Acephalous

Only, there's no such thing as Social Darwinism.

Erik's posts (here and here) on the seemingly Darwinian politics of modern conservativism aren't wrong about the lilt of these contemporary thinkers, but they do a bit of injustice to the historical ones, because there was no such thing as "Social Darwinism" during the Gilded Age. There was such a thing as William Graham Sumner, and his collected essays bear the title Social Darwinism, but those essays were collected in and published in 1963. The editor of those essays was following the lead established by the historian Richard Hofstadter, whose Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944) identified Sumner as the brains behind the social Darwinist movement in the Progressive Era. The problem is that there wasn't a social Darwinist movement during the Progressive Era. I'm not just kicking against the pricks here—as people writing dissertations are wont to do—as will become clear if you ask yourself a simple question:

When was the Modern Synthesis formulated?

The Modern Synthesis, if you don't know, is the combination of Mendelian genetics with Darwinian evolutionary theory, and represents the moment when the previously theoretical Darwinian model finally found itself a mechanism of transmission. Darwin's theory of natural selection was elegant, but prior to the Modern Synthesis scientists lacked a means of proving that it could exist in nature. When was it formulated? Between 1936 and 1942. Why is that significant?

Because prior to the Modern Synthesis there was little consensus as to the driving force behind the development of species. Russian scientists, for example, were working under Lamarckian assumptions about the heritability of acquired characteristics well into the 1960s. (The had an ideological commitment to keeping the Lamarckian faith after the Modern Synthesis, but eventually even they relented.) Point being, during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Darwinian thought wasn't the dominant strain of evolutionary theory. It lacked the evidence required to back up its elegance, and so its status in the scientific community was as tenuous then as its competitors are now. Vernon Kellogg, then president of Stanford (or not?), wrote a book entitled Darwinism Today (1908) that basically argued that there really wasn't any. It devoted itself to explicating "the various new theories of species-forming with ... names, such as heterogenesis, orthogenesis, metakinesis, geographic isolation, biologic isolation, organic selection, or orthoplasty." So why do we associate Darwinism with this period?

Because of the Whigs and their history. The aforementioned Hofstadter wrote Social Darwinism in American Thought in 1944 in order to create a bogeyman whose existence would justify the policies of the New Deal. From what Stephen J. Gould called the "maximal diversity" of evoultionary thought during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Hofstadter selected those thinkers whose work contained implications dire enough that politicians in the 1940s could point to them to frighten the masses. Darwinism, as I demonstrated above, wasn't regnant during the period, much less the social application of it, but Hofstadter had handed New Deal liberals their bogeyman and they weren't about to give it up.

Ironically, the scientific community bolstered Hofstadter's claim during the centennial of the Origin in 1959. In a book titled Darwin's Century, Loren Eiseley and his fellow scientists created a teleological narrative of Darwinism's development in which all evolutionary thinkers were groping their way towards the Modern Synthesis. Which is ironic because the key insight of Darwinian thought is that development isn't teleological—that natural selection isn't based on forethought and doesn't working according to a plan. Eiseley and his colleagues transformed the development of Darwinian thought into the stuff of Intelligent Design, and when that narrative was welded onto Hofstadter's, the result was the impression that Darwinism reigned supreme during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

It didn't. It only seems to have because people have forgotten all the other evolutionary theories that were in play at the time, the most prominent of which was Lamarckian, not Darwinian, prompting prominent medical thinkers (and popular novelists) like Silas Weir Mitchell to declare:

I have sometimes been led to think that over brain-work tends not only to stunt the body and to contract the pelvis, but, by the law of evolution, to develop bigger headed offspring, or at least offspring with heads relatively disproportioned to the pelvis of the mother.

That's correct. The most prominent neurologist in America opposed educating women because they would become smarter, pass on their larger brains to their children, then die during childbirth. Outside of giraffes, it's difficult to find a more classic formulation of Lamarckian thought. I could go on for ages—or pages, hundreds of them—but I think I've established that "the Social Darwinism movement" is an ahistorical construct designed to justify policies and theories with which I otherwise agree.

