Category Archives: Darwinism

Photo: Charles Darwin, enthroned, by Elliott Brown from Birmingham, United Kingdom [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Over atScientific American, Allison Hopper has penned a scathing indictment of those who deny evolution. She states: I want to unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies. Apparently, it never even occurred to Hopper that some people might question evolution based on the many scientific problems with it, such as the Cambrian explosion, where myriads of new body plans emerged in a relatively brief geological time span (see Stephen MeyersDarwins Doubton this topic). No, according to Hopper, anyone questioning evolution is ipso facto a white supremacist.

But what if that someone who rejects evolution is a black African or an African-American or a Hispanic or a Muslim of whatever color or a Jew (and white supremacists are well-known for their anti-Semitism)? Hopper apparently has no clue that millions upon millions of people of color reject evolutionary theory, either because of scientific or religious reasons. Does that mean they are white supremacists?

In order to build her case against those who reject evolution, Hopper points to a few of the misguided ideas of racist Christians in the past. However, she implies that these ideas are still embraced by most Evangelical Christians, which is absurd. The ideas she discusses, such as the mark of Cain being dark skin, were never mainstream ideas among Evangelicals, even in the racist past. Im not sure if anyone today still believes that; if so, they are a tiny fringe element. Her claim that those who reject evolution believe that Adam and Eve were white is likewise ludicrous. Ive been involved in Evangelical Christian circles for most of my 62 years, and I have never heard anyone even the most uneducated, unsophisticated layperson make any such claim.

It seems that Hopper has taken some past beliefs of some racist Christians and insinuated that todays rejecters of evolution adhere to these outmoded dogmas.

Now lets ask ourselves: What happens if we look at past beliefs of evolutionists about race? Its not a secret that Charles Darwin himself was a racist. InThe Descent of Man, he wrote an entire chapter On the Races of Man,in which he said: The variability or diversity of the mental faculties in men of the same race, not to mention the greater differences between the men of distinct races, is so notorious that not a word need here be said. Darwin considered racial differences in physical, mental, and even moral qualities, a proof of human variability. He argued that the lower races (this is his term) would be exterminated by the civilised races.

Darwin was not idiosyncratic among evolutionists; most Darwinian biologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were racist and used racism as evidence for their theory. Konrad Lorenz, for instance, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist, argued in an article in 1940 that Darwinism was the best foundation for racial inequality. Its ironic in light of Hoppers article that the primary thrust of Lorenzs article was to combat creationism. American biology textbooks in the early 20th century taught scientific racism and used it as evidence for evolution. More recently the Nobel Prize-winning biologist James Watson has stirred considerable controversy with his racist views.

Now what happens if we examine the real white supremacists today? Are they creationists? I have done a good deal of research on this topic, and as it turns out, the vast majority of white supremacists today embrace Darwinian evolution and use it as evidence for their white supremacy. In a 2017 article in hisRadixjournal, Richard Spencer, a leading figure on the white supremacist Alt-Right argued thatGroup differences exist as consequences of evolution by natural selection and racial differences are a natural and normal consequence of human evolution. This is a commonplace view among white supremacists, as you can easily discover by looking at white supremacist websites and print publications.

In sum, most people today who reject evolution, which includes many people of color, are not racists. On the other hand, most of the leading white supremacists today embrace evolutionary theory with alacrity. Hoppers attempt to tar those who do not believe in evolution with racism may play well with the pro-evolution lobby, but unfortunately it is based on distortions and misrepresentations of those who reject evolution, as well as ignorance of the history of scientific racism and the ideology of contemporary white supremacists.

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Is Denying Evolution a Form of White Supremacy? - Discovery Institute

The Purge universe is based on a simple and nihilistic premise: In a dystopian near-future, a democratically-elected American theocracy legalizes any and all crimeincluding murderfor 12 hours each year, with the starting bell a 7:00 p.m. siren blast on March 21 that announces anarchy until the following morning. The stated purpose is to psychologically purify a society wracked by unemployment and rampant crime, allowing Americans to live peacefully among each other for the remainder of the year.

In (this fictional) reality, however, its all just a ruse by bloodthirsty oligarchs to sell guns and insurance while culling the ranks of those who cant afford to hunker down for the night in gilded panic rooms. One part hardcore social Darwinism, one part Escape From New York and a sprinkle of The Handmaids Tale have combined to the tune of nearly $500 million at the worldwide box office.

Thats just a taste of the hazily sketched political philosophy the Purge films lay out. Regardless of their thematic ambiguity, theres an obvious hook: They serve as opportunities for the viewer to purge in their own mind over the course of 90-110 minutes, imagining how they might survive in a world of unbidden violenceor what they might be tempted to do if given the chance to act with impunity. The viewer can damn the Purges avaricious creators while enjoying the catharsis-by-proxy of the violence they unleash. Even better, the masters of this particular universe are drawn vaguely enough that viewers of all political stripes can imagine them as the foes of their choosing: religious autocrats, a shadowy global cabal of far-right fever dreams, or anything in between.

The political details of the world conjured by franchise creator and screenwriter James DeMonacoscattershot and contradictory as they arereveal the driving impulses of the populist id that drives todays politics. Now nearly a decade after its launch, one could do worse than squinting at the Purge franchise to glean an impressionistic, if woefully incomplete, picture of American social erosion.

In The Purge, the franchises 2013 maiden voyage, simplicity is a virtue. Produced on a relatively shoestring budget of $3 million, the film is effectively an old-school haunted house picture focusing on one familys efforts to make it through Purge Night at home. The civic trappings of the franchise are almost irrelevant here, replaced by a series of straightforward moral quandaries: What do we owe our neighbors? How much risk would you take on to protect them? How far are you willing to go to protect your own family?

Those are the questions the films protagonist, a McMansion-dwelling but economically insecure salesman played by Ethan Hawke, faces as he glowers his way through what recalls a lengthy, uber-violent, not-very-sophisticated episode of The Twilight Zone. The demons at Hawkes heavily-fortified doorhe happens to peddle security systems meant to keep those who can afford them safe from the Purgeare a roving gang of American Psycho-style preppies, who appeal to class solidarity by imploring Hawke to release a homeless man taken in by his compassionate offspring. With its sadistic elite antagonists, the film establishes the series crude populism, and although it doesnt amount to much of a social critique, the final product is probably the most satisfying in the series by virtue of its small-scale, human focus.

In its 2014 sequel, The Purge: Anarchy, the camera zooms way out. Were introduced to the wider sociopolitical context of the Purge, which has created a country where unemployment is below 5 percent and crime is virtually non-existent, while every year fewer and fewer people live below the poverty line, as the films opening title card helpfully explains. Eventually, via painstaking verbal exposition, the viewer learns that the ruling party (the perfectly vaguely named New Founding Fathers of America) is now simply deploying death squads to indiscriminately murder the poor, who apparently have not done an efficient enough job of it themselves come Purge time.

The sequel does some things effectively. By turning its focus to the people who cant afford to enter Ethan Hawkes bunker, it confronts the viewer more directly with the pitch-black implications of the series premise, up to and including a disturbing scene of threatened sexual violence. But in what becomes a recurring theme for the franchise, that strength is also the films weakness. Bogged down by dull action, bizarre pacing and the ham-fisted introduction of a Black resistance group for whom the term caricature would be generous, The Purge: Anarchy introduces a raft of provocative, upsetting ideas and proceeds to do less than the bare minimum with them.

That trend largely continues in the series third installment, The Purge: Election Year. As one might surmise from the title, the film tackles electoral politics head-on. Its plot follows an idealistic, crusading politician who seeks the presidency on a single-issue platform of abolishing the Purge. Although its cinematically more successful than its predecessorbenefiting from tighter action sequences as DeMonaco is clearly more comfortable with the larger budgetit still lacks real thematic punch or focus. Its protagonist, portrayed by Lost star Elizabeth Mitchell, invokes Lincoln in a debate speech against her opponent; one of the films scrappy rebels faux-cynically proclaims Shes full of it too, nothing will actually change.

By the time the film was released in mid-2016, critics were salivating for parallels between its bleak universe and the Manichean, id political landscape that years real-world election had shaped. They were hard to come by. Ironically, perhaps more than any other film in the franchise, Election Year dodges the explicitly topical in favor of the closest thing to a throughline that exists between the five films: its vague, stick-it-to-em populism. When its captured antagonist implores the films heroes to murder him in cold blood, he repeats a common refrain from Anarchy, smugly reassuring them that its their right as an American. Who across the political spectrum wouldnt like to stick it to their entitled opponents? (Here, its ultimately a moral victory, although action cult hero Frank Grillo does get in a solid below-the-belt shot and Arnold-style one-liner.)

The next entry, the 2018 prequel The First Purge, benefits from a shakeup. In its origin story of both the Purge itself and the dystopia that birthed it, we see glimpses of the political dynamics DeMonaco surmises could drive Americans to such depravitya housing crisis, an epidemic of opioid use, widespread and uncontrollable protests. Its the cinematic equivalent of a You Are Here sticker (and in case the setting wasnt immediate enough for you, theres a brief cameo from CNNs Van Jones interviewing the Purges in-universe creator).

Despite its head-on embrace of the imagined political conditions under which such an event could take place, The First Purge is the most entertaining film in the series by virtue of a street-level narrative focus that recalls the series origins. It also benefits from easily the most charismatic Purge lead in Ylan Noel (of HBOs Insecure), a laconic Staten Island drug kingpin who intends to lay low as the new government uses his borough as the Purges experimental testing ground.

Of course, he does not succeed, and the film follows him and a largely Black cast of Staten Islanders as they attempt to escape the Purge nights violence. Of all the Purge films, The First Purge most directly acknowledges the ugly reality that many Americans would no doubt use such an opportunity to vent their racial animus in horrific and violent ways. An indelible, disturbing image of Noel choking the life from a white stormtrooper in a Sambo mask hits far harder than similar agitprop from across the series. The filmmakers clearly grasp, for the first time, that without nailing the humanity part of inhumanity, depicting it is ultimately just an exercise in morbid juvenilia.

Which brings us to The Forever Purge. Like its predecessors, the newest Purge flick gleefully prods at raw wounds in the American psyche, depicting societal tensions as the basis for grisly violence. And it does so while providing an allegory more explicit than any film in the series thus far. In a town on the northern side of the U.S.-Mexico border, racist paramilitary groups keep the annual violence going past its legally-sanctioned window in an attempt to rid American society of non-whites. A Hallmark-handsome family of white ranchers with a pregnant matriarch and their Mexican migrant colleagues then must make a treacherous border crossing to Mexico to escape the violence, in a predictable inversion of the typical North American refugee narrative.

While its politics are stated more clearly than any other film in the series, the allegory isnt nearly clever enough to overcome the same two-dimensional characters and formulaic action that have historically depressed the franchises Rotten Tomatoes score. The audience is now apparently catching up to the critics, with the film opening to the series lowest box office even as movie theaters wake from their pandemic slumber. The film is, simply, not very good, an inert border-crossing thriller onto which the franchises stale trappings are welded.

It ends, however, on an odd but revealing note: an audio collage of news broadcasts reporting that across the country, people are banding together to fight back against the racist militias that have overwhelmed the racist theocracy. (I know.) It seems like an uncharacteristically hopeful note to end on for such a bleak series, but to close Purge watchers, it should make perfect sense: Against all odds, the films have a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. Time and again, its established that most people are, in fact, not interested in murder, rape, arson and the like, and that the depraved violence depicted is perpetrated by mostly either psychotic outliers or a government dissatisfied with its charges lack of bloodlust.

That confidence in human nature reveals the fundamental flaw at the heart of the Purge series, and why its politics seem so head-spinningly inconsistent. The films are abrasive, button-pushing, and purposely confrontational in a way that plays on the viewers own insecurities and fears about the state of Americas social contract. Their subliminal reassurance of the viewer, however, defangs them in the absence of any meaningful critique. The series fails to either confront the viewer directly enough to reach any kind of real insight about the world, or provide the quality of dumb-fun pulp entertainment that would make us not care.

