Category Archives: Darwinism

Photo: Herbert Spencer, via Wikimedia Commons.

On a newID the Future episode,historian Richard Weikart (Cal State Stanislaus) dissects a new Cambridge University Pressbook on social Darwinismby Jeffrey OConnell and Michael Ruse. Weikart, author ofHitlers Ethic,From Darwin to Hitler,Hitlers Religion, andThe Death of Humanity, says that a major shortcoming of the new book is the authors attempt to put as much distance as possible between Darwin and eugenics thinking, and between Darwin and Hitler. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

The new book paints Darwins follower Herbert Spencer (pictured above) as the eugenics-championing bad guy and posits that Darwin and Darwinism had little or no influence on Hitlers warped master race ethic. Weikart patiently highlights some key evidence to the contrary, statements front and center in Hitlers writing. Did Darwin cause Hitler? No. Would Darwin have approved of Hitler? Almost certainly not. But according to Weikart, Darwins own racist and pro-eugenics thinking, combined with some implications of his theory that he himself explicitly recognized, manifestly did lay the groundwork for Hitlers diabolical outlook on the master race, the struggle for life, war, and eugenics.

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Listen: Richard Weikart Reviews a New Book on Social Darwinism - Discovery Institute

In the face of Indias catastrophic pandemic, the tongue goes silent and the pens fall dry. What can one say that is meaningful? There is seldom any consoling story to be told about grief or mass suffering. There are brave journalists bearing witness. But what does bearing witness do in a culture of official nationalism where the images of death offend more than death itself? There is an urgent need to fix several policies. But what do policy proposals mean, when all policy is about managing headlines, not achieving an objective? There is a need to fix accountability. But how does accountability get fixed when so many institutional sinews from federalism to bureaucracy have snapped? There is justifiable anger at the Prime Minister, whose self-obsessive callousness and abdication of leadership has contributed immeasurably to the current crisis. But in the case of this government, anger seems misplaced. Anger presumes a leader who is standing within the space of reason, where the point of anger is to restore a certain reciprocity between citizen and leader. Anger is completely beside the point, when you have an imperious leader, who has come to mistake the hologram of his own mendacity for reality. In any case, the scenes of suffering make even anger a luxury; there are more urgent tasks to be attended to.

The only empowering thought in this context has been the splendid work that professionals, frontline government workers, health professionals and volunteers are doing to compensate for massive state failure. The extraordinary mobilisation of civic action whether in supplying oxygen or cremating the dead has been exemplary. These are, of course, sometimes limited by class and geography, but it would be churlish to deny the depth of commitment of what we are witnessing. This civic commitment has helped mitigate suffering. It provides slivers of solidarity in a politics that has long forgotten that word.

India has always been a tough place; the callousness that comes with inequality is deeply inscribed in our social structure. Politics was supposed to mitigate at least the harshest edges of this inequality. Instead, what we are seeing in the politics of the BJP is the unleashing of an unvarnished social Darwinism, a ruthless exercise of power on behalf of the powerful: Majorities against minorities, state against dissenters, and big capital against small. The spectre of more repression being unleashed to manage the post-pandemic discontent cannot be ruled out. The question is this: Will these rudiments of public solidarity on display counter deadly social Darwinism that our official politics has become?

Perhaps, a good test case is something urgent: A reconsideration of our vaccine policy. The three basic ingredients of a vaccine policy for a pandemic of this kind are clear. Do whatever it takes to make sure there are enough supplies (the right procurement contract, capital subsidies, capacity expansion, and, if need be, the suspension of intellectual property rights). Centrally procure vaccines, but give states operational flexibility. And distribute them free. This is essentially what the United States did. And do all of this as fast as possible, if we are to prevent new mutants from arising.

Instead, what we got in vaccine policy is a bizarre combination of ruthlessness and managing the headlines. First, there is a scarcity of vaccines and will be for a while because we did not get our capacity expansion and procurement contracts right. Then you had the pandemic surge in some states, which raised two questions: How much operational flexibility can be given to the states? And how much does it make sense to reallocate vaccines to states or districts where they are most urgently needed? These questions could have been easily resolved by a modicum of trust building. But instead, we try to cover up the scarcity and prioritisation question by managing the headline. We unleash a Darwinian competition between states on procurement. The demands of the states could have been resolved in better ways. Now some states will make the vaccines free. But there is a greater opportunity cost to the states doing this. They have less resources than the Centre. And there is high probability that they will divert money from other essential services.

