The Dark History of Progressivism

This movement has been the enemy of both science and humanity from day one

This piece has been stewing in my mind for a while now, and it began with this video, which you may want to hold off on watching until I bring up a point that seems a wee bit incongruent, since it’s over an hour long:

Anyone who has been on social media since the early days, long before the tech companies started censoring everything, will undoubtedly remember the evolution of online arguments. In the early days of YouTube, before the website was bought by Google (but also in the few years immediately afterward), the prevailing argument of the age was evolution versus creationism. There is, as a result of these endless debates, a wealth of information on YouTube alone on the subject of evolutionary biology framed in the context of debunking creationism. One of the arguments that creationists like to make is that Darwinism leads to Nazism and Communism. Never mind the fact that moral consequentialism is a logical fallacy, this particular argument is hilariously wrong on account of the fact that Hitler was a creationist (though not of the Christian variety) and Marx was a Lamarckist. However, progressive Christians (as opposed to conservatives or fundamentalists) have been shoehorning Darwin in with Marx while throwing genetics out of evolution and lumping Mendel in with Hitler. While I can’t say for certain whether progressive Christians are responsible for the narratives that “Darwin recanted his beliefs and accepted Jesus on his deathbed” or that “Marxism is a secular form of Christianity,” the fact that both false narratives exist is, itself, extremely suspicious. Progressive Christians are just as anti-history and anti-science as Marxists and National Socialists, and as strange as this may sound, atheist neo-Marxists seem to have latched on to the narratives that they are propagating. This is because, at the end of the day, progressive Christians and neo-Marxists are united by one thing: progressivism itself. When Lewis Barton says that he suspects A E Samaan (author of the book titled From a Race of Masters to a Master Race, for those who haven’t yet watched the video) of foul play, he’s right: Samaan is controlled opposition, specifically part of a massive psychological operation to divide people (Christians especially) into Mendelian and Darwinist camps, both of whom think that they are on the side of “real science,” when the reality is that they are both working with exactly half the picture. Combining these two halves at first resembles a dialectical synthesis, even though the split was artificial to begin with.

To explain why both the progs and the creationists are wrong, it is necessary to explain the real origins of the Theory of Evolution, which Samaan never does, and as of this writing, there don’t appear to be any comments on the video bringing this up. The first indication of common ancestry was taxonomy, invented by Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), who was initially a creationist. Linnaeus believed that species were immutable, but his observation that organisms can be classified into nested tiers of fundamental similarity challenged his beliefs. Linnaeus was also the first to suggest that humans were primates in 1735, and was rather vocal about his hesitance to do so, but nonetheless challenged his fellow naturalists to identify any anatomical characteristic to separate humans from apes. In fact, chimpanzees were originally classified as Homo troglodyte before being placed in the genus Pan much later. The classification of humans as a subset of apes was controversial back then, and to say that it remains controversial to this day would be an understatement. However, more background is necessary to explain why… a lot more, so grab a tall glass of your favourite poison and get comfortable.

Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892) was a pioneer in the field of palaeontology, and is most famous for founding the Natural History Museum in London, and outside of the UK, probably most famous for coining the word “dinosaur.” He was also the mentor to Charles Darwin (1809-1882), and they began butting heads long before Darwin had anything to say about the evolution of humanity. One of Darwin’s earliest observations was that a bird’s wingtip resembled a dinosaur’s hand with the phalanges fused. Birds commonly have vestigial thumb claws (anyone who has butchered a chicken is aware of this), and some even have fully-formed thumb claws as young, notably the hoatzin. In 1859, Darwin published the first edition of On the Origin of Species and predicted that a fossil bird with unfused phalanges would eventually be discovered. Two years later, he was proven right when the holotype specimen of Archaeopteryx lithographica was discovered. There was one slight problem with it, however: it didn’t have a head. Owen, when he found out about it, made a prediction of his own: that when a specimen of Archaeopteryx with its head intact was eventually found, it would be no different from the head of any other bird. In 1875, he was proven wrong when another specimen was discovered in Berlin, and the skull is virtually identical to that of Compsognathus, a small theropod dinosaur. In fact, other than the length of the arms, Archaeopteryx and Compsognathus have virtually identical skeletons through and through. Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), who worked closely with Darwin, was the first to propose that birds descended from dinosaurs, an idea which Owen absolutely hated because it went against his theology. In his particular variety of theistic evolution, God was constantly tinkering and improving on previous designs. However, as more and more discoveries showed that dinosaurs were not the ponderous, plodding lizards that he originally thought they were, and were in fact much more bird-like, Owen’s idea was completely ruined. Therefore, rather than admitting that evolution wasn’t a series of constant improvements (progress), and occasionally that “superior” animals like dinosaurs would be wiped out in favour of “inferior” meek creatures like mammals due to environmental pressures (volcanic and meteoric winters tend to do that), Owen decided to double-down on his scientific misjudgments, and completely disgraced himself in the latter years of his career. Today, he is little more than a footnote in history, overshadowed by his former student (gee, where have we seen that before?), despite his significant contributions early on.

Now we finally get to Charles Darwin, the most misrepresented scientist in history. Samaan in particular tries to tie Darwin to Alfred Russell Wallace, a mystic, who came to the exact same conclusion as Darwin in a vision. What Darwin had taken 20 years to figure out, Wallace learnt in a dream. Nonetheless, because Darwin had waited so long to publish his findings, he had no choice but to share credit with Wallace. The two never worked together beyond that, and in fact, Darwin had many disagreements with Wallace. Furthermore, because Darwin was rather reserved and preferred to spend his time doing research rather than defending himself in the press, his ideas were largely propagated and defended by his allies, notably “Darwin’s Bulldog,” Thomas Huxley. Then as now, the perception of Darwin is tainted by what others have said about him and his beliefs, be they supporters or detractors. Even in the case of supporters, their “support” is merely ostensible in many cases, and Darwin didn’t actually believe what they said he did. One of the arguments that creationists habitually bring up is the original subtitle of On the Origin of Species, which is “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.” This is yet another one of those details that creationists like to fixate on in an attempt to smear Darwin as a racist, but it is important to note that the word “race” means “subspecies” in this context. In chapter 7 of his 1871 book titled The Descent of Man, Darwin expressed disagreement with the prevailing sentiment of the day that humanity could be divided into six, seven, eleven, or forty-two different races (or whatever it was, I can’t be bothered to go look), and instead said that there is only one human race. In other words, Darwin was the first to propose what is now the prevailing opinion among anthropologists: there is no such thing as race. That is not to say that all humans are inherently the same, so stick a pin in that thought, because we’ll come back to it eventually. For now, it is important to know that the progressive movement has never embraced this idea, and misrepresented Darwin’s ideas from day one in order to justify eugenics.

Another figure Samaan referenced that creationists habitually bring up in order to discredit evolution is Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), who never worked with Darwin at all. Haeckel was a naturalist who worked in many fields, but he was also a talented artist, and this is how his work gained such popularity. Among biologists, he is known for coining the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” which is the idea that an animal’s evolutionary history is reflected in its embryological development. This is true, but not to the extent that Haeckel asserted. In order to learn what is really going on, one must instead study the work of the true father of embryology, Karl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876). He didn’t work with Darwin either, though Darwin credited his work as foundational to his own in both On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. In his later years, von Baer relentlessly criticised Darwin for two main reasons: first, that Darwin never explained what he believed to be the driving force behind evolution, and second, that Darwin believed every species to be in transition, with no end goal in mind. Oddly enough, the first of these was the most burning question within Darwin’s own mind (stick another pin in), and the second has no basis in science (von Baer believed in teleology). Nonetheless, von Baer’s work is the basis of modern embryology, especially with respect to evolutionary development (“evo-devo”), not Haeckel’s.

