Conspiracy by Means of Natural Selection
Sherman P. Bastarache
Idein Publishing (2024)
ISBN: 978-0992159436
Reviewed by Justin Gaynor for Reader Views (10/2024)
Many people would rather eat canned cat food than dive into the arcane world of academic writing, with its prickly insistence on citing references, tedious explanations of experimental methods, and oh-so-predictable A-leads-to-B-leads-to-C thought processes. Sherman Bastarache provides an alternative in “Conspiracy by Means of Natural Selection,” in which his thoughts flow like a clear stream over rocks instead of stupefied students sitting in an exam hall. In this book, he takes on no less a subject than the nature of consciousness itself. It makes for stimulating reading.
So many books of this type focus on the mental processes of Man the Hunter! But of course, a more logical place to look for the ways in which the brain develops is in the interactions of newborns with their mothers, or “goddesses,” as Bastarache has it. After all, to an infant, its mother is not only a literal fountain but also a fountain of language acquisition and learning. He lays this all out in far more detail than I’m providing here. Suffice it to say that there is a natural progression in the cognitive abilities of most animals, then other primates, then now-extinct versions of Homo, and finally by us. He gets at this point in many different ways, including this one:
The problem, as we can see, is not what we hold as true, but what we refuse to let go of. For religion, it is the lack of faith that God can create; however, God chooses to create, including the ‘factheory’ of natural selection. For the atheist, he refuses to let go of the fact that ignorant humans were the first to ‘hold as true’ our origins story being created from the goddess. Held as true was the starting point of mental life, not reason.
As the book progresses, this defense of and admiration for women becomes the foundation of the intellectual house he is building. One thought-provoking argument he provides late in the book refers to abortion rights for women who have been raped. In ten states of the United States, abortions in these circumstances are completely forbidden, while in another eleven states, the procedure for obtaining one places a substantial burden on the victim. Bastarache points out that blame for terminating the embryonic life should not be placed on the victim or the doctor, but rather on the rapist who set the grim chain of unwanted events in motion. A more morally consistent position would be to charge the rapist both with rape and murder of the unborn, should the victim choose not to proceed with the pregnancy.
This is some challenging material, and unfortunately, the author’s jumpy style, replete with obscure references, sentence fragments, and invented vocabulary, will not appeal to all readers. But when was the last time you had a real mental adventure with your reading? It may be time to give this book a try.
Before something can become property, it must first be objectified. Remember this when we consider human nature and human rights.