Then, to deflect attention we open up vaccinations for all age groups. The controlled media claps. But you have exacerbated the problem: If supplies are scarce, opening it up to a free-for-all accentuates the allocation problem. Now allocation will be based on whoever can lay their hands on the vaccine, not what is best suited to combat the virus and reduce health burdens. You then say there will be differential pricing. In essence, those who can afford to get them at private sector rates shall get them more easily. The argument is that they will cross-subsidise. This is a specious argument; if people want to genuinely fund cross-subsidies in health, better to collect it as taxes and create public goods, not distribute vaccines as a privileged good under scarcity.

In the meantime, our supply strategy is still not clear. There are no reliable schedules of production targets. You offer Serum Institute of India what seems like an unsustainable price, and slow their capacity expansion, by delaying whatever capital subsidies were necessary. Bharat Biotech then announces a price that is too high, and surely the Prime Minister will step in to reduce the price and claim credit. Meanwhile, you have to wonder at this. India and South Africa have, at the WTO, rightly called for a temporary suspension of patents on COVID-19 vaccines. Why dont we set an example and do this ourselves with Bharat Biotech and take away its production rights? Let any company produce the vaccine. There are ways of doing this that still allow the company to make enough money and invest in R&D. It will also be a better way of positioning Indian brands and India globally than to try and position yourself as a monopoly supplier. In any case, some of the research is publicly funded and should be treated as a public good.

In miniature, this is an illustration of how vaccine policy is made. There is no logic of incentives or cross-subsidies or a free market in these decisions. There is no epidemiological logic. This is ad hoc social Darwinism. The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. A perfect metaphor for our healthcare system. This is the moment to convert private acts of kindness into demands for a different public health culture. We can start by demanding a reconsideration of our vaccine strategy, and then think of larger political change.

This column first appeared in the print edition on April 28, 2021 under the title Vaccine Darwinism. The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express.

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The ruthless politics of the Centres vaccine strategy - The Indian Express

In A Nutshell, Evolution Can Be Explained Better On Molecular Basis With The Unification Of Neo-Lamarckism And Neo-Darwinism.

The coalesce subject of modern biology is based on the Darwins theory of evolution, the process of natural selection, organisms change with the course of time and the fittest ones are selected by the nature to reproduce and survive. Such changes bring new variants of species. At that time when Darwin gave the concept of evolution it lacked the explanation on molecular basis. But modern genetics and molecular biology have given us the outline of how evolution happens I.e. neo-Darwinism.

But several studies have suggested that there exist some other molecular factors that contribute prominently in the pipeline of evolution of some species. There is also a problem with the Darwin theory that the mutation rate of complex organisms is too slow to explain the changes contribute in the process of evolution. Scientists compensate this by proposing different genetic theories like genetic drift and epistasis. Hence, swift origination of some traits is difficult to explain on the basis of classical genetics.

Some other questions also arose the answers to them are hard to give just relying on the theories of Darwin and classical genetics like why identical twins, having the same genes, generally catch different types of diseases as if phenotype is genetic based? How is it possible that environmental contaminants can change the assault of disease, rendering the DNA Sequences? Why the phenotypic trait divergence rate is higher than the genetic mutations and variations?

Answers to above mentioned questions partly can be explained by Lamarckism, according to Lamarcks theory of evolution, environment has great effect on phenotype of organisms and these changes could pass to next progeny, same concept had been proposed by a developmental biologist Conrad Waddington of the University of Edinburgh stated that fruit flies at the embyonic development stage if exposed to enivironmental contaminants or change in the temperature could bring about variations in the wings structures and that variations could also pass to next progeny. Waddington showed up with a modern term epigenetics to narrate this phenomenon of rapid change. That single generation variation was in support to Lamarcks theory as it was seen that environment could impact traits.

