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

SELECTION

I did not post anything for November. I kind of like my post for October, on the contrast between Darwin’s vision of evolution and the more humane vision of some of his contemporaries, and I would let that stand a little longer.

I will just put up one question here: Did Darwin use natural selection as a model for artificial selection, or the other way around? The way this is usually presented is that natural selection came first for Darwin and then he saw man copying that. Or as a British writer put it over 200 years earlier, God is the first Husbandman which becomes a pattern for man to follow as he breeds animals and plants.

But I think it is really artificial selection that came first for Darwin and for that older writer. Man improving the world was very much on the mind of many Europeans. Darwin was no exception. He was rather an exemplification of the belief in improving species. The British believed they were especially good at it. In case you have not noticed it, read Chapter I of The Origin of Species again and you will see how much Darwin boasts about English breeding practices and “the enormous prices” British productions fetch in “almost every quarter of the world.”

This means that for Darwin, British imperialism provided a model for how nature works. That is hardly an objective way to study nature. When he speaks of small and broken species in Origin, he might just as well have been thinking of the way the British decimated native groups around the world. What has been passed off as objective in western science is more subjective than we would like to think..

© 2019 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

MORE THAN ONE WAY TO BE AN EVOLUTIONIST

The essence of evolutionary thinking is that the creative power of nature does not end. It did not spend itself in one burst eons ago. Nature continues to create, albeit very slowly, because that is what nature is. The work of creation is not over. God or nature did not create the world once upon a time and then creation was basically finished. The world is still being created every day.

This is the idea that the early evolutionists pushed for, before Charles Darwin came along. They were excited by it and they communicated their excitement to the public and occasionally to a young scientist. It was thrilling to realize that creation does not end. The divine power can never be inactive, said Constantine Rafinesque. Robert Chambers compared evolution to a pregnant woman. They made evolution an attractive idea to the general public. That is why it had already caught on before Charles Darwin entered the picture. And it made much more sense that nature’s creativity was an ongoing process than the idea that nature’s creative force happened only once at the beginning of time and then stopped. The early evolutionists convinced the public of the sense of this.

Charles Darwin contributed little to nothing to the idea of general evolution. He inherited this idea and did little to expound on it. He was more interested in finding the cause of continuing organic change. The preceding evolutionists, including his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, were not as interested in looking for a causal mechanism. The fact that organic evolution was occurring was thrilling enough for them. They were more interested in the meaning of evolution and its spiritual and moral implications.

For all of them—Erasmus Darwin, Constantine Rafinesque, Robert Chambers, and probably Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (though I know less about him)—the constant change we see in nature should teach us tolerance and love for our fellow creatures. We are united with them in familial, genetic relations. Chambers argued this should teach us to respect the rights and the feelings of animals. Yes, he actually said that. Charles Darwin never came close to saying anything like that. He made it clear that animals serve human beings; we should not be cruel towards them, but animal rights is not something that ever occurred to him.

To Darwin, evolution was primarily a map for how imperialism should proceed. European human beings should spread out and conquer other peoples, even exterminating them, to give us the best chance of survival in the centuries ahead. The earlier, holistic evolutionists were not interested in conquering. They wanted to celebrate the connectedness of all life on earth. Darwin in theory recognized these connections, but celebrating it was the last thing on his mind. He would do nothing that could potentially interfere with the mindset of imperialists. There are winners and losers in his conception of evolution. For his grandfather and the others, there are no losers. Nature blesses all of her creations. Extinction is an unfortunate side effect and not something human beings should imitate.

Many people today are leaning towards the kinder interpretation of evolution. That’s a good thing. But academics are promoting the lie that this comes from Charles Darwin. It certainly does not. It comes from those other thinkers whom we have erased from history. We have erased them and their accomplishments. And that’s not a good thing. If we tell lies about history, our lies will come back to bite us in the ass. What is a lie but severing a connection. Remember: We are all connected and if we destroy any of these connections by using our historical erasers, the result of that cannot be anything good.

