist" option in real life, though I can well imagine people flaky enough to pretend they do.  Really, a moral requirement to have an abortion, torture someone, commit incest.   Let me just repeat that last one,  the loony psychologists asked people if because someone, undesignated by their question, perhaps a father's or a mother's boyfriend, decides that it would produce "greater good than bad consequences" that they would, by, uh, "virtue?" of that "IT WOULD BE MORALLY OBLIGATORY TO HAVE SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH A FAMILY MEMBER!!!"  Just in case someone looking at this didn't bother to look at the link to the "Scale" document where that really is one of the insane options that these researchers gave and which made their study worthy of inclusion in a peer reviewed journal.   The next one is about a moral obligation to commit cannibalism.  In case that last one didn't set off this scientific instrument.

Second update:   Yikes.  Did I ever make some typos in the version of this that has been up for the past several hours.  I should have a blog for this time of year called "Bloggging on Benadryl."  I just created it so, I got dibs on the name.

Stephen Colbert About The Death of His Mother 

Mercedes Sosa - Al Jardín de la República

MERCEDES SOSA. LA FLOR AZUL

The Decadence of Physics And Cosmology Is a Product of Materialism and Fundamentalist Atheism

I have kept close to the point of view of natural science throughout the book.  Every natural science assumes certain data uncritically, and declines to challenge the elements between which its own 'laws' obtain, and from which its own deductions are carried on. Psychology, the science of finite individual minds, assumes as its data (1) thoughts and feelings, and (2) a physical world in time and space with which they coexist and which (3) they know.  Of course these data themselves are discussable; but the discussion of them (as of other elements) is called metaphysics and falls outside the province of this book.  This book, assuming that thoughts and feelings exist and are vehicles of knowledge, thereupon contends that psychology when she has ascertained the empirical correlation of the various sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditions of the brain, can go no farther -- can go no farther, that is, as a, natural science. If she goes farther she becomes metaphysical.  All attempts to explain our phenomenally given thoughts  as  products of deeper-lying entities (whether the latter be named 'Soul,' 'Transcendental Ego,' 'Ideas,' or 'Elementary Units of Consciousness') are metaphysical.  This book consequently rejects both the associationist and the spiritualist theories; and in this strictly positivistic point of view consists the only feature of it for which I feel tempted to claim originality.  Of course this point of view is anything but ultimate.  Men must keep thinking; and the data assumed by psychology, just like those assumed by physics and the other natural sciences, must some time be overhauled.   The effort to overhaul them clearly and thoroughly is metaphysics; but metaphysics can only perform her task well when distinctly conscious of its great extent.  Metaphysics fragmentary, irresponsible, and half-awake, and unconscious that she is metaphysical, spoils two good things when she injects herself into a natural science.  And it seems to me that the theories both of a spiritual agent and of associated 'ideas' are, as they figure in the psychology-books, just such metaphysics as this.  Even if their results be true, it would be as well to keep them, as thus presented, out of psychology as it is to keep the results of idealism out of physics.

William James, The Principles of Psychology [1890]

William James's extreme caution in conditioning his treatment of human minds with the methods and presumptions of natural science in 1890 is admirable if not question begging in the extreme.  Later treatments, from then up to today, would take his presumptions without the enormous range of governors and breaking systems that James clearly knew were essential to keep psychology from veering wildly this way and that.  If people engaged in the study of the mind would forget and ignore those cautions almost immediately,  those who took assumptions from that study but who were engaged in studying non-thinking objects would prove to, most often, go totally overboard.

Why psychologists at the beginning of the formal study of psychology would begin with the assumption that minds, thinking, consciousness, etc. were the kind of "thing" that the methods of natural science was invented to study is an interesting one.  There was no reason to believe that minds, invisible, unobservable, incredibly variable and obviously immaterial are subject to the same kinds of physical forces, conditions and mathematical analysis that objects are.  James could be forgiven for his naive faith in the power of scientific methods to divine such occult entities in 1890, he hadn't seen the subsequent history of Freudianism, Behaviorism, various "Humanistic" and other psychological systems, as they rose, in some cases dominated, gained political and, so, legal power, wreaked havoc in lives and nurtured insane societal delusions and, eventually, teetered and crashed into the bone yard of discontinued science, filling an enormous section of that seldom visited cemetery.  If, as I heard a biologist say recently, nutrition isn't the most uniformly successful of the sciences, psychology certainly is less successful.

