Category Archives: Darwinism

Photo: Casey Luskin in South Africa.

Five years ago, on December 31, 2015, after working at Discovery Institute for ten years, I wrote a farewell message. I said the following:

It is with a mixture of sadness and excitement that I write this to announce that, as the year 2015 closes, I am leaving Discovery Institute. I am doing so in order to fulfill a lifelong goal of furthering my studies. My colleagues, who entirely support this decision, are people of the utmost integrity and they have been incredibly generous and welcoming to me and my family. I know we will miss each other.

Now at the beginning of 2021, it is with a mixture of joy and excitement that I write to announce that Im grateful to return to Discovery Institute as Associate Director of the Center for Science & Culture (CSC). And Im very optimistic about the future!

Over the past few years, Ive seen critics of intelligent design (ID) advance some wild and amusing conspiracy theories about the reasons for my departure and absence. Fortunately, none of them are true. I chuckled when they wishfully and confidently asserted that I had, alternatively, jumped ship, abandoned ID, was fired or retired.

So where was I for the last five years? Hiding out because I couldnt take the heat? Finally seeing the light and converting to Darwinism? Fired from Discovery Institute? Not at all. The truth is exactly what I said in my farewell post: I was fulfilling a lifelong goal of furthering my studies specifically, to earn a PhD in geology.

This pursuit took me to the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in South Africa, where I used paleomagnetism to study the early plate tectonic history of the Kaapvaal Craton, an ancient portion of Earths crust in southern Africa that traces back to over 3 billion years in age. Although my research does have some implications for early earth habitability, it was not related to intelligent design. And while many of my colleagues were aware of my ID views (and my prior work at Discovery Institute), to my knowledge they did not share them. My colleagues at UJ are first-rate geologists doing phenomenal research, and are great people who have nothing to do with ID. The focus of my PhD at UJ simply was not intelligent design, but rather Archean geology (and the subfield of paleomagnetism). I had a great time doing it.

My PhD project focused on the Pongola Supergroup, a major section of supracrustal rocks in southeastern South Africa (Kwazulu-Natal and Mpumalanga provinces) and southern Swaziland, aged ~2.8 3.0 billion years old. These rocks represent some the earliest deposits of volcanic rocks and siliciclastic sedimentary rocks that were deposited on stable continental crust. Specifically, my research investigated the paleomagnetism of the Pongola Supergroups volcanic rocks of the Nsuze Group, focusing on trying to determine where they were located on Earth at the time they formed about 2.95 3.0 billion years ago.

When molten rock cools, it frequently gets magnetized by the Earths magnetic field. Because the magnetic field varies according to latitude (i.e., angular distance from the equator), studying the magnetic properties of rocks can reveal where on Earth the rock originally formed in terms of its original paleolatitude (though not paleolongitude). If you have enough data, you can use paleomagnetism to attempt to reconstruct the plate tectonic history of a continent that is, figure out where continents were located in the past, what they may have looked like, and where they have drifted over time.

Suffice to say, this project involved months and even years of fieldwork, lab work, data analysis, and writeup. Like most PhDs, mine had its ups and downs, complete with excitement, fun, blood, sweat, tears, near-madness, sheer terror, and utter boredom.

Regarding excitement and terror, more than once I collected samples where signs warned of crocodiles, pythons, hippos, leopards, and other hazards. Fieldwork also gave me new experiences such as getting tick bite fever and other weird illnesses, getting caught in lightning storms, an angry farmer threatening to shoot me, and nervously tromping through countless kilometers of snake-infested bush.

Regarding the boredom and tears, my PhD required me to endure machinery and lab instrument breakdowns which slowed progress significantly and forced travel to other continents to finish lab work, amounting to untold days and nights spent alone in a small, windowless room measuring rock samples. As for the madness, thats what happened after I wrote over 30,000 lines of Python code to create new software tools for generating paleomagnetic diagrams. My family bought me a t-shirt that said I dream in Python because for months it was all I ever thought about.

None of the above makes me special or unusual. It just makes me like every other geologist who has done fieldwork, lab work, and data analysis. But in the end, the research was immensely rewarding because it allowed us to test fascinating hypotheses about whether Kaapvaal Craton of southern Africa and the Pilbara Craton of western Australia were once connected as an ancient supercontinent billions of years ago in the Archean.

Oh yes, the big question! Over the last few years many friends have asked me, Why did you go to South Africa for your PhD? Well, a major reason is that my wifes family is South African and we have a lot of extended family there. Another reason is that I wanted to study geology, and with South Africas rich mineral resources and extensive mining industry, it has among the best national infrastructures for geological research in the world.

The University of Johannesburg has a world-class geology department doing many forms of cutting-edge geological research, and was a superb place to study. Many other top geology research institutions are located in South Africa, offering prime opportunities for research collaborations. There are other reasons I went there, too, but all in good time. In sum, South Africa was an ideal place to do geological research.

Critics of ID often claim that if you dont have a PhD then you cant understand science and you dont deserve to speak on the topic. This is simply false.

There are lots of very smart people with PhDs but an amusing and astute saying Ive heard says that Science is 50 percent luck, 50 percent hard work, and the rest brains. Earning a PhD isnt easy, but Im now more convinced than ever that a PhD is not a litmus test for whether youre intelligent, whether you understand science, whether you have the ability and right to cogently speak in public about science, or whether your scientific views are ultimately correct. That said, Im immensely grateful for the experiences and opportunities I had working toward my PhD.

Of course everyone on the planet who has ever gotten a PhD did so because they wanted to improve their skills, credentials, and advance their career. But to be frank, before I did the PhD I was content with my credentials and my career. So for me, those werent the driving concerns.

Prior to attending law school, I had a bachelors degree and a masters degree in earth sciences from UC San Diego. As a kid, I would make my dad pull over our familys old RV on road trips so I could scamper off into the desert to collect rocks. Science was always my first academic love, and I was a weird geology-loving kid from a young age. Simply put: Going on to obtain a PhD in geology was a lifelong goal I had. None of my close friends were surprised when I told them I was doing this.

So why did I do the PhD? Answer: For the love of science, a desire to do research, and a quirky passion for rocks Ive had my entire life! And South Africa was an amazing place to do it.

So, you dont need a PhD to do good science, but that doesnt mean a PhD is a cakewalk. My PhD was the most mentally and emotionally exhausting academic venture of my life and I suspect that most folks who have gone through the experience will agree. Im still recuperating. In the end, I feel incredibly grateful to have learned a ton, met amazing people from all over the world, made many great friends, and had the experience of a lifetime.

