Breaking Free of Psyops Ep. 23: Darwin’s Secret, Malthus & the Battle Over Human Nature

Back in Canada after a trip to Istanbul, the host opens with the story behind his new Constantinople videos: why two Egyptian obelisks and the serpent tripod from Delphi ended up beside the Hagia Sophia on Constantine's orders. Then the main lecture asks whether Charles Darwin's theory was honest science or a political project. It starts with Richard Dawkins and The Selfish Gene, then sets Henry C. Carey, Lincoln's economic advisor, and William Gilpin's Cosmopolitan Railway and Bering Strait tunnel against Thomas Huxley's X Club and Herbert Spencer. Darwin's own autobiography credits Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, and the episode walks through Darwin's view of the weak members of civilized society, the Trojan horse axioms of gradualism, selfishness, scarcity and diminishing returns, and the false choice between literal creationism and Darwinism. Alternative thinkers such as Karl Ernst von Baer on the harmony of nature, and Carey's Unity of Law, round out the presentation. In the Q and A, H.G. Wells and Julian Huxley's evolutionary synthesis, the Church of Gaia and bogs, and a plug for the book Science Unshackled close the show.