Applied Science: Interlude Scherzando and Early Selections

This is the second section of the serial essay I first posted in 2008. It deals with the passage of The Descent of Man in which Charles Darwin explicitly lays out the premise of eugenics, that natural selection eliminates "weaker members" of the population, that "civilization" inhibits natural selection, that the "weaker members" have children who are inferior and that leads to a down turn in the quality of the species.   Darwin explicitly identifies who he is talking about, a list of those whose continued existence is a danger to the human species. After the Second World War it is a list that anyone with a knowledge of history should find profoundly disturbing.   As Tom Blaney said about that passage in his rather sympathetic, if unsparing study of the Darwin family and eugenics, from Charles Darwin to his grandson, Charles Galton Darwin: With such words, he provided the reasoning that under pined eugenics, particularly that which we will come to describe as “negative” eugenics.

The Chief Sea Lion's Inheritance:  Eugenics and the Darwins  Tom Blaney

Living on the left you may eventually come across a very rare species, the principled, Hegelian cheap-skate. The few I’ve met have been Marxists, though I’ve read about other varieties, even anarchist skin flints. This scruple against giving alms or charity avoids corrupting the destitute into complaisance by making life too easy for them. You might ask what separates the leftist tight wad from those who make up a far larger percentage of the right? The ones who we justly think of as selfish swine? As usual, it’s different because it’s a matter of science. “Science” is supposed to settle all questions of motivation, isn’t it? You see, in addition to affording the poor the moral benefits of the strenuous life, whether or not they like it, depriving them the price of a sandwich is a means to force them to shake off their torpor and do their part in pushing the dialectic ever onward, back and forth, until the glorious day of its arrival at its scientifically determined destiny.

One example, who could be named but who may still be alive and, one imagines, might be litigious, was a fixture of the New York left of earlier decades. He was a noticeably comfortable psychotherapist who on at least one occasion said that he had held to the principle against charity since learning it as a red-diaper baby. And, being what he turned out to be, I’d guess he still holds to it. In less charitable moments one suspects that his subsequent drift from Marxism to neo-conservatism in the great migration of the late 60s and 70s was due to his realizing he wasn’t quite the figure in the left that he had believed himself to be. Though, thinking it over perhaps the former Marxist was doing his part to move history onward. No doubt, if this is true, he is just awaiting the word, printed in some small magazine with a plain cover and chaste type face, that the dialectic over Manhattan is on the move again. Propitiation sufficed. And, if he hasn’t since died, he will end his days as a neo-com.

None of the devotees of principled stinginess who I’ve observed, though, have undertaken self-improvement and applied their principle to themselves, voluntarily making their own lot more desperately miserable in order to rouse themselves from the coffee house table or book shop stall to the barricades and a more active part in the workings of history.

As we see, some principles of science are easier to put into practical effect than others.

Early Selections

Part Two  

Note:  The paragraph after the one analyzed here, the often relied on "assistance" paragraph,  is discussed in Part Three and it will be examined in more detail in a planned post in the Darwin-Eugenics series.  I should note that there are several things I said, unrelated to Charles Darwin, that I would not say today.  Beginning with the concept of  "a belief neutral democracy".  In the past four years I've come to see that democracy is absolutely and completely dependent on beliefs that are moral in nature.  Equality, fairness, justice, inherent rights, the belief that those are as real as a table or chair or an organic molecule, is a mandatory prerequisite for democracy to exist, and they are all moral contentions.  Though it is necessary for democratic governments to be nonsectarian, without those metaphysical, moral holdings, democracy won't exist, where a belief in those erodes, democracy will die. 

Due to habits formed in the defense of the wall of separation and public school science against creationism it can be difficult for a leftist to read Marilynne Robinson’s essay, “Darwinism”. It is also uncomfortable for someone on the left to talk about Darwin’s language as she does because many will immediately assume you are a creationist, or accuse you of some other form of apostasy by stealth. This is guaranteed to happen no matter how explicitly you endorse EVOLUTION or a belief neutral, democratic government.*

But you can’t have integrity unless you say what you mean. You also can’t be a decent person if you don’t believe and act as if people are not objects, abstractions, mere ideas or actors in your dearly loved fantasy scenarios playing out what you take to be the grand forces of the universe.

In her essay, Robinson is unsporting enough to read Darwin and others and to believe that they mean what they have written. Asserting that someone didn’t really mean what he continually and lucidly writes should mean that he isn’t to be trusted. But in polite society you are expected to pretend it doesn’t in cases such as this. You are also to concentrate on the demurral appended as an obligatory afterthought and ignore the bulk of what is clearly proposed

As an example, among the quotes she dares to take directly from Darwin and others, I’ll concentrate on this one.

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The Descent of Man

Darwin regretted that the lower orders will be saved from necessary pruning by our sentimentality. That is as clear as the words he wrote. He was afraid that the level of charity current in mid 19th century, the time of Dickens’ England, was too much charity due to its impeding natural selection. Not that Darwin means to subject himself to natural selection. One assumes that the Darwins and the mostly well off families of his followers didn’t gave up the practice of vaccination or seeking medical care themselves. I’ve looked and can’t find evidence that early Darwinists refused medical care as a matter of principle, if you know of any I will revise. Thus these advocates of the benefits of universal human culling allowed sentiment to overtake their responsibility as members of the rational class, to husband their own stock to a higher state through the death of the underbred.** Perhaps this is something more noticeable for people who have reason to suspect they or, as in my case my great-great grandparents, were included in Darwin’s underclass. Perhaps your ancestors in the 1870s were also among those referred to above.

It is especially interesting to think about this passage due to Charles Darwin’s history of hypochondria - which seems to have begun before his marriage and his decisive reading of Malthus - his history of seeking treatments, cures and just about anything available to, how did he put it, have medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of Charles Darwin to the last moment. Was not such an unfit specimen as Darwin clearly judged himself to be, and he did apprentice as a doctor, marked as one for whom nature should be allowed to take its course?

Some sources say that he worried that his malady was heritable. Charles Darwin was the last person in the world to have missed that possibility. Wasn’t he an example of the worst kind who should be discouraged, at the very least, from breeding? Eventually he produced ten children, two of whom died in childhood, one a famously beloved daughter. You wonder if he thought about his own daughter’s death when he wrote this.

If you think it’s harsh of me to bring up his daughter’s death, do you think it was harsh of him and his admirers to meditate dispassionately on the benefits of untold other peoples’ children being weeded out of the breeding stock by small pox, other diseases, violence and starvation? Does it being called ‘science’ make that noble and good, or at least all right? Does it being “science” preclude further consideration of these matters?

How does this clear warning of dire consequences stemming from the vaccination of the lower orders differ in kind from the Imams in Nigeria advising people not to have their children vaccinated for polio several years ago? That is a real question and there is an answer. The difference is that the Nigerian Imams were afraid of the vaccine being tainted. There had been a drug test in Nigeria several years before which, they believed , had killed eleven children and disabled 200. ***They were also concerned that HIV might be spread through contamination during the immunization program. The clerics and government officials in Nigeria acted through ignorance and paranoia, perhaps, but their crime, for which they were roundly condemned, was an ill informed and ignorant attempt to protect children, not a tacit approval of their culling for racial hygiene. Does anyone reading this doubt that Darwin would have classed these children among the ‘savages’.

