Explaining Darwin's unexpected 1860s success : rising populations of labourers same time as the rise of their cheaper, more mallible replacement, the hydrocarbon energy slave

Unexpectedly, during the the 1860s, the global modern elite - including Darwin himself - found a little something to applaud inside the vast concept forest that was his theory of 'Natural Evolution'.


He and they basically rejected his key idea that evolution was totally directionless and that the variants that selection acted upon were thrown up totally by chance.

But elites everywhere seized upon the idea that they and not Darwin had actually invented : that Life was not a linked chain of being with every species needed to keep all the other species alive, as supposed for centuries.

Instead they took up the new claim that life was actually an enormous one-time track meet, entitled the Survival of the Fittest ---- with all the losers destined to slowly starve away.

That simply wasn't so - or at the very least, Darwin never actually said that.

Admittedly, in a very long lifetime of words, he totally buried the lede, but ultimately Darwin did say that Life was actually about a million races a year, each and every year, from the beginnings of Life in the yesteryear on into eternity.

Darwin-the-scientist said that each tiny little niche held its own race and as the niche changed, so a new race was run within it.

But Darwin-the-Manchester-Liberal, like almost all modern elites in the 1860s, tended to deny these claims and instead to fall in with Herbert Spencer's views about the survival of the fit instead.

Why ?

Cruel Timing

I believe it can all, Auschwitz,Hunger Plan East and all, can be put down to an unfortunate coincidence in timing - or mis-timing.

Mid Victorian families, like all earlier families, had lots of pregnancies because most kids died before birth or before the age of five.

Ten pregnancies to get five kids to survive to youth, so their labour could add to the income of the family farm or other human labour oriented family business.

Now in the 1860s, more of the traditional ten pregnancies were surviving to birth and even beyond the age of five, because of fewer reoccurring national famines and purer drinking water,etc.

National populations were soaring.

But once families realized that (a) more kids were surviving to their teen years and (b) less and less labour, including child labour, was going to be needed, they would reduce their pregnancies way way down.

But connecting the dots would take time - introducing a critical "lag".

Overcoming that demographic lag in understanding changing circumstances could take decades - it took exactly 100 years  for birthrates to fall in rural Antigonish, for example, as my partner Rebecca can personally attest!

At the very same time, smart minds among the greedy and ambitious were realizing that with cheap abundant hydrocarbon energy about, machines (machine energy slaves) would be much cheaper, much more reliable, much less tireless, much less likely to demand unions or vote for anti-capitalist governments, than human slave labourers.

But the rising national human survival rates were producing much more human labourers at the exact time the elites were deciding they needed much less.

A much older, much less hypocritical age might have just led the surplus labourers out into a wintry howling wilderness to die out of sight, but modern mass media and modern photography made that solution, as marxist-latte-lapping-academics are wont to say, "problematic".

The optics - and there would always be optics ( Aylan Kurdi as a recent example) - would look as "bad", as morally bad as this effort really was.

So Evolution cum 'The Survival of the Fittest' emerged just at the right time.

Now Evolutionary failure and Mother Nature could be blamed for Man's evil doings --- basically his finding as many ways as possible to speed Nature's reduction in the number of human "useless mouths", without getting caught at it.

But of course, as Hitler, Stalin and Tojo discovered during WWI and as we are still re-discovering in 2015, humanity's replacement, the mechanized slaves, can't always do many things (usually downmarket manual things, ironically enough) as well as people paid minimum wage and kept on unpaid 'call' for all hours.

Human Labour Shortage Looming

In fact, I predict that by the 2060s, the world will  face a simply enormous human labour shortage.

Another mistimed coincidence, in fact the exact reverse side of the 1860s situation.

Only now we will be running out of (cheap) hydrocarbons to do our dirty hard work just at the very time as our world fills up with retired ancients like me, demanding to be maintained in the swell lifestyle to which cheap hydrocarbons have accustomed us ...

Fermi's Paradox ("Where are they?") meets Dawson's Paradox ("Why are they still here?")

Scientists who smallmindedly pursue only one scientific question their whole careers can still end up being regarded as 'great' scientists, if the question they ask (and the answer they provide) is big enough to matter deeply to all of us.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson basically spent his personal research career asking, if life truly was "the survival of the fittest", why it was that Life's most unfit lifeforms - the small, simple,primitive microbes - were also, far and away, its oldest and most successful survivors ?

Because in 1940, it was crystal clear to almost every human on Earth that we were Life's most successful species and that the small weak and primitive microbes were our very antithesis.

But Dawson tried to burst this bubble of hubris and group think , by daring to ask , "well then why are these manifestly unfit beings still around ---- and been around since Life began ?"

Dawson's Paradox was a counterpart to Fermi's Paradox

The famous atomic scientist Erico Fermi once famously asked, if the possibility of many lifeforms in the vast universe is so great, then "Where were they?"