What we talk about when we talk about hands.

As I was writing and writing and writing and writing about Jack London in my dissertation, I noticed something I was never able to fully incorporate into my argument: the man's obsession with hands. He not only wrote about them regularly in his fiction, but his letters are heavily peppered with references to his own "deformed" mitts. I scare-quote "deformed" because history has no record as to whether his hands were as he believed them to be—the scarred and calloused collection of fingers that his life of hard labor had created. That a leading voice for the working class was embarrassed by the signs that he'd once and long been a member of the same is one of those historical ironies that's better left for braver souls to judge. I'm more interested in the evidence. For example, were you a photographer taking a profile picture of London, he would present you with this:

 Or this:

Decent shots, no doubt, but ones in which the palms of his hands have been deliberately obscured. If you were a different sort of photographer entirely—one who wanted to take pictures of famous authors in diapers, for example—London would oblige thus:

A Better, Purer Science

As someone who wrote a dissertation entitled “Maximal Diversity: Non-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory in American Fiction, 1895-1910,” I can’t help but lend my full support to this bill:

Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern wants to make it clear that her new legislation protecting the rights of science teachers to “teach all science instead of just the Darwin model” is in no way an attempt to introduce creationism or Intelligent Design into the classroom. It is, in fact, just an attempt to let teachers teach “pure science” about “all of evolution”

No student in Oklahoma can possibly understand the modern world without a firm grasp of heterogenesis, Lamarkian inheritance, kinetogenesis, orthogenesis, metakinesis, geographic isolation, biologic isolation, the Baldwin effect, organic selection, and orthoplasty, to name but a few. To stick to those strains of evolutionary theory that Morse Peckham called “Darwinisticistic” is a travesty against science and democracy that can only be rectified by the State of Oklahoma commissioning to write a textbook for many moneys.

The short answer to Yglesias's question is "Yes."

But as I'm incapable of short answers, let me provide a slightly longer one. In this post, Yglesias shares his experience of having learned that

it’s not merely that taking time to help inform a non-specialist audience about political science findings isn’t specifically rewarded, it’s positively punished. And not simply in the sense that doing less research and more publicizing is punished; I was told that holding research output constant, getting more publicity for your output would be harmful to a junior scholar’s career because it would feed an assumption of non-seriousness.

That’s pretty nuts.

It is. I won't speak for political science as a discipline, but I can speak to the problem as it exists in mine. The basic logic is that sharing work with the general public is a means of circumventing the "serious" peer review process, and as such is necessarily "unserious." The problem with that explanation is that the peer review process is itself a monument to unseriousness:

There are numerous examples one could cite of plagiarism, or poor practice, that seem to slip right through the peer review process. Add to this the fact that many, if not most, journals are famous for vetting processes that are as slow as Cream of Wheat going down the kitchen drain. Graduate assistants and faculty editors who lose track of manuscripts; readers who are given six months to complete the review and have to be pushed to complete it anyway; and the capacious use of "revise and resubmit" rather than bluntly saying the article is poor and needs to be completely rewritten—all of these things and more are acknowledged problems with the academic publishing process that make many people reluctant to send work to journals.

The other downside to publishing exclusively in journals that live behind pay-walls is that, while the articles contained therein are totally serious, no one ever reads them. As my advisor once told me, if I want an idea to die, the best thing to do is publish it in a flagship journal. He wasn't being serious, obviously, but neither was he being completely unserious. To paraphrase what I believe this fellow once told me, but which I can't seem to locate, my discipline's flagship journal is treated like issues of The New Yorker: they live next to the toilet or in a pile forever awaiting the day in which we have nothing else to read. It's prestigious to be published in it, but it's a means to be hired or promoted, not start a conversation.