Saying that Darwin wasn’t actually advocating that many people die is dishonest. Does anyone really believe that with the thinnest of alibis for cover, he didn’t endorse the idea of allowing people to go unvaccinated, untreated, unfed and allowing a huge number of them to die of disease, starvation or in a horrific, violent struggle for food? He was informed enough about the governmental and economic practices of his time to know that his suggestions could easily have been put into effect with the slightest encouragement, almost by accident.

And he had seen the people he believed it was a folly to save on his travels and at home. Here is his list, “the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick .... [the alleged beneficiary of] poor-laws ... the weak members of civilised societies” all of these should be allowed to undergo what he approves of as the brutal culling found among “savages”. Does this list contain no actual people? Do you really believe that? With the benefit of reading this after witnessing the brutality of the self-professed, scientific regimes of the twentieth century the list should seem all too familiar to us. The word “selection”, also.

The effect of the Darwinists’ casual dismissal of the lives of people in marshaling opposition to the fact of EVOLUTION isn’t considered nearly often enough. Anyone who doesn’t believe that is a part of the opposition to the study of EVOLUTION is deluding themselves. The links between Darwin and those who overcame sentiment to put his ideas into practice are real and the opponents of evolutionary science know about them. Look at their websites if you think this isn’t true. Darwin shouldn’t remain the public face of evolutionary science.

Maybe less noticeable at first reading is that there is no supporting data given, at least in the edition I’ve got, to demonstrate his contention that vaccinating for small pox actually has the degrading effect he suspects. It’s a speculation based on his supreme theory, which isn’t evolution but the origin of species by natural selection. Darwin predicts dire consequences in vaccinated populations. I’ve not been able to find science from his time or up to today which supports his contention that it has this degrading effect. You wonder if the WHO shouldn’t suspend their efforts if such evidence existed. You also wonder what contemporary advocates of mass vaccination would make of this passage.

It is impossible to read Darwin and his circle and not be reminded of these things, once you have gotten over the habit of ignoring what’s right there in front of you. That was the greatest effect of reading Robinson’s essay, it is a slap to wake up and admit what is there to be seen. I’m sure she knew it would be misunderstood and misrepresented, yet she wrote it and her bravery deserves to be noticed.

Robinson points out ironies in her essay, none greater than the fact that the Darwinists and those who agitate for creationism effectively share the same economic morality. Looking at Republican social policy of the past thirty years, you see a practical attempt to remove any barriers to brutal selection forces. Only it’s called ‘competition’.

My question is how can the very basis of the left’s agenda survive the idea that our reason and morality don’t matter or that it is incompatible with what’s purported to be scientific truth. Equality, justice, democracy, a decent, peaceful life in a habitable environment. If the left really comes to believe that biology is destiny, that free will and good will are illusions or impotent, that the market of natural selection is the inevitable law that governs human lives, our agenda is wrong.

I don’t think it is. I think that the history of the past century proves it isn’t and that there is no realistic alternative to it. Too many of us have been duped through public relations into accepting fundamentally anti-democratic ideas that are based in the assumptions made by self-interested people with an agenda basically at odds with our ideals. I believe that the depressing, dispiriting effect of falling for various species of biological determinism leads to impotent cynicism. Those ideas have been given the test of time. They produce a nightmare.

That is the subject of the third part of this series.

* “Darwinism” is from the collection of essays, The Death of Adam ISBN 0-312-42532-5

Many, especially the throng of devout blog Darwinists who have never read him, might be surprised that Robinson concentrates first and foremost on the economic origins of Darwinism. They should go look at him and see that for him reading Malthus was his breakthrough event, literally everything springs from that moral atrocity. Malthus isn’t simply an implication or a starting point in the line of biological determinism stemming from Darwin he permeates it. Malthus is the seed, Darwin sowed it and it grew.

** You might want to contrast the content and tone with this passage, not much farther on into the book.

Man accumulates property and bequeaths it to his children, so that the children of the rich have an advantage over the poor in the race for success, independently of bodily or mental superiority. On the other hand, the children of parents who are short-lived, and are therefore on an average deficient in health and vigour, come into their property sooner than other children, and will be likely to marry earlier, and leave a larger number of offspring to inherit their inferior constitutions. But the inheritance of property by itself is very far from an evil; for without the accumulation of capital the arts could not progress; and it is chiefly through their power that the civilised races have extended, and are now everywhere extending their range, so as to take the place of the lower races. Nor does the moderate accumulation of wealth interfere with the process of selection. When a poor man becomes moderately rich, his children enter trades or professions in which there is struggle enough, so that the able in body and mind succeed best. The presence of a body of well-instructed men, who have not to labour for their daily bread, is important to a degree which cannot be over-estimated; as all high intellectual work is carried on by them, and on such work, material progress of all kinds mainly depends, not to mention other and higher advantages. No doubt wealth when very great tends to convert men into useless drones, but their number is never large ; and some degree of elimination here occurs, for we daily see rich men, who happen to be fools or profligate, squandering away their wealth. The Descent of Man.

“But the inheritance of property by itself is very far from an evil.... Nor does the moderate accumulation of wealth interfere with the process of selection.” One suspects Darwin’s “moderate accumulation of wealth” which was not yet insalubrious included the wealth of the Darwin -Wedgewood families. Why, since he refuses to consider the possibility that humans’ capacity for reason, moral reflection and self-denial might exempt us from the brutal forces of natural selection, does he seem to think that membership in his notably brutal economic elite should render its members immune?

You also wonder why Darwin didn’t include the laws against stealing in the list of unfortunate curbs on the workings of natural selection. If you doubt that the laws protecting private property are one of the greatest inhibition of the weeding out of the unfit, imagine what would have happened in Darwin’s Britain if it was suddenly legal for the masses of the poor to take from those worthless drones bred to the aristocracy. The resultant struggle might have saved Darwin the embarrassment of explaining how he neglected to discourage their vaccination.

*** “The Pfizer drug test in 1996 is still on our minds. To a large extent, it shaped and strengthened my view on polio and other immunisation campaigns," said Mr bin Uthman. At the time, the US company had used an untested drug on children to fight an epidemic of bacterial meningitis in the Kano area. Lawsuits have since been lodged against Pfizer in the United States and in Nigeria, alleging that the drug trial was illegal and that it killed 11 children and left 200 others disabled.

N.B I’d thought of writing a post about the politics of Darwinism within science, having followed a few of the vicious fights over even minor attempts to introduce additional mechanisms of evolution for consideration (no, ‘intelligent design’ wasn't even considered) but it would have gotten way too long. One of the things found while researching that topic was this abstract by Susannah Varmuza of the University of Toronto. This says it better than I can.

Evolution is an idea that inspires huge emotional responses, in part because it speaks to our very identities. The religious overtones associated with debates about evolution are not restricted to those between evolutionary biologists and creationists (the inspiration for the quote above). Among evolutionary biologists, there is an aura of deification of Darwin that tends to stifle discourse on ideas that are construed by the mainstream to be anti-Darwinian, perhaps, as pointed out by Gould (1981), to counteract the political machinations of the creationist movement. Over the decades, attempts by non-traditionalists to introduce new thinking into the study of evolution have met with either stony silence or rancorous derision. Goldschmidt, Gould, and proponents of Lamarckian inheritance can still raise hackles, even posthumously (‘Goldschmidt is a bum!’ echoed around the lecture theatre at a recent scientific meeting, 44 years after his death. 