To take The Purge franchise as emblematic of our times, then, might be done better by examining its style rather than its content: Angsty, fearful, lacking clarity but willing to point an omni-directional and accusatory finger at a moments notice. Judging by last weekends aforementioned box office, the past few years of American life have somewhat exhausted our appetite for such fare. The series creators, however, surely appreciate that fate on some level. To quote one of the universes various hulking brutes, who shouts the phrase unbidden like a mantra, its survival of the fucking fittest.

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The Head-Spinning Politics of the Purge Franchise - POLITICO

Photo credit: Casey Luskin.

As Paul Nelson noted here already, Richard Lewontin, the famed Harvard zoologist, has passed away. He was 92. Lewontin was an extremely influential evolutionary biologist in the 20th century, having pioneered many new ideas and techniques in evolutionary studies. Though he was an explicit critic of intelligent design and a strong defender of evolutionary thinking in science, he was also brave and willing to criticize his own field when he thought it was appropriate.

One of Lewontins most famous contributions to science came in a 1979 paper he co-wrote with Stephen Jay Gould, titled The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme. The paper critiqued the standard Darwinian viewpoint that every feature of life must have an adaptive benefit. They introduced the term spandrel into evolutionary biology based upon the gaps between supportive arches common in medieval architecture as a feature that is not immediately adaptive but a natural byproduct of other features (which may be adaptive). Lewontins article with Gould was heavily critical of the adaptationist programme and its credulity, the tendency to embrace weak tales to explain the origin of features:

We fault the adaptationist programme for its failure to distinguish current utility from reasons for origin (male tyrannosaurs may have used their diminutive front legs to titillate female partners, but this will not explain why they got so small); for its unwillingness to consider alternatives to adaptive stories; for its reliance upon plausibility alone as a criterion for accepting speculative tales; and for its failure to consider adequately such competing themes as random fixation of alleles, production of nonadaptive structures by developmental correlation with selected features (allometry, pleiotropy, material compensation, mechanically forced correlation), the separability of adaptation and selection, multiple adaptive peaks, and current utility as an epiphenomenon of non-adaptive structures. [E]volutionary biologists, in their tendency to focus exclusively on immediate adaptation to local conditions, do tend to ignore architectural constraints and perform just such an inversion of explanation. We wish to question a deeply engrained habit of thinking among students of evolution. We call it the adaptationist programme This programme regards natural selection as so powerful and the constraints upon it so few that direct production of adaptation through its operation becomes the primary cause of nearly all organic form, function, and behaviour. We all say that not everything is adaptive; yet, faced with an organism, we tend to break it into parts and tell adaptive stories as if trade-offs among competing, well designed parts were the only constraint upon perfection for each trait. It is an old habit. Too often, the adaptationist programme gave us an evolutionary biology of parts and genes, but not of organisms. It assumed that all transitions could occur step by step and underrated the importance of integrated developmental blocks and pervasive constraints of history and architecture.

They cite many examples of spandrels in biology which defy simple adaptationist explanations, including the zig-zag grooves, ribs, and, colors on clam or brachiopod shells; horns, antlers, and tusks in various vertebrates; colors and shapes of snail shells; and others. One would be hard pressed to find an adaptive purpose for the beautiful graphic texture on a sea snail shell (see above; I believe it belongs to Darioconus auricomus) that I bought as a gift for my wife last year.

We are sometimes told that the term Darwinism is pass and no longer used, but in an essay, The evolution of Charles Darwin, written for the bicentennial celebration of Darwins birth, Lewontin used this term and explained precisely why it remains appropriate:

Why do we call the modern theory of organic evolution Darwinism? Charles Darwin certainly did not invent the idea of evolution, that is, of the continuous change in time of the state of some system as a fundamental property of that system, or even the idea that a process of evolution had occurred in the history of life. By the time of the appearance of the Origin, the physical sciences had become thoroughly evolutionary. By the younger Darwins time, the idea of organic evolution had become a common currency of intellectual life. Two years before the publication of the Origin, Herbert Spencer argued for a belief in organic evolution on the basis of the agreed-upon universality of evolutionary processes

The answer to Lewontins question of course is that it was Darwin who proposed natural selection as the primary mechanism driving evolution. He thus notes: The Darwin-Wallace explanation of evolution, the theory of natural selection, and Darwins ideas in Origin of Species had immediate success because the theory purported to explain the adaptive complexity of life. But Lewontin simultaneously noted that explanations based upon natural selection often amount to stories that dont always have a high level of inferential strength. He criticized Jerry Coyne, writing:

Where he [Coyne] is less successful, as all other commentators have been, is in his insistence that the evidence for natural selection as the driving force of evolution is of the same inferential strength as the evidence that evolution has occurred. So, for example, he gives the game away by writing that when we examine a sequence of changes in the fossil record, we can determine whether the sequences of changes at least conform to a step-by-step adaptive process. And in every case, we can find at least a feasible Darwinian explanation.

But to say that some example is not falsification of a theory because we can always find (or invent) a feasible explanation says more about the flexibility of the theory and the ingenuity of its supporters than it says about physical nature. Indeed in his later discussion of theories of behavioral evolution he becomes appropriately sceptical when he writes that imaginative reconstructions of how things might have evolved are not science; they are stories.

While this is a perfectly good argument against those who claim that there are things that are so complex that evolutionary biology cannot explain them, it allows evolutionary theory to fall back into the category of being reasonable but not an incontrovertible material fact.

Lewontin reiterated criticisms of the strength of selection-based explanations in 2010, when he published a review of What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini in The New York Review of Books. He said that natural selection fails to explain many things:

The trouble with this outline is that it does not explain the actual forms of life that have evolved. There is an immense amount of biology that is missing. It says nothing about why organisms with the evolved characteristic were more likely to survive or reproduce than those with the original one. Why, when vertebrates evolved wings, did they have to give up their front legs to do it? After all, insects can have two pairs of wings and six legs, so there cannot be any deep general biological constraint on development. Why dont birds that live in trees make a living by eating the leaves as countless forms of insects do instead of spending so much of their energy looking for seeds or worms?

Lewontin even criticized the standard peppered moth story, saying: One unfortunate feature of this case is that the caterpillars of the dark-winged forms also have a slightly higher survival rate than those of the speckled-wing form, even though they are not black, so something more is going on, but this fact is not part of the curriculum.

In the 2010 essay, Lewontin expressed concern that To a degree never before experienced by the current generation of students of evolution, evolutionary theory is under attack by powerful forces of religious fundamentalism. He noted that What Darwin Got Wrong got the attention of evolutionary biologists because in it two accomplished intellectuals make the statement Darwins theory of selection is empty. Because of existential threats to evolutionary biology, he wrote, they thereby generate an anger that makes it almost impossible for biologists to give serious consideration to their argument. But Lewontin agreed with Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini that evolutionary explanations are often insufficient to generate certain scientific knowledge:

Even biologists who have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of what the actual genetic changes are in the evolution of species cannot resist the temptation to defend evolution against its know-nothing enemies by appealing to the fact that biologists are always able to provide plausible scenarios for evolution by natural selection. But plausibility is not science. True and sufficient explanations of particular examples of evolution are extremely hard to arrive at because we do not have world enough and time. The cytogeneticist Jakov Krivshenko used to dismiss merely plausible explanations, in a strong Russian accent that lent it greater derisive force, as idel specoolations.

Even at the expense of having to say I dont know how it evolved most of the time, biologists should not engage in idle speculations.

These are intriguing statements, for they show that Lewontin was an honest scientist who said what he really thought and was willing to buck the trend in his own field. But the quote for which Lewontin has become best known appeared in his 1997 review of Carl Sagans book Billions and Billions of Demons, also in The New York Review of Books. In this famous passage he acknowledged that modern evolutionary science assumes materialism is true, regardless of the state of the evidence:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Methodological naturalism (MN) is the idea that when practicing science we must assume that there are no intelligent and/or supernatural forces that can interfere with the natural world. To do otherwise, according to defenders of MN, subjects scientific investigation to the whim of a deity, as biologist John A. Moore put it. It also protects science against the God of the gaps mistake, where we initially attribute something to intelligent causes only later to discover a natural cause.

But what if there were a reliable, predictive method to detect intelligent causation? What if we could detect when an intelligent agent was at work by using reliable scientific methods just as reliable as the methods we use to detect material causation? This would bring intelligent agency back into science proper. William Dembski explains that this is exactly what the theories of design detection provided by the intelligent design research community provide for us:

Scientists are beginning to realize that design can be rigorously formulated as a scientific theory. What has kept design outside the scientific mainstream these last 130 years is the absence of precise methods for distinguishing intelligently caused objects from unintelligently caused ones. For design to be a fruitful scientific theory, scientists have to be sure they can reliably determine whether something is designed. Johannes Kepler, for instance, thought the craters on the moon were intelligently designed by moon dwellers. We now know that the craters were formed naturally. This fear of falsely attributing something to design only to have it overturned later has prevented design from entering science proper. With precise methods for discriminating intelligently from unintelligently caused objects, scientists are now able to avoid Keplers mistake.

Lewontin was right to see science as based upon reliable methods that produce some degree of certainty. And he tried to be fair, applying these requirements not just to intelligent design but also to evolutionary biology. But if Dembski is correct, then the modern theory intelligent design has developed rigorous methods for detecting the prior action of an intelligence, based upon predictable and regular features we observe when intelligent agents are at work. This makes intelligent causation a proper subject for scientific study, and it threatens to make intelligent design a legitimate competitor to Darwinism.

I have no doubt that Lewontin would have disagreed that intelligent design deserves a place in science. But I would argue that like Darwinian evolution, intelligent design is a historical science. Because historical sciences deal with events of the past, their inferences are often weaker than in empirical sciences that study modern-day processes. Lewontin recognized this weakness in explanations citing natural selection (or other evolutionary mechanisms). But if Lewontins criticisms of evolutionary just-so stories are correct, and if Dembskis statements about the robustness and reliability of the design inference are correct, then I believe ID could satisfy Lewontins concerns about including intelligent agency in science.

Perhaps saying so is the best way an ID theorist can honor him.

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Honoring Richard Lewontin, Famed Evolutionary Biologist and Sometime Critic of His Own Field - Discovery Institute

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Consolidation is built into the nature of corporations. If some little upstart is eating into your market, it is easy enough to buy the upstart and add its market share to your own. Capitalism is a lot like Darwinism put a little fish in the path of a big fish, and the big fish is compelled by its nature to eat it.

But even as little fish are absorbed into big fish, more little fish are being born.

There was a time in contemporary music when there were dozens of iconic record labels, each of which had a distinct identity. Even people who dont follow music know what a Motown record sounded like. Asylum Records meant LA singer/songwriters (Jackson Browne, The Eagles, Linda Rondstadt); Stax Records was Memphis soul (Booker T. & the M.G.s, Rufus Thomas, Otis Redding); Island Records began as a reggae label (Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff); and Sire Records practically owned New York punk (Talking Heads, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Ramones).

Compare that to today, when Universal Music Group owns Capitol, Geffen, A&M, Interscope, Republic, Def Jam, Caroline, Decca, Verve as well as the catalogs of the long-gone Chess, Blue Thumb, 20th Century Fox, ABC, Chrysalis, Dot, Dunhill, Fantasy, IRS, Imperial, Mercury, MCA, MGM, EMI, Uni, Paramount, Shelter, Virgin and dozens more.

But while Universal and the other two majors Sony and Warners dominate the market, they are operating in a world where the barriers to entry have fallen away. In the 20th century, the majors stayed major because they controlled the means of distribution. To even get their records into many parts of the country, Indies had to make distribution deals with the majors.

In the 21st century, pressing plants and trucks dont count for much. Music is distributed through the internet and there is a recording studio in every laptop. If you are Adele or Bruno Mars, it makes sense to be on a major label. But in a TikTok world, the next hit single can come from anywhere YouTube, a Spotify playlist or a video game.

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It works that way across all media. Marvel Comics has been absorbed into Disney, as a feeder and R&D division, as DC Comics has been swallowed by WarnerMedia. The move of those old pulp businesses into international entertainment conglomerates has only encouraged small comic book companies to enter the marketplace. You never know where the next Hellboy or The Walking Dead is going to come from.