It hasn't always been this way—or, at the very least, we once made a concerted effort to appear otherwise—but as it currently stands, the choice is between being a "serious" scholar who engages no one or an "unserious" scholar whose work is read by many but, because of that, counts for nothing. I'm obviously not endorsing this model, nor am I saying it's the same in all disciplines, as I would love to be in a discipline in which my work mattered on its merits rather than for what its publication wins me; however, for those invested in the system as it's currently constituted, the idea of public engagement is understandably frightening. After all, if you've spent decades advancing up the tenure ladder by never being read, a situation in which your work might be read and evaluated could result in people judging—and determining whether you deserve—your ostensibly illustrious career.

Only, no. That's the fear, but far from the reality. If you scroll through the many, many pages I tagged "dissertation," what you see is a community of very useful people helping me develop my ideas on a daily basis. (Twenty-four comments about Edith Wharton's understanding, or lack thereof, of heliocentrism? How is that not useful?) So, one of the reasons behind not sharing non-peer-reviewed work with the general public is simply misguided fear; the other is that its difficult to be gatekeepers when there's no gate, even though the road to it and through it currently resembles a Chinese traffic jam.*

I've strayed a little far from Yglesias's question, but I think a detour into the internal logic of academic publication is necessary to understand why its "serious" fruits must be kept in a closely guarded garden. There's a lot more to be said about this, obviously, but given that Yglesias was identifying the nuttiness of the situation among political scientists, I think it's best to stop before my reasoning becomes too discipline-specific. Accordingly, I'm interested in learning whether a similar situation obtains in other humanities disciplines, as I long ago learned that scientists and engineers actually read each others' work.

*Am I the only one who sees that becoming a metaphor for something sooner rather than later?

[Edited to reflect the fact that it's rude to call people you only think you know because you've been reading them for years by their first names.]

You'll learn nothing at all from thems et al.

Do you know what happens when you allow “scholars” like Jonah Goldberg to invent historical movements and monsters?  You end up with uncited statements of obvious provenance that mask sheer lunacy behind the rhetorical scrim of conventional wisdom:

[T]he principles that inspired the American founding were always viewed as universal principles, which applied to all of mankind. Curiously, it wasn’t until the introduction of Historicist and Darwinian philosophy (which gave birth to Progressivism) that some Americans began to argue otherwise.

I wrote a dissertation about popular adaptations of evolutionary theory during the Progressive Era and have long styled myself an historicist* and I have absolutely no idea what that second sentence could possibly mean.

Does its author, Joseph Philips, mean to argue that Darwinism—which was neither the only nor even the dominant evolutionary paradigm of the Progressive Era—gave birth to “Progressivism”?

Does he mean to argue that the New History movement—inaugurated in 1912 by James Harvey Robinson’s The New History and abetted by works like Charles Beards’ An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913)—gave birth to “Progressivism” fifteen years after it’d been born?

Or does he mean nothing at all—but learned from the likes of Goldberg et al.—that the best way to prevent people from criticizing the seriousness of an assertion is to pretend its “knowledge” so common as to be above reproach?

Care to place bets as to where I fall on this one?  I didn’t think so.

*Before someone objects: writing “an historicist” is too correct.

History is what you make of it?

Johann Hari's review of Wolf: The Lives of Jack London suggests that its author, James Haley, says nothing about its subject that has not been long known.* The only people who would be surprised by the facts of Jack London's life and life of mind, then, are those who know nothing about him, like Ilya Somin, who uses the occasion of Hari's review to condemn the group he describes as "early 20th century Progressives," claiming

London’s simultaneous advocacy of racism and socialism was no anomaly among early 20th century Progressives.