It wouldn't be surprising if a lot of the earliest assertion of the scientific nature of the new field of psychology was due to university politics, using the prestige of science to gain support for including it into the curriculum.  There was certainly little to no evidence to support that designation at the time.

I no longer believe that human minds are entities like physical objects that are susceptible to scientific and mathematical analysis of the kind which constitutes natural science.  I am entirely skeptical of that presumption based on the failure of the effort and the fact that enormous amounts of human thinking, human perception, the reports of  people of the experiences of which those people are the only possible source of information that have to be set aside in order to make some alleged scientific claims about them even cohere as a story.  I think psychology is an enormous effort at regularizing the file drawer effect into a science.  I think other behavioral sciences also practice that, collecting confirming confirmation, discounting or debunking anything that is inconvenient for the researcher or scribbler.  Ignoring the enormous range of possible problems with the effort that no less a figure than William James warned of at the very beginning of the "science".

I've read that James gradually diminished his involvement with psychology, I wouldn't be surprised that as he saw it develop he saw some of these problems with it.


In reading about the truly bizarre, largely atheist generated, idea of Boltzmann Brains, I've come to believe that they are an artifact of the materialistic and scientistic faith in the power of, not only scientific method, but of the power of the mathematics of probability and statistics.  The idea that these disembodied cosmic brains, remarkably anthropomorphic as considered in everything I've read, could come about by the power of probability is an extraordinary act of faith, not far removed from the power of the Creator to create human minds which the atheists among these physicists, cosmologists, etc. ridicule.  Considering the place that mention of that Creator, the desire to debunk God, plays in the talk surrounding this stuff, it's clearly relevant to the consideration.  As with the cult of the universe creators, they set up physics and, now it is obvious, mathematics as competing creators, coming up with their own competing creation mythology and, now, the equivalent of the invention of orders of archangels, gods, demons, etc.  After all, if probability creates thinking entities so much like us, then probability, operating in enormous time spans, even into effective infinity, must generate all kinds of minds, those which we can understand as more like animal minds, perhaps units of volition or taxis comparable to those of bacteria, and an infinite number of conscious entities we can't even conceive of.   If anything, the accounts of creation deriving from the Jewish tradition is parsimonious in the extreme by comparison.  As an aside, this stuff is such a basic violation and refutation of Occam's Razor that no one who makes recourse to it should ever be able to wield that weapon against the ideas of anyone else.

Given the growing range of supreme entities that contemporary atheism is generating, various quantum vacuums, other alleged originators of the universe, random fluctuations, probabilities,.... and the mania for aggressive, hegemonic atheism in the culture of science, and so in wider academic life in 2013, things will only get worse.  Some physicists and cosmologists have been on this quest to use science to destroy religion for a couple of centuries, the literature of that attempt is not an inconsiderable part of the wider literature of and about science.   These days that effort is bigger than it ever has been, more public, more aggressive, more conceited and more arrogant.   Of course, the effort to destroy God was never supposed to fall within the study of the physical universe as it can be subjected to the observation and analysis the comprises science.  It is decidedly extra-curricular, an extension of scientific methods beyond anywhere they can competently be applied.  To deny that is to erase the limits of those methods, without which science ceases to exist as a definable entity.  Now that physicists and cosmologists and others are delving into a consideration of invisible, disembodied minds created from probabilistic fluctuations as part of the effort that decadence has reached an extraordinary range.  Those guys, the self declared champions of science and mathematical logic, who would make those the substitute for God in human culture, have turned that effort in on itself and it has imploded into an ever deeper and darker spiral of metaphysical fantasy.  Turning probability into God carries the added irony that probability is as much a human conception as anything found in Genesis or any other attempt at explaining creation.

There is no evidence at all that human minds obey or operate within laws of probability.  There is no evidence that minds of any kind are created out of some kind of probabilistic fluctuations.  The validation of probability is found in the physical universe of non-living objects.   The most that probability seems to be able to do is to come up with a range of chances that a universe capable of bodies capable of hosting consciousness exist.  There is no evidence, whatsoever, of the power of probability to create disembodied brains.  That these "brain only" types discuss such stuff seriously should show the world how hypocritical and silly they can be.   In the end probability is a rough human attempt to impose order on the observable universe, it isn't a force within itself.  It is a net that can catch what it can, anything that escapes it would be imperceptible to probabilistic analysis.  The same is true for any such method.  None of them are supreme, in the end.

