Category Archives: Darwinism

In early 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Charles Darwins On the Origin of Speciespublished in Britain in November 1859became a topic of conversation among a number of New England intellectuals. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau read the Origin. So did Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa Alcott, and Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children's Aid Society. Two leading scientists also read the Origin: the botanist Asa Gray, who defended Darwin, and the zoologist Louis Agassiz, who attacked Darwin. Now, in The Book That Changed America, Randall Fuller declares that "the Origin did what few books ever do: alter the conversation a society is having about itself."

Did Darwin's theory of evolution really "ignite a nation"? It's hard to say from the evidence Fuller provides in this lucid book because he writes mainly about New England intellectuals. (Indeed, my only quibble with Fuller is that occasionally he adds novelistic touches that are not warranted.) Yet perhaps the subtitle is accurate, for Darwin wrote to Asa Gray: "I assure you I am astonished at the impression my Book has made on many minds."

The Origin only marginally altered the conversation about slavery. Darwin's theory that every living creature is descended from one prototype undermined the argument for polygenesisthe notion that God created blacks as a separate species. Yet many writers who agreed with Darwin that there was a common origin for all human beings nevertheless argued that blacks were at a lower stage of development than whites, somewhere between apes and humans. This view was widespread among Southern apologists for slaverycartoonists often depicted Abraham Lincoln as a man/apebut this view was also commonplace in the North. The Origin did not change anyone's mind about slavery; it just gave writers for and against slavery different arguments to support their positions. Darwinism, Fuller says, "could be used to support just about any social or political claim one wanted to make."

Like all the New England intellectuals, Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray condemned slavery, yet Agassiz insisted that blacks were a different species. Opposing miscegenationit was called "amalgamation"Agassiz believed that people of African descent should return to Africa. Gray said that it was impossible for blacks to be a different species: Different species cannot interbreed, yet slaveholders often mated with slaves. Polygenists argued that biracial children were infertile, but there was no evidence to support this claim. Charles Loring Brace agreed with Agassiz that it would be best if blacks emigrated: The United States, he argued, was a great nation because its leaders were Anglo-Saxons. He worried (Fuller writes) "that one day America might not be a white nation at all." Brace, however, disagreed with Agassiz about Darwin: He admired the Origin and made use of Darwin's theory in his Races of the Old World, which Fuller calls "a sprawling, ramshackle work ... deeply marred by a series of internal contradictions."

The Origin had a greater impact on the conversation about science and religion. Many Americans rejected the notion that the diversity of species was a result of chance. They agreed with Agassiz, who conducted a public campaign against Darwin, calling the theory of natural selection "fanciful." Agassiz said that God had created immutable species: "What," he asked, "has the whale in the arctic regions to do with the lion or the tiger in the tropical Indies?" Agassiz always invoked God as an explanation for the diversity of the animal kingdom: "There is a design according to which they were built, which must have been conceived before they were called into existence." (Gray argued that Agassiz's view "was theistic to excess." By referring the origin and distribution of species "directly to the Divine will," he said, Agassiz was removing the study of organic life from "the domain of inductive science.")

Bronson Alcott rejected any theory of species diversity that left out God. He offered his own odd take on evolutionarguing, in Fuller's words, that "all creatures had begun as humans, as part of a Universal Spirit. ... The lower the animal in the chain of being, the further that particular animal had fallen from its true spiritual state." Humans came first! Alcott was the most woolly-minded of the New England intellectuals, yet even the astute Gray was reluctant to give up the notion of design. He wrote to Darwin to say that design must have played some part in evolution; how else can one explain the extraordinary nature of the human eye? "I grieve to say that I cannot honestly go as far as you do about design," Darwin replied. "I cannot think the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design." Darwin maintained that "the notion of design must after all rest mostly on faith." But he did not think his theory should affect people's religious beliefs: "I had no intention to write atheistically." Gray, a devout Presbyterian, concluded that God chose natural selection as the method for creation: "A fortuitous Cosmos is simply inconceivable," he said. "The alternative is a designed Cosmos."

Fuller points out that, by 1876, "a large swath of the liberal clergy" agreed with Asa Gray that natural selection was a mechanism employed by God. Yet, to this day, many Americans do not accept Darwin's theory: According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Group, "34 percent of Americans reject evolution entirely, saying humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."

The Origin also affected the conversation Americans were having about politics. Should capitalism be regulated? Adam Smith thought that it should, but Social Darwinists warned that regulating capitalism was misguided because it was against nature. Capitalism should be understood as a Darwinian struggle where the "fittest" thrived; why help the "unfit" when it was clear from nature that they were doomed to fail? So argued Yale social scientist William Graham Sumner:

A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.

A good gloss on Sumner's thought is a remark Gray made to Brace: "When you unscientific people take up a scientific principle, you are apt to make too much of it, to push it to conclusions beyond what is warranted by the facts."

Fuller begins and ends this book with Thoreau, who admired Darwin's detailed observation of the natural world in both The Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of Species. Thoreau was a budding natural scientist who took thousands of pages of notes about local flora. "What he intended to do with all this data," Fuller says, "is still not entirely clear." Fuller speculates that Thoreau may have "had difficulty organizing his material into a coherent project. ... He had adopted the methods of science without the benefit of a scientific theory."

The strongest evidence that Darwin influenced Thoreau comes from Thoreau's notebooks. In the last year of his life (Thoreau died in 1862) he embarked on a project to record the innumerable ways in which local forest trees propagated and thrived in a constantly changing environment. And in his notebook, he offers a hypothesis about what he has observed: "The development theory implies a greater vital force in nature, because it is more flexible and accommodating, and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation." Thoreau, Fuller contends, "no longer relies upon divinity to explain the natural world." Fuller supports his contention with another sentence from Thoreau's notebooks: "Thus we should say that oak forests are produced by a kind of accident."

Of course, the notion of "accident" would have been rejected by Bronson Alcott, who was a close friend of Thoreau's. Alcott visited Thoreau on the day he died, reporting that his friend was "lying patiently & cheerfully on the bed he would never leave again." Another visitor, an aunt, asked Thoreau: "Have you made your peace with God?"

"We never quarreled," Thoreau replied.

Stephen Miller is the author, most recently, of Walking New York: Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole.

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Survival of the Pithiest - The Weekly Standard

We are now contemplating, Heaven save the mark, a bill that would tax the well for the benefit of the ill.

Although that quote reads like it could be part of the Republican repeal-and-replace assault against the Affordable Care Act (ACA), its actually from a 1949 editorial in The New York State Journal of Medicine denouncing health insurance itself.

Indeed, the attacks on the ACA seem to have revived a survival-of-the-fittest attitude most of us thought had vanished in America long ago. Yet, again and again, there it was in plain sight, as when House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) declared: The idea of Obamacare is that the people who are healthy pay for the people who are sick. Contemporary language, but the same thinking that sank President Harry Trumans health care plan almost seven decades ago.

Ryans indignation highlighted a fundamental divergence in attitudes that repeatedly turned the health care debate into a clash over the philosophy behind Obamacare-style health insurance. To some, the communal pooling of financial risk of medical expenses seems too often an unacceptable risk to personal responsibility.

As a researcher who has documented this approach to health care, Ive been startled to see the debate over the AHCA reignite a political philosophy and policy approach that seemed to be have been discredited and be in sharp decline.

When Truman launched the first comprehensive effort to cover all Americans, most of the population had no health insurance.

Last year, thanks to the ACA, nearly 90 percent did, according to a Gallup-Healthways poll. Yet then and now, many conservatives have downplayed the impact on physical health and focused, instead, on fiscal temptation.

Take, for instance, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) warning low-income Americans on March 7, 2017 that they had to make a choice about their spending: So rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care. (He later walked back his statement.)