Dawson similarly asked , if the microbes are so manifestly unfit,  then "Why are they still here?"

1940 : majority of world opposed Progress but resigned to it as inevitable

In 1940, energetic elites, at every social level and in every nation and colony on Earth, tended to automatically see themselves as 'advanced' and 'progressive' - though they divided sharply over the details of what constituted 'advances' in 'Progress'.

For too long a time after 1940, we have focused on these vocal minorities' rhetorical differences, rather than what unconscious assumptions that they all held in common.

So we know all about the rhetorical differences between those claiming to seek liberal democratic mixed economies in each nation and those seeking scientific socialism (in one nation !) or those seeking scientific national socialism/fascism for one nation.

We fail to notice their actions differed only in degree not kind.

Meanwhile the majority of the world's population were more frightened than glad about the prospects of yet more Progress, but they weren't about to fight it.

(True, other sizeable traditional elites (the Catholic church for one) had lots of tested older intellectual tools to bring to their opposition to Progress thus defined .

But in practise they had no convincing or current intellectual tools to defeat this anthropocentric definition of Progress.)

The silent cowed majority had long ago become convinced by a generation of intellectual heavyweights, and by the intellectuals' journalistic popularizers, that the continued panzer-like Progress of the new/fit/mighty over the bodies of ancient/unfit/weak was an inevitable fact of Nature, proven beyond a doubt by Science.

So the continuous slow starvation and TB-hastened deaths of the America's original ancient native populations was regrettable --- but also inevitable.

I believe you can divide up the entire wartime world into Axis and Allied camps, even if only in their lean towards one or the other camp, country by country, year by year.

And that all of those countries, among their energetic young elites anyway, the belief in the inevitable Progress of the big over the small did not differ at all between the Allied and Axis, except in degree....

Dawson: I've treated pneumonia in the richest AND the poorest

Nothing made Dr Henry Dawson more angry than hearing his more 'progressive' colleagues pontificate on about how the poor were only kept alive because a misguidedly kindly society persisted in giving them the best possible medical care for their bloody pneumonias.

"Out there in Nature, the poor would all be dead".

The famed medical science research centre known as the Rockefeller Institute had a very tiny hospital attached and most of its patients were friends of the Rockefeller family, the equivalent of today's New York City billionaires.

It was Henry Dawson's job for his two years at the Rockefeller Institute hospital to treat the pneumonias of the city's rich and famous with the world's best medical care.

Now he was a clinical researcher at Columbia Presbyterian teaching hospital where many of the patients were among the city's poorest and he treated their pneumonias as well.

So Dawson well knew - contrary to Social Darwinism theories from the medical progressives - that the survival of the people regarded as humanity's 'fittest' was just as dependent on good medical care as were the lives of the poor.

"Out there in Nature, the rich would all be dead as well..."

Tenure track & Auschwitz track

My job, as I see it, is to convince you over the course of the life of this blog that the tenure track, intellectually speaking, is not that different from the track at Auschwitz, the one with the little girl in the red coat.

Both tracks were designed to keep overwhelming numbers of untutored geniuses from competing for the too few good jobs that the tutored un-genius children of un-tutored geniuses regarded as their own - by simple birthright.

(Most educated people today are half aware that large numbers of bright, driven Jewish scholars tried to get some of the relatively few academic jobs available in the 1920s and 1930s .

And that this badly rattled the the equally bright but not so driven Aryan and WASP students expecting those same jobs as their birthright.

Columbia University's solution was quotas ; Chelmno used gas.)

small "m" modernization

Open commensality, in fact global commensality, is the inevitable end result of the unconscious process of modernization.

In self conscious reaction against modernization a new form of the ancient black art of closed commensality, one involving hierarchical selection and certification procedures, arose.

As much against the simultaneous and self conscious ending of a land-based noble aristocracy as against the unconscious arise of modernization.

Big "M" Modernity

Thar reaction we now know as the supra-ideology of Modernity.

Today's tenure track and peer review - together with yesterday's Auschwitz train track, are the very pinnacles of achievement for Modernity.

The retort that 'to a hammer everything looks like a nail', has never really lost its sting because so many of us have seen it ring true in the lives we live.

Let us see how accurately it describes Modernity's science.

Land aristocracy almost instantly replaced by Professional aristocracy

The passage, beginning in the 1830s, of the various Reform Acts in Great Britain, then the globe's leading edge power, signalled the slow death of a land based noble aristocracy.

I do not consider it at all a coincidence that, at that very same point in time, the student bodies of universities and colleges began to rapidly change their character, becoming dominated by the driven and the competitive.

No longer did Daddy extract the rents from thousands of acres of prime farm land to buy an Army commission for his surgeon son.

Instead wealthy, connected Daddy bought 25 years of extremely expensive education, from childhood tutors and holiday foreign grand tours, prep school, the best university money could buy its way into, grad school and post-grad specialist training overseas.

