NOBODY SHOULD GET AWAY WITH BAD IDEAS

[My most recent book A Short but Full Book on Darwin's Racism is available here at Amazon; also at other online vendors.]

I understand why many people regard Darwin as a hero. I understand why people like having heroes. I have some myself, but I hope I will always keep it to admiring certain things they did and avoid worshiping them in the abstract. Worship leads to blindness towards uncomfortable facts, if any should appear.

What is peculiar about hero worship of Darwin, at least by the general public, is that he is not admired for some of the best things about him and is rather adored for things that are not true. Darwin was a great naturalist, a great observer of flora and fauna, but very few people pay attention to that part of him. He may have made fascinating observations about earth worms and orchids and more, but that is not what holds most people’s interest.

Instead, people have thrust on Darwin a greatness as an anthropologist and observer of the human condition. That is far-fetched. Some evolutionists did give us that, but Darwin was not one of them. It was not Darwin who taught that all life is one, that humans are part of a beautiful whole, and that we should all be kind to one another. You could call that holistic evolution and it came from people like Robert Chambers who published his book on evolution 15 years before Darwin’s. Chambers taught that evolution means we are connected to the entire world of nature and we must learn to respect the rights and feelings of animals (yes, he actually said rights and feelings). Darwin never said anything remotely like that. But many people falsely assume he did.

So what kind of human science did Darwin give us? He divided the world into higher and lower races and promoted the idea that the higher races would naturally and inevitably wipe out the lower ones, at which point humanity would rise to a higher level, as he said in one letter. The common origin of all life had no moral or spiritual implications for Darwin as it did for Chambers. What interested Darwin more was the fact (for him) that the single origin had diverse descendants who could be ranked on a scale from lowest to highest.

In theory, Darwin believed that all life is one, since we are all descended from a common progenitor, but in practice, it meant little to him. His grandfather Josiah Wedgwood coined a medallion that pleaded the cause of slaves, “Am I not a man and a brother?”, but in his Notebooks, Darwin expressed doubts about this. Civilized men and Christians may believe this, he said, but he found it more striking that, “yet differences carried a long way.”

That was Darwin’s lesson. Human groups are different and can be legitimately destroyed by their betters. While he did not believe any humans should be enslaved, he was shockingly indifferent to their extermination, even teaching that genocide was natural and not a moral dilemma. That may make many people very uncomfortable and it should. He was not the only one who contributed to Europe’s genocidal attitude towards others, but he was definitely one of the contributors and he did it with all the authority of science. In making him a great scientist, we are endorsing scientific racism.

In the end, that is what really bothers me about the adoration of Darwin. If we let Darwin off too easy and fail to appreciate how racist he was in his work, not in his personal life, we are teaching a very bad lesson. We are saying that if someone becomes a big enough icon, then we can overlook some very foul ideas he stood for. We are saying racism and genocide are excusable if the source is a worshiped hero.

© 2019 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

BELIEVING IN SMALLNESS

It is a relief to study the facts, in any field, whatever the facts are. In a world with so much injustice in it, so much fear and hatred, it is a huge relief to be able to say: This is what I know. Doing more, like trying to figure out what the facts mean, could be an added bonus, but only as long as we stay close to the facts and do not leap to big conclusions. A good rule to follow in all investigations is to keep it small. I don’t mean that the big issues are out of the question. I just mean we should stay focused on telling the details of the truth and not to be swayed by ideology. Don’t force meaning on the evidence. Let it come naturally.

Maybe this is a selfish way of thinking. When lies have become the standard way of studying history, it is almost a joy to be able to say, Here’s what’s wrong with that. The facts may or may not solve or rectify any injustices. But they can be an escape from the turmoil of the day and that, I admit, is selfish. It’s not all selfishness. The facts also offer some assurance that truth matters. And if you believe that truth leads to justice, then some good has been accomplished by just getting something right.

When I see politicians spewing their hatred, I feel reassured when I surround myself with solid facts. I feel even more reassurance when I see that many others also relish the truth. “We are a nation of immigrants” I hear over and over. And that is true. The fact is that this country was built on immigration. In an early pamphlet, Thomas Jefferson said that the colonies were not created by charters from the king of England, but by the universal right that people have to leave the place where they were born and seek new habitations. Travel and movement were considered basic rights. The great European experts on international law said so. Emigration was seen as natural. That is a historical fact.