You should read the entire thing if you’re interested in evolution and genetics. I’ve got the feeling the epigenetics might help open up a lot of new areas into the effectively infinite reality of EVOLUTION. But they will have to stop pretending that Darwin can't be questioned first.

Another Note on George Darwin's 1870s Eugenics Activity

As mentioned in an earlier post in this series, the first life line thrown to the eugenics-free Charles Darwin is the fact that Francis Galton hadn't gotten around to naming his new "science" "eugenics" until 1883, the year after Charles Darwin died.   And as mentioned in a note yesterday,  George Darwin, Charles' son, was one of the earliest to take up eugenics - as can be seen in Charles Darwin's letter to Galton, it was George who read "Hereditary Genius"  first and enthusiastically recommended it to his father.

I came across this  answer to the claim that Charles Darwin couldn't have inspired eugenics because of it didn't have a name by the time he died,  made by a source whose authority to say what he did is about as solid as possible.

Francis Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin and the brother of George Darwin, wrote a memoir of his brother when his scientific papers were collected and published after George's death.   It's clear that Francis Darwin saw no problem in identifying his brother's article "On Beneficial Restriction to Liberty of Marriage"  as a "eugenic article" despite it having been published a decade before Galton coined the word "eugenics".

In spite of unwellness he [George Darwin] began in 1872-3 to write on various subjects. He sent to Macmillan's Magazine an entertaining article,  "Development in Dress," where the various survivals in modern costume were recorded and discussed from the stand-point of evolution. In 1873 he wrote  "On benefical restriction to liberty of marriage," a eugenic article for which he was attacked with gross un-fairness and bitterness by the late St George Mivart. He was defended by Huxley, and Charles Darwin formally ceased all intercourse with Mivart.

Francis Darwin:   BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS [of George Howard Darwin] From Scientific Papers of George Howard Darwin vol. Five

Development in Dress discussed form the standpoint of evolution?  How far out on a limb were the Darwins  prepared to go with the old man's ideas?   It sounds like it might have be in the running as the first "Just So" story of the evo-psy kind in history.

St. George Mivart, an early convert to Darwinism, is an interesting case.   As a professor and a Darwinian, he attended lectures  on Darwinism given by Thomas Huxley and came away more skeptical than he had been when he started.

As to 'natural selection', I accepted it completely and in fact my doubts & difficulties were first excited by attending Prof. Huxley's lectures at the School of Mines.*

Some of the things he was skeptical of were probably due to the problems that many other competent biologists had with Darwinism.  Natural selection in the 1860s and 70s was hardly a complete theory.  It didn't achieve its modern form until the 1930s with the Mendelian synthesis.   Mivart held it wasn't legitimately a theory but a hypothesis at the time of the dust up.   No doubt Charles Darwin was stung by having a fairly well known convert turn to a skeptic.

The incident of Mivert's criticism of George Darwin's article, which argued, among other things, that marriages should be dissolved if one of the couple was declared insane,  seems to have caused Charles Darwin to set his bulldog on Mivart, later to take his own revenge.

Darwin's revisions to the Origin eventually compromised it, so keen was he to respond to critics. Not only did he defend, he attacked. It is hard to know which to admire more, the skill with which he and his band of disciples went about preparing the ground for the Origin (shrewdly distributing advance copies to potential opponents, for example) or the zeal with which they all, after publication, set about savaging (not always fairly) the critics. Although we are familiar with Huxley's role as Darwin's bulldog, Darwin was quite capable of being his own rottweiler. When a paper by his son Francis was rejected by the Royal Society, Darwin ruthlessly counterattacked in Nature. In 1873, St. George Mivart got into a spat with Darwin's son George over a sort of proto-eugenics. Darwin nearly went to court on behalf of George (who was in the wrong) and later blackballed Mivart for membership in the Athenaeum.

Keith Thomson: American Scientist, Jan.-Feb., 2003

But whether or not Mivart was unjust in his criticism doesn't concern me here. What is important is that Charles Darwin was aware of his son, George, publicly advocating eugenics in the form of nullifying marriages.  Something that was pretty shocking for 1870s Britain.  And young George apparently didn't think that once recovered, the formerly insane should be able to resume the abolished marriage.  He compared it to someone being retired not being able to get his job back.  That's a seriously coercive proposal,  I'd say.  And, obviously, what George said in the article was all right by his father who, on most matters like that, is as prim as a Victorian.

And, the reason I am posting this,  his own brother, Francis, said, using the "E word",  the proposal his father had no problem with and supported was "eugenics".

*  Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850-1875, p. 137.

His discussion of how St. George Mivart fell from grace to be attacked by the Darwin inner circle is an antidote to the pious version of Darwin most people are familiar with from sources like the BBC and PBS.  I will note that Mivart wasn't exactly innocent in the brawl, getting in a few punches, himself.  Mivart was certainly wrong about many aspects of evolution, as was everyone else during that period,  including Charles Darwin.   They were all, Darwinist and anti-Darwinist, going far, far past the point supported by evidence.  Desmond doesn't seem to mention the George Darwin incident, concentrating on Mivart's publications and the machinations of Huxley's younger associates who were, obviously, trying to bend Darwinism in ideological directions even in that period.

EVOLUTION, Evolution, Ideology and the Continuation of Life

Note: This is the first part of a serial essay I first posted in January 2008. I am posting it here over the next four days while I continue writing the Darwin-eugenics series.  The original posting of it created a firestorm of criticism after the third part was up, a condemnation of Darwin's biological determinism as it undermines democracy. Most of the flack that post got was false, most of it nearly identical to the criticism of anyone who dares to criticize Charles Darwin, almost all of it completely uninformed by the Darwin record.  I may post parts of the new series as they are finished.  

I used the upper case EVOLUTION to designate the actual history of life on Earth and evolution to designate the scientific study the actual reality of EVOLUTION.  I've kept it because that is an important distinction for the purpose of the essay and in real life.  The real fact of life is infinitely more important than the academic study of it.  Which is something that is often forgotten.

Dedicated to the memory of my sister-in-law, MDL PhD, the research biologist who read this over before I posted it and who discussed some of the points in it with me 

Part one

EVOLUTION is long. Really, really long. It encompasses the entire duration of life on the planet Earth. Most commonly that is thought today to be a period of more than three billion years. That’s a number we are all familiar with hearing but getting your mind around what even one billion - 1,000,000,000 - years really consists of is impossible. What could a billion years mean to a person? What would the first, the last and all of the varied unknown and unrecorded days, seasons, years and ages in between years one and one billion mean. They are incomprehensible in their vast duration and compass of possible experience in terms of even the longest human life span. We have no frame of reference.

And not only is EVOLUTION (upper case) long, it is also large in numbers, encompassing, literally, all of the lives of all of the organisms that have ever existed. All of the organisms which have reproduced or been produced. That number is of many magnitudes larger than even the incomprehensible billions of years already mentioned. Consider, just as a sample of the complications, the known time periods between generations of living species of rodents, and of one-celled organisms. Consider the number of fertile eggs some species of plants, insects and mollusks produce in one reproductive cycle. Each of the surviving, reproducing individuals was and is a variation, many have the possibility of having an effect on future generations. Leaving the entirely relevant question of individuals aside, imagining even the number of what we might classify as species, each comprising subspecies, varieties, and other sub groupings is incomprehensible.

