Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker - A Literary Review

I'm sure a literary review is something I bet you never would have expected from this blog, but I've decided to inject a bit of culture for once. Before you wet yourself with excitement I would like to add that I'm not explicitly reviewing the book, but actually an article that promotes the book. If this is a standard promotional piece then it should cover the basic points in the book, so without further ado let's take a look at what great arguments are made in the supposed framing of a 'Victorian mythmaker'.
_____________________________________________________________________________
https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/it-s-time-charles-darwin-was-exposed-for-the-fraud-he-was-a3604166.html
_____________________________________________________________________________

The article begins with a strange comparison. Comparing scientists with politicians of bygone ages doesn't seem like a particularly good line of argument when your explicitly calling Darwin a fraud from a scientific perspective. Lenin and Darwin are two completely different characters from history, so I'm really not too sure why you find this false equivalence an acceptable argument. Presumably it's this notion that, like Communism, Darwinism will eventually fall and become an obsolete way of thinking. However, here we are two centuries later and Darwin's pioneering work is still perfectly applicable to evolutionary theory, and Lenin as you quite rightly identify is an extremely controversial figure. Darwin is still seen as a revolutionary scientist, whereas Lenin is just seen as a revolutionary. I don't recall Darwinists ever rounding up dissidents and royal family members so they can have them all butchered. This comparison between the two men is completely unwarranted, and to say it's clutching at straws would be a huge understatement. Darwin didn't erect his own statue, so it seems a bit unfair to call someone a fraud by judging him for events that happened long after the person's own death.

I'm also intrigued as to why you have a gushing opinion of Richard Owen and not Charles Darwin. It's interesting to note that all the arguments you make criticising Darwin can also be applied to the 'great scientist' Richard Owen. Apparently it's absolutely not fraudulent to provide inaccurate reconstructions of dinosaurs and plagiarising the work of others. Turns out it's only fraudulent when an idolised Charles Darwin allegedly does it. I absolutely hate this straw man argument that runs through the whole piece implying that Darwin is revered because he and his followers purposely hid his own flaws. This is simply not true, and I know of not one scientist today that doesn't understand Darwinian limitations, because unlike you Mr. Wilson they understand the importance of a reasoned debate.

Darwinism and Mendelian genetics are not similar theories in the slightest. One may have used finches and the other used pea plants as evidence for a biological theory, but they are both revolutionary scientific theories in differing areas of the subject. Darwin's theory, like Mendelian genetics, has been proven a countless number of times, and just because some don't believe in it doesn't instantly make it incorrect. Opinions are irrelevant in determining scientific facts, which is a point I wish you would understand.

This whole paragraph may have been an acceptable line of argument at the turn of the 20th century, but the once conflicting Mendelian and Darwinian ways of thinking have been amalgamated for years thanks to the pioneering work of scientists such as Haldane and Dobzhansky to name but a few. This argument is deliberately not showing the whole picture of evolutionary theory, either purposely for the sake of the argument or due to a fatal lack of understanding. You can't just vilify Darwin and simultaneously idolise Mendel when they both suffer from the same faults you cite. You can just as easily make the argument that looking to Mendel as an icon would be stupid when his laws of inheritance have been disproved, most notably his law on independent assortment, and his method of sampling was debatably biased and suspicious to say the least. Funnily enough you'll find every scientists make mistakes, even the ones that Mr Wilson idolises. It's hardly fair to criticise Darwin for making mistakes in sciences that were decades away from being refined. It's a testament to the man that such a primitive scientific field at the time still today contains the foundations of such an archaic piece of literature. Variation and inheritance were way off from being refined, so describing the critical process of natural selection, which is still a cornerstone of evolutionary theory, is pretty damn admirable by my understanding.

Then we return to the flat out bizarre argument that Darwinism is some form of religious cult. I honestly have no idea how you can even jump to that conclusion with the measly evidence that's been produced in support for that idea. The fact that Darwinism can be seen as a religion is certainly not the primary reason towards Darwin's popularity. Maybe, and here's a silly suggestion, he may have become the figurehead for evolutionary theory because he fucking pioneered it. It's arguments like this that make me seriously doubt whether Wilson has actually read a single word of Darwin. It's all very well making the pathetic remark that a unified explanation of a complex natural process is childish, but where's your evidence for this unqualified insult. The beauty of science in that you can provide evidence instead of just trying in vain to attack an individual with petty insults.