Update:  Thinking about it, I'll give you the next paragraph in William James's text.

I have therefore treated our passing thoughts as integers, and regarded the mere laws of their coexistence with brain-states as the ultimate laws for our science.   The reader will in vain seek for any closed system in the book. It is mainly a mess of descriptive details, running out into queries which only a metaphysics alive to the weight of her task can hope successfully to deal with.  That will perhaps be centuries hence; and meanwhile the best mark of health that a science can show is this unfinished-seeming front.

The treatment of thoughts as integers is a pretty drastic reduction and conflation of what were unobservable, intangible, immaterial experiences, not known in anyone else but by secondhand report of unknowable though presumably variable accuracy and honesty was an extremely bold, if not wild, if not obviously audacious, leap of assumption.  The extremely tenuous attempt to impose order and make reliable predictions about thoughts and, withi its own cargo of assumptions and prejudices, behavior, should have been shown James how far out on a limb he was climbing.  Perhaps his brother and his colleagues in producing fiction could have advised him of doing that with entirely made up people.

The next clause about their "coexistence with brain-states" is both audacious and, obviously, an essential warning to the attempt.  Assuming coexistence assumes that the thoughts are as real as the brain-states and as valid.  James rejected the attempt to turn those assumptions into a "closed system".  Almost immediately his fellow psychologists and those who began to use the new science would start constructing closed systems.  That lead within a decade of James's death the rise of Watsonian Behaviorsm and onward to the denial that thoughts were much of anything but mistaken physical processes.  The metaphysics that James considered essential for any kind of successful treatment of his "descriptive details" would seem to be unlikely to come from the science that psychology that aspires, eternally and unsuccessfully, to be.   Now that the materialists as physicists and cosmologists are imposing their biases on the problems of studying thoughts, minds, even entirely fictitious "brains," things will only get worse.

Ah, Donc Je Comprends

Someone mentioned to me that "Ste. Jean-Bap'st" is coming up on the 24th, so French Canadian music has been going through my head.  Though my family is Irish Catholic, there was no Irish parish in my town so we went to a French Canadian church.  I'm old enough to remember when the feast day of St. John the Baptist was really celebrated among some French Canadians in some towns in New England, especially among those whose origins passed through Quebec.   That was in the generation when a mixed marriage where I come from meant an English speaking Catholic marrying  a Yankee protestant, and when it was a French speaking Catholic marrying a Yankee, well, in some circles, it was about as welcome as gay marriage was about twenty years ago.

I'm also just old enough to remember some old folks listening to 78s of La Bolduc,  I had no idea who it was they were playing but I remember the music.  The younger folks listening to Edith Piaf and Yves Montand, there was actually French language commercial radio programming around here back then.  La Bolduc went through a bit of a re-birth when a collection of her complete recordings was issued in the 1990s  which was when I first had a name to put with the music.

Chez Ma Tante Gervais

Je M'En Vais au Marché

Les Femmes 

Quand J'étais chez Mon Père

Jean-Baptiste Beaufouette

Another site with lots of information about La Bolduc is at Collections Canada.  The mp3s are from the Virtual Gramophone which has about her entire discography, oddly enough, cataloged under Bolduc, Édouard.

Materialism In The News: Flying Teapots (which no one believes in) Are Superstition, Bolzmann Brains Are Just Groovy

Getting used to the new, evidence free, physics and its even more up and coming twin, physics and, presumably, other physical science freed of both logic and its subject matter, the knowable physical universe, gets some getting used to.  But while trying to get used to the breezy science surrounding jillions of universes and the myriad of contradicting declarations about those that are made, there are always things you've, somehow, never stumbled over.  I have to admit that Bolzmann Brains are new to me.  That could be because, as this article says,  "It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science."   That embarrassment might account for the dearth of pop-sci shows about them and short-of-breath descriptions of them elsewhere in the media. At least nothing like that has come my way, though I don't watch the Sy channel or Discover.  And I pretty much stopped watching Nova when it turned into adds for military contractors and string theory-materialist ideology.