That does not mean we are bound by such facts. Societies can change. We can say that what was once accepted policy is no longer what we want to do. The past cannot handcuff  us. But if we are going to change, we should be clear about it and why we want to change.

It was a sound principle in Jefferson’s time that no generation had the right to make laws which are eternally binding and a handicap to future generations. The current generation may decide that it wants to put an end to immigration. It has that right. But we should know that if we do this, we are bucking a longstanding historical trend. Why was this trend in place for such a long time? Why was emigration considered to be a God-given right of all human beings? What were the benefits? What other rights was it connected to? We should think about it before we willy-nilly change it. Or we can change it blindly and react to the fear of the moment. When we do things out of fear, does that generally lead to good results?

I like saying simple facts. I like saying: I know this, that, and the other. Who doesn’t like saying what they know? I know I like this pizza, this is good, this flavor ice cream is great, this TV show is worth watching. Some of the things I like are relatively simple, like pizza. Liking a TV show is a bit more complicated. It’s funny, it’s dramatic, it reveals something about life. Some of those revelations may not be so simple. Still, it did a good job. I felt something, it moved me. That’s all I have to know. It moved me. Explaining why may get very messy, but the fact of being moved is simple, maybe too simple. So much evil in the world comes from being moved by inane slogans. Being moved is no guarantee you’re moving in the right direction.

I recently saw an episode of a German TV show called “Crime Scene Cleaner”, which is as self-explanatory a title as you can get. It is a half-hour comedy series in each episode of which our hero shows up at an apartment or house, after someone has died, to clean up the blood, and after the police have finished collecting the evidence. He always works alone, but he also always encounters someone (a relative, a neighbor, etc.) with whom he gets caught up in the most hilarious conversations, often bordering on the philosophical. In this episode, it is a neo-Nazi he meets. The room he has to clean up is filled with Nazi memorabilia. He is astounded that anybody could still believe this crap.

At one point, our hero asks the other man, “Don’t you think it was insane to kill six million Jews?” The man answers that maybe they went a little overboard there, but so what? The French Revolution also went crazy with excessive violence, but we still can discuss the ideas of the French Revolution and take them seriously. Why can’t we do the same with Nazi ideas? Maybe we need a new modern Nazism. Our hero fantasizes punching him in the face, but does not do it. I won’t tell you the end, but he gets a small taste of justice; painting the walls pink is part of it.

My feelings about this show are very complicated. In a way, it is the opposite of what I usually spend my time doing which is digging up the plain facts. For example, I like reporting that at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, James Wilson of Pennsylvania defended the illogical nature of the three-fifths compromise (southern states would be able to count three-fifths of their slave population towards how much representation they would get in Congress)—illogical because each slave was considered as something between a person and a piece of property, and arbitrarily given the status of three-fifths of a person—illogical but necessary, Wilson argued, for reaching a compromise with the southern slave states. But at his state’s ratification debates over whether to approve the new Constitution, Wilson was convinced that the new Congress would have the power to emancipate all the slaves throughout the country. He called this a “delightful prospect” and the power to tax the import of slaves he called a “lovely feature in the Constitution.”

When you go carefully through the evidence of the Constitutional Convention, a clear pattern emerges with respect to slavery. Varieties of James Wilson’s sentiments were expressed. Another delegate believed, “Slavery in time will not be a speck in our Country.” So they were in no rush to push the issue now. The people that opposed slavery turned out to be mildly antislavery. These antislavery advocates put off their hopes for an end to slavery to an indefinite future. In the meantime, they conceded the strength of slave owners and gained few concessions from them. It was like a game of poker in which one side held all the good cards. The slaveholding states got much of what they wanted. There is a satisfaction in understanding what happened in history. So this is how we got to where we are today and this is why racism is so strong today.

There is a very different satisfaction in watching something like “Crime Scene Cleaner”—or maybe not very different at all, it just feels different. We can feel poetic justice at work in the episode I saw. Given the crimes of the Nazis, that is trivial, very trivial in fact. It is almost nothing. But we, or at least I, need the trivial to go on living. Sometimes just the smallest thing is enough to give us reason to go on. A flower, a fact, a punch in the nose against the right person at the right time, even if only in our dreams or on a TV show. The smallness of gathering facts is like that. It is such a little thing to do, but it is a relief against the assault of lies and hatred.