The accepted history of post-Bonnie & Clyde Hollywood is that the old studio bosses did not understand a world where Easy Rider did better than Hello Dolly! and in their confusion opened the door to a generation of rebels Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Terrence Malick who revitalized American cinema for a few years until Jaws and Star Wars introduced the mass-release summer blockbuster and the revolution was squashed.

But was the underground really defeated? There are always new generations bringing new revolutions. Independent voices continued to emerge: Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch and the Coen Brothers in the 80s; Allison Anders, Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson in the 90s. They often got their shots through new independents like Miramax and New Line, spiritual successors to BBS Productions and American Zoetrope.

The cycle of art reflects the cycle of life those who are rebels in their twenties may elect, by age 40, to join the system (Scorsese), drop out (Malick) or accept financial compromises in order to continue to work on the margins (Altman). There will always be new rebels, as long as there are new people turning 20, and dumbass bull-headed entrepreneurs willing to risk it all for odds-defying, out-of-the-box creative ideas!

Our studio, named after a lyric from a fiercely independent artist, Aimee Mann, is seeing and hearing these unapologetic voices emerge in the AVOD, podcast, short-form and even the SVOD space. In the sci-fi and horror genres (typically dominated by old white men with all due respect to that genre of human), Gunpowder & Sky has global FAST channels DUST and ALTER that both exhibit cinematic short films by widely diverse filmmakers from South Korea to Colombia. These novel pieces of IP are now migrating, and spinning off, to wider audiences in partnership with icons of the genres from Sam Raimi to James Wan to Stephen Spielberg who are recognizing how these creators are reminiscent of their own, louder, less categorizable selves.

I hope we, collectively, dont forget to provide a roof, the appropriate stimulants and fast food for the unmanageable freaks that will inevitably surprise and scare us. Sort of the way Steve Golin did with Propaganda, and David Geffen did with Asylum and Martin Goodman did with Marvel. These indie voices buoy diversity, move culture along and ultimately fill the pipes that feed content into homes worldwide. After all, if Spike Jonze had been justifiably ushered out of whatever workspace he was provided, I couldnt have helped make the Oscar-nominated (yes, no kidding) Jackass series and movies and lets be honest, the world wouldve been a sadder place without Steve-O.

Read original story You Cant Kill The Indies (Guest Blog) At TheWrap

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You Cant Kill The Indies (Guest Blog) - Yahoo Entertainment

The term Darwinism has both a narrow and a broad meaning. In the narrow sense, it refers to a theory of organic evolution presented by Charles Darwin (18091882) and by other scientists who developed various aspects of his views; in the broad sense, it refers to a complex of scientific, social, theological, and philosophical thought that was historically stimulated and supported by Darwin's theory of evolution. Biological Darwinismthe first sensewas the outstanding scientific achievement of the nineteenth century and is now the foundation of large regions of biological theory. Darwinism in the second sense was the major philosophical problem of the later nineteenth century. Today, Darwinism no longer provides the focus of philosophical investigation, largely because so much of it forms an unquestioned background to contemporary thought.

Darwin's theory is an example of scientific innovation that has had reverberations into the farthest reaches of human thought. It is fair to say that every philosophical problem appears in a new light after the Darwinian revolution. In order to outline the connections between biological and philosophical Darwinism, it will first be necessary to describe Darwin's own views and to discuss various criticisms that were directed against them. It will then be possible to describe Darwinism in the broader sense, and to distinguish the various ways in which the scientific theory has afforded material for philosophical inquiry.

The theory of the origin of species by means of natural selection was the discovery of Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (18231913). Both Darwin and Wallace had stated the theory in a series of papers delivered before the Linnaean Society on July 1, 1858. The members of the Linnaean Society listened without enthusiasm and apparently without much understanding, but in fairness to them, it should be observed that Wallace and Darwin did not present their theory forcefully on this occasion. Some of the shattering implications of the theory were not drawn in detail, and the evidence in its support, which Darwin in particular had amassed, was barely hinted at. Wallace's paper "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type" was a discussion of a widely accepted argument in favor of the "original and permanent distinctness of species," namely, that the varieties that are produced by artificial selection in domesticated species never vary beyond the limits of the original wild species, and that whenever artificial selection is relaxed, the domesticated varieties revert to the ancestral form. These facts were interpreted by naturalists as evidence for an innate conservative tendency in nature that kept all variation within the bounds defined by the unbridgeable gaps between species.

But, Wallace argued, the view that artificial selection can produce only new varieties, never new species, rests on the false assumption that naturalists possess a criterion for distinguishing the species from the variety. Moreover he stated, "This argument rests entirely on the assumption that varieties occurring in a state of nature are in all respects analogous to those of domestic animals, and are governed by the same laws as regards their permanence or further variation. But it is the object of the present paper to show that this assumption is altogether false." Overproduction, together with heritable variations, some of which are better adapted to the circumstances of life, will tend to make varieties depart indefinitely from the ancestral type, bringing about changes that will eventually amount to the origin of a new species. Wallace accounted for the reversion of domestic varieties by pointing out that the ancestral type is better adapted to life "in a state of nature," and consequently the very same principles that bring about progress in nature also bring about the reversion of domestic varieties.

Wallace aimed his argument precisely at the philosophical presupposition that for so long had stood in the way of a proper interpretation of natural selection, namely, that the speciesbeing the exemplar of a divine archetypeis as well adapted as it could be and, consequently, that variation away from the type will automatically be selected against. Natural selection, according to this interpretation, is an agency of permanence, not change. One of Wallace's, as well as Darwin's, most original contributions consisted in breaking the hold of this idea.

Wallace's argument is implicit in Darwin's Linnaean Society papers, but the focus is different. Instead of challenging accepted opinion, Darwin added up well-known facts. With great eloquence he described the prevalent overproduction of animals and plants: "Nature may be compared to a surface on which rest ten thousand sharp wedges touching each other and driven inwards by incessant blows." The wedges are held back by large numbers of "checks" that bring about the death, or prevent the mating, of individuals. "Lighten any check in the least degree, and the geometrical powers of increase in every organism will almost instantly increase the average number of the favored species." He called attention to the extreme heritable variability of animals under domestication. In nature there is also variation, although no doubt not as much. Some variants will be better adapted to their environments than others and will tend to survive and propagate. "Let this work of selection on the one hand, and death on the other, go on for a thousand generations, who will pretend to affirm that it would produce no effect?" To the effects of this natural selection, Darwin added the effect of "the struggle of males for females."

Both Wallace and Darwin had stated the essence of the theory of the Origin of Species (1859). The Origin itself is mainly a sober, scrupulously fair, and thoroughly documented elaboration and defense of the doctrine of natural selection presented in the Linnaean Society papers. Darwin set out to accomplish three things: (a ) to show that evolution has in fact occurred; (b ) to describe the mechanism of evolution; and (c ) to account for the major facts of morphology, embryology, biogeography, paleontology, and taxonomy on the evolutionary hypothesis.

Darwin freely admitted that we do not directly observe the process of evolution. The time needed even for the origin in nature of a new variety is far too long. Consequently, the case for the occurrence of evolution is simply the same as the case for its scope and mechanism, and Darwin did not have access to direct evidence for the efficacy of natural selectiona gap that was not filled until the twentieth century. Darwin argued that life is too short for direct evidence but that certain facts force the conclusion upon us that there must be evolution; and if we adopt the hypothesis, a wide range of hitherto unconnected facts may be given a uniform explanation.

Darwin described three mechanisms that tend to effect the evolution of populations. These are natural selection, sexual selection, and the inheritance of characteristics acquired during the lifetime of the individual organism.

In the Origin Darwin placed the greatest weight on evolution by natural selection. It operates in conjunction with sexual selection and the inheritance of acquired characters and, Darwin argued, there are some features of organisms that could have developed only by natural selection. Indeed, it seems that the theory of natural selection was partially inspired by his obser-vations on the Beagle voyage (18311836) of local variations, particularly in the islands of the Galpagos Archipelago, that could not be accounted for on Lamarckian grounds.

The theory of natural selection as Darwin presented it may be summarized as follows: (1) Populations of animals and plants exhibit variations. (2) Some variations provide the organism with an advantage over the rest of the population in the struggle for life. (3) Favorable variants will transmit their advantageous characters to their progeny. (4) Since populations tend to produce more progeny than the environment will support, the proportion of favorable variants that survive and produce progeny will be larger than the proportion of unfavorable variants. (5) Thus, a population may undergo continuous evolutionary change that can result in the origin of new varieties, species, genera, or indeed new populations at any taxonomic level. Darwinian natural selection may accordingly be defined as a differential death rate between two variant subclasses of a population, the lesser death rate characterizing the better-adapted subclass.

Darwin was careful to present evidence for every hypothesis in his account of natural selection. It was especially necessary to argue that natural populations do exhibit the requisite amount of variation and that the variation is heritable. He cited, among other things, the extreme variability of domestic plants and animals and the well-known fact that new varieties can be propagated. He admitted that the causes of variation were unknown; but he argued that changing environmental conditions greatly increase variability by action on the reproductive system, thereby providing material for natural selection when it is most needed. This is "indefinite variability." In addition, there is "definite variability," due to the direct action of the environment on the body of the organism. "Definite variations" are heritable; they provide material for natural selection and, being responsive to the environment, are more likely than chance variations to be adaptive.

"The laws governing inheritance," he remarked, "are for the most part unknown." This lack of knowledge turned out to be the most serious obstacle to the further development of the theoretical foundations of selection theory in the nineteenth century; but, as Darwin noted, although the laws of inheritance were unknown, a number of the phenomena of inheritance were known, and those were probably all that were required for the theory of natural selection. Most important is the obvious fact that progeny bear an overwhelming resemblance to their parents, although they differ in some degree. In addition, Darwin was familiar with the intermittent appearance of hereditary characters, with sex-linked and sex-influenced characters, and with the tendency for a character to appear in the progeny at the same developmental stage that it appears in the parents.

For natural selection to be an agency of change rather than an agency of permanence, it is necessary that some variations from the ancestral type represent better adaptations. Darwin pointed out that, in fact, every organism could be better adapted to its ordinary environment; and that, moreover, environments change.

Pre-Darwinian taxonomy ascribed a very special significance to the species, as against varieties, genera, and the higher taxonomic groups. The species was regarded by the pious as the unalterable work of God; the limits laid down by the diagnostic features of any species established the limits of possible variation within the species. Thus, although any biologist would be willing to countenance the origin of new varieties or subspecies, brought about by the operation of biological laws, most were unwilling to admit the possibility of the origin of new species by natural processes. The title of Darwin's book was aimed precisely at this conception. Like Wallace, he argued that there is no difference in principle between the diagnostic characters of varieties and species; therefore, to admit the origin of new varieties amounts to admitting the possibility of new speciesand if new species appear, so may new genera, families, and so on. He cited the existence of "doubtful species"groups that cannot be definitely placed at either the variety or species leveland the general inconsistency of taxonomists in the identification of species.

In the Linnaean Society papers Darwin described the second mechanism of evolution as the "struggle of males for females." The theory was developed further in the Origin, and it occupied some two-thirds of the pages of his Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). In these later statements of the theory, the struggle of males for females is a special case of a more general phenomenon. Suppose that a population is divided in some proportion between males and females and suppose for the sake of simplification that all of the males and females are equally well endowed for the struggle for survival. Now, Darwin argued, it may happen that either the males or females are unequally endowed with some characteristic that will increase their propensity to leave progeny. There will then be selection in favor of that characteristic, even though it will not be favored by natural selection. All such cases Darwin calls "sexual selection." It is clear that different sorts of characteristics can influence the probability of having offspring. Some individuals, for example, may possess behavior patterns that lead to the fertilization of a larger percentage of eggs or have more efficient organs of copulation. Or they may have some advantage in the competition for matesmigratory male birds may arrive early at the breeding grounds and be ready to receive the more vigorous females, leaving the culls for their tardy brothers; or the females may for some reason prefer plumage or displays of a certain character; or some males may aggressively drive away other males; and so on. Finally, some characteristics that are also useful in the struggle for survival might also be useful in the competition for mates; for example, the antlers of male deer may do double duty against both rivals and predators.