Was London a racist and a socialist? Absolutely. Did he believe in progress? He did. Did he align himself with the Progressives? He absolutely did not.** Not only did he despise the lukewarm commitment of populists like Williams Jenning Bryan to the socialist cause, he publicly quarreled with the Progressive Party's one and only Presidential candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, five years earlier, when the then President declared him a "nature fakir" after reading his account of a lynx killing a dog-wolf. Far from being a Progressive standard-bearer, London couldn't even agree with this lot about the finer points of dog psychology.

The first problem with Somin's argument, then, is that he applies the term "Progressive" to someone who was an avowed "Socialist." London was a capital-S Socialist who believed in lowercase-p progress, but he was not a capital-P Progressive. Teddy Roosevelt was a capital-P Progressive, but he didn't believe in progress and was neither a socialist nor a Socialist. These are distinctions with difference to everyone who cares more about history than contemporary politics. They must be made to obtain.

The second problem with Somin's argument is that its logic lacks logic. Smudging your greasy fingers on the glasses of history only obscures your view of its record:

The racist elements of Progressive ideology don’t prove that economic interventionism is racist by nature, or that the policies Progressives defended in large part on racist grounds can’t be justified in other ways. Still less do they prove that modern left-wingers are necessarily racist as well. But they do undercut claims that racism is primarily a product of the “right” and that economic leftism and racial progress necessarily go together.

Proving that Jack London was a racist only proves that Jack London was a racist. It weakly suggests, and then only by extension, that those who shared his ideological commitment to socialism—which, it bears repeating, is only the same thing as Progressivism if you consider Teddy Roosevelt a socialist—might be racist. What it does not and can never prove is anything at all about people who were not London and did not share his beliefs.

Anyone who thinks otherwise was likely also impressed by Jonah Goldberg's masterful Liberal Fascism: Two Words Next To Each Other, and deserves to be taken about as a seriously.

*Part of the reason that the details of London's life are already familiar is that, as he wrote S.S. McClure at the beginning of his career, “[he] took the facts of life . . . added to them many other facts of life gained from other sources, and made, or attempted to make, a piece of literature out of them” (10 April 1906). Be it in the Yukon stories of The Son of the Wolf (1903), his time among the English poor in The People of the Abyss (1903), his Tales of the Fish Patrol (1905), his account of The Cruise of the Snark (1913), or his struggles with John Barleycorn (1913), Jack London made certain the world knew "the facts of [his] life." Moreover, his compulsion to rewrite the narrative of his intellectual development, as manifested in The Sea-Wolf (1904), The Iron Heel (1908), and Martin Eden (1913), always included an oblique, but still extensive, bibliography of the "other sources" that inspired his philosophy.

**The closest he came were a few late-in-life publications in a magazine called The Progressive.

Being a secret socialist is hard.

I'm still a few days behind the news cycle, what with volcanoes and not picking up people to take them to the airport, so I just now ran across this item which, for reasons that boggle the mind, has been linked pretty much everywhere.  As someone who, unlike Kagan, wrote an actual dissertation on the impact of early 20th Century socialism on American thought—reconciling Jack London's Darwinism and socialism requires discussing his socialism, after all—I wondered how easily I could be branded a traitor to this great nation on the basis of cherry-picked quotations, and as it turns out I'm doomed.  Just consider the charges against me.

Of course I believe in change:

[Jack] London wanted to believe that if industrial life could ravage a body in so short a time, social and cultural change could improve a society over a shorter span than the “deep time” geology-influenced evolutionists believed was required. London wanted to believe that a new social order could create a new, superior species in units calculable in years instead of eons.

Of course I believe in progress:

Received wisdom had the trajectory of social evolution necessarily moving—progressing—toward increasingly complex forms of collective behavior.

Of course I want an undemocratic socialist tyrant in charge:

Telic actions cannot be performed by acephalous organizations; democracy is hamstrung by “by the arrant idiocy of political organization.” Such actions can only be undertaken by undemocratic organizations whose leaders are chosen not because they represent society at large, but because they do not. Such leaders will accelerate the process London believes already at work: namely, that “from the facts of [human] history . . . the trend of [social] development is toward greater and greater collective wisdom.”