© 2019 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

THE DANGERS OF BIAS

More and more, I am coming to think that bias in academic scholarship is exactly like what happens in prosecutorial misconduct in criminal law. One element of that misconduct is confirmation bias. Not only is confirmation bias a problem in most academic fields, but scholarly reactions, when you point out the bias, are just like those of prosecutors who have been told that they have wrongly tried and convicted a defendant. Just mention the possibility of bias, and prosecutors and academics alike become defensive and hostile. Even when a court orders a wrongly convicted person to be released, many prosecutors will not apologize or support compensation for someone who has spent years on death row.

Things are changing in criminal law. There are many books and articles on confirmation bias and other problems that lead to the convictions of innocent people. It is at this point a well recognized phenomenon. That is partly because of the serious consequences of prosecutorial misconduct. Innocent people are in danger of being executed or living the rest of their lives in prison. So people are willing to pay attention.

In general, in most areas of academia, the consequences of bad scholarship are not as dire. Even if there is some connection between lies told about history, for example, and lethal results for certain people, the connection is way down the road. It is hard to prove a direct connection. That is probably the main reason it is so hard to make corrections in many areas of scholarship. The failure to do anything and to admit any wrongdoing does not seem so terrible.

There does not seem to be any great problem, like potential loss of life, that would motivate academics to take a closer look at themselves. In fact, it appears to me that most scholars think there is no harm in a little lying about the evidence, especially if it’s in a good cause. So what if we say Darwin was a great humanitarian and we hide the fact that there is so much racism in his work, as in his dividing the human family into a hierarchy of races? Where’s the harm? We are promoting good antiracist ideas and we’re telling some white lies about Darwin’s participation in this cause. We are not hurting anyone.

But lies about history always have bad ramifications. They teach us to adopt fraudulent methods of research and logic to support the lies. The lies hide how easy it is to let racism slip into a system and distort the evidence. There may be no immediate bad effects, but the long-range consequences can be devastating. Just think of how Darwin naturalized and normalized genocide, and tell me no harm was intended or resulted. The harm of proclaiming that the extermination of lower races is inevitable and natural—nothing immoral about it—has been tremendous. Too many scientists still think of western civilization as the winning civilization and attribute its success to evolution; they think the west is the endpoint of human evolution.

Just try raising any of this with scholars. Like criminal prosecutors who are convinced they can do no wrong, they will get angry, defensive, hostile. It is impossible to have a rational conversation about any of this. Scholars, especially of history and especially of the history of science, will not readily admit that they suffer from confirmation bias or any other kind. Once, it was that way in criminal law too. Neither the public nor prosecutors were open to considering how bias leads to wrongful convictions. That has been changing for a while now. Whatever it is that led to improvements in criminal law, concerning the study of bias in investigations, we could use a strong dose of that in the rest of academia.

© 2019 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

REWRITING HISTORY TO SUSTAIN A MYTH

In my last post (in Sept, as I did not post in October), I briefly mentioned a new book by David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life. Its focus is on later developments in the science of evolution, but it does pay some attention to Darwin. Now that I have had a chance to read at least these and related parts of the book, I can say once again that the myths about Darwin continue. For a science that is supposed to offer insights into the origins of life forms, evolutionary theory is preciously ignorant of its own origins.

Quammen treats evolution as if it were Darwin’s own theory. In discussing Darwin’s early Notebooks (before he came up with natural selection), Quammen refers to evolution as “his theory.” Like every other writer, he presents Darwin as if he had a blank mind when he went on his Beagle voyage, as if he came up with evolution all on his own. Yes, Quammen acknowledges that Darwin had predecessors, including his own grandfather, Erasmus, but he regards them as figures who may be dismissed, not having accomplished too much except for their wild speculations about evolution. He gives them all short shrift, leaving us with no details of what they actually did accomplish. They did more than engage in wild speculation.