In reality, of course, the premiums from the GOPs late and abandoned American Health Care Act would dwarf any savings from iPhone abstinence. For a 64-year-old making US$26,500 a year, the cost of health insurance would have shot up from $1,700 to $14,600, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), or more than half that individuals pre-tax income.

Chaffetz and others seem to sincerely believe that what keeps the great majority of people well is the fact that they cant afford to be ill although those words come from the 1949 editorialist again, not a Trump administration tweet. The editorial continued:

That is a harsh, stern dictum and we readily admit that under it a certain number of cases of early tuberculosis and cancer, for example, may go undetected. Is it not better that a few such should perish rather than that the majority of the population should be encouraged on every occasion to run sniveling to the doctor? That in order to get their moneys worth they should be sick at every available opportunity? They will find out in time that the services they think they get for nothing but which the whole people of the United States would pay for are also worth nothing.

As it happens, the effect predicted in 1949 on the detection of cancer less of it is precisely what has happened with the spread of high-deductible health plans praised by conservatives for encouraging more careful shopping by consumers. A study in Medical Care showed that screening rates for colorectal cancer declined under high-deductible plans until, under Obamacare, the federal government forced those plans to include first-dollar coverage of preventive services. The screening rates for colorectal cancer promptly rose. A recent study in Cancer found the same results for mammography.

Separately, surveys and research on high-deductible plans have found that 20 to 25 percent of people have avoided needed care of all kinds because they cant afford it.

Nonetheless, the GOPs conservative wing denounced ACA-mandated essential health benefits, echoing the idea that it is a threat to American freedom. Or as that same New York medical journal put it:

It is time that someone everyone should hoist Mr. Charles Darwin from his grave and blow life into his ashes so that they could proclaim again to the world his tough but practical doctrine of survival of the fittestThe Declaration of Independence said that man was entitled to the pursuit of happiness. Any man who wishes to pursue happiness had better be able to stand on his own feet. He will not be successful if he feels that he can afford to be ill.

For most physicians, that compassionless condescension lies in the faraway past; for example, the AHCA was overwhelmingly opposed by medical professional groups, including the American Medical Association.

Yet an implacable medical Darwinism retains a firm grip on many conservatives, even on physicians. Then-Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, an obstetrician/gynecologist and prominent Republican, told a sobbing woman at a 2009 public meeting on the ACA that government is not the answer when she said she couldnt afford care for her brain-injured husband.

Similarly, in 2011, after the ACA passed, then-Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), also an obstetrician/gynecologist, was asked what should be done about an uninsured, 30-year-old man in a coma. What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself, Paul responded, adding, Thats what freedom is all about, taking your own risk.

Or as conservative scholar Michael Strain put it in a 2015 Washington Post editorial: In a world of scarce resources, a slightly higher mortality rate is an acceptable price to pay for certain goals includingless government coercion and more individual liberty.

Strain is right, of course, that resources are limited. Moreover, its long been known that overgenerous health insurance can lead to overuse of medical care services.

However, most Americans, including some prominent conservative intellectuals, dont see stripping away health insurance from 24 million countrymen the CBOs estimate of the AHCAs 10-year impact as striking a blow for liberty. In a Quinnipiac University poll released just before the scheduled AHCA vote, only 17 percent of respondents approved of the Republican plan and 46 percent said theyd be less likely to vote for someone who supported it.

One day later, GOP leaders withdrew the legislation, sparing Republican representatives a vote on the record. Although Vice President Mike Pence has called evolution an unproven theory, it turns out Republicans really do believe in survival of the fittest (at least in a political sense), after all.

Michael L. Millenson, Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Did medical Darwinism doom the GOP health plan? - Raw Story

Twenty-seven years ago marked the end of a shopping era in Baltimore. That was the year 1990 that retailer Hutzlers shut its doors forever after 132 years in the retail business.

The Grand Dame of retail in that town, my hometown, wasnt just a store: Hutzlers was a shopping experience. When its customers walked through its doors, they were treated to unbelievably personalized service and a vast but curated selection of exclusive merchandise. When they walked out, they held tightly to the brand cache that came from carrying a shopping bag emblazoned with the Hutzlers name.

As a longtime customer exclaimed when the store closed its doors, Hutzlers was like your mother; they took care of you. In 1990, everyone living in Baltimore, having grown up shopping at Hutzlers for just about every significant event in their lives, grieved like theyd just lost someone special.

I reflected on this story as I was preparing to speak to a group of retail executives last week since, like most middle-class kids growing up in Baltimore, shopping at Hutzlers was just what you did. It was where moms took their little girls to buy their Easter and Christmas finery and took their little boys to buy their Oxford shirts and navy blue blazers. Its shoe department selection and service rivaled any department store of its era.

I thought the Hutzlers story was an appropriate metaphor to spark a conversation about the state of retail today and what we might learn from those retail Grand Dames who exist no longer. Its a fitting case study to uncover important insights and reflect on the crisis that traditional retail is facing.

And debate an ending that may also be both similar and inevitable and perhaps even the right outcome for the many traditional retail brands who now struggle to reinvent themselves and survive.

Retails Golden Age

Hutzlers opened its doors for the first time in 1858 on the corner of Howard and Clay Streets in downtown Baltimore. One of the Big Four that occupied the same block in downtown Baltimore Stewarts, Hochschild Kohns, The Hecht Company and Hutzlers the department store then was a modern marvel of merchandise selection and presentation all under one roof. Women went shopping in dresses and hats, men in suits and ties. Shopping was an enjoyable, somewhat leisurely and very social, experience.

Hutzlers prided itself on being a retail innovator from the start.

Its stores had passenger elevators with elevator operators, gigantic display windows and a refund policy that gave customers back their cash if they returned items they no longer wanted even if those items werent bought from their store. They had a restaurant, the Tea Room, that served homemade Maryland classics, like Crab Imperial and Lady Baltimore Cake, that not only attracted shoppers but nearby businessmen for lunch.

Hutzlers was the first store to create a one-price policy that eliminated the common practice of haggling with sales associates and with it, the inequities over what its customers would pay for the same item.

They also curated merchandise that tapped into what consumers wanted to buy at that time. Hutzlers boasted, for example, that its fabric, button and lace department rivaled anything that existed outside of New York. What may seem quaint and anachronistic by todays standards, their approach responded to a pretty important consumer trend in the late 19th and early part of the 20th centuries: the rise in popularity of the sewing machine and the desire of middle-class women to wear different clothes every day. By 1900, nearly all middle-class women had sewing rooms in their homes, using them to make clothes for themselves and their children. Hutzlers wanted those women as their customers.

During the Great Depression, Hutzlers also responded to the economic hard times upon which many of its customers had fallen. Hutzlers Downstairs, described as a thrift store with Hutzlers standards, opened on the lower level of its downtown retail store in 1929. It carried a line of discounted merchandise, but not just any discounted merchandise merchandise that came with the Hutzlers imprimatur for style and quality.

That customer intimacy was the foundation upon which Hutzlers built its business and its financial strength for its first 90 years. It invested time, money and effort into building and securing those relationships. Someone, for example, was assigned to read the newspaper daily for notices of customer (or family member) deaths, births and engagements and then send personal handwritten notes, sometimes even accompanied by a small gift to those customers.

Hutzlers launched a free, same-day delivery service for its charge customers who wanted the convenience of charging and sending their bundles home. And for women who drove to its downtown retail location from the suburbs and parked in their parking garage, sales associates voluntarily carried their bundles so that women didnt have to juggle both their shopping bags and their kids on the way to the car.

Hutzlers focus on the customer could also be seen in its retail merchandising strategy.

Buyers worked with brands to source and then sell exclusive labels and clothing lines. It also launched new, popular and first-to-market products in their stores, always in limited supplies to engender immediacy and scarcity and always with the idea to use those products to bring people into the stores to buy those items and other things while there. In the 1970s, Hutzlers began staging a series of festivals in their downtown store, featuring items from a variety of European ports of call to keep women coming into the store to explore and buy those one-of-a-kind products.