Of course I believe socialism is the product of natural selection:

As Thomas Huxley wrote in a letter (27 October 1890) to William Ball: Have you considered that State Socialism—for which I have little enough love—may be a product of Natural Selection? The societies of Bees and Ants exhibit socialism in excelsis.

Of course I believe that the death of capitalism is the fiat of evolution and the word of God:

You are perishing, and you are doomed to perish utterly from the face of society. This is the fiat of evolution. It is the word of God. Combination is stronger than competition.

Of course I believe the Fish-Eaters are the chosen of God:

When the tribe complains of hunger, the Bug “sang a song of how good it was to be a Fish-Eater[, how] the Fish-Eaters were the chosen of God and the finest men God had made[, and] how fine and good it was for the Fish-Eaters to fight and die doing God’s work, which was the killing of the Meat-Eaters.”

And if that weren't enough, of course I want to kill puppies:

For a week it appears as if Big-Tooth may indeed bring about the domestication of the dog, but then he returns home one day to find his friend Lop-Ear “had killed the puppy and was just beginning to eat him.”

If some patriot doesn't put a stop to me soon, I'm gonna be forced to take action myself.

Jonah Goldberg tells his half of the story.

My overstuffed inbox informs me that Jonah Goldberg is writing half-histories again,  but if you can believe it, this time the argument he makes is more accurate than not:

Look, eugenics was a very complicated phenomenon. But it does not clarify the topic to insist that, contrary to mountains of evidence and common sense, that all of the progressives who subscribed to it were just wearing a conservative mask.

That's true as far it goes—progressives who supported the study or practice of eugenics weren't crypto-conservatives—the problem is that it doesn’t go very far:

[T]here’s no evidence provided that any conservatives supported eugenics.

Nor would you expect there to be, because the reason that conservatives opposed eugenics in particular was that they opposed science generally. Given that, at the turn of the last century, eugenics required a belief in some sort of form of evolutionary theory—not Darwinism, strictly speaking, but a pre-synthesis amalgam of mutation theory, Lamarckism, and orthogenesis—it should come as no surprise to anyone that then, as now, many conservative opposed eugenics on religious grounds. G.K. Chesteron's principle complaint in Eugenics and Other Evils was that regulating who could marry would undermine the traditional family, and some of his examples are eerily prescient:

Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up quite suddenly. (13)

Death panels, anyone? Granted, Goldberg is more than happy to occupy this moral high ground, coinciding as it does with the moral positions of contemporary conservatives; however, he downplays the obvious corollary, i.e. that in the name of what we now call family values, earlier generations of conservatives would have severely curbed scientific progress.

I'm not saying that eugenics per se was laudable, but it was necessary to the furtherance of scientific knowledge: it validated human society and the human body as objects of scientific inquiry. Conservatives opposed this because it removed humanity from its pedestal of special creation. To thinkers like Chesterton, treating humans like animals was patently absurd, which is why he characterized eugenic proposals circa 1910 as emanating from a period in which

Mr. Bernard Shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a man like a cart-horse was the true way to attain higher civilization, of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight, which may be found in cart-horses. (ii)

So why, then, were liberals more likely to support eugenics? Because conservatives clung fast to their retrograde and anthropocentric beliefs. Goldberg downplays this, and rightly so, because opposing science on principle isn't a particularly praiseworthy attitude, and his game here is to smudge the historical record such that the only legible items are those that condemn the forebears of his ideological opponents. He offers no affirmative argument for his political kin because, I suspect, he knows that there's not much of one to be made. 

Of course, he also ignores the vast body of unscientific theories of personal and cultural inheritance that were embraced and vigorously defended by social conservatives. Concurrent with the rise of the eugenics movement in America was a vogue for historical novels of the Revolutionary period—at least 141 novels set during that time were published between 1898 and 1903—the majority of which trafficked in talk of blood and breed, i.e. the unscientific counterparts of eugenics that just so happened to favor those with financial, social or political capital. 