© 2019 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

CONCLUSIONS AND FACTS

Probably the most frequently repeated error made across all scientific and scholarly disciplines is confusing facts and conclusions. It is an important distinction often raised in legal proceedings, in order to achieve greater accuracy in witness testimony, but it is generally overlooked in other fields, particularly in historical studies.

A legal example would be someone testifying that a group of men had approached him in a hostile manner. An alert judge would not allow such testimony. “Hostile manner” is not a fact, it is not something one can observe. I should stress here that for purposes of this entire discussion, I do not mean by “fact” that it is true or that it actually happened. I only mean that it is something that could have been observed, had you been transported to that time and place. You cannot observe someone being hostile. You can observe the details that support this accusation—details such as what they were saying and what gestures they made—those are the details that give us the facts, but hostile is a conclusion we attach to the facts. In a legal case that strictly follows this distinction, we will get the most accurate testimony. Passing off the conclusion as a fact makes a mess of getting at the truth.

The distinction often seems a trivial one and so we ignore it all the time, but ignoring it even in trivial cases has serious consequences for our intellectual honesty. Benedict Arnold betrayed his country. Is that a fact or a conclusion? Quite obviously it is a conclusion. The facts would be his contacts with the British, what actions he took, what happened after he was exposed, etc. The problem is that his betrayal has become such a well-established conclusion that we forget it is a conclusion. It is now simply a fact of history.

And that is wrong. You cannot observe someone betraying. What is observable are the facts that add up to a betrayal. We almost never discuss these facts which establish the conclusion. Those are the real facts of history, and traitor may be the most certain conclusion, but it can never be more than that. In Benedict Arnold’s case, this may not be of the greatest consequence. But it creates a huge problem when in the case of Judas’s alleged betrayal of Jesus, we take this allegation as a fact. It is not a fact and the accusation can never be used to prove Judas betrayed Jesus. When we start looking for the facts to back up this conclusion, we find a lot of ambiguity and nothing really solid. But I have discussed this elsewhere.

George Washington was the first President of the United States. Fact or conclusion? This is a borderline case. It is tempting to say that this is simply a well-known fact. But when you start to break it down, conclusion seems the better category to put it in. The facts that can be observed are that the Constitution is the document that created the office of the Presidency, the various state legislatures or conventions ratified the Constitution, achieving final ratification in March 1789, and then we observe an election and Washington being sworn in, and we also observe that no one was sworn in before him. If those are the facts, then Washington as the first President is a justified conclusion, but not really a fact.

It may seem petty and hairsplitting to analyze history this way, but as I said, ignoring the distinction between facts and conclusions can have devastating consequences, which is why the law is so careful at maintaining this distinction. The sciences have not been so cautious.

Almost every anthropologist in the 19^th century was a lousy scientist. Almost all of them claimed that the inferiority of Indigenous peoples was a fact. In reality, it was their highly subjective judgment or conclusion. They had no good facts to back it up. And their conclusion of inferiority, which they falsely presented as a fact, colored the facts they did report and caused them to leave out facts that contradicted their conclusion. Charles Darwin was as guilty of this as anyone else.

German anthropologist Georg Gerland was a rare exception. Darwin read his book Über das Aussterben der Naturvölker (On the Extinction of Primitive Peoples) (1868), but he did not get it. Gerland was very clear that the so-called inferiority of these peoples was a judgment, not a fact, and it was a very questionable judgment. This false fact had led everyone, including Darwin, to declare that the extermination of primitives was inevitable. Gerland criticized this too. Inevitable extermination had no facts to support it and it was an inhumane conclusion. Gerland made all these points and more. 

Other anthropologists would have liked to label the extinction of Native peoples as a fact, but as it had not happened yet, they could not do that. Instead, they called it an inevitability which was the next best thing to fact. For Gerland, it was a very biased way to study human life on earth.

The consequences of 19^th century scientists failing to observe the difference between facts and conclusions have been devastating. It continues to have this effect as long as we go on pretending that certain conclusions are facts.

© 2019 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

A LIBERAL THOUGHT FROM DARWIN

Not much to say for this month, but I did recently come across a liberal economic thought in one of Darwin’s letters from 1845 (he would have been 36). It is so unusual for him that I thought I would record it here.