Graphic by Ian Alexander showing the differences between Haeckel and von Baer’s versions of embryological development. Source

Von Baer noted that animals pass through the same embryological development as their ancestors, but never the adult stages. For example, both whales and snakes evolved from four-limbed ancestors, and both develop four limb buds as embryos. However, later in development, the whale embryo absorbs the hind limb buds, and the snake absorbs all four. Of course, the most popular example of this phenomenon is the series of pharyngeal arches, which all vertebrate embryos have at some stage. These superficially resemble the gill slits of a shark, and in all fish, they do develop into gills. However, in other animals, they develop into glands and ears. They never function as gills in the embryo of any mammal, they simply bear them a superficial resemblance. Haeckel’s particular version of recapitulation theory was eventually disproven in 1910, though the saying “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” remained popular well into the 1970s.

If all this serious biology is making your eyes glaze over, worry not, we’re almost done with all the background information before getting into the core of this article’s premise. Anyway, Darwin admitted that natural selection was never meant to explain how variations arose in a population, only how they propagated. The mechanism that generated those seemingly random variations remained one of his most burning questions, and sadly, thanks to Darwin’s inability to read German (one of several reasons we know he wasn’t inspired by Karl Marx), he had the answer right in front of him, but didn’t realise it, when Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) sent him a copy of his own research. Mendel was acutely aware of Darwin’s work, and of his quandary regarding the actual mechanism of “transmutation” propagated by natural selection that many of his critics, from Owen to von Baer, constantly hounded him about. Modern evolutionary theory may be summed up as “descent with inherent modification,” its mechanism is “natural selection working in concert with genetic drift,” and had Darwin read Mendel’s work (why he didn’t just ask Huxley to translate it, I don’t know), not only would it would have emerged much sooner than the 1930s, but Darwin would have been able to silence his critics as well. Instead, ideologues mixed science with pseudoscience and came up with the idea of “survival of the fittest.”

There is no inherently “superior” people for the same reason there is no inherently superior organism. When evolutionary biologists speak of “advanced” and “primitive” species, what is meant is by that is “most derived” and “least derived,” respectively. Scorpions are considered more primitive than spiders for the simple reason that scorpions are ancient, basal arachnomorphs, whereas spiders emerged much more recently, and are highly derived. The reason that scorpions have persisted in their (more or less) original form as well as spawning multiple different lineages is precisely because scorpions are living Swiss Army knives that can do basically anything. Scorpions are “primitive,” but no-one would ever argue they are “unfit.” Plenty of other lineages have both appeared and disappeared, but scorpions have outlasted all of them. Something similar holds true for human society; empires rise and fall, but cultures persist well beyond.

Though the cradle of civilisation (Mesopotamia) is in a very warm climate, the civilisations of colder climates eventually surpassed it in terms of technology, and the reason boils to down to one thing: time preference. In warm climates, harvests are more reliable and almost continuous, so there is little environmental pressure to preserve and store food in case of a bad harvest or long winter. Therefore, Europeans and northern Asians had to develop much more sophisticated methods of food preservation in order to survive. Climate disasters, such as the volcanic winter of 536 AD, which resulted in a “little ice age” that lasted until 560, proved which cultures were more adaptable to changing times. One migration period ended, but another started, as people in warmer climates hunkered down, people in colder climates began to move, seeking greener pastures. This would not the first or last time this happened in human history, but the decline of several empires and the eventual rise of others serves as a microcosmic example of how this happened in the much more distant past. Dinosaurs, for example, lived in an age of plenty, and thanks to an overabundance of food combined with their lightweight skeletons, grew to be the largest land animals ever, dominating the Mesozoic Earth. However, immediately after an asteroid about 6 kilometres in diameter, weighing roughly 150 million tonnes, crashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, conditions were such that a lot of plants died, leaving insufficient food for the herbivores, and with them gone, large predators starved as well. The dinosaurs could not adapt to the new environment, so despite them being arguably more fit than any mammal, they went extinct. The “struggle” that Darwin wrote of is, more than anything, a struggle against the environment. Different characteristics are more advantageous in different environments, and in a world where food is scarce, being small is an advantage in and of itself. Intelligence, however, is always an advantage, which is why animals that are more intelligent tend to out-compete animals that have greater physical strength in the long run, and animals have gotten smarter over time in general. In the distant past, there were mammalian predators that were far larger and stronger than the biggest lions, tigers, and bears that exist today, but were less intelligent, and this contributed to their downfall. One of the most reliable indicators of intelligence in animal populations is the presence of a social structure. Social animals are among the most successful species in the world, whereas solitary animals are over-represented among endangered species. This might lead one to believe that “more social = more successful,” and to no-one’s surprise, eusocial insects are among the most successful species. However, humans are not eusocial, no primate is, and the only mammal that even comes close is the naked mole-rat… which is also cold-blooded, just putting that out there.