Hutzlers sales were legendary and widely coveted because they were held only twice a year. Its annual Centennial Sale featured markdowns of existing merchandise. But it was the annual Occasion Extraordinaire sale that created the desire for people to stand in line for hours before the store opened to get their pick of that sale litter.

OE, as it was known, required a rigorous curation of merchandise on the part of Hutzlers buyers, well in advance of the sale. Items made available for the sale had to be approved by management first and offered at a minimum of 20 percent off. Often these products were sourced from other parts of the world and specified only for this sale. One of the privileges of being a Hutzlers charge customer was access to this sale two days before it was open to the public.

Life was very good for the Hutzlers family and its eponymic department store.

Until, suddenly, it wasnt. At all.

Hutzlers saw the same data that everyone else did in the 1950s and 60s and responded to the economic reality of its shoppers moving to the suburbs. It expanded its footprint accordingly, opening its first suburban location 80 years later in the affluent suburb of Towson, Maryland, in 1952. Between 1952 and 1981, Hutzlers opened nine other suburban locations.

It also kept investing in its downtown flagship store, given its significant contribution to the bottom line at the time. It was also an asset that the Hutzlers family valued immensely. And it was also a decision that would ultimately set the stage for the death spiral that would deliver Hutzlers demise.

The late 1960s and 1970s was a time of great social and economic upheaval in Baltimore. Civil unrest drove those who once lived and shopped downtown to the suburbs. Over a 40-year period, from 1950 to 1990, Baltimore Citys population decreased by nearly 214,000 people with 119,000 residents leaving the city in the decade between 1970 and 1980. Another 51,000 left between 1980 and 1990. Those who used to shop downtown also stopped going.

At the same time, the Vietnam War created a wave of activism against The Establishment. Young people turned their backs on, among other things, the retail stores where their establishment parents shopped.

The two-year recession that started in 1973 saw the post-WWII economic boom come to a screeching halt. The rise of the two-income family during that period introduced time pressures that didnt exist before. Women entering the workforce had no time for leisurely shopping trips to Hutzlers downtown store or even any of its suburban retail locations.

At the same time, discount department stores came marching full-force into Baltimores suburbs. Caldor, Two Guys, Korvettes, Epsteins, Luskins to name but a few appealed to this cash-strapped, time-starved shopper under the rubric of more value for less money. Those stores were a short, easy drive away with free parking in vast parking lots.

Hutzlers, not unlike its other Big Four compadres, began to see its sales suffer because of these shifts and saw it happen most dramatically at its downtown flagship store, which once drove the bulk of its revenue. In 1968, the downtown store delivered $22 million in annual sales. Nine years later, in 1977, those sales had been gutted by 50 percent.

But despite the lack of customers and the lack of sales there, Hutzlers doubled down on investing in its downtown location. While three of its Big Four competitors cut back and ultimately closed their downtown operations in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hutzlers invested millions in the renovation of its flagship store one they affectionally called the mothership. That renovation was completed in 1985 in the hopes of bringing its suburban customers back downtown as part of the citys bigger plans for urban renewal and redevelopment.

Five years earlier, in 1980, Hutzlers opened a new store near the citys brand new, tony Inner Harbor in an effort to appeal to a female business customer shopping on her lunch break. A smaller format store, it featured luggage and work-appropriate clothing lines for men and women.

Neither delivered the impact that the Hutzlers team had expected.

The limited selection of merchandise combined with competition from the newer boutique shops in the Inner Harbor area meant the store failed to grab the attention of that female shopper on her lunchbreak. And the Palace Store was stocked with merchandise at price points that might have appealed to a suburban shopper thirty years before, but was well out of the reach of the urban dweller with far less money to spend.

Keeping the downtown store afloat in the midst of the macro social and economic issues that retailers were facing in the late 1960s through the 1980s drained the profits made in Hutzlers other suburban stores. That meant less cash all around with which to buy the more exclusive merchandise that the loyal Hutzlers shopper was accustomed to buying.

Hutzlers had no choice but to change its merchandise mix to reflect both its cash-strapped reality and, it thought, the shoppers demand for more reasonably priced goods. But that only confused its loyal customer base, who no longer knew what Hutzlers stood for, while failing to attract new customers who had already established other store preferences.

Hutzlers was forced to close stores and sell off real estate assets, notably the land upon which the parking garage adjacent to its Towson store was located. The Towson store was the last Hutzlers store to close in January of 1990.

Ironically, perhaps, that location is home to a mega Barnes & Noble (NYSE:BKS) that will close in May of this year. None of the other stores referenced in this piece exist anymore none of the discounters that challenged Hutzlers and none of the department store rivals who tried to, either.

The one exception is the Hecht Company, one of the Big Four that was acquired by The May Company in 1959. The May Company, with its scale, was in a better position than the other family-owned and operated businesses to put substantial capital into the Hecht Company franchise in Baltimore, even propping up its downtown location as a lower-priced competitor to Hutzlers over the years. The May Company merged with Federated Department Stores in 2005, and, in 2006, the last remaining Hecht Company stores in Baltimore were converted to Macys (NYSE:M).

And we all know Macys ongoing retail struggles.

There is a lot we can learn about retail today from the Hutzlers story and why traditional retail stands where it does right now.

The shift from urban shopping to the suburbs is not unlike the shift from physical to digital.

Hutzlers made a critical mistake when trying to navigate that shift: It assumed that people would always prefer shopping downtown. Even until the end, the retailer was convinced that they could always lure shoppers back to the place that they loved, but found too late that different customers with different preferences didnt value the same things. Undaunted, Hutzlers continued to invest in that physical asset even at the expense of its other locations until it was forced to sell off all of its assets to pay the bills.

The shift in consumer preferences brought about by the changing economic and social mores is no different than the shift being driven today by the changing preferences of all consumers who value a different retail shopping experience and define loyalty very differently.

Millennials dont want to shop at the stores that their parents shop any more than we wanted to at their age, unless its Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) where they even buy their clothes. Their litmus test isnt what name brand is on the masthead, but whether a store can offer them value for the money and the products they and not their parents want to buy. Hutzlers banked on the fact that their brand alone was enough to keep customers coming and once they came, theyd find what they wanted. In the end, it wasnt even nearly enough.

The allure of the discounter at the expense of Hutzlers sales is no different than the allure of the discount today.

Retailers have trained the customer that there will always be a sale. So, like good students, consumers wait until they get a promo code thats better than the last promo code they were offered two days before. The days of anticipating a sale and the execution of strategies that advocate the exclusivity and scarcity of merchandise at full price as a lure for shoppers is long gone.

The allure of the experience of shopping at Hutzlers is no different than the experience that everyone seeks today when they shop.

Serendipity was the experience that Hutzlers created for shoppers when times were good the anticipation of not knowing what that shopper might find until she walked through the door and started to navigate the store. More than its other Big Four department store companions, Hutzlers built its reputation on outstanding merchandising and curation and the joy of finding something special. It was what made shopping fun and the experience consistently enjoyable. When its financial condition kept it from delivering that experience, consumers no longer had a reason to visit. Todays traditional retailers dont offer their shoppers that serendipity either. Supply chains and business models force financial constraints that, in turn, dont offer consumers the merchandise variety and frequency and uniqueness, which should give them incentive to shop their stores.

The problems are real, and the solutions are tough.

As a result, some retailers live in denial, clinging to the 92 percent of sales still happening in physical retail fantasy, while at the same time watching shopping foot traffic plummet dramatically over the last seven years.

Some want to blame Amazon for commoditizing retail rather than face the reality that when consumers arent offered a choice in physical locations, its just easy to buy from Amazon or another online retailer. And that brands, knowing this, adapt their own retailing strategies accordingly, reserving their best and most complete selection for the channels where they get traffic via their own physical or virtual stores or marketplaces where there is a steady and reliable stream of eyeballs.

