Darwin Rules
An occasional column, “Observatory,” by Henry Fountain appears episodically in the Times as a kind of supplement to the weekly Science Times Tuesday feature. A recent piece (October 3rd) on the diet of frogs illustrates the paper’s penchant for embracing an extreme form of Darwinistic determination.
The question posed is whether there “is a connection between . . . the size of a territory [a species] covers, and its diet.” One idea, Fountain suggests is that a restricted range should lead to a specialized diet, since there is a smaller variety of foods available in tight quarters. A second is that “selection might come into play” since any adaptation would spread through the restricted population. But the point of the article is to highlight research showing that “the opposite is true. . . . species with the smallest ranges had the most diverse diets. “The explanation offered: “The smaller the range, the more prone a species is to extinction. A small-range species that depends on one food source, then, risks being wiped out if that food source dries up. But one that is a generalist eater can better survive the vagaries of the food supply.”
Well, this explanation is one hypothesis, but it seems to me that Marx’s notion of “the lash of hunger” (used to explain why people take dirty and dangerous jobs) works for other animals as well: a hungry frog will eat the insects that are available. Since a limited range has less of its favorite food, it has to turn to less desirable forms or starve. Isn’t that why concentration camp inmates ate cockroaches?
Why might the Times be so hung up on an extreme form of Darwinism? One explanation might be because the modern liberalism it represents has become ever more closely tied to science in order to distinguish itself from right-wing know-nothingism. Thus, stem cell research — the subject of considerably hyped promises and likely to be very risky for the large numbers of women who will be needed for the industrial production of eggs should it be successful — is contested terrain for political reasons, as the last election showed. The Times is unabashedly in favor of such research, as a hallmark of its view of correct politics, and has yet to publish any serious pieces about the low chances of stem cell work producing disease cures or the risks, costs, and dangers of actually using it.
These science-based “solutions” also divert attention from the possibilities of social causation of societal problems —a useful posture when liberal schemes championed by the Times go awry. this approach also allows the paper to argue for allocation of considerable resources to techno-elites and managers, rather than pursuing more distributed ways of tackling the problems. A persistent theme in the paper is the support of continually expanding research budgets for scientists (a major constituency of the paper), even when a problem might be more amenable to a non-technological fix. (See, for example, “Congressional Budget Delay Stymies Scientific Research,” Jan. 7, 2007; )
For example, the Times has carried pieces arguing that genetically engineered food is necessary to feed a hungry world, despite the obvious fact that hunger exists in societies with an excess of food and a surplus of genetic engineering (such as the US)–because people are too poor to purchase it. Norman Borlaug continues to get accolades while Mao Tse-Tung (a wicked character to be sure) is not acknowledged for having ended far more hunger by his land reform programs than the Green Revolution.
Trope of the Times: Many social and cultural phenomena are the results of scientific laws and we must rely on experts to tackle them.