What else is to be made of claims by market economists that their anti-regulatory claims that "the market" is the all powerful, all knowing an inevitable best force which must be allowed to govern our lives are in line with natural selection other than that "the market" is identical to the tacitly asserted force which selects and that the character of that selective force is as Darwin asserted?
By doing that, by claiming that they have discovered that natural selection is at work in the economy as well as in biology, they certainly aren't denying that such a force within economics would have the same character as it does in biology. As to whether or not such an assertion can make any sense at all - given that Darwin was claiming that it worked through a mode of inheritance of traits which make no sense when dealing with economics - is beside the point because the entire exercise in economics as done by economists isn't evolutionary, producing new species, it is an argument against any change at all, an argument for stasis of a status quo from before the period when governments faced with periodic catastrophes, homicidal business practices such as selling people poisons in their food and medicines, swindling people through frauds and insurance blackmail, stealing their homes and often livelihoods through loan sharking and any means that businessmen and their lawyers and crooked politicians and judges could dream up tried to prevent those through regulation.
As I noted yesterday, Darwin's claim was that it was his reading the psychotic depravity of Thomas Malthus "for amusement" as he put it which gave him his theoretical force behind the evolution of new species. As I noted the other day Karl Marx concluded that what he had actually done was turn Malthus on his head and claim that what Malthus said set human beings apart from the world of plants and animals - human based class systems - applied to all of nature EXCEPT "CIVILISED MAN". And as I've also pointed out, as soon as such people as Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel and Thomas Huxley, Darwin's most inner of inner circles, had read On the Origin of Species, their minds turned to the question of how to eliminate human beings from the human population so as they would not leave descendants. In that they were far more in line with Malthus who also favored harrying the poor, especially, out of existence.
Given its history, especially in the pre- World War Two period, was an academic, scientific and legal assertion of nature red in tooth and claw, and the consequences of that, any present day white-collared, clean handed academic economists who claim that their anti-regulatory, market asserting Darwinian economics must be advocating not only free markets but the human carnage, slow motion and individual or fast and massively harmful that prevailed then.
The extent to which the post-war lie, the invented non-eugenic Darwin has aided that effort is worth asking. The huge lie that natural selection can ever be separated from eugenics, from Darwin's and virtually every one of his closest and approved interpreters assertions that not only selective breeding and culling of the human population was desirable and would have salubrious effects for the survivors - AND VIRTUALLY EVERY ONE OF THEM SAID SUCH THINGS IN ABSOLUTELY UNMISTAKABLE DECLARATIONS PRESENTED AS HAVING THE RELIABILITY OF SCIENCE - that was also the informed, educated conclusion of what natural selection means. I will point out that not only did Darwin and his inner circles assert the vital and absolute need for eugenic measures, they also, frequently, though not consistently asserted the desirability of imperial wars of conquest of "savage races" of the "uncivilised" in Darwin and Haeckel, especially of other named groups, none of them considered by them to be white. The native inhabitants of the Americas, Australia, many of the Pacific islands who were slated by Darwin and Haeckel for extinction by name. Other Darwinists, such as Huxley, named others.
All of that was covered up by academics, by scientists, by journalists and writers in the aftermath of the crimes of the Nazis being exposed, to a lesser extent in the West, the racial crimes of Mussolini and the Japanese imperial command. But that was a lie which depended on people never reading Darwin and those he cited, it depended on the ignorance of allegedly educated people who would never do what you would think the cult of Darwin would have promoted, reading what he said, in full, doing what he advocated people do, read the authors and books and articles he cited to support his scientific assertions - much of his citation being of some of their most depraved advocacy of eugenics, neglect of the poor and sick so as to hasten their death, infanticide, war and genocide.
I have noted that all of that is changing as Darwin's production goes online, his books, his articles, his papers, his letters, those of the scientists he cited positively, the writings of other conventional Darwinists and the eugenicists who declared, virtually to a person that their anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, advocacy of even the most depraved immorality, even the mass murder by gassing of people, is in line with their understanding of natural selection as a force of nature. All of that will be known, now, because the lie covering all of that up depended on it being mostly available in aging books which were seldom taken down from library shelves at universities to be read. Playwrights and screen writers could write Inherit the Wind, a near total distortion of the actual history of the Scopes Trial, they could stage TV costume dramas of Darwin and Huxley - his mythical encounter with Bishop Wilberforce - and those theatrical, propaganda distortions would be taken as history even by officially educated people - I had a huge row over that with two PhD scientists online a few years back, neither of them seemed to understand that you could actually know what was said because the transcript of the trial is a far more detailed and accurate record than the fossil record provides.