With the advancement in molecular biology and genetics, Lamarcks theory and Waddingtons concepts are now making some discernment. Several environmental factors can turn on and off many genes hence changing the expression of proteins in cells. Epigenetics, thus, involve several molecular processes that can change the gene expression without altering the DNA sequences. Epigenetic modifications include DNA methylation and histone modifications. Of them, DNA methylation, in which a methyl group attaches to cytosine at carbon number five, has extensively been explored. This methylation contributes in the gene expression, can permanently be acquired and pass over generations.

Histone modifications involve methylation, acetylation, phosphorylation, ubiquitylation, and sumoylation of histone proteins that are responsible for chromatin structure. These modifications can permanently change the gene expression. Non-coding RNAs is another type that bind to DNA, RNA, and proteins alter the gene expression regardless of DNA sequence. Hence these epigenetic modifications play crucial role in DNA expression regulation. One can conclude that genetics and epigenetics are highly interlinked.

If these epigenetic modifications are inheritable, known as Environmentally induced epigenetic transgenerational inheritance has been observed in many species, in plants, birds, rodents, insects, pigs and humans, can play a significant role in evolution. These modifications can run into minimum of ten generations to hundreds as in case of some plants. One example of this was observed by Carl Linnaeus in flowering plants I.e., heat-induced flowering trait, this altered trait had been persisted for hundred generations.

Changed environment effect on the biology of organism strongly goes in favor of Lamarckism as these alterations in traits could be observed in next progeny. Darwin also put forward the importance of environment in evolution process and if these environmental factors persist for large span of time, the changes we observe then go in correspondence with Lamarckism by epigenetic means.

A recent study was conducted on the speciation of finches, observed by Darwin on Galapagos islands, changes in phenotype no doubt were results from DNA mutations but an interesting thing that was explored is that epigenetics alterations(epimutations) are larger in number and more related to phylogenetic distance among species.

There are other more obvious evidence in support of epigenetics playing a critical role in evolution. In a nutshell, evolution can be explained better on molecular basis with the unification of neo-Lamarckism and neo-Darwinism, as both are responsible for evolution and highly interlinked. Infact, trait variations within the population can be increased by environmental epigenetics, which empower natural selection.

Scientists are now accepting the role of epigenetics in the process of evolution as evolution could not be justified just on the basis of classic theories of Darwin. Lamarcks concept with the addition of science of epigenetics cannot be just put back and ignored. By accepting, Lamarcks ideas there is no mean to disrespect the classical genetics and Darwinism. Indeed, there unification could change the understanding of evolutionary scientists and will help us to understand the insight concept of evolution. Genetics and epigenetics should not be considered as conflicting subjects. Evolutionary processes like genetic drift and genetic assimilation could easily be grasped with the understanding of epigenetics. Evolution explanation needs a unified theory combination of Darwinism and Lamarckism and integration of them would give us broad and better view of molecular causes that control life.

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Darwinism, Lamarckism And Epigenetics Unify The Theory Of Evolution - - Technology Times Pakistan

In some ways, the 67th legislative session was unlike any other starting off with a court case over a district seat, pandemic protocols and eventually the expulsion of a lawmaker. During those unique circumstances, here are some of the bills that became law.

The governor and state health officer can no longer enact a mask mandate. That bill passed both chambers, and had the votes to overcome the governors veto.

I believe good people, when theyre educated and informed will make good decisions, Sen. Terry Wanzek said in support of the bill.

And you might see some better roads and bridges soon. A $680 million bipartisan bonding bill aims to improve infrastructure using legacy fund dollars.

Well this bill will be one of probably three bills coming through the legislature that will put Legacy money out into the state of North Dakota, investments, grants and so forth to help the people of this state move forward, Sen. Rich Wardner said.

Soon, schools will have immunity from lawsuits for posting the Ten Commandments in the classroom.

I certainly hope our teachers would be able to teach that as much as we teach Darwinism today, Sen. Janne Myrdal said.

Plus, a slew of gun-related bills passed, one of which makes North Dakota a stand-your-ground state, eliminating the duty to retreat before using deadly force, in some circumstances.

Its not saying you can shoot anybody you want. Its saying if you find yourself at risk of death or serious bodily harm, or a felony involving violence, you dont have to run away, Rep. Ben Koppelman said.

But lots of bills didnt pass.