Quammen faults Erasmus Darwin for having “offered no material mechanism” for his evolutionary ideas, but that is not what the earlier Darwin should be remembered for. Erasmus Darwin admitted he did not know the cause of evolutionary change, but he could still see it happening. What Darwin grand-père did was to present enough evidence for a general theory of evolution to make it a reasonable hypothesis to pursue. The scandal of science was that other scientists would not acknowledge what a good job he did at this, his grandson Charles never admitted it, and historians of science today are still loathe to deal with it.

Towards Charles Darwin, Quammen is extremely generous. Even though Darwin got a lot wrong, it is not his fault, as he did not have the advanced knowledge from later genetics, molecular biology, and more. He did not even know how heredity works. Referring to Charles, Quammen says, “He did the best he could, which was exceedingly well, with the evidence he could see.” But this is even more true of Erasmus who had less information to work with than his grandson did. In Erasmus’s day, it was not even settled whether extinction was a fact of life and the age of the earth was still hotly debated. Yet Erasmus could see enough evidence to make evolution a credible hypothesis. Quammen doesn’t get Erasmus’s accomplishment at all.

The biggest shock of Quammen’s book is that he completely omits Robert Chambers whose book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published 15 years before Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, really put evolutionary theory on the map. Chambers did this by proving that evolution was more probable than the idea of special creation. He assembled almost all the same evidence that Darwin was privately working on without publishing his conclusions. (Darwin wrote two preliminary unpublished essays in 1842 and 1844; the second one was completed in May, several months before Chambers anonymously published Vestiges in October.)

Chambers saw what Darwin saw: A large pattern of evidence made evolution the better explanation for what was going on. Here is just some of the evidence Chambers presented: the fossil record, incomplete as it was, supported the idea that life forms were evolving and, just by the way, man was a late arrival (which did not make mainstream scientists happy); the commonality of structure in various organic beings (Chambers gave an example, also used later by Darwin, of the bone structure in a human hand being similar to that in a bat’s wing); the existence of intermediate forms and gradations, which Chambers often called links (though he became infamous for suggesting that spontaneous combustion played a role, he loved to emphasize how gradual evolution was); the fact that nature’s potential for variation could be seen in artificial selection or breeding; and the startling resemblance of the embryos of many different adult animals, as if they all had the same common ancestor.

Small wonder then that so many young scientists were favorably inclined towards the development hypothesis, as it was known, as a result of Vestiges; ten editions had come out before Origin appeared. Quammen falsely claims that Darwin’s book all on its own “converted a generation of scientists to the idea of evolution.” The conversion process had actually begun earlier with Chambers’s book. Quammen fails to give credit where it is due and bestows credit where it is exaggerated.

Chambers is still overlooked by most writers, and Quammen joins this grand tradition of erasing a Darwin competitor from history. Vestiges came out in 1844 and, by 1847, most scientists, including Darwin, had figured out Chambers was the author. He was working class and that could not be tolerated in science which was dominated by the upper classes. He was also holistic in his approach to evolution, which meant that he did not see mankind as the be-all and end-all of nature. That human beings are part of a whole and are related to other parts of the whole should make us more humble. That is not a lesson western scientists wanted to learn.

Chambers offered a far more humane version of evolution than Darwin who was obsessed with ranking organisms (“groups subordinate to groups” appears throughout Origin) and with upholding the idea that the dominant species become ever more dominant. Western scientists tend to study nature to learn how to become more dominant and controlling. That was not Chambers’s goal, except that he was after any information that could improve the well-being of the lower classes.

There is a reason why people like Chambers are erased from history and it does not speak well for the inhumanity that constantly recurs in science.

The rest of Quammen’s book is quite fascinating. He has a great story to tell about new discoveries in molecular biology, horizontal gene transfers, and evolution among bacteria proceeding by absorption and not by natural selection. He would replace Darwin’s tree metaphor with the idea of a web. And then another curious omission on his part. Quammen never tells his readers that Erasmus Darwin chose the web as the best way to describe what happens in nature. “Life’s subtle woof in Nature’s loom is wove,” he wrote. And not just one web, but many webs: “webs with webs unite” and “the living web expands.” In this sense, Erasmus saw further ahead than Charles and he did it with much less evidence.

