Natural Selection
A reader with the royal yet Caledonian name of KingMcDee writes: “Materialists following this line of reasoning have for several years now been selling the notion that altruism and homosexuality are actually somehow good for the survival of the species, even though they tend to reduce the reproductive likelihood of the individuals that have them.”
One problem with such a line of argument is that it is a non-disprovable.
A theory that cannot be proven nor disproven is not a theory. It is an “ad hoc” story, or, better yet, a “just-so” story, like the Kipling tale explaining how the elephant got his trunk.
Darwinism holds that the constellation of traits passed from parent to child in a given generation were “naturally selected” — a term that is deceptive. Sometimes the stronger brother in the litter falls from a tree, or cannot find food, or is stricken by disease, and the weaker brother lives to adulthood, and this is not due to any weakness of physiognomy nor due to miswiring of natural instincts, but due to chance. Not selection of any kind, natural or not, takes place.
Indeed, the idea that a mutation could produce an entire bloodline that is unfit and hence more prone to being wiped out before adulthood than their cousins is not something ever seen in nature, nor could it ever be seen, since no one death can be attributed to genetics in general, nor to genetics alone, rather than to accident. If the strong brother slipped when climbing a tree, and died, while the weaker brother did not, in what sense can this be attributed, either in the individual case, or across a large number of statistically similar cases, to a genetic defect in the brother, rather than a dizzy spell, a slippery patch of bark, a gust of wind, or some other accident?
Now suppose that the weaker brother is weaker not because he carries a weak gene. Suppose he is an identical twin, but that, due to mischance, he did not run around and exercise his muscles in youth. Weaker of limb, he does not attempt to scale tall trees in search of beehives. But his stronger brother does and did, to encounter a woeful swarm of angered bees, who so stung his bewildered head that his claws lost purchase, plunging him down to his fate!
This death is not due to genetics. What if, by similar mischance, most of this family’s deaths are not due to genetic unfitness? What if none of them were? What if not just the family, but the whole breed were?
But by the logic of Darwinism, the mere fact that one brother lives and one dies, one bloodline lives and one dies, one breed live and one dies, one species lives and one dies, is defined as being caused by inherited traits fit or unfit for survival, so much so that other contributing factors, such as learned traits, are ignored, or are treated as inherited traits.
And, if the stronger brother dies in such a case, the genes he shares with his weaker brother are largely the same. How, then, can it be said that the genes being passing along by the weaker brother have been “selected” in any sense of the word for their greater survivability?
Moreover, all the genes of the weaker brother are candidates to being passed along, not just the one than made him weaker. Or, to put it another way, if it were his genes and not his bad luck which made the stronger brother die in an accident, all his genes and not just the accident-prone one fails to be passed on.
Now, the assumption of Darwinism is that the natural environment in the long term, across many generations, has a mix of good and bad accidents sufficient to reduce accidents to a statistical homogeny, allowing only the traits defined by genetics to be significant. This, of course, is an unproved assumption, and unproveable.
How would one know if it were the case or not the case?
Because one can certainly think of cases where the logic of natural selection does not apply. Was the Irish Elk wiped out by natural selection, because the beasts could not properly adapt to being hunted by prehistorical Celts, or were they wiped out by Celts? If the unicorns of Atlantis, found only on that one island, were caught in the deluge, and go extinct, in what sense is this a natural selection rather than an unlikely and unrepeatable disaster?
It is true that unicorns lack the genetic make-up allowing them to fly away from a sinking island, but then again, so does everything without wings. Does nature naturally select against non-avian life, or only during the rare disasters when wings are useful?
To ask the question exposes its hollowness. If naturalists saw a countless forms of life, each unfit for its environment except by mere lucky happenstance, and each generation culled one additional least useful characteristic from the horde, so that there were a thousand species, then a hundred, then ten, and all ten had the same group of useful characteristics, then Darwinism would be describing natural selection. But that is not what we see.
What we see is animals exquisitely adapted to their environments like the wheels in a pocketwatch, as if one designer correctly anticipated the variations in prey and predator across geologic ages, and the only variation is variation of breed, and the occasional sport or mutation, which is never seen as anything but deleterious. The idea of random, beneficial mutation has no support in the natural world. It has never been seen to happen.
The most famous example of natural selection offered in textbooks is of moths that have both light-winged and dark-winged breeds, said to have suffered a sharp drop of lighter-winged bloodlines due to industrialization coating trees with soot, allegedly making the lighter-winged easier for predators to see, that is, making light wings no longer a useful survival trait.
Note that this proposed chain of cause and effect, leading from soot to darker trees to less effective camouflage to increased death rate from predators — is all speculative. Any number of other factors may have also been at work.
In other words, even supposing the speculation accurate in this case, all other traits by which the moths vary are assumed to be not influencing the survival numbers nor mating numbers of the next generations in any statistically significant way. What justifies this assumption?
And the adoption of modern antipollution techniques should have returned the trees to their former hue, in which case the trait of lightwingedness was a survival trait only for a small number of generations.
