My views on Darwin and evolution

Pat Buchanan has a new column up on evolution, “Making a Monkey Out of Darwin.”

My response:

Pat here in a short column ties together several things that need to be untied. First, as Pat admits, “Yet a theory can produce evil–and still be true.” And Darwinism, or at least a modest application of micro-evolution (change at or below the species level), has produced many medical breakthroughs in understanding how humans and other organisms function, and will do so even more in the future. One need only look at research into lactose intolerance (most Northern Europeans don’t have it) and malaria (most Africans and some Italians developed a resistance to it, but also a tendency to sickle-cell anemia).

Even most Fundamentalist Christians who oppose macro-evolution (at or above the level of species) accept micro-evolution.

Second, as to macro-evolution, this theory is much more complex, and I must admit that I seem to be one of the few agnostics on the matter. It is, after all, a *theory*. Maybe if the government wouldn’t tax me so much I might be able to conduct a thorough investigation.

There’s also a problem with macro-evolution advocates: As Pat said, they all, it seems (or at least the major ones we hear about), look on it as a substitute religion, instead of just a scientific theory. Richard Dawkins (an atheists who keeps his Christian first name) calls anyone who opposes him an idiot, and insists that parents who don’t accept evolution have their children taken away. Christopher Hitchens (an atheist who keep’s his Christian first name) says the same thing; although Hitchens himself isn’t a scientist, many books on evolution cite him on the blurbs on their back covers (for example, “Why Evolution Is True,” by Jerry A. Coyne).

If evolutionists were more modest and took time to explain things to the lesser breeds without the law of evolution, they might get further.

Third, as to public policy, the real reason the elites in America and Europe promote evolution is to brainwash children against their parents’ faiths — in public schools, many private and parochial schools, colleges, and universities.

Yet Christian Fundamentalists avoided the Darwinian political crimes of the Nazis and Communists that Pat notes. (Although, in practice, Stalin and his biological henchman Lysenko were Lamarckians.)

At a purely scientific level, the Fundamentalists also avoided the theory of the “multiregional” origins of humans, meaning the races evolved in different areas, which was widely believed as recently as 50 years ago by such folks as respected Harvard anthropologist Carleton S. Coon. Modern genetics proves, instead, the “out of Africa” theory, that all humans have a common ancestor.

The Fundamentalists believed that all humans were offspring of Adam, and so all deserving of respect as children of God. So whatever the Fundies believed about science, they were right about the most important thing: that there are just men, not sub-humans and uebermenschen. (Unfortunately, nowadays the Fundies are obsessed with America invading the Middle East to incite God to Armageddon, thus getting them raptured from their cars.)

Finally, the real battle for those of us on the Right is not to bring “creationism” into the public schools, but to abolish the public schools and to end or reduce tax funding of all colleges and universities, which nowadays are anti-intellectual citadels of intolerance.

If Darwinians really believe their theories are superior, they should be the first to reject the crutch of coerced tax subsidies.

Privatization of all education would mean educational Darwinism: competing theories battling it out in the classroom, with parents, with students, and in the marketplace of ideas. Let the fittest theories survive.