'Darwin’s Bluff' by R. F. Shedinger. The Mystery of the book that Darwin never finished.
'Darwin’s Bluff' by R. F. Shedinger. The Mystery of the book that Darwin never finished.
Darwin never provided a single page of proofs for his theory. Darwinism became an industry, then a religion. $cientism.
“Open up the possibility that everything you know is wrong.” Terence McKenna, ethno-botanist
R. F. Shedinger has written a very interesting book on aspects of Darwin’s life and philosophy that most people are unaware of. In schools and the mainstream (fake news) media, you get the usual hagiography, much as you do with quacks and criminals such as Jenner or Pasteur, or the anti-reality philosophers like Einstein. Maybe it is time that people had a critical look at the theology of Darwinism and its utter paucity of proofs or logic. There is nothing scientific about evolution.
The Philosopher
There are many frauds in the history of science. God-like status has been given to many men, who were plagiarisers, liars, cheats, con-artists, second-rate philosophers, quacks and who provided no mechanical-objective-replicable proof for their ideas. Many if not most famous scientists including Galileo, Newton, Michelson, Morley, Einstein, Hawking, Dawkins and Darwin all belong within this spectrum to some extent, to name but a favoured few. Aspects of some of their work might be scientific or relevant, but much of what is accepted as ‘science’ is simply gibberish.
“The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about and refuse to investigate.” Wayne Dyer
Darwin is an example of the poverty within the Church of ‘The Science’.
Darwin’s scientific work is meagre to non-existent. No one can show me a single experiment he performed to prove his rather asinine and simplistic theory that a fish became the fisherman. Fins to legs and arms, scales to skin and hair, and a complete system rewrite and rebuild from the brain to the stomach. Why would a fish want to become a reptile and how did those early fish survive on land? Why would a reptile crawl up a tree to a branch and jump, ‘striving’ to turn scales into feathers? How many generations would this take to turn the leaping lizard into a lark? These are feats of magic that make the miracles of Christianity look tawdry and boring by comparison? How did the shrew become you?
Victorian philosophies
Darwin was in essence a Victorian philosopher who relocated human engineered domestic breeding to nature. In this theology he proposed a sort of laissez faire competition within nature based on materialist improvements to a species. In Darwin’s world, only the material matters. Complexity does not exist, and all creatures are rather simple with similar homological designs which can be transmutated naturally and materially over time. Nature in place of the human does the selecting of traits and variations in traits, and anoints the fittest to survive who then pass these skills and traits to offspring. Over long periods of time due to Malthusian competition and the accumulation of these beneficial traits, selected by nature, new species form.
The above ideas are typical of Victorian hand-waving. These meek theorems are simple, dialetically and rhetorical. In fact, as Schedinger correctly observes, there is no proof that the aforementioned ideas were generated by Darwin’s apocryphal discovery of ‘finch beaks’ in the Galapagos. This is simply another lie within the Darwin mythology.
Rather, Darwin was deeply impressed with the long discredited Malthusian theory related to rising populations and famines. Namely, that competition for food and resources amidst a rising population would mean that only the fit would survive in a Malthusian world of scarcity. Darwin simply applied Malthus’ theories to nature and the formation of different species. What is never explained is how competition in a Malthusian world, would lead to one species transmogrifying into another?
Given the resolutely unscientific nature of Darwin’s writings we can state that Darwin’s theology has nothing to do with objective scientific proof. It is a metaphysical program premised on Victorian ideas and based on the works and philosophies of many other men. Darwinian ‘evolution’ was always a philosophical and literary endeavour. It was never a scientifically premised discovery.
(Did Darwin create his theory to gain renown and fame?)
Mentally ill
Schedinger confirms that Darwin probably wrote some 3 million words in his lifetime as a leisured non-working wealthy Victorian aristocrat intent on making a name for himself in ‘science’. The ‘Origins of the Species’ is 150.000 words; ‘Descent of Man’ some 250.000; ‘The Variation of plants and animals under domestication’ another 300.000; and his ‘Beagle diary’ about 150.000 words. Millions of words jostle in his capacious catalogues of letters. Yet despite this rather colossal output, Darwin complained disingenously, about being in ill-health his entire life.