A few years of unusual snowfall, or some other environmental change no less significant than local industrialization, would produce a variation in the numbers of the various moth breeds, who will, of course, revert to prior numbers if the change ever reverts. So how does any one trait ever so predominate as to outperform all competing bloodlines, if whichever traits the environment currently favors are constantly in flux?
The fossil record suggests that giant mammals once roaming Europe were mightier than their modern counterparts. Clever “just-so” stories can surely be invented to explain why being small and weak is better than being large and strong — less food needed, for one thing — but these do not explain why saying blind accident wiped out the megafauna rather than natural selection selected against them.
Unless these two phrases just mean the same thing. If the words “natural selection” just mean “blind accident” then it cannot be said that the survivors had survival traits. All that case be said is that, as a matter of brute fact, they survived.
They had blind accident traits. And this is assuming their inherited traits somehow meant more, in the long term, than inherited , coming from upbringing, diet, inner spirit, or even (why not?) the astrological influence of the stars.
So, even given the assumption that homosexuality is a genetic trait rather than, say, a decadent sin, or a mental disease caused by childhood trauma, is there any argument to show that this increases the likelihood of one’s genes reflected in nephews and cousins thereby being more likely to be passed along under the circumstances of Early Paleolithic North Africa, where homo sapiens emerged?
Because if sodomy is morally justified by the mere fact of increasing the statistical likelihood of passing along more genes through nephews than through sons under the conditions of Early Paleolithic North Africa, then what justifies sodomy in Neolithic Asia, or Precolumbian North America, or anywhere else, at any other time, where those conditions no longer apply?
I am not sure what observation or experiment can isolate one healthy gene out of a constellation of genetic material, and hold all non-genetic influences as constant long enough to perform enough trials over enough circumstances to show that it is the homosexual predilection of a given tribe of homosexuals, rather than, say their dietary practices or hand-eye coordination, that makes their nephews and cousins reproduce with greater survival chances than heterosexuals tribesmen of a related breed.
Of course, to perform the experiment at all, one will have to identify which breed or subspecies of man is more prone or less prone to sodomy. This will be a delight of political correctness, once researchers say it is a Greek trait, or Arabic, or Turk, Han or Mongol or Ethiopian.
And, again, by the same logic, if it is the Roman Race that has the alleged survival benefits of the sodomy gene in their bloodline, then this explains all their remarkable successes in spreading Latin culture throughout the known world, in brutal conquest after brutal conquest.
This, of course, assumes researchers prove that Romans have the sodomy gene, and not that the sin emerges in any successful society once they grow luxurious and decadent, lazy and perverse, and hungry for divertissement.
Then, by the same logic showing that Roman a genetic preference for sodomy allowed Europe to dominate the modern world, parallel logic shows all other European customs and habits as being genetically superior. If sodomy is promoted by Darwin, why not race-hatred? Why not diatonic music, perspectival drawing, the scientific method, the use of heavy cavalry, the use of gunpowder? Why not Holy Wars? Surely wiping out all competition for a given environmental niche aids in the promulgation of one’s bloodline?
Do those women turned on by FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, or teen boys who read John Norman’s Gor novels also have some genetic advantage to reproducing the species?
If they do, why not those who practice bestiality, necrophilia, or pederasty? Surely these have nephews and cousins whose needs are just as nicely served by a non-reproducing uncle of sort, if the non-reproduction of sodomy serves them.
No, sad to say, that if any biomaterialist is foolish enough to trace this rabbit warren of argument to its end, he will find one thing: if the Roman race is the genetic master race, and if the traits leading to worldly measures of success are genetic traits, then these are the traits that arguably have large influence on mating and reproduction: namely, the European customs and laws supporting monogamy meanwhile forbidding divorce, contraception, and exposing unwanted infants.
In which case the argument ends at the opposite conclusion of its original aim: for the laws and customs forbidding sodomy are of the same nature and purpose as these others supporting monogamy. If these other virtues, customs, and laws are determined by racial genetic traits, so is this.
And if this is a racial genetic trait, then it is a trait that inclines the heart to receive the Roman Catholic religion, or some heresy thereof nonetheless supporting monogamy and forbidding divorce and contraception.
But that same Roman religion says that men have free will, and struggle eternally with desires the light of right reason shows to be sins, in which case, the same genetic predisposition inclining them toward this religion, and which makes Romans the Master Race, predisposes them to scoff at the argument that sodomy is a trait justified by Darwinian natural selection.
And if the objection is raised that the Roman theories about Darwinian natural selection, or the Roman choice to be baptized, are not controlled by genetics, but by the content of one’s character, hence a matter where a man has a choice, it is answer enough to say that the same is true for any man, those who yield to temptation, sexual or otherwise, hale or perverse, as well as those who prevail.
If I say I have no choice but to yield to a given particular temptation, I have nothing to say if you answer that you have no choice but to doubt me. Your bloodline forbids it. How is one answer different from the other?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