Do you really think any person would change their gender and subject themselves to abuse just to win a track event, or play on a basketball team? Sen. JoNell Bakke said.

One that came close would have restricted transgender students participation in public school sports. The governor vetoed it, and the legislature almost overrode it but was four votes shy in the Senate.

Advocates of legalizing marijuana were also dealt a blow, with a bill that made it through the House but was snuffed out in the Senate.

The object is not to make it where theres no regulation whatsoever, but the idea is to say that this is a legal substance, but not that this is an unregulated legal substance, Rep. Marvin Nelson said.

The 47 senators and 94 representatives meet in Bismarck every two years.

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Recapping the 67th legislative session - KX NEWS

To ultra-conservatives, taxes are theft by the majority to take what they have no moral right to: the fruits of another person's labors. Democracy is undesirable because, to them, it allows a majority (the average citizen) to impose their will (social programs) on a minority (the wealthy).

A cabal of billionaires has been working for the last several decades to create an ultra-conservative libertarian society. Some of their propaganda organizations are the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Tax Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and others. They want to eliminate government-provided Social Security and Medicare, social programs, unemployment compensation, the graduated income tax, public schools and colleges, the United States Postal Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other programs that they believe are financed by taking money from the wealthy and giving it to the undeserved.

Ultra-conservatives want a return to an unfettered Lassaiz-faire capitalism that existed before the rise of labor unions. It was social Darwinism at its finest: robber barons, 12-hour work days, child labor, poor pay, cycles of recessions, unsafe working conditions and contaminated food. They only want a government for protecting their property and defending the country from foreign invasion; anything else is an abridgement of their freedom to make money by their own initiative any way they can. If you're not up to the task, that's your problem. Their attitude is that if workers feel exploited at their workplace, they can just look for another job somewhere else.

However, capitalism is a system devised by the very people that are bound to succeed in that system, that is, the brightest, the most aggressive, and sometimes the greediest. Without controls there is a tendency for employers to exploit their employees as the history of early capitalism has shown. Some people, like Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who are champions of Laissez-faire capitalism, may say it's too bad some can't compete; it's just as well that they are winnowed out of society.

As to taxes, former Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. stated that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. However, the wealthy fail to realize they are profiting from a system set up by the framers of the Constitution that favors the land owning and monied class: those with the education and means to exploit the system. Also, they are not cognizant they are in that position by the luck of the draw; not everyone is born able to compete on an unfair playing field, and consequently the wealthy are ethically responsible to give back to society for the greater good of the country. Failure to do so only leads to more poverty, unemployment, crime, and eventually rebellion when things get out of hand.

Republican President D. Eisenhower had a 90 percent tax rate for the super rich during his administration. According to Eisenhower, the super rich could avoid the high taxes by investing their money in things that make America stronger. If they wanted to avoid high taxes, he said they could invest in business expansions and higher employee wages. The Eisenhower years generated enough taxes to launch and complete the labyrinth of interstate highways.

Ideally, we would have a society where we consider everyone as part of our human family and eligible for all rights and privileges. As with religious and secular humanists, we would have concern for all people without regard to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or station in life. We would have free health care for all through a government single-payer system similar to other advanced countries. We would eliminate the retributive death penalty as the vast majority of the countries of the world have done. Right now we stand ignobly with countries like Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria, Uganda and others.

We would attempt to be inclusive instead of divisive. In sum, we would have a nurturing, peaceful and cooperative society, somewhat like the Nordic countries. Our brutally competitive society, with its winners and losers, along with unemployment, poor pay and racism is a prime contributor to poverty, homelessness, crime and a world-leading high incarceration rate.

David Keranen is a retired Bakersfield College math professor. In retirement he reads extensively, writes letters and articles, and plays occasional golf.

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Community Voices: Whoa, President Biden wants to raise taxes on the wealthy! - The Bakersfield Californian

Photo: Ernst Haeckel, via Wikimedia Commons.

Editors note: For Parts 1 and 2 of Professor Weikarts review ofSocial Darwinism, seehere and here respectively.