© 2018 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

BEGIN AGAIN

Today’s sermon is based on the third sentence of the first paragraph of Erika Hayden’s front page review (NY Times Book Review, Aug. 19, 2018) of David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life. She writes that Charles Darwin’s “radical idea [was] that, over time, organisms change to give rise to new species.” This is yet another example of how pervasive is the misrepresentation of Darwin and the history of evolutionary thought. This was not Darwin’s idea. It was given to him by previous naturalists. They also gave some evidence for it, and one, Robert Chambers, even proved it was more probable than the traditional view that each species was created separate and apart from the others. Darwin merely continued a well-established idea.

In the year that Darwin was born (1809). French scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck outlined how human beings may have evolved from apes. Fifty years later, in On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin still could not bring himself to say anything about this. So much for how daring he was. It was only twelve years after that, in The Descent of Man (1871), that he finally approached this theory of human origins, and he did not have much more to say about it than Lamarck did 62 years earlier.

Even the expression “origin of species” was well in use before Darwin. Robert Chambers used it twice in the second edition of Explanations (1846). In the first edition of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), he used “origination of new species.” Comparing the birth of new species to the birth of individual organisms was common to all the early evolutionists, including Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who was making this point in his work in the 1790s. Their main point was that creation was not over, it was still going on. That scared a lot of people, but it exhilarated many more.

The reason this is important is because we have lost something valuable by suppressing this history. The first evolutionists were more holistic than Charles Darwin. They looked at the evolution of the whole of nature and they did not elevate the strong or dominant species over the weak and small, as Charles Darwin did. They emphasized the oneness of life on this planet and believed nature made room for all. They had a humanitarian vision that we have forgotten. We have prodded ourselves into forgetting the origins of evolutionary thinking and how it entered the world in a humane way. We need their vision now more than ever.

© 2018 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

WORLDVIEW

[My book A Short But Full Book on Darwin's Racism is available here at Amazon and other vendors.]

I think the main reason Darwin’s The Origin of Species is considered such a classic is because it promotes the worldview of that time and ours—that is, that conquering is good and the culture that does it the best or the most is the premier, superior culture on earth—and his book makes us feel good about this very selfish point of view by demonstrating that this is not a moral or immoral choice we are making, but simply, what nature wants, so we don’t have to feel guilty about it or the disappearance of other cultures, or feel anything at all but unqualified joy that we are so blessed.

I once heard an author of self-help books say in an interview on the radio that the first piece of advice he gives to anyone who wants to publish a successful book or create any kind of successful business is that you must not challenge the worldview of your audience. As I see it, that’s why western culture often seems to be a closed circle, we are all talking to each other within set parameters, thinking about how to advance our culture, while we pretend we are making objective discoveries about the world or adding something new to our world, when it’s always the same old same old.

But didn’t Darwin challenge the worldview people had that man is at the center of the universe and that organisms are fixed and could not possibly be changing as time goes by? No, he did not. There are two points to make about that.

First, man is still at the center of things in Darwin’s system, he is the goal of evolution, and not just any man, but European man, or even more specifically, British man. At the end of The Descent of Man, he calls man “the very summit of the organic scale” and at the end of Origin, he calls the higher animals, “the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving.” In Origin, he expresses his pride in the superiority of British life forms and the superiority of Britain’s ability to artificially create new varieties and export them to different parts of the world. It would not be a stretch to say that Origin was written to make British imperialists proud of their achievements (in case they were having any doubts). Darwin embraced the idea of changing species in a limited way. In his world, change reinforces the dominant species, so nothing ever really changes. The strong get stronger, the weak weaker.

Secondly, even if someone insisted that there is in evolutionary theory a completely different understanding of nature than the standard worldview of Darwin’s time, that credit should go to the evolutionists who preceded Darwin. In the limited space of this blog post, I will single out Robert Chambers who more than anyone else made the public comfortable with the idea of gradual change in the organic world, producing new species over long periods of time. Unlike Darwin, he did it in a radical way and did not strive to make evolution fit the imperialist mode. Achieving ever more dominant species was not Chambers’s vision of evolution.

As far as Chambers was concerned, evolution blessed all life on earth, the strong and the weak, all have a valuable place in nature, and in fact, the world was constantly changing so that a life form that was down one day could be up the next. For Darwin, evolution was about dominance and any life form that did not do that was on “the high road to extinction.” For Chambers, there was no inevitable extinction, nature was always ready to hand out blessings even to the weak and the small. Social classes were not fixed either. In a sense, for Chambers, all life was upwardly mobile. That was not true for Darwin who held all life to be divided into three categories—dominant, extinct, or on the way to extinction.