In the short amount of time I've had to look into the idea, it's hard to get a single, clear description of these free-floating, disembodied, cosmically cosmopolitan gigabrains that come about because of predictions made on a now unfashionable steady-state universe but which, apparently, nonetheless, are taken seriously by some actual scientists who haven't been subjected to the same anathema as Rupert Sheldrake, Brian Josephson and the widely vilified Pons and Fleischman who were, after all, noted for their work in actual experimental and verifiable science before they were declared as banned and shunned.

It seems kind of unfair to me to blame Ludwig Bolzmann an extension of whose theories are used to generate either a limited number or these accidental brains as presenting the same kind of trouble that the tribbles posed for the velour* clad residents of The Enterprise.  These, perhaps, hair-brained brains would seem to be a modern invention, one serious enough that sci-guys and math-sluths publish papers about them. A recent  news story reassures us that the worry that they must eventually overpopulate the universe is probably due to insufficient mathematical analysis.  Since they seem to have been born within the limits of present day mathematical analysis and speculation, perhaps that is the way to make them disappear.  Or at least whittling them down to size.   I'm not making this up, you know, here

Hyper-Intelligent Superbrains Floating In Deep Space Probably Don't Outnumber Humanity, Say Physicists

Physicists say there is now good evidence that a legion of floating space brains are not spontaneously bursting into existence throughout the universe.

For about a decade there has been a theory (really a thought experiment) that so-called Boltzmann brains - self-aware conscious entities with no external physical presence - might exist in space.

The idea roughly goes - and we'd suggest further reading - that given a suitably dramatic timescale, energy and matter, it's possible that a consciousness could form into a working mind, of its own accord, in space.

Consciousness is commonly thought by scientists to be essentially an illusion, created by the interaction of a vast number of simple 'actors'. In the human brain these are neurons, of which we each have about 86 billion.

Yeah, accidental cosmic brains of ginormous proportion are possible, the human consciousness with which those are imagined is an illusion.  Though the statement that "consciousness is commonly thought by scientists to be essentially an illusion,"  is something I doubt.  I would guess that other than those whose motive seems to be far less discovering reliable information about the observable universe, it is primarily those who are based in theory motivated by materialism, naturalism, physicalism, who account for the denial of the one and only thing which we have direct access to, the experience of our own consciousness**.   I would imagine many of those conducting this "thought experiment" into disembodied "brains" are exactly the "brain only" types in other contexts, imagining and writing papers about imaginary minds without brains while denying the possibility that the very real phenomenon of human consciousness - I'd include animals but that's a different post - could exist apart from the brain.

Unless these guys can come up with the first bit of evidence that Bolzmann Brains, alternate universes, and a number of other crack-pot seeming inventions growing out of the desire to kill God once and for all, they should be considered as evidence of only one thing, that decadence I proposed has settled into contemporary physics.   From its traditional position as the emperor of science, the ultimate and ruling force of them all, physics is seeming less impressive an interpretation of physical reality than chemistry, these days.  But, then, I've been watching the Periodic Table of Videos over the past couple of months.

That little "thought experiment" passage in the quote above seems to me to be covering the theory at the other end, where some might expect Bolzmann Brains really originated.

* Had to look it up, I originally guessed orlon but didn't want the trekkies on my back as well as the sci-rangers.

**  I hope to post more on that later.

Update:  I forgot, I intended to include this somewhat related comment at a recent story in The Guardian, from "Ubermench 1"

"Do you have evidence that physicists believe this, or is this merely conjecture from a misunderstanding of the way theorists go about their work?"

I object to the attempt to be patronising. What makes you think I ( who have had scientific papers published ) am not a 'theorist' ?
Physicists who support the multiverse hypothesis do so on the basis that even though the 'laws of physics' may vary between universes, the laws of maths don't. That is precisely how the same mathematical string theory can come up with 10 ^ 500 'possible' types of universe.
It's a seemingly very reasonable assumption, because whilst one can imagine physical constants and properties varying, it is incredibly hard to imagine the laws of maths having any alternatives.
However, the argument that physics supervenes upon maths rather than maths upon physics is is not an argument for crazy universes in which 2 + 2 = 3. It is essentially an argument that there is actually only one possible type of universe.
It's worth pointing out that in 'eternal inflation' nobody really explains WHY bubble universes that pop up should have laws different from the meta laws of the background expanding space.
Physicists may be able to 'imagine' 10 ^ 500 universe types ( actually they can't as all the atoms in our universe could not contain a brain capable of imagining that many universes )...but I can also imagine unicorns.