As Shedinger reveals from Darwin’s voluminous personal correspondence, it is clear that he was a mentally ill hypochondriac. Darwin’s letters always reference being sick or unwell. Hypochondriacs suffer from a variety of mental illnesses as well as the purported physical. We saw this during the Corona plandemic when hypochondriacs were constantly ‘testing’ themselves with fraudulent tests and declaring themselves ill or near death if the fake test offered a ‘positive’. Hypochondriacs have a primitive need to feel important and special. They are hardly the go-to-people for health or ‘science’.
When readers noticed that ‘Origins’ for example, left out historical attributions and references to other authors and works, both in the dim past and in the current epoch, Darwin blamed his ill-health and tiredness for his inability to include all the necessary information and attributions. This was a ploy he used his entire life. Either the man was psychosomatically ill, or he was a liar, or both. In essence he used his hypochondria to escape commitments or do proper scientific work including attributions when necessary and detailed experimentation to support his claims.
Yet as witnessed by Darwin’s own botanical work, he was more than capable of expending vast amounts of energy and patience. For example he spent 8-years studying and categorising ‘barnacles’ though it has never been explained why he was so interested in these creatures, given that such an endeavour has nothing to do with his great theme of species meta-mutations.
Darwin also spent years breeding and meticulously recording and measuring all aspects of orchids and their life-cycles. His study on orchids has impressed many botanists with its detail and rigour. In his orchid work there is the residue and hint of a scientist at work.
These projects were large undertakings and do not give the impression of a sick or ill man. He also had the sex drive and energy to sire 10 children. It is likely that Darwin spun the tale of the humble, lowly, often-ill scientific dabbler, to curry favour, deflect criticism and escape commitments.
Not a scientist
Below I list from Shedinger’s book some of the more interesting discussion points that he raises, which proves yet again why Darwin was not a scientist.
1. Darwin was wealthy, never worked and possessed a Bachelor of Arts from Cambridge without distinction. He had previously failed out of theology and decided to pursue ‘science’. He was never trained in ‘science’. Today many ad-hominins are launched by ‘The Science’ at those who are not ‘experts’ in the field. Where is your PhD, (variously described as a pretty-happy-dude degree, or degrees piled on high and deep), they will moan? Well, where are Darwin’s educational credentials?
2. Darwin attempted some forays into geology, intrigued by friends such as Lyell with ‘long ages’. His dabbling in geology was a failure, his theories wrong and his analysis of geological issues bordering on puerile and simplistic. An example was his claim that subsidence formed coral reefs, or that oceanic movements formed the Glen Roy hills in Scotland (glaciation created Glen Roy).
3. In the 1859 publication of ‘Origins’, Darwin promised a ‘big book’ with all the ‘proofs’ confirming species evolution. Darwin claimed that ‘Origins’ was just an abstract of a much larger work, but that the proofs for ‘evolution’ were not included because it would make ‘Origins’ too large and tedious to read (and besides his health was poor etc).
For example, in a letter to Adam Sedgwick, Professor of Geology at Cambridge and a former teacher of Darwin’s, he states that Origins is part of a larger work: “As the conclusion at which I have arrived after an amount of work, which is not apparent in this condensed sketch…” Which is replicated in many letters sent on the same topic including one to Jule de la Rive, Swiss zoologist, “I have taken the liberty to send you, as a mark of my respect, a copy of my work (as yet only an abstract) on the Origin of Species…”
Sedgwick was a great critic of Darwin’s theology, writing to Darwin that he found ‘Origins’ to be an absurdity and laughed in places until his sides ached. De la Rive was equally unimpressed with Darwin’s ‘science’ or more accurately, the lack of it. Darwin never published the larger work, nor any proofs for ‘Origins’.
4. Even Ernst Mayr, a biologist at Harvard and one of Darwin’s main supporters, was embarrassed at the lack of proofs for ‘natural selection’ in ‘Origins’ and highly critical of the book. The criticisms of Darwin ran deep and wide. Almost everyone who suffered through ‘Origins’ were unimpressed, noting that it was not original, mostly rhetorical, did not present a single transitional species, and no proof whatsoever of natural selection. Contrary to myth, most scientists, scholars and lay people were unimpressed with ‘Origins’ and its lack of veracity.
