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 Like
Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb, Darwin was uneasy with what he had
wrought, so uneasy he took to bed and was unable to bring himself to
publish his book for two decades. Some say it was psychoneurosis. So
naturally the first question is, at what point in the eons of Evo did
psychoneurosis mutate in hominids? As the psychoneurosis fossil has yet
to be found scientists can only speculate.
And the next question is, why did Darwin chance to come down with it?
It can't have been because of worry that his theory would be challenged
by skeptical fellow scientists, or tweaked, updated, meddled with, maybe
a lot. Such challenges and permutations are what science is all about,
or was. A good scientist himself, Darwin would know all that and relish
or at least accept it.
A lot of people say it was the thought of hitting the religious fan that
rattled him. But whether he was remorseful or gleeful about damaging
religion is curiously hard to determine. Evoeans like to say Darwin was
brought up dumbly devout and only when faced by facts de-converted, in
tears, and they counsel the religiously inclined young student to go and
do likewise. But Darwin's own autobiographical writings suggest he had
always disbelieved, though covertly, a classical way of avoiding overt
conflict at the cost of inner turmoil.
But what could have really sent him running for the covers was the
prospect of being sucked like a pigeon into the monster philosophical
jet engines he himself would engineer, like a frail quark into the black
philosophical holes he would generate, and what his theory would look
like coming out the other side -- not just modified or permutated but
transmogrified -- and his own words – warped, kinked, kinky; disavowed,
disgorged, simply nowhere, gone.
In any case, Darwin was in bed when he could have been out having
book-signing parties, the hors d'oeuvres, broccoli, cauliflower,
chardonnay.
But when he finally got up and went public, the survival of the fittest
part – the lynchpin of the whole theory, the engine of both Evo science
and the Evo metaphysical cosmos -- was an encouraging and immediate hit
all around. Fittest fetish, if we may call it that, fitted Capitalism
exquisitely, although at the beginning it was Scripture that Capitalists
cited. Like Scripture, fittist-ism was all purpose and also worked even
more famously, and forthrightly, for Scripture-eschewing Marx and
Communism.
Fittest-ism also was just the ticket for original "Social Darwinism,"
which licensed imperialism, even fascism. For naturally if there are
fittest individuals there must be fittest races, Europeans, as it
happened. As Darwin himself explained, Europeans "immeasurably surpass
their former savage progenitors and stand at the summit of
civilization." And furthermore, "...the civilized races of man will
almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage
races."[1] Fittest-ism also suited slave owners and Nazis, the fittest
of the fittest of the fittest. But that was a regrettable turn and
extinguished primitive Darwinist exceptionalism as neatly as dinosaurs,
and nobody sheds a tear.
Now it's called Eurocentricity and racial bigotry, the gravest sins
known to the planet, repented of in sackcloth and ashes, with
restitution in dollars. Who gets blamed bemuses us. That only the fit
survive, or only the righteous are blessed, were once precious promises
for Darwinists and Christians respectively, but absolutely foundational
to Darwinism. Yet it's the Darwinist types who now most loudly, and
accusingly, and piously, denounce it.
To reverse the always bad mutations Evo always delivers left to her own
devices, Eugenics was devised to give Evo a hand in getting the gene
superiority selection right, good logical practical Darwinism. Greatly
esteemed back then, it isn't so much now, though there are still
residual nidi of it -- stem cells thriving secretively on the haute
culture plate. We recently saw an ad in an airline (not adult or humor)
magazine for human eggs gleaned from doctorate holders and grad
students, superiority guaranteed.[2] Of course guaranteed -- every last
gene is Evoean and tenured.
If calling any human or race superior to another is not current, just
calling humans the superior product of evolution is politically
incorrect. If Darwin gave us monkeys as ancestors, Darwin's (and the
monkeys') descendants have propelled them forward (or us backwards).
Monkeys are our siblings, only of a different culture.
But it was the feminist fan that Darwin really hit. Without ducking (he
sure would now) he announced: "The chief distinction in the intellectual
powers of the two sexes is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence
in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain—whether requiring deep
thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and
hands." "...the average standard of mental power in man must be above
that of woman."[3] Fast-forwarded into Evoean hyper-equality, this
species of females holds news conferences to announce how sick to the
stomach they are made by Darwin's stupid bigotry. For a much more
delicate valentine the president of Harvard recently got ex-ed. Abed
with ice bags to his head, Darwin and the ex-president now know Evo hath
no fury like a feminist made sick to her stomach.