I have no idea if "Ubermench" is a physicist who knows what he's talking about, as he claims, but his comment makes an enormous amount of sense to me.  I especially like his idea that, assuming the "brain only" hypothesis that there aren't enough atoms in the universe to make up enough brains to imagine the jillions of universes that are so breezily created by those who hate the idea of a Creator.  It forces the fact that when they start talking about these imaginary universes they're not really talking about universes, they're talking about numbers and wild conjectures, made in this one universe we can observe, within the minds of one peculiar kind of life on one little tiny planet in that enormous universe.  These multi-universe creators are vastly more arrogant and inconsistent than the religious folks they clearly disdain and despise.   They make the wildest speculations about the dimensions of God dreamed up in Jewish mysticism, the vastness of Brahma in some schools of Indian speculation and all other religious statements of that sort (many of which are clearly metaphorical, at least in their origins) modest and humble by comparison.

There is no way for them to hold the possibility of disembodied minds and the brain-only dogma and claim to be rationally consistent.  If there are other universes, there is no basis for assuming that human mathematics or physics or metaphysics apply there.  As I've pointed out, those systems which propose one and two dimensional universes would, through imposing human geometry on them, obliterate the basic assumptions of materialism, that the only real reality is that containing matter and physical forces acting on matter.  That takes more than two dimensions, by their own definition.

Maine's Governor is a Crude Foulmouthed Vulgarian

and a tantrum throwing brat.  

I'm Not Going To Draw Anyone A Roadmap To The Pedophile Porn

When I wrote the post about what are obviously photographs and film clips of children being raped by adult men available on one of the biggest and most profitable - and therefore most respected - social media venues, the question of how easy I was going to make it for a reader to find that was inescapable.  Providing links would make me not much better than Tumblr, so would providing names of websites and dates when the images were posted.  So those are things I wouldn't do.  Anyone who has an interest in exposing and suppressing it, getting Tumblr to exercise sufficient control of its property to not be in the business of distributing those images can find it easily.   I originally went looking for clear examples of exploitation of adults, for pornography that advertised itself as being without condoms, depictions of rape, of sadism, of intentional domination and degradation, of misogynistic and gay hating content - it's remarkably there in gay porn of that kind, not to mention ubiquitous in straight porn - and came across those images mixed in with that.   Most of what I saw was on the disturbingly incest-themed  sites, those which sell images themed on "daddies" having sex with "sons", where those images are, unsurprisingly, found among those which convincingly do feature "models" who are believably over the age of 18.  Some customers as well as peddlers want the real and not merely simulated thing, eventually.   I would guess that the child prostitution industry is more than willing to go into that as a side line, not to mention "amateurs".

I have been at this long enough so I've heard every venue of denial by those who have more regard for the bromides of the free speech industry than they do the welfare of children raped and used and destroyed by the porn industry, not to mention adults who are coerced into being exposed to sexual violence and life threatening sex with men who have had many paid and unprotected sexual encounters with those within the porn industry.  I've heard every single smug, self-satisfied, even invertedly self-righteous declaration of the free speech absolutists recited to the benefit of the tranquility of those who are in no danger of being used and destroyed in such a manner and whose loved ones have little chance of being so used.  It's so easy to declare your fealty to the Bill of Rights when it costs someone else.  Such free speech absolutists are as responsible for that destruction of human beings as a mob lawyer who gets off serial killers to kill again are.  I have nothing but contempt for them.