Isn't it funny how this branch of conservativism never makes it into books about creeping fascism?

Stuff White People Like Stealing

Considering that

• two Jews from the Bronx, Bill Finger and Robert Kahn (Bob Kane) created Batman
• two Jews in Cleveland, Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster, created Superman
• a Jew from Washington Heights, Mortimer Weisinger, created Green Arrow and co-created Aquaman
• another Jew from Washington Heights, Stanley Lieber (Stan Lee), teamed up with a Jew from Brooklyn, Jacob Kurtzberg (Jack Kirby), to create the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Avengers, the Hulk, the Silver Surfer, the Black Panther, Galactus, Doctor Doom, and Iron Man
• a few decades earlier, a Jew from Rochester, Joseph Simon, had also partnered with Kurtzberg, and together they'd created Captain America
• another Brooklyn Jew, William Eisner, is possibly the most important comic artist ever (dayenu); arguably invented the graphic novel (dayenu); wrote two of the most influential theoretical books about comics (dayenu); and has the award for creative achievement in the medium named after him

would it be fair to say that white people stole superheroes from the Jews the same way they'd stolen rock 'n roll from black people?*

*Not really.  This is territory is trod plenty and well, but it's worth rehearsing: Elvis Presley borrowed rock 'n roll from black people, and always returned as much of it as he could promptly and with gratitude.  But he could never give it all back, because from the perspective of white America, it tainted him: anyone that the New York Times could call, as it did Elvis in 1956, a "blues shouter ... imbued with the spirit and style of those Negro singers" clearly had dangerous and unsavory associations. That same year, the Chicago Defender pushed the issue of this affinity to the fore in articles like "Arrival of Elvis Presley No Puzzle to T-Bone Fans," in which Presley's speech was rendered in Negro dialect: "Yew-oo ain't nuthin but a houn' dawg," the paper has him singing; later, he explains his style by saying "Ah'm jus' singin' the only way ah know how."  Claiming, as Eric Lott did in Love and Theft, that Elvis was no better than a Nineteenth Century minstrel; or, as people generally do, that he stole rock 'n roll from black people, misses the point: many black intellectuals, following the lead of black musicians, not only praised Elvis for respecting their tradition, they loved the fact that, via Elvis, that tradition had been embraced by the sons and daughters of die-hard Dixiecrats.  One editorial in the Defender (that I can't relocate at the moment) was a series of winks, nods, and nudges about ceremony in Tupelo at which John Rankin, reputed to be the last white man to utter the word "nigger" in anger at a black man on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, was forced to bestow some sort of honor on Tupelo's most famous son.**

**I'm not sure why the footnote is that much more substantial and academic than the post it qualifies, but I figure that if I can get away with it in a dissertation, I can get away with it on a blog.

Open with care!

Due to an unfortunate affair with a package of razors, I now have a right index finger of the sort Francis Galton defined in Finger Prints (1892) as belonging to "idiots of the lowest type," because I have sliced its ridges clean off.  On the plus side, I'm now capable of "thrilling to the touch of velvet," but only if by "thrilling," he meant "squealing like a child on fire."  The effect of three-fingered typing may be salutary on my brain's plasticity, but for the moment, I'm as annoyed as a one-eyed kitten.  Posting may be light the next few days. 

Inelegant integration and my discontents.

Tomorrow morning, I will again try to teach my students how to integrate quotations into their prose.  Since the last lesson failed to stick, I think I'll use one this time instead of that damnably ineffective carrot.  The passages they will be trying to integrate will, therefore, not be randomly selected from books and articles relevant to their research, but passages from my dissertation which, should they mangle, will lead to their mangling.  (Or so I'll say.  I only hope they haven't taken my oft-repeated mockery of the thing too much to heart.)  For example, I will present them with a sentence from page 94 of the dissertation, followed by four possible ways of citing it:

The End of Lurker Amnesty Week & a Brief Meditation on Professional Identity in the Public Sphere

From now on, any lurker who leaves a comment will face reprisals both terrible and swift.

