08.15.08
Toward A Secular Postdarwinism
A selection from World History And The Eonic Effect
1.3.2 Toward A Secular Postdarwinism
Darwin’s theory of natural selection borders on fraud, and is the original case of the crank theory. To make natural selection do the whole work of the entirety of metaphysics, in the process resolving all of its antinomies, has to be the biggest tomfoolery in the history of ‘science’. This theory is likely to put the whole of secularism at risk. We should move at once to ask, What do we mean by secularism? And we can wonder if Darwin’s theory is appropriate as its defining standard.
Looking at history in light of the eonic effect we can be finished with the question of Darwin’s theory once and for all. And can see why this theory is so badly off the mark, in the process freeing our sense of history from Darwinian pseudo-explanation. The method used here is very simple, and almost incontrovertibly elemental, using basic periodization. Simply examine history close up, as a whole, step by step. You may not agree with all aspects of the result, but the process of enquiry will suddenly make you see in broad strokes what’s going on in world history, and why Darwin’s theory is a scientific myth. Subtract your case from complicity in this botched theory with a high coefficient of murder, and learn to stand up to Big Science propaganda using Darwin for legitimation of social ideology.
A secular critique of Darwin for liberal/left culture is very much needed, with a reminder that Creationist critics are confusing the issue. And the exploitation of debate to leverage Darwinian confusions with intelligent design arguments has compounded that confusion. The standard Darwin debate has settled into a ‘science versus religion’ routine designed to produce more noise than anything else. Darwinists need a reality check, and are living in a fantasy world where reductionist thinking has declared itself omniscient. We can embrace the fact of evolution, it is the theory of natural selection that is the problem. This is a specialized argument adapted to the emergence of man, and the facts of world history. Our use of the term ‘evolution’ is designed for world history first and foremost. But one simple question haunts this history. When did evolution stop and history begin? As we tackle this almost whimsical question, we find that ‘history’ must just as well apply to earlier stages of man’s descent. Thus our overlap produces an ironic photo finish falsification of Darwin’s theory, which is seen to be extremely implausible, or incomplete.
History records the exact moment where the Malthusian fallacy overtook Darwin’s thinking, leading to a completely speculative extension of visible natural selection to universal explanation. The debugger backtracks to this moment, the basic mistake. Science proceeds by the facts of the case, and the facts of civilization override reductionist obsessions attempting to derive a priori solutions to the historical givens. The immense industry of Darwinists defending Darwin’s theory is formidable. But this theory flunks a few very simple tests. It cannot resolve fact-value distinctions, and it can’t explain the fact of, or evolution of, consciousness. It is simply disingenuous, rank propaganda, to claim a complete science here.
It is not hard to critique Darwin. The problem springs from the way modern science is taken as a complete subject that can explain everything, and therefore already has, when if fact it has miscast its methodology altogether in areas outside its classic successes in physics. In the Enlightenment period, the full Enlightenment, and not just the cloned cliché version promoted today, alarm bells went off on the subject of reductionist explanation. But nineteenth century scientism decided to simply go through the red light, full steam ahead. And the obsessive design debate helped to push scientists into a hole, apparently for good. A minimal first step, and a quick escape hatch if the point seems debatable, is to see that the issue of facts and values is crucial. A science must eliminate all values. The special case of physics is thus misleading. If the first step is wrong or too limited, all subsequent steps can be brilliant to no avail. If we can show that values are central to any theory, must be central, then the current mindset fails at once. The result must be a revision of our views of naturalism, not some religious argument.
Darwinism’s direct connection to Social Darwinism is often denied, or blamed on Herbert Spencer. And yet the connection ought to be exceedingly obvious. We don’t speak of Social Spencerism, since that would be a transparent social philosophy open to challenge (which it was), but Social Darwinism. This entity is Darwinism itself in disguise. This confusion leaves scientific glamour intact, and entails our belief as science. Because of this ever-present danger, it is important to have a means to free yourself in your own mind from the reign of ‘experts’ here. Even now Social Darwinist thinking operates behind the scenes, as leftist thinkers denouncing ideology remain taken in. And the danger of eugenics and genocide is always there. Study the social and political scene carefully, and you will find the game continuing, behind veils of public relations. Stop assuming this theory has been proven. You are responsible for the consequences of this theory. Deferring to experts is no excuse.
The payoff of this method is that the study of biology can improve dramatically because you will stop being confused by wrong-headed or cunning literature in the field, and much that is being discovered is of great interest. Make no mistake. Darwinists sacrifice their own students on the altar of the Paradigm. We are betting you are the victim of phony textbooks, and we can offer a better methodology product (for the history/evolution transition). This approach leads to a better study of biology than what biologists can produce themselves. In fact, a great deal of the current literature is fine the way it is, and not touched by this critique. But the number of misleading books on Darwinism is large indeed, and at some point many are going to react in shock.
Darwinists are experts at counterattack against all critics who are systematically pilloried, Huxley-style. The public is helpless against the tide of positivistic thinking ambitious to rewrite every aspect of man. It has to fail sometime, and the needless confusion has put the whole of modernism at risk. Even a generation of the Science Wars has seen fit to ‘leave Darwin alone’ in tacit paradigm rigidity. Life must be understood on its own terms. Darwin’s theory is one of the most dangerous theories ever proposed, with a horrendous legacy of Social Darwinism, and yet no amount of criticism seems to alter the cultural domination of this world-view. The alternative tends to appear some invocation of the spiritual, and this simply fuels the Darwin obsession to reduce the facts to an oversimplification. A sort of Darwin Propaganda Machine routinely ignores all objections of critics and is ironically well served by the stance of fringe Creationists contrasted with hard science. A false success fails the worse in the end. And the crunch point is coming soon. Darwin’s theory is in the process of discrediting a whole civilization.