Monthly Archives: April 2021

Social Darwinism met its match in the 1930s. The evil of the poor was a hard concept to sustain during the Great Depression. Suddenly, through no fault of their own, the poor were family, friends and oneself. It gave rise to the huge popularity of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the diminution of social Darwinism.

The Depression empowered FDR to institute the social safety net, relieve the poor and bolster the middle class. Like Teddy before him, FDR slowed the move toward oligarchy. The role of the economic system in creating poverty was uncovered. The Gilded Age elite became known as the robber barons. The role of government in alleviating poverty was newly discovered and acted upon.

Even though communal responsibility and the social safety net were back, it was different. In the mid-1800s, the responsibility was assumed by individuals. In the mid-1930s, it was assumed by the government. It was more as it had been in our earliest settlements communal responsibility reinforced by church and government. During the Depression and after World War II, America came the closest to aid without taint.

In response, the super-rich called FDR a traitor to his class. The taint of poverty and the moral superiority of the rich were ideas that would not die. The farther we moved from The Great Depression, the more often those who accepted help were looked down upon. The proudest among us, refused assistance to avoid the taint of poverty. During the Bill Clinton administration, work-fare imposed draconian regulations before a dollar in aid was granted. Social Darwinism held sway even as the need for assistance was acknowledged.

FDR, his programs and his ideas were under constant assault. When Social Security could not be undone, the Social Security Trust Fund was raided by Congress. Congress then told the American public Social Security was going bankrupt. The public was not told Social Security was perfectly sound if only politicians put back what they misappropriated.

Today, as little as 1 percent of the population controls as much as 90 percent of the wealth. Will there be an unstoppable shift away from democracy? Money talks, but does it dictate? Will the 1 percent ask the politicians it supports to establish the form of government that best serves them? If the economy is allowed to tilt severely enough, is there an inevitable effect on our form of government?

In April 2019, at the House Financial Services Committee hearing, freshman Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., asked JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, a man who earns $31,000,000 annually, how an employee of his, a woman who earns $35,000 annually, was supposed to live. Dimon said he didnt know. Apparently, no one does. The point Porter was making was that too many incomes do not cover costs. Too many Americans are working poor. Dimon earns 1,000 times more than his entry-level employee. That is indisputable income inequality. Does that explain a political tilt to the right?

The population of America is much larger today than it was in the Gilded Age. The increased population puts an additional strain on the government and its ability to produce and dispense goods and services. Yet the need, a product of the disproportionate distribution of wealth, exists now as it did in the Gilded Age. We live in a world of finite resources. If we mean to economically suppress a group, first we vilify them. People of another color and another land are not merely different they are dangerously different. Is that the basis of the resurgence of hate groups?

Is the American Rescue Plan an end of welfare as we knew it or a caesura? During the time of COVID, we can say the magic words about people who need assistance: through no fault of their own. When COVID is behind us, will social Darwinism and its invidious comparison hold sway once more?

Recently, Missouri Republicans blocked federal funds for the expansion of Medicaid. In an editorial, The Kansas City Star could not understand it why turn down free medical care for those who cannot afford it? The editorial concluded that they hate the poor.

The story told in the Gilded Age social Darwinism justified the income disparity. The story was told from podia and pulpits. If a culture tells a story that a majority accepts, the power of that story cannot be overestimated. That story shapes and directs.

Today we cannot agree on much not even the story of us. If our fastest growth and the strongest middle class in U.S. history are behind us; if an America wherein a single-wage earner can support a family is behind us; if Americans who trusted the government and demanded it work as hard and honestly as they did is behind us; if all that is in the past what is our future?

Who are the ones that will push back against oligarchy? Biden and his party proposing more legislation like the American Rescue Plan? If so, expect a fight in Congress and in the streets. Expect the continuing battle: the social safety net versus the poor mans bootstraps. The solution of warning out versus economic growth of inviting in.

Watch the battle with a clear understanding that behind it all is the real fight: Will a few control the power and money or will the many share both?

Carole Owens, a writer and historian, is a regular Eagle contributor.

View original post here:

Carole Owens: The history of welfare in America, Part 3 The Depression to modern day - Berkshire Eagle

Image: Cambrian animal phyla, by CNX OpenStax, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

Here are two very interesting updates to my recent articles at Evolution News on alleged Ediacaran animals and the Cambrian Explosion.

In my article (Bechly 2018b) about the iconic and enigmatic Ediacaran organism Dickinsonia, I showed why in spite of new biomarker evidence presented by Bobrovskiy et al. (2018), Dickinsonia is unlikely to be an animal. Such evidence-based skepticism is of course not greatly appreciated in Darwinist circles and provoked a response.