Or not.

For the most part, I performed this experiment to figure out who I'm writing for because 1) there are many more of you now, but the increase in readers has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the number of commenters, and 2) I thought knowing who you were might compensate for the fact that I'm not sure who I am anymore.

Technological progress is like a boot to the neck.

What would my dissertation have looked like were this a reality?  Something like this:

Jack London claimed that and do I really want to start a sentence with the name of the author crap I'm quote unquote typing all this so yes comma insert comma insert comma fuck it so Jack London claimed that and I'm going to have to delete all this shit meaning it certainly isn't saving me any time fuck I'm going to have to delete that too period period caps lock period stop you fucker fine no commas no periods we can write this like Gertrude I always loved that bit in everybody's autobiography and shit is this thing still typing why yes it is asshole and it'll continue to so long as you think stop thinking and how do you do a period in this thing? Hey look a question mark I made a question mark now how do I make a comma? Hey look another question mark I guess I understand questions better than answers and what are you trying to tell me you fucking machine?

That's simulated, of course, but devastatingly accurate nonetheless.

FYI, Part II

Remember Work Bird?  Well:

Get on it, people!

"And there still would have been the Holocaust..."

Few write on the history of evolutionary theory as compellingly as John Wilkins. (Had his Species: the History of an Idea and Defining Species: a Sourcebook from Antiquity to Today been available in 2002, I could've avoided years of thankless legwork and finished my dissertation with normative time to spare. Not that I'm bitter.) So I can think of no better way to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin than to listen to Wilkins speculate about what would have happened had it never existed. My only qualm is with this paragraph:

Lamarckism, by which I mean the progressivist view of evolution, not the “acquired inheritance” version that has little to do directly with Lamarck and anyway is set up as a contrast with Weismann not Darwin, would have played an even greater role in people’s thinking than it did. It may still be with us now—we would be trying to figure out how progress occurs out of necessity, rather than it being the rather odd view of people like Conway Morris.

I think scholars who focus more on the scientific literature underestimate the popular appeal of what amounts to quasi-Lamarckian thought both then and now ... but then again, as I'm the person who wrote my dissertation, I would.

On the style of Octavia Butler's Patternist novels

People routinely slam the prose styling of Octavia Butler (as I would demonstrate with citations and quotations were the new TypePad editor not so averse to material copied from OpenOffice documents), but reading the Patternist novels according to the chronology internal to them has me appreciating the gentle relentlessness of her prose.  However, sometimes I think the critics have a point:

"What does the white animal follow?" asked Anyanwu's grandson loudly enough for Doro to hear.  "What has he to do with us now?"

"My master must pay him for you," said Anyanwu's grandson loudly enough for Doro to hear.  "What has he to do with us now?"

"My master must pay him for you," said Anyanwu.  (Wild Seed 41)

That just scans something awful.  In all seriousness, though, rarely is the reason behind an editorial error so obvious or so indicative of an author's stylistic tics.  In Wild Seed, Butler wed her characters to her prose, such that the latter's stolidity became evidence of the former's hard-fought restraint.  (It is, after all, a novel about two people who spend their unnaturally long lives finding excuses not to murder each other.)  She did so deliberately because, at this point in her career, she could.  The novels were published in this order: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), Clay's Ark (1984); but they move through narrative time in this one: Wild Seed (1980), Mind of My Mind (1977), Clay's Ark (1984), Survivor (1978), Patternmaster (1976).