Keep in mind that Darwin was socially conservative in almost every way and much of it seeped into his science. He preferred to view nature as a hierarchy of beings in competition rather than as a holistic collection in which every organism has an important part to play. He seemed to hate social and political expressions of equality. He did not like labor unions and cooperatives because he believed they hurt the competitive principle. In New Zealand, he did not like seeing slaves step out of line and greet someone before their owners did. Tribes that practiced equality were primitive and would not advance until they acquired strong chiefs, he thought.

So I was quite surprised to read these comments by Darwin in an 1845 letter, which concerns the taxes or duties that someone had to pay when purchasing land in England:

“I believe few things would do this Country more good in future ages than the destruction of primogeniture,—so as to lessen the difference in land wealth & make more small freeholders.—How atrociously unjust are the stamp laws which render it so expensive for the poor man to buy his ¼ of an acre, it makes one’s blood burn with indignation.”

I suppose it makes some sense for Darwin to have written this. It could be taken as consistent with his view that competition should always be encouraged, but it is still rare to see him invoke this principle in favor of the poor man. Justice in and of itself does not seem to have been a principle with him; he was after all blind, for example, to the justice that labor unions were seeking. He does not seem to have ever thought that competition might itself be unjust on occasion. He more likely believed that whenever the fittest survive (in accordance with what his conservative class considered fitness), justice simply does not enter into it.

© 2019 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

GIVING CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

In a letter to his friend the botanist Joseph Hooker, Charles Darwin said he thought the theory of “the common descent of species” (i.e., the general theory of evolution) “is the more important point” as compared to his theory of natural selection. And the widespread belief in the theory of evolution “may be fairly attributed in large part to the ‘Origin.’”

Yes, Darwin’s book certainly deserves some of the credit, but not all the credit and I would not even give it the lion’s share of the credit. At the very least an equal share must go to Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). The book went through ten editions before Darwin’s Origin was published. (Though published anonymously, by 1847 most scientists were pretty sure Chambers was the author.) Not only was it enormously popular and turned on many people, including many budding scientists, to evolutionary theory (the development hypothesis, as it was then called), but we have suppressed its major accomplishment: It proved that the transmutation of species was the better explanation for the variety of life we see on this planet.

Before Darwin ever published a word on this, Chambers presented much of the same evidence that Darwin was already working on, but would not publish for another 15 years. Chambers saw that embryos, commonality of structures (such as the bones in a human hand and in a bat’s wing), artificial selection, and more made it more likely that species descended from other species than that each species was specially created. Evolution as an explanation of life had greater probability going for it.

Was Chambers as rigorous or methodical a thinker as Darwin? No. Could he have been clearer and more thorough? Yes. But these are not the issues. The questions are: Did Chambers do it, did he prove greater probability for the development hypothesis, and did he use the right evidence to make his proof compelling and correct? The answer is a resounding yes to all three of these questions. Yet he has never been given the credit he deserves.

Just to give one intriguing example of how unfair everyone has been to Chambers, in his follow-up book, Explanations (1846), Chambers spent some time explaining why John Stuart Mill’s ideas on logic were so important to development theory. It was correct procedure to formulate a hypothesis based on a little bit of data and then scan nature for more evidence that could be explained by the hypothesis. When Darwin’s book came out, Mill praised it as logically sound and friends of Darwin reported this to him. He was thrilled. He took it as another sign that he was on the right path. Everyone simply forgot that Chambers had been there a dozen years earlier.

Why this unjust shunning of Chambers? Part of it is undoubtedly that Darwin became an icon within his own lifetime and no one wanted to detract from that saintly status by dragging Chambers into it. But I think that there is a more profound reason. Chambers had something in common with other exponents of evolution, such as Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), Constantine Rafinesque, Georg Gerland, and others. They were all more interested in the moral and spiritual consequences of the theory than in the cause. They understood evolutionary theory as giving an important boost to humanitarianism. It should teach us tolerance and love. It should teach us that all life is one and interconnected.