One of the key problems with Jeffrey OConnell and Michael Ruses new book onSocial Darwinismis what it omits: substantive discussion of social Darwinism among Darwinian biologists, especially the kind of social Darwinism that justified militarism, racism, and even racial extermination. To be sure, they do discuss Darwin himself they couldnt really get around that. However, from Darwins time until Julian Huxley in the mid 20th century, the only biologists mentioned are those who opposed social Darwinism e.g., Thomas Henry Huxley. (I should note that despite his rejection of evolutionary ethics, Huxley was not entirely free of social Darwinism see my essay on this here.)

The figures during this period that they do discuss are industrialists, military men, and politicians. Why is this? It is not for lack of examples, because many Darwinian biologists in the late 19th and early 20th century were social Darwinists who promoted laissez-faire capitalism and/or militarism and/or racism and/or racial extermination.

The most conspicuous omission is Ernst Haeckel, the leading Darwinian biologist in Germany. Actually, the authors do discuss Haeckel briefly, but their comments misleadingly imply that he was not a social Darwinist. For instance, they mention that he opposed World War I. However, they conveniently dont explain that the reason he opposed European countries fighting each other was because he thought European wars killed the wrong people the best and brightest, the so-called fittest. Thus, he thought Europeans should focus their military activities on exterminating inferior races in colonial wars. The authors also forget to mention that during World War I Haeckel changed his mind and wrote an entire book justifying the German war effort and promoting German expansionism. In that work he interpreted the First World War as an expression of the Darwinian struggle for existence.

Haeckel was by no means an outlier. As Ive shown inFrom Darwin to Hitler, many German biologists embraced social Darwinist militarism and racial extermination. Many American biologists also promoted social Darwinist positions. Henry Fairfield Osborn, professor of zoology at Columbia University in the early 20th century, wrote a foreword to Madison Grants racist screed,The Passing of the Great Race. Charles Davenport, a Harvard professor who founded the Eugenics Record Office, promoted immigration restrictions against the allegedly inferior stock that was coming to the United States in the early 20th century. Social Darwinist racism was so mainstream in early 20th-century America that it appeared in standard biology textbooks.

Despite ignoring all these scientists who promoted social Darwinist positions, the authors do later discuss Julian Huxley, a politically progressive biologist who promoted evolutionary ethics, and E. O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology. However, they dont really make clear if they think Huxley was a social Darwinist or not. They also dont explicitly say that Wilson is a social Darwinist, but they seem to imply it by tagging him as a Spencerian (see my previous post on Darwin and Spencer).

Why is this omission so problematic? After all, this is a short book and they cannot discuss everything. The reason is because it implies that social Darwinism was a position taken by non-scientists who just didnt understand the science when they applied Darwinism to political and social thought. It neglects an important facet of the story: Many Darwinian biologists and anthropologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries argued that biological inequality, racism, and militarism were based on sound scientific (i.e., Darwinian) principles. Haeckel, for instance, scorned socialists for their un-Darwinian egalitarianism. You will not discover it in this book, but in its heyday social Darwinist racism and militarism were considered scientific.

Originally posted here:

New Book: Social Darwinism Among the Biologists - Discovery Institute

Editors note: For Part 1 of Professor Weikarts review of Social Darwinism, see here.

In Cambridge University Presss new bookSocial Darwinism,Jeffrey OConnell and Michael Ruse tackle an issue that I have written about extensively: the connections between Darwinism and Nazi ideology. Unfortunately, however, as far as I can tell, they ignore almost everything I have written (I have to say almost because they do quote from a blog post I wrote). To be sure, they do cite my book,From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, though I cannot tell if they read a line of it, because they never discuss any specific material from the book. Worse yet, they do not even cite my later books,Hitlers Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress(2009) orHitlers Religion: The Twisted Ideas that Drove the Third Reich(2016), even though these are the most thorough and important scholarly books that deal with the topic of Hitlers social Darwinism.

In their chapter on The Hitler Problem they make the completely untenable assertion that Hitler did not believe in evolution at all. As is obvious from their citations, the way they came to this conclusion was by reading Robert Richardss works, especiallyWas Hitler a Darwinian?(Richards answers his question with a resounding, No!).

