THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

For it or agin it, everyone admits that Evolution was a major development. In the last half of the last century, we have an equally revolutionary change in our picture of Nature.

But none of it is even mentioned in the social sciences. All of our social theories, from Communist to Libertarian, go back to the 1950s idea that man was his own product, that all social structures were imposed on man by the System.

Karl Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin but Darwin refused. I the introduction to Kapital, Marx recognizes advances in science about man, something no Marxist will do today.

I heard that Nathaniel Branden was Ayn Rand's husband. I heard from their followers that he had himself sterilized and made it his life's work to prove that man has no instincts.

This is probably true. Marx and Ayn Rand were both trying to prove that the social system and logic made man what he is. Both of them came from Rousseau's idea of the Noble Savage. Man was Noble until he was corrupted by Private Property or by government that warped him.

This is NOT an exaggeration. This is what we believed in the 1950s, just as we believed that continents stayed in the same place forever. As with the Mantra, you don't need to be a great analyzer to make everything Intellectuals believe today look as ridiculous as it is.

You just have t o state it in plain, uncompromising English.

And that is what respectable conservatives are paid NOT to do. None of them will ever point out that revolutions in science have put every single political and social theory on the Left and on the Right into the dustbin.

Another thing that has gone without notice into the dustbin is the entire theory of psychoanalysis.

In 1950, there was no such thing as schizophrenia. It was called the Schizophrenic Response. Like everything else in the post-Hitler world, everything about the human brain was a response to social stimulae, not genes, which were only mentioned by naziswhowantedtokillsixmillionjews.

Today if you were to state what social scientists insisted on in 1950, you would leave your audience thunderstruck.

Which is why respectable conservatives have a whole industry going built around NOT talking about such things.

One period in the history of medicine fascinates me. With the discovery of bacteria and of blood circulation and about everything else we actually know about medicine today, the Balance of Humors of the Roman Galen, which had been the foundation of all medical education until that time. Was simply tossed out the window.

But how could professors who were middle-aged and had studies nothing BUT Galen and astrology and so forth, men who had made it up through the bureaucracy of the medical studies of their time, possibly throw out the old trash?

It would be good to know, because the social sciences are in exactly the same position today. The idea that animals have no social classes, no territory and that male birds tweet to attract female birds is as dead as bleeding to cure pneumonia.

This has happened before, and I am sure the old medical elite tried to restate everything in Galen's terms and simply put the quietus on what the real world looked like, just as the social sciences are doing today.

Bleeding for pneumonia was still around to kill George Washington in 1799. The present social scientists will be followed by many a president in the next generation.

But all present political theory, in fact all present social science, is as out of date as Galen. The foundation is gone. The superstructure is huge, and has a lot of momentum.

But eventually people get down to speaking English. When people start doing that, Mommy Professor is dead.