We aren't talking about some dirty book made of nothing but ink on paper, we're talking about an industry that destroys real people, children, women, gay men and straight men, animals, in some cases.  Pretending that is not as clear a distinction as possible is, in this case, as irresponsible a lie as those lies the enablers of slavery told, on which its perpetuation depended.  The law, judges, make less obvious, less consequential distinctions with total confidence every single day.  Only when the issues surrounding the rape, abuse and destruction of people, even obviously minor children, can be framed in "free speech" everyone involved plays stupid, often to their profit.  That free speech is used in this case as obviously in the exact same manner as free association was used to support racial discrimination and segregation is also obvious.  The Bill of Rights is a sword that can be wielded by those with money and power to oppress those without it when those kinds of lying fudges are allowed, even without bothering to wink.   One of the means that is done by these days is to cite the "agency" of those who are coerced if not enslaved into the "work" that damages and destroys them.   That coal miners who get black lung and die from gas buildup, explosions or cave-ins "choose" to work in the mines is no less an act of agency than an adult who is destroyed by the porn industry.  Only, over time and with sufficient propaganda, that was seen by liberals as not being the same kind of "agency" as is now asserted for the destructive use of even minor children by the porn industry.   When you mix sex and the dishonestly deployed language of freedom into the mix, pseudo-liberals go all stupid and hypocritical over it.

Tumblr Carries Actual Child Porn But Even That Doesn't Make It Officially Disreputable.

I just heard an NPR piece blithely talking about how enormously rich internet companies are peddling the attention span of children by "offering" them increased access to attractive programming.  Having recently noticed the number of young children who were grossly obese, something that would have been extremely rare as recently as fifty years ago,  that effort should be seen as a national security threat.  More Americans are dying from obesity related diseases and disorders than have been killed by every terror attack we have ever suffered.

One of the media companies breezily mentioned as having attracted the attention of children before adults even noticed it was Tumblr.   I would be counted among those adults who didn't notice Tumblr much until I revived my researches into the predominant media presentation of gay men, pornography. One of the things I noticed almost immediately is that in both straight and gay porn on Tumblr photographs and film clips of clearly adult men raping clearly underage children is rampant, free and fully available.   And by children I don't mean eighteen-year-olds who look fifteen, children though those are, I mean children who appear far younger than that.  And there are graphic images, drawings, anime style crap which depicts the rape of even younger children than are raped for the camera.  Quite often violently and sadistically raped.  I've blocked Tumblr from my computer.  If I accidentally click on one of its websites, the message "Shouldn't you be working" comes up.  So don't bother with the rote response that "if you don't like it you don't have to look at it."   Children who are raped to produce child porn don't have such an easy out.

Where's the Dateline sting operation?   The research to find this stuff is as easy as putting in a few relatively innocuous seeming search terms and clicking a few keys.  It is free and easily available, the disclaimer that the person putting the images on Tumblr that they "believe" the "models" are all over the age of 18 is a clear lie, it's obvious many of them are beneath any age of consent in any American state, today.  Many of them clearly from Eastern Europe or the third-world

Last month I wrote about the practice of child sacrifice, pointing out that it wasn't something left behind in Pagan pre-Russia or the Inca Empire.   Tumblr's tacit permission to disseminate photographs of children being raped by men is a return to Roman Paganism, when it wasn't uncommon for slave owners to hire out slave children, of both genders, to temple brothels, to be raped by men who would pay for the permission to do that.  Children who survived that either went on to adult slavery or adult prostitution though it is almost certain many of them didn't survive it.  I have no doubt many of the children being raped for the benefit of the internet trade in their images results in many of them dying or having shortened, blighted lives.  Instead of a corrupt theocratic Pagan temple benefiting or a desperate effort to placate gods to provide adequate food, today's child sacrifice is to the cult of "free speech" and "free press", though behind it is the massive theocratic rule of the worshipers of Mammon.

Before Going Back To Political Campaigning: 2014 Edition

The ways that smart people think that get them into trouble has always been interesting to me.  Being politically on the far left of the scale, the political aspects of that have been the major focus of my writing.  It’s not the ideals or even much of the analysis of the left that are wrong. All you have to do is see where the policies of the right get us, as in the recent austerity mania, the imperial foreign policy and the environmental recklessness - which may well kill us all, to see that. Real life confirms much of the policy of the genuine left*  So the failure to convince an effective majority of the population isn't due to just being wrong. Our agenda is democratic, egalitarian, promotes the common good and saves the biological basis of life.  That of our political opponents does the opposite.

