UPDATE

Not much to say. Leon is not feeling well, but will resume blogging as soon as he can.

Thanks for your patience.

This has been posted by a friend at Leon's request.

THE HUMANITY OF SCIENCE

Science is essentially humane because it stands for clear, rational thinking. You cannot be unjust or propagate lies when clear thinking has a hold of you and becomes the primary goal. I am talking about thinking that is so clear that all deception, including self-deception, becomes impossible because the deception immediately reveals itself. The humanity of this lies in the fact that when scientific thinking is applied to any problem, injustice becomes, if not impossible, more easily correctable. All fields of study, such as the law and the study of history, are at their best when scientific thinking is followed.

More specifically, here is what I mean by scientific or rational thinking: Do not leap to big conclusions. Keep your thinking small and tightly bound to the evidence. Do not confuse conclusions and facts. A conclusion must not be presented as a piece of evidence that proves itself. Bear in mind all the potential theories that could explain a problem. Listen up when someone points out that you have engaged in circular reasoning and self-fulfilling prophecies.

The power of these rules to achieve clarity becomes obvious only when you see them in action in specific cases. Here are four examples of applying clear thinking (the last one concerns Darwin):

One: There is only one place in all the Gospels where Judas is called a traitor (at Luke 6:16). Does that count as one piece of evidence that Judas betrayed Jesus? Just about every New Testament scholar would answer yes to that question. That is so wrong. Traitor is a conclusion that someone offered once upon a time, but it is not evidence for the proposition that Judas betrayed Jesus. It is evidence that some people spread this accusation, but it has nothing to do with the search for the truth about what really happened. It is a record of an accusation and an accusation can never be used to prove itself.

            To put it another way: Three hypotheses could explain how Luke 6:16 became part of the record. One is that Judas really betrayed Jesus (which means there would be supporting facts as to what exactly he said and did). A second is that someone maliciously lied that he was a traitor. In other words, being an innocent man falsely accused of betrayal could explain that verse in Luke. And the third is that some facts were misperceived creating the wrong impression of betrayal. That is the clearest way to analyze this piece of evidence. Assuming the conclusion or accusation is true is terribly unscientific and leads to deception in the study of history.

Two: In mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts, some trials were held of slave rescuers. They had tried to prevent slave catchers from seizing an allegedly escaped slave and were charged with violating the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 or some other relevant statute. One issue that might come up was whether the person they aided was really a slave. If he was not, then he was not a fugitive slave either and there was no violation of that particular law. In at least one case, the judge instructed the jury that evidence of being sold and bought or otherwise treated as a slave was evidence that the person was indeed a slave. That was false reasoning (and, by the way, contrary to recent case law which held that such evidence was inadequate). Evidence of being treated as a slave proves only that he was so treated and not that he was in fact a slave. What if he had been a free citizen kidnapped into slavery? The attorneys for the defendants tried in vain to convince the judge that he was wrong on this point.

Three: Suppose we read the following in a colonist’s diary: “The other day, some natives approached us in a hostile manner. We engaged them in battle and slaughtered them all.” Is this evidence that the Natives were hostile? No, it is not. Hostility is a conclusion, not a fact. The colonist has recorded his accusation, but has given us no supporting facts (such as what the Natives said and what gestures they made). What I said above about the case of Judas applies here as well. Three hypotheses could explain this diary entry: It is true (i.e., there were supporting facts concerning gestures and things uttered that could have proven this), the colonist misperceived what were innocent signs, and lastly, the colonist outright lied to justify the massacre. Without more evidence, all three hypotheses are equally viable. That is the correct way to study history.

Four: Darwin and probably a majority of scientists of his time claimed that Indigenous peoples around the world were biologically and culturally inferior to Europeans and therefore doomed to extinction. A minority, but quite a few, argued that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy and that the extermination of Native peoples was not inevitable. These dissidents included Herman Merivale, Saxe Bannister, Georg Gerland, John Lort Stokes (a cabin mate of Darwin for part of the Beagle voyage), Charles Napier, and more. If they are not well-known today, that demonstrates the power of academia to erase dissidents from history. They were well enough known in their time.

            Merivale criticized Darwin for his inevitability thesis over a decade before On the Origin of Species (1859) was published. He was responding to what Darwin had said in his published Beagle journal. Gerland, a German professor, made the same criticism and in more depth in his 1868 book which Darwin read very carefully with the help of his daughter Henrietta. Darwin never responded to their criticisms. What was happening to the Indigenous peoples was not inevitable, not even their destruction by disease. Darwin knew how damaging, often deliberately so, Europeans were to the Natives, but never considered this a moral issue. He presented his conclusion of inevitable extermination as if it were a biological fact and not a conclusion. Evidence to the contrary did not interest him.