As I return to Discovery Institute, I remain as optimistic about IDs future as I was when I wrote my farewell post in December 2015: my personal support for ID and confidence in its future have never been stronger the fundamentals of ID are sound. In that post, I discussed four general areas where ID was forging ahead: (1) scientific advancements and peer-reviewed papers, (2) failed attempts by critics to suppress ID, (3) IDs performance in high-level debates against top critics, and (4) a growing community of ID-friendly graduate students and scientists. Considering various developments over the past few years while I was doing the PhD, I believe this optimism remains warranted, and that ID is in an even stronger position than when I left:

Evidence supporting ID and/or challenging standard materialistic evolutionary models has continued to grow these past few years. There are so many examples its hard to know where to begin. In 2016, the Royal Society held a meeting on New trends in evolutionary biology, in which some talks were sharply critical of modern evolutionary biologys ability to explain the origin of new complex biological features. Also in 2016, a team led by Scott Minnich published a paper in the Journal of Bacteriology which showed that the famous Cit+ phenotype of Richard Lenskis Long Term Evolution Experiments actually involved, as the paper argued, No new genetic information. Then, in 2017, Discovery Institute released an updated list of pro-ID peer-reviewed papers, now topping over 100 papers.

There will surely be quite a few more papers added when we next update our peer-reviewed articles page, but there are a few worth mentioning that showed ID expanding into new areas of research. One of my favorite developments of the past few years was a paper published in BIO-Complexity in 2018 by computer scientist Winston Ewert. He applied the concept of common design to produce a dependency graph model of organismal relationships based upon the principle that software designers frequently re-use the same coding modules in different programs. Ewert tested his model by comparing the distribution of gene families in nine diverse organisms to a treelike pattern predicted by neo-Darwinism versus a dependency graph distribution used by computer programmers. His preliminary analysis showed that a common design-based dependency graph fit the genetic data 103000 times better than a Darwinian evolutionary tree!

Another important novel contribution from the ID camp was a project on human origins that published a paper in BIO-Complexity in 2019. This paper used population genetics to refute those who cite evolutionary models to claim that human genetic diversity indicates we could not have originated from an initial couple. As a final example, in 2020 a major article came out in the Journal of Theoretical Biology which supported intelligent design by name, noting that ID aims to adhere to the same standards of rational investigation as other scientific and philosophical enterprises, and it is subject to the same methods of evaluation and critique. The authors predicted that we will establish fine-tuning as a sustainable and fully testable scientific hypothesis, and ultimately a Design Science.

How did critics respond to IDs advances? Well, the media gave muffled coverage to the Royal Society conference in 2016 while participants tried hard not to think about ID. As for the Journal of Theoretical Biology, it issued a tepid disclaimer and weak rebuttal to the 2020 pro-ID paper, which, as John West pointed out, showed the article survived peer-review and was accepted for publication despite the open hostility of the journals top editors! The episode demonstrated the bias and opposition often faced by ID theorists in the scientific community, but that quality pro-ID science is being published nonetheless. Another episode from last year was telling. When we merely cited evidence from a mainstream journal that fulfilled IDs prediction of function for junk DNA though making it clear that the writers did not intend to support ID the same journal responded by calling for us to be censored!

I suppose little has changed in the past five years while I was doing the PhD: attempts to suppress ID continue, but the evidence for ID grows stronger apparently so strong that it cant be answered on the merits and must be suppressed. One wonders why there cant just be a serious, civil conversation about ID.

ID has fared superbly in high-level debates against its top opponents in recent years. Consider Brian Millers exchange with fellow physicist Jeremy England in the journal Inference. Miller showed that leading origin-of-life thinkers like Dr. England still cannot account for the high-energy, low-entropy states of living systems. As Miller explains, doing so requires explaining the origin of molecular machines which perform work to maintain these states. And explaining the origin of molecular machines requires accounting for the information that encodes them. Miller identifies the crux of the matter: Until origins researchers address the central role of information, the origin of life will remain shrouded in mystery. The exchange showed that even brilliant origin-of-life theorists like England simply do not have an answer for the origin of that necessary genetic information.

Or consider the scientific debate over Michael Behes book Darwin Devolves which came out in February 2019 and argued that evolutionary adaptations typically break or diminish function at the molecular level. The book received a critical though serious review in the journal Science, as well as in other scientific journals, and a lively debate ensued online. I followed the debate closely, and could not help but participate in it with a few anonymously submitted posts here at Evolution News. What I saw was that top anti-ID scientists like (such as Richard Lenski, Jerry Coyne, and others) barely put a dent in Behes arguments. Undoubtedly they would feel otherwise, but consider this: On degradation in polar bear genes, Behes defenders carefully answered every objection from critics and uncovered medical research showing that, as Behes model predicts, degradative mutations to APOB can help reduce cholesterol (see here for a summary and guide to that intense debate).

As we dug into other criticisms, Behes arguments stood the test at almost every turn. Then last year, Behes arguments were further vindicated when a Harvard geneticist wrote in Current Biology that the majority of the mutations that lead to adaptation are loss-of-function mutations that impair or eliminate the function of genes rather than gain-of-function mutations that increase or qualitatively alter the function of proteins. Read the Criticism & Response page on the books website to get a sense of how well Behes arguments fared.

This past year I had the pleasure of assisting with the 2020 Summer Seminar on Intelligent Design my first time teaching at the program in five years. I was reimpressed that there are dozens upon dozens of bright and motivated ID-friendly graduate students around the world doing (or planning to do) research in fields including biology, biochemistry, physics, cosmology, chemistry, and many other fields who want to advance the case for ID. Quite a few Summer Seminar alumni are already publishing papers contributing to the ID research program showing that ID is a healthy science with an up-and-coming crop of international scientists. Meanwhile, high-level defections, such as Yale computer scientist David Gelernter, show that its not just young scientists who are coming to doubt Darwin. Gelernter came out in 2019 as a critic of Darwin after reading Stephen Meyers Darwins Doubt (though hes not persuaded by ID). Another example is Gnter Bechly, a German paleontologist and entomologist who first officially came out as a Darwin-skeptic and ID-sympathizer in late 2015, but became widely known in 2016 when he publicly joined the ID community, and gained even more notoriety in 2017 after being forced to resign from his position as scientific curator for amber and fossil insects at the State Museum for Natural History in Stuttgart, and Wikipedia tried to erase him from history.

Over the last few years, many other scientific advances turned out to support ID and/or challenge Darwin. I hope to discuss those in depth on other occasions. For now, I want to list one final reason for optimism. Prior to my leaving Discovery in 2015 I helped craft the vision for the ID 3.0 research program a vision that has since become a reality. As Associate Director of the CSC, Im excited about helping to manage the research that is being funded by Discovery Institute and about renewing my contributions to the ID community in many other ways.