Darwin appeals to sexual selection in order to account for the evolution of such things as mating rituals and secondary sexual characteristics, such as breeding plumage in birds. He regards it as especially significant in the evolution of man. The loss of body hair, for example, is attributed to systematic choice among man's ancestors of mates that exhibited large regions of bare skin.

Darwin's work was plagued by ignorance and misinformation concerning the laws of heredity. The principles of segregation and independent assortment, which form a cornerstone of contemporary evolution theories, were discovered by Gregor Mendel in 1864; but his paper remained unnoticed until 1900. Moreover, although "sports" were well known to biologists, the concept of mutation had not been clearly formulated. Consequently, the modern theory of the origin of genetic variation in populations was not available to Darwin; instead, he suggested that some variations are due to the action of the environment on the germplasm and that others are due to the effects of use and disuse. For example, if an animal's skin is tanned by sunlight, this may induce changes in its germplasm that will result in its progeny possessing pretanned skin; or if a wolf develops his muscles by chasing rabbits, his pups may inherit larger muscles. These mechanisms, if they exist, would account for some variability. But they would also account for some evolutionary change even in the absence of natural or sexual selection. Since, accordingly, there seemed to be no sound reason for rejecting the inheritance of acquired characters and since the doctrine would aid in explaining both variability and evolutionary change, Darwin was led to adopt it and to give it increasing weight in his later years. This aspect of Darwin's views is often labeled Lamarckism, but the Chevalier de Lamarck himself, although he did accept the inheritance of the effects of use and disuse, did not accept the doctrine of the direct action of environmental factors on the germplasm.

It is clear that Darwin regarded his theory as revolutionary. He believed that all the traditional branches of biology would be transformed and deepened; familiar phenomena would take on a new significance; apparently unconnected facts could be regarded as mutually related. Even the vocabulary of the older biology would acquire new meanings: "The terms used by naturalists, of affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology, adoptive characters, rudimentary and aborted organs, etc., will cease to be metaphorical, and will have a plain signification." Natural history would acquire the fascination, not of a catalog of curiosae, but of a labyrinth that may be charted.

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a long history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, when we thus view each organic being, how far more interestingI speak from experiencedoes the study of natural history become!

And not only would the old biology be put on a new foundation; whole new fields of research would become possible. For example, "Psychology will be securely based on the foundation of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."

The major part of the Origin is devoted to the detailed application of the theory of natural selection to a range of biological phenomena. It is impossible to give more than a general impression of the thoroughness, detail, and diversity of Darwin's evidence. The modern reader cannot fail to be impressed not only by Darwin's immense learning but also by his subtlety of insighthis ability to locate those phenomena that lend his theory the most striking support.

The Origin as a whole provides, on the one hand, a sweeping portrait of the history and biology of living things, a portrait whose internal balance and consistency are easily discernible. On the other hand, Darwin fills selected regions of his portrait with careful detail, exhibiting the applicability of his theory to a variety of phenomena. These two aspects of his work constitute both the argument for the fact of evolution and the argument for the truth of his account of its mechanisms.

In the broad portrait Darwin shows how the main facts of known fossil successions, the relation of living fauna and flora to recent fossil forms, the geographical distribution of species, the connection between morphology and function, and the major features of embryological development are explicable by his theory. He applies it in detail to such phenomenato mention only a fewas rudimentary organs, insect metamorphosis, the divergence of island and mainland forms, and sexual dimorphism. He provides us with a discussion of taxonomy that is philosophically superior to many contemporary accounts, arguing, among other things, in favor of the special significance for the taxonomist of embryological and phylogenetic studies.

Darwin was always sensitive to the effect that his views might have on the general public. In composing the Origin he decided to avoid the whole topic of man's evolution; the book would be a sufficiently bitter pill without explicitly treating a subject that was "so surrounded with prejudices." His only explicit reference to man was the remark quoted above, that "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." Darwin's successors, however, were not so cautious. Sir Charles Lyell (17971875) discussed the question in 1863. Shortly thereafter, Wallace published his paper "The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of Natural Selection." T. H. Huxley (18251895) and a number of Continental morphologists, particularly Ernst Haeckel (18341919), produced a series of studies aimed at showing the similarity of man and the anthropoid apes and giving speculative reconstructions of man's ancestry. Thus, by the date of Darwin's Descent of Man (1871), the controversy over man was in full swing, and there were already a number of alternative theories that Darwin had to consider, such as whether the races of men are distinct species.

Darwin showed a wise unwillingness to acknowledge any known nonhuman species, living or extinct, as ancestral to man. We have so far examined, he argued, only animals that have diverged from the prehuman stock. For instance, the anthropoid apes and man have a common ancestor, but its remains have not been found. Nor did he identify species that are ancestral to the primates, the mammals, or even the vertebrates. He did trace a general line of descent: Old World ape, a lemurlike animal, some "forms standing very low in the mammalian series," marsupials, and monotremes. No true reptile is an ancestor of man. All the classes of vertebrates may have been derived from a remote ancestor similar to the larvae of the tunicates. With a flash of romanticism, Darwin wrote: "In the lunar or weekly recurrent periods of some of our functions we apparently still retain traces of our primordial birthplace, a shore washed by the tides."

In the Descent of Man evolution by the inheritance of acquired characters and by sexual selection plays a larger role than in the Origin. Darwin admitted that he had been accused of overrating the importance of natural selection, but added, "whether with justice the future will decide." His relative retreat from natural selection was probably occasioned by two factors: first, his doubts as to whether Earth is old enough for evolution by natural selection without substantial help from faster mechanisms; second, his belief that man is in many ways less the child of violent nature than his ancestors, a belief that requires considerable appeal to sexual selection and to the development of moral and spiritual qualities through social usage.

In spite of the resistance that Darwin's theory aroused on other than scientific grounds, the weight of his arguments was largelybut with many notable exceptionssufficient for the younger generation of biologists. In 1872, in the sixth edition of the Origin, Darwin was in a position to write, "At the present day almost all naturalists admit evolution under some form." It was, like any novel and important theory, carefully scrutinized for empirical weaknesses. We shall describe the major ones and indicate how they were dealt with.

The most damaging scientific objections were the following:

The first two objections were commonly raised in the nineteenth century; they are genuine questions that require some sort of answer. Darwin, however, was not in a position to answer them in a way that would satisfy everybody, since the weight that one assigns to them depends in part upon personal preference.

With regard to the first objection Darwin pointed out that natural selection cannot be directly observed; we can only present indirect evidence in its favor. On this point he was mistaken. Natural selection has been directly studied in the twentieth century, both experimentally (in fruit fly populations, for example) and in nature (for instance, the development of so-called industrial melanism). But even today Darwin's and Wallace's contention that evolution by natural selection can pass the species limit has no direct support. Darwin recognized, however, that it is no fatal objection to a theory if some of its components are not subject to direct verification.

On the second criticismthe absence of forms intermediate between speciesDarwin had a double-barreled answer. He admitted that, for instance, we know of no forms intermediate between man and the apes. But we have innumerable examples of species that are in process of giving rise to new species, namely, those that have varieties or subspecies. These polytypic species (as they are now called) are intermediate between other species which, to be sure, have not yet evolved, but which are in process of evolving.

When it was further objected that we ought to have better examples of demonstrable ancestors of existing species, Darwin appealed to the incompleteness of the fossil record. This is the correct answer, but one that is hardly satisfying to a skeptic. Again, the weight that one would assign to the objection depends upon personal preference.

Darwin was well aware of the difficulty in accounting for the origin of structures that would be useless, even deleterious, until they were essentially complete. The eye, he wrote, gave him "a cold shudder." In such cases as the eye, however, he had no alternative but to appeal to natural selection. Therefore, he was compelled to argue that in point of fact all the earlier stages in the evolution of the eye were useful in the struggle for survival. Darwin himself provided us with the standard textbook example: he constructed a plausible sequence of stages that could have led to the human eye. Each stage is a functional eye; and something similar to each stage does exist in one or another living species. The criticism has the form, "Such and such could not have happened." It can be countered piecemeal, by showing in a variety of cases how it could have happened.

A great many of Darwin's critics accepted the fact of evolution but entered reservations concerning his account of the mechanisms of the process. The reservations were of several types. Some rejected "Lamarckism," by which they meant simply the inheritance of acquired characters; they were known as the Neo-Darwinians. Others doubted that there was such a process as sexual selection. Still others, however, believed that there must be an evolutionary process that Darwin had not identified at all. The evidence consisted in the existence of apparently nonfunctional evolutionary trends. Trends that continue over long periods and that are relatively straight-linedfor example, increasing size in horses and increasing length of sabers in the saber-toothed catcame to be called orthogenetic trends. The question was whether orthogenetic trends could be accounted for on Darwinian principles.

Wallace argued (in "Geological Climates and the Origin of Species," Quarterly Review, 1869) that the development of man's brain could not be so accounted for. Man's apelike ancestors, he argued, had reached a certain stage of evolution and then, over a period of some ten million years, remained largely unchanged except for a steady orthogenetic increase in the size and complexity of the brain. This was an unprecedented episode in the history of life, for it freed man from those ordinary pressures of natural selection that so often led to close specialization and ultimate extinction. Moreover, the brain acquired abilities that could not have been exercised in a primitive environment, such as the power to construct speculative systems of ideas or the insight into spiritual reality. These are present in modern man, but would have been useless in man's primitive ancestors. Natural selection operates only on abilities that are actually so exercised as to give an advantage in the struggle for life. "An instrument," Wallace concluded about the brain, "has been developed in advance of the needs of its possessor." Later he wrote: "A superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms." Thus we avoid the "hopeless and soul-deadening belief" that man is the product of "blind eternal forces of the universe."

Darwin looked upon this as a failure of nerve, a hankering after miraculous origins for man. "I can see no necessity for calling in an additional and proximate cause in regard to man," he wrote in a letter to Wallace. Nevertheless, Wallace's position, fitting as it did the efforts of many theologians to come to grips with Darwinism, gained a number of adherents, and although the main line of evolutionary theory has bypassed it, even now versions of Wallace's position turn up from time to time.

Wallace had argued that the evolution of the brain was an orthogenetic trend that outstripped its usefulness. Others argued that trends sometimes continued even after they had become positively deleterious. A favorite example was the teeth of the saber-toothed cat, which, it was alleged, were valuable as weapons up to a certain length, but which finally became detrimental by interfering with feeding. There would be selection against increased tooth length under these conditions; consequently, it was argued, some cause other than natural selection must have operated. A variety of theories were proposedfor example, those of Karl Ngeli (18171891) and E. D. Cope (18401897). These theories posited an otherwise unknown internal principle of change, which was compared to the laws of embryological development, to the principle of inertia, or, as with Henri Bergson, to creative spiritual activity. Since the theories accounted for nothing other than the alleged orthogenetic trends, they have always had a peripheral position in the history of evolutionary thought. Moreover, subsequent analysis of orthogenesis has shown that in most cases the trends are in fact adaptive; and in those cases where they are not adaptive, contemporary theory provides various possible sorts of explanation compatible with the doctrine of natural selection, such as the explanation that if a trend affects only adults past the breeding age, it will not be selected against.

In 1865 William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, published a paper titled "The Doctrine of Uniformity in Geology Briefly Refuted." Its argument was aimed at Lyell and his followers, who had maintained that Earth as we now find it is not the result of a series of catastrophes, but is the outcome of the ages-long operation of geological processes that we can still observe. This viewpoint, known as uniformitarianism, was widely accepted among geologists even before the publication of the Origin, having been impressively established in Lyell's Principles of Geology (1834). It was in fact an earlier application of the idea of evolution. But uniformitarianism required vast reaches of time; consequently, Kelvin was prodding its weakest point when he argued that Earth could not be as old as the geologists supposed. Grant, Kelvin argued, that Earth was once a molten sphere; then it could not have solidified much over twenty million years ago, or it would now be cooler, through dissipation of its heat, than we actually find it. The biological consequences were clear: there was not enough time for evolution to have produced the forms we now see.