Some just fiddle while Rome burns, implementing new technologies in an effort to make paying for stuff easier in their stores, when their real problem is getting consumers interested enough to buy from them in the first place.

But none of them, at least not publicly, will admit that maybe the best thing to do is to milk the asset for what its worth while the getting is good, and acknowledge that, like Hutzlers, nothing lasts forever. Sell off valuable assets, like Sears (NASDAQ:SHLD) has done with Craftsman, or real estate, like Macys is doing.

And recognize that they cant reinvent themselves so perhaps they should stop trying.

After all, businesses, like people, die. Only 13 companies on the Fortune 500 list are more than 150 years old: banks, insurance companies, consumer products companies and one retailer Macys. And nine out of every 10 companies on the Fortune 500 list in 1955 when it was first launched have disappeared.

Thats not all bad. It illustrates the vitality of business and the power of innovation. It shows what happens when we make room for strong, bold ideas that scale and usher in new paradigms. It demonstrates the ability of those strong companies to respond to the shifts in the markets that they grew up with instead of the struggle that comes when growing into those markets from a totally different starting point.

Especially when that reinvention happens too late in the process to change the outcome.

In his book about the history of Hutzlers, Michael Lisicky recounts a story of family heir, David Hutzler, who received a package delivered to his office by a mailman shortly before the Towson store closed. The mailman was said to have remarked to Hutzler, after he had expressed his profound sadness to him over the course that the family business had taken, but you did pretty good for 135 years.

Maybe thats not such a bad perspective to have.

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The Rise Of Retail Darwinism | Seeking Alpha - Seeking Alpha

House Speaker Paul Ryan announced March 24 that he was pulling his proposed health care bill from consideration.

We are now contemplating, Heaven save the mark, a bill that would tax the well for the benefit of the ill.

Although that quote reads like it could be part of the Republican repeal-and-replace assault against the Affordable Care Act (ACA), its actually from a 1949 editorial in The New York State Journal of Medicine denouncing health insurance itself.

Indeed, the attacks on the ACA seem to have revived a survival-of-the-fittest attitude most of us thought had vanished in America long ago. Yet, again and again, there it was in plain sight, as when House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) declared: The idea of Obamacare is that the people who are healthy pay for the people who are sick. Contemporary language, but the same thinking that sank President Harry Trumans health care plan almost seven decades ago.

Ryans indignation highlighted a fundamental divergence in attitudes that repeatedly turned the health care debate into a clash over the philosophy behind Obamacare-style health insurance. To some, the communal pooling of financial risk of medical expenses seems too often an unacceptable risk to personal responsibility.

As a researcher who has documented this approach to health care, Ive been startled to see the debate over the AHCA reignite a political philosophy and policy approach that seemed to be have been discredited and be in sharp decline.

When Truman launched the first comprehensive effort to cover all Americans, most of the population had no health insurance.

Last year, thanks to the ACA, nearly 90 percent did, according to a Gallup-Healthways poll. Yet then and now, many conservatives have downplayed the impact on physical health and focused, instead, on fiscal temptation.

Take, for instance, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) warning low-income Americans on March 7, 2017 that they had to make a choice about their spending: So rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care. (He later walked back his statement.)

In reality, of course, the premiums from the GOPs late and abandoned American Health Care Act would dwarf any savings from iPhone abstinence. For a 64-year-old making US$26,500 a year, the cost of health insurance would have shot up from $1,700 to $14,600, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), or more than half that individuals pre-tax income.

Chaffetz and others seem to sincerely believe that what keeps the great majority of people well is the fact that they cant afford to be ill although those words come from the 1949 editorialist again, not a Trump administration tweet. The editorial continued:

That is a harsh, stern dictum and we readily admit that under it a certain number of cases of early tuberculosis and cancer, for example, may go undetected. Is it not better that a few such should perish rather than that the majority of the population should be encouraged on every occasion to run sniveling to the doctor? That in order to get their moneys worth they should be sick at every available opportunity? They will find out in time that the services they think they get for nothing but which the whole people of the United States would pay for are also worth nothing.

As it happens, the effect predicted in 1949 on the detection of cancer less of it is precisely what has happened with the spread of high-deductible health plans praised by conservatives for encouraging more careful shopping by consumers. A study in Medical Care showed that screening rates for colorectal cancer declined under high-deductible plans until, under Obamacare, the federal government forced those plans to include first-dollar coverage of preventive services. The screening rates for colorectal cancer promptly rose. A recent study in Cancer found the same results for mammography.

Separately, surveys and research on high-deductible plans have found that 20 to 25 percent of people have avoided needed care of all kinds because they cant afford it.

Nonetheless, the GOPs conservative wing denounced ACA-mandated essential health benefits, echoing the idea that it is a threat to American freedom. Or as that same New York medical journal put it:

It is time that someone everyone should hoist Mr. Charles Darwin from his grave and blow life into his ashes so that they could proclaim again to the world his tough but practical doctrine of survival of the fittestThe Declaration of Independence said that man was entitled to the pursuit of happiness. Any man who wishes to pursue happiness had better be able to stand on his own feet. He will not be successful if he feels that he can afford to be ill.

For most physicians, that compassionless condescension lies in the faraway past; for example, the AHCA was overwhelmingly opposed by medical professional groups, including the American Medical Association.

Yet an implacable medical Darwinism retains a firm grip on many conservatives, even on physicians. Then-Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, an obstetrician/gynecologist and prominent Republican, told a sobbing woman at a 2009 public meeting on the ACA that government is not the answer when she said she couldnt afford care for her brain-injured husband.

Similarly, in 2011, after the ACA passed, then-Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), also an obstetrician/gynecologist, was asked what should be done about an uninsured, 30-year-old man in a coma. What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself, Paul responded, adding, Thats what freedom is all about, taking your own risk.

Or as conservative scholar Michael Strain put it in a 2015 Washington Post editorial: In a world of scarce resources, a slightly higher mortality rate is an acceptable price to pay for certain goals includingless government coercion and more individual liberty.

Strain is right, of course, that resources are limited. Moreover, its long been known that overgenerous health insurance can lead to overuse of medical care services.

However, most Americans, including some prominent conservative intellectuals, dont see stripping away health insurance from 24 million countrymen the CBOs estimate of the AHCAs 10-year impact as striking a blow for liberty. In a Quinnipiac University poll released just before the scheduled AHCA vote, only 17 percent of respondents approved of the Republican plan and 46 percent said theyd be less likely to vote for someone who supported it.

One day later, GOP leaders withdrew the legislation, sparing Republican representatives a vote on the record. Although Vice President Mike Pence has called evolution an unproven theory, it turns out Republicans really do believe in survival of the fittest (at least in a political sense), after all.

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Did medical Darwinism doom the GOP health plan? - The Conversation US

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Twenty-seven years ago marked the end of a shopping era in Baltimore. That was the year 1990 that retailer Hutzlers shut its doors forever after 132 years in the retail business.

The Grand Dame of retail in that town, my hometown, wasnt just a store: Hutzlers was a shopping experience. When its customers walked through its doors, they were treated to unbelievably personalized service and a vast but curated selection of exclusive merchandise. When they walked out, they held tightly to the brand cache that came from carrying a shopping bag emblazoned with the Hutzlers name.

As a longtime customer exclaimed when the store closed its doors, Hutzlers was like your mother; they took care of you. In 1990, everyone living in Baltimore, having grown up shopping at Hutzlers for just about every significant event in their lives, grieved like theyd just lost someone special.

I reflected on this story as I was preparing to speak to a group of retail executives last week since, like most middle-class kids growing up in Baltimore, shopping at Hutzlers was just what you did. It was where moms took their little girls to buy their Easter and Christmas finery and took their little boys to buy their Oxford shirts and navy blue blazers. Its shoe department selection and service rivaled any department store of its era.