It is no accident that the economists who are asserting that their economics is in line with natural selection tend to be opposed to government regulations that protect consumers, that protect the environment, that prevent industries and companies from doing things that destroy the environment and kill people. As even a moment's thought of what natural selection claims makes obvious, it is, as Karl Pearson said, an assertion of benefit to the survivors from the deaths of others, in the human population, ultimately, other people. Given both its provenance in Malthusian economics and the almost immediate use of it, with Darwin's warmest approval, by Francis Galton to make assertions that the British elite, the old families of wealthy people, possessed "Hereditary Genius" and that such biological superiority accounted for their wealth and power. That use of natural selection, for the wealthy to proclaim that their position at the top was ordained by nature by virtue of their own biologically endowed superiority has been one of its most potent features. In fact, such extra-scientific use of it would, in its original form, probably be far more enduring than its actual use as a pure law of nature of use to doing actual science. Darwinism had to be patched up with Mendelian genetics eighty to ninety years after its invention and it has undergone extensive renovation all during its existence as further discoveries in science have to be either made to fit with it or have required its further alteration. I have noted that some of the more recent old guard such as Jerry Coyne are anxious that newer discoveries and assertions will destroy Darwinism and those just might, eventually, after it falls as happens in science. But in the mean time, it, with the smokescreen put up around its pathological and homicidal and, most of all, its anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic immorality, will be as potent as it has been since the ink dried on the first circulated drafts of Origin of Species to be read by an eager elite.
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A note about the accusation that was made that I've "cherry picked" Darwin. I've written exhaustively on entire paragraphs and sections of Darwin's books, I've noted what he actually said through multiple citations of entire paragraphs and passages, I've provided links to the books and articles and letters I've quoted so people could read them in their entirety, I have not, in any instance ever "cherry picked" "quote mined" or distorted what was said.
It is ironic because when that accusation was made to me I looked up the origin of the idea of "cherry picking" and "quote mining" and several things I read noted those phrases were either invented by the defenders of Darwin or they got some of their most extensive uses by the people who defended him - against his own words, in fact.
In doing my research of Darwin, doing what virtually none of his champions do, reading him and looking up his positive, supportive citations, I found that Charles Darwin, himself, practiced not only "cherry picking" but altering quotations to make them sound less obviously offensive than they are. And I have also found evidence that he not only invented citations but that he lied about what the authors said in at least one instance. But, to find that out you have to do what .... I don't know, I was told you had to do when I was in jr. high and they were teaching us how to write research papers READ STUFF TO FIND OUT WHAT IT SAID.
What is even more ironic in the etymology and use of those terms is that no one practices them more consistently than the Darwin industry does. I've found a puzzling absence of letters from Darwin to Ernst Haeckel - letters available - in English, not needing translation - from the project to put all of Darwin's letters online. I've also had to depend on books published before the Second World War to find some of his letters which his professional promoters don't seem to be eager to put in the online record. I used to wonder why that would be, but I think it's fairly obvious why.
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Another note. It is supremely ironic that the Republican Party which has used Biblical literalists, anti-evolution religious believers to gain power when it is exactly the most horribly immoral aspects of Darwinism that rule their economics, their social policy and their program of elite corruption.
It was the wrong thing that some Biblical literalists objected to in Darwinism - though I will note, given what I said about Inherit the Wind, not William Jennings Bryan, he got it pretty well exactly right in his ungiven summary argument in that trial. What was wrong was not the idea that people shared a common ancestor with the great apes, it is the eugenics, the advocacy of inequality and violence and murder and the Republican social policy of telling the poor, the sick, the discriminated against, the alien among us to just hurry up and die, its inherent racism. That is the real shame of the Fundamentalist opposition to Darwinism, that their Biblical literalism blinded them to the utter depravity of its content, that they put the champions of the most anti-Gospel, anti-democratic Darwinian depravity into office.
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