Despite this positive outlook, I must again confess a lingering sadness: I left a major part of my heart in the South Africa. With its wonderful people, rich multicultural society, cheerful vibe, and unmatched natural beauty, including incredible wildlife testifying to natures design, South Africa will always be a special place for me. If you ever plan to go there, feel free to contact me and Ill offer some tips for your trip!

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I'm Excited to Return to Discovery Institute to Find Intelligent Design Stronger Than Ever! - Discovery Institute

Photo: G. K. Chesterton, via Wikimedia Commons.

Editors note: The following, second in a three-part series, is adapted from an essay inNational Reviewand is republished here with permission. ProfessorAeschlimanis the author ofThe Restoration of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism(Discovery Institute Press). Find the full series here.

Oscar Wilde (18541900), a witty Dublin Protestant-atheist Irishman like GeorgeBernardShaw, but of a very different class, stamp, and implication, wrote that natural science, by revealing to us the absolute mechanism of all action, [frees] us from the self-imposed and trammeling burden of moral responsibility. Wildes resultant, post-Christian aesthetic immoralism shocked and mocked the earnestness of late Victorian Britain in witty prose and plays, including the satirical wit (and homosexual implication) ofThe Importance of Being Earnest(1895). Both Shaw and G. K. Chesterton had an intimation that Wildes witty persiflage actually disguised deep decadence, an argument made brilliantly several decades later by the American Jewish moralists Philip Rieff (The Impossible Culture: Wilde as a Modern Prophet, 198283, reprinted inThe Feeling Intellect, 1990) and Daniel Bell (The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 1976; Beyond Modernism, Beyond Self, 1977). From Wilde came the Bloomsbury aesthetes and, we may say, nearly the whole world of the modern arts.

Yet both Shaw and Chesterton were themselves noted wits (both sometimes even accused of being paradox-mongering buffoons), and in fact Shaw shared much of the iconoclasm of his countryman Wilde, becoming a self-described feminist, Nietzschean, Ibsenite, and Wagnerite. But for Chesterton one of Shaws great achievements was his deep, abiding hatred of aestheticism Shaw even insisted that the Puritan evangelist John Bunyan (The Pilgrims Progress) was a greater writer than Shakespeare, and frequently, unaccountably, made orthodox statements, such as There is a soul hidden in every dogma and Conscience is the most powerful of the instincts, and the love of God the most powerful of all passions. Along with T. S. EliotsMurder in the Cathedral(1935) and Robert BoltsA Man for All Seasons(1960), Shaws playSt. Joan(1924) is one of the wisest, wittiest, and most sympathetic dramatic depictions of Christian religious belief in the last hundred years.

Both Shaw and Chesterton believed that the root problem of modernity was Darwinism, the acceptance of which made it impossible to resist its moral corollary, social Darwinism, and therefore plutocracy, amoral capitalism, imperialism, racialism, and militarism. Shaw wrote in the preface toMan and Superman(1903): If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.

Though Shaw was a small-p protestant religious heretic (he argued that Joan of Arc was an early Protestant, like Hus and Wycliffe), Chesterton asserted that he was a true if eccentric Puritan moralist. Shaws critique of Darwinism was profound, especially in the long preface to his mammoth playBack to Methuselah(1921): The literary critic R. C. Churchill has called this preface the wittiest summary of the Darwinian controversy ever written (see especially the sections from Three Blind Mice onward). In his own 1944 postscript to the play, Shaw, while still insisting on the need to give up the Protestant creed (and all other Jewish and Christian creeds) of his youth in the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in Dublin, held that Darwins exclusion of mind and purpose from nature was wrong and destructive: Unless we can reclaim mind, will, and purpose as realities in some kind of non-Darwinian, creative evolution, we fall into the bottomless pit of an utterly discouraging pessimism.

Shaws predecessor Samuel Butler (18351902), and his Franco-American successor and admirer Jacques Barzun (19072012), have made similar arguments, arguments given renewed strength more recently by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel (see my Rationality vs. Darwinism,National Review, 2012). Shaws resistance to determinism, and his insistence on the irreducible reality of human consciousness and will in nature and history, elicited Chestertons profound respect and admiration. In his final, 1935 chapter on Shaw, written in the last year of Chestertons own life, he said of the older mans achievements in drama over the previous 40 years: He has improved philosophic discussions by making them more popular. But he has also improved popular amusements by making them more philosophic. He added that Shaw was one of the most genial and generous men in the world.

Yet Chestertons admiration and approval were shadowed by a sense that Shaw had great deficiencies and that his influence was ambiguous and in some cases malignant. Born 18 years earlier than Chesterton, Shaw outlived him by another 16, his life encompassing both world wars, unprecedented destruction, and the fundamental disproof of his early progressivism and cosmopolitanism. His early Fabian socialism led him to become an influential communist fellow traveler. The famously exuberant, energetic Shaw told his biographer Hesketh Pearson, a close friend of Malcolm Muggeridge, that, in the postWorld War II world, he wished when he went to bed that he would never wake again.

Like H. G. Wells, he was threatened with an utterly discouraging pessimism when his political hopes came to seem almost completely vain. Commenting on the significance of Aldous Huxleys satirical dystopiaBrave New World(1932), even before George Orwells1984, an English writer quoted by Chesterton in his 1935 chapter said, Progress is dead; andBrave New Worldis its epitaph. Beyond the world of fiction, in the world of actual human tragedy, works such as Elie WieselsNightand SolzhenitsynsGulag Archipelagomay be said to have proved the point unanswerably: Human progress may be possible, based on willed choices, but there is certainly no mystical, progressive, propulsive purpose immanent within history.

Chestertons argument about Shaw from the beginning was that he was in three ways an outsider, ways that gave him a unique perspective and insight but that also prevented his understanding what Chesterton thought of as a fundamental piety that had been characteristic of Western civilization and Western societies at their best: Shaw was a Protestant Anglo-Irishman who disdained his own country and left it permanently for London; he was emotionally, intellectually, and politically a fastidious Puritan moralist who could not, however, believe any longer in the Puritan God; and he was a Nietzschean-socialist futurist whose disgust with the human past and its traditions made him an ultimate outsider to any particular historical community or continuity.

Free from what Chesterton called the vile aesthetic philosophy of his also-cosmopolitan Irish countryman Wilde, a philosophy of ease, of acceptance, and luxurious illusion, Shaw read and was deeply affected by Nietzsche after having committed himself, in mind, action, and loyalty, to the Fabian-socialist cause, making lifelong friends and allies of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whom he was instrumental in getting buried with full honors in Westminster Abbey in 1947. But reconciling Nietzsche with socialism was a lifelong conundrum, and it should be no surprise that Shaw came to admire strong men beyond the bourgeois-democratic tradition and temper such as Mussolini, Stalin, and the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. Stalin has delivered the goods, the celebrity Shaw wrote in 1931, the year of his state-conducted tour of Russia with his friend Lady Astor. A photo of the two of them in a chauffeured car on Red Square in Moscow is on the cover of David Cautes indispensable bookThe Fellow Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment(1973), a brilliant documentation of the lamentable credulity of Western intellectuals in confronting Lenin, Stalin, and what the Webbs called the new civilization of the Soviet Union. Shaw died in his English country house in 1950 with a signed photograph of Stalin on his mantelpiece.

