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By Root 2028 0

whose existence Paine argued was apparent at a glance at the natural world. But condemning much of the Bible while embracing God seemed an impossible position to most of his contemporaries. Christian theologians concluded he was drunk, mad or corrupt. The Jewish scholar David Levi forbade his co-religionists from even touching, much less reading, the book. Paine was made to suffer so much for his views (including being thrown into prison after the French Revolution for being too consistent in his opposition to tyranny) that he became an embittered old man.*

[* Paine was the author of the revolutionary pamphlet ‘Common Sense’. Published on 10 January 1776, it sold over half a million copies in the next few months and stirred many Americans to the cause of independence. He was the author of the three best-selling books of the eighteenth century. Later generations reviled him for his social and religious views. Theodore Roosevelt called him a ‘filthy little atheist’ – despite his profound belief in God. He is probably the most illustrious American revolutionary uncommemorated by a monument in Washington, DC.]

Yes, the Darwinian insight can be turned upside down and grotesquely misused: voracious robber barons may explain their cut-throat practices by an appeal to Social Darwinism; Nazis and other racists may call on ‘survival of the fittest’ to justify genocide. But Darwin did not make John D. Rockefeller or Adolf Hitler. Greed, the Industrial Revolution, the free enterprise system, and corruption of government by the monied are adequate to explain nineteenth-century capitalism. Ethnocentrism, xenophobia, social hierarchies, the long history of anti-Semitism in Germany, the Versailles Treaty, German child-rearing practices, inflation and the Depression seem adequate to explain Hitler’s rise to power. Very like these or similar events would have transpired with or without Darwin. And modern Darwinism makes it abundantly clear that many less ruthless traits, some not always admired by robber barons and Fiihrers -- altruism, general intelligence, compassion - may be the key to survival.

If we could censor Darwin, what other kinds of knowledge could also be censored? Who would do the censoring? Who among us is wise enough to know which information and insights we can safely dispense with, and which will be necessary ten or a hundred or a thousand years into the future? Surely we can exert some discretion on which kinds of machines and products it is safe to develop. We must in any case make such decisions, because we do not have the resources to pursue all possible technologies. But censoring knowledge, telling people what they must think, is the aperture to thought police, authoritarian government, foolish and incompetent decision-making and long-term decline.

Fervid ideologues and authoritarian regimes find it easy and natural to impose their views and suppress the alternatives. Nazi scientists, such as the Nobel laureate physicist Johannes Stark, distinguished fanciful, imaginary ‘Jewish science’, including relativity and quantum mechanics, from realistic, practical Aryan science’. Another example: ‘A new era of the magical explanation of the world is rising,’ said Adolf Hitler, ‘an explanation based on will rather than knowledge. There is no truth, in either the moral or the scientific sense.’

As he described it to me three decades later, in 1922 the American geneticist Hermann J. Muller flew from Berlin to Moscow in a light plane to witness the new Soviet society firsthand. He must have liked what he saw, because - after his discovery that radiation makes mutations (a discovery that would later win him a Nobel Prize) - he moved to Moscow to help establish modern genetics in the Soviet Union. But by the middle 1930s a charlatan named Trofim Lysenko had caught the notice and then the enthusiastic support of Stalin. Lysenko argued that genetics - which he called ‘Mendelism-Weissmanism-Morganism’, after some of the founders of the field - had an unacceptable philosophical base, and that philosophically ‘correct’ genetics,