Darwin was deeply concerned by this reasoning. As far as he could tell, it was perfectly sound; on the other hand, he was perfectly convinced that Earth had supported life for a much longer time. His later emphasis on Lamarckism was probably an attempt to provide an evolutionary process that was swifter than natural selection. But this was a half measure; in fact, Darwin simply swallowed what he believed to be a contradictiona not uncommon occurrence in the history of science. It turned out that Kelvin's argument was mistaken, since he was unaware of an additional source of heat within Earth, namely radioactive decay.

As noted above, the evolutionists of the nineteenth century worked in ignorance of the principles of genetics discovered by Mendel; this lack was by far the most serious theoretical gap in the Darwinians' arguments. It now appears that no fundamental innovation in evolutionary theory was possible until the gap was filled. Biologists of the nineteenth century accepted a rough theory of blending inheritance, that is, the view that the characteristics of the progeny of sexual crosses were intermediate between the characteristics of the parents. This theory was seldom explicitly defended, since everyone was familiar with a variety of phenomena that were incompatible with it, for example, blue-eyed children of brown-eyed parents. Nevertheless, when biologists theorized at all on the subject, the theory produced was ordinarily a vague and suitably guarded version of the theory of blending inheritance.

In 1867 Fleeming Jenkin ("The Origin of Species," North British Review ) pointed out that the blending theory was incompatible with the theory of natural selection as ordinarily presented by the Darwinians. He argued that if favorable variations appeared in a population, their characteristics, even if favored by natural selection, would soon be lost in the vast population pool by crossing with individuals of the normal type. Assume, for instance (as Jenkin did), that a white man is greatly superior to a black man and that a white man is shipwrecked on a black-populated island. "He would kill a great many blacks in the struggle for existence; he would have a great many wives and children. But can anyone believe that the whole island will gradually acquire a white, or even a yellow population?" Jenkin's argument in essence is this: the white man's children will be darker than their father; and it is impossible on the blending theory that their descendants could become lighter, whatever the effects of natural selection might be.

Again, Darwin was forced to admit the strength of a powerful objection that he was unable to counter directly. At best, he could only argue that natural selection would be effective if adaptive variations were sufficiently common; the black island could become white, for example, if there were a steady influx of shipwrecked sailors. He actually had no evidence that adaptive variations were sufficiently common; instead, he retreated more and more to the Lamarckian theory that variation is due to the effects of activity in the environment and would accordingly be largely adaptive.

Unlike the answer to Kelvin's objection, which could not have been offered in the nineteenth century, the answer to Jenkin was available but remained unknown except to a few, who did not see its significance. Mendel's paper on plant hybridization established an alternative to the blending theory of inheritance. Mendel showed that there were discrete genetic factors that pass unchanged from generation to generation and are hence not subject to Jenkin's swamping effect. Mendel had established that the character of these factors (genes) is not changed by other factors in the germplasm and that the factors segregate independently of one another in gamete formation. (He was unaware of the phenomenon of linkage.) Researchers of the literature on heredity recovered Mendel's work in 1900; and in 1904 William Bateson (18611926), in Genetics and Evolution, applied Mendel's laws to the theory of natural selection, thus answering Jenkin's objection.

The new genetics turned out to be far more significant for the theory of evolution than merely answering Jenkin's objection. The history of scientific Darwinism in the twentieth century was mainly the story of a series of advances in genetics, and the working out of their consequences for evolution. Mendel's laws were correlated with the behavior of the chromosomes in meiosis; the concepts of chromosome and gene mutation were introduced; linkage was discovered and understood; and statistical methods were employed in the analysis of the dynamics of genetic change in natural populations. One major gain of these developments was a systematic understanding of the origin and maintenance of genetic variabilitythe question that was so troublesome for Darwin. Another was the final decline of the Lamarckian aspect of Darwinism.

The Neo-Darwinians had already denied the inheritance of acquired characters, but their evidence against it, like the Neo-Lamarckians' evidence in its favor, was largely anecdotal. August Weismann (18341914) had presented the theory that life is essentially a continuous stream of germplasm that from time to time gives rise to whole organisms; the organisms die but the germplasm is immortal. The stream can divide (gamete formation) and merge (fertilization), thus accounting for variability. This view was employed by Weismann and others as a theoretical argument against the inheritance of acquired characters, for it is an easy step from the continuity of the germplasm to its independence of somatic influences. The emergence of Mendelism shed a new light on Weismann's theory. The mechanism of "immortality"self-replication of chromosomeswas elucidated, and evidence accumulated that the chromosomes were indeed uninfluenced, or influenced only randomly, by somatic factors.

We have considered Darwinism as a biological theory; we may now consider its wider intellectual connections. These are many and complex, so it will be necessary to select the most importantthose which now seem to be enduring ingredients of speculative thought or those which struck the people of the later nineteenth century with the greatest force. The differences between the climate of opinionthe ordinary presuppositions, ideas about the proper pattern of argument, assumptions as to proper method, in short, the worldviewof the mid-nineteenth and twenty-first centuries is large, comparable in degree to the differences between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Of course the change had many causes, but the advent and absorption of Darwinism, while in part an effect of other currents, was also one major cause.

We shall consider the connections of Darwin's theory in three major regions: scientific cosmology, theology, and social doctrine.

Scientists have general views about the way things are. The scientists of any historical period are likely to share a common set of views, with, of course, individuals differing over one or another point to some degree. These general views, insofar as they concern a subject matter of professional scientific interest and insofar as they are capable of influencing method, methodology, or empirical formulations, may be called cosmological. They differ from the ordinary statements of a science (for example, "organisms overproduce," "acquired characters are not inherited") in degree of determinateness. They are so formulated that they are exempt from immediate verification and falsification but subject to specification, by means of a series of semantical decisions, into determinate, verifiable propositions. A good example of such a cosmological proposition is "Nature makes no jumps," or "Nature has no gaps." Darwin, unlike many of his contemporaries, was fond of making this remark (in Latin); he employs it in the Linnaean Society papers and subsequently quotes it again and again. It constitutes part of Darwin's cosmology and is a point on which the nineteenth century was deeply divided. It is clear that the sense of the proposition is not sufficiently determinate, as it stands, for verification. But it can be construed to mean, for instance, that evolution is gradual or that the apparent gaps between living species can be filled if we consider a sufficient stretch of history.

These properties of cosmological belief have important implications. First, it is possible to arrive at a cosmology by a process akin to generalizationan empirical statement can be construed as the determinate form of an indeterminate proposition, which in turn can be applied to new subject matters. This is the formal pattern of the influence of science on cosmology. Second, the precise verbal formulation of a cosmological belief is relatively unimportant; indeed, it can affect thought without being explicitly formulated at all. For cosmological beliefs do not function as premises of empirical arguments; rather, they impart color to empirical argument, affecting its form and conceptual materials.

Darwin's biological theory was itself supported by prior developments in cosmological belief. The theory of evolution by natural selection did not occur to Darwin in an intellectual vacuum. Most important of these cosmological beliefs was uniformitarianism, the belief that nature operates everywhere and always by the same sorts of law. This view Darwin had imbibed from Lyell's Principles of Geology ; it became cosmological by construing the geological theory as exhibiting a general truth about the way things, including livings things, are. This particular belief is already a powerful stimulus to look at organic nature as the outcome of a historical process, although, to be sure, the belief does not entail this conclusion.

A second belief, which Darwin inherited and was seen to support, was the necessity of taking time seriously. This meant, among other things, that the past is long. By the date of the Origin there was little actual evidence on the age of Earth, let alone the age of the universe. Outside scientific circles, the prevailing view was that Earth and universe were the same age, something on the order of thousands of years. As long as this is accepted, evolution is evidently most improbable. Some geologists, in particular James Hutton (17261797), had, on the other hand, argued that Earth is infinitely oldan important argument, since it helped to accustom scientists to the possibility of vast stretches of time and change. Geologists after Hutton were willing to help themselves to as much time as they needed, and Darwin gladly followed suit.

Taking time seriously, however, gained a deeper meaning after the publication of the Origin, namely, that change is a fundamental feature of nature. This constituted part of the cosmology of every Darwinian. It meant that the process of change is not merely the reshuffling of preexisting materials in accordance with physical law but that the materials themselves are subject to alteration. For instance, as applied to biology it meant that the fundamental form, the species, did not merely exhibit eternal law but changed in such a way that new regularities of behavior replaced the old. In the favored terminology of the nineteenth century, we may say that taking time seriously meant that the laws of nature are subject to change.

Structures and patterns of behavior, then, have to be regarded as historically conditioned. This is the cosmological aspect of the most characteristic post-Darwin view of method, the insistence upon the investigation of origins, together with the view that such investigation can be scientific. Thus, we find the development of the idea of a human prehistory, the application of elaborate schemes concerning, as they were called, stages of developmentspiritual, social, political, moraland the belief that, at least in outline, the future of man may be successfully charted.

Pre-Darwinian biological theory was strongly influenced by the view that all living things are patterned after an eternal idea or archetype. This was held not only for the species but also for other taxonomic categories and for anatomical structures as well. Taxonomists were fond of describing, for example, the ideal vertebrate or mollusk; and morphologists described the ideal organ. One of the achievements of Darwinism was to break the hold of this notion on taxonomic and anatomical theory. Darwin was finally able to write, in Descent of Man, "A discussion of the beau ideal of the liver, lungs, kidneys, etc., as of the human face divine, sounds strange to our ears."

The expressed doctrines of theology are related to empirical propositions as cosmological doctrines are related to the natural sciences. The role of Darwin's theory as a generator of such indeterminate beliefs naturally is well exemplified in theology. On the one hand it was immediately taken to be in prima facie opposition to a number of theological doctrines, especially the following: the uniqueness of man as God's supreme creation; the importance of natural theology; and the dominant theory, in Protestant circles, that the Bible is an authoritative source of beliefs about the natural world.

The first theological reaction to Darwinism can only be described as one of outrage; but by the close of the century, theologians having decided that since they must live with Darwinism, they ought to love it, the outlines of a reconciliation had been sketched. Even further, Darwinism was allowed to guide the formation of a new brand of theology. We shall consider first the reaction.

As we have seen, Darwin's readers were quick to grasp the consequences of the Origin for man himself. These consequences immediately aroused the most intense feelings. These feelings were quite justified, for Christian theology demands that man be considered unique; and his uniqueness was universally interpreted as ontological separateness from the rest of creation. The geologist Adam Sedgwick (17851873), for example, spoke no more than common opinion when he wrote in 1850 that man is a barrier to "any supposition of zoological continuityand utterly unaccounted for by what we have any right to call the laws of nature." The Darwinians not only argued that man is continuous with the animal kingdom and subject to the laws of nature; they also asserted that his mental, moral, and spiritual qualities evolved by precisely the same processes that gave the eagle its claws and the tapeworm its hooks. Such opinions were a threat to the deepest level of Christian doctrine, and were bound to be, until man's uniqueness could be given a new theological interpretation.

Moreover, the furor over the animal nature of man was heightened, especially in Britain, by local circumstances. T. H. Huxley compared man and the ape with endless zest, knowing how the comparison annoyed his opponents. For apes and monkeys were thought to be oversexed and obscene; in addition, the British took very seriously the principle that a man's standing in the world is dependent on the standing of his ancestors. Thus the literature of the period is enlivened by comic remarks, such as, "Are you descended from an ape, Mr. Huxley, from your mother's or your father's side?" (Bishop Wilberforce) and "You can't wash the slugs out of a lettuce without disrespect to your ancestors" (John Ruskin). But the symbol of the ape squatting in one's family tree was no more than an expression of dismay at being swallowed up in the infinite forms of nature. The twentieth century did not fully regain its equanimity on this point. Pius XII wrote that a Catholic may accept a doctrine of evolution, but should beware of doubting that there was a first man and woman. And consider this passage from the speech of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes trial (1925): "We are told just how many species there are, 518,900. and then we have mammals, 3,500, and there is a little circle and man is in the circle, find him, find man."

