Don't Mention Darwin,

in a social or political context, except in jest.

Nostalgia for the Grace of George H.W. Bush

by Jon Meacham, Oct 15 2016 (LINK to article, which was approved & published)

"As Henry Adams once remarked of the movement from Washington to Grant, the journey from George H. W. Bush to Donald J. Trump disproves Darwin."

Many a true word is spoken in jest. Only, it's not that Darwin is disproved, so much as mentioned at all in a political context, which is, of course, only permissible as a joke, Darwin having been banned from all political thought in the aftermath of WW2 and the Holocaust.

He was banned, because the Nazis hijacked and abused, for their own evil purposes, the half-baked ideas of social Darwinism.

They may have been half-baked and largely misconceived, but they didn't deserve to be demonised the way they were, and still are.

Darwinian logic has a vital role to play in understanding ourselves, Homo sapiens, human societies and civilisation at large, and the fact that a taboo has been made of it is comparable to the Catholic Church once having made a taboo of the Copernican view of the universe, only much more serious. The taboo on Copernicus delayed our understanding of the universe by just a few decades, while the taboo on applying Darwin to our own species may delay our understanding of civilisation permanently, i.e. fatally.

The reason the world is in such a mess and heading towards an even bigger mess (civilisational breakdown, no less) is because of the complete lack of a human-evolutionary, i.e. Darwinian, perspective in the social and political sciences.

I've made a start on correcting this HERE. 

Britain's Responsibility for First World War

A Century Ago, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Changed Everything

By Dennis Overbye, Nov. 24, 2015 (LINK to article)

"Cheered on, to his disgust, by most of his Berlin colleagues, Germany had started a ruinous world war." 

Wrong! Germany got involved in a European war, for which it was no more -  or less - to blame than its main adversaries, Russia and France.

It was Britain, my own country, which decided to turn this European war, which probably would have been over by Christmas 1914, into the First World War, and to stick with it for 4 long bloody years (costing millions of lives), until, with America's help, "victory" was achieved, Germany defeated and humiliated, and the way paved for the rise of Nazism, WW2 and the Holocaust.

I know this isn't the subject of this piece, which commemorates Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, but it is no less important. In human terms it is probably more important, because it is our refusal to recognise our own dire political failings, piling all the blame on the Germans instead, that has got us into the sorry political state we are in, and which we won't succeed in getting out of until we do recognise our own failings.

We need a Copernican or Einsteinian revolution and change of paradigm in the social and political sciences, as we have had a number of in the physical sciences. Otherwise, our civilisation will not survive this century.