I thought the Hutzlers story was an appropriate metaphor to spark a conversation about the state of retail today and what we might learn from those retail Grand Dames who exist no longer. Its a fitting case study to uncover important insights and reflect on the crisis that traditional retail is facing.

And debate an ending that may also be both similar and inevitable and perhaps even the right outcome for the many traditional retail brands who now struggle to reinvent themselves and survive.

Retails Golden Age

Hutzlers opened its doors for the first time in 1858 on the corner of Howard and Clay Streets in downtown Baltimore. One of the Big Four that occupied the same block in downtown Baltimore Stewarts, Hochschild Kohns, The Hecht Company and Hutzlers the department store then was a modern marvel of merchandise selection and presentation all under one roof. Women went shopping in dresses and hats, men in suits and ties. Shopping was an enjoyable, somewhat leisurely and very social, experience.

Hutzlers prided itself on being a retail innovator from the start.

Its stores had passenger elevators with elevator operators, gigantic display windows and a refund policy that gave customers back their cash if they returned items they no longer wanted even if those items werent bought from their store. They had a restaurant, the Tea Room, that served homemade Maryland classics, like Crab Imperial and Lady Baltimore Cake, that not only attracted shoppers but nearby businessmen for lunch.

Hutzlers was the first store to create a one-price policy that eliminated the common practice of haggling with sales associates and with it, the inequities over what its customers would pay for the same item.

They also curated merchandise that tapped into what consumers wanted to buy at that time. Hutzlers boasted, for example, that its fabric, button and lace department rivaled anything that existed outside of New York. What may seem quaint and anachronistic by todays standards, their approachresponded to a pretty important consumer trend in the late 19th and early part of the 20th centuries: the rise in popularity of the sewing machine and the desire of middle-class women to wear different clothes every day. By 1900, nearly all middle-class women had sewing rooms in their homes, using them to make clothes for themselves and their children. Hutzlers wanted those women as their customers.

During the Great Depression, Hutzlers also responded to the economic hard times upon which many of its customers had fallen. Hutzlers Downstairs, described as athrift store with Hutzlers standards, opened on the lower level of its downtown retail store in 1929. It carried a line of discounted merchandise, but not just any discounted merchandise merchandise that came with the Hutzlers imprimatur for style and quality.

That customer intimacy was the foundation upon which Hutzlers built its business and its financial strength for its first 90 years. It invested time, money and effort into building and securing those relationships. Someone, for example, was assigned to read the newspaper daily for notices of customer (or family member) deaths, births and engagements and then send personal handwritten notes, sometimes even accompanied by a small gift to those customers.

Hutzlers launched a free, same-day delivery service for its charge customers who wanted the convenience of charging and sending their bundles home. And for women who drove to its downtown retail location from the suburbs and parked in their parking garage, sales associates voluntarily carried their bundles so that women didnt have to juggle both their shopping bags and their kids on the way to the car.

Hutzlers focus on the customer could also be seen in its retail merchandising strategy.

Buyers worked with brands to source and then sell exclusive labels and clothing lines. It also launched new, popular and first-to-market products in their stores, always in limited supplies to engender immediacy and scarcity and always with the idea to use those products to bring people into the stores to buy those items and other things while there. In the 1970s, Hutzlers began staging a series of festivals in their downtown store, featuring items from a variety of European ports of call to keep women coming into the store to explore and buy those one-of-a-kind products.

Hutzlers sales were legendary and widely coveted because they were held only twice a year. Its annual Centennial Sale featured markdowns of existing merchandise. But it was the annual Occasion Extraordinaire sale that created the desire for people to stand in line for hours before the store opened to get their pick of that sale litter.

OE, as it was known, required a rigorous curation of merchandise on the part of Hutzlers buyers, well in advance of the sale. Items made available for the sale had to be approved by management first and offered at a minimum of 20 percent off. Often these products were sourced from other parts of the world and specified only for this sale. One of the privileges of being a Hutzlers charge customer was access to this sale two days before it was open to the public.

Life was very good for the Hutzlers family and its eponymic department store.

Until, suddenly, it wasnt. At all.

Hutzlers saw the same data that everyone else did in the 1950s and 60s and responded to the economic reality of its shoppers moving to the suburbs. It expanded its footprint accordingly, opening its first suburban location 80 years later in the affluent suburb of Towson, Maryland, in 1952. Between 1952 and 1981, Hutzlers opened nine other suburban locations.

It also kept investing in its downtown flagship store, given its significant contribution to the bottom line at the time. It was also an asset that the Hutzlers family valued immensely.

And it was also a decision that would ultimately set the stage for the death spiral that would deliver Hutzlers demise.

The late 1960s and 1970s was a time of great social and economic upheaval in Baltimore. Civil unrest drove those who once lived and shopped downtown to the suburbs. Over a40-year period, from 1950 to 1990, Baltimore Citys population decreased by nearly 214,000 people with 119,000 residents leaving the city in the decade between 1970 and 1980. Another 51,000 left between 1980 and 1990. Those who used to shop downtown also stopped going.

At the same time, the Vietnam War created a wave of activism against The Establishment. Young people turned their backs on, among other things, the retail stores where their establishment parents shopped.

The two-year recession that started in 1973 saw the post-WWII economic boom come to a screeching halt. The rise of the two-income family during that period introduced time pressures that didnt exist before. Women entering the workforce had no time for leisurely shopping trips to Hutzlers downtown store or even any of its suburban retail locations.

At the same time, discount department stores came marching full-force into Baltimores suburbs. Caldor, Two Guys, Korvettes, Epsteins, Luskins to name but a few appealed to this cash-strapped, time-starved shopper under the rubric of more value for less money. Those stores were a short, easy drive away with free parking in vast parking lots.

Hutzlers, not unlike its other Big Four compadres, began to see its sales suffer because of these shifts and saw it happen most dramatically at its downtown flagship store, which once drove the bulk of its revenue. In 1968, the downtown store delivered $22 million in annual sales. Nine years later, in 1977, those sales had been gutted by 50 percent.

But despite the lack of customers and the lack of sales there, Hutzlers doubled down on investing in its downtown location. While three of its Big Four competitorscut back and ultimately closed their downtown operations in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hutzlers invested millions in the renovation of its flagship store one they affectionally called the mothership. That renovation was completed in 1985 in the hopes of bringing its suburban customers back downtown as part of the citys bigger plans for urban renewal and redevelopment.

Five years earlier, in 1980, Hutzlers opened a new store near the citys brand new, tony Inner Harbor in an effort to appeal to a female business customer shopping on her lunch break. A smaller format store, it featured luggage and work-appropriate clothing lines for men and women.

Neither delivered the impact that the Hutzlers team had expected.

The limited selection of merchandise combined with competition from the newer boutique shops in the Inner Harbor area meant the store failed to grab the attention of that female shopper on her lunchbreak. And the Palace Store was stocked with merchandise at price points that might have appealed to a suburban shopper thirty years before, but was well out of the reach of the urban dweller with far less money to spend.

Keeping the downtown store afloat in the midst of the macro social and economic issues that retailers were facing in the late 1960s through the 1980s drained the profits made in Hutzlers other suburban stores. That meant less cash all around with which to buy the more exclusive merchandise that the loyal Hutzlers shopperwas accustomed to buying.

Hutzlers had no choice but to change its merchandise mix to reflect both its cash-strapped reality and, it thought, the shoppers demand for more reasonably priced goods. But that only confused its loyal customer base, who no longer knew what Hutzlers stood for, while failing to attract new customers who had already established other store preferences.

Hutzlers was forced to close stores and sell off real estate assets, notably the land upon which the parking garage adjacent to its Towson store was located. The Towson store was the last Hutzlers store to close in January of 1990.

Ironically, perhaps, that location is home to a mega Barnes &Noble that will close in May of this year. None of the other stores referenced in this piece exist anymore none of the discounters that challenged Hutzlers and none of the department store rivals who tried to,either.

