#darwinian evolution

[booksperience]

(via Animals in the World - A Study of Aristotelian Biology by Pierre Pellegrin)

"While all his previous classic Greek biologists were either purely mechanists or formalists, he understood the true diversity of the animal world and formulated his theories with a more realistic outlook..." (Read more on Booksperience site)

[things-have-been-said]

True spirit animal, Brachycephalus coloratus

MEAN TO HIM!!!

[trueconservativepundit]

Genesis 1-11: Authentic History from an Awesome God

The world sees God and the Lord Jesus Christ as enemies whom they believe need to be eradicated from the mind of humanity   By Donald Whitchard Genesis 1:1,John 1:1-4,Hebrews 1:1-4,Psalm 19:1,Colossians 1:16-18,Psalm 47:7   Summary: This is the introduction to a series on the historical foundations of the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis.  These chapters present authentic events and…

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Paula Wright

Published: Feb 19, 2023

If any man could draw up a comprehensive, infallible guide to navigating this treacherous territory, we would certainly erect a statue to his everlasting memory. There is a Twitter account dedicated to exploring and enumerating precisely the distinctions and differences between the acceptably erotic and the intolerably sexist. It’s called @SexyIsntSexist. It is, of course, under the control of a woman.” Neil Lyndon. Do men really understand what sexism is? The Telegraph 20/5/14

I created Darwinian Gender Studies (DGS) in 2008 as a cross-disciplinary area of study and research which utilises insights across the evolutionary behavioural sciences, including but not limited to, evolutionary psychology, biology, anthropology, ethology, palaeoanthropology and cultural evolution.    It represents the consilience of the natural and social sciences, as envisioned by E. O. Wilson.

Back then, my planned PhD thesis was to be in developing an evolutionary, bio-cultural model of ‘patriarchy’ which challenged the premises of the feminist conception of patriarchy. Even in 2008, the project foresaw that political correctness, social justice and toxic feminism were taking us deep down the postmodern rabbit hole. My goal was to build bridges of understanding between the sexes not walls of fear and mistrust, which is what feminism does today. To learn about humans and humanity; what we are, and what we are not.

Two things we are, which we cannot cease to be and remain human, are a sexually reproducing, moderately sexually dimorphic, pair-bonded species. These are basic facts of our human nature which cannot be erased by social engineering.

Within DGS, I interrogate orthodox feminist concepts, such as patriarchy theory, objectification theory, gender, power, mating strategies, and sex differences and similarities, using humour and evolutionary explanatory models such as natural and sexual selection, parental investment theory, female choice, signalling theory, life history theory, intersexual competition and intrasexual competition.

History has demonstrated many times, that whenever our species attempts to take control of biology and bend it out of shape to ideological goals, human tragedy always follows. It’s a lesson we still don’t seem to have learned, as in spite of overwhelming evidence, many people still hold fast to the idea of an endlessly flexible human nature, and indeed, human nature is flexible, but a blank slate it is not. Neither however is it a crude caricature of immutable deterministic drives and instincts as often painted within the straw man of biological determinism. Human nature is very much mutable, but not infinitely or arbitrarily so, and here lies the nub: Within what may seem like infinite variations of human action and reaction to what life throws at us, our predispositions on an average scale are actually predictable. There are enough constants within this calculus to recognise the existence of an unmistakably human nature. This nature will vary and recalibrate between individuals and ecologies (variation is one of the engines of evolution) but these variations dance around a constant, evolutionary fire.

“Those who journey from political correctness to truth often risk public disapprobation, but it is notable that most never lose their tolerance or humanity. They may question the politics of race, but not that racism is bad; they may question campaigns about women’s pay, but not that women and men deserve equality of treatment.” Browne, A. (2006) The Retreat of Reason: Political correctness and the corruption of political debate in modern Britain. Civitas

I was, and am, standing on the shoulders of many female evolutionary scientists and philosophers who came before me such as Barbara Smuts, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Anne Campbell, Helena Cronin, Griet Vandermassen, Catherine Salmon, Maryanne Fisher, Bobby Low, Helen Fisher, and many more. Over the last 50 years, their scholarship has revealed that, far from feminist fears to the contrary, evolved sex differences do not equate to inferiority.  Via evolution, we in fact see true equality expressed in discrete and fascinating ways.

These women (and many men) have illuminated the role females play as potent agents of evolution via the phenomenon of female choice. This is sadly still an unsung revolution – unsung by feminism, not evolutionists –  as it shattered the male perspective biases that once dominated biology and Darwinism. These women did this, not with rhetorical declarations of war against ‘patriarchy’ but with logic and critical thinking.