If anyone challenged our worldview, it was Chambers, which is probably the main reason his reputation has not fared so well. Chambers saw the meaning of evolution in the whole of nature in which mankind is just a piece. We get our dignity and our humility from being a part of the magnificent whole, not from being superior to other organisms. Chambers was delighted that human beings are descended from previous animal forms, making us a late arrival on earth, and drew the conclusion that because we are related to so-called lower animals who were here before us, we are bound to respect them and treat them well.

Darwin found the meaning of evolution in hierarchy and dominance. With the help of friends, he managed to make himself appear to be a revolutionary, while giving aid and comfort to the ruling classes. Very early in Origin, Darwin told his readers that dominant species “become still more dominant” which is exactly what the upper classes wanted to hear. He believed lower animals are here to serve us and while we should not be wantonly cruel towards them, we are entitled to experiment on them, including performing surgery on live animals, if necessary to find ways to improve the human condition. He pleaded with a Royal Commission not to recommend placing an outright ban on experimentation on living animals.

Darwin accepted the ranking of organisms that was popular in his time and had been popular at least since the Middle Ages. Darwin was a biological theologian. He made the theology of “groups subordinate to groups” (a phrase he frequently uses in Origin) the centerpiece of his system of thought. The previous evolutionists like Chambers and Erasmus Darwin challenged this stilted worldview. We still cannot forgive them for that. As long as western culture thrives, we will deprecate their insights and achievements.

So it goes. As historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot put it, “Worldview wins over the facts.”

© 2018 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

SPECIAL CREATION IN DISGUISE

In my work, I have been very critical, and will always be critical, of the way Charles Darwin introduced racism into evolutionary theory. The evolutionists who preceded him, such as his own grandfather, did not do that. They were holists and saw the evolution of the whole in which each part, small and great, weak and strong, played a vital role. From the point of view of the whole, there really is no such thing as being small or great. All the parts are equal in the service they give. Charles Darwin, on the other hand, replaced this approach with a belief in hierarchy in which each species is ranked.

But enough about that, for the time being. Darwin did sometimes get things right. It is interesting how Darwin admirers and followers do not listen to some of them. Earlier this year, Edward O. Wilson published The Origins of Creativity. I usually quote directly from the source, but this time I am going to the New York Times Book Review (Jan. 14, 2018) for a quote from his book: “It is becoming increasingly clear that natural selection has programmed every bit of human biology—every toe, hair and nipple, every molecular configuration in every cell, every neuron circuit in the brain, and within all that, every trait that makes us human.” So says Wilson.

But Darwin warned against such thinking, which he admitted he had been guilty of. In The Descent of Man, he said he had been led to “my tacit assumption that every detail of structure, excepting rudiments, was of some special, though unrecognised, service.” And so he had “extend[ed] too far the action of natural selection.” In other words, it is possible to overdo explanation for “every toe, hair, and nipple,” to use Wilson’s example.

What is more interesting still is Darwin’s insight into why he had made this mistake. He had retained a belief in special creation: “I was not, however, able to annul the influence of my former belief, then almost universal, that each species had been purposely created.” Believing in the purpose of each “toe, hair, and nipple” was just another version of believing in the special creation of each species.

This means that many Darwinists today, including Wilson, are believers in an intelligent designer. I am sure they would furiously object. But whether you call your intelligent designer God or natural selection, it comes to the same thing. Darwin’s point was that to be supremely careful (and Darwin often failed in this), we must remember that natural selection does not design anything. It eliminates mutations that are injurious to an organism, but it does not create beneficial mutations, except by accident, and it certainly does not create the optimum design that would serve an organism well. Almost any natural organism could have been designed much better for its environment. No organism follows the best design possible, which is why new organisms, introduced from another environment, often decimate native populations; they just happen to be an even better fit in that environment.

That is not the only issue on which Darwinists have failed to follow Darwin. There is another story to tell about how far apart Darwinists and Darwin are in belief in randomness. Darwin disparaged chance, often calling it “so-called chance.” He believed in determinism all the way, “fixed and immutable laws” as he once put it. But that is a story for another time.

© 2018 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com