It's certainly true that the theory of evolution was widely accepted before Darwin's 1859 work, but the great revelation of Darwin's work was that this newly discovered process of evolution occurred by natural selection. This is such a critical point that wasn't picked up on by contemporaries such as Lamarck, which is why their predictions of evolutionary biology are widely rejected today, and that's the same scenario with each of the figures mentioned in this paragraph. Georges Cuvier for reference was one of the leading opponents to the theory of evolution and believed life was created and destroyed in determined cycles, and Von Goethe was primarily a writer and not a published scientist. Similarly Erasmus Darwin published his ideas of evolution in a fucking poem, so funnily enough had fuck all to do with the origins of evolutionary theory. None of these people even remotely touched on the idea of natural selection, so it would simply be idiotic to claim they were just airbrushed out of history without any evidence supporting this statement.

I'm astonished that Wilson still insists of repetitively spewing this simply untrue narrative that Darwin stole his fame. From his autobiography we learn that Darwin was reluctant to publish his groundbreaking work for fear of retribution. To quote the final line of page 83 from his autobiography: 'Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work; but I was so anxious to avoid prejudice, that I determined not for some time to write even the briefest sketch of it.' It was only the correspondence from a malaria ridden Alfred Wallace that the book was even jointly published by both men. These activities from a man who allegedly 'airbrushed all predecessors'.

There seems to be a complete misunderstanding of Darwinian theory here. I'm currently not aware of any leading evolutionary biologists who dispute that evolution happens little by little. When these scientists are referring to leaps in the fossil record they're still referring to events that occur millions of years apart from each other, which is just like what Darwin theorised. I've read a fair bit of Gould, and believe your misinterpreting his ideas that closely related populations often experience periods of rapid evolution after periods of stability. This is known as punctuated equilibrium and does not describe the general trend of transitional forms that Darwin had predicted. Again, when trying to make scientific arguments it helps if you don't rely on blind ignorance to suffice as evidence.

The point that paleontology has come up with virtually no missing links is just absolute bollocks. It's instantly clear you don't have an insightful view into the world of evolutionary biology if you start referring to the redundant term 'missing link', but instead there are tonnes of examples of transitional specimens to fit your criteria. The reason why the frequency of these findings is lower than you might expect is because of the sheer complexity in the process of speciation, and where there are gaps that's because finding a theoretical fossil aint easy. At a time when the fossil record was piss poor I don't think it's at all warranted to be bitching about Darwin's slightly inaccurate predictions when you have the benefit of hindsight and yet still get the basic theory completely muddled.

Certainly it's true that Darwin shared the now immoral views on race that were common with the majority of imperialists at the time, however this does not discredit his objective scientific theories. This whole reductionist argument of why Darwin thought nature was so brutal is so painfully idiotic that it pulls into question just what fucking research Mr Wilson has done. The answer to why Charles Darwin had this brutal depiction of life does not simply boil down to 'he was a racist'. That's the level of argument I would expect from a handicapped child, and completely fails to mention such critical events as the premature death of his beloved daughter and his inspiration from other pessimistic theorists such as Thomas Malthus.

Apparently it's common knowledge where Darwin's theories all led. That knowledge being common to the idiots who claim Charles Darwin had a role in the Holocaust. To claim this is a huge fucking lie, and in complete denial of the truth. I'm not sure how Darwin can be blamed for a Nazi operation when they burned his fucking book. This whole point is just vile slander. Eugenics, if not in an ideological sense, has been around since the dawn of humanity, and we've seen countless race based purges before Darwin was even conceived. This would be like making the argument that the inventor of the wheel is responsible for the Holocaust because it was their invention that ferried the Jews to death camps.

I honestly dread to think what this whole text would read like. I can only imagine that it's hundreds of pages of slanderous bullshit. It's not even the first time Wilson's work has come under criticism for being complete bollocks. His biography of Hitler for example was panned by historians, and his biography on John Betjeman used a rather humorous hoax as evidence. The bottom line is that to claim that Darwin stole his ideas, and that these stolen ideas are not truthful is plain bullshit. It's all very well being able to articulate a simple argument, but here we have an example of scientific illiteracy clearly rearing its ugly head and diluting any form of rationality. I've not had the displeasure to read the finished copy, but if the promotional material is anything to go by then it's likely to be flat out moronic. How dare this columnist express a sense of intellectual superiority when their abysmal scientific scrutiny is just pompous drivel at its very worst. Maybe it's Wilson, and not Charles Darwin, that should be publicly shamed for being an arrogant and lying fraud.