It being essential to save our species and almost certainly life on our planet, our political success, the left, actually taking power and making laws and policy and CHANGING the ways we defeat ourselves, is the most important issue there is.  A good part of our problem is that pretending is often easier and more pleasant than facing the unpleasant truth. But the truth will out in the end. We are at the time of reckoning in every way.  Taking your own advice is a way to foster confidence that you might be on to something. So the left should face the facts of its past failure too.

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It was through trying to figure out the problem that the inadequacy of how we look at the world came to assume a greater importance.  A faith in the efficaciousness of the behavioral and social sciences and the melding of those with genetics is endemic to the left. I’d guess that those have largely replaced liberal religion, Marxist theory, and even basic liberal civics in a large part of how leftists back up their ideas. George Lakoff's present influence is symptomatic of that faith. Looking at it in as generous a light as possible shows mixed or inconclusive results. The scientifically vetted and clearly meat-headed “General Betryaus” idea was no rip roaring success. I don’t think the results flowing from that sector have been very useful politically. They haven’t led to our having a better chance of winning elections.

The latter day successors of social Darwinism not only do that, they knock the legs out from under the basic agenda of the left. We can’t be right about even the possibility of democracy and equality if any form of biological determinism is true. When you look at their absurd research methods and the amount of myth you have to swallow whole to believe they’re right tends to leaving them behind and wading into life without the leaden life preserver of their dogmas. I've tried to bring up instances when determinism has been politically important to what happens and the inevitable disasters that result. Democratic politics is all about results, making things better. Nothing that doesn't have that result is politically valid.

The predictable responses of the fans of Dawkins et al has been that they are politically liberal. I’m not at all sold on their liberalism but, as I've said about some leftists, they can just as easily be our own worst enemies. Quite frankly, I don’t feel very good about someone who opposes a return of sodomy laws if they undermine the very concepts of equality and freedom that led to their being abandoned in real life. There is a reason that these guys are popular with Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks.

Having rejected the methods used in the social sciences you get left with those most unscientific but probably more successful political methods, noticing things and consulting the hard lessons of experience. Those unfashionable methods, I am fully convinced, are as good as we are ever going to have.

I very strongly suspect that the mania for free markets in the society at large got its biggest boost with Milton Friedman’s load of garbage shown on PBS** a number of years ago. Those possessing a certificate of higher education in the United States depend a lot on what is shown on TV for its common received wisdom outside of their specialty. We’re not as far removed from the plebs as we like to think. And, as a group, we aren't notably more industrious about continuing education. Once an idea is lodged in our collection of bromides and aphorisms, replacing them for others isn't very easy.

With the series of disasters following the path Friedman and his allies have brought us, why that isn’t seen as the equivalent of economic Lysenkoism is an interesting question. I’m at a loss to understand why anyone would have kept their faith after the crisis of the 90s, never mind having the same ideology that led to that being the predominant one persist to cause the disaster we are in today. Harry and Louise seem to have needed more than one jolt of experience to wise up. I think part of that is the same kind of faith in anything with the trappings of science. You have to remember that in a lot of universities that economics is taken as one of the social sciences. It’s been pointed out by others here that a lot of economists seem to believe themselves to be biological scientists these days.

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We The People are a motley and scruffy lot. Democratic politics can’t attempt a basic scrubbing of the necks and ears of the electorate. You can’t attempt to completely eradicate and “correct” basic beliefs that you don’t like, certainly not in the time frame that we've got to work with in an election cycle. The attempt carries a guarantee to produce a self-defeating backlash. You are not going to “end faith” in God, the wearing of synthetics or even an addiction to forms of entertainment you find annoying. Leftists need to grow up and face that the electorate as it is now is what we have to work with. Our politicians are their servants as much as they are ours.  Our politicians, not the phony ones who run the eternal series of campaigns that never win and never expect to win, the real ones who get elected, face that basic fact every single day, they have to or they get out of politics. Leftist political impotence has in no small part been due to the insistence of many of the loudest that facing this most basic fact of democracy, is a form of selling out.

Another of the big problems of the left is the instance that our politicians be, if anything, even more correct than we would like the electorate to be. Having just pointed out that it is the far from surgically clean electorate that gets to choose who is a real politician, instead of a pretend politician, expecting this of our elected officials is about the stupidest attitude we maintain.