When it comes to the principles of natural selection – the struggle to survive – men and women differ very little. Rather, it is in the principles of sexual selection – the struggle not just to survive but thrive enough to have offspring and allow them to thrive also – that the main differences start to become manifest. It is a categorical fact that none of these differences equates to any moral inferiority. No genuine evolutionary scholar would ever make such a claim.

Feminists have long claimed that logic is an exclusively male trait. So much so that to counter the “male” scientific method they felt the need to create “female” method – social constructionism - which ironically invokes every negative female stereotype they claim to want to refute. They did this not because social constructivism was a better tool – it is untested – but because it was the binary opposite of the scientific method.

Women, in fact, have nothing to fear from logic. Yet feminists do fear it, as philosopher Janet Radciffe Richards notes in her book The Sceptical Feminist, 

“…in spite of girls doing better at school than boys, feminists are still woeful at rationality…feminism has some tendency to get stuck in the quagmire of unreason from time to time [but] it cannot be denied that adopting an anti-rational stance has its uses; it can be turned into an all-purpose escape route from tricky corners”  

They also fear it because it falsifies the very premises feminism rests on – especially female inferiority.

This is a description of all feminisms today: radical, intersectional and all other tribes battling for dominance in the victim narrative – including ideological men’s rights, MGTOW and “red pill” groups. All feminisms eschew logic and reason for dogma and ideology and all are in thrall to the flying patriarchal spaghetti monster in the sky. Ask a question about female oppression, you already know the answer: it’s the patriarchy, stupid. And ideological men’s groups have their own version of patriarchy, known as gynocentrism. Both concepts are intellectually myopic.

I created DGS all those years ago because I wanted the opportunity to have a role, however small, in helping us better understand ourselves as a species.

It is true that as a woman I am perhaps more interested in the unique selection pressures women face due directly to their sex. As an evolutionist and a realist, however, this bias does not make me blind to the fact that men face their own unique selection pressures due explicitly to their sex.

The truth is, one sex cannot be understood except in the light of the other. Men and women have co-evolved, each shaping the other both physically and psychologically via sexual selection. Men desire power and resources because women desire men who have power and resources. And female conflict, well that doesn’t look like male conflict, and so often goes unseen, especially by feminists.

From an evolutionary perspective, feminism can be categorised as the study of the conflict between the sexes – intersexual conflict – aka the “battle of the sexes” with a particular interest in proximate, conscious mechanisms of how men can oppress women and how this oppression can be countered. But this is only half the story. Evolutionists posit that to really understand intersexual conflict one must also analyse intrasexual conflict. We do this because we observe across species that competition within a sex is always far more intense than between the sexes. An evolutionary lens also broadens the enquiry to include an analysis of ultimate, unconscious mechanisms of not just how, but why, men pursue the goal of power and resource control. What do men want to do with power? To create strong alliances, subdue rivals, protect against enemies and attract mates.  

Much is known about male intrasexual competition. We have had 2000 years to work it out – its role in shaping cultures and empires – for better or worse. Far less is known about conflict - and conflict resolution - between women; female intrasexual competition (FIC). It is the pink elephant in the feminist room. Do we have the same amount of time to understand female intrasexual competition? For better or worse? I don’t think we do. The epidemic of female-on-female bullying in nursing has long been acknowledged in academia, yet nothing is done about it. In the UK it costs the NHS billions of pounds in workplace attrition, sick leave and low efficiency. It can also cost lives, as a “culture of bullying” was highlighted in the official reports on two scandals in UK maternity wards where both infants and mothers lost their lives.

In another example observe the rise of intragender conflict in the West. Third-gender people exist in many cultures, but only in the West are males who identify with the female gender trying to use it as leverage to get access to sex-based rights and privileges. Then we have feminism itself a battleground fraught with female intrasexual competition, which is often mistakenly called “internalised misogyny”.  Women too, it seems, want to create alliances, subdue rivals and attract the best mates.

Using FIC as a lens to look anew at hot feminist topics such as the beauty industry, cosmetic surgery, anorexia, and the endless wars of attrition between the many tribes of feminisms brings fascinating new insights, as all these phenomena seem to be expressions of female competition not male oppression.

Nonetheless, there is still a comfortable consensus among all feminists that the beauty ‘ideal’ is a tyranny perpetrated upon women by the patriarchy. “Feminists down the ages have argued that the oppression of women is played out on their bodies, their clothes, their style of adornment. To politicise dress has been one of the enduring projects of the women’s movement.” (Walter, N. 1999) Naomi Wolf tackled this concept in her seminal book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. It suggested that this patriarchal strategy is one of ‘divide and rule’ as it “creates a climate of competitiveness among women that divides them from each other.”