The edifice of traditional theology was touched at other points. Early-nineteenth-century theologians placed heavy weight on the cooperation of science and religion. The clergyman-naturalist was a familiar figure. It was thought that the intricacy and systematic interconnections of nature exhibited the handiwork of God; to study them was an act of piety. More specifically, natural teleology was the mainstay of natural theology. William Paley's Natural Theology (1802) is a good example. He holds that God's creation is totally good, that the organs of living things are almost perfect, that all animals have their just share of happiness, and that all this demonstrates with thousandfold certainty the existence and beneficence of God. An older natural theology tended to see evidences of God's design throughout nature; but Paley, and others after him, such as Thomas Chalmers in the Bridgewater Treatises (1834), rest their case on the structure of living things: consider, they suggest, the hand, the heart, the eye (especially the eye); they are complex and adapted for their functions to a degree that transcends all possibility of chance correlation.

By hindsight this attitude appears curiously self-defeating as well as vulnerable. The religiously inspired examination of organic adaptation was precisely one factor that led to Darwin's account of the origin of adaptation. His theory made the last citadel of divine teleology in nature untenable except, of course, for a few holdouts; but it was also widely interpreted as refuting all natural teleology, especially by the German materialists. "Chance" had been defined by Paley as "the operation of causes without design," and on this definition Darwinism leaves the origin of species to chance.

Theology in the middle half of the nineteenth century was especially vulnerable to Darwinism on a second point, namely, its extreme Biblicism and, even further, its literalism in biblical interpretation. It hardly needs saying that Darwinism is incompatible with any literal construction put upon either the Old Testament or the New Testament. The laity and most of the clergy, however, insisted upon such constructions. Matthew Arnold quotes the following as prevailing opinion in England: "Every verse of the Bible, every word of it, every syllable of it, every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the Most High"a view Coleridge describes as "Divine ventriloquism." The matter was not so extreme outside of Britain, but the fact remains that Protestant education and practice relied heavily on the study and interpretation of the Bible.

The intellectual compromise that gradually emerged seems obvious today; the problem was not to think of it but to accept it. It consists in admitting that man is part of nature and that he is indeed, even in his spiritual aspects, the outcome of an evolutionary process. But lowly origins do not detract from a unique present. And the process of evolution is either guided, as Wallace suggested, or is itself the mode and manner of God's creation. Indeed, it was sometimes argued that Darwinism provides us with an elevated conception of God. Canon Charles Kingsley, for example, wrote to Darwin as follows: "I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that he created primal forms capable of self-development , as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which He Himself had made." This passage is quoted by Darwin with some changes in later editions of the Origin. As Kingsley also put it, Darwin allows us to get "rid of an interfering Goda master-magician, as I call it" in favor of a "living, immanent, ever-working God."

The final step in this direction was to give God an even more intimate metaphysical connection with natural process. This step had been taken by previous philosophersBenedict (Baruch) de Spinoza and G. W. F. Hegel, for example; but it was repeated under the aegis of Darwinism by Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and a number of Protestant thinkers. The problem of a divine nature that is both perfect and yet incomplete is one contemporary heritage of Darwinism.

The social thought of the later nineteenth century drew so heavily from the theories of evolution that its major ideas became known as social Darwinism. The 1850s were a period of revolutionary fervor in the streets as well as the academies, and political ideologists seized on Darwin as their major intellectual spokesman. His views, or rather selected aspects of them, presented ideal material for application to ethical, economic, and political problems.

It is convenient to divide social Darwinism into a political right and left, using these terms in their rough, contemporary editorial-page sense. In adopting Darwinism to social questions, it must be admitted that the right wing had the best of the bargain. In Europe these were the men whose interests were vested in hereditary privilege and in the factories and institutions of the industrial revolution. On the grounds of these interests they defended themselves against any attempt to justify social revolution, governmental control, unionism, or socialism in any of its many nineteenth-century forms. The ideology that was developed, with the help of Darwinism, in order to facilitate this defense also committed them, in various combinations, against such things as child-labor legislation, poor laws, compulsory safety regulations, and public education. A similar ideology provided the United States with its justification for the undisturbed economic expansion, speculation, and competition that we associate with the robber barons.

On the other hand, Darwinism was employed by the social reformers. Karl Marx wanted to dedicate the first volume of Das Kapital to Darwin. George Bernard Shaw, although he criticized the theory of natural selection, defended his socialism with the help of his version of Bergson's creative evolutionism. The reformers saw Darwinism as the final demonstration that no particular economic or political institutionhowever hallowed by tradition or supported by existing theoriesneed be regarded as unalterable. The forms of society, like the forms of life, are local, temporary, and functional and may accordingly be changed (for the better) without shaking the foundations of the cosmos.

In short, the biology and cosmology of Darwinism was capable of being all things to all men. It enjoyed this status by virtue of its ability to inspire and lend a measure of apparent scientific support to the following major ideas:

(1) The vision of a science that was historical, and at the same time a rigorous application of natural law, inspired a new vision of a science of society. Herbert Spencer (18201903), whose evolutionism antedated the Origin, became the symbol of this ideal wedding of history and sociology. He drew elaborate comparisons between social structures and the forms of living organisms and saw societies as undergoing a progressive evolution in which egoism would be gradually replaced by altruism through a mechanism analogous to the inheritance of acquired characters. Sociology stood in relation to society as evolutionary biology stood to the phenomena of organic nature.

(2) The process of natural selection, interpreted as the survival of the fittest, provided a means for explaining social process. The American political economist William Graham Sumner (18401910), for example, saw society as the outcome of a social struggle in which each man, in pursuing his own good, can succeed only at the expense of others. The fittest in this social struggle are the ruthless, the imaginative, the industrious, the frugal. They climb to the top, and it is right that they should do so. The idle, infirm, and extravagant are losers, not adapted to the realities of their world, and thus legitimately subject to elimination by "social selection." Sumner presents society with an alternative: either "liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest," or "not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest." Self-made millionaires are the paradigm of the fittest. They are "a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done."

This doctrine of the financially successful as the cream of the universe naturally had a sympathetic audience. John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Theodore Roosevelt were supporters, although Roosevelt believed that the unfit were entitled to some protection.

(3) Darwinism provided a rationale for Adam Smith's doctrine of the "Invisible Hand." Smith had supposed that while each man follows his innate tendency to "truck, barter, and trade," men's efforts would automatically dovetail in such a way that the economic good of society as a whole would be served. And Darwin had shown that the net result of each organism's engaging in a struggle for its own welfare was continuous evolution of the species as a whole in the direction of better adaptation to its environment. The political implications of this viewpoint are clear.

The central ethical question raised by the social Darwinists is this: granted that man is subject to natural law, and even granted further that he is subject to some form of natural or social selection, can one legitimately derive from this such policies as laissez-faire? Alfred Russel Wallace had argued that with the advent, under divine guidance, of man's brain, the evolution of man was no longer controlled by natural selection, so that inference from the doctrine of natural selection to ethical policy would be illegitimate. Huxley provided a similar argument: Man represents an island of cultural evolution in a sea of Darwinian change. These issues have largely passed into history, however, due to the philosophical point that whether or not to support a law of nature is not a question for decision.

The fate of Darwinism since the twentieth century has been mixed. Social Darwinism is of no more than historical interest. It is rightly regarded as philosophically naive and, moreover, as concerned with social questions that are not of contemporary interest. The same is largely true of the theological battles over the significance of evolution. Current theology exhibits a sublime indifference to the questions that agitated Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce. It must be pointed out, however, that modern theology is free to pursue other problems because of the clarification of the status of man and of the relation of science to theology that emerged from the Darwinian debate.

In biological theory proper, Darwin's theory remains secure. His Lamarckism is no longer accepted, if we discount some periodic revivals in the former Soviet Union; and the doctrine of sexual selection is still a matter of some debate. But the major theory of the Origin, evolution by natural selection, is the framework of modern evolutionary theory. This modern accountsometimes called the synthetic theory and sometimes, rather confusingly, Neo-Darwinismaccepts in toto the doctrine of natural selection as described above but develops it in a manner that Darwin himself could not have envisaged. The synthetic theory may fairly be described as Darwin's theory of natural selection, deepened by the absorption of twentieth-century genetics and systematically applied to the whole range of biological phenomena.

The absorption of genetics accounts for the novel developments in the doctrine of natural selection itself. Darwin thought of natural selection fundamentally as differential survival, and he regarded the organism as the natural unit that is subjected to selective pressures. With the advent of Mendelian genetics, and especially of the statistical study of the genetics of populations, these two Darwinian conceptions underwent a significant change. From the geneticist's point of view, differential survival is subordinate to differential reproduction of genetic materials; evolution is simply temporal change in the genetic constitution of a population. The simplest model of evolutionary change would be the following: Suppose that we have in a population two alleles, a 1 and a 2, of a gene a, and that a 1 is present in the proportion p, and a 2 in the proportion 1p. Then any temporal change in the value of p would be a case of reproductive differential between a 1 and a 2; and it would be an evolutionary change in the population. Some biologists simply identify such differential reproduction with natural selection, in which case sexual selection is a special case of natural selection. The natural unit of selection becomes the gene rather than the whole organism.

This conception of natural selection is not incompatible with Darwin's. Differential survival is still the major cause of differential reproduction of genes; and there is still a clear and obvious sense in which the organism is the fundamental unit of natural selection. But the new conception of natural selection facilitates the discussion of a large range of questions, for example, the roles of isolation and migration in evolution; the effectiveness of very small selective advantages; the roles of gene mutations, sex-linkage, and dominance; and so on. The modern theory has much to say on these topics that could not have been foreseen by Darwin, but nothing that he could not readily endorse.

See also Arnold, Matthew; Bergson, Henri; Darwin, Charles Robert; Darwin, Erasmus; Ethics, History of; Evolutionary Ethics; Evolutionary Theory; Good, The; Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Huxley, Thomas Henry; Lamarck, Chevalier de; Laws of Nature; Marx, Karl; Paley, William; Racism; Ruskin, John; Smith, Adam; Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch) de; Sumner, William Graham; Teleology; Wallace, Alfred Russel; Whitehead, Alfred North.

Darwin, Charles Robert. On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London, 1859. A variorum text, edited by Morse Peckham (Philadelphia, 1959), was published in paperback with an introduction by G. G. Simpson (New York, 1962). There is also a Modern Library edition (New York, 1949).

Darwin, Charles Robert. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: J. Murray, 1871.

Darwin, Charles Robert. The Voyage of the Beagle. London and New York, n.d. A reissue by J. M. Dent and E. P. Dutton of their 1906 edition of the Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H. M. S. Beagle, 18321836.

Darwin, Charles Robert, and Alfred Russel Wallace. Evolution by Natural Selection. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1958. This contains Darwin's sketch of 1842, his essay of 1844, and the Darwin and Wallace papers read before the Linnaean Society in 1848.

Wallace, Alfred Russel. Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection. London: Macmillan, 1870.

Wallace, Alfred Russel. Darwinism. London: Macmillan, 1889.

Wallace, Alfred Russel. "The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of Natural Selection." Journal of the Anthropological Society of London (1864).

Dewey, John. The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy. New York, 1910.

Eiseley, Loren. Darwin's Century; Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958. Contains many illuminating discussions of the interplay of philosophical and scientific theories.

Fothergill, Philip. Historical Aspects of Organic Evolution. London: Hollis and Carter, 1952. A history of evolutionary theories.

Goudge, T. A. Ascent of Life; a Philosophical Study of Evolution. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961.

Gray, Asa. Natural Science and Religion. New York: Scribners, 1880. A topical discussion of the way theism looked to an evolutionist.

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959.

Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought, 18601915. Philadelphia, 1944.

Huxley, Thomas Henry. Evolution and Ethics, and Other Essays. New York, 1898.

Schneider, Herbert. "The Influence of Darwin and Spencer on American Philosophical Theology." Journal of the History of Ideas 6 (1945).

Darlington, C. D. The Evolution of Genetic Systems. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1939.

De Beer, Gavin. Embryology and Evolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930.

Dobzhansky, Theodosius. Genetics and the Origin of Species, 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951.

Fisher, R. A. The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930. This is the classic application of statistical methods to the dynamics of evolving populations; together with the Darlington and Dobzhansky works, it affords a good introduction to the crucial relations between evolution and population genetics.

Mayr, Ernst. Systematics and the Origin of Species. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942.

