Happy Darwin Day!
As expected, I couldn’t get organized enough to do anything, but I did have a GREAT time working… (yeah, right…).
Anyway, what I would have done had I had the time, was to write a very nasty letter to the local paper about the Associated Press story they ran on Saturday. The story, by Dylan T. Lovan concerns Ken Ham’s new book Darwin’s Plantation: Evolution’s Racist Roots. You can get the article online here. Mr. Lovan tries to be fair and quotes some scientists rightfully defending Darwin’s honour, but in general, the article takes Ham’s stupidity serious. The article also seems to me to accept Ham’s rather jaundiced view of evolution: that is a progress from lower to higher, inferior to superior and that obsolete ’survivals’ of the primitive may be found. This recalls the ’social Darwinism’ of the early twentieth century that had a hold on what passed as social science back then, but this is merely a continuation of age old xenophobia and ethnocentricism. Let us not forget that the Bible was categorizing many a people as “cursed” long before Darwin set foot on the HMS Beagle.
The article also ignores the fact that Hitler–who Ham accuses of being a Darwinist–actually spoke a lot about God, destiny and so forth: trappings not of science but of religion. The personality cults of Stalin and Mao also smack of religion, and the transhistorical state or race that demands total loyalty in many dictatorships certainly occupies the role of a deity. The tremendous scale of the atrocities of the 20th century need careful examination and their causes are probably complex. It is way too simplistic to claim that without the theory of evolution these crimes would have been minimized or prevented. The huge scale of the murders was also due the larger populations than at pre-scientific times and the technology to transport and murder millions of people did not exist in previous centuries. And lets not forget all the biblical justification for slavery, stories of God demanding genocide and all that. Funny how Ham forgot about those little gems of biblical wisdom…
Anyway, I was going to write something like that for Darwin Day and send it off to the newspaper, but I didn’t, so I typed up a short version here.