The one exception is the Hecht Company, one of the Big Four that was acquired by The May Company in 1959. The May Company, with its scale, was in a better position than the other family-owned and operated businesses to put substantial capital into the Hecht Company franchise in Baltimore, even propping up its downtown location as a lower-priced competitor to Hutzlers over the years. The May Company merged with Federated Department Stores in 2005, and, in 2006, the last remaining Hecht Company stores in Baltimore were converted to Macys.

And we all know Macys ongoing retail struggles.

There is a lot we can learn about retail today from the Hutzlers story and why traditional retail stands where it does right now.

The shift from urban shopping to the suburbs is not unlike the shift from physical to digital.

Hutzlers made a critical mistake when trying to navigate that shift: It assumed that people would always prefer shopping downtown. Even until the end, the retailer was convinced that they could always lure shoppers back to the place that they loved, but found too late that different customers with different preferences didnt value the same things. Undaunted, Hutzlers continued to invest in that physical asset even at the expense of its other locations until it was forced to sell off all of its assets to pay the bills.

The shift in consumer preferences brought about by the changing economic and social mores is no different than the shift being driven today by the changing preferences of all consumers who value a different retail shopping experience and define loyalty very differently.

Millennials dont want to shop at the stores that their parents shop any more than we wanted to at their age, unless its Amazon where they even buy their clothes. Their litmus test isnt what name brand is on the masthead, but whether a store can offer them value for the money and the products they and not their parents want to buy. Hutzlers banked on the fact that their brand alone was enough to keep customers coming and once they came, theyd find what they wanted. In the end, it wasnt even nearly enough.

The allure of the discounter at the expense of Hutzlers sales is no different than the allure of the discount today.

Retailers have trained the customer that there will always be a sale. So, like good students, consumers wait until they get a promo code thats better than the last promo code they were offered two days before. The days of anticipating a sale and the execution of strategies that advocate the exclusivity and scarcity of merchandise at full price as a lure for shoppers is long gone.

The allure of the experience of shopping at Hutzlers is no different than the experience that everyone seeks today when they shop.

Serendipity was the experience that Hutzlers created for shoppers when times were good the anticipation of not knowing what that shopper might find until she walked through the door and started to navigatethe store. More than its other Big Four department store companions, Hutzlers built its reputation on outstanding merchandising and curation and the joy of finding something special. It was what made shopping fun and the experience consistently enjoyable. When its financial condition kept it from delivering that experience, consumers no longer had a reason to visit. Todays traditional retailers dont offer their shoppers that serendipity either. Supply chains and business models force financial constraints that, in turn, dont offer consumers the merchandise variety and frequency and uniqueness, which should give them incentive to shop their stores.

The problems are real, and the solutions are tough.

As a result, some retailers live in denial, clinging to the 92 percent of sales still happening in physical retail fantasy, while at the same time watching shopping foot traffic plummet dramatically over the last seven years.

Some want to blame Amazon for commoditizing retail rather than face the reality that when consumers arent offered a choice in physical locations, its just easy to buy from Amazon or another online retailer. And that brands, knowing this, adapt their own retailing strategies accordingly, reserving their best and most complete selection for the channels where they get traffic via their own physical or virtual stores or marketplaces where there is a steady and reliable stream of eyeballs.

Some just fiddle while Rome burns, implementing new technologies in an effort to make paying for stuff easier in their stores, when their real problem is getting consumers interested enough to buy from them in the first place.

But none of them, at least not publicly, will admit that maybe the best thing to do is to milk the asset for what its worth while the getting is good, and acknowledge that, like Hutzlers, nothing lasts forever. Sell off valuable assets, like Sears has done with Craftsman, or real estate, like Macys is doing.

And recognize that they cant reinvent themselves so perhaps they should stop trying.

After all, businesses, like people, die. Only 13 companies on the Fortune 500 list are more than 150 years old: banks, insurance companies, consumer products companies and one retailer Macys. And nine out of every 10 companies on the Fortune 500 list in 1955 when it was first launched have disappeared.

Thats not all bad. It illustrates the vitality of business and the power of innovation. It shows what happens when we make room for strong, bold ideas that scale and usher in new paradigms. It demonstrates the ability ofthose strong companies to respond to the shifts in the markets that they grew up with instead of the struggle that comes when growing into those markets from a totally different starting point.

Especially when that reinvention happens too late in the process to change the outcome.

In his book about the history of Hutzlers,Michael Lisicky recounts astory of family heir, David Hutzler, who received a package delivered to his office by a mailman shortly before the Towson store closed. The mailman was said to have remarked to Hutzler, after he had expressed his profound sadness to him over the course that the family business had taken, but you did pretty good for 135 years.

Maybe thats not such a bad perspective to have.

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The Rise of Retail Darwinism - PYMNTS.com

Gregor Mendel is, of course, the father of the science of genetics. In a new peer-reviewed paper, Mendels Paper on the Laws of Heredity (1866): Solving the Enigma of the Most Famous Sleeping Beauty in Science, geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lnnig asks why Mendels theory of heredity, developed in the 19th century, was initially rejected or ignored by many other scientists. Writing in the journal eLS, Dr. Lnnig concludes that its because at that time, the scientific community was completely enamored with Darwinian evolution and unwilling to consider ideas that did not fit with Darwins models of evolution and inheritance.

Darwinism cast a shadow over the study of heredity. As Lnnig puts it:

His [Mendels] analysis, discernment and exposition of the laws of heredity as well as his views on evolution diametrically defied and contradicted the ideas and convictions of Darwin and his followers. [T]he basic reason for the neglect of the laws of heredity was essentially this: To imply something like a static definition of the species by constant hereditary elements right into a momentous process vigorously favouring the Darwinian revolution (continuous evolution by natural selection without any teleology intimately combined with the inheritance of acquired characteristics, to underscore the latter, often forgotten point once more) was met although usually silently with skepticism, deliberate ignorance and strong opposition.

In other words, if you implied as Mendel did that species were static, you were doing that at a time when science vigorously favored Darwinism. That is why Mendels ideas met with skepticism and opposition. More:

And there is no doubt concerning Darwins overwhelming victory in the battle for the scientific minds in the nineteenth century, so much so that Mendels performance before the Natural History Society of Brnn was even met with scornful laughter.

Lnnig quotes Italian biologist Giuseppe Sermonti who concurs with this explanation: What really happened was that Mendel ruled out almost all the forces that Darwin had invoked to explain evolution.

Mendels theory of inheritance produces all-or-nothing traits. Lnnig explains that this conflicted with Darwins ideas about gradual evolution:

[P]erhaps even more important, Mendels discoveries cast doubt on another definitely decisive and essential part of Darwins theory: continuous evolution, for which Darwin had postulated infinitesimally small inherited variations, steps not greater than those separating fine varieties and insensibly fine steps, for natural selection can act only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a leap, but must advance by the shortest and slowest steps.

According to Lnnig, [I]n Mendels view, endless evolution was neither probable for cultivated plants nor for species in the wild.

What does the phrase sleeping beauty refer to in Lnnigs title? In a science context, it means an idea or publication that lies dormant for decades, asleep, until being rediscovered and winning deserved acclaim and acceptance. From an article on this fascinating subject:

The most famous case of a sleeping beauty was that of Gregor Mendels seminal study on plant genetics that received widespread recognition 31 years after its publication. Sleeping beauties led to Nobel prizes (Herman Staudinger, Nobel in Chemistry 1953; Peyton Rous, Nobel in Chemistry 1966). They usually reflect premature discoveries that the scientific community was not ready to recognize when published. Some suppose that this has to do with most scientists tendency to adhere to their established paradigms.

The paradigm in this case was Darwins theory. In impeding the emergence of genetics, Darwinian evolution was a science stopper, and not for the first time.