Most of Darwin’s supporters and Darwin himself were more interested in how evolution could be used to support Britain’s imperialism. One dominant species over all was a lesson Darwin was quick to draw. Chambers and others would stress that all God’s creatures, even the smallest and weakest, have a place in the sun—a deserved place in the scheme of things. Darwin did not see it that way. He was more into ranking organisms (“groups subordinate to groups” as he frequently says in Origin) and he had no problem with the extermination of groups, even Europeans exterminating native peoples.

So let’s remember why we erase people from history. It is not always because their accomplishments were somehow less. It is often because we are afraid of their greater insights into morality and the spirit of mankind. And maybe too their science was better than it was made out to be.

© 2019 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

APPLYING LEGAL REASONING TO HISTORY

[My recent book on Darwin's racism, A Short But Full Book on Darwin's Racism, can be found here on Amazon.]

There is no such thing as a type of reasoning that is unique to a particular field. Good reasoning is the same wherever you go. The goal is always to think so clearly that all deception becomes impossible. That’s the essence of scientific thinking. The lessons learned in one field about how not to deceive yourself or anyone else are easily transferred to other fields. Courts of law provide some of the best examples of how to reason well. Historians could learn a lot from them.

I can give two examples from TV small claims shows. On an episode of Judge Judy, a litigant was relating an incident when he and his friends were attacked by some rowdy drunks. He began by saying that this group approached him and his friends in a hostile manner. Judge Judy said this was a conclusion. She wanted evidence. He tried again and said something like, “Well, they were very aggressive.” No, she said, you’re offering a conclusion again. Tell me what you saw and what you heard.

He was frustrated and could only say they were threatening him and his friends. Judge Judy would not accept that either. Finally, she helped him out by asking him, “Were they saying anything, were they making any gestures?” Now his expression lit up and he was able to offer more proper testimony. “Yes,” he said, “they were cursing at us and saying we’re going to get you, and they were waving their fists and empty liquor bottles at us.” Now you’re telling me something, Judge Judy said.

The second example is a little more subtle and comes from The People’s Court with Judge Marilyn Milian. The plaintiff, a doctor, had not been paid by a lawyer, the defendant, for his expert testimony in another court case. The lawyer’s secretary testified that at one point, the doctor had called their office to complain about not getting paid. She said the doctor was not happy about not getting his money. Judge Milian pointed out that this was a conclusion, not a fact, a hard piece of evidence. Like the litigant in the Judge Judy case, the secretary was frustrated and did not know how to explain it. Judge Milian made it simple for her. “Tell me exactly what the doctor said to you on the phone.” The secretary answered, “He said, ‘I’m unhappy that I did not get paid yet for my testimony.’” Now that was a fact that Judge Milian could evaluate.

To many people, the difference between the two portions of the secretary’s testimony is so slight and so subtle that it is hardly worth dwelling on. But from the point of view of logic, the difference is huge. Consider these two propositions. #1: “The doctor was unhappy that he had not been paid.” #2: “The doctor said to me, ‘I am unhappy that I have not been paid.’” To a careless thinker, they are basically the same, but #1 and #2 are not at all the same thing. The first is a conclusion. We have no idea how the secretary arrived at this conclusion. It is inadmissible in a court of law because it does not give us any concrete facts to go on. The second is a fact that we can then investigate by cross-examining the doctor, the secretary, and possibly others.

Examples like these from TV court shows should encourage historians to be more precise thinkers. We have many examples in history of conclusions, or people leaving us their conclusions about what they thought of persons and events in their time, but we don’t always have the facts their conclusions were based on. And by a fact, I do not mean something that is necessarily true, but merely a piece of evidence, something potentially observable, something that could have been seen or heard, if it actually happened, and then we can think about whether it is a true fact or a false fact.

Suppose we had the diary of a colonist from America or Australia or anywhere else. In the diary, we find this statement: “The other day, a group of natives approached us in a hostile manner.” (There may also be follow-up statements like “So we engaged them in battle and slaughtered them all,” but I am only concerned with the initial statement.) Too many scholars would assume the statement in the diary must be true and proceed from there—as if only one hypothesis could explain that statement.