Now it’s necessary to make a distinction between EVOLUTION, the actual fact of life in both its ancient and contemporary diversity and numbers, and the human science of evolution (lower case), which attempts to study the mechanisms and artifacts of all those lives and to understand many different aspects of them, including the attempts to make general assertions about them. Let’s allow the conventional beginning of the science of evolution as the publication date of The Origin of Species, 1859. In that case, evolution as a formal, scientific, study has been going on for about a hundred fifty years.

Immediately we have come on something remarkable, the difference between the billions of years that EVOLUTION has been operating and the mere one hundred fifty years that it has been studied to date. The fraction which would represent the part of EVOLUTION which is taken up by the human study of it looks something like 150 over 3,000,000,000+. A hundred-fifty years outstrips the conscious experience of most human beings by about twice, but it would appear to be like the briefest noticeable moment when opposed to the time that EVOLUTION has been continually in process*.

As a way of beginning the approximation of how complete a picture our science of evolution can give us today , other factors, of equal and even greater importance than the number of years, species, and individuals, have to be considered. While the numbers yielded by these aren’t known we can know that whatever it is would tax our imagination so as to be incomprehensible even before multiplication of factors to be considered begins. It is far from the end of it.

The individual physical aspects of the bodies and lives of all individuals which could impinge on the processes of EVOLUTION, those which we know about, those which we will never know about due to the fact that their traces are lost for all time. The physical record available to us represents an infinitesimally small number of the physical variations that must have had some impact on the species and individuals alive today. Many of the examples available to us may or may not be representative of whatever species we might assign them to, if we were able to. Added into that the impacts of climate, pathology, nutrition, and those entirely unavailable variables, behavior and chance happening, which would properly enter into the study, the data available to study might be seen as nugatory. We can be certain that the information we have available or will ever have available is inadequate to present even a general picture of EVOLUTION, our study must, therefore, be limited to only a small part of it.

If, by some miracle, the reproduction by a single strand of life continued unbroken over more than three billion years it would produce astonishing physical variation if only as a matter of chance mutation over time. To say ‘by some miracle’ is not accurate, though, because that is literally the case of every single organism alive as you read this. It has been a single unbroken strand from the beginning of evolution that has produced each of us, no two alike. And that is entirely too simple, because we are at the ends of intertwining stands through innumerable exchanges of genetic material among different organisms, all of them subject to the possibility of mutation. Reproduction by the numbers we are considering clearly produces variety of results, in ways and almost certainly by means which we can not begin to imagine. It would be literally miraculous if it hadn’t. One thing that it is essential to keep in mind, at every moment in that three billion years there was a living being that was the offspring of living beings and which produced living beings all living in an environment that allowed them to survive.

This experiment could lead us to an important conclusion, while EVOLUTION is a fact supported by the relevant science, the belief that we know more than a tiny part of that phenomenon is absurd. EVOLUTION, in terms of human capacity, is effectively of infinite complexity**. It is almost certain that much many more facts will be known if the study continues, maybe many times more than what we have now. I would propose that it is certain we can’t even suspect enormous parts of even what will be knowable.

-------
But this daunting picture doesn’t mean that what we do know is unimportant. A mathematician once pointed out that given the infinity of topics that could possibly be taken up to study in mathematics, the question of interest becomes a matter of greatest importance. And as we have seen the possibilities surrounding EVOLUTION are equally taxing of the attention of the human species.

What do those who study evolution want from it? What uses can it be put to, what uses is it put to? To what extent do people who hope to make a profession out of the study of evolution allow their personal interests to effect their ideally objective science? Do they hope to get a certain job with people of a certain ideology? It could be the hope of professional acceptance that might shade what is concluded. It might even be that the science itself, what has been published to date and what is currently fashionable skews consideration. Does the professional study of evolution limit the science itself ? Do those engaged in it find what they are looking for and miss other things?***

And, by all means, we have to limit the consideration to those who accept that EVOLUTION is a fact and who do not try to impose an agenda which cannot be evaluated with the legitimate tools and methods of science. To do that removes someone from serious, scientific, consideration.

I have said that the science of evolution is important but it isn’t the most important thing in life. Life has gotten along for billions of years without our science, as shown in the fourth paragraph above. Somehow its having done so without the custodial care of human science almost leads to a feeling of anxiety. And yet it happened unobserved and unremarked by us.****

There is a consideration made much more interesting than evolution by necessity, today. We are in the midst of a mass extinction event caused by human activity. It endangers a huge part of the diversity of the biosphere, shutting off the lines of huge numbers of species, entire biotas are in danger of extinction. It is entirely possible that the products of science, technology, economics, politics and other human activities could kill us all.

EVOLUTION compared to the human study, evolution, is infinitely more important. Preservation of the thing studied is more important than the study of it. Our most important tool to preserve the biosphere, the only link between the entire past of life and the entirety of what life there is in the future, is politics. Politics is one of the greatest tools we have to correct human actions that endanger us all. The political success of environmental protection and species preservation is far more important than protecting any dearly cherished ideology of humans. Capitalism, communism, socialism, physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, Darwinism - which, many of you will be surprised to realize, isn’t the same thing as evolution -, creationism, etc. None of these are as important as saving the planet, none of them would have the possibility of existing without the life of the planet being saved.

Even these cherished ideologies and theories which our educations falsely lead us to believe are paramount, are entirely dependent for their existence on the future of EVOLUTION. Whatever they can lend to that effort is necessary, whatever preserves the life of the planet is necessary, whatever endangers it must be rejected. This includes whatever these ideologies, sciences, fads, etc. do which results in preventing political change that is necessary to save the environment. Environmental science, in so far as it is used to preserve the basis of life is the most important science we have ever devised. It is the science that deserves our greatest concern and effort. It is the key to our survival.

* We could also consider the number of researchers in evolution and its allied fields and wonder how that number could compare with the range of what is included with Evolution.

** The opponents of evolution and those who deny EVOLUTION aren’t stupid. They are quite able to read and figure out the weak spots in the man made theories about it. Not being honest about those weaknesses, pretending that the fact of EVOLUTION stands or falls on the basis of current ideologies within evolution plays into their hands.

*** Maybe it is right to look at the body of professionals who make their living in evolutionary science as being the product of selection pressures, or of adaptation to their profession’s environment. While EVOLUTION is a fact supported by an amazing amount of science it is large enough and unknown enough to produce different ideas. Perhaps a different species of evolutionist would dominate the field if the cultural environment and, especially, those with the ability to fund it hadn’t favored a particular point of view. Being a casual witness to just the death match over the rather modest idea of “spandrels”, in the 90s its clear there was a struggle for survival and reproduction. How could they object to these questions being raised about their profession?

**** It is undeniable that EVOLUTION would have fared better in species diversity and, most likely, in the possibility of its continuing at all, if humans and our culture, hadn’t evolved. Though they are not entirely to blame, science and technology are some of the primary causes of the destruction of the environment. They have accelerated the process of destroying the environment through magnifying the powers of human despoilers and they have provided chemicals and mechanisms not found by those without science and technology. They have done this at a rate many times faster than they have generated the knowledge needed to preserve the planet. To deny that is as irresponsible as it is ridiculous. To allow that fact to go unsaid precludes possibilities of reform and we need reform in the behavior that results from science. Science is almost as important as politics in the struggle to save the planet.

