Biology Reference
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Virginia's right to sterilize Carrie Buck, but memory of the disasters wrought
by that era's unrestrained scientism (one would hope) will continue to sus-
tain greater public caution. However, if European and American consumers
of science are now repulsed by the prospects of scientific social engineering,
this has been due to external factors—to the shocking marriage of eugenics
with National Socialism and a civil rights movement that awakened our bet-
ter angels. The scientific culture itself has never entirely backed away from
the underlying framework of ideas that rationalized such initiatives. It has
only become more reluctant to advance, except under the cover of abstract
academic tomes on sociobiology, the moral and political authority that evo-
lutionism always claims for itself.
Evolutionism does not persist because those who subscribe to it are
bad people—or at least not intrinsically any worse than the rest of us—but
because it is a mainstay of the contemporary scientific identity. For this rea-
son, it is hard to envision a time when scientists will be willing to abandon
it. Without evolutionism, science would be without its institutional self,
and while another similar grand narrative might be found, it is hard to
imagine one as potent as this. Any alternative construction of the scientific
identity, much like the Baconian one that came before it, would require
that scientists surrender to outside symbolic resources of public authority
that currently seem to arise from within.
My argument will sound to some like a conspiracy theory, but it is not.
The conspiracy theorist typically accuses an institution, say an office of the
federal government, of hatching a plot that others do not perceive and that
authorities formally disavow—a systematic effort to blackball opponents, to
cover up some crime, or to obscure the fact that its policies are genuinely
grounded in Marxist ideology or in secret alliances with a Masonic cult.
In order for a conspiracy theory to be plausible, one must also believe that
the accused institution has constructed, more or less in secret but also by
design, a vast infrastructure of relationships, plans, and materials capable
of perfectly executing its misdeeds. The outsider must also believe that the
institution has simultaneously managed to cover all this up—which explains
why conspiracy theorists never feel obliged to produce concrete evidence for
such plots.
Were I proposing evolutionism as a kind of scientific conspiracy, I
would have to suppose that scientists intentionally promulgate lies when
they claim that evolutionary science reveals the progressive order of history
and promises to deliver a new blueprint for social existence and moral val-
ues. I would also have to suppose that they are just as intentionally covering
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