Just So Stories

DARWINISM JUST PROVIDED A JUSTIFICATION FOR THE EMPIRE:

Prehistory’s Original Sin: a review of The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins by Stefanos Geroulanos (Connor Grubaugh, 5/07/25, The Hedgehog Review)

Geroulanos’s portraits of major thinkers and movements in fields such as paleontology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, historical linguistics, psychology, and religious studies are well-drawn and often devastating. He is right to argue that these disciplines emerged together as the authority of Christianity declined in the eighteenth century, becoming bearers of a modern faith that the origins of humanity and the meaning of human existence can be explained in naturalistic terms alone.

Beginning with the Enlightenment ideal of the noble savage and the Romantic lore of the untamed Indo-Aryan, then proceeding at a clip through stadial theories of prehistorical “deep time,” the diffusion of innumerable rival Darwinisms, the savage Id and collective unconscious, and more, Geroulanos demonstrates how speculation—and projection—have always run rife in these arenas of purportedly scientific research. Academic disagreements about the deep past and their popular representation have always tracked with the dominant ideologies of the times. “The story of human origins has never really been about the past,” he writes. “Prehistory is about the present day; it always has been.” And every generation gets the Neanderthals it deserves.

DARWINISM WAS JUST AN EXCUSE FOR COLONIALISM:

‘Biological reality’: What genetics has taught us about race (Adam Rutherford, 4/20/25, BBC)

When scientists unveiled the first draft of the Human Genome Project 25 years ago, it seemed to deliver the final word on some antiquated myths about race. It provided definitive evidence that racial groupings have no biological basis. In fact, there is more genetic variation within racial groups than between them. Race, it showed, is a social construct.

But despite that fundamental finding, which has only been reinforced as work on human genomes has continued, race and ethnicity are still often deployed to categorise human populations as distinct biological groups. These are views that can be found circulating in the pseudoscience on social media, but they also still creep into scientific research and healthcare systems.

There’s no such thing as species.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

Dire wolf debate raises concerns on scientific overhype: Even de-extinction advocates say that Colossal Biosciences’ claims are misleading (Max Barnhart, April 11, 2025, C&EN)

“It’s not a dire wolf. It’s misleading to call it that,” says Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo. “I can’t explain how pissed off it made me, because they’re still saying this stuff, and they know it to not be true.”

David Shiffman, an environmental scientist and independent policy consultant, agrees. “This is not a dire wolf by any reasonable definition of a dire wolf,” he says. “This is a gray wolf that has had a tiny fraction of its genes modified to look more like what they think a dire wolf looked like. That means these animals are still gray wolves.”

THE WHOLE POINT OF DARWINISM…:

In Genetics, a Tense Coexistence of Mainstream and Fringe Views (Ashley Smart, 03.26.2025, UnDark)

In the summer of 2022, Abdel Abdellaoui was set to give a keynote at the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research. But when he learned he’d be sharing a speaker roster with Emil Kirkegaard, Abdellaoui announced on Twitter that he was cancelling his lecture.

Kirkegaard is perhaps best known for his provocative writing on genetics and race. On his blog, he has asserted that Black Americans are less honest and less intelligent than their White counterparts; that affirmative action produces Black and Hispanic doctors who kill people with their incompetence; that Africans are excessively predisposed to violence; and that the hereditarian hypothesis of intelligence — roughly, the idea that races or ancestry groups differ in average intelligence in ways that are substantially attributable to genetics — is “almost certainly true.”

UNLEASHED
Living in the Age of Risky Science: An Undark Special Series.

At the time of the 2022 conference, “this guy was having a bad influence with the crap he was spreading, and the way he behaved online, and he was giving our scientific field a bad name,” recalled Abdellaoui, a geneticist working in the Department of Psychiatry at Amsterdam University Medical Center whose research interests include the genetics of intelligence. Abdellaoui noted in a post on Medium that Kirkegaard had never been part of any credible research program or Ph.D. program, and had a reputation for publishing sloppy scientific work in dubious journals. “I just didn’t want to be associated with that, and I wanted to have that be clear — that he’s not on my team and I’m not on his.” (Kirkegaard did not respond to multiple email requests for an interview for this story.)