How Much Did Darwin Really Believe In Natural Selection

Darwin and W. R. Greg
Sometimes considered the co-founder of eugenics

If you read Charles Darwin's book,  "The Descent of Man", you will read one assertion after another about natural selection in the human population,  speculations and purported data taken from contemporary people around the world with some historical references.   Those references are taken from many men, I believe all of them were men, of varying scientific credentials.   Some of the references Darwin makes can be found online or in a good university library.   Those I've looked up are of wildly variable character,  some had an impressive looking facade of mathematical tables and calculations and exhibits,  Galton and Haeckel,  some seem to be more like what would be considered gossip, today.  I strongly suspect that a lot of the data wouldn't stand up to current standards of validation but that's for other people to argue.  In some of his contentions,  Charles Darwin doesn't seem to have any real evidence at all.  One infamous passage* that is often cited by those who lay the charge of eugenics against Charles Darwin seems to be an assertion of natural selection to produce an artificial narrative as a substitute for evidence of natural selection, which, completes the circle with the assumption that the artificial evidence constitutes support for natural selection.   I will be dealing specifically with the complex of paragraphs that paragraph is part of later .  It is followed by another passage with its own history of polemical use.

I'm going to ask a simple question about another passage that has gotten some but less attention for what it might indicate about a place where Darwin contradicts that infamous passage directly.   Not only that passage but the contention of his book that natural selection is relevant to human societies and that the struggle  of natural selection, resulting in the deaths of the "weaker members" of a society, would leave the survivors in "a vigorous state of health."   Here is the passage:

A most important obstacle in civilised countries to an increase in the number of men of a superior class has been strongly insisted on by Mr. Greg and Mr. Galton (19. 'Fraser's Magazine,' Sept. 1868, p. 353. 'Macmillan's Magazine,' Aug. 1865, p. 318. The Rev. F.W. Farrar ('Fraser's Magazine,' Aug. 1870, p. 264) takes a different view.), namely, the fact that the very poor and reckless, who are often degraded by vice, almost invariably marry early, whilst the careful and frugal, who are generally otherwise virtuous, marry late in life, so that they may be able to support themselves and their children in comfort. Those who marry early produce within a given period not only a greater number of generations, but, as shewn by Dr. Duncan (20. 'On the Laws of the Fertility of Women,' in 'Transactions of the Royal Society,' Edinburgh, vol. xxiv. p. 287; now published separately under the title of 'Fecundity, Fertility, and Sterility,' 1871. See, also, Mr. Galton, 'Hereditary Genius,' pp. 352-357, for observations to the above effect.), they produce many more children. The children, moreover, that are borne by mothers during the prime of life are heavier and larger, and therefore probably more vigorous, than those born at other periods. Thus the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: "The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts—and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five- sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal 'struggle for existence,' it would be the inferior and LESS favoured race that had prevailed—and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults."

The entire paragraph sets up the passage I've underlined.  Leaving aside W. R. Greg's rather questionable qualifications [though some credit him with Galton as the co-inventor of eugenics] and noting his obvious bigotry against the Irish, a common prejudice that Darwin would seem to share as he doesn't seem to notice it,  Darwin seems to have forgotten the huge percentage of the Irish population who died in the potato famine of the 1840s, during his life.  We know he knew about the famine because he discussed it in letters as it happened, he was involved with research into blight free potatoes.  I don't know if he knew about the other potato famine of 1782,  or the even worse one, a century before the worst of all, in the  1740s.  Each likewise, reduced what Darwin, as a disciple of Malthus, no doubt, saw as a surplus of the population.  In letters Darwin mentions ancient Celts in several places so you'd think he'd have a slight interest in more recent events in Ireland.  Given that Darwin seems to look for every chance to see natural selection, even in all the wrong places, you wonder how he could have missed the chance to see his claim to fame in action, during his lifetime.  The Irish population had been repeatedly culled by famine in the century and a half before Darwin wrote "The Descent of Man".

The obvious question is why Darwin believed Greg that the surviving population was "careless, squalid, unaspiring" instead of more vigorous than the Scots who hadn't, likewise, been subjected to Darwinian struggle for life in such a horrifically dramatic way?

In the book, Darwin is constantly assuring us of the benefits for the population of having lots of people die off, preferably in childhood, weeding out the "weaker members" before they can "propagate their kind", leaving a more vigorous "race".  But he doesn't seem to believe that was the case in the one real life example that was nearest in time and location to him.  Clearly, part of that is Darwin's massive bigotry, freely on display throughout the book,  but I think it's also a matter of class hatred.  The Irish were a permanent underclass under British rule,  Irish aspiration was a danger to the British common received POV.  Not to mention the wealth and investments of many British families Darwin knew.   Perhaps it was wishful thinking on Darwin's part, believing that characterization of the "Irishman".

I will say, outright, that I think there is a lot more wishful thinking in Darwin than leads to good science.  In fact, in this book that was so useful to eugenicists, most of his assertions betray his class bias, his Anglo-Saxon privilege,  his racism and bigotry and his male supremacy.   But, it being Darwin, you're supposed to overlook those and the effect it obviously has on his second major SCIENTIFIC BOOK dealing with evolution.   You are supposed to excuse his disabilities in objective thought due to him "being a man of his time".   But what in most cases of hero worship is merely historically dishonest,  when it's science, which is supposed to be a very reliable source of knowledge about the world and when that world is the one Darwin addresses in The Descent of Man,  that excuse is inadequate. In this case it was extremely dangerous.  If scientists want to enjoy the enhanced credibility and repute that comes with the belief that they have taken the greatest possible trouble to produce real science of the greatest possible reliability, they don't get to use the excuse that their insertion of their own self-interest and their prejudice into the work has an excuse.

Whatever the reason for it, Darwin  missed the contradiction between his prediction of what would happen in a population that had undergone a devastating struggle for life and the population nearest to him that had undergone that culling.  As well, he missed the extreme bigotry of Greg that he parrots to, unwittingly,  undermine his proto-eugenic assertions.   That should force an inquiry into the rest of Darwin's book and the rest of his record to see how much of it is a product of his time, his social class and other avenues of bias and a distortion of reality.   A distortion that is directly responsible for the crime of eugenics.   You can look at what the eugenicists were saying about it if you don't believe that.

Addendum:  John Wilkins did the service of posting the essay of W. R Greg which Darwin took that passage from.  With Wilkins commentary.  You can see in the comments that I was engaged in researching Darwin back then.  I don't know why there is text in the original as given by Wilkins which is not present in The Descent of Man.  I would propose that Darwin might have been sanitizing it a bit, making it slightly more palatable.  Also, Darwin took it from a longer paragraph.  Was Charles Darwin guilty of "quote mining"?   It makes you wonder what a careful inspection of other quotes in the book would show in that line.

‘The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman, fed on potatoes,  living in a pig-stye, doting on a superstition, multiplies like rabbits or ephemera:  the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts,and in a dozen generations, five sixths of the population would be Celts, but five sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ‘struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed,and prevailed by virtue not of its qualities but of its faults, by reason not of its stronger vitality but of its weaker reticence and its narrower brain. "

Greg's comment "fed on potatoes" is a cruel and despicable thing to say about two decades after the famine ended.  It is impossible to think that Greg and his readers were unaware of what it meant in that context.  Especially considering it was largely because the Anglo-Saxons left them little choice because they exported grain, fish and meat from Ireland for the profit of the English and Scottish landowners and to keep the price of food in England lower than it would have been.  And they did in huge quantities during the famine of the 1840s.  During the famine of 1782, the ports had been closed to prevent exporting food.  Clearly the government during Darwin's time, enlightened by Malthus and the current scientific thinking decided to not take a chance at preserving the surplus population of  the "carelessness, squalid, unaspiring" race.

