When Darwinism Fails

The Tea Baggers are just social Darwinists on LSD.  But rather then viewing the world as it was in the 1960s, they view it as it was in 1790, or thereabouts.  Needless to say, the USofA today bears little resemblance to what it was 300 years ago.  Tea Baggers assert that all would be well if only government and society were returned to those halcyon times.

They're lunatics, of course.  The overwhelming driver of American exceptionalism in the 19th century was access (only the natives needed be killed off) to a natural resource endowment never before available.  There isn't now, either, especially in the USofA.  We've squandered them.  It is a saying among midwest farmers:  the soil's only purpose is to hold up the plants, (petro)chemical fertilizers provide what the soil once did.  We're about out of petroleum.  Natural gas, it appears, can be extracted if we don't mind squandering huge amounts of water and fouling what's left.  The same is true of shale oil (mostly in Canada).

The number which matters is resources per capita.  I don't have a hard number as I write.  There likely isn't one, since each resource need be weighted in an index.  Suffice to say: population in 1790 - 4 million, population in 2010 - 308 million.  There's a well known term in demography:  hockey stick.  This refers to what happens to a population once predation fades and before it returns.  Population grows hyper-linearly until food and water run out.  Scientists have done controlled studies of (non-human) animals to prove this, as you may not know.  The desertification of the South, most severely in the Southwest, continues apace.  An electrified fence on the Mason-Dixon line is in order.  Those wastrels should all expire, not with a bang but a whimper.

I recently saw a program on Easter Island (one of the History Channels, I suspect), or you can read the Wikipedia article.  Isolated, pre-industrial (i.e., migrationally difficult) islands are as close as we'll get (well, without Nazis anyway) to controlled experiments with humans.  And, of course, the society chewed through the resources without regard for sustainability until collapse.  I've seen no evidence that the Tea Baggers are any smarter.  Similar conclusions have been made about South American Pre-Columbian societies.

Here's the problem:  Darwinism only works if the stupid expire before they reproduce.  If the manifestation of stupidity (which includes debilitating health problems) doesn't happen until after reproducing, then Darwinism fails.  Think about that for a minute.  Darwinism requires that the "survival of the fittest" happen while it still matters.  Modern societies have removed, by and large, that stricture.  We've vaccinated and drugged and surgeried away all those childhood and young adult maladies.  The Pharma folks continue to develop more of same for ever more arcane fatal and debilitating conditions. 

Now, in order to return to what they consider balance, the Tea Baggers seek to make permanent the gains (well, thievery) of the 1%-ers in the times since Reagan.  Only the rich get health care, for instance.  Just like the inbred, and vitally stupid, hereditary nobles of Europe in the Dark Ages.  We'll spend gobs of money keeping 1%-ers alive for a few months longer, all the while protecting their spawn so that they can get similar.  Such a world to look forward to.