Competitiveness is the keyword here. Perhaps the idea of sanctioning the idea, nay the fact, of female intrasexual competition seems frightening for feminists because on the surface of it, it threatens the very notion of a ‘sisterhood’. Yet we know that men are murderously competitive with one another, as homicide rates attest, and this does not seem to threaten their notion of ‘the patriarchy’.

The evidence actually shows that the beauty myth may not be a tyranny perpetuated on women by men, but on one other - if it is a tyranny at all! And it reveals a much more complex and fascinating picture of female agency which goes far to liberate women from the doctrine of passive femininity.

The fact is, women are fiercely competitive with one another, but as the existence of feminism attests, this does not stop women at least trying to cooperate to face challenges, though, as feminism also shows, its own willful ignorance of human nature means feminists cannot agree on anything for long. This explains the many tribes within feminism, and the fiercely defended hierarchies that exist within feminism itself.

I do not deny that these revelations are tricky for feminists to negotiate, but that is no reason for not taking them on. That female intrasexual competition exists is not in doubt. The degree of it however will vary from culture to culture. We know dominance hierarchies exist in many species and all apes. Humans add to the mix competence hierarchies which allow for the utilisation of innate talents and the division of labour which has allowed our species to become far more than the sum of its biologically determined parts.

We also know females have a large role in the construction and maintenance of such hierarchies, for better and worse. Women are individuals and as such are often not united in their interests. An individual’s environment is crucial to how they calibrate their own needs. Yet, ironically, the collective structure of feminism, suppresses the evolutionary mechanism of individual female choice. The epithet “choice feminism” is regarded with contempt by most feminists today.

 “If we do not know what we are capable of…then we do not know what to watch out for, which human propensities to encourage, and which to guard against.” Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.

Further reading: Griet Vandermassen Sexual Selection: A Tale of Male Bias and Feminist Denial ; Griet Vandermassen: Who’s Afraid of Charles Darwin: Debating Feminism and Evolutionary Theory; Anne Campbell: A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women ; Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding ; Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Mothernature ; Susan Pinker: The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Real Gender Gap ; Christina Hoff Sommers: Who Stole Feminism? ; Cindy Metson & David Buss: Why Women Have Sex; Women reveal the truth about their sex lives, from adventure to revenge (and everything in between) ; E.O. Wilson: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge ; Jerome H.Barklow (ed): Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists

==

We recognize that the evolution of peafowl, bees, seahorses, angler fishes and marsupial mice has resulted in males and females whose physiology and behavior development has influenced and responded to each other. Yet somehow, that female and male humans behave as they do as a result of the other is somehow unreasonable or even "sexist." Like creationist Xians, this is a denial of evolution and of humans as members of the animal kingdom.

It seems like the "god did it" dragon of "tHe PaTrIaRcHy," then, was conjured to fill the gap in the combination of denial of biological sex-based differences (directly responsible for the formulation of gender ideology; and itself a denial of evolution), and denial of intrasexual competition between women ("On Twitter, women are more misogynistic than men") in order to obscure female agency.

If "gender studies" had been based on science instead of Marxian psychosis and postmodern fantasy, it might well have been harder for the Queer Theorists to find a solid ideological foothold and enthusiastic collaborators.

[tanadrin]

Biomes of Sogant Raha: Xenogrowth and Xenogrowth Mix

[Map: major xenogrowth belts in central Rezana, showing full xenogrowth in red and xenogrowth mix in orange]

The recent biogeographical history of Sogant Raha can be divided into two major phases. The first of these phases concerns the planet as it was when the first Exiled arrived in orbit from a distant star. Driven by a soteriology that had grown up between legends of a lost paradise from which they had originated, and a future paradise embodied in a far-off exoplanet, whose atmosphere betrayed signs of a rich biosphere in its spectroscopic signature, an immediate debate began on what form human settlement on the new world would take.

This debate coalesced around two major ideologies that were in concurrence on many major issues, but which differed on a subtle but important point. The Instrumentalists sought to integrate humanity into this alien biosphere; they believed that human and Sogantine life should co-exist. The Renewalists sought to conform to the rigors of the Sogantine biosphere; they believed that the stewardship of Paradise was the highest priority. Both factions were extraordinarily conscious of the dark myths which stretched back into the first days of the Exile long ago, that said humanity was driven to flight, and the first Paradise laid waste because of the works of human hands. Both recognized that, in a cosmos in which living worlds seemed to be painfully rare, this was an opportunity that must not be squandered.

