Defending Darwin

By Cernig

Sometimes I feel sorry for folks like John Derbyshire, having to defend Darwin and evolution from the fundie naysayers of the extreme Right. It's not only a thankless and endless task but it must be downright embarassing to realise one shares a political party with such neo-Luddite nutters.

Still, Derbyshire continues to do a great job - as when he was asked to comment yesterday on a simple strawman attack on Darwin's theories by yet another religio-wingnut.

Some readers want me to pass comment on David Klinghoffer's Darwin-inspired-Hitler piece.

As so often with creationist material, I'm not sure what the point is. Darwin's great contribution to human knowledge, his theory of the origin of species, is either true, or it's not. Is David saying: "When taken up by evil people, the theory had evil consequences. Therefore the theory must be false"? Is he asserting, in other words, that a true theory about the world could not possibly have evil consequence, no matter who picked it up and played with it, with no matter how little real understanding? Does David think that true facts cannot possibly be used for malign purposes? If that is what David is asserting, it seems to me an awfully hard proposition to defend. It is a true fact that E = mc², and the Iranians are right at this moment using that true fact to construct nuclear weapons. If they succeed, and use their weapons for horrible purposes, will that invalidate the Special Theory of Relativity?

If David does not think that Darwin's explanation for the origin of species is correct, let him give us his reasons; or better yet, an alternative explanation that we can test by observation. That a wicked man invoked Darwin's name as an excuse to do wicked things tells us nothing, nada, zero, zippo, zilch about the truth content of Darwin's ideas.

Derbyshire also notes that guilt by association can work both ways. All Islamofascists are evolution-denying creationists too.

This issue is one of the most deeply divisive of all for conservatives. The (guilt-by-association) Christofascists will run in droves from a Republican candidate who has the nerve to repudiate their nonsense, which is why people like McCain have been so careful to continually parse their positions on it. I don't really get why Dem candidates don't exploit it more by putting their opposite numbers on the spot about their exact positions on the age of the Earth and whether they believe in evolution. There's simply no way it can be more politically damaging to Dems than to Republicans to profess a sane belief in science, surely.