            Western scientists had become too fond of their own conjectures and dignified them with the label of facts. Darwin knew how harmful false facts could be to scientific studies because they are harder to overturn than false theories, but in the case of Native peoples, he allowed himself to be convinced of the objectivity of what was really a very subjective study. He knew that the decimation of Natives was happening at a much faster rate than natural selection would allow and yet he continued to see this as facts of biology. It was not just Darwin of course. Too many scientists had deserted scientific thinking and fallen into the well of their own deceptions.

© 2020 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

TWISTING THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION

Darwin could be described as a gifted man who blew up his gifts into arrogant assertions. The previous evolutionists, like his grandfather Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, as also his contemporaries Alfred Wallace, Robert Chambers, and Georg Gerland, were just as gifted as he, but their effort was to keep the gifts small and far from arrogant assertions of power. They were seeking smallness, not greatness, because they believed in the whole which kept everything in perspective for them.

From the point of view of the whole, everything is small. That’s why the first evolutionists have been neglected and unfavorably compared to Darwin. They did not promote power as mainstream scientists did. The western ability to manipulate nature went to our heads. We forgot how to live with anybody who would not conform to our domination. Our domination is a gift from heaven, we said, and we still expect everybody to buy that. We cannot make up our minds whether evolution is designed and progressive, or an endless meandering, but it does not matter, we say, because anyway you look at it, we come out on top and that’s what is important. We believe in a top and a bottom, a hierarchy, as Darwin certainly did, and make out one to be more important than the other, while the first thinkers who saw the possibility and probability of evolution believed in the bottom just as much as in the top. We still cannot forgive them for that.

James Bonwick offered this insight in his 1870 book. “If we meet with a hunting tribe, we seek to make them farmers and clerks at once. In the processes of nature, it took, perhaps, thousands of years to effect this transformation with our own ancestors, when we would fain accomplish it in a year with others.” Nature allowed us many centuries to get where we are, but we then foist unrealistic and unnatural expectations of swifter change on those unprepared for this, and we deem them inferior for failing to achieve something we could never have achieved either in so short a time. Western civilization has been pushy and western scientists have inherited that pushiness. Bonwick’s solution was that we should lose our contempt for Indigenous cultures and look for aspects of their culture which could more easily blend with ours—and respect those places where they do not want to bend.

We should always keep in mind that ideas of hierarchy and racism developed in Europe long before anyone thought of evolution. Evolutionary theory and even natural selection are not inherently racist. Darwin did not find racism in evolution and that is because it isn’t there. He rather brought pre-existing racist ideas to evolution and incorporated them into a biological process where they do not belong. He inherited that western desire to be pushy.

There are only three things inherent in evolutionary theory in its ideal form: 1) a belief that there is a common ancestor for all life on this planet; 2) therefore, all creatures, including humans, are genetically related (‘genetic’ was used over and over by Chambers in one edition of Vestiges); and 3) the creative force of God or nature is ongoing; it did not spend itself in one burst a long time ago; life is not fixed but is still in creative ferment, resulting in a diversity that is not fixed but always changing. The original evolutionists believed this was a more sublime conception of God or nature, and I think they were right. Creation does not end. For people like Chambers, Rafinesque, Erasmus Darwin, Emma Martin, and probably more, it meant that the classes of society were not final either, but open to change and improvement.

The holistic evolutionists looked at the world and saw this: Life and nature do not just produce the strong and the dominant. Nature also produces the small, the weak, the hungry, the low, the ill-fitted, the bottom. Why? Because from the viewpoint of the whole, every piece is necessary and valuable. There is no low and high.

Too many human beings make judgments about ranking things (“survival of the fittest” is about ranking), but the whole (or nature) does not rank anything. In the whole, everything has a legitimate place. The whole confirms the existence of the small and weak just as much as that of the strong and dominant. Neither has more importance than the other. There is no hierarchy. The struggle for life by the weak is just as valid as the struggle by the strong. An antiracist view is more true to nature and natural selection than a racist view. Evolution gives us lessons of antiracism. Making evolution racist (which is what Darwin did) is an unnatural twist of logic and the facts of nature; it is a counter-revolution that destroys objectivity. Nature itself is never racist.

© 2020 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com