But despite the apparent consonance between these groups, the tension on what degree of importance to grant the human settlement of Paradise rapidly grew, and nearly resulted in civil war aboard the Ammas Echor. Two events prompted reconciliation. First, a joint surface expedition returned with the news that the native biosphere was safe for humans to inhabit, with little risk of disease spreading from humans to the xenobiota or vice-versa. Second, the Great Record, a genetic encyclopedia containing the whole genome of a vast number of Terran lifeforms and information on how to reconstruct living organisms from that data, was discovered carved into the bones of the Ammas Echor. This second discovery in particular threw the plans of both the Instrumentalists and Renewalists into confusion, and the Archivists, a third faction consisting of the heavily genetically and cybernetically altered caste responsible for shepherding the Ammas Echor during its millennia-long flight between the stars that had until then remained aloof, stepped in to broker a peace.

Under the watchful eye of the Archive, human settlement of the surface would begin, and steps would be taken to start the rebirth of terrestrial species that had been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years; but both would proceed along highly controlled and extremely cautious timetables, confined to small designated areas of the surface. Thorough computer simulations and carefully controlled ecological experiments would be undertaken before any expansion was considered; and the human population would remain tightly controlled for centuries to come. This was understood to be a price well worth paying to safeguard against the possibility of dealing irreparable harm to a unique world.

But not all the settlers were happy with this outcome. In particular, a small circle of radical Instrumentalists, augmented by geneticists and ecologists who felt that the Archive was suppressing legitimate scientific inquiry to keep the peace, began a rogue program of species-resurrection, believing that they could accelerate the Archive’s timetable considerably, without seriously endangering the native ecosystem. Working at Khoda Station, a weather observation post far to the southeast of the human colony, they started with various flowering plants before moving on to insects, birds, and (their crowning achievement) bottlenose dolphins. When this rogue operation was discovered, the Archive arrested everyone involved and ordered the destruction of Khoda Station and the sterilization of the surrounding land, to prevent the escape of any potential invasive species. One scientist who refused to evacuate was killed; but the dolphins, partially forewarned by the agitation of the humans, escaped into the open sea.

Further disruption to the program of settlement occurred two generations later; an epidemic of delirium, delusion, and madness began to sweep through first the planetside colonists, and then those who remained aboard the Ammas Echor as well. Only too late, the microbiologists of the Archive realized they had incompletely misunderstood the biosphere of Sogant Raha. Besides the familiar orders of cellular life, which resembled the biology of terran life in their structure, if not their particulars, there was a second order of life that was radically different. Non-cellular, chemically distinct--and in fact much more akin to human biology in composition--this order was principally microscopic, was found as a commensalist throughout the native biosphere, and had begun to colonize the endobiota, humans and the resurrected terran species. What was benign in the xenobiota that had co-evolved with the acytic clade had, for unknown reasons, begun to cause adverse reactions in humans. Led by a brilliant scientist named Kaituro, the Archive’s microbiologists raced to solve the underlying biological mysteries before the plague claimed the lives of the entire colony.

One morning, Kaituro’s colleagues awoke to a mystery: they found Kaituro in an isolation chamber meant for sterile experiments, hooked up to monitors for his vital signs; his body was alive and breathing, but he was brain-dead; the structure of his cerebellum had been destroyed, essentially liquefied, and replaced with a thick slurry of acytic microorganisms and neural protein. An IV in his arm indicated he had injected himself with a compound dangerous to humans but known to promote acytic growth, and a data feed connected to a port in his arm suggested he had been monitoring the activity of the acytes in his bloodstream for an unknown reason; but the data recorder was damaged, and the information unrecoverable. Whatever experiment he had been running was a failure; his body was incinerated that evening.

In subsequent months, the plague reached a fever pitch. Madness claimed the Ammas Echor itself, whose pilots drove it out of orbit and into the sea, a colossal loss for the colony which was still extensively reliant on the technology and fabrication facilities the ship provided. The planetside Archive strove to maintain peace, but panic and anger eventually caused a total political collapse; humans began to spread out across the planet, no longer unified by a single plan or purpose, and they brought with them various resurrected endobiota, which began to integrate themselves into the native ecosystem.

This is the essence of the first phase: a continuous history with the pre-human ecology of Sogant Raha, albeit with the gradual introduction of new endobiota. Although the technology used to resurrect endobiota was lost within a few centuries of the Ammas Echor’s destruction, by that time a huge portion of the Great Record had been transcribed, as it were, into living species. Some endobiota subsequently went extinct, outcompeted by xenobiota that were better adapted for Sogant Raha’s climate and soil, while others found new niches all their own. Oceanic endobiota were much less successful on the whole; besides the bottlenose dolphin, some species of kelp, and various species associated in coral reef ecosystems (which thrived in Sogant Raha’s warm, shallow seas), most oceanic endobiota simply could not compete with native life, and were not successfully resurrected.