Then surgeon sonny got a commission in the military, after displaying his considerable credentials and passing a tough series of exams - open to all (with similar extensive credentials) - 'on his own merits'.

To professional science , every natural event looks like a tenure procedure...

Science had once been an amateur activity, open to all who loved it - allowing untutored geniuses from poor families, people like Michael Faraday, to secure world fame for their discoveries.

Jealous tutored un-geniuses envied the untutored geniuses that the open commensality of amateur science threw up.

They tried (successfully) to create a scientific world where 'who you knew' (who was your academic mentor, what institutional letterhead was your grant application written upon) once again became far more important than 'what you knew' (the actual discoveries you had made).

Soon these would-be professional scientists had created a closed commensal hierarchy of worth.

At the top, the only ones with a good salary, a secure job for life and a direct line to the media and the powerful were the full professors and department heads at the biggest research universities.

These positions had been obtained as much by luck as by effort, family money and genius.

Connections, dad's money, sheer hard work and raw genius could only take one so far.

For one had to also have the acute political sense of what were likely to be the up and coming sub-disciplines when one was forty, paddle to those pools and always swim well within their circumscribed intellectual worlds.

Espousing the 'wrong' intellectual theories - in their eyes - before tenure was fatal. After tenure, you remained alive. Remained alive as an associate professor for life - just barely tolerated by your ever collegiate colleagues.

Peer review gatekeepers guard the sacred flame

Always, always there were endless peer review gatekeepers to ensure the continued purity of the sub-discipline's sacred flame.

Peer gatekeepers always were about : busy deciding who got into graduate schools, into tenure streams, got the grants, the conference invite, book contracts from the biggest university presses, invites to honour-based academic societies, calls to serve on government commissions.

On and on.

You and I could take all this as a bit of a joke - the sort of things that we tutored un-geniuses simply must do to live happy and fairly productive lives.

But when science's peer review hammer heads out into nature to do some real work , trouble ensues - for now every looks like a nail.

Survival of the fittest, normal and deviant, lives worthy and unworthy of life, lower and higher fungi, virulent and avirulent bacteria are just some of many similar sounding modernity era scientific concepts.

And today - to me - they all seem like direct echoes of the selection processes that so dominate the lives of the academic and professional scientist then and now ...

"This key is fit". Bad grammar but good modernity.

This key is 'fit'.

One could, and probably should, write a long learned essay on the wrongs created over the last 150 years under the delusion this sentence makes grammatical and real world sense.

When, however, we modify the sentence so it reads: "The key will fit this lock but not that lock" , most of us agree it now does make grammatical and real world sense.

The entire phrase "will fit this lock but not that lock" can be thought of a one long adjective modifying ,and accurately limiting, the noun key.

The outstanding aspect of that long adjective phrase is its tentative nature -- which, in turn, accounts for its windy lengthiness.

 "Will" could be replaced by words like "used to" ,"once", "may", "no longer" and the words "this lock" and "that lock" replaced by other modifying and limiting nouns.

 But the phrase "the key is fit",  with the word "fit" being totally unmodified and unlimited by adjectives, together with the fact it is set in a tense of eternal and universal is-ness , strikes us as very odd indeed.

Unless we modify the sentence to say "John is fit", then most of us accept this sentence as seemingly making perfect grammatical and real world sense (and tense).

But it does not.

That broad shouldered six foot tall 175 pounds hunk of svelte eye candy might be "fit" in all of our eyes, but is he actually "fit" for being a race jockey or "fit" to crawl into a narrow tube to weld a joint ?

The Darwin of 1859 said that in a real world of 'the survival of the fittest', strong but lithe men would become horse jockeys but not Rugby forwards while huge chunky men would become Rugby forwards but not race jockeys.

In our actual world, the reality we must live with, "Fittest" is always found modified by an adjective phrase , indicating the particular time and space limitations that allows this particular being or object to be temporarily the fittest for that situation.

It accepts that the world is filled with millions of possible niches and that they change all the time.

I don't think there is any possible moral or scientific objection to this Darwin.

But the later Darwin of 1871 seemed to imply that reality is really about the survival of the "fit", an unmodified, absolute and universal/eternal noun : European males being "the fit" and no one else - and nothing else - being in that category.

It sees the world (and eventually the universe) as potentially one great vast niche, with European-origined humans as the only species needed to be able to fill it completely and permanently.

Modernity science fiction saw future human worlds as living under glass bubbles on planets of bare rock, devoid of atmosphere, generating all we need by chemical synthesis, with no need for plant or animal or microbe.

No need for Jew, Gypsy , Slav or 'defective' either.

Those authors and illustrators only said in print and pictures what our grandparents (and the Darwin of 1871) were just thinking.

Until 1939-1945, when they got a chance to play it all out in a world-war sized sandbox ---- and ended up with sand in their Pampers .....