The Greatest Scientist Ever:
I continue to get incredulity, even incomprehension, from intelligent people when I point out that a mating pool size that is too large is just as bad for fertility as one that is too small. Once I could attribute that to a lack of evidence, and even now it may be due to lack of clarity on my part in explaining it, but I have had a lot of practice. It is just believed that science has proven that the bigger and more diverse a gene pool, the better, and that ends it. It must be a law of nature.
But if that proposition has scientific support, then it is a scientific theory. And it would be an amazing theory. Not only is it counterintuitive on first principles, since everything else we need we can get too much of, but it is easy to understand. Not many people really understand the theory of relativity of Einstein. Very few indeed make their own measurements and use the relevant equations to decide what they are going to do on any given day. We don’t actually use Darwin for practical purposes. We were breeding animals long before his time. We were pointing arrows farther up when shooting a longer distance long before Newton. Galileo’s notion of how the solar system works does not influence our daily lives. But these great men, and a lot more besides, are household words. The question of whom to marry is of enormous consequence to our daily lives, and the theory that the bigger more diverse gene pool is readily applied by a large proportion of the population. But whose theory is it?
This would clearly have to be the greatest scientist who ever lived. His work affects our daily lives; his principle is applied constantly. The theory even promises world peace by the stratagem of mixing every community with every other so that nobody has and identity except that of being a human being, resulting in world peace.
Ignore the question of whether it could be true for a moment; just consider
what a fantastic claim that is. The claim is that the very strategy that would give us the healthiest gene pool, the ideal humans from a genetic standpoint, would also put an end to the horrors of war that visit us with such terrible regularity. It claims to give us something for nothing. Peace delivered with not sacrifice asked. If it seems odd that such a splendid arrangement never occurred to anybody before in history, and it cannot have been tried successfully or we would know it, then that is all the more reason to idolize this great scientist who worked it out and gave it to the world.
So who was he? What resistance did he meet for his revolutionary ideas? Was he tried before the Inquisition like Galileo? Was there a debate with an archbishop like the one concerning Darwin? (It was pretty mild, admittedly. Darwin had Huxley to do his talking for him and Wilberforce was a nice guy who offered no serious challenge.) Was he in danger of losing his job for his beliefs like Newton? (The job was a sinecure, and Newton had friends so powerful that the king himself came to the rescue, but still it’s a story. Did he undergo a “long, dark midnight of the soul” like Einstein? (I sympathize. I find his work kind of boring, too.)
What is his icon, like Newton’s apple, Einstein’s A bomb, Galileo’s leaning tower or Darwin’s ape man? And what was his killer evidence? What set of data demolished all resistance by its sheer beauty, clarity and logic? Newton had his tidal charts. Galileo had his telescope. Darwin had his finches. Einstein had his bending of light around the sun. What was the evidence for this unknown genius? What was the historic moment when the evidence was found? What kind of evidence could there possibly have been that produced a standard of proof so excellent that most educated people gladly stake the survival of humanity on the certainty of the principle that evidence proved?
Where are the television biographies that romanticize him? Who are the debunking churls who say he accomplished nothing special?
We ought to see all of those things. We see nothing at all. We cannot name the man (assuming it was a man).
The reason is that there never was such a person. There never was any evidence. There never was a debate. It simply is not true. There has been work done that demonstrates that inbreeding is bad, but this is as different from inbreeding as drowning is from dying of thirst. It is an idea that has never been defended. I would think that should bother people.
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