Capitol Ideas / Proletarian Evolution

...Anyway, catastrophism is back, and this is but a reflection of a more important underlying change in the intellectual climate...

...Frederick T. Zugibe, a pathologist who has examined the Holy Shroud of Turin, has come to the belief that the late Jesus Christ may have suffered the same affliction as President Abraham Lincoln, Marfan's syndrome...

...Put another way...

...Lewontin (note the non-sexist initials in best Science-forthe-People fashion), both of Harvard, s u s p e c t t h a t Darwin perceived all those Victorian firms struggling away competitively, with only the fittest surviving, and proceeded to " d i s - cover" in nature Victorian capitalism writ large...

...For a generation or longer the latter two have been .select members of the Evolutionary Curia (other members have included George Gaylord Simpson, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and Julian Huxley...

...The THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 5 nineteenth century that Charles Darwin knew was a time of slow-butsteady progress, and nature was perceived as having an "improving mechanism" built into it--natural selection...

...for a few million years, then . . . look out...

...Follet, attired in pinstripe trousers, a black jacket, and a battered bowler with .a Union Jack flying from its band, calls himself the "self-appointed Brftish ambassador to the world...

...and Mrs...

...t l e o l l e , g o l i i o o l l o o o o o a o . , o t i Q l l o o o o l CONTINUING CRISIS (continued from page 2) book, writing every Jane she finds, and her researches have taken her even beyond the Louisville directory...

...Although Mayr has enjoyed almost Papal authority in this field, he seemed this day to be a little on the defensive against the bearded Gouldish upstart...

...Evolutionary theory as constituted at present is unable to explain definitively the extinction of any species, whether it be modern mammoth or ancient archaeopteryx...

...evolutionary dogma so well since Darwin's day...

...In the mid-nineteenth century, science wrested away a good deal of authority from religion and retained it for well over a hundred years...

...How is it that hypotheses come and go, falling every so often in and "out of favor," as the AAAS program puts it...

...Species chug along happily in a parent-offspring chain (not too sexist, we hope...

...T h a t ' s why this resurgence of creationism makes people like Gould "concerned and angry," as he has written...

...In Holland, Michigan a young girl died when a hospital bed went out of control and Mr...

...The miracle came about when state health officials scrutinized the girls' pompons, as they are called, and discovered that one had accidentally absorbed acid from an automobile battery...

...Now, I suspect, this authority is being retrieved by clergymen...

...The question then becomes: What forces " s h a p e " the permissible theories at different periods...

...This is called "punctuated equilibrium," in suitably arcane fashion...

...Prepayment is required on all orders not for resale...

...There are just too many facts out there, like snowflakes by Tom Bethell in a blizzard...

...So the scientists have to start with a theory which in turn guides them to the appropriate factual snowflakes...

...One indication is provided by the behavior of the "germs" of socialism, that most debilitating disease of our time...

...More 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982...

...He predicted it back in 1977, when he warned of performers and producers of sexually explicit films being victimized by public officials "trying to make political mileage" at the expense of these enlightened marriage counselors...

...Take a look at the University of Chicago's proceedings of the 1959 Darwin Centennial, Julian Huxley's remarks in particular, if you don't believe me...

...It is a finding certain to please others who are tall, thin, and have an arm span greater than their height, though it might make them think twice about taking controversial positions...

...One may ask why the prestige of science is crumbling...

...Holmes languishes in the coils of California justice...

...Liberation theology" is the new battleground of socialism...

...The question to be asked about creationism is not "Is it science...

...Forget that last bit about " d a t a , " which is intended to create the impression that scientists just follow the facts whereever they lead and then dutifully and subserviently construct a theory to fit these facts...

...Alfred C. Kinsey is redeemed...

...Lenin to mate with (there's a bit of a problem there--how do you get a compatible Mr...

...Gould also attributes the creationist resurgence to " r i g h t i s t groups," which is just wishful thinking on his part...

...You only have to see magazines like-Omni, and films like Star t~ars and Raiders of the Lost Ark to realize that the culture today is beginning to flirt with the idea that such "magical" moments really exist...

...The real reason is that the authority of science is crumbling, that authority is migrating elsewhere, and with it the faith in materialism-the belief that there are no nonmaterial interventions in nature--is receding...

...These germs are always transmitted by the most authoritative "carriers" of the day...

...As of last month he had hitchhiked and cycled through 50 countries and covered 62,000 miles...