Among some endobiota, a curious change occurred: some--but by no means all-organisms colonized by the acytes began to undergo radical changes in their morphology and behavior, changes that failed to be passed on to the offspring if the acytes were purged from them at an early stage of embryonic development. Rumors of monsters in the wilderness were followed by captured specimens of strange and dangerous beasts; and eventually, these were followed by bloody live encounters with humans. The natural world seemed to be turning against humanity.

Worse was to come: for a long time, it seemed that the human body had adapted to the presence of the acytic commensalists that had caused the original epidemic of madness; however, some centuries later, this epidemic returned in a new form. Now tending to cause primarily ataxia, tremors, insomnia, and mood swings, new outbreaks of acytic disease began to occur in a way that suggested they were caused by proximity, though no infectious agent could be identified besides the acytes themselves, which were present in the healthy and the sick alike.

At the same time, tensions were rising among states in the south of the world; investigation of the acytes showed that they had evolved a complicated signalling mechanism that stored a fantastic amount of energy, meaning that if they could be concentrated together in a high enough density, primed with the right signals and fed on the right substrate, they could be made into a powerful weapon.

Although this technology was abandoned as too difficult to control, and likely to promote vicious reprisals from competing states, knowledge of the technology spread to a transnational political faction that had come to understand the native biosphere as wholly hostile to continued human existence. Reports of ghostlike apparitions and many-limbed monsters composed of cold fire killing hundreds and shattering buildings were now becoming commonplace, coming where the new epidemic was most concentrated. Building on that earlier research, and using what was left of the sophisticated technology of the first colonists, they attempted to construct a machine that would permit them to selectively turn the acytic signalling mechanism against the native biosphere of Sogant Raha.

They succeeded beyond their wildest imaginations--in fact, they set off a cascading reaction that could not be stopped, and which began to destroy all native life on the planet. This era, dubbed “the Burning Spring,” resulted in countless acres of dead savannah and jungle that were consumed by wildfire, throwing thick smoke into the planet’s upper atmosphere, releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, and resulting in the deaths of millions due to famine and sickness. But as the Burning Spring passed over the world, endobiota--and endoflora in particular--seemed to revel in the destruction, rapidly claiming the territory yielded up by the native life.

It took many millennia for the global climate and human population to stabilize again; by the time it did, humanity could scarcely remember a time before, and the planet’s surface was now utterly transformed. This is the essential portrait of the second phase of Sogantine biogeography: instead of being dominated by xenobiota, with a small presence of endobiota and occasionally dense pockets surrounding human settlements, endobiota dominated the land-based biosphere, with significant intrusions into the ocean along continental shelves and in the upper water column, while the xenobiota was confined to dwindling refugia, mostly in the continental interiors, and the deep sea.

In the many thousands of years since the Burning Spring, the size of those refugia has continued to shrink. As they have dwindled, they seem to somehow become more conscious of the threat the alien intruders represent, and more unsparing in their defense. In those regions of xenogrowth mix, which seem to spread outward from and be supported by, the unmixed xenogrowth regions in their hearts, human life is impossible for any length of time. Both endo- and xenoflora here are unaccountably toxic, unusual and aggressive animals are found that are known nowhere else, novel viruses cause fulminant cancers and keratinous growths on the skin, and acytes within the human body seem to go haywire, causing neurological disruptions, hallucinations, and necrotic abscesses. It is rumored that beyond this nightmarish borderland, the heart of these refugia are tranquil and beautiful in comparison--remnants of a world once yearned for by humanity and now long-forgotten. But few have survived long enough to explore these regions.

Since these regions represent areas not available to use or exploration by humans, maps of Sogant Raha’s climate and biomes usually do not differentiate between types of xenogrowth or xenogrowth mix; the same colors represent forestlike, savannahlike, and grassland-like conditions.

[oh-dear-so-queer]

The fact is that two-spiritedness, homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender are at the forefront of some of the most significant scientific re-visionings of our time – in which the gap between indigenous and Western perspectives is finally being bridged – yet their contribution is rarely, if ever, acknowledged by Western scientists. When prominent chaos theoreticians, biodiversity experts, and post-Darwinian evolutionists invoke the teachings of tribal peoples, they are usually unaware of the pivotal role played by homosexuality and transgender in these indigenous belief systems, or in the lives of the writers, storytellers, and visionaries who give poetic voice to their scientific concepts.

"Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity" - Bruce Bagemihl

[theisticles]

[tenth-sentence]

It is important that scientists working in chaos theory, biodiversity/Gaia studies, and post-Darwinian evolution acknowledge their genuine affinities with indigenous perspectives.

"Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity" - Bruce Bagemihl

[bluefuecoco]

anyway, if the dlc doesnt include more information on the time traveled pokemon and what their existence means in terms of pokemon evolution as a whole, i’m gonna be upset

[wisdomfish]

MIND-BLOWING New Grand Canyon Info Confirms Noah’s Flood

This MIND-BLOWING new Grand Canyon info confirms Noah’s Flood and debunks the evolutionary timeline… In this presentation, Dr. Andrew Snelling shares new research that points to the layers in the Grand Canyon being formed during the biblical flood.

[artbyblastweave]

Top scientists at MIT have announced that they've located a 500-cubic-meter region of space where Lamarckism is true. "Now to be clear, Darwinian Evolution is true and correct everywhere else, but in here? All Lamarck, all the time," they clarified. "We're not telling anyone where, because you'd all come and do stuff even worse than what we've been doing, like with athletes and soldiers and shit. Whereas we've mostly stuck to Giraffes. Boy, have we stuck to some fucking Giraffes. You would not believe the necks that we've managed so far, I mean cut these thing's heads off at the shoulder and you're most of the way to a Titanoboa. Anyway."

[a-s-fischer]

Antisemitism and the Nazi Worldview: a Guide for the Perplexed

While most people know the Nazis hated Jews, few people understand just how integral Jew-hate was to the Nazi philosophy. This leads into many of the misconceptions about Nazis and the holocaust that regularly pop up, so it bears discussing what Nazis believed about racism and the Jews.

The Nazi conception of "race" was much narrower and "scientific" than we think of it today. The Nazi conception of race was that humans were split into subgroups with distinct traits, that set them apart from each other and gave them advantages in a great and bloody contest of the races. These races pattern on better to ethnicities, nationalities, or even language groups, than race as we think of it today, which is why it would make sense in a Nazi framework to talk about an Irish race, or a Polish race, for example. And of course in the Nazi mind, these races were a real biological reality, and not a social and cultural construct, and the strength and purity of a fit race might be lost through race mixing.

And of course races were differently fit or unfit, superior or inferior, and through the races warring against each other in a battle of the fittest, the superior race would rise above the rest, and subjugate the earth. Hitler came of age in a time of scarcity, war, and famine, and he believed there was no way to feed the entirety of the human race, so eliminating the lesser races through this perpetual struggle of races against each other was the only way for humanity to survive. It was all very Darwinian except that it completely misunderstood how the Darwinian model of evolution actually works, since the unit of selection was the nonexistent race, not the individual.

This struggle of the races was in Hitler and the Nazis' conception not only natural and necessary, but good. Conquest and the slaughter of inferior races was good. The state of the world with nation states and silly notions like laws, and morals, this was bad and unnatural. Humanity, or the strongest race, needed to do away with this system, or humans would all perish of starvation in a degenerate race-mixed scrum. The Nazis were heros, looking to save humanity from this foul unnatural state it had been tricked into adopting.

Tricked by the machinations of one race. One race had broken away from the others, and learned how to hack the system, to survive over under the rule of other races, when it should have been destroyed as a weaker lesser race. This race figured out how to lie and cheat, and live off other races as a parasite, while controlling them from within with fake, unnatural, vile concepts of laws, ethics, notions of justice and compassion, human rights, and international cooperation. And also with money. That race was the Jews.

In the Nazi mind, other races might be lesser, weaker, worthy only of a slow starvation under Nazi rule, but Jews, Jews were unique, special. Weak but cunning, only the Jews had figured out how to subvert and pervert the noble struggle of the races. The Jews were not only especially hated in the Nazi mind but they also served an explanatory purpose. The Jews were the reason humans were not in what the Nazis viewed as a state of nature, and the reason that the areas hadn't eliminated all the other races and taken over the world already. And anything that went wrong for the Nazis was of course caused by Jewish manipulation. The Jews had to be stripped of their unnatural power and control, and eliminated quickly, to keep them from continuing to undermine the strongest race, the Aryan Germans.

Early on, there was some discussion about how this was to be done. The mass slaughter of Jews under this philosophy might have been inevitable but it wasn't obviously inevitable to all Nazis. The important thing was to reduce the Jews to a state of nature, to take away their unnatural control, and leave them in the position of any other lesser race. This is where ideas, like sending all the Jews to Madagascar, to "build their own state" but really to inevidably die in the wilderness, came from. If Jews were separated from their stronger hosts, the logic went, they would just be one more weaker race and they would die just the same. This was also why so many Nazis took a special delight in simply denying captive Jews the means of survival, leaving them to starve, freeze, and die of disease in a state of nature, without the resources they had parasitically leached out of their host races.

But that process took too long. There were simply too many Jews, and too many (to the Nazi mind) Jewish controlled enemies. As Germany and the Axis' began to lose the war, and then as that loss became increasingly only a matter of time, the Nazis ramped up their efforts to kill Jews, by bullet and by gas, because if they could kill enough Jews, surely that Jewish control over their enemies would break and the Aryans among those enemies what recognize their racial interest, and join with the Germans, giving them victory. Instead the resources poured into the wholesale murder of Jews were resources stripped from the Nazi war machine, hastening the Allied victory.