Chestertons brief study of 1909 and its even briefer 1935 sequel were thus profoundly apt in assessing Shaws greatness and his folly. He saw that Shaw was really no democrat, that his admirable public spirit had in it something cold, abstract, theoretical, and even Platonist in the sense of Plato as an elitist authoritarian; whereas Chesterton himself was truly a kind of democrat, actually liking the common man and assuming that human beings across time had come to certain conventions, traditions, and sentiments that usually had in them some important truth. (This idea profoundly influenced the Chestertonian William F. Buckley Jr.)

Tomorrow, Shaw, Scientism, and Darwinism.

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Darwinism as the Root Problem of Modernity - Discovery Institute

When Swami Vivekananda uttered, Sisters and Brothers of America" at the World Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, they declared Vedantic humanism to the world.

Vedantic humanism is fundamentally different from the humanist philosophies of the West in the sense that it is based on the fundamental unity of all existence which is also manifested in the oneness of humanity.

The West was then still struggling to come to terms with the idea of common unity of humanity. The discovery of humanity being but one branch in the grand tree of life as revealed by Charles Darwin, had yet again removed man, especially the white man, from the centre of the biological universe as well.

The West tried to retain its collective racial ego through Social Darwinism as the answer to biological Darwinism.

Not only the religious fundamentalists who rejected outright evolution but also the philosophers of the West, whether the conservatives or the radicals including the emerging Marxists, who embraced varying degrees of social Darwinism.

They speculated that the less evolved state of the non-European races justified colonialism which either eliminates or elevates the 'lower races' through a very slow process of 'civilising' that happens, of course, under colonisation.

Even Marx and Engels basically advocated such a process.

Here, it should be stated that Charles Darwin himself was not very comfortable with the idea of social Darwinism. After Darwin, many leading social philosophers of the West, as well as those influenced by the West embraced Social Darwinism eagerly.

Swami Vivekananda is refreshingly different. Long before intelligent design (ID) became the camouflage for creationism, Vivekananda refuted the ID argument. With Sankhya Darshana he knocked down the concept of creator:

In a scathing attack on design and creator that actually anticipates Dawkins, Vivekananda states:

Lest anyone rushes to map priest craft to Brahmins because of the colonial-evangelical negative stereotypes, Swami Vivekananda warns:

Then with Yoga and Advaita he could check Darwinism becoming Social Darwinism.

For him, the modern research will make "the evolution theory of the ancient Yogis better understood", the yogic conception of evolution provides "a better explanation. He correctly cautions that "sexual selection and survival of the fittest", which are terms used by evolutionists when taken into human realm could "furnish every oppressor with an argument to calm the qualms of conscience.

In his explanation of the Yoga aphorisms of Patanjali, he contrasts the flawed social Darwinism with the inner evolution that Patanjali brings out:

To him "there is no reason to believe that competition is necessary to progress" rather "when knowledge breaks these bars, the god becomes manifest" as becoming god is the next step for humans.

Interestingly, in the writings of Swami Vivekananda conceptually (filling in as the cause of speciation) and more explicitly in Sri Aurobindo, a kind of premonition of punctuated equilibrium sudden bursts rather than gradualism in evolution.

The Western society, post-Darwin and till Holocaust, was drunk to saturation with the idea of eugenics and social-Darwinism. Those who were labelled invalids and hereditary criminals were barred from marriages and jailed. Sometimes they were forcefully made sterile. All these practices were justified in the name of science.

In India, the colonial government enacted the 'Criminal Tribes Acts' and branded entire communities as criminals based on birth. However, Swami Vivekananda rose against this tide and declared that human evolution is based on qualitatively different process.

It was only after the Nazi Holocaust and the horrors of mass killing of mentally challenged and physically challenged populations as well as elimination of the ethnic groups labelled as 'inferior' by Nazi State machine that the Western thinkers realised the immense folly of their upholding of social Darwinism.

As against these there have been voices in isolated isles of the West which spoke against social Darwinism, and interestingly invariably these voices had a Vedantic connection.

One such example is Pyotr Kropotkin. Kropotkin emphasised that not struggle but mutual cooperation is a strong process that shapes evolution.

His book Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution was published in 1902. In 1900, he met Swami Vivekananda at Paris. Author P Mukherjee writes: "The core of these meetings, I would like to believe (and believe) is to explore the distinctiveness of different shades of opinion, however, diverse they are or they might look to be."

Swami Vivekananda's observation, that the evolution of non-human organic life and human evolution making an organically united yet a qualitatively different process is accepted by evolutionists today.

Even die-hard neo-Darwinian like Richard Dawkins speaks of human evolution as governed by memes and extended phenotypes unlike the other organisms where genes and selection pressures alone determine evolution.

This is a collective evolution. System biologists like V I Vernadsky speak of transition from biosphere to noosphere. Sri Aurobindo took forward the vision of Swami Vivekananda and spoke of supra-mental consciousness descending on the planet.

And this vision never favoured any specific race or culture but entire humanity. Both Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda recognised that all humanity owes its evolution to all humanity. In fact, Swami Vivekananda, rejecting the Aryan race theory, sharply reacted to those who spoke high of their 'Aryan' superiority or Aryans civilising the world thus:

So, what Swami Vivekananda set in motion on September 11 at Chicago is the continuing declaration of Vedantic humanist ideal which manifests itself when humanity liberates itself from the shackles of all artificial barriers it has built around it and realises that it is part of the great cosmic divinity that permeates and animates all existence.

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Vedantic Humanism For Post-Darwin Humanity Through The Eyes Of Swami Vivekananda - Swarajya

Photo credit: Bruce Gendler via Unsplash.

Editors note: Welcome to anEvolution Newstradition: a countdown of our Top 10 favorite stories of the past year, concluding on New Years Day. Our staff will be enjoying the holidays, as we hope that you will, too!Help keep the daily voice of intelligent design going strong. Please give whatever you can to support the Center for Science & Culture before the end of the year!

The following wasoriginallypublished on March 18, 2020.

There is a joke abouta cat on a roof:

A man left his cat with his brother while he went on vacation for a week. When he came back, he called his brother to see when he could pick the cat up. The brother hesitated, then said, Im so sorry, but while you were away, the cat died.