...In the official program of the AAAS meeting, under the heading "Evolution," there occurs the following, sentence: "After many years out of general favor, catastrophic causal mechanisms, both internal and external, have once again come to the fore, largely supported by paleoceanographic and geochemical data...

...Good point, but Gould may have been too polite to remind him that t h e r e w e r e n ' t too many transitional forms in the fossil record, either...

...May there not be times when material manifestations have nonmaterial antecedents...

...Social Darwinism, usually depicted as a reprehensible corruption of Darwinism, was in fact the progenitor of it...

...To order, or for a copy of our catalogue, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...

...This I find one of the more intriguing left-wing ideas of recent years...

...By contrast the twentieth century has been filled with Communism, violence, and revolution...

...Such explanations used to be couched in terms of gradual changes in the environment, but the hot new idea is that an asteroid slammed into the Earth, stirring up a lot of dust which in turn shut off the sunlight, thus temporarily stopping photosynthesis, vegetation, and, by implication, dinosaur meals...

...After my upbringing I probably know just as much of the Bible as they do . . . and I believe in God just as much as they do...

...I still think we are within the realms of Darwinism, but the theory is maturing...

...catastrophism is finally in fashion, and natural selection is now regarded with grave suspicion (the fittest survive, yes...

...Gould and R.C...

...Science also asserts the hegemony of materialism, and it has become quite apparent in the past decade that materialism is a philosophy which exerts only a weak hold on man's mind_ The picture of life that it entails is too boring and humdrum and unconvincing to persuade us much longer, and it is now being discarded, I think...

...And if t h e r e are no transitional forms (as one or two now believe) then new species must either have started life as hopeful monsters, or been blown in from another corner of the universe, as Francis Crick now seems to be suggesting, o r . . . (oh dear) . . . been created by God...

...There is the sound of the 1970s for you, replete with unctuousness...

...dollars...

...The edifice of Science is less monolithic and dogmatic than it has been for many a decade...

...If we knew the answer to this question with any precision, we would be able to predict what was coming next...

...Materialism asserts that the "billiard balls" of matter only move when struck by other billiard balls--that material effects have material causes...

...In his words he would "shake their hands, buy them a Coke, and talk religion with them...

...Chill swept through the artistic community when it was learned that officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin would not allow rock musician Ozzy Osbourne to bite the heads off bats or even doves, a bird long loathed by conservatives...

...If your theory happens to be out of synch with fashion (as Velikovsky's collision theories were 30 years ago), then it really doesn't matter how many facts you amass, you will simply be cast into the outer darkness of non-respectability...

...but fitness is defined by the survivors...

...And he is a creative type, having written over 17 television scripts and " a t least" five "children's classics...

...Darwin, the "discoverer" (i.e., inventor) of natural selection, was also a uniformitarian...

...This new edition of Socialism has a Foreword by E A. Hayek, English translations for all non-English notes and expressions in earlier editions, new annotations clarifying the original footnotes, and two new indexes...

...Yet no one objects...

...Here comes a Leninist mutation out of the womb, who somehow finds Mrs...

...The big problem, which never seems to come any closer to resolution, is to explain why and how all those dinosaurs (and lots of other beasts, too,) became extinct some 65 million years ago...

...For one thing its offspring, technology, has not yielded a utopia, but rather nuclear fallout with the likelihood of worse to come...

...C A P I T O L I D E A S PROLETARIAN EVOLUTION I went to the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting at the Washington Hilton last month and had a good old time...

...Today it is not the "scientific" but the "moral" character of socialism that most highly recommends it...

...We pay postage on prepaid orders...

...Holmes's replies to the Ann Arbor News interviewer, my favorite is his assertion of how he might handle vicious anti-porn protestors...

...Within certain empirical boundaries, obviously, scientists find what they are looking for and ignore everything else...

...A55 Indianapolis, IN 46250 every so often...

...Visiting it is even something of a "trip...

...Science has also perhaps become too popular and popularized for its practitioners to seem worthy of being vested with priestly authority...

...Of all Mr...

...The of fending pompon has been retired and the act goes on...

...But I just think they're confused...

...He attributes this in part to "unquestioning authoritarianism," which is true...

...9 Naderites received Glad Tidings when Sheik Abdel-Aziz, the Saudi Arabian theologian, asseverated that women should restrain themselves from driving automobiles, test they run "the risk of falling into incalculable sins...

...But then science itself has been highly authoritarian...

...He [God] probably giggles a lot at all of our hangups...

...As Norman Macbeth says in his excellent little book Darwin Retried, all explanations of extinction boil down to elaborate ways of saying that the animal at issue stopped reproducing...