There is no politician in our history who did more of what the left wanted than Lyndon Johnson during his presidency. He also did quite a bit which was among the worst a president has done.

As an aside, I think if he hadn't listened to some of the product of our most prestigious universities, he might have avoided a lot of the worst. He would have probably been re-elected in 1968.  Instead the more liberal - and Northern - Hubert Humphrey was attacked by the left and lost to Richard Nixon.  Nixon's campaign and presidency made use of the excesses of those who had pushed the real left to the side and made themselves the public face of "the left".   Anyone looking back at that period would have to conclude that Nixon better read the electorate and saw the possible avenues to grabbing and holding power than the left did.  That was certainly what he did.  He certainly didn't do it through personal attractiveness and a devotion to high ideals and democratic policies.  Meanwhile, the left preened in its purity, its higher educational level and a number of other things, which may have been technically true in the abstract but which didn't produce political effectiveness.

Lyndon Johnson was a rude, crude, bigoted, sexist, unscrupulous and ruthless and rather conservative politician. Perhaps most unforgivable of all to many on the left, he had a humble formal education as opposed to being the graduate of an elite university.  But, as Hillary Clinton pointed out during the 2008 campaign, he also delivered those laws that are the highest achievement of our democracy to date. His legacy is that which has been under constant attack for the past forty years. If he had gotten us out of the Vietnam War he might have been able to count on the left supporting him. We’ll never know. Someone like him, today, couldn't get elected with the support of the left.

Nancy Pelosi was the actual high water mark for the left in out entire history to date. Her record as Speaker and as the leader of the Democratic caucus has had to deal with the real effective limits on what she can do. She didn't have the power to keep the Republicans and conservative Democrats from blocking the moderate and liberal wings of the Democratic Party. The majority she has to work with is small and often unstable. I believe she was doing as much as she possibly can under the real limits of her power. That she had and has to watch out for attacks from the left is a problem but she’s got larger problems she has to deal with.

One of the responses to one of these posts the posts has been “ .... how do we push the Dems leftward? And how do we punish them when they move right?"    Well, the left has tried to inflict punishment on Democrats. The abandonment of Democrats in 1968 for Eugene McCarthy (no relation worth mentioning), clean Gene in countless other presidential farces, Barry Commoner’s candidacy in 1980 (still got my pin), Nader in 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008 and the disaster of 2010.   Lord knows how many others in between and in races for lower office, all of those have been attempts to “punish Democrats” for not doing what we want. It is an idea that has been given the test of time and has failed, failed absolutely and in the worst possible way.

Unfortunately, the attempt to punish Democrats in that way has, more often than not, led to Republicans taking office and doing a hell of a lot worse than what Democrats were guilty of. And it has led to the marginalization of the left within the Democratic Party. Republicans have used the power they got from those elections to free broadcast media of fairness and equal time provisions, silencing the left, allowing the rise of right-wing hate talk radio and TV and the further marginalization of the left in the general culture. And they have had the full and complete cooperation with the pseudo-left, which is actually libertarian, not interested in equality and economic justice.  Anyone who doesn't see that the deregulation of the electronic media as a political liability, in the face of its corporate ownership, is too stupid to listen to and too little concerned with the common good, mistaking secondary aspects of utility as more important than self-government which those must serve to be valid.  When you look at the record and find that much failure an idea should also join the Lysenko list of political futility.

The part of the left that has taken that most the superficially gratifying road of getting even isn't large enough to make the threat effective. We’d have to be able to prove our ability to decisively deliver electoral victory, in the first place, to do that.

Our future depends on making effective coalitions, with those we like and with those we don’t especially like. That’s the only way that the left is going to exercise any kind of political influence for the foreseeable future. The road of leftist puritanism leads to nowhere. The other road might be “ahead but much too slow” but at least it leads somewhere worth trying. Maybe I’ll see you there.

*  Since writing the first version of this I have come to realize that the genuine left is not the pseudo-left which I would probably have included in the left.  That form of materialist pragmatism is far closer to the materialist right than it is to the genuine left which is transcendent and so not materialist.

** I seem to recall PBS put it on in “response” to the series by Galbraith on the history of economics. For anyone who missed the Galbraith, it paralleled his wonderfully entertaining book “Money”.