I'll discuss how her interest in evolution is, fundamentally, a narrative one (and in so doing, discuss how this interest's inherent in all evolutionarily-inflected narratives, including Darwin's) at some point in the near future.  For the moment, what fascinates me is how the elder Butler crafts the prose of the later novels in such a way that it "develops" into the style of the earliest one (Patternmaster).  Were she actually a Dickian hack ("sophisticated ideas communicated in pedestrian prose," as Consensus Q. Amalgam would have it), such a feat would be beyond her; but comparing the occasionally dense and ornate prose in Wild Seed (which shares formal concerns and historical content with 1979's Kindred) to the more direct, straightforward prose of Clay's Ark—written nearly half a decade later—it is difficult to imagine that the latter's resemblance to Patternmaster is anything other than intentional.  When she was young, she couldn't help but write of the future in spare and quotidian manner; but by 1984, she could adopt a transitional voice, something that approximates in complexity the difference between 1977's Mind of My Mind and 1976's Patternmaster. 

While it may seem odd to call attention to the refinement of her narrative voice, it is essential to understanding the refinement of the thought processes it develops alongside: the series is unusual in that, as Butler said, she invented a society that was conceptually fascinating, but instead of going on to invent another, she became interested in how that one could possibly have come to be.  The fact that eugenics and alien invasion were, for her, the answer is troubling, but I'll leave the how and why of that for a later post. 

Dear Readers of the Washington Post,

Not only am I someone "who says he has a PhD in English from the University of California at Irvine" (emphasis mine), I actually do! 

On an unrelated note, I'm not sure whether the Google Image results for this blog are representative or insulting, but they certainly are something.

I take requests: "Remember that post you wrote about playing in the outfield and writing a dissertation? I'd love to read it again, now that I'm a week away from filing my dissertation."

(Considering the alternatives, I love the fact that this post is the one I might be remembered for.  As I noted at the time, I'd had this half-written for ages but never could quite finish it.  This post is as close to naked as I get—so much so I deleted it two seconds after I'd posted it before reversing course.  I've received emails thanking me for this post from struggling grad students in chemistry, physics, political science, geography, geology, English, Spanish, French, Russian, education, mathematics, astrophysics, statistics, philosophy, biology, molecular chemistry, history of consciousness, and dance departments.  It is, as the person who requested I repost it tonight said, an academic version of "You Are Not Alone," which would be much more awesome if it didn't analogize me into Michael Jackson.  That said, I'm more than happy to oblige this request, and apologize for the overlong introduction.  But before I get to the post itself, I should say that [1] the reason my interlocutor couldn't find this post is because my category for all things baseball is the Spanish "béisbol," and [2] if you read my post without reading Wally's comment, you've done yourself a disservice.)

"Good passage in French on what dogs dream when awake."

That being what I wanted to name my contribution to the book event on Jenny Davidson's Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century, not because it's relevant, but because it's my favorite entry in the Darwin notebook I cited in the post.  You're welcome to comment on the post here or at The Valve, but I don't want to reproduce it over here and risk confusing the search engines as to the location of the event.

The dissertation you were destined to write.

For some reason, I kept on hearing the name "Lambert" repeated recently.  Every time I did, the theme from my favorite childhood cartoon took up residence in my head for hours on end:

Watching "Lambert the Sheepish Lion" as an adult made me realize that the reason I always remembered Winnie the Pooh narrating it was because Winnie the Pooh narrated it; more importantly, I learned that my fascination with nature vs. nurture debate started early.  I can graft so many elements of that cartoon onto arguments in my dissertation that it makes more sense to say that those arguments were rooted in it.  

"Lambert" tackles the notion that we essentially are what we are, but can choose to be otherwise.  So too does my dissertation.  It addresses the fact that superiority is dependent upon environment, and that environment encompasses both the social (the lambs) and natural (the wolf) worlds.  So too does my dissertation. 

I would go on, but I can barely see for all the irony: a cartoon I loved as a child in which the premises of deterministic thought were challenged likely determined the topic of the dissertation I would write as an adult.