...One day I saw a film called "The Asteroid and the Dinosaur" (Time-Life Video), a 60minute documentary which was thoroughly enjoyable but which 20 or 30 years ago would have been rigidly excluded from polite scientific company along with the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky, which it resembles...

...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...

...It has rather an oldfashioned ring to it now...

...Remember "scientific socialism...

...But it is no more possible to do this than it is possible to predict the skirt-length at Paris fashion shows two years from now...

...mutation at the same time?--but we'll gloss over that), and as you can imagine between them and t h e i r offspring they e n t i r e l y sweep away the old order and "build a new society," in which New Leninopod lives and multiplies in egalitarian bliss for a few million years until the next revolution occurs...

...Left-wing biologists such as S.J...

...I've straightened out a lot of people's lives," he declares...

...In the first place, we are now witnessing (rather late in the day) the importation of leftist ideas into biology...

...I wonder how many scientists have paused to consider that catastrophism is quite a bit closer to creationism than it is to the old, slow but steady, stodgy uniformitarianism (causal factors operating in the environment are approximately the same as they have always been) that has served the Tom Bethell, The American Spectator's Washington correspondent, holds the DeWitt Wallace Chair in Communications at the American Enterprise Institute...

...So we have a return to catastrophism--abrupt change...

...Unless I am much mistaken, t h e r e ' s another and more drastic underlying change taking place...

...Ahs, now Mr...

...Hardcover $11.00, Softcover $5.00...

...I attended a symposium at the conference, with Gould, Ernst Mayr of Harvard, and Ledyard Stebbins of the University of California among the panelists...

...Holmes's role in X-rated movies transcends art, however, and reaches into the hushed realms of sexology...

...In an analogous way, however, it is fashion that concerns us...

...It seems to me that Gould and his pals have had quite a success with this new "paradigm...

...This is quite revealing...

...She has written Miss Jane~P~'~ley in New York, some'771 miles away, and Princess Diana of far-off England seeking the princess's good offices in securing a letter from her sister, Lady Jane...

...9 On the culture beat, those 13 Mill Valley, California cheerleaders who suffered burning eyes, itching skin, nausea, and disintegrating pantyhose have been cured...

...This is true, as science asserts, but is it always true...

...The authority of science itself seems to be ebbing dramatically...

...This thought at first seems fantastically off-target, the Death of God being so recent an event, but one can't help noticing that Popes, Mullahs, and Metropolitans are roaming the Earth once again, and my guess is we haven't seen anything yet...

...The bishops in their turn ceded it almost without a struggle...

...If this-is so--and of course we should not forget that the movement imparted to matter by mind constitutes a nonmaterial intervention in nature (you can't find the mind, see it, weigh it, or measure i0--then it follows that science, whose major underlying premise is the uniformity of nature, is true most of the time but not quite all the time...

...In the l e f t i s t world view, on the o t h e r hand, we have dramatic and revolutionary upheavals in nature LlbertyPress hber lasszs Socialism By Ludwig von Mises A praxeological and economic analysis of society comparing the results of socialist planning with those of free market capitalism in respect to property, equality, law, science, religion, morals, race, democracy, the state, utopia, war, slavery, monopoly, competition, labor, capital, the family, marriage, and other issues...

...Intellectual fashion is the ultimate shaper and determinant of scientific theory...

...New York's Governor Hugh Carey announced that he will not seek a third term but instead will devote the year to making his state "at once compassionate and competitive...

...Ken Follet of Great Britain remains at large...

...He also said he hoped to hear no more talk of Goldschmidtian hopeful monsters, because there wasn't even a trace of a hopeless monster to be found in the fossil record...

...Thomas Huxley reflected late in life that he had been looking forward to a (continued on page 40) 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 CAPITOL IDEAS (continued from page 6) good fight and was if anything dismayed by the swift and almost unopposed victory of science...

...Theories always change, modify," said the aged but spry Mayr...

...Overcoming the "hangups" induced by "15 years of Sunday school and a very religious upbringing," he made over a dozen sexual masterpieces, and received "hundreds of letters from people saying I'd helped them, saved their marriage, and improved their sex lives...

...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...

...of course it isn't) but "Is it true...

...Not so...

...End of planteating beasts, and (a few weeks later, we may assume) meat-eating ones, tOO...

...Leftists are inclined to believe (or at least hope) that life isn't regular and steady, but is on the contrary interrupted occasionally by violent revolutions...