A lot of aristocrats leaned into those misrepresentations of Darwin’s ideas, kicking off a race to find the oldest human or proto-human remains, because that would show which people were “most evolved,” never mind this isn’t remotely how evolution works. The ancestral homeland of any given population is where you would expect to see the greatest genetic diversity, but also the least amount of morphological differentiation, and this is but one piece of evidence for the prevailing “out of Africa” theory. When the going gets tough, an animal population is presented with exactly three options: adapt, move, or die. Since adaptations are produced by genetic drift, not by conscious effort, the population that stays put will, in the event of changing environment, experience a bottleneck, and any new traits will propagate quickly, resulting in more rapid evolution than normal and a relatively abrupt change in specimens. Palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) called this phenomenon “punctuated equilibrium,” and was the first to propose that evolution wasn’t a uniformly gradual process, despite ever-present genetic drift. Between this and other factors, there is plenty of evidence to suggest ancestral populations of humans migrating out of Africa and Asia, but none out of the British Isles, at least until the 18th century. Regardless, it was the supremist mentality of the Gilded Age that inspired the infamous 1912 hoax known as Piltdown Man, primarily as a direct response to the 1892 discovery of Java Man (a subspecies of Homo erectus). It wasn’t as a means of “proving human evolution” as creationists like to say, but because the British couldn’t possibly accept that humans came out of Asia, they fabricated evidence that merry old England was the cradle of humanity. Of course, as more and more human remains were unearthed and the lineage became a little more clear, Piltdown Man was shoved to the side, because no-one could figure out where it fit in the phylogenetic tree. It was eventually discovered in a drawer in 1949, and after some chemical tests, was proven, definitively, to be a fraud in 1953. Twenty-one years later, the “missing link” between man and “primitive” ape would finally be discovered.

Probably the most important thing to take away from all this is that Darwin never states that his observations about nature are in any way guidelines for how humans should behave. “Nature is red in tooth and claw” is a lamentation, not a battle cry. The creationist interpretation, naturally, is that the world is a deeply corrupted version of what God originally created before man sinned and ruined everything. The progressive interpretation, on the other hand, is that nature is “the source of all goodness” (something a prog once said to me), and that only man is capable of evil. Funny how similar those two things sound, isn’t it? But enough about why I stopped trying to write satire that combines the most bat-shit insane takes from both wokists and young-Earth creationists into a single sermon of dialectical insanity. What a lot of people tend to forget is that the progressive movement used to be aligned with Christianity, and in the US in particular, with the movement we now know as fundamentalism. However, while “Christian fundamentalism” has been around for about 150 years, it is important to note that the fundamentalism of yesteryear is not the same as fundamentalism today. The original version of Christian fundamentalism is remarkably reasonable by today’s standards, whereas fundamentalism today actually shares a lot in common with the progressive movement of yesteryear, and despite some important differences, a lot of fundies today would have been progs if they lived a hundred years ago. Don’t believe me? Feast your eyes on this:

I think there is something in the genetic code that deals with the disposition towards gentleness or meanness, and I think in God's perfect law, if we would continually eliminate, execute people that do these certain crimes, we would gradually get a much better society that... not so many people have this “mean gene” in them. - Kent Hovind

In addition to being a eugenicist and a young-Earth creationist (YEC), Hovind is also opposed to the consumption of alcohol. Why is this relevant? Simple: Prohibition, that “noble experiment” that banned alcoholic beverages from 1919 to 1933, was the brain-child of feminists and religious zealots (imagine those two working together today). An example of a person who was both was John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943), a member of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, which is largely responsible for the proliferation of young-Earth creationism, despite most YECs hating being associated with it because of its weird theonomy. While the progs did some good things, including Kellogg himself, their entire world view was based around the idea of “improving humanity,” which meant grinding away at materialism, eliminating “undesirables,” and socially engineering the existing population for some “higher purpose.” It was only after the World Wars that this belief in “progress” was dashed to pieces and social engineering was finally seen for the evil that it truly is…

Just kidding!

The progs are still trying their hand at social engineering, but they can’t repeat the disasters of the 20th century until those atrocities are removed from memory. Social engineering (which has its origins in occult pseudoscience, I’d remind you) inevitably leads to miscegenation laws, forced segregation, forced sterilisation, and genocide, all of which the US government has engaged in at some point. Everyone knows this, but the horrors of Nazi Germany are still in recent-enough memory that the progs aren’t going to try anything like that again soon. What should scare you, however, is that Holocaust denial is on the rise among younger generations. One poll I came across (I’m not going to bother looking it up, it’s only one poll and might not be valid anyway) claimed that 20% of Zoomers say they don’t believe there is sufficient evidence for the Holocaust compared to 8% of Millennials and 5% of Generation X. Authors like Samaan, presenting a narrative distortion, only fuel the denial of history, and I’ll conclude by explaining why.

Lewis Barton may not have the knowledge of evolutionary biology or the history of science that I do, but he nonetheless does his due diligence in looking up what Charles Darwin actually wrote, as well as cross-referencing Samaan’s work with other authors. He’s also not the only one to criticise the way that Samaan writes. Here’s a review I found:

This book presents a number of difficult features. It is privately printed. The author’s name is a pen name.

Not sure why either of those are a problem, but go on.

The history is done like an archeological dig, going from the Nuremburg trials to the issuing of the Communist Manifesto. It also cannot be read from back to front because of its cross-references. The font for headings and subheadings is stylistically idiosyncratic making it distracting to read. The narrative is that of a PhD thesis, with massive amounts of quotes but no formal bibliography of the cited works. On the website, Samaan describes himself as an architect, designer, mechanic, artist, photographer, and student of pre-Colombian architecture in Latin America. He was born in El Salvador, but is now an American citizen with mixed Palestinian-Christian and Hispanic ancestry.

Source

Clearly, Barton is not alone in his complaint that the book is written backwards. Anyway, I think I figured out the agenda. Samaan portrays himself as a libertarian, and I think the very end of the book is meant to be the divisive part. Students of evolutionary biology probably know a good portion of the history I just went through. Anyone who took the same “history of scientific literature” course that I did in my senior year will also know a good portion of that history as well. Nothing I presented here was particularly obscure. However, there isn’t a whole lot of overlap between evolutionary biologists and libertarians. Libertarians will pick up Samaan’s book and probably buy into the narrative that Darwinian Evolution is progressive statist pseudoscience. An evolutionary biologist or other scientifically literate person will pick up the book, see the massive narrative distortion at the end, and write the whole thing off as libertarian anti-science propaganda. In other words, I think Samaan is a pied piper trying to make libertarians avoid science while keeping scientists shackled to the service of the State. People like him keep the dissident movement impotent while making the establishment look good by comparison. Be ever vigilant, do not let people like this fool you, and trade not one cult for another, but be free instead.