The man was very upset and yelled, You know, you could have broken the news to me better than that. When I called today, you could have said he was on the roof and wouldnt come down. Then when I called the next day, you could have said that he had fallen off and the vet was working on patching him up. Then when I called the third day, you could have said he had passed away.

The brother thought about it and apologized.

So hows Mom? asked the man.

Shes on the roof and wont come down.

Jokes when analyzed lose their humor. At the risking of my bludgeoning this particular joke, the premise here is that people more readily accept shocking news when its given to them in partial steps. Not, The cat is dead, but first, The cat is on the roof. Something like that is going on in the debate about evolution. As biochemist Michael Behe explains in the Introduction to his new book, out today A Mousetrap for Darwin:Michael J. Behe Answers His Critics the public is being prepared very slowly for the demise of Darwinian evolutionary theory. It wasnt planned that way, but it is how things are playing out.

As popular media and biology textbooks present the matter, all is still well with Darwin. He is on the roof, but safe. ID scientists, such as that scoundrel Michael Behe, may pose their anti-science challenges. However, it is merely a gentle breeze on a cats fur.

But wait Actually, the cats fate has advanced a step beyond that. Behe writes:

Since the turn of the millennium a raft of distinguished biologists have written books critically evaluating evolutionary theory.Noneof them think that Darwins mechanism is the main driver of life. It may surprise people who get their information about the state of science from gee-whiz puff pieces in the mainstream media, but, although strong partisans still hold out, the eclipse of Darwinism in the scientific community is well-advanced. A few years ago the journalNaturepublished an exchange between two groups of scientists, one defending Darwin and the other saying its time to move on. Its nice to have defenders, but when an idea has been around for 150 years wished well by all right-thinking people, investigated to death by the scientific community and a piece appears in the worlds leading science journal saying its time to move on, then its time to move on.

The question of course is, move on to what? Those books by scientists dissing Darwin offer their own clever ideas, but so far the scientific community isnt buying any of them. All the new ideas self-organization, facilitated variation, symbiosis, complexity theory, and more are quickly concluded to be nonstarters, to have the same problems as Darwins theory, or both. In the absence of an acceptable replacement and because of its usefulness as a defensive talking point in fending off skepticism from the public intellectual inertia maintains Darwinism as textbook orthodoxy.

Actually, for Darwinism, the situation is even worse thanthat. Books by Behe, and other ID theorists doing an independent of audit of evolutionary thinking, find devastating faults in the theory.

But hold on, the critics have their responses to the ID proponents. They say Behe never answers their rebuttals! As a trio of prominent scientist authors, Nathan Lents, Joshua Swamidass, and Richard Lenski,wrotein the journalSciencelast year in reply Dr. Behes bookDarwin Devolves(emphasis added):

That sounds pretty bad. He ignores critics. He double down on his claims that have already been refuted. He fails to engage. Behes purported unresponsiveness was one of the main themes of the attack by Lents et al. Surely the cat is safe after all. It is on the operating table. It may be under veterinary anesthesia but is expected to recover just fine. Right?

Unfortunately for Darwins partisans, no. Dear Sir or Madam, we regret to inform you of the passing of your pet theory. Claims that Mike Behe doesnt answer critics are massively refuted now with the publication of his new book. It is556 pages of answers to critics, all written with Behes customary wit and rigor. The chapters cover the range of criticisms that have been aimed at his books. Some, including devastating answers to Lents, Swamidass, and Lenski, were published first by us here atEvolution News.

This giant book is among the strongest indicators yet that the cat is dead. The public hasnt been informed yet and evolution theorys loyal defenders are in denial. Its just a matter of time, though. Michael Behe demonstrates as much inA Mousetrap for Darwin.Order your copy now!

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#7 Story of 2020: Darwin Is on the Roof - Discovery Institute

Charles Darwins theory suggests that it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, it is the one that is most adaptable to change. As the world races towards digital banking, we consider why banks need help to adapt to a digital future.

Technology is redefining whats possible across all sectors. For the most part this is a triumph for consumer sovereignty. Consumers are better informed, more empowered and enjoy greater choice than ever. Disruptive technologies bring tremendous innovations, but todays source of competitive advantage can quickly become tomorrows table stakes. The age of the customer experience has arrived, but undoubtedly it creates many challenges for those on the supply side. Especially banks.

A Proud Heritage Does Not Determine Future Success

Banks face a real quandary with their technology investment strategies. Recent research from Forrester suggests that 83% of banks will execute a digital transformation within the next two years.* An important caveat is that making technology investment decisions based on what has worked before will likely miss the mark regarding the array of benefits and challenges inherent in modern banking transformation.

Risk, Uncertainty and a Lack of Know How

Established risk models need to be adapted and aligned to the present day. For many banks, investing in a new core is uncharted territory. Many core systems have been in place for decades; in-house knowledge may be limited in terms of understanding the nature and scale of the tasks and changes that modern transformation involves. In most cases, replacing a core platform is a journey into uncertainty. The good news is that the journey is far safer and more predictable with an expert guide.

Banks are good at managing risk, indeed its what they do. But investment in new technologies has evolved from being a question of risk to becoming an issue of uncertainty. When a situation has a finite number of possible outcomes it involves risk; when the number of potential outcomes cannot be quantified it becomes uncertain. As technology change accelerates at breathtaking speed, it creates an infinite number of possibilities. Many banks simply cannot keep up with the pace of change and are uncomfortable in an environment thats uncertain.

In many cases, technology stacks that drove profitable growth over many decades have become unwieldy and expensive behemoths that cannot adapt to a digital future. Moreover, banks that have never installed a new core platform may lack needed awareness not only of the challenges to be faced but also of the opportunities that are ahead.

The Need for Original Thinking

The implications of Digital Darwinism are clear and pungent invest strategically in future-proof technologies that facilitate change.As I discussed in a recent blog, digitalization is about doing different things and doing things differently. While this seems relatively easy in theory, the practicality of shifting from a product-led mainframe environment to an agile open platform microservices architecture is an involved process.

Transforming a bank is also about much more than technology. Its about people, processes and culture. Technology is fundamentally a people business it is produced by people and designed to work with and for people. Following the Darwinian analogy, the modern bank technologist is a different species to those who went before and occupies a different habitat. No longer confined to the back office, the bank technologist of the future will be obsessed with the customer experience and how the bank delivers on its brand promise. Technology is no longer just the engine of the bank, essentially it IS the bank.

Greenfield Banks and the Missing Link

Many banks acknowledge this missing link in their technology skillset. The growth of new digital banks on greenfield sites reflects a common desire to escape the past and start afresh. But many of these digital bank projects are still run by incumbent banks, with the same mindset and an absence of new thinking. Experience suggests this will put a ceiling on what can be achieved and may even hinder progress.