Shortly after Abdellaoui announced his withdrawal, he learned that Kirkegaard was scratched from the speaker lineup, and Abdellaoui decided to give the keynote after all. Yet just two years later, Kirkegaard would be back at the ISIR conference podium — a podium that has served as a platform for Kirkegaard and other proponents of the hereditarian hypothesis since long before Abdellaoui’s threatened boycott. Their presence at ISIR, alongside psychologists and geneticists from many of the world’s top research institutions, underscores a complicated reality in this fraught field of study: When it comes to the genetics of intelligence, the line between mainstream and fringe can be hard to pin down, and the work of the former can intertwine with that of the latter in ways that are difficult to disentangle.

…was to justify the Empire by showing “others” inferior.

IT WAS NEVER MORE THAN A CULT:

The Social Turn: Psychoanalysis at an inflection point (Maggie Doherty, April 2025, Harpers)

[I] was in New York mainly to investigate rumors I’d heard about major changes afoot in the American psychoanalytic community. Psychoanalysis, I’d heard, was modernizing. APsA was opening up to the broader world. There was a push to bring in new members, as well as a rising tide of psychoanalytic work that sought to make analysis more accessible to and effective for people of different stripes. I wanted to understand what these changes meant for clinicians and patients and whether they were being resisted. What would it take for psychoanalysis to change?

APsA may have an iron hold on the profession, but it has a small fist, I thought, as I counted the people milling about on the hotel’s second floor. It was Thursday, the convention’s third day but only the first with a full slate of panels and discussions, and there were perhaps fifty people present before the afternoon sessions. The crowd seemed old, strikingly so; I saw a lot of gray hair and sensible shoes and the kind of funky jewelry worn by women of a certain age. According to their name tags, many attendees hailed from a few coastal cities: Boston, San Francisco, New York. Almost every person I saw was white. There was a small book exhibit next to a poster display that reminded me of a high school science fair. Representatives from the mental-health treatment center Austen Riggs, advertising in-patient treatment in the Berkshires (more than $70,000 for six weeks), had set up shop just a few steps away.

The sleepy atmosphere, the sparse crowd: it was hard to believe that psychoanalysis had once been central to American culture. From the aftermath of World War II through the mid-Sixties, analysis was seen as a reliable treatment for mental illness. Psychoanalysts sat on the boards of medical schools and chaired departments of psychiatry. Psychoanalytic researchers received government funding. A rosy portrait of the psychoanalyst appeared in the press; journalists themselves entered treatment. The historian Nathan G. Hale Jr. calls this time the golden age of psychoanalysis.

But the golden age didn’t last. In the Sixties, psychoanalysis came under attack from feminists, as well as from advocates of community mental-health services who derided the practice as a luxury for the well-off. Meanwhile, a new generation of physicians and psychiatrists were turning away from psychoanalysis—particularly with the development of what would later be called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which was evidence-based and promised concrete results within a set time frame. By the late Seventies and early Eighties, insurance companies largely excluded psychoanalytic treatment on the grounds that it wasn’t evidence-based, and the majority of analysands had to pay out-of-pocket. In 1980, the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders purged its pages of psychoanalytic theory, explicitly bringing American psychiatry into a post-psychoanalytic era that was more focused on “biological” explanations and cures, like drugs. Soon pharmaceutical companies began promising patients that their depression or anxiety could be treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and by the end of the century, mainstream American psychoanalysis could be said to be on the decline—and in crisis.

NOTHING EVER SPECIATES:

A Mathematician’s View of Evolution: There are at least four fundamental problems with Darwinian evolution as an answer to the origins and complexity of life on earth. (Granville Sewell, February 8, 2025, American Spectator)

Problem 3.  It is widely believed that Darwin’s theory of natural selection of random replication errors (mutations) explains evolution. But in fact, Darwin’s implausible theory becomes more implausible with every new biological and biochemical discovery.

In 1960 Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote “It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly…. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes, and phyla are systematic and almost always large.”