5. Darwin never proved, and no Darwinian since has proved, that in nature there is a ‘natural selection’ of the ‘fittest’ and most competitive, akin to how a human can breed dogs, pigeons, fowl, and husbandry. ‘Origins’ does not discuss a single proof of natural selection within nature.
6. Darwin did produce a 300.000-word manuscript to support ‘Origins’ with his promised-proofs, but he never published it. It was not published because it came nowhere near to answering the vast array of criticisms directed at ‘Origins’. In various letters he mutters that this long-awaited proof will arrive but that he is beset with problems and of course ill-health. He couldn’t publish it because it contained little to no science.
7. Darwin published a silly book on orchids, calling this a ‘flank attack’ on his critics, and surmising that a book on how a human can breed different varieties of orchids, would somehow ‘prove’ natural selection and variation. In fact, reviewers of his orchid book stated that it proved natural theology not evolution.
8. Darwin was friends with those in the Royal Society of Science, including the lawyer Charles Lyell, Thomas Huxley and botanist Joseph Hooker. These men, particularly Hooker, were responsible for getting ‘Origins’ published and distributed. It was on the strength of these contacts and their pull and weight within the Victorian scientific and media communities that allowed ‘Origins’ to reach a wide audience. In other words, the old boys club. Jenner’s ridiculous work on ‘vaccines’ had followed the same well-trodden path, creating a profitable industry for both government and drug dealers.
9. In ‘The Descent of Man’ Darwin fulminates against Victorian society’s predilection to save the unfit, the ill, the sick and wounded. In his view this negates Malthusian ‘evolution’ and the upward march of mankind and creates an obstacle to the natural ruling elite (himself for example) which must be developed through natural selection and variation. He openly proposes eugenics and declaims various strains of racism writing that Whites are superior to Blacks. Darwin did not support slavery but he did believe that non-Whites were inferior. Awkward.
Rhetoric and nonsense
Schedinger references biochemist Michael Behe’s ‘Darwin’s Black Box’ and ‘The Edge of Evolution’ which systematically destroy the inane simplicity of Darwinism at the micro-bio-chemical level. Irreducible complexity is our reality. The entire organism in all its vast intricacy must appear at once including the organs and all the components which are interlocked and dependent. There is not an example or experiment a Darwinist can give for the creation of a single-cell bacteria’s flagellum, itself composed of dozens of interconnected parts. How then did Darwin’s orchid become Oscar?
Given the paucity of proofs Darwin supplied it is rather amazing that it was, or is, accepted as ‘scientific consensus’. Again we go back to the problem stated in many posts on this substack. In times past mechanical proofs and hands-on engineering and innovation always preceded scientific theory. The theory for example of how to build a Cathedral, or develop field and crop-rotation farming, or create paper, or a mechanical clock or printer, or to understand why light refracts in a glass, always followed experimentation and real world deployments.
Upside Down
With Darwin and the mid-19th century, real science and learning is overturned. Now theory and abraction are used to simplify and explain complexity and describe, in lieu of proof, the behaviour of objects, systems, or evidence from observations. This is the apriori approach, or philosophical reasoning, based on pre-determined ideas, to explain what one views in reality.
These philosophical abstractions which now include maths and models, precede experimentation and hands-on engineering. This is wrong and this is not scientific. Darwinism is simply apriori philosophy based on Victorian ideas with many of them such as Malthusianism, being utterly wrong.
Another Great Lie
Darwinism is thus one of the Great Lies we are told to believe. Deprogramming one-self from the propaganda is not that difficult once you understand that Darwinism along with many other conceits and deceits, has nothing to do with reality or real science. Darwinism is simply a materialist-mechanical philosophy which for 3.000 years has failed the tests of science.
The fact that Darwinism is so assiduously promoted and its critics so viciously attacked, simply confirms that Darwin’s materialist theology is a false religion based on myths and lies. Dissent is problematic because you the heretic, will be erased. So it goes with all of the Great Lies of ‘The Science’. Censorship, anti-reality, violence and falsehoods. And this is the ‘modern age’.
===
Sources
Schedinger, R. F. ‘Darwin’s Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished’, 2024.
