Trump’s appeal to common sense

The 2016 election tightened the grip that conservatives have on US politics and this could pose a severe threat to the funding of scholarship in the social sciences and humanities in the country.

Darwin’s energy-dependent “conditions of life” linked what organisms eat to their pheromone-controlled physiology of reproduction. That fact links survival of our species to the survival of all other species on Earth. Many have become extinct.
Trump’s appeal is that he does not appear to believe in ridiculous theories that social scientists have invented. The theories have led to the deaths of millions of people, including those who died from the 1918 Spanish flu.
Article’s conclusion:

“Our differences are more a matter of emotional commitment than reason. But even in the midst of a fight, wisdom lies in trying to understand and respect one’s “enemies”. Blind hatred or contempt makes the fighting worse and the prospects of peace more distant.”

War and disease are profitable to those who invest in them. Peace and healthy longevity are benefits that greed does not allow.
Neo-Darwinism is about greedy organisms that must mutate to evolve. Darwin’s theory and his “conditions of life” were bastardized. The pseudoscientists who did that have caused several generations of intelligent conservatives to be overwhelmed by the amount of pseudoscientific nonsense they were taught to believe. Biologically uninformed liberals taught many of us to believe in nonsense.
Trump’s appeal is an appeal to common sense. For example, in his forward to the reprint edition of Schrodinger’s “What is Life?” Roger Penrose wrote:

How often do we still hear that quantum effects can have little relevance in the study of biology, or even that we eat food in order to gain energy? — Roger Penrose 8 August 1991

If you asked a neo-Darwinian theorist to explain why they never asked that question, their answer would explain Trump’s appeal. Neo-Darwinian theorists have not tried to link quantum physics from ecological variation to peaceful energy-dependent  ecological adaptations. They failed to ask whether Schrodinger‘s thoughts about the anti-entropic energy of sunlight might be important to life on Earth.

Indeed, in the case of higher animals we know the kind of orderliness they feed upon well enough, viz. the extremely well-ordered state of matter in more or less complicated organic compounds, which serve them as foodstuffs. After utilizing it they return it in a very much degraded form -not entirely degraded, however, for plants can still make use of it. (These, of course, have their most power supply of ‘negative entropy’ the sunlight.)

See also: Trump’s appeal to common sense (2)