Ross, H. H. A Synthesis of Evolutionary Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962.

Read the original:

Darwinism | Encyclopedia.com

Contents

Social Darwinism is a loose set of ideologies that emerged in the late 1800s in which Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection was used to justify certain political, social, or economic views. Social Darwinists believe in survival of the fittestthe idea that certain people become powerful in society because they are innately better. Social Darwinism has been used to justify imperialism, racism, eugenics and social inequality at various times over the past century and a half.

According to Darwins theory of evolution, only the plants and animals best adapted to their environment will survive to reproduce and transfer their genes to the next generation. Animals and plants that are poorly adapted to their environment will not survive to reproduce.

Charles Darwin published his notions on natural selection and the theory of evolution in his influential 1859 book On the Origin of Species.

Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection was a scientific theory focused on explaining his observations about biological diversity and why different species of plants and animals look different.

Yet in an attempt to convey his scientific ideas to the British public, Darwin borrowed popular concepts, including survival of the fittest, from sociologist Herbert Spencer and struggle for existence from economist Thomas Malthus, who had earlier written about how human societies evolve over time.

Darwin rarely commented on the social implications of his theories. But to those who followed Spencer and Malthus, Darwins theory appeared to be confirming with science what they already believed to be true about human societythat the fit inherited qualities such as industriousness and the ability to accumulate wealth, while the unfit were innately lazy and stupid.

After Darwin published his theories on biological evolution and natural selection, Herbert Spencer drew further parallels between his economic theories and Darwins scientific principles.

Spencer applied the idea of survival of the fittest to so-called laissez faire or unrestrained capitalism during the Industrial Revolution, in which businesses are allowed to operate with little regulation from the government.

Unlike Darwin, Spencer believed that people could genetically pass learned qualities, such as frugality and morality, on to their children.

Spencer opposed any laws that helped workers, the poor, and those he deemed genetically weak. Such laws, he argued, would go against the evolution of civilization by delaying the extinction of the unfit.

Another prominent Social Darwinist was American economist William Graham Sumner. He was an early opponent of the welfare state. He viewed individual competition for property and social status as a tool for eliminating the weak and immoral of the population.

As social Darwinist rationalizations of inequality gained popularity in the late 1800s, British scholar Sir Francis Galton (a half-cousin of Darwin) launched a new science aimed at improving the human race by ridding society of its undesirables. He called it eugenics.

Galton proposed to better humankind by propagating the British elite. He argued that social institutions such as welfare and mental asylums allowed inferior humans to survive and reproduce at higher levels than their superior counterparts in Britains wealthy class.

Galtons ideas never really took hold in his country, but they became popular in America where the concepts of eugenics quickly gained strength.

Eugenics became a popular social movement in the United States that peaked in the 1920s and 1930s. Books and films promoted eugenics, while local fairs and exhibitions held fitter family and better baby competitions around the country.

The eugenics movement in the United States focused on eliminating undesirable traits from the population. Proponents of the eugenics movement reasoned the best way to do this was by preventing unfit individuals from having children.

During the first part of the twentieth century, 32 U.S. states passed laws that resulted in the forced sterilization of more than 64,000 Americans including immigrants, people of color, unmarried mothers and the mentally ill.

Adolf Hitler, one of the worlds most notorious eugenicists, drew inspiration from Californias forced sterilizations of the feeble-minded in designing Nazi Germanys racially based policies.

Hitler began reading about eugenics and social Darwinism while he was imprisoned following a failed 1924 coup attempt known as the Beer Hall Putsch.

Hitler adopted the social Darwinist take on survival of the fittest. He believed the German master race had grown weak due to the influence of non-Aryans in Germany. To Hitler, survival of the German Aryan race depended on its ability to maintain the purity of its gene pool.

The Nazis targeted certain groups or races that they considered biologically inferior for extermination. These included Jews, Roma (gypsies), Poles, Soviets, people with disabilities and homosexuals.

By the end of World War II, social Darwinist and eugenic theories had fallen out of favor in the United States and much of Europepartly due to their associations with Nazi programs and propaganda, and because these theories were scientifically unfounded.

Social Darwinism; American Museum of Natural History.Americas Hidden History: The Eugenics Movement; Nature. September 18, 2014.In the Name of Darwin; PBS.Victims of the Nazi Era: Nazi Racial Ideology; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Continued here:

Social Darwinism - HISTORY

Photo: Wolf-Ekkehard and wife and dog in his back yard in Kln, by Granville Sewell.

Writing here back in April, I discussed the 1971 Masters of Science thesis written by botanist Wolf-Ekkehard Lnnig at the Free University of Berlin, which was remarkable in that young Wolf-Ekkehard openly advocated for intelligent design in this work. Wolf-Ekkehard would go on to earn a PhD from the University of Bonn and work as a geneticist for over 25 years at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne. He has continued throughout his career, and now in retirement, to criticize Darwinism and promote intelligent design in hiswritings, several of which have been published in scientific journals. My earlier post includes links to two recent interviews with Lnnig.

In his youth, Dr. Lnnig bravely opposed dogma that was almost universally accepted and perilous to question. Although his faculty advisor, the director of the botanical gardens and botanical museum of Berlin Dahlem, actually had high praise for his thesis, Wolf-Ekkehard would throughout his career be confronted by the cancel culture that is now so prevalent in our own country. Some of his battles with the cancellers are documentedhere.

Dr. Lnnig has now posted his thesis onlinehere. I consider this to be an important historical document because it contains many of the arguments that are used by intelligent design advocates today, 50 years later. Though of course the thesis is in German, I have translated one particularly interesting section, where he discusses the God of the gaps objection to intelligent design, and criticizes methodological naturalism:

b) When we arrive at a place where we may temporarily be unable to progress and in this place insert God, we hinder the progress of science.

This objection is in principle valid. As church history shows, one has often enough inserted God into places where one did not know how to continueplaces, however, that later proved only to be gaps in knowledge. In such situations scientific progress had to fight against the belief in God, at least with those who believed in a direct intervention of the Creator. In order to avoid this forever, one should never assume the direct intervention of God, and even in the case of phenomena we cant understand [even if their organization points to an intelligent cause] we must never assume such an intervention, as even these phenomena may only be not yet understandable.

Although seemingly reasonable, this last conclusion is, as the following example shows, false. Let us suppose an indigenous tribe, who has never come into contact with an advanced civilization, has previously always used supernatural powers as an explanation for all events, but upon closer study has now regularly discovered that an entirely natural explanation has always been found for such events. Let us further suppose this tribe finally formalizes this discovery and asserts that everything must have a natural explanation, that is, an explanation consistent with their newly discovered laws of Nature. For the sake of argument, lets insert some representatives of our advanced civilization into their region, lets say landing with two or three helicopters, not in their immediate vicinity and unnoticed by the natives. Suppose the reason for the landing is a technical defect in one of the helicopters, whose crew is for safety transferred to another of the helicopters; the defective machine is left behind.

The story now gets interesting: our native tribe soon discovers this strange craft and now stands before the biggest puzzle of their history. At this point their demand that everything must be explained usingtheirknown laws of Nature must lead to comical miscalculations. Our entire tribe begins to ponder which natural laws could have caused this strange apparatus to come into existence. At this point, we can imagine to what clever ideas the tribesmen may resort. Some specialists among them have, for example, discovered that some of the metals which they have found in the helicopter are also to be found in some surrounding mountainous regions, and sometimes even in refined form, especially in the vicinity of volcanos. Thus the volcano creation theory evolves. To be sure, even after hundreds of years of intensive research they still dont know how to explain in all detail how the development of the helicopter could have happened through forces of nature, for example, volcano eruptions. But they argue, based on their previous experience, that one must not allow anything other than natural powers to be considered; because it is methodologically impossible to considernon-mechanisticalfactors as explanations for the origins of an apparatus.

We need not carry this example further. It shows, I hope clearly, that requiring adherence to a fixed method of research can lead to great errors. The justification, that earlier we have misinterpreted a large number of entirely natural phenomena by ascribing them to non-mechanistical factors, does not change this. When one confronts things that in our experience always point to consciousness, intelligence, and mind, that require planning and goal-oriented ordering of material to highly integrated systems when these things furthermore not only cannot be explained through known laws of nature but even defy known laws (such as the principle of increasing entropy), and when attempts to clarify them naturally raise thousands of other difficulties, then there is no longer any justification for ruling out non-mechanistical factors in discussions of origins!

With regard to the dangers of interpretingmechanisticalphenomena as non-mechanistically: this is a two-edged sword. The danger of interpreting non-mechanisticalphenomenamechanisticallyis equally great. We should be on guard in both directions. In both directions we can hinder the progress of knowledge.

Read more here:

Intelligent Design, Ahead of Its Time: More on WE Lnnig's 1971 Thesis - Discovery Institute

American Museum of Natural History, by Ingfbruno / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0).

When evolutionist Colin Patterson asked at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981, Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing, that is true? his colleagues were aghast. Why, the origin of species that leads to macroevolution is an accepted truth! One does not question accepted truths. Of course they knew about evolution! The evidence is everywhere. Its here, its there, its well, evolution is a fact, and if the evidence isnt available today, it will be tomorrow.

A recent paper in Science allows us to hold the magnifying glass up to claims of observable evidence supporting macroevolution. Gustavo Burin et al., in Macroevolutionary stability predicts interaction patterns of species in seed dispersal networks, published in the journal Science, use the word macroevolution 32 times. Burin and two colleagues from Brazil studied 468 bird species in 29 seed dispersal networks. From the data, they claimed to see evidence for macroevolution evidence so secure, it allows them to make predictions about evolution. This should be a good case study. Do they really know about evolution, or is their exercise a detailed construction of a house of cards?

Two reviewers, Carolina Bello from Switzerland and Elisa Barreto from Brazil, gave their perspective about the paper, also in Science. As evolutionists, they were pleased to see the effort by Burins team showing The footprint of evolution in seed dispersal interactions.

The footprint of evolution should be obvious. Fruit-eating (frugivorous) birds eat the fruits with the seeds, then fly away, leaving seeds widely dispersed for the good of the plant. Widespread distribution of favorite plants is also good for the birds. One bird species will often feed on multiple fruits, and plants will often host multiple species of birds. A complex network of bird and plant interactions should result. Over time, the symbiotic relationships should persist even as the players evolve or go extinct. Bello and Barreto use the word macroevolution 7 times in three paragraphs, and yet their piece betrays a persistent undertone of doubt about what Burin et al. showed indeed, what all such macroevolutionary studies have been able to show. Here are some of the problems they mention:

Their support for the Burin paper is, in the final analysis, only faint praise:

Accurately estimating speciation, and particularly extinction rates, from phylogenies composed solely of extant species is still a challenge, making it hard to detect the footprint of evolutionary dynamics on species interactions. [Emphasis added]

After reading the Burin paper, therefore, Bello and Barreto are not entirely sure the authors know what they claim to know.

One thing Darwinism has going for it: it sure generates a lot of busy work. But so does constructing a house of cards; whether effort corresponds to knowledge is a separate question. With their 32 mentions of macroevolution, can Burins team demonstrate knowledge about it? Even in the case of watching birds eat fruit, is the evidence clear? The authors are offered a fair chance to convince a skeptic as we dive into the text and supplemental materials.

They face challenges at the outset. They cannot watch extinct birds eating fruit, obviously, so whats up with that?

Starting from a molecular phylogeny (Fig. 1A), we estimated rates of speciation, extinction, net diversification rate (speciation minus extinction), and extinction fraction (extinction divided by speciation rate) for all species in the networks. We then estimated species interaction patterns (how they were connected) within each of the 29 networks (Fig. 1B), using three different network descriptors to characterize interaction patterns of each species, which were then combined into a single descriptor index for each species by using principal component analysis (PCA). We then used a hierarchical Bayesian phylogenetic framework to test for relationships between macroevolutionary stability and interaction patterns of bird species (Fig. 1C).