If Darwin's reigning heirs are embarrassed by Darwinian racial,
taxonomic, and gender bigotries, and by capitalism or Marxism, and
Imperialism and fascism and Nazism, by slavery, by eugenics, by his
Euro- and other eccentricities, they aren't by postmodernism, the
ultimate Evo Frankensteinian mutation, but Darwin surely would be. The
most advanced philosophy Darwin ever fathered wheels around and, like
Oedipus or a big boomerang, whacks him: Postmodernism insists that
inasmuch as everything is the Darwinistically random product of chance,
there is no such thing as absolute truth, only momentary fancies like
all other molecular conflations, and therefore -- ergo -- no science.
Postmodernism is as straightforward about this as Darwin was about
European and male superiority. Ergo, even Evo isn't true either. It's
just another chance whimsy. And if Evo is science so what? Science is
whimsy.
But meanwhile in court Evo is suddenly the ultimate truth and the
ultimate science. By law. Really stretching it, the court adjudges Evo
as Science Itself, capitalized, italicized, the measure of science, no
appeal.
Looking at fossils and drawing a conclusion, Darwin called Evo a theory,
only a theory. That's the scientific way. The court goes the opposite
direction and proceeds from Evo as a given, like the Constitution --
only much more sustainable. Evo, the product of mutation, is
immutable. That's authoritarianism, fit for court but hardly science.
Either Darwin or the court doesn't know what science is. They can't
both be right. Darwin was an exemplary scientist; what does that make
the court?
In the Grand Canyon as in court, both recently remodeled as theme parks
for academic echo tourists, science reverberates among the pillars and
strata. We've long been used to folks venturing into the Grand Canyon
and rhapsodizing Creation or Intelligent Design – and getting swatted
for expounding bogus science. But now an E.R. doctor, on leave from his
E.R. imperturbability, rafts in rapture down the Colorado River Grand
Canyon ejaculating, "Evolution is the basis of biology, biology is the
basis of medicine,"[4] therefore Evo is the basis of medicine.[5] We're
an old doc and that's news to us and, we suspect, to Darwin. And here's
the Evoean who equates teaching of Evo with the US standing in science
among nations.[6]
Finally, an AMA writer, an ethicist exercising a novel sort of ethics,
even connects Evo with "the very integrity of American democracy,"[7]
Once famous for fighting quackery, the AMA itself now sells snake oil --
cures everything from AIDS to ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive
disorder). Darwin at least confined his excesses to Europeans and
males.
"Now that's what I was afraid would happen!" moans our friend, his
torments twisted by his disciples into raptures or retchings, his mere
theory neo-Darwinised, neo-ed out of sight, given extreme makeovers, the
gaps photoshopped and special-effected away, while simultaneously
apotheosized as the soul of science, the hallowed pillar of orthodoxy,
the core of law, hyped like a Hollywood docudrama, adulated and
litigated, worshipped elaborately and bandied off-handedly. In name
only – the name has market value – is his theory still his.
Evo charges Intelligent Design with the attempted murder of Darwin. Evo
itself does the deed, and then enshrines his remains in a marble
sarcophagus that has displaced the Ten Commandments in court. Well,
maybe he is due for re-evaluation, some of his ideas being at least as
outmoded as present-day Evoeans say Creationism is.
But this? The poor man shoulda stood in bed.
1. See Darwin quotes (Darwinspeak), this site.
2. Satisfaction at your own risk. What do you expect of a test tube?
Fun?
3. Darwin quotes, this site.
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/science/sciencespecial2/06canyon.html?ex=1286251200&en=100194700c0c7d2c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
This one has become a classic. Just take the exact quote and Google it
and you'll see.
5. If A=B and B=C, then A=C.
6. Time Magazine cover story, August 15, 2005 issue.
7. http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/15765.html. We're an old
doc and we're still wincing. See our essay about it in the Summer 06
issue of "Creation Digest."
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