I have every confidence that is the reason that Darwin sanitized that particular phrase out of the quote as he published it.  Such is the quality of the "science" Darwin relied on in the book.

* I have hitherto only considered the advancement of man from a semi-human condition to that of the modern savage. But some remarks on the action of natural selection on civilised nations may be worth adding. This subject has been ably discussed by Mr. W.R. Greg (9. 'Fraser's Magazine,' Sept. 1868, p. 353. This article seems to have struck many persons, and has given rise to two remarkable essays and a rejoinder in the 'Spectator,' Oct. 3rd and 17th, 1868. It has also been discussed in the 'Quarterly Journal of Science,' 1869, p. 152, and by Mr. Lawson Tait in the 'Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science,' Feb. 1869, and by Mr. E. Ray Lankester in his 'Comparative Longevity,' 1870, p. 128. Similar views appeared previously in the 'Australasian,' July 13, 1867. I have borrowed ideas from several of these writers.), and previously by Mr. Wallace and Mr. Galton. (10. For Mr. Wallace, 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.  With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.  

The passage in bold is what is usually taken from the longer paragraph.  You will notice that both Galton and W. R. Greg are cited as authorities in this.

UPDATE:  When I get the chance I am hoping to follow up on Darwin's position on the Home Rule for Ireland issue that was so important during this period.  A number of British scientists were quite vocal in opposing home rule, many of them in terms that are obviously in line with Greg's bigotry.   Darwin clearly shared Greg's view of the Irish people or he'd have seen the problems this example poses for his assertions in the book.   Darwin, though, exposes himself as massively bigoted in the book.

What It Would Take for Charles Darwin To Beat the Eugenics Charge

Part 2.  Leonard Darwin  and Schallmeyer 
with a note about George Darwin

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, 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.  I would reject, though, 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 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.

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 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 I find Schallmeyer's German unusually difficult, taking a great time to read, everminnd 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 to 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.

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 I assume 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 when it came to more controversial aspects of proto-eugenics but it would seem a search for fingerprints is justified.  

N.B. I am going to rely almost exclusively on primary documents and on translations that would have been available to Charles Darwin or which had the obvious approval of his closest associate, Thomas Huxley.  In this post I have also relied on Sheila Faith Weiss's book cited in it.

* 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 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 Eugenics: The Standard of Evidence Required To Make the Case

This is not a judicial matter,  the charge that Charles Darwin inspired eugenics.   It is not going to be decided in a law court but by people in the world.   Going past the legal standards of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, Darwin's champions insist on a standard of absolute proof of guilt for their hero, that he would have had to have explicitly endorsed forced sterilization and genocide.  Absolute proof of guilt.  That is a standard of evidence that is insisted on by true believers of many personality cults throughout history and no matter how many letters the true believer has after their name.   I'm unaware of anyone else in science whose reputation enjoys that level of impunity,  those kinds of figures are more common to politics, religion and pop-culture.   For the most hard bitten of the true believers in the mythical Charles Darwin his cult has constructed , it would have to be proved that he, himself, did those things with his own hands . 

But the charge isn't that Darwin drew up and endorsed the complete history of eugenics as it became real in the world,  the charge is that he inspired it, that he established its premise that he gave it his blessing as Galton and others established the "science" during its gestation to full term.   One of the first lines of defense by his champions is the deliberate distortion of that charge into an absurdity that couldn't be true, in lieu of presenting a case against the accusation as its made.  That is what happened when Allen Miller inserted it, irrelevantly, against  me during an argument about an unrelated matter*.  That was my inspiration for this series of posts overturning the phony Darwin that so much of his ideology stands on.   I want to destroy that one so the real Charles Darwin will be known in his own words and deeds.

This isn't going to be decided by either of those most stringent of legal standards of proof mentioned above, it's going to be decided by persuasion,  and there is no persuasive case that Charles Darwin is innocent of inspiring eugenics.   As noted in a previous post the evidence is not going to be overturned unless that can be done in the words of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton and other eugenicists.  It will have to be made against the actions and words of Darwin's own children who knew him more intimately than any of us.  Any eugenicist who cited Darwin as their inspiration, and myriads of them did, proves the case that he inspired them.  His own endorsements of books by those developing eugenics, of spouting eugenics arguments and proto-eugenics confirms he said the things that inspired them.

Most people have no practical reason to care about evolution.   As compared to many of the other topics that could be included in a high school biology course, nutrition, viral and bacterial infection, other kinds of disease and illness, all knowledge that could lead to maintaining health, preventing pregnancy and disease, saving the biosphere, ...   evolution is one of the least useful.

What would be rightly taken as an obscure and esoteric study, if judged by its importance to most people,  has taken an outrageous amount of the world's attention.   There are ideological reasons for that, as someone noted at Sandwalk blog last week, certainly the strongest of those is the use that atheists make of evolution to attack religion, an effort that began almost as soon as On the Origin of Species was published and translated into German.  Virtually all of the early followers of Darwin and many up to today have been openly and strongly anti-religious,  Huxley, Galton,  Haeckel,  ...  their complete works all contain statements of extreme hostility to religion.  And today the ultra-Darwininsts,  Dawkins, Dennett, are famous for their attacks on religion and have made themselves, unfortunately, the representatives of evolutionary science to many ignorant people.  I would include many of their admirers among those.  On the other side, of course,  religious fundamentalists absolutely reject the possibility that anything outside of Genesis could be true.  They also make false charges, quite often, but not all of their assertions, outside of science,  are unfounded.

Outside of biology -where the reputation of Charles Darwin has no real place - the foremost use of  Darwin among those who accept evolution has been in a continuing war against religion and, conversely,  for fundamentalism within religion.   Charles Darwin is a mascot of the most obnoxious kind of atheists and they are the major constituency for forcing him and the baggage he left onto science.   Given what he wrote in The Descent of Man, in other published material, his letters and notebooks, the racism that is obvious, the ethnic bigotry,  the male supremacy, the clear disdain he has for poor people and the disabled - he continually presents them as a danger to the entire humans species -  his clear preference for his own class of the wealthy even within supposed science publications,  all of that makes Charles Darwin a millstone around the neck of science in a time when evolutionary science has moved on far, far from where it needs a St. Darwin.

But today, the case for the eugenics-free Charles Darwin is lost for anyone who wants to read the record.   Charles Darwin, himself, cited Galton and Haeckel and others as understanding what he'd said in On the Origin of Species, he never rejected their developing application of his ideas as misrepresenting them., he praised them and cited them and those very books and articles.    When Galton credits Darwin and On the Origin of Species as the inspiration of his eugenics, he sealed that case.  And Galton wasn't the only eugenicist who Darwin endorsed,  Ernst Haeckel, as I will show in a later post, also had Charles Darwin's endorsement as he was embarking on an even more extreme eugenics effort.