My book,Hitlers Ethic, contains an avalanche of evidence that Hitler believed in evolution, including human evolution. My later book,Hitlers Religion, contains a chapter, Was Hitler a Creationist? that directly refutes Richardss false arguments. Here I can only provide a few tidbits, but if anyone wants more evidence, including explicit refutations of Richardss claims, please consult these works.

Let me give some examples of Hitlers belief in evolution and social Darwinism from a variety of sources: HitlersMein Kampfand hisSecond Book, his speeches, his monologues, and testimony from his associates.

InMein Kampfand in hisSecond Book, Hitler not only uses Darwinian terms constantly, such as evolution, struggle for existence, and struggle for life, but several times he explicitly describes the struggle for existence as a natural law that humans should be careful not to contravene. In one passage he mentioned that the struggle in nature vanquishes the weak and sickly, and then stated,

Always struggle is a means to improve the health and stamina of the species, and thus a cause of its evolution. By any other process all development and evolution would cease, and the very reverse would take place.

In HitlersSecond Book, social Darwinism is even more obvious, as Hitler opens the book with a chapter on The Struggle for Life (which incidentally is a term that Darwin himself used as a synonym for the struggle for existence). In this chapter Hitler explained in detail his view that organisms, including humans, reproduce faster than the available resources and living space, so this makes the struggle for existence inevitable. In the limitation of this living space, Hitler asserted, lies the compulsion for the struggle for survival, and the struggle for survival, in turn, contains the precondition for evolution. (Adolf Hitler,Hitlers Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel toMein Kampf, ed.Gerhard L. Weinberg [New York: Enigma Books, 2003], 8)

The struggle for existence was a frequent theme in Hitlers speeches, too, and in a 1927 speech he clarified its significance in human evolution, stating,

You are the product of this struggle. If your ancestors had not fought, today you would be an animal. They did not gain their rights through peaceful debates with wild animals, and later perhaps also with humans, through the comparative adjustment of relations by a pacifist court of arbitration, but rather the earth has been acquired on the basis of the right of the stronger.

In a 1942 speech Hitler explained that Germany needed to fight wars to comply with the laws of nature. He then explained,This struggle leads in effect to an unswerving andeternal selection, to the selectionof the better and tougher. We thus see in this struggle an element of the building up of all living things. He then reiterated that struggle is a law of nature that produces progressive evolution. (Hitler,War der Zweite Weltkrieg fr Deutschland vermeidbar? May 30, 1942, inHitlers Tischgesprche, 492)

In Hitlers monologues he often broached the topic of evolution and the struggle for existence. For instance, in a long monologue about evolution, science, and religion on October 24, 1941, he was dismissive toward Christianity and clearly expressed support for evolution. At the close of the monologue he stated,

There have been humans at the rank at least of a baboon in any case for 300,000 years at least. The ape is distinguished from the lowest human less than such a human is from a thinker like, for example, Schopenhauer.

Otto Dietrich, Hitlers publicist, claimed that Hitler considered nature the source of the final truth about life. He took such principles as the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest and the strongest, for the law of nature and considered them a higher imperative which should also rule in the community life of men. Dietrich also stated that Hitlers evolutionary views on natural selection and survival of the fittest coincided with the ideas of Darwin and Haeckel. (Otto Dietrich,The Hitler I Knew, trans. Richard and Clara Winston [London, 1957], 19, 153) Hitlers personal secretary, Christa Schroeder, concurred, stating that Hitler believed:

Science does not yet clearly know from which root human beings have arisen. We are certainly the highest stage of evolution of any mammal, which evolved from reptiles to mammals, perhaps through apes, to humans. We are a member of creation and children of nature, and the same laws apply to us as to all living organisms. And in nature the law of the struggle rules from the beginning. Everything incapable of living and everything weak will be eliminated.

OConnell and Ruse ignore all this evidence (and much, much more) that I have presented in my writings. Instead, they emphasize the valid point that anti-Semitism was crucial in Hitlers ideology, but Darwin never promoted anti-Semitism. True enough, but it misses the important point that no one certainly not me has ever argued that Darwinism contributed to anti-Semitism or that Hitler derived everything in his worldview from Darwinism. On the contrary, I have clearly argued in all my works that Hitler was an eclectic thinker who drew on many different intellectual influences some of them contradictory. He was influenced by the ideas of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner, and many other thinkers, both well-known and obscure. (I examine many of these at length inHitlers Religion).