For example, many banks seeking to realize the benefits of cloud elasticity and scale have shifted existing business processes to a cloud environment. While these will produce generic cloud benefits, they will miss the transformational potential of a cloud-native build that embraces modern methods, such as Agile, DevOps and continuous delivery. In practice its like fitting a new engine in an old car the engine is fine, but the car is still old.

Collaborate, Improvise and Move Ahead

The message is clear: To be successful, modern banks require modern technology and modern thinking. While this may seem obvious, many banks are uncomfortable with the practicalities of running two misaligned technology stacks. They shouldnt be open application program interfaces (APIs) are constantly redefining systems integration; modern components can facilitate a migration to a digital technology stack when the time is right. Todays world craves digital banking, and timing is sensitive.

While getting started may seem daunting, we know it needs to be done. Darwin himself suggests a way forward: In the long history of humankind those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. With the right partners, cultural shifts, and strategy, banks can successfully adapt, transform, and prevail.

* Forrester Infographic: European Financial Services Firms Accelerate Digital Transformation, June 2020.

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Banks in the Age of Digital Darwinism - Finextra

Photo: Portland riot, by Tedder / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).

The year so far has delivered a stunning lesson in the fragility of freedom and of civilization. Endless lockdowns matched with urban chaos its hard to believe these two shattering phenomena overlapped entirely by accident. How exactly, though, do they relate? At Mind Matters, Michael Egnor suggests Darwinism as a missing link.

Egnor cites Plato, as analyzed by philosopher Edward Feser. Plato charted a devolution in forms of government, from what he regarded as the best (a sort of philosophical aristocracy) to oligarchy, timocracy, issuing in base democracy, followed by tyranny. Egnor understands totalitarianism Nazism and Communism as the special modern iteration of tyranny, which received its scientific imprimatur from the theory of Darwinian evolution.

The transformation of tyranny to totalitarianism, as explained by philosopher Hannah Arendt (19061975) is Darwinian. Arendt notes that

Darwinism met with such overwhelming success [in totalitarian systems] because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race and well as class rule

Underlying the Nazis belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwins idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human beings, just as under the Bolsheviks belief in class-struggle as the expression of the law of history lies Marxs notion of society as the product of a gigantic historical movement which races according to its own law of motion to the end of historical times when it will abolish itself.

Nazism was clearly inspired in no small part by Darwins theory and Arendt notes that Marx and Engels explicitly credited Darwin with insights essential to Marxism. She points out,

the great and positive interest Marx took in Darwins theories; Engels could not think of a greater compliment to Marxs scholarly achievements than to call him the Darwin of history the movement of history and the movement of nature are on and the same.

This is not to say that Darwin caused totalitarianism. Totalitarians were on the scene a century before Darwin. Marx also drew heavily from Hegels World-Spirit metaphysics and from Feuerbachs atheism and materialist anthropology. But Darwin provided a naturalist rationale a scientific imprimatur for the indispensable characteristic of totalitarian movements, which is the claim that their triumph is an inexorable natural movement. In the Platonic scheme, totalitarians are tyrants (thugs) who rule not by their mere base lusts but by a fanatic devotion to an ideology of human evolution biological/racial evolution (Hitler) or economic/class evolution (Marx, Lenin, Mao).

In each totalitarian variant of tyranny, the pandemonium of late democracy is atomized, terrorized, and paralyzed, like a herd of unruly cattle stampeded in a single direction dictated by the alleged irresistible laws of nature. Totalitarianism is, in short, the tyranny of guided evolution. Thus, Darwin provided a scientific imprimatur for this modern mutation of ordinary Platonic tyranny.

In other words, Darwinism provides a framework and pretext for totalitarian thinking, which sees itself as fulfilling an evolutionary destiny. You can have totalitarian tyranny without Darwin, but the idea of evolution paves the way.

Does this sound overstated? Melodramatic? It would be interesting to ask Cliff Mass. The University of Washington climate scientist took a two-hour walking tour last week through largely abandoned and boarded up downtown Seattle. From lockdown to looting and riot, our once-lovely city has been on a mad plunge to suicide. On his blog, Mass compared what has happened to the city to Kristallnacht, the November 9, 1938 Night of Broken Glass in Hitlers Germany. An online mob came for Professor Mass for that one, and he got cancelled from his gig commenting on the weather the weather! for NPR. Analogies are always risky, especially when they encompass anything to do with the Nazis. But he wasnt entirely off-base. While Nazis rampaged against Jewish businesses, Antifa and other protestors have targeted all business and normal life in general. The government in both cases winked at it, while good people were afraid to speak out.

In 2020, our culture could well be poised on the edge of something still darker than what weve seen so far. Antifa was at it once more last night in Seattle, as Chicago again witnessed rampant looting and anti-police violence. And then there is the ongoing chaos in Portland. Hannah Arendt would not have seen such mayhem and the isolation and powerlessness of lockdown as separate and unrelated. In Michael Egnors reading, neither would Plato. The pandemonium of late democracy walks hand in hand with atomization, terror, and paralysis. The contribution of evolutionary ideology in getting us here should not be neglected.

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Darwinism Paved the Way to Our Perilous Cultural Moment - Discovery Institute

If you are, like most people, anxiously awaiting the good news that the lockdown has finally been lifted, in all likelihood you missed out on all the other news that have been making the headlines recently. Here is a sample of those headlines: How data can aid the fight against COVID-19; Facebook invests $5.7 billion in Indian internet giant Jio; Chile will issue immunity cards to people who have recovered from the virus; Why the wealthy fear pandemics; Miamis rich-poor divide is exposed by flawed Covid-19 testing; With selective coronavirus coverage, China builds a culture of hate; In India, a pandemic of prejudice and repression.

I find the above disconcerting because the overall theme of the articles contents reflects social Darwinism or survival of the fittest. It is hard not to miss the pivotal roles played by social media, e-commerce and money in setting the parameters of coronavirus testing, which is crucial to containing the pandemic.

Now that Facebook has acquired a 9.9% stake in Reliance Jio, it is only a matter of time before FB ends up owning Jio, whose assets of $26 billion pale in comparison to FBs $133 billion. If you think it wont happen, think again. Walmarts attempt to enter the Indian market in a big way was initially rebuffed, but it found a backdoor by buying up Flipkart, Indias e-commerce giant. At the time of the takeover, Flipkart had assets worth $2 billion versus Walmarts $236 billion. FBs first attempt to enter the India market by offering Free Basics was strongly rebuffed. It has since found a backdoor by zeroing in on Jio. All of this does not bode well for the public.

In an incredibly self-serving op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Facebooks CEO Mark Zuckerberg opined that Facebook was in a unique position to help researchers and health authorities get the information they would need to respond to the pandemic since it knew the identities of large numbers of people. Quoting from the op-ed piece, The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good. Note the use of the words we and superpower.