Image: Sleeping Beauty, by Viktor Vasnetsov [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lnnig on Darwinism and Gregor Mendel's Sleeping Beauty - Discovery Institute

Prior to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) it was known that for every one million people who were uninsured, 1,000 of them died yearly due to a lack of health care. This was how the market system factored out of the gene pool those individuals who were developmentally-unfit to care for themselves. Capitalism, through health care, served to make America great again.

In this way American health care is a continuation of that tradition of social Darwinism, begun during those greater-days of the early 20th century. Then, over fifty thousand women, who were legally deemed "feeble-minded," were sterilized under the popular eugenics laws.

Eugenics finally became un-popular in America when it was taken up, with more programmatic ardor, by Adolf Hitler. It seems that Americans found Nazism to be even less attractive than feeblemindedness. A nation of mo

re intelligent offspring did seem desirable, unless they also were unkind and intelligent. So we became more kind... but also weak. The lame were permitted to live. The meek inherited the Earth.

We need not worry about this now. We can repeal this situation. We are free to call "good" that which serves self-interest. There is no Hitler to call us out. If this makes us less human, that is okay. Those voices of the suffering poor, who appeal to our all-too-human sensibilities, will die out in time. This is how it should be. In the end, it is about "winning." Unless, of course, what we become is not worth winning.

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Noblett: Health care and social Darwinism - Roanoke Times

Vice President Mike Pence had made it clear he thinks little of Charles Darwin, having thoroughly dissed evolution as just a theory. Once again, Pence finds himself on the wrong railroad track of history. And the light at the end of his tunnelonce againis the oncoming train of Donald J. Trump, his boss. Theres no immediate record of Trump expounding on evolution, but given that hes embraced survival of the fittest with all the ardor of a boa constrictor in heat, one can only assume hes a big fan. As always with Trump, an unmistakable element of perversity isinvolved.

I say this because Trumpas has been widely reportedwon biggest in communities with the highest death rates among white voters. This demographic cohort in the United States is unique among all westernized industrial democracies: Its members have experienced an actual decline in life expectancy. In fact, this life expectancy decline emerged as the single most reliable indicator of Trump support, even more than political party affiliation. In other words, more dead white people, more Trump votes. Typically, victorious politicians seek to curry favor by rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Trumpstrikingly counterintuitively, and yes, even boldlyis doing the exactopposite.

In a morbid way, this makes sense. If Death by Despairopioid addiction, suicide, gun deaths, and alcohol poisoninggot Trump to the dance, he can stay in the cha-cha line by feeding that despair. Based on the fine print of the repeal-and-replace health-care bill that Trump is trying to ram down the throat of a reluctant Congress this week, thats exactly what hes doing. Even with last-minute changes to make the bill more palatable, the Republican health-care alternative will harshly punish the rural white communities that overwhelmingly supported Trump while simultaneously rewarding younger, affluent voters who overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton. Trump is doing this mayhem by making private insurance more expensive for older whites, hacking their subsidies, and pushing them off the expanded public-health-insurance ledge thats proved to be the single-most-effective element of the Affordable Care Act by far. Feed thedespair.

By cannibalizing expanded Medicaid coverage to the tune of $880 billion, Trump and the Republicans can justify massive tax cuts for a group who needs them the least, the very wealthy and reasonably healthy. Depending on whose numbers you use, $275 billion in these tax cuts will benefit the top 5 percent of income earners. Two-thirds of the cuts will go to the top 20 percent, and 40 percent of the proceeds will line the pockets of the now famous One Percent. For their sacrifice, those who already have a lot will get to have more. On any normal planet, this would be sufficient to make even robber barons blush, and the proposal would have been DOA. Instead, it remains on life support as House Speaker Paul Ryan gives new meaning to the expression a pig in a poke. At some point, real people will die. Others will wish theyhad.

Again, this makes sense under a perverse Darwinian logic. America spends $3.1 trillion a year on health caremore than $9,000 a year per man, woman, and child. Thats screamingly more than any other nation on the planet; 70 percent of which goes to 10 percent of the population in hopes of prolonging their last six months of life. If our expenditures are high, life expectancies are decidedly not. By that metric, were lucky to hover in the middle of the pack among comparable nations. Rather than reform what is an impossibly complex system and focus more on health and less on sicknessas the Affordable Care Act soughtTrump and the Republicans have seized upon a much bolder solution: Cut costs by making health care accessible to those who need it leastthe young, healthy, andrich.

In Santa Barbara, push is coming to shove in ways both obvious and not so obvious. Since Obamacare was passed, roughly 1,000 people have signed up for drug-addiction treatment with the County of Santa Barbara. Of these, 30 percent have opioid addictions. Many of these can be regarded as the able-bodied individuals some Republicans insist shouldnt qualify for re-imbursement. In a similar vein, Obamacare has enabled the Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics to screen 7,000 of its patients for opioid-addiction issues. Of those, it appears 1,000 need serious help. The clinics provide primary care to about 20,000 low-income, working people, many of whom are Spanish-speaking immigrants. Before Obamacare, 35 percent of the clinics customers were uninsured, meaning they paid what they could, typically $42 for a basic visit. Those visits cost $170 to provide. Under Obamacare, the number of self-paying visits has dropped to 22 percent. Thats helped give the clinics a degree of financial stability that long eluded them. Maybe you dont use the clinics so dont care. If they disappeared overnight, thered be 50 more patients a day choking up the Cottage Emergency Room. Absolutely everyone would feel that.

The clinics will also be hurt by Trumps decision to cut all funding to the Community Development Block Grant programwhich has funded low-income assistance services for 42 years. Thats because four of the five county government entities receiving block grants use a portion of their funds to keep those clinics afloat. Its no secret the clinics serve large numbers of immigrants. Since Trump unleashed the hounds of mass deportation, the number of patients visiting the neighborhood clinics has dramatically dropped. Some sick people too afraid to get medical help will get better. But most just get sicker. Sooner or later, sick people end up in the Emergency Room. If you think that doesnt affect you, think again. No one outruns Charles Darwin. Not even Mike Pence.

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Trump Making Social Darwinism Sexy Again - Santa Barbara Independent

No idea has become baked into the social fabric than Darwinism, and yet Darwin himself never meant this to happen. In his mind, he was scientifically describing "the descent of species," a specific notion of how life forms changed over time. Evolution was a rebuttal of the prevailing concept that species were fixed--if honeybees, ferns, and pandas exist, they always had. The momentous discovery of fossils, among other things, offered irrefutable evidence that species could vanish, and more importantly, that current species had ancestors.

But the term "evolution" turned into a loose metaphor, quickly escaping the rules of science. And the most dangerous application of the metaphor was to human society, where certain ideas about everyday life became falsely linked with Darwinism. Here are the main distortions that enormous numbers of people believe in without thinking.

1. Nature is all about survival of the fittest; therefore, so is society.

2. Evolution works through bloody competition that weeds out the weak and favors the strong. This applies to human competition and makes violence amoral--Nature is working through us, the ultimate excuse for the powerful dominating the weak.

3. If you are weak, you deserve to fail. Nature demands that survival be ruthless in order to strengthen a species.

4. Poverty is a sign of weakness in the evolutionary scheme.

5. Lower species evolve physically, but once evolution reached the level of early humans, evolution began to apply to psychology, emotions, and social behavior.

There are other offshoots of this main mistakes, but let's stay with them. The most pernicious application of the evolution metaphor crops up as a justification for inequality. Racism dictates that some races are superior and others inferior. Sexism dictates that men are powerful and women comparatively weak. Free market fanatics push the notion that money shouldn't be wasted on the poor, aged, or sick because it is the obligation of such groups to fend for themselves in open competition. Pushed to such limits, the doctrine of social Darwinism, as it came to be called in the nineteenth century, can justify almost any kind of power grab or ruthless competition. As we've learned in this country quite recently, the appeal of social Darwinism remains both widespread and powerful. Millions of people feel the attraction of a white male portraying himself as a strong man who is a winner instead of a loser--all are masked Darwinian terms.