However, the influence of social Darwinism on Hitler was not minimal, because it was a key ingredient of many important Nazi doctrines, such as racial struggle, living space, militarism, eugenics, euthanasia, and more. Not only that, but as we shall see in my next post, these ideas of Hitlers were not just fringe ideas of people who had little understanding of Darwinian biology. Many Darwinian biologists and anthropologists promoted these ideas, too.

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New Book: Social Darwinism and The Hitler Problem - Discovery Institute

The consensus is that the current pandemic will be with us for a long time to come. We will enter a period of intermittent outbreaks of Covid-19, whose precise characteristics are yet to be defined. There are no clear rules governing the interplay between our immune system and the mutations of the virus. We will have to live with uncertainty, however dramatic the advances in contemporary biomedical science.

Yet we know a few things for sure.

We know that the recurrence of pandemics is related to the dominant model of development and consumption, and to the associated changes in climate; to the pollution of seas and rivers and to the deforestation of forests.

We know that the acute phase of this pandemic the possibility of severe contamination will only end when 60-70 percent of the worlds population is immunised.

We know that this task is hampered by worsening social inequalities within and between countries, combined with the fact that Big Pharma does not want to give up patent rights on vaccines. Vaccines are already seen as the new liquid gold, succeeding oil, the liquid gold of the 20th century.

We know that state policies, political cohesion around the pandemic and public behaviour are decisive. The degree of success depends on the combination of epidemiological surveillance, infection reduction through containment, the effectiveness of the hospital back-up, better public knowledge about the pandemic and attention to special vulnerabilities.

Mistakes, negligence and even necrophiliac intentions on the part of some political leaders have given rise to forms of death-by-health policies that we call social Darwinism: the elimination of disposable social groups because they are old, because they are poor or because they are discriminated against for ethnic, racial or religious reasons.

Finally, we know that the European (and North American) world showed in this pandemic the same arrogance with which it has treated the non-European world for the past five centuries. Believing that the best technical-scientific knowledge comes from the West, it has been unwilling to learn from the way other countries in the Global South have dealt with epidemics and, specifically, with this virus.

Long before Europeans realised the importance of the mask, the Chinese made it compulsory. On the other hand, due to a toxic mix of prejudice and lobbying pressure from Western pharmaceutical companies, the EU, the US and Canada have relied exclusively on vaccines produced by these companies, with as yet unpredictable consequences.

On top of all this, we know that there is a geo-strategic vaccine war badly disguised by empty appeals to the well-being and health of the world's population. According to the science journal Nature, as of 30 March, the world needs eleven billion doses of vaccines (based on two doses per person) to achieve herd immunity on a global scale.

As of the end of February, orders for some 8.6 billion doses were confirmed, of which 6 billion were destined for the rich countries of the Global North. This means that impoverished countries, which account for 80% of the worlds population, will have access to less than a third of the available vaccines.

This vaccine injustice is particularly perverse because, given the global connections that characterise our time, no one will be truly protected until the whole world is protected. Moreover, the longer it takes to achieve herd immunity on a global scale, the greater the likelihood that virus mutations will become more dangerous to health and more resistant to available vaccines.

A recent study, which brought together 77 scientists from several countries around the world, concluded that within a year or less, mutations in the virus will render the first generation of vaccines ineffective. This is all the more likely the longer it takes to vaccinate the worlds population.

Now, according to estimates by the Peoples Vaccine Alliance, a global coalition of health and humanitarian organisations, at the current rate only 10% of the population in the poorest countries will be vaccinated by the end of next year. Further delays will result in a further proliferation of fake news the infodemic, as the WHO calls it, which has been particularly destructive in Africa.

There is consensus today that one of the most effective measures would be the temporary suspension of intellectual property rights on patents for Covid-19 vaccines by big pharmaceutical companies. Such a suspension would make vaccine production more global, faster and cheaper. Thus, more quickly, global herd immunity would be achieved.

Excerpted: Vaccines Must Be Treated as Public Goods Before It's Too Late

Commondreams.org

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Public goods - The News International

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Cambrian Explosion Has Just Gone Nuclear - Discovery Institute