Major Leonard Darwin’s forgotten role in the eugenic revolution

The subject of this blog post is a 1912 article from The New York Times entitled: “Babes Of The Future: Major Leonard Darwin Tells True Purposes Of Eugenics“. Major Leonard Darwin was the son of Charles Darwin and held the honour of being the President of the First International Congress on Eugenics.

In a later article from the New York Times published in 1932^[1], Major Leonard Darwin appeared again in the news – that he wanted to create a caste system similar to that practiced in India that “would be so rigid as to prohibit all movement between the different social strata”. Basically, what this would mean in economic terms is that someone pigeonholed into a ‘middle/lower class’ position would never have the means to climb atop the ladder in this hierarchic society. (it also needs no pointing out that Adolf Hitler‘s Aryan caste system was pretty much an implementation of Major Leonard Darwin‘s theories)

From the article:

The main aim of the eugenist is to insure the interests of the unborn of the future always being held in view in connection with all of our social customs and all our legislation.”

The interests of the unborn is in short used here as an ‘euphemism’ for: preventing them from being born as some sort of preventive abortive measure. Indeed, the eugenic sterilization laws of the United States and Nazi-Germany ensured just that – eugenic pre-screening of the parent and forced sterilization if the parent was determined to be ‘feeble-minded’ (based on flawed intelligence tests and racially biased outlooks).

“As to our other aims, they will become more definite as our knowledge increases”

As Francis Galton (the founder of ‘eugenics’) advocated: “eugenics should be pushed as a creed”. First came the basic creed (which was being spread in the early pre-twenties by such influential figures as Woodrow Wilson [the POTUS at the time], Margaret Sanger and of course Major Leonard Darwin), afterwards came the actual policies – such as ‘gas chambers’^[2], ‘forced sterilization, ‘segregation of the unfit’, and so on.

We can, however, positively affirm that we do not advocate any interference whatever with the free selection of normal mates in marriage

The misdirection going on here is that the ‘eugenic screening process’ would determine who qualifies as ‘normal’ and who qualifies as ‘feebleminded’. An early abuse of this can be found in the post-Great Depression days. Paupers (poor people without money) were perceived as having a ‘poverty gene’ that might attribute to them being in the economic straits they found themselves in. Socio-economical conditions and plain common sense did not even figure into this – according to eugenicists, whether or not you were poor had all to do with your inheritance.

There will no doubt always remain a class outside the pale of all moral influence, and of these there will be a small proportion who, if they become parents, are certain to pass on some grievous mental or bodily defect to a considerable proportion of their progeny.”

Same basic argument as today.

Finally, we advocate economic forces being brought to bear in certain directions;

As far back as Thomas Malthus (chief economist for the British Empire), eugenic measures went hand into glove with monetary and economic policies. In the nihilistic mind of a state planner, lesser people entails lesser mouths to feed for the state – and if a qualitative difference could be established amongst the masses, those could be classified as the ‘useless eaters’ that had to be taken care of. Malthus advocated that sick or poor people be placed into poor houses with poor sanitation so that those people would die off quickly. This was widely practiced in insane asylums all throughout the US and UK, as can be read in Edwin Black’s ‘War Against The Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign To Create A Master Race‘ (2003). Dr. Harry Haiselden even admitted to as much[3].

as for instance, in making taxation, and also the pay of employees in all public services, vary somewhat with the size of the family to be maintained, and in administering the poor law so as not to encourage reproduction on the part of degenerate paupers.”

Poor families were to be discouraged from having larger families – whereas the rich were allowed to have families as large as they wished.

In The Netherlands, similar policies were enacted in the mid-1800s^[4].

These are, in brief, the aims of our societies, for which we appeal for widespread sympathy.

so ends the article. In the following section, I will provide a full transcript of Major Leonard Darwin’s letter to the New York Times (NYTimes’ PDF is image-only I’m afraid – they didn’t bother to convert it into text using OCR).

Transcript – entire letter

BABES OF THE FUTURE:
Major Leonard Darwin Tells True Purposes of Eugenics

Eugenics Education Society of Great Britain, 6 York Buildings, Adelphi, London, Dec. 11, 1912

To the Editor of The New York Times:

As there appears to be a good deal of doubt on both sides of the Atlantic with regard to the objects and methods of eugenic societies, perhaps you will be good enough to give me an opportunity of stating briefly what they should be in our opinion.