At the Peaceful Science forum, an anonymous atheist and self-professed blogging graduate student (evograd 2018), who obviously lacks sufficient expertise as well as some reading comprehension, criticized my article with a red herring quibble about two of six references that Bobrovskiy et al. quoted (which I actually never disputed), while ignoring all real arguments. Just read my article and compare it with his criticism to decide for yourself if it has any merit. Anyway, this young know-it-all then triumphantly proclaimed:

The relevant context here is that the authors were specifically testing the animal affinity for Dickinsonia against other hypotheses of a lichen fungi affinity or a giant protist affinity. By ruling out lichen fungi and giant protist affinities, the only remaining plausible option is that Dickinsonia is an animal.

The problem is, this is simply false. Do not take my word for it, but that of paleontologist Professor Gregory Retallack, who is a renowned specialist on Ediacaran biota. In response to the article by Bobrovskiy et al. he wrote a comment to the journal Science (Retallack 2018) titled Dickinsonia steroids not unique to animals. In this comment Retallack explains that the biomarkers found in Dickinsonia fossils are fully compatible with an affinity to lichenized glomeromycotan fungi. If there are even such alternative candidates among living organisms, this may well have been even more the case in the extinct Vendobionta, which have been proposed as an independent Ediacaran kingdom of life by Seilacher (1992). The very alien body plan of Dickinsonia with glide symmetry definitely supports such a Vendobionta hypothesis rather than an animal affinity (McMenamin 1998/2000).

Charles Darwin was quite aware that the sudden appearance of animals in the fossil record poses a major problem for his theory, but he hoped that this problem was due only to our insufficient knowledge of an incomplete fossil record, and therefore will dissolve over time with future research. However, 150 years of paleontological exploration after Darwin has made the problem far worse: not for nothing is it called the Cambrian Explosion. All attempts to explain this problem away have failed (Meyer 2013), including the still beloved artifact hypothesis (Bechly 2020).

Nevertheless, evolutionists still hoped that they can somehow squeeze the gradual evolution of the complex animal body plans into the time between the strange Ediacaran biota and the actual Cambrian Explosion. A good example is a study on arthropod origins by Daly et al. (2018). They claimed to have found evidence for a gradual rather than explosive evolution of arthropods, but instead proved the exact opposite (Bechly 2018a). In their study, Daly et al. (2018) had admitted that the recent discovery of Burgess Shale Type Lagersttten from China and Mongolia demonstrates that animals were absent before 550 million years ago. They also documented trace fossil evidence for trilobite arthropods around 537 million years ago, which leaves only 13 million years for the evolution of complex animal body plans like that of arthropods. This may sound like a long time but actually it is just about as long as the average lifespan of 1-2 successive marine invertebrate species (Levinton 2001). This alone renders a Darwinian scenario almost impossible. But it turns out that even this short time frame vastly overestimated the available window of time.

Recently, I stumbled upon a paper from 2018 that I had previously overlooked, and it proved to be dynamite. It is a study by a research group from the University of Zurich about the transition from the Ediacaran organisms to the Cambrian animal phyla in the Nama Basin of Namibia (Linnemann et al. 2018). What they found is truly mind-blowing. The window of time between the latest appearance date (LAD) of the alien Ediacaran biota and the first appearance date (FAD) of the complex Cambrian biota was only 410,000 years. You read that correctly, just 410 thousand years! This is not an educated guess but based on very precise radiometric U-Pb dating with an error margin of only plus-minus 200 thousand years. This precision is truly a remarkable achievement of modern science considering that we are talking about events 538 million years ago.

The authors of the study fully realized that their finding documents an unexpected extremely short duration of the faunal transition from Ediacaran to Cambrian biota. Therefore, they speculated about ecologically driven reasons for this rapid onset of the Cambrian Explosion. Of course, no ecological factors whatsoever could solve the information problem of the origin of the new animal body plans in the Cambrian Explosion, as was elaborated by Stephen Meyer in his book Darwins Doubt (Meyer 2013). With this new and very precise time frame, the population genetic waiting time problem for the origin of animal body plans is lifted to a whole new level and suggests that no unguided process could ever plausibly explain these data. The Cambrian Explosion has gone nuclear and simply evaporates neo-Darwinism as a brilliant and beautiful but failed scientific theory, as it was recently called by Yale University professor David Gelernter (2019).

See the original post:

The Cambrian Explosion Has Just Gone Nuclear - Discovery Institute