While we lost the war on privacy a long time ago, I think there is still time to contain its fallout.

When a successful vaccine is developed, I presume FB will be in a unique position to identify aggrieved communities to whom the vaccine should be made available. Just as effectively as it did in the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

In two recent coronavirus testing studies done in California, one set of volunteer participants was drawn from a random sample of email addresses and telephone. The second set of participants was obtained through advertising on Facebook. The first people to volunteer came from wealthy neighbourhoods.

Even though the population of New York State is 19.4 million (55% white, 15% black) and that of the State of Nebraska is 1.93 million (86% white, 4% black), NY received a paltry $12,000 in federal aid per infected case while Nebraska received more than $380,000. Likewise, in Europe, Hungary and Poland (both countries have been actively gutting democratic institutions over the past two years) which have recorded around 1,143 and 545 coronavirus deaths respectively, received 48 million Euros in assistance, whereas Italy and Spain, which have more than 60,000 deaths between them, received 6.5 million Euros.

As an article in the Guardian newspaper nicely put it, Using Big Tech to tackle coronavirus risks swapping one lockdown for another. To which I might add, physical lockdown is only temporary and will end, sooner or later, but the virtual lockdown never will.

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Darwinism in full play as the pandemic rages - Deccan Herald

As we live through the coronavirus lockdown, some surprisingly diverse sources fromThe New YorkertoTucker Carlson have begun referring their audiences to an alarming word: totalitarianism. In this context, journalist and activistMasha Gessen, writing inThe New Yorker, recommends the work of Hannah Arendt, for her complicated and precise descriptions of isolation, solitude, and loneliness. The reference is apt, and worth exploring, not least because of Arendts insights linking totalitarian ideology with Darwinism.

Hannah Arendt was the leading philosopher of totalitarianism in the 20th century. Her writing, especiallyThe Origins of Totalitarianism(1951), is always interesting and relevant, and her insights into totalitarianism are chillingly accurate. She explicitly links totalitarian ideology to Darwinism naming Darwin often as a cornerstone of modern totalitarianism. She distinguishes between different forms of government, as a function of the set of predicates by which a nation is governed. Some governments rule by deontological rules theocracies that use the Ten Commandments, etc. Some rule by positive law written laws established by legislation. Some rule by tyranny the arbitrary rule by the opinions of one or a few individuals. Each of these has its advantages and disadvantages.

Totalitarianism is something radically different, even radically different from tyranny. Totalitarianism is rule by natural laws she means by laws of nature, not natural law in the scholastic sense. Nazism ruled by biological natural laws drawn from Darwin and his followers concepts of racial superiority, survival of the fittest, etc. Communists rule by natural laws of class, history, and economics the class struggle, struggle against capitalism, etc.Marxists draw parallels between these laws and those established by Darwin. As Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature,said Friedrich Engels, Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.

Its noteworthy that while we think of Hitler and Stalin as tyrants, Arendt would say that they werent really tyrants in the sense she means. Tyrants are arbitrary, and totalitarians arent. For example, Caligula (a classic tyrant) could make his horse a senator, just by whim. Hitler could not have made a Jew his minister of defense, and Stalin could not have made a capitalist his minister of the interior.

Tyrants are less dangerous because they are not wedded to unalterable ideology. In this sense, Augustus was a tyrant, too he had complete personal power but his rule was for the most part rational and humane. Totalitarians are much more dangerous than tyrants because they are absolutely committed to an ideology, and that ideology takes precedence over all other considerations over positive law, over moral law, over personal relationships. Germans were expected to turn in Jews to the Gestapo, even if the Jew was a friend. Soviet citizens were expected to turn in relatives who didnt buy into Communism to the Cheka, even close relatives such as parents.

Totalitarianism is uniquely dangerous because it is objectively driven and unchecked by any other considerations. It is very effective in the sense that it systematically destroys opposition in an organized way that tyrants, theocrats, etc. tend not to do.

Arendt noted that totalitarians work using terror. She defined terror as the completely arbitrary use of fear. Anyone could get a knock on the door at 3 a.m. from the Cheka, for any reason. Guilt in the sense of legal violation plays no role the accusation is the conviction, and there is no recourse to law or reason. The goal of terror is to utterly disorganize society and disorganize individual thought. You never can predict, you never can know what is coming next. This disorganization is essential because it leaves only the ruling ideology the natural law as a guiding principle. The struggle is theonlyorganizing principle, and that is the essence of the totalitarian system.Onlythe natural law only the struggle matters, and war is perpetual. Under totalitarianism, people are terrified and paralyzed Arendt often used the word paralyzed. People in a totalitarian state are like panicked livestock, to be bred, culled, slaughtered, and used to advance the ideology and win the perpetual struggle. Terror and paralysis are the cornerstones of public policy in totalitarian states.

The COVID-19 lockdown isnt fully totalitarian, of course.Dennis Prager notesthat while we are closer to a police state than ever in American history, a police state does not mean totalitarian state. America is not a totalitarian state; we still have many freedoms. But you can get a flavor. Proponents of radical lockdown instill fear (as you may be aware if you have followedevents in California). They are arbitrary (you can go to the liquor store but not to church, or in Michigan, you can buy vegetables butnot seeds for a garden). A noteworthy example of this arbitrariness is New York mayor Bill de Blasiosthreat to arrest Orthodox Jewswho attend funerals, whilehe issued no such threat to spectators who gathered in crowds to watch the Blue Angelsfly over a few days ago.

For Arendt, Darwin was at the root of modern totalitarianism, because he offered the most pervasive natural law natural selection. Logically, Darwin influenced both Nazi and Communist totalitarians. The highest qualities of human beings were, according to Darwin, the direct consequence of a struggle built into nature. Darwinism offers a scientific validation of totalitarian natural law, on which a totalitarians system could be built. For Arendt, Darwin was, in a way, the prophet of totalitarianism.

FromThe Origins of Totalitarianism:

Darwinism met with such overwhelming success [in totalitarian systems] because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race and well as class rule

Materialism is an indispensable boost to Darwinian and totalitarian ideology. Thats whyDarwinist Jerry Coynes denial of free will is so dangerous it removes the idea of guilt or innocence, and makes us livestock to be managed and culled according to ideology. In Coynes world without free will, a man cannot coherently say But Im innocent! Without free will, there is no moral innocence or moral guilt. There is only matter in motion, to be controlled by the state for the states (ideological) purposes.

In this COVID crisis, we need to carefully consider the social and political implications of the measures our government takes to stem the pandemic. As Hannah Arendt so masterfully explained, a nation paralyzed by fear and locked down by government-by-edict has moved in a subtle but undeniable way toward totalitarian dynamics. Fear and involuntary quarantine carry more than just an economic price. Totalitarianism is no less deadly than a pandemic and is just as easy to misdiagnose in its early stages.