The main aim of the eugenist is to insure the interests of the unborn of the future always being held in view in connection with all our social customs and all our legislation. For the sake of our fellow-creatures of to-day and to-morrow every effort should without doubt be made to improve the environment of mankind by rational methods. But, as regards the more distant future, we can now practically only beneficially affect the great stream of humanity through the agency of heredity. We desire therefore greatly to increase the sense of responsibility in connection with all matters pertaining to human parenthood, to spread abroad a knowledge of the laws of heredity as are as now known, and to encourage further research in that domain of science.

With regard to this last point, about which there is little controversy, scientific investigation must remain to a great extent in the hands of such bodies as the Carnegie Institute of Washington, which is pouring forth such a volume of admirable work. Eugenic societies may perhaps play a useful part in collecting material, such as carefully compiled human pedigrees, and in impressing on the public the scientific value of such information when accurately rendered. By means of such co-operation between the general public and the expert investigator progress may be greatly facilitated.

As to our other aims, they will become more definite as our knowledge increases. We can, however, positively affirm that we do not advocate any interference whatever with the free selection of normal mates in marriage. But we firmly believe that, if the moral sense of the nation could be aroused to the importance of the eugenic problem great benefits would result. These advantages, we hold, would arise because the fit, if suitably mated, would recognize more clearly than they do at present the moral evil of avoiding the duties of parenthood; whilst, if not already mated, they would more often refuse to mate with the unfit. Again, as regards the unfit in body, they would more often refrain from marriage for fear of passing on their defects to future generations.

Hence we regard the educational campaign which we are carrying on as being of the greatest practical importance. There will no doubt always remain a class quite outside the pale of all moral influence, and of these there will be a small proportion who, if they become parents, are certain to pass on some grievous mental or bodily defect to a considerable proportion of their progeny. Here and here only must the law step in. As to whether surgical sterilization should ever be enforced on such persons we have still an open mind, but certainly not till further information on this subject is available. Unquestionably these unfortunates must be treated with all practical consideration, and must be made to feel that they are not being punished for a crime, yet sufficient control must be maintained over them in institutions or elsewhere to prevent them from breeding.

Finally, we advocate economic forces being brought to bear in certain directions; as for instance, in making taxation, and also the pay of employees in all public services, vary somewhat with the size of the family to be maintained, and in administering the poor law so as not to encourage reproduction on the part of degenerate paupers.

These are, in brief, the aims of our societies, for which we appeal for widespread sympathy.

LEONARD DARWIN, President

Footnotes

1 [^]Read the article linked to below for more information on Major Leonard Darwin’s remarks.

Link: – http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/index2.html?tag=1805 (“Genes and Eugenics,” New York Times (8/24/1932), critical review of Third International Eugenics Congress)
2. [^]In fact, back in 1910 George Bernard Shaw proposed at the International Congress of Eugenics that gas chambers be implemented as a humane method for killing off the ‘unfit’.

From Edwin Black’s book ‘War Against The Weak‘, page 248:

“A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence, simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.” – George Bernard Shaw, Lecture to the London Eugenics Education Society, 1910

It would take until the mid-1930s before a regime would be established (Nazi-Germany) that was willing to go out on a limb and push this through in legislation.

3. [^]Dr Harry Haiselden was a Chicago physician that became the point of controversy in 1915 when he refused to give an infant a life-saving operation that would have saved its life. This he did so out of conscientious eugenic objections. He was taken to court by the parents, but he eventually won the case. During the court proceedings, Haiselden made remarks such as: “I should have been guilty of a graver crime if I had saved this child’s life. My crime would have been keeping in existence one of nature’s cruelest blunders.”

He felt his victory in court was a vindication of his action – shortly after he ramped up the eugenic killing spree and ordered his staff to withold treatment from even more deformed or birth-defcted infants. Sometimes he would handle it personally, letting a child bleed to death, for instance. He held regular interviews with the media on his ‘plight’ to save mankind from passing on its hereditary defects to the next generation and he also played himself in a major Hollywood production called ‘The Black Stork‘ (a thinly-disguised eugenics propaganda piece).

The following snippet from Edwin Black’s book ‘War Against The Weak’ goes into Harry Haiselden‘s assessment of the mental health institutions (page 254):

“Haiselden continued to rally for eugenic euthanasia with a six-week series in the Chicago American. He justified his killings by claiming that public institutions for the feebleminded, epileptic and tubercular were functioning as lethal chambers of a sort. After clandestinely visiting the Illinois Institution for the Feebleminded at Lincoln, Illinois, Haiselden claimed that windows were deliberately left open and unscreened, allowing drafts and infecting flies to swarm over patients. He charged that Lincoln consciously permitted “flies from the toilets, garbage and from the eruptions of patients suffering from acute and chronic troubles to go at will over the entire institution. Worse still,” he proclaimed, “I found that inmates were fed with the milk from a herd of cattle reeking with tuberculosis.”