In fact, there are three hypotheses that could explain the diarist’s statement. But the first thing to pay attention to is that “hostile manner” is not a fact. It is a conclusion. Or we could say that it is a fact that the diarist drew this conclusion, but the conclusion is not a fact in itself. The three hypotheses to explain the appearance of this conclusion in the diary are as follows: Number one is that it is true, the natives really were hostile (making certain gestures and shouting specific words in one language or another, which would be the facts we really need). Number 2 is that “hostile” resulted from a misperception of the colonist as to the meaning of the natives’ gestures, etc. And number 3 is that the colonist outright lied in his diary in order to cover up a wanton massacre.

All three of these hypotheses have to be considered. Assuming only the first is possible is simply bad reasoning and it would be bad in any field of study. What we have in historical studies is a situation where 1) scholars often confuse conclusions and facts, and 2) they fail to see that different hypotheses could explain what are really conclusions. Both conditions are common to so many fields of historical study. Tell this to scholars and they get as frustrated as the people testifying in those small claim cases. They don’t want to hear that they have been presenting conclusions, not hard evidence.

The story of Judas in the Gospels is a good example. When you examine the verses very closely, we can see that there are a lot of conclusions being offered and precious little in the way of facts. Traitor (which accusation appears only once and it’s in the Gospel of Luke) is a conclusion or accusation, not a fact. The facts, if any, would be the details that support the accusation. Those details are absent in Judas’s case.

Once upon a time, somebody wanted to stick the conclusion of traitor on Judas and there it has remained. But when you sort out the few facts we do have (e.g., Judas leaves the table and returns with soldiers, no one at the time levels the accusation of traitor at him, and a few more), it is surprising to see that they are consistent with the hypothesis that Judas was an innocent man falsely accused of being a traitor; even the conclusions we have in the Gospels are consistent with that hypothesis. My books on the historical Jesus go into more detail.

Historical Jesus scholars do not examine the Gospel verses concerning Judas with any great degree of care. They simply take the conclusion of traitor that was presented once upon a time and refuse to look at other hypotheses, especially any that point towards Judas’s innocence. An innocent man falsely accused of betrayal is a legitimate hypothesis that has been erased from consideration.

Scholars of Charles Darwin are another good example of indulging in bad reasoning. It may be a little more subtle here, but in essence, we get a lot of conclusions and little in the way of facts. The facts here are primarily what did Darwin actually say in his published works. We are given the impression that his work is a great example of objective science, but this results from a careless reading of what he created.

Is On the Origin of Species an objective work of science? Did Charles Darwin inject racism into his study of evolution? Are there notions of superior and inferior in his writings? Most scholars present Darwin as a great humanitarian, a conclusion that they will not permit any challenge to. They slant the facts of what Darwin’s work is like so that it appears he was a calm, reasonable scientist who had no ax to grind. That he spoke often of the extermination of lower races is something they would rather not pay attention to.

In their view, Darwin was a modest man who proceeded very slowly. One of the myths about Darwin’s Origin is that he does not address the matter of human evolution in it. They say he spoke of human beings only once in a cryptic remark in the last chapter—in some future time, “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” In fact, Darwin addresses the human condition many times throughout Origin, including an earlier statement that light will be thrown on the racial differences among humans (though he does not explore this any further here). While Origin is in part a work of science, it is equally a work to advance the cause of European imperialism and to put each organic group, including human beings, in their place, “groups subordinate to groups,” as he frequently says. My books on Darwin clearly demonstrate the truth of that.

When you collect the facts of what he actually wrote—how often he spoke of superior and inferior, higher and lower, groups subordinate to groups, domination of the weak, let the dominant become ever more dominant, and more—his work certainly seems to have a lot of racism and genocide in it, and much of it appears to be composed to justify European imperialism. Those are conclusions I am offering, or you could also call them alternative hypotheses, but there is a plethora of facts to support them. Learn to think like Judge Judy or Judge Marilyn Milian and you can make great discoveries.

The lesson here is to remain humble. Lessons from a TV show can take you far. Never reject anything as a potential source of knowledge. Even TV shows may be a source of profound wisdom, if you’re paying close attention.

© 2019 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com