Photo: Hannah Arendt died in 1975 and was buried on the campus of Bard College, by Loslazos / CC BY-SA.

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Darwinism, Totalitarianism, and the Lockdown - Discovery Institute

Next time you fail your math test, tell your teacher to give you an A. Why? Because you failed because of their opinion. While clearly a joke, this point questions what makes something right or wrong.

Right and wrong depend entirely on someones worldview. For example, nonreligious people do not believe in a supernatural world, while religious people believe in a higher power to explain things. These perspectives shape their life outlook giving the appearance of an immovable object meets an unstoppable force.

There will never be a right answer to these worldviews because only the person who holds them can change them. During a mental health workshop I took as a student athlete, I learned that the best way to foster change is through having people recognize the issue.

We can tell people the right course of action, but if they do not recognize it themselves, they will never change. Ever try debating a relative with an opposing political opinion? Did you convince them?

Look at who people think is the winner of a political debate. It will always be the candidate they will vote for anyways. Psychologists call this thinking error confirmation bias because people accept new information that supports their worldview and reject other information. This means that value judgements, such as right and wrong, are references to how we perceive outside events.

This is why there is still a debate about the existence of God. For two people may be exposed to the same event, yet will come to different interpretations of that event. The believer will apply their belief in God as a cause for the situation, while the nonbeliever will not.

Since humans have internal bias, then all human inventions will have a degree of it, including science. Yet, scientists argue that the scientific method prevents human bias from bleeding into science. I would ask these scientists how the scientific method allowed wonky ideas like Social Darwinism to take place.

During the late 19th century, many scientists used the teachings of Charles Darwin regarding human evolution to form a human hierarchy based on race, gender, intellectual abilities and wealth. These scientists followed the scientific method which led to the sterilization of 8,000 people in North Carolina alone. Interestingly enough, Charles Darwin hailed from a long line of fervent abolitionists, and many speculate his commitment to proving human evolution by chance was influenced by his hatred of slavery, Adrian Desmond and James Moore say. According to their biography, Darwin was outraged when he saw the suffering inflicted by slavery and was motivated to prove that all humans came from one common ancestor.

Yet, peoples personal opinions about human evolution impacted methods free of human bias. Despite horrible things being done in sciences name, it has made the world a better place. Why? Because good people found different interpretations of existing information. The world will be a better place when everyone comes together and shares similar opinions about the right course of action.

Dont believe me? You dont have to. After all, it is just my opinion.

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Caleb's Concepts: Why Everything is just a matter of Opinion - The Appalachian Online

Introduction

Social Darwinism is a complex and controversial topic, a package of ideologies supposedly inspired by biological evolutionism that is of interest to scholars of both the life and the social sciences. In principle it includes any political system inspired by the view that human nature and social activity are driven by our biological nature, especially as defined by the process of evolution. The complexity of the topic derives from the fact that the term social Darwinism has been applied to a number of different (and to some extent incompatible) ideologies. The key feature is supposed to be the influence of Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection, in which the struggle for existence determines the survival of the fittest, thereby ensuring that the species adapts to new conditionsalthough it is widely assumed that the process also guarantees progress toward higher levels of complexity. The classic image is of the proponents of unrestrained free-enterprise capitalism justifying their policy by appealing to the survival of the fittest. But the term has also been applied to justifications of militarism and imperialism (national or racial struggle) and to the eugenics movements efforts to replace natural selection with a process of artificial selection by restricting the reproduction of the unfit. The term has also been applied to more or less any claim that human nature is fixed by hereditary factors, especially those linked to social class or race. The topic is contentious because social Darwinism is almost always used in a pejorative sensethe opponents of these ideologies use it to define positions they reject, and this becomes particularly sensitive when applied to areas such as Nazi racial policies and the Holocaust. Most forms of social Darwinism are associated with right-wing ideologies, despite the fact that scholars can point to many left-wing writers who were also inspired by Darwin. The problem of interpretation is compounded by the fact that historians of both the biological and the social sciences are involved, bringing very different interpretive frameworks to bear. Scholars interested in the social world tend to equate social Darwinism with any ideology based on the struggle for existence, whether or not there is evidence of inspiration from biological Darwinism. Historians of science may be well aware that the term refers to a much wider range of ideologies than those inspired directly by Darwin, but they do expect the analysis to respect the fact that other biological ideas and, indeed, other evolutionary mechanisms were involved.

There are few wide-ranging studies of social Darwinism, in part because so many different ideologies have been associated with the movement, but also because the national contexts in which these ideologies developed are very different. Disagreement exists even over the meaning of the term social Darwinism, often reflecting the varying backgrounds from which scholars approach the subject. Historians of the social sciences have tended to equate social Darwinism with more or less any ideology promoting the view that struggle and competition (at whatever level) are the motors of progress. Historians of the life sciences are generally more aware of the complexity of the biological debates, which provided the models on which the social policies were based and stress that the Darwinian theory of natural selection was by no means the only source of inspiration for ideologies of social progress based on the struggle for existence. Of the few general overviews available, Bowler 1993 provides the perspective from the life sciences, while Hawkins 1997 is written by a historian of the social sciences. Alexander and Numbers 2010 is a wide-ranging collection of essays on the relationship between biology and ideology, beginning in the pre-Darwinian period and continuing to recent debates. Tort 1992 also offers a wider perspective, but one generated from outside the English-speaking world.

Alexander, Denis R., and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. 2010. Biology and ideology from Descartes to Dawkins. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

E-mail Citation

A collection of essays that includes material on the origins of race science, Darwins social views, the idea of progress, eugenics, the role of Marxism, and 20th-century developments.

Bowler, Peter J. 1993. Biology and social thought, 18501914. Berkeley: Office for the History of Science and Technology, Univ. of California.

E-mail Citation

A survey of the early development of links between evolution and ideology noting the impact of both Darwinian and non-Darwinian evolutionary theories and showing how anthropologists and archaeologists developed a model of human progress independently of developments in evolutionary biology.

Hawkins, Mike. 1997. Social Darwinism in European and American thought, 18601945. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511558481E-mail Citation

The most comprehensive overview, based on a clear recognition of the problems generated by equating social Darwinism with capitalism. Written from the perspective of the social sciences, and thus tends to equate any ideology based on struggle with social Darwinism irrespective of the actual evolutionary models employed.

Tort, Patrick, ed. 1992. Darwinisme et socit: Colloque international, 46 juin 1991, Paris. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

E-mail Citation

Collects the papers delivered at an international conference. Particularly useful on social Darwinism beyond the English-speaking world.

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