4. [^]According to Margaret Sanger’s book ‘The Case For Birth Control’, during the mid-1800s there was an anti-pauperism/anti-poor policy in Holland that encouraged the poor to take contraception so that they could not bear children – and the poor were generally encouraged to have smaller families than the rich.

“Holland is an intensely patriotic country, and its need for military efficiency is beyond dispute. It is inconceivable that her statesmen could contemplate a policy in any way detrimental to this. Yet it appears that in 1881 an organisation having as its direct object the reduction of the birth-rate, especially among the poor, was formed in Amsterdam, and that it received the warm support of Dr. van Houten, Minister of the Interior, and of Mynheer N.G. Pierson, the Finance Minister. It was thus enabled to conduct an energetic propaganda in favor of small families among the poorest classes, whose means or health did not permit them to do justice to large famillies. In 1895 its work had become so appreciated that it was approved by Royal Decree as one of the Societies of Public Utility.” – Margaret Sanger, The Case For Birth Control, p73

Link: – http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021854561 (Internet Archive: Margaret Sanger – The Case For Birth Control)

The Deleuzian society – more Orwell than Orwell, and right around the corner

The document ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control‘ was written back in 1992 by a French philosopher known as Gilles Deleuze. Apparently he is the friend of another famous French philosopher, Michel Foucault.

Michel Foucault once remarked that: “One day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian”. And, admittedly, if one thought Orwell was prescient, one has never read the following postscript by Deleuze.

Here, in summary, is what Deleuze says in his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control‘:

• The family, the school, the industry, the hospital, the prison are all dead. They’re giving them their ‘last rites’ as we’re speaking.
• Most of them will be incorporated into the ‘corporation’ – wages will be even lower and even less substantial, because the ‘bonus’ so to speak will be more of a ‘psychological’ bonus.
  • He admits that the whole corporate ‘group session’ is all meant as a therapeutical conditioning game – it’s meant so people get into fights over prestige – to encourage the ‘dog-eats-dog’ mentality as it is on the workplace.
• In the future, there will be ‘perpetual’ learning – continuous exams and so on.
• ID cards and electronic bracelets (whatever shape they may take on) will monitor you day and night and WILL be able to prevent you from entering certain residential areas or (for instance) being able to leave the country.
• In the ‘hospitals’, the doctor and patient relationship is to be abolished. The ‘computer’ will decide if you are a ‘risk’, and if so you will be quarantined accordingly.
• Computers are central in all this – well, gee whiz.
• Our ‘economies’ (that of the ‘First world’ western countries) are only meant to be ‘service economies’ – all the production is in the Third World (well, that would be China, India – that have now grown to be First World).
• Some talk about one single corporation that only has stockholders (think back to the movie Network with the guy who played Howard Beale)
• You will be eternally in debt.
• Convicted persons will get an electronic collar and be forced to stay at home during certain hours depending on their penalty. I guess they will drag you in front of a Project Natal-type device and ‘reprogram you’, but that’s just something I added.
• They want to break up the unions. And if the unions ‘reject’ this new society of ‘control’ – then something has to be done about them.
• Every person individually will ‘serve’ the society of control. That’s in this Frenchmen’s own words: “It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve”.

it also talks about Role-Based Access Control (though not by name but the allusion is clear) – what this means is that everything you will be able to do on your computer will be regulated by role-based access control – what YOU are allowed to access, and at any given time they can revoke those rights. And this will count for everything in society – not just your Internet, not just your computer, not just your access to data at work – it means your money, your social security, everything. They can make you ‘unexist’, to make a reference to Nineteen Eighty Four’s O’Brien here. Think of The Net – a similar scenario is played out there where they erase a dissident’s personal identity and give her another fake identity and frame her for committing a computer crime.

http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/netzkritik/societyofcontrol.html

Society Of Control – Gilles Deleuze (1992)

I. Historical

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school (“you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (“you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa ’51 could exclaim, “I thought I was seeing convicts.”

Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure–prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors–scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. “Control” is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

II. Logic

The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn’t necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it’s because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything–the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it’s because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest–the flock and each of its animals–but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay “priest.”) In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.” Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society–not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines–levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker’s familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It’s a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner–state or private power–but coded figures–deformable and transformable–of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.

III. Program

The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position–licit or illicit–and effects a universal modulation.