If you think about what gradual transitions between major groups of animals would have looked like you will understand why we generally don’t see them in the fossil record. Gradual development of the new organs or new systems of organs that gave rise to new orders, classes, and phyla would require the development of new but not yet useful features. The development of new organs through their initial useless stages obviously cannot be explained by natural selection, since new features present no selective advantage before they are useful.

Features which are useless until they are well developed, or almost perfect, are said to be “irreducibly complex,” a term that was introduced by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box.  Irreducibly complex features and processes are ubiquitous in living things, especially at the microscopic level, as Behe documented in great detail in this now-classic book.

In fact, the development — gradual or not — of new organs or other irreducibly complex features through their useless stages could only be guided by a process with foresight, able to think ahead and envision their future uses. In other words, a mind. Indeed, Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose is the title of a 2019 book by Brazilian chemist and ID proponent Marcos Eberlin, which carries the endorsement of three Nobel prize winners.

The first part of the video Why Evolution is Different has further documentation, including a New York Times News Service report on a 1980 meeting of  “nearly all of the leading evolutionists” at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History,  for the assertion that major new features generally do not appear gradually in the fossil record and could not be explained by natural selection even if they did. Here is a segment from the report on the 1980 meeting:

Darwin, however, knew he was on shaky ground in extending natural selection to account for differences between major groups of organisms. The fossil record of his day showed no gradual transitions between such groups, but he suggested that further fossil discoveries would fill the missing links.

“The pattern that we were told to find for the last 120 years does not exist,” declared Niles Eldridge, a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Eldridge reminded the meeting of what many fossil hunters have recognized as they trace the history of a species through successive layers of ancient sediments. Species simply appear at a given point in geologic time, persist largely unchanged for a few million years and then disappear. There are very few examples — some say none — of one species shading gradually into another.

A 2022 article in The Guardian, “Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution?”  retells the traditional Darwinian story for how eyes evolved and then says

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.  For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place…

And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”

In 2004, Michael Behe and David Snoke published a paper in Protein Science whose conclusions are summarized on p. 242 of Steve Meyer’s 2013 book Darwin’s Doubt:

[T]hey assessed how long it would typically take to generate two or three or more coordinated mutations.  They determined that generally the probability of multiple mutations arising in close (functionally relevant) coordination to each other was “prohibitively” low — it would likely take an immensely long time, typically far longer than the age of the earth.

This explains why Darwinists have always insisted that evolutionary progress must be assumed to have always been very gradual, despite the evidence that it was not.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

Footprints Reveal Two Early Human Species Walked the Same Lakeshore in Kenya 1.5 Million Years Ago (Sarah Kuta, 12/02/24, Smithsonian)

Their footprints, made within hours or days of each other, provide the first direct, physical evidence that multiple early human species coexisted in the same habitat, according to a new study published last week in the journal Science.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Philosophical Dead Ends: John Dupré reviews Richard Dawkins’s “The Genetic Book of the Dead” and Sara Imari Walker’s “Life as No One Knows It.” (John Dupré, November 30, 2024, LA Review of Books)

First, Dawkins remains, loosely speaking, a genetic determinist. I say “loosely speaking” because, of course, he does not believe that genes are sufficient to produce an organism. DNA alone in a test tube does not somehow turn into an elephant or an orchid. But Dawkins does take genes to be what matters. The additional necessary resources—oxygen to breathe, parental care, and so on—are background conditions normally sufficient to allow the genes to do their causal work. A crucial consequence of this is that development doesn’t matter for evolution. If the phenotype is fully inscribed in the genes, then it makes sense to think of evolution as ultimately a sequence of genomes competing with one another. The phenotypes are proxies for the genomes that determine them.

But life is not like that. Development is complex and multifactorial. Various nongenetic factors—e.g., cultural or epigenetic (non-sequence-based features of genomes), which may have their own distinct evolutionary trajectories—play a role.

AND THAT’S HOW THE LEOPARD GOT ITS SPOTS…:

Coyotes have the face muscles for that ‘sad-puppy’ look (Susan Milius, 10/01/24, Science News)

Coyotes turn out to have face muscles that look capable of making that big-eyed, sad-puppy face that dogs have used to melt human hearts for eons.