Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Hate Mail - The Longer I Think About What Is Claimed For Natural Selection The More Like A Delusion It Seems To Me

I wrote a piece a long time ago in which I called what is proposed to constitute Natural Selection "The Mother of All N-Factorial Problems".   A lot of your accusations and claims were answered in that post.   I've dealt with issues of natural selection any number of times since then.  A day or two before I wrote that one, I wrote one in which I quoted Richard Lewontin pointing out that the difficulties in even observing and measuring proposed selective forces made those two most basic, crucial steps which cannot be left out impossible.    He admitted that any story or scenario about those alleged forces could not be put to a test.  Unlike many who make up those stories and believe and claim and sucker even college grads into believing they've done science, Richard Lewontin certain knows better.   I underlined what I thought was most important about that for my argument.

It is not only in the investigation of human society that the truth is sometimes unavailable.  Natural scientists, in their overweening pride, have come to believe that eventually everything we want to know will be known.  But that is not true.  For some things there is simply not world enough and time.  It may be, given the necessary constraints on time and resources available to the natural sciences, that we will never have more than a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system.  For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them.  In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them.  Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were.  Over and over, in these essays reproduced here, I have tried to give an impression of the limitations on the possibility of our knowledge.  Science is a social activity carried out by a remarkable, but by no means omnipotent species.  Even the Olympians were limited in their powers. 

Which would take many, I would now say virtually all, if not all alleged scenarios of natural selection outside of the realm of real science.  If you can't really observe or measure some proposed "trait" if they are too subtle or too anything to remove them from the very methodology of science,  if the problems involved makes it impossible for you to really test proposed ideas about them, in reality, not in Just-so fiction, then that makes all of that definitively NOT science.  I think even calling it "lore" which is often based in habitual, sometimes even careful observation, is more than most of it deserves,   Did you read my analysis of one of the most famous of those?

I think natural selection is most likely a delusion, an imposition of an all too artificial and all too humanly invented economic order*  on all of the unknown lives and events in the forever invisible past which constitutes the real "thing" we have called evolution.  My thinking doesn't deny that evolution is a fact, which I think it is.  My thinking denies that squeezing such an incredibly large, detailed, unobservable, unmeasurable, series of events over billions of years and who knows how many trillions of lives of how many billions of what we would call species of organisms into one theory or even a handful of theories is honestly possible.   I think much if not all of the "usefulness" of the theory of natural selection is an illusion in which professional pride and convenience plays entirely more of a part than biologists, real ones, and certainly the frauds who do it as social science while entirely invested in it would care for anyone to notice.

Though not all biologists, certainly not now as even some eminent ones are expressing increased skepticism about either its universal explanatory powers or even whether or not it's a good theory.

The matter of teasing out "traits"  and building them up into either adaptive or maladaptive categories is another fundamentally insoluble problem of trying to come up with science demonstrating natural selection.   You might be able to sell people on what you claim but I'll bet you won't be able to sell anyone who thinks really, really hard about the problem who doesn't have a stake in pretending you've succeeded.

If you want, I can give you some of my more recent reasons for concluding natural selection is a mass delusion among the educated.  Those tend to be rather complicated.

I have also pointed out why so many millions of college educated people today, especially those who are not of "Anglo-Saxons" or other related North-Western European ancestry (excluding the Irish) should seriously question Darwinism because, according to Darwin, they shouldn't have been born because they carry a permanent inferiority that makes us a danger to the future of the human species.  Lots of those suckers are among the biggest promoters of the naive, ignorant Charles Darwin, one based in not reading what he really said.  You don't give me a name so I can't tell but that you might not be on Darwin's hit list for those to be excluded from the future of humanity due to not only ethnic but, perhaps even more so, the economic status or your Victorian era ancestors or, most of all, the health status of those same ancestors.  When you look at the list of those on Darwins hit list or that of his colleagues whose work he endorsed, placed there on the assumptions about natural selection in the human species, that number probably includes most of the people alive today.  Including, I will bet, most of those who hold college degrees, including many of the biggest suckers for the Darwin industry post-war model.   Any claim that evolutionary biologists and, even worse, those in the so-called social sciences and, worst of all, those who claim some kind of Darwinian character for their would-be philosophy have left ideas like that aside could only be made by someone who is profoundly ignorant of post-WWII eugenic proposals, made by some of the most eminent people in the field.  For example, the famous Watson and Crick, Crick probably being a far more committed racist and eugenicist than his obnoxious American partner.

*  Here's the quote from Marx which I left out of that piece the other day.  As much as I disagree with Marx on most things, this is absolutely spot on.

I'm amused that Darwin, at whom I've been taking another look, should say that he also applies the ‘Malthusian’ theory to plants and animals, as though in Mr Malthus’s case the whole thing didn’t lie in its not being applied to plants and animals, but only — with its geometric progression — to humans as against plants and animals. It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes and is reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an ‘intellectual animal kingdom’, whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society.

Karl Marx:  Letter to Engels,  June 18th, 1862

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