The circularity of their reasoning escapes them. They assume macroevolution (molecular phylogeny) to learn about macroevolution. They estimate speciation rates and extinction rates based on their belief in macroevolution. They place each bird into a network and connect all the assumed data points into a phylogenetic framework. Nowhere do they mention fossils, like finding a fossilized dove eating a fossilized apricot. Essentially, they use evolutionary assumptions to demonstrate facts about macroevolution! Do they know how many species originated, and how many went extinct? No! They only estimate how many must have evolved, based on their Darwinian mindset.

We found that central bird species in seed dispersal networks tend to belong to macroevolutionarily stable lineages. Standardized speciation and extinction rates show, respectively, positive and negative associations with species patterns of interaction (Fig. 2A). Hence, central species are more likely both to persist in time (negative correlation with extinction rate) and to belong to clades that are more likely to provide a replacement species if one goes extinct (correlations with extinction fraction and diversification rate).

Any skeptic of Darwinism would call foul here (no pun intended). One cannot simply assume that evolution will provide new species for ones that bow out by extinction, when they have no fossil evidence that that is what happened. Their powers of suggestion lead them into fantasyland:

This suggests that the macroevolutionary sorting mechanism acts at a regional scale, sorting the species within each region through their relative rank of stability, rather than on absolute values of speciation, extinction, extinction fraction, or net diversification rates. Our results indicate that representatives of important seed-dispersers groups across multiple localities indeed have high relative macroevolutionary stability, as the result of either fast species accumulation (e.g., thraupid genera, such as Tangara and Thraupis) or long-lived lineages (e.g., species of Turdidae). Ecological factors such as species abundance distributions and the presence of invasive species also influence network organization. Unfortunately, the lack of data prevents us from further testing if macroevolutionary consequences to network structure are modulated by those factors.

The paper is built on assumptions .

They also used an arguably vacuous measure of phylogenetic signal called Pagels Lambda, a value between 0 and 1 that infers that species that resemble each other are more closely related. There are obvious exceptions among species with strong sexual dimophism and in cases of alleged convergence.

Phylogenetic correction was used because the network descriptors showed significant phylogenetic signal (mean value for Pagels lambda = 0.537 but note that for each tree the corresponding lambda value was used).

At least one ecologist, Carl Boettiger at UC Berkeley, has argued that its time to retire Pagels Lambda, because it relies on biological nonsense and doesnt measure what it claims to measure. Whatever one thinks of its usefulness, its a statistic that relies on Darwins tree concept, therefore circular.

So Bello and Barreto were right to express doubts. Its hard to detect the footprint of evolutionary dynamics on species interactions. Estimating speciation and extinction rates from extant species is still a challenge. Burin et al. took a leap to merge macroevolution and interaction networks. Whether they found a consistent and robust effect, even when accounting for the uncertainty of the rate estimates and the phylogenetic hypothesis, is in the eye of the beholder, considering all the assumptions, questionable techniques and circular reasoning involved.

And so, in the end, Colin Pattersons question echoes through the decades: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing, that is true?

Continued here:

What Do Biologists Really Know About Macroevolution? - Discovery Institute

On June 10, Florida became the most recent state to ban critical race theory in its classrooms. The ban was enacted by the Florida State Board of Education, which defined critical race theory as the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.

Contrary to the talking points and fearmongering of some conservative lawmakers, critical race theory is not focused on attacking white people for their whiteness. Instead, it exposes the disenfranchisement and oppression of people of color by American systems that are based in the nations indubitably racist past.

The idea that America is fundamentally racist may be difficult to sit with, but it is impossible and dangerous to ignore this reality. One needs only to examine the many instances of systemic injustice that exist within our country to accept this fact.

One needs only to see how Black K-12 students have far less access to college-ready courses than white students. One needs only to question why Black youth are disproportionately stopped by police in comparison to the rest of the youth population. If not for systemic racism, then why does the average white family have at least 10 times more wealth than the average non-white family?

It is impossible to overcome a problem that isnt acknowledged as truth. If not educated on this nations past, how can students promote equality as the leaders of tomorrow?

These bans enable racist ideologies and stereotypes through their dismissal of systemic racism. If economic inequality, racial profiling by police, and educational inequality are not embedded in the very fabric of America, then why are people of color disproportionately poor, uneducated and imprisoned in the U.S. compared to their white counterparts?

What should this debate mean to the students and staff of The University of Alabama?

First, we must acknowledge that the University is both a prominent institution in Southern education and an establishment literally built by Americas racist past. The University owned and enslaved African Americans from its inception until it was destroyed by Union troops in 1865.

We live, work and learn at an establishment rooted in racism. Denying the oppression that is fundamentally woven into our lives would degrade the University into an institution that is delusional, hypocritical and misinformed.

The University holds weight in this conversation. State Rep. Chris Pringle, R-Mobile, recently pre-filed a bill for the next legislative session that would ban Alabama public schools from teaching critical race theory.

From its inception, The University of Alabama has served as a guiding force for the state, bringing jobs, resources and education to Alabama. This is a chance to continue to utilize its leadership role for good.

If the University is truly the home of educational excellence that we all believe it to be, then it will not simply denounce any attempt at banning the critical race theory in Alabama. It will go further to preserve the spirit of education, supporting critical race theory as an honest and accurate tool for educating Americans.

To preserve the teaching of critical race theory, the University must distinguish itself from lawmakers and institutions that buy into the notion that racism in this country is an antiquated phenomenon. In the quest to combat institutionalized racism, there is no such thing as being too thorough.

One means by which the university can combat current rhetoric on race is by continuing to expand UAs course catalog to implement the teaching of critical race theory in a substantial way. We cannot allow controversy or eurocentric thinking to prevent us from teaching accurate and inclusive portraits of our past and present. Courses highlighting the experiences of people of color should be limited to electives or minors. It belongs in our core curriculum.

Since racism is pervasive in every atmosphere, critical race theory must not be isolated to a select few courses of history or political science. In the discussion of evolution, how can we ignore the history of Social Darwinism? Courses of all disciplines must commit themselves to tackling racism in whatever way it presents itself.

Perhaps most importantly, the University must bridge the gap between campus and the greater Alabama community. The University Does not exist in a vacuum. We represent the state of Alabama and vice versa. Students and professors must communicate with local representatives, urging them to vote against bills like Pringles that protect racist ideology.

If the University wants to promote itself as a forward-thinking institution, then we must fight against regressive policies that threaten to keep Alabama from moving toward a more just future. We must make it known that the University will not stand idly by when lawmakers attempt to halt progress in our state, especially when it comes to education.

If we advocate for critical race theory as a policy and actually implement it in our own community, we can signal to both the state of Alabama and the nation as a whole that we are setting an example. It will be shown that no matter what comes out of Pringles bill, the University is on the side of equality, inclusion and honest education.

Our nations relationship with racial injustice is not easy to stomach, but as some conservatives themselves like to say: facts dont care about your feelings and the fact of the matter is, we still have a long way to go. Lets start now.

Original post:

Opinion | UA should embrace critical race theory - The Crimson White - The University of Alabama Crimson White

What biology student has not been tested on Lamarck vs. Darwins explanations for the giraffe? Its one of the obligatory stories on evolution in textbooks. Lamarck thought that the necks became longer as giraffes stretched for the treetops and their offspring inherited those acquired characteristics. Students hear about problems with that view (usually with auxiliary stories about Weismanns experiments chopping off the tails of generations of mice). Then, Darwins mechanism natural selection is introduced as the victor. Congratulations usually follow about Darwin being one of the most original thinkers in the history of science. (What students are not told is that Darwin became more Lamarckian in later revisions of the Origin due to increasing criticisms of natural selection.)

But what if both views are misguided? What if the real explanation is not evolutionary? Lamarck and Darwin both assumed that the giraffe evolved from some pre-giraffe with a short neck. Is that assumption necessary? It only seems necessary if one starts with the assumption of universal common ancestry by unguided natural processes. A few outliers, like structuralists or theistic evolutionists, might quibble with that claim, but the majority of evolutionary biologists do not tolerate any guidance or direction to the evolutionary process (hear J. P. Moreland explain this on ID the Future). The giraffe body plan, with all its unique traits, was never a goal in Darwinism or Lamarckism. Things just turned out that way.

A new complete giraffe genome is beginning to shed light on which view has more empirical support. Published by Chang Liu et al. in Science Advances (open access), it gives biologists a fresh start in discerning links between genotype and phenotype for this unique iconic animal.

The suite of adaptations associated with the extreme stature of the giraffe has long interested biologists and physiologists. By generating a high-quality chromosome-level giraffe genome and a comprehensive comparison with other ruminant genomes, we identified a robust catalog of giraffe-specific mutations. These are primarily related to cardiovascular, bone growth, vision, hearing, and circadian functions. [Emphasis added.]

Most summaries of the paper, including those in Science magazine and The Scientist, fail to account for the long neck the very trait that most interested the early evolutionists. Instead, they focus on one particular gene named FGFRL1. In humans and mice, this gene is associated with bone strength and with blood pressure.

The team decided to check what happens when the giraffe version of the gene, with has seven differences from the gene in other mammals, is inserted into mouse embryos. The mice did not grow long necks, but they grew more compact and denser bones. Most importantly, they also survived a drug that raises blood pressure. Giraffe blood pressure is twice that of humans. It appears, therefore, that giraffes have a version of FGFRL1 that protects them from the expected damage to tissues and organs from blood pressure high enough to pump blood up to their lofty 5-meter-high heads. Why is this gene also associated with bone growth?

These findings provide insights into basic modes of evolution. The dual effects of the strongly selected FGFRL1 gene are compatible with the phenomenon that one gene can affect several different aspects of the phenotype, so called evolutionary pleiotropy. Pleiotropy is particularly relevant for explaining unusually large phenotypic changes, because such changes often require that a suite of traits are changed within a short evolutionary time. Therefore, pleiotropy could provide one solution to the riddle of how evolution could achieve the many co-dependent changes needed to form an animal as extreme as a giraffe.

A few other interesting things were found in the genome: genes related to circadian rhythms that might explain why giraffes get by with little sleep (since getting up off the ground is a lengthy and awkward procedure), why their olfactory genes are reduced (probably related to a radically diluted presence of scents at 5m compared to ground level), and why their eyesight is so sharp (assumed to be an evolutionary trade-off for less reliance on the sense of smell). The most obvious traits of the giraffe the long neck, long legs, fur patterns and all have not been addressed in the paper. The authors admit that more research on the functional consequences of giraffe-specific genetic variants is needed.

If pleiotropy is the explanation for the giraffe, what a lucky mutation in FGFRL1 must have occurred! Not only did it protect the giraffe from high blood pressure, it simultaneously switched on some other gene that created denser, faster-growing bones that the giraffe needs to reach its full height without breaking its neck in the process. The authors conclude:

Overall, these results show that pleiotropy is a plausible mechanism for contributing to the suite of co-adaptations necessary in the evolution of the giraffes towering stature.

Since pleiotropy sounds like a good explanation for that, why not invoke it all over the animal? Think how it would reduce the number of lucky mutations. Evolution could get more done in less time by winning the red powerball. One mutation might create the fur patterns, put in the spongy brain that prevents a hemorrhage when the giraffe stoops to drink, rearrange the blood vessels and nerves, and do a dozen other things that otherwise would require separate chance mutations. Obviously, that gets silly. If the giraffe evolved to its current status gradually, it would have to win multiple red powerballs to keep its traits in sync as they change.

Throughout these articles, one can see the writers inserting the adjective evolutionary in front of everything.

Typists could avoid carpal tunnel syndrome by eliminating this unnecessary word in science papers and news stories. It seems that the evolutionary biologists, who should just call themselves biologists, want to push a narrative that everything in the living world must pay tribute to Darwin. The repetition of the word hammers it into peoples heads. Everything in nature, they are taught with this propaganda tactic, is part of a fluid phantasmagoric tableau where every creature came from some other creature and is becoming something else.

In fact, whats important is understanding the design of the giraffe: how its genes produce the traits, and how the traits make it successful in its environment. That much should be sufficient for scientific understanding. The evolutionary narrative reflects a philosophical predilection. Since ones worldview preference is unrelated to the empirical content of scientific research, it should be stated up front for full disclosure. Wouldnt that make readers more astute!

See the original post here:

Giraffe Genome Is Not Evolutionary - Discovery Institute