True believers will believe in their heroes' sanctity no matter what evidence is presented.  The mythical Charles Darwin constructed in the post-war period has the advantage that so few of its fans have read much if any of what he wrote,  If one in a hundred have read The Descent of Man through, I'll eat a copy of it.  Virtually none of them have looked at what Galton, Schallmeyer, Leonard Darwin, Ernst Haeckel,  Karl Pearson, and others relevant to this case have written.  The Darwin myth is founded in ignorance of the primary documents, relying on clearly ideological secondary material and tertiary garbage.  The irony in that is that some of the primary material often makes it into the creationist literature, the most honest of it,  Though most of creationist argument also sinks into secondary and tertiary irrelevance and dishonesty.   But history shows that the creationist use of Charles Darwin has been more of a political success, convincing more people that the science is wrong than the mythical Darwin as presented by the BBC, PBS, and the large Darwin Industry  has been.

And what is science doing by presenting a cult of personality in place of the science as it stands today, in the first place?   Science is best sold to non-scientists by presenting solid science that won't get overturned in a future news cycle.**

Scientists who want to protect science will have to address the primary record left by Darwin and the relevant eugenicists honestly if they want to overcome that political liability.   It's way past due for some prominent evolutionary biologist to break with the Darwin myth and to lay out the fact that eugenicists either directly took their ideas from Darwin or they were filtered through those who had. and that they had Darwin's approval as they were doing it.    They will need to address that Darwin's children were major figures in early eugenics, especially Leonard Darwin.   Those things are far more understandable to most people, even those who have college degrees, than molecular and other evidence that supports evolution.  It will be hard enough to present a convincing scientific case for evolution.   Presenting a Darwin puppet that is so clearly not credible hasn't worked and it won't work with any but ignorant people.

* When you hear the word "Darwin", your first association is frequently "Hitler",   Allan Miller   Sandwalk Blog August 9, 2012

That bit of snark turned out to be my limit of toleration for that tactic of dishonest argument.  His clearly unhinged fellow Darwin champions, "Diogenes" and "J Thomson"  also used it.  I wasn't surprised, it's a continuing feature of the new atheist discourse.

You can read my response to Miller and the ensuing brawl at the link.   Please, notice who provided documentation and citation in the argument if you read it.

** I would bet anyone that most of what the college educated audience could tell you about that is the  pseudo-science of "evolutionary"  psychology,  an effort that less extreme admirers of Darwin,  such as Steven J. Gould and Richard Lewontin,  warned against as a revival of eugenics.

How Much Do You Have To Quote Before You're Not "Quote mining"

I couldn't find any documentation of the first use of the term "quote mining" from a standard reference source.  Lacking that, I went to the alternative which is free, if there's one thing you can say for it, Wikipedia.  Which, considering the un-professional level of editing there,  is ironic in itself.   Here's what it says about that, at least for today:

Scientists and their supporters used the term quote mining as early as the mid-1990s in newsgroup posts to describe quoting practices of certain creationists.[10][11][12] It is used by members of the scientific community to describe a method employed by creationists to support their arguments,[13][14] [15] though it can be and often is used outside of the creation-evolution controversy. Complaints about the practice predate known use of the term: Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in his famous 1973 essay "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" that

"Their [Creationists'] favorite sport is stringing together quotations, carefully and sometimes expertly taken out of context, to show that nothing is really established or agreed upon among evolutionists. Some of my colleagues and myself have been amused and amazed to read ourselves quoted in a way showing that we are really antievolutionists under the skin."

This has been compared to the Christian theological method of prooftexting:

The tone of the Wiki article on "quote mining", clearly influenced by the anti-religious bias of this last decade,  is made ironic by reading all of Dobzhansky's essay with ends with this:

Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness. 

 One of the great thinkers of our age, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote the following: "Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems much henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of though must follow this is what evolution is. Of course, some scientists, as well as some philosophers and theologians, disagree with some parts of Teilhard's teachings; the acceptance of his worldview falls short of universal. But there is no doubt at all that Teilhard was a truly and deeply religious man and that Christianity was the cornerstone of his worldview. Moreover, in his worldview science and faith were not segregated in watertight compartments, as they are with so many people. They were harmoniously fitting parts of his worldview. Teilhard was a creationist, but one who understood that the Creation is realized in this world by means of evolution.

Dobzhansky would certainly be flamed out of any discussion of this topic on the ScienceBlogs, not to mention de Chardin who, while I don't agree with his theology or existentialism and find his science a bit outmoded, I've defended against new atheists on those very blogs.  And you should read what he says  before then:

Was the Creator in a jocular mood when he made Psilopa petrolei for California oil fields and species of Drosophila to live exclusively on some body-parts of certain land crabs on only certain islands in the Caribbean? The organic diversity becomes, however, reasonable and understandable if the Creator has created the living world not by caprice but by evolution propelled by natural selection. It is wrong to hold creation and evolution as mutually exclusive alternatives. I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way.

Imagine him saying that on PZ Myers or just about any "science themed blog",  especially those that are really atheist themed blogs.   I doubt his position as one of the greatest geneticists of the 20th century could  have protected him from the united wrath of PZ's Sci-Rangers.   Jerry Coyne, sort of Dobzhansky's scientific grandson (through Richard Lewontin) would fulminate mightily and unhingedly against him.

Anyway. For this series, the question is how much of Darwin do you have to quote before you aren't "quote mining" anymore?  I ask because in my recent long fight at Sandwalk Blog the two lifejackets in the form of quotations that are always thrown to the eugenics-free Darwin got hauled out by one "Diogenes", as ironically named a scientistic crackpot as inhibits the comment threads.

He'd been heaving the old "quote mining" charge against me for days.   Only, when the boy got around to quoting Darwin - which I suspect he took from Darwin fan club websites-  he clipped off both passages in a way that distorted their meaning.  That is something I've seen done over and over gain on pro-Darwin websites and in other media.  I was very familiar with both quotes clipped in that way.   Needless to say, I pointed it out and gave the entire passages in context to show what they really mean.  Not that that impressed the congregated atheists, one of whom accused me of quote mining what his  buddy "Diogenes" had  clipped off.

I will be discussing each of those oft mined passages in the context of what Darwin wrote what he said, pointing out that in both cases they are mischaracterized  by Darwin's defenders just as creationists misuse other passages.  I know that whenever someone quotes Darwin to criticize what he says that they will be accused of "quote mining".  Of course, if you ask them how you committed that sin they'll get flummoxed and never address your question because 1. they just throw the phrase around like it meant whatever is convenient, 2. odds are, they never read what the quote is taken from.

In the long argument last week, I challenged "J Thomas", "Diogenes", Allan Miller and others to list books they'd read on the topic.   Other than Miller claiming to have read On the Origin of Species,  none of them could list a single work they'd read, including the ones I cited and quoted.  And yet they all resorted to the accusation of "quote mining" freely and wrongly.

The new atheism is a fad that relies on the ignorance of its adherents.  It is a shallow, bigoted, dishonest intellectual fad that exists primarily to convince them that they are superior to the majority of the population without requiring that they fulfill the first duty of anyone engaging in an intellectual discussion, knowing what you're talking about.

Update:   While going through my notes to write the post about Darwin and W. R. Greg today,  I noticed a possible incident of quote mining by none other than Charles R. Darwin, himself.   Here is the section of that post:

John Wilkins did the service of posting the essay of W. R Gregwhich Darwin took that passage from.  With Wilkins commentary.  You can see in the comments that I was engaged in researching Darwin back then.  I don't know why there is text in the original as given by Wilkins which is not present in The Descent of Man.  I would propose that Darwin might have been sanitizing it a bit, making it slightly more palatable.  Also, Darwin took it from a longer paragraph.  Was Charles Darwin guilty of "quote mining"?   It makes you wonder what a careful inspection of other quotes in the book would show in that line.  Here is the passage with what Darwin left out in bold. 

