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Jerry Fodor, the American philosopher [and writer of] What Darwin Got Wrong, the new book he has co-authored with the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini.
He hadn’t just identified evidence that natural selection was more complicated than previously thought…Natural selection, he explains, simply “cannot be the primary engine of evolution”.
The irony in all this is that Darwin himself never claimed that it was. He went to his deathbed protesting that he’d been misinterpreted: there was no reason, he said, to assume that natural selection was the only imaginable mechanism of evolution.
But rejection of an intelligent designer Creator was and remains a pillar of the concept, so the only other mechanism of evolution is survival of the fittest through intentional measures.
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The Darwins; a Bright Family With a Dark Side
Charles Darwin’s paternal grandfather Erasmus Darwin was a well-known doctor whose experiments on the origin of life were referenced by Mary Shelley in her novel Frankenstein.
Charles’ maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, who became wealthy on his china company after developing a new manufacturing process, belonged with Erasmus Darwin to the Lunar Society to discuss scientific matters with intellectuals and industry pioneers.
Positive Eugenics
One of Charles Darwin’s cousins, Sir Francis Galton wrote the book on eugenics as a science to “improve” humanity biologically and combat genetic deterioration through arranging marriages.
This is apparent in the marriages between
- Erasmus Darwin’s son Robert and Josiah Wedgewood’s daughter Susanah,
- and in their son Charles Darwin’s marriage to a cousin, Emma Wedgewood,
- and in Charles’ sister’s marriage to Emma Wedgewood’s brother.
This, despite the knowledge of laws of inheritance, first published by Mendel in 1866.
The second child of Charles Darwin and his wife / first cousin Emma Wedgewood had a series of illnesses, succumbing just a few weeks past her 10th birthday, possibly from tuberculosis, and Darwin “fretted that the ill health of his children might be due to the nature of the marriage. He realized that with breeding of any kind, it’s better to cross-breed than to put close relatives together”.
Howbeit, within the mix of hereditary chances the family did produce a dynasty of social elites. We can be sure that the social factors of a healthy and mentally stimulating home environment, prosperity, education, social relationships, elitist connections, good marriages and so on played a major role in achieving their success.
“Negative” Eugenics
This aspect of social control defended the refusal to permit certain marriages, sterilization of genetically inferior couples, and even elimination from society, through death if necessary.
Survival Of The Fittest
The voyage of the Beagle was actually part of England’s empire-building effort.
From Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities
Charles Darwin had no training whatsoever for the role he played in developing a “scientific” explanation for the Origins of the Species.
- At Cambridge at a time when science was not yet a structured profession a botany professor invited him to parties to meet the famous men of the university. This was equivalent to being inducted into the Skull and Bones Club for prospective politicians.
- Adam Sedgwick took him as an assistant for two weeks of summer fieldwork examining rocks in Wales.
- Then Henslow offering him a voyage round the world on a British survey ship, HMS Beagle.
“Today the multimedia fame of the Beagle voyage sometimes makes it hard to remember that its purpose was not to take Darwin round the world but to…exploit British interests overseas.”
Charles Darwin was by no stretch of the imagination a scientist. He was simply a pawn of powerful men capitalizing (that’s a pun) on the massive social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. He was a political front man for underwriting Britain’s latest exploitation of the world’s resources both human and natural during the height of its imperialism, while, if the idea of Evolution was utterly shot down by the Religious Establishment, he could be thrown under the bus with no harm done to any of the prestigious men with careers to protect.
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was used to justify… imperialism, racism, eugenics and social inequality.
Darwin borrowed popular concepts, including “survival of the fittest,” from sociologist Herbert Spencer and “struggle for existence” from economist Thomas Malthus…
Darwin appeared to be confirming with science what they already believed to be true about human society—that the fit inherited qualities such as industriousness and the ability to accumulate wealth, while the unfit were innately lazy and stupid.
Spencer applied the idea of “survival of the fittest” to so-called laissez faire or unrestrained capitalism during the Industrial Revolution, in which businesses are allowed to operate with little regulation from the government.
Spencer opposed any laws that helped workers, the poor, and those he deemed genetically weak. Such laws, he argued, would go against the evolution of civilization by delaying the extinction of the “unfit.”
Paradoxically, his ideas were accepted – through the collaboration of science, education, politics and the military – by the general public who are destined to be crushed underfoot by the elite.
What wins Evolution’s converts over from Creation-based religion is not the origin of life, but the destination of life after death. No accountability to a Superhuman Being who gave life and judges what we did with it. Freedom to do whatever you want in this life with no negative consequences later.
God Is Dead
The death of God didn’t strike Nietzsche as an entirely good thing. Without a God, the basic belief system of Western Europe was in jeopardy, as he put it in Twilight of the Idols: “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole…”
With the old system of meaning gone a new one could be created, but it came with risks—ones that could bring out the worst in human nature…What could the point of life be without a God?
In The Will to Power he wrote that: “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism.
European culture has been moving…toward a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong…that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.”
What Nietzsche foresaw was simply the outcome of evolutionary belief in action, an upsurge in the baseline experience of the strong dominating the weak.
The Rape of Africa [in just 30 years AFTER slavery was abolished] was the invasion, occupation, division, and colonization of African territory by European powers. The 10 percent of Africa that was under formal European control in 1870 increased to almost 90 percent by 1914…due to the Industrial societies’ demand for raw materials, especially copper, cotton, rubber, palm oil, cocoa, diamonds, tea, and tin.
many atrocities were perpetrated in the Congo Free State…laborers who failed to meet rubber collection quotas were often punished by having their hands cut off…
up to [half] of the estimated 16 million native inhabitants died [in 25 years] between 1885 and 1908…[from] “indiscriminate war”, starvation, reduction of births and diseases.
Note also the signs of Kwashiorkor, swelling of the gut, caused by a severe form of malnutrition, especially an extreme lack of protein. This results in the inability for osmosis to occur across cell membranes, therefore fluids to accumulate in the gastro-intestinal system, as well as an enlarged diseased liver.
In the neighbouring French Congo…brutal methods, along with the introduction of disease, resulted in the loss of up to 50 percent of the indigenous population.
In Egypt, while building the Suez Canal, sources estimate that 120,000 workers died over the ten years of construction due to malnutrition, fatigue and disease, especially cholera.
In Germany, France, and Britain, the middle class claimed a “place in the sun”…bolstering nationalism and militarism in an early prototype of fascism.
Germany became the third-largest colonial power in Africa after England and France in the 1890’s under Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “Second Reich”, with the aim of transforming Germany into a global power, which ultimately led to World War I, which was the single most important event in shaping the history of Europe during the twentieth century. Europeans came to the realization that the supposedly civilized men of the twentieth century had outdone in savagery the barbarians of all preceding ages.
Conquests of territories were inevitably followed by public displays of the indigenous people for scientific and leisure purposes…”human zoos” could be found in Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, Milan, New York City, Paris, etc., with 200,000 to 300,000 visitors attending each exhibition.
In [1906 at the Bronx Zoo in New York City], Madison Grant, head of the New York Zoological Society…a scientific racist and eugenicist, placed [Pygmy] Ota Benga in a cage with an orangutan and labeled him “The Missing Link” in an attempt to illustrate Darwinism, and in particular that Africans like Ota Benga are closer to apes than were Europeans…
And so Africans, by the Evolutionary processes of “survival of the fittest” would – and should – be eliminated.
Kingdom Come 