Antisemitism wasn't simply one more bigotry for the Nazis to tack onto their general racism. It was foundational to the Nazi conception of how the world functioned. It was the explanitory mechanism in the Nazis' conspiratorial framework. And with this philosophy at the core of Nazism, the Holocaust became not only inevitable, but the highest calling of the Nazis, their sacrifice for humanity, or at least what was left of humanity after the strongest race had triumphed over all the others. Very little about Nazism is unique. Their militarism, their glorification of violence and struggle, their racial pseudo-Darwinianism, certainly their conspiratorial antisemitism, all had plenty of precident long before they came on the scene. It was their particularly potent combination of these existing elements that made them Nazis. And in this combination, it was the Jew-hate which held everything together and which provided the energizing force.

[yorickish]

textbook describing some shang dynasty king's wife (one of many wives) whose grave complex managed to survive to the present day without being graverobbed. it contained 1.6 metric tons of bronze objects in total, 130 weapons, 755 jade objects, and 564 bone objects.

feel like these crazy tombs were a distinctly bronze age thing... pharaohs obviously did that sort of shit. others too?

I remember seeing bret deveraux complaining about how whenever the romans conquered some non-state people, those people stopped doing elaborate noble-warrior burials where rich people would get buried with all their shit (which sucks for historians obviously). but that was iron age

it's making me think that like... this shit is just so colossally wasteful. this king-wife had what's got to be the entire productive output of probably dozens of lives thrown away with her. imagine if she wasn't even that hot. actually wait if it's just dozens that might be peanuts in an empire of hundreds of thousands, probably more like millions. I don't know if it's dozens or hundreds or what. how much is a ton of bronze anyway

in general I'm very skeptical of like, darwinian concepts of social evolution, cause you really don't have a lot of "generations" for that. but I wonder if there is a degree to which, after just a thousand years or so of these practices, social organizations that didn't throw so much away beat them all out. probably not really how it went

oh right definitely not cause people were just stealing all this shit back out of the graves. well maybe that took a few centuries

imagine being a naturally tightassed and cheapskate imperial scribe type and having to just shut your mouth and let this shit happen. no wonder they were doing human sacrifice I would have to kill someone to blow off steam too

[transmutationisms]

do you have any reading recs (books, ~scholarly articles, whatever) in the same vein as this post? (doesn't need to be a super long list, i'm content to branch off with the works cited of whatever you come up with...) as always, love your blog!! :-)

yes :3 split roughly by subtopic, bolded some favs

Evolution in England prior to (Charles) Darwin

Cooter, Roger. The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organisation of Consent in Nineteenth Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1985).

Desmond, Adrian. The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1989).

Elliott, Paul. “Erasmus Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the Origin of the Evolutionary Worldview in British Provincial Scientific Culture, 1770–1850.” Isis 94 (1): 1–29 (2003).

Finchman, Martin. “Biology and Politics: Defining the Boundaries.” In: Lightman, Bernard (Ed.). Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1997), 94–118.

Fyfe, Aileen. Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2012).

Harrison, James. “Erasmus Darwin’s View of Evolution.” Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (2): 247–64 (1971).

McNeil, Maureen. Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and his Age. Manchester: Manchester University Press (1987).

Ospovat, Dov. “The Influence of Karl Ernst von Baer’s Embryology 1828–1859: A Reappraisal in Light of Richard Owen’s and William Benjamin Carpenter’s ‘Palaeontological Application of Von Baer’s Law.’” Journal of the History of Biology 9 (1): 1–28 (1976).

Rehbock, Philip F. The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press (1983).

Richards, Robert J. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behaviour. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1987).

Rupke, Nicolaas. Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2009 [ 1994]).

Secord, James. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2001).

van Wyhe, John. Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism. London: Ashgate (2004).

Winter, Alison. “The Construction of Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in the Early Life Sciences.” In: Lightman, Bernard (Ed.). Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1997), 24–50.

Yeo, Richard. “Science and Intellectual Authority in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain: Robert Chambers and Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.” Victorian Studies 28 (1): 5–31 (1984).

Edinburgh Lamarckians and Scottish transmutationism

Desmond, Adrian. “Robert E. Grant: The Social Predicament of a Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist.” Journal of the History of Biology 17 (2): 189–223 (1984).

Jenkins, Bill. Evolution Before Darwin. Theories of the Transmutation of Species in Edinburgh, 1804–1834. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (2019).

Secord, James. “The Edinburgh Lamarckians: Robert Jameson and Robert E. Grant.” Journal of the History of Biology 24 (1): 1–18 (1991).