The irony is that Homo sapiens long ago left "the state of nature," the naked arena where physical evolution takes place. In the state of nature, two things determine if a species survives: the ability to compete for food and to mate. Food is the most basic need for survival; mating passes on genes that would otherwise disappear from the gene pool. For thousands of years human beings have consciously departed from these two driving forces.

1. We care for our sick, weak, and old rather than letting nature takes its course.

2. We resort to medicine to wipe out and control fatal diseases that would thin the population if left untreated.

3. We have economies that spread food to every corner of the globe. People can buy the food they otherwise couldn't raise.

4. Concepts of justice punish those who use violence to harm others or steal what they want.

5. We override who is physically strong or weak with weapons and bullets, allowing us to harm and kill at a distance.

These are only a few of the ways human beings escaped the arena where survival of the fittest rules (not that Darwin ever used that phrase, or espoused it). Some of humanity's post-evolutionary traits are negative to the point of being horrifying, like the development of weapons of mass destruction, suicide bombers, and even suicide itself. Where evolution promotes physical survival, our ability to willingly end life has been a curse that people volunteer to place on themselves through war, crime, and violence of every stripe. Other post-evolutionary traits like charities and hospitals exist as symbols of the benefits of escaping the state of nature.

There are evolutionists who continue to maintain that Darwinism applies to human beings, particularly in the two related fields of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, but those applications have their own skeptics. Let's set them both aside. Because post-evolution has brought good and ill effects to humanity, and because the metaphor of evolution is still powerful, the crucial question is whether we still want to evolve and if so, how? In its crudest form, the evolutionary metaphor is still about survival, so future evolution depends on such survival issues as the ecology, global climate change, and nuclear weapons.

In less crude form, the evolutionary metaphor is synonymous with progress, and almost everyone in modern society wants progress to continue, despite pull-backs by radical jihadists who yearn for a return to the illusion of religious purity, white supremacists who yearn for equally illusory racial purity, and xenophobes who push ultra-nationalism following a third illusion, that a single nation can isolate itself from the tide of globalism.

Yet the most compelling reason to seize the evolutionary metaphor is to promote post-evolution, to win even more freedom from the state of nature. This largely happens individually as the evolution of consciousness, a notion that was ridiculed fifty years ago, but which now drives the aspirations of millions of spiritual seekers. Having abandoned formal religion, these people have turned inward to find their own path to higher consciousness, and if that term is too elevated or alien, there is the search for inner peace, love, creativity, joy, and fulfillment. Long ago, human beings made the most radical evolutionary leap in history, turning away from physical evolution to mental evolution--hence the amazingly rapid development of the higher brain (cerebral cortex) from which all language, morality, and rational thought emerged.

There is no reason to assume that our consciousness can't keep evolving, but there is no evidence that the brain needs new structures physically. The brain has enough flexibility already to set us free by our own choice. We choose to evolve or not, to explore new domains of the mind or retreat into old, outmoded ones. In the end, the reason that Darwinism is the best of theories and the worst of theories comes down to how the theory is used. We are no longer Darwinian creatures, but as a metaphor evolution traces a path that applies to the best and worst possibilities in us.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, Clinical Professor UCSD Medical School, researcher, Neurology and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are You Are the Universe co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. discoveringyourcosmicself.com

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Have Human Beings Stopped Evolving? - Huffington Post

There has been much chatter about President Trumps proposed America First budget as well as the roll out of Trumpcare, which has been designed to replace The Affordable Care Act. Beyond the debatable specifics of these budget and health care proposals, it is clearat least to me--that they reveal a disturbing back to the future philosophy that applauds the American Social Darwinism of the early 20th century. As an anthropologist who has been thinking about the dynamics and culture and society for more than 30 years, these proposals are nothing less than a blueprint to re-structure our society into a social organism, to cite President Trumps favorite classification scheme, of winners (the fit) and losers (the unfit), the latter of which will eventually weaken, sicken, die and disappear, ensuring a fine and pure social life for all the winners.

Who are the winners and losers in Trumpcare and the America First Budget?

--the young, the healthy, and the white, who are Christians;

--the corporate elite (also white and Christian, for the most part);

--White Nationalists, racists who want to return America to a pure state (white and Christian);

--The military-industrial complex, which will be showered with billions of additional funds.

In the context of Social Darwinism, the winners protect us from the losers who, if left alone, will pollute and weaken a pure society. Thats what it means to take our country back.

--the old, whose programs like Meals on Wheels are no longer productive;

--the poor, who will lose their health insurance and heat subsidies;

--the infirm of all ages and backgrounds, who will also lose their health insurance and no longer be a burden to society;

--immigrantsespecially Muslims and Hispanics-- terrorists and rapists, who are bad people;

--African Americans, genetic polluters who threaten our way of life;

--all peoples of color, also genetic polluters who speak and behave differently;

--Jews, who dare to practice openly a non-Christian religion and operate Jewish Community Centers;

--scientists, speakers of inconvenient truths, on climate change, for example;

--social scientists, who engage in social and cultural critique;

--artists and humanists who seek understand the human condition to make life sweeter for everyone;

--journalists, who attempt to rebut an avalanche alternative facts

The philosophy that shapes the America First Budget and Trumpcare proposal underscores the notion of personal responsibility. If youre poor or unemployed, you must be lazy or unfit. Dont blame your misery on the rich or on the structural forces that have created and reinforced social inequality. If you work hard, you can be rich. If you dont, then youll be poor and its your fault. This line of thinking, in fact, channels Lionel Barrymores Mr. Potter in Frank Capras classic film, Its a Wonderful Life, a film that mirrors our contemporary debate about social class, social fitness, and the social contract.

Beneath the surface of this reactionary rhetoric lies a troubling pattern that underscores the Social Darwinist notion that the rich or the strongest and fittest should be socially viable, while the poor or the weakest and least fit should be allowed to wither and die. Loosely based upon Darwins theory of natural selection, Social Darwinists always want nature to take its rightful course in society. In the past the rich and powerful used Social Darwinism to deny workers a decent wage, bash labor unions, and justify the refusal of the economic elite to help the poor. The poor were unfit and not worthy of help.

Let the market do its work. Dont blame the rich for your problems! Blame yourselves for being unemployed. Let nature take its course.

Doesnt that sound like Tea Party rhetoric? Doesnt that echo the rhetoric of candidate Trump? Doesnt this set of ideas give shape and substance to the America First Budget and the Trumpcare proposal?

Before the Great Depression, Social Darwinist beliefs not only expanded American social inequality but also prompted the eugenics movement, which inspired programs in which the genes of the unfit were cleansed from society. Beliefs in eugenics compelled many American state legislatures to pass laws that sterilized unfit people. Inspired by eugenic theories, the US Congress passed a series of Immigration Restriction Acts in the 1920s. These laws severely limited or barred the immigration of peoples deemed unit. Fit people came from Northern Europe. They were the winners. Unfit people came from Asia, Eastern or Southern Europe. They were the losers. The American eugenics movement, of course, inspired the Aryan nationalism of Nazi Germany that resulted in The Final Solution and the cleansing of six million unfit Jews.

That was the horrific past. In the present it seems preposterous that American society might return to a past of scientific racism, anti-immigrant prejudice, and severe social inequality. But from my anthropological vantage, which has been shaped by generations of anthropological opposition to the racism and religious intolerance that fueled American Social Darwinism, thats what the America First Budget and Trumpcare is all about.

If we do not resist Trumps social engineering with every fiber of our being, we will not only drift back to a reconfigured form of 19th century economic royalism, but also return to the winner-loser ideology of Social Darwinism. Such a return will tear our society apart.

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Budgeting Social Darwinism - Huffington Post