The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of “substitution,” at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the “corporation” at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine “without doctor or patient” that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation–as they say–but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a “dividual” material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.

Footnotes

1. This document was published in full in the book ‘Rethinking architecture: a reader in cultural theory‘ (1997) by Neil Leach. A preview can be found here. Go to page 309.

This document appeared in all the major university papers in the US.

Here is the same document from the Journal Storage – a United States-based system for archiving academic journals.

Link: – http://www.jstor.org/pss/778828

Arthur Koestler’s attack on Neo-Darwinism

One thing that I didn’t expect to find while researching Arthur Koestler‘s book, ‘The Ghost In The Machine’, was that the man was an early critic of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.

In his book, he subjects the neo-Darwinistic evolutionary theory to intense scrutiny and manages to shoot some convincing holes in it.

Just to give a few quotes so that people can get a sense of what I’m talking about (from page 115, The Ghost In The Machine):

The classical Darwinian answer to the question how man was created out of a blob of slime is much the same as Watson’s answer to the question how Patou creates a gown out of a piece of silk: ‘He pulls it in here, he pulls it out there, makes it tight or loose at the waist… he manipulates his material until it takes on the semblance of a dress…’ The evolutionary process is supposed to operate by similar random manipulations of its raw material – pulling it in here, pushing out there, putting a tail on here, putting an antler there – until a ‘pattern is hit upon’, fit to survive.

Flat-earth science explains mental evolution by random tries, preserved by selective reinforcement (the stick and the carrot) , and biological evolution by random mutations (the monkey at the typewriter) preserved by natural selection. Mutations are defined as spontaneous changes in the molecular structure of genes, and are said to be random in the sense that they have no relation whatsoever the organism’s adaptive needs.

Now that last line there needs emphasizing – because if you ask a current Darwinian like Richard Dawkins today whether their creed still hinges upon mutations being random, they will flat-out deny it and state that you ‘do not understand evolution’ and that Darwin always argued that mutations in his evolutionary theory was ‘non-random’. It could be argued that this position (on Darwin always having been right from the inception of his theories) is straight-out revisionism (or at best a cop-out, if you go by the strawman that evolution is random, but the ‘natural selection’ process isn’t) as evidenced by the numerous times Koestler goes into the neo-Darwinist mindset – time and time again he reiterates that the official orthodoxy hinges upon the consensus that mutation is random and haphazard for lack of a better description.

Although these criticisms and doubts have made numerous breaches in the walls, the citadel of Neo-Darwinism orthodoxy still stands - mainly, one supposes, because nobody has had a satisfactory alternative to offer. The history of science indicates that a well-established theory can take a lot of battering and get into a tangle of absurdities and contradictions, yet still be upheld by the Establishment until an acceptable global alternative is offered.

This begs the question: who created the ‘preconditions’ that led to it becoming an ‘accepted’ theory? And who exactly does Koestler refer to when talking about the ‘Establishment’? (assuming the myth that we’re still living in a ‘democracy’ has any validity to it – for a minute, mind you)? Big money interests and an elite interested in endorsing a particular creed perhaps? Was not eugenics pretty much the same thing – faulty science being pushed as an established fact? Is not global warming following steadily in its footsteps today? So if ‘science’ is just about – oh, this sounds most plausible – then why are skeptics on the Darwinist version of evoltuion being utomatically derided for ‘denying reality’ and being ‘stupid’? Is that not really evidence of an acolyte-like disdain for anyone who doesn’t concur with their views?

Continuing on from the book:

A number of corrections and amendments to neo-Darwinian theory have been proposed by evolutionists over a number of years; and if these were to be put together, there would be little left of the original theory – as amendments to a Parliamentary bill can reverse its emphasis and intent.

Darwinians are the most vocal critics of religion out there. One of their chief complaints regarding Christianity is that The Bible was written and amended by thousands of Men over the ages, including Kings and Queens interested in keeping the public under their thumb – and that it’s a hodgepodge of fairy tales and interpretations of the laws of nature that serve to control ‘people’. Yet what does that make Darwinism then given this charge by Koestler?