Corsi, Pietro. ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians? The Authorship of Three Anonymous Papers (1826–1829)’, Journal of the History of Biology 54 (2021), pp. 345–374.

Darwin and Darwinism

Desmond, Adrian and James Moore. Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. New York: W. W. Norton & Company (1994).

van Wyhe, John. “Mind the Gap. Did Darwin Avoid Publishing his Theory for many years?” Notes & Records of the Royal Society 61 (2007), 177–205.

Sloan, Philip R. “Darwin, Vital Matter, and the Transformation of Species.” Journal of the History of Biology 19 (3): 369–445 (1986).

Phillip R. Sloan, “The Making of a Philosophical Naturalist.” In: Hodge, Jonathan and Gregory Radick (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2009), 17–39.

Sponsel, Alistair. Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2018).

Young, Robert M. “Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory.” Past & Present 43 (1969): 109–45.

Young, Robert M. “Darwin’s Metaphor: Does Nature Select?” The Monist 55 (3): 442–503 (1971).

Bowler, Peter J. The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1988).

Bowler, Peter J. The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1983).

Hale, Piers J. “Rejecting the Myth of the Non-Darwinian Revolution.” Victorian Review 41 (2): 13–18 (Fall 2015).

Lightman, Bernard. “Darwin and the popularisation of evolution.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 64: 5–24 (2010).

Richards, Robert J. The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1992).

Ruse, Michael. The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1979).

Lamarck and Lamarckism

Barthélemy-Madaule, Madeleine. 1982. Lamarck, the Mythical Precursor: A Study of the Relations between Science and Ideology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Burkhardt, Richard. 1970. Lamarck, Evolution, and the Politics of Science. Journal of the History of Biology 3 (2): 275–298.

Burkhardt, Richard. 1977. The Spirit of System: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Corsi, Pietro. 1988. The Age of Lamarck: Evolutionary Theories in France, 1790–1830. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Corsi, Pietro. 2005. Before Darwin: Transformist Concepts in European Natural History. Journal of the History of Biology 38 (1): 67-83.

Corsi, Pietro. 2011. The Revolutions of Evolution: Geoffroy and Lamarck, 1825–1840. Bulletin du Musée D’Anthropologie Préhistorique de Monaco 51: 113–134.

Jordanova, Ludmilla. 1984. Lamarck. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Spary, Emma C. 2000. Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[horsesource]

“Yeah dude it just feels so good to know I’m not a bad person. I’ve got a hardware issue. A wiring problem. The problem? Well, they measured my adaptive functioning and it’s terrible. It’s so low. Adaptive functioning? Well it’s how well adapted I am to my surroundings. Yes I guess it does sound a bit Darwinian. Yeah “successful adaptation” is notoriously tricky to “measure” in a moment. But these are social scientists. These ARE measurements. Sure Alfred Binet kept talking about how his “measure” was a heterogenous order, NOT akin to a measurement of quantitative attributes. But he was just being modest! I’m telling you they measured my adaptive levels, they are shot. I’m not gonna make it, evolutionarily speaking. It’s a miracle of evolution that I’ve made it this far. Thank god mental health professionals have identified my evolutionary problem of finding the dominant modes of abstraction that are killing the planet (what are we supposed to be adapting to again?) utterly intolerable. Maybe if I undergo enough social skills training I won’t die by evolution”

[tanadrin]

So obviously even if life arose on another planet that was chemically very similar to the primordial Earth it would not use the exact same biochemical arrangements. There are lots of simple sugars that could form genetic polymers, even ones with a helical structure, and lots of different possible nucleobases, and even the correspondence between codons and amino acids (including what amino acids life uses in the first place) are arbitrary. As long as everything is water soluble and the bonds aren’t so weak that big organic molecules fall apart nor so strong that you can’t take them apart to reuse (or get any kind of stochastic changes at all to drive Darwinian evolution), it’s mostly a question of what particular chemical combo your alien microbes happen to land on, with an assist from molecular geometry and stuff.

A lot of this has been played with experimentally—xenonucleic acids and unnatural nucleobases and such—but of course mostly with an eye to doing practical stuff like antisense therapies or studying the history of life on Earth. What I have a less good sense of is what kind of chemically-similar-but-totally-historically-distinct developments you could get in such a scenario. Could you have a genetic molecule based entirely on amino acids? Are there other organic macromolecules that could be efficient ways of storing genetic information? Is it absolutely necessary to have genetic information be totally distinct from proteins in the first place—could you have some kind of system where certain critical proteins built copies of themselves and other important functional proteins?

I don’t see an immediate reason why not, but I really don’t know enough about molecular biology to be confident in that assessment, much less what such structures would look like!