08.30.08
Neo-Darwinism is dead & a deadly weapon against Darwinists
Counterpunch reprints Newman interview
The question of evolution has reached a turning point, and the Alternberg conference, and now a public statement by Stuart Newman, has produced a public whisper of this transition.
The problem is that the entire scientific community is oblivious to their situation, and its perilous judgment on science, should scientists once again simply try to ride out the onset of dissent, feeble and marginalized as it is.
In the endless science prattle at Scienceblogs over science trivia, not a single blogger has addressed any of this.
And the same is true on the left, since Newman is, I believe, a liberal/leftist (?) [correct me here?], and the reprint at Counterpunch no accident. It is time for the left to grasp their liability here, over a century of Darwin confusion, given nonetheless Marx’s instant (later suppressed) rejection of Darwinism as ideology. We need, amidst this paradigm transition, to be done with Darwin apologetics on the so-called ‘left’. Let’s forget such leftists.
The left apart (they have lost an immense opportunity for guidance here in the expose of ideology), the general liberal culture (using the word ‘liberal’ in almost a cultural rather than a political sense) needs to reinvent itself beyond the Dawkins generation which has delayed change here for that entire generation. As S. J. Gould sensed, but didn’t have the gumption or insight to really get straight, and declared decades ago, Neo-Darwinism is dead.
No more pussyfooting around here. We need to bypass the phonies at Sciencebloggers, and their type, along with the orgs like NCSE which are constantly putting on the brakes, and move on, past the Scylla and Charybdis of religious conservatives, and science technocrats/economic ideologists.
Darwinism is and always was a social ideology promoted by economic elites. The failure of the left to see this is their disgrace.
We need a new social philosophy of liberal/left culture that can shake loose from this archaic nineteenth century corpse of theory.
It is very difficult to deal with the immense power of the Darwin propaganda machine. But those working for change here have a deadly weapon concealed in their weakness:
science itself is on the docket: if change can’t happen, and some kind of intelligent discourse appear, then a new version of the ‘end of science’ will inexorably appear.
The clock is ticking.