To leave no doubt of the shakiness of Darwinism’s foundations in Koestler’s opinion, let’s offer a few more quotes:

The propounders of the orthodox theory may have been uneasily aware that something essential was missing, and paid occasional lip service to ‘unsolved problems’, then hurriedly swept them under the carpet. To quote one authority, Sir Peter Medawar (himself not excessively given to tolerance of other people’s opinions): ‘Twenty years ago it all seemed easy: with mutation as a source of diversity, with selection to pick and choose… Our former complacency can be traced, I suppose, to an understandable fault of temperament; scientists tend not to ask themselves questions until they can see the rudiments of an answer in their minds. Embarrassing questions tend to remain unasked or, if asked, to be answered rudeley…“

Could it be that by upholding ‘science’ that can’t be entirely validated – but has to be agreed to nonetheless – that the people practicing science are in fact enslaving themselves and the people they are supposed to ‘enlighten’ from the Dark Ages – because they can’t break free of its trappings? That they’re kind of like the computer code running inside the debugger – they can’t break free out of the program – they remain stuck inside that atom forever. (a somewhat flimsy analogy, admittedly. Perhaps I will think of a more valid one at a later date).

Continuing on from page 157…

Yet it is precisely this perverse view which determines the orthodox interpretation not only of the evolution of new animal forms, but also of new patterns of animal behaviour. The only explanation that neo-Darwinian theory has to offer is that new forms of behaviour, too, arise from chance mutations affecting the nervous system, preserved by natural selection. If, apart from a few tentative studies, the evolution of behaviour (as distinct from the evolution of physical structures) is still an uncharted territory, the reason may perhaps be an unconscious reluctance to put the already strained theoretical framework of neo-Darwinian genetics to an additional test.

This review seems to recognize Koestler’s criticism without the usual vindictive disdain – but seems to struggle coming up with a genuine rebuttal all the same:
http://www.new.dli.ernet.in/rawdataupload/upload/insa/INSA_1/20005af7_1.pdf

Given that Koestler gets a free pass by Darwinian evolutionist followers, what is the justification for Ben Stein being villified in the press and on blogs like the one from Richard Dawkins for merely releasing a movie that merely states the obvious – that Darwinism layed the seeds for eugenics and the Nazi movement’s own implementation of that ‘science’? To my mind, that can’t even be debated – it’s part of the historical record. Perhaps they object to the pro-’intelligent design’ message – but otherwise it strikes me as odd for the entire media apparatus to denounce this as ‘unscientific’ given what Koestler and the rest of the academic community already purported about Darwinism back in the ’70s – namely, that it was composed of contradictions and implausibilities.

George Orwell – How background music serves to eradicate thought

This essay, Pleasure Spots, by George Orwell comes as highly recommended. He points out the obvious: that most people’s conception of what constitutes a ‘good time’ (a vacation or some other substitute, if you may) revolves around ‘never being alone’, music always playing in the background – loud enough but not so loud that they cannot talk over it, and of course, electric, artificial lights everywhere.

He also claims that this use of background music is consciously employed by bars, cafes, and even the trained citizens themselves to eradicate thought and to make people feel ‘comfortable’ in an artificial way – or, in Orwell’s own words, to make them revisit the feelings they experienced when they were inside the womb.

The music-and if possible it should be the same music for everybody-is the most important ingredient. Its function is to prevent thought and conversation, and to shut out any natural sound, such as the song of birds or the whistling of the wind, that might otherwise intrude. The radio is already consciously used for this purpose by innumerable people. In very many English homes the radio is literally never turned off, though it is manipulated from time to time so as to make sure that only light music will come out of it. I know people who will keep the radio playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent, while the chatter of voices stops one from listening attentively to the music and thus prevents the onset of that dreaded thing, thought.

So even when people think they’re having a ‘good time’ they’re constantly being ‘conditioned’ in the most appropriate sense of the word – their thoughts suppressed or eradicated to the point where they can ‘enjoy themselves’ on a superficial level. Also interesting and something that I always suspected but couldn’t quite verbalize: the music is the same for everybody inside the bar/cafe. You could say this is due to the technology – but seen from another perspective you could argue that by playing the same music for everyone in the crowd, the same song with the same ‘programming’ (whether it be a news report, a song containing political or sociological lyrics)  can be redirected to anyone inside the room. For instance, if a bar plays a tune with the lyrics ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ or ‘Dance with the devil’, that will definitely have a subconscious effect on the individual regardless of his or her personal predisposition – because everyone else hears it simultaneously and statistically, someone from the crowd will respond to it in a certain manner that will draw up a conversation – or get the crowd in a particular mood. This can be noticed in many clubs and so on – that the DJs go to extreme lengths to include soundbytes from movies or popular television – and always somewhat aggressive or naughty soundbytes to put everyone in a half-aggressive/half-sexually aroused mood.

Read the essay in full here.

Footnotes

Link: http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/spots/english/e_spots (George Orwell: Pleasure Spots)