‘The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman, fed on potatoes,  living in a pig-stye, doting on a superstition, multiplies like rabbits or ephemera: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts,and in a dozen generations, five sixths of the population would be Celts, but five sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ‘struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed,and prevailed by virtue not of its qualities but of its faults, by reason not of its stronger vitality but of its weaker reticence and its narrower brain. "

Greg's comment "fed on potatoes" is a cruel and despicable thing to say  two decades after the famine ended.  It is impossible to think that Greg and his readers were unaware of what it meant in that context.  Especially considering it was largely because the Anglo-Saxons left them little choice because they exported grain, fish and meat from Ireland for the profit of the English and Scottish landowners and to keep the price of food in England lower than it would have been.  And they so did in huge quantities during the famine of the 1840s.  During the famine of 1782, the ports had been closed to prevent exporting food.  Clearly the government during Darwin's time, enlightened by Malthus and the current scientific thinking decided to not take a chance at preserving the surplus population of  the "carelessness, squalid, unaspiring" race. 

What Would It Take for Charles Darwin To Beat the Eugenics Charge

Part 1:  Galton

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 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. 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 (I'd guess 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 six 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.  In the arguments I've had on this issue, I've generally discovered that those who insist on their phony Charles Darwin have never read much if anything he wrote.

That 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. 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, no doubt 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.  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 The Word "Darwinism"

Sometime in the last decade a piece of folk etymology has become current on the blogs that "Darwinism" is a word that is used almost exclusively by creationists.   I've been told that it began in the ScienceBlogs, Orac of the quite ironically entitled "Respectful Insolence" blog, specifically.

Wherever it started, it is a piece of nonsense that serves mostly to show that the person asserting that has never read much, if anything about the subject.  Darwinism was given its modern meaning by Thomas Huxley, Charles Darwin's foremost champion, famously called "Darwin's Bulldog" from the first years after Darwin became famous for On the Origin of Species.   Before he used it in one of his several reviews of On the Origin of Species,  "Darwinist" meant someone who believed in Erasmus Darwin's theory of evolution, something which, I believe, both Huxley and Charles Darwin noted at some time or other.

Darwinists from the first years of Darwin's fame have used the word, in English, in German and in other languages.   In no place I've come across did Charles Darwin ever object to the word.  He is on record as having read and fulsomely appreciated books about Darwinism, in both English and German (Darwinismus).

As I said, the thing you learn from the folk wisdom of the online Darwin Fan Club is that most of them have never read anything about it.  If they had, they would find it being used from Huxley and Haeckel right down to Richard Dawkins.

From what I observe and understand, that bit of pseudo-linguistic erudition is not current in Britain.  I'm not sure if it is confined to places where the ScienceBlogs are most read or if it's mostly North American nonsense.

The point that a decided minority of the Defenders of Darwin online have read so much as one of his books will figure marginally in this series.  It remains a major irritation to anyone who discusses these issues who has gone to that bother.   After wading through comments from those "Darwinists" for the past two weeks, not to mention for the past four years,  I'm done being nice about it and I won't pretend to be respectful about it.

Notice of Intent

Following a long blog brawl at Sandwalk blog, that has extended into two comment threads and more than a week, I'm planning on writing on Charles Darwin's role in inspiring eugenics and Social Darwinism in the English speaking people and Germany.

The current belief common on the left is that Charles Darwin, somehow, had no role in inspiring eugenics and nothing to do with Social Darwinism.   Until about six years ago, it was a belief I shared,  a belief based mostly in my never having read much of the primary source material from Darwin, Francis Galton and others relevant to those issues.   Then, I decided to write on that topic on the blog I was writing for.   I expected to find the documentary record would support that contention of a eugenics-free Darwin who was greatly wronged and sullied by the distortion of his thinking that Social Darwinism represents.  Only, as soon as I started looking at that record,  The Descent of Man  by Charles Darwin,  Memories of My Life by Francis Galton,  that sanitized Charles Darwin began to fall apart.   I found that Galton explicitly credited his cousin Charles Darwin and, specifically,  On the Origin of Species as inspiring  his eugenics.   He published the letter from Darwin, gushing enthusiasm for Galton's book "Hereditary Genius".    In Descent of Man, I found glowing endorsement for Galton's book and other publications,  I found that Darwin, far from disdaining Herbert Spencer, the counterpart of Galton in Social Darwinism, he called him a "great philosopher".   Most disturing of all, I found a lot of similarly glowing endorsements of Ernst Haeckel and his publications, some of which I was somewhat familiar with as they are infamous in the history of German scientific racism and, again, eugenics.

Since that shock I've looked at the record even more, always depending on primary documents, in the words of Charles Darwin, Galton, Haeckel, and others, including, soon after, Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin's son, himself an infamous figure in eugenics and Francis Galton's successor in British eugenics. Leonard Darwin, who seems to be reticient about mentioning his father, leaving that to others, nevertheless, associated his father with his own eugenics and, in a really stunning article, cited his father's role as the independent inspiration of German eugenics.

Early in the effort I realized that in order to overcome those primary documents there would have to be documents from Charles Darwin, himself, or others as closely associated with Charles Darwin as his own children (three other sons and other Darwins were active in eugenics) who distanced him from eugenics.   That is something I've never found, every step of the way I've found only that those who knew Charles Darwin had, personally, associated him with eugenics. Eugenicists who never knew Darwin cited him as part of their inspiration.   I have, yet,  come across no eugenicists who have disassociated Charles Darwin from eugenics.

I have not found any self-defined Darwinists who did that before World War II ended, when, I greatly suspect, the eugenics free Charles Darwin began to be constructed in an effort to rehabilitate him.   Before then, eugenics was controversial but it was also one of the most remarkable and rapid success stories of a new "science" in history.   Eugenics was adopted in intellectual circles, university science departments, textbooks and, most of all, by legislatures and courts.  Before the war, it wasn't uncommon for people opposed to eugenics to be seen as ignorant and backwards, science deniers.

After the Nazis and their allies showed what eugenics really meant when put into practice, after the eugenics programs in the United States and Canada started to come under more scrutiny and their deplorable violations of rights became known,  eugenics went from a success for Darwinism in real life to a mill stone around the neck of evolutionary biology.

Instead of de-eugenicizing (as it were) evolutionary science, for largely ideological reasons unrelated to the science, the science establishment and others with an ideological interest in the reputation of Charles Darwin started to construct a sanitized version of the man and his work.  It was that sanitized Darwin who was presented to me along with other phonied up substitutes for history, such as Inherit the Wind.   I bought pretty much all of it until six years ago when I started doing what I should have done before forming opinions on the subject, reading the actual record left by those who the secondary records and tertiary junk are supposed to be based on.

After that long argument on Sandwalk blog, an argument begun with an attack on me by another participant as I was discussing the topic of the post, I've had enough.   I will be acting as the devil's advocate in the case for the canonization of Charles Darwin in several planned posts.  I'm an internal critic of that, accepting that evolution is a fact, as proven a fact as exists in the biological and, perhaps as Gould contended,  in all of science.   That doesn't mean that I don't expect any of the legion of true believers in the cause of St. Darwin won't lie about that.  But I'm not going to be intimidated into lying about it anymore by those tactics.