Tag: Evolution

Charlie Brooker Reviews ‘The Genius of Darwin’

PZ Meyers linked to this review of Richard Dawkins’ new documentary ‘The Genius of Darwin’. The reviewer, Charlie Brooker, has a wit about as acerbic as Dawkins’, writing,

Darwin’s theory of evolution was simple, beautiful, majestic and awe-inspiring. But because it contradicts the allegorical babblings of a bunch of made-up old books, it’s been under attack since day one. That’s just tough luck for Darwin. If the Bible had contained a passage that claimed gravity is caused by God pulling objects toward the ground with magic invisible threads, we’d still be debating Newton with idiots too.

Since Darwin’s death, Dawkins points out, the evidence confirming his discovery has piled up and up and up, many thousand feet above the point of dispute. And yet heroically, many still dispute it. They’re like couch potatoes watching Finding Nemo on DVD who’ve suffered some kind of brain haemorrhage which has led them to believe the story they’re watching is real, that their screen is filled with water and talking fish, and that that’s all there is to reality – just them and that screen and Nemo – and when you run into the room and point out the DVD player and the cables connecting it to the screen, and you open the windows and point outside and describe how overwhelming the real world is – when you do all that, it only spooks them. So they go on believing in Nemo, with gritted teeth if necessary.

Ouch.

Ben Stein – Creationist Idiot?

Ben Stein — the Win Ben Stein’s Money Ben Stein — is fronting a pro-creationist documentary called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie is set to come out in April, and looks to advance the typical sort of creationist claims that they’re being oppressed because the scientific community rejects their claims.

Stein has been blogging about the movie, and if his blog posts are any indication, the movie’s going to be an outright embarrassment. This post in particular, illustrates just how far off the rails Stein has gone.

The post, titled “Darwinism: The Imperialism of Biology” makes an fairly standard argument against Darwinism, but one that usually comes from the Left rather than Right,

Darwinism, the notion that the history of organisms was the story of the survival of the fittest and most hardy, and that organisms evolve because they are stronger and more dominant than others, is a perfect example of the age from which it came: the age of Imperialism. When Darwin wrote, it was received wisdom that the white, northern European man was destined to rule the world. This could have been rationalized as greed–i.e., Europeans simply taking the resources of nations and tribes less well organized than they were. It could have been worked out as a form of amusement of the upper classes and a place for them to realize their martial fantasies. (Was it Shaw who called Imperialism “…outdoor relief for the upper classes?”)

But it fell to a true Imperialist, from a wealthy British family on both sides, married to a wealthy British woman, writing at the height of Imperialism in the UK, when a huge hunk of Africa and Asia was “owned” (literally, owned, by Great Britain) to create a scientific theory that rationalized Imperialism. By explaining that Imperialism worked from the level of the most modest organic life up to man, and that in every organic situation, the strong dominated the weak and eventually wiped them out.

This is, of course, simply the radical feminist/postmodernist critique of science — those imperialist white men created it, so it must be simply another tool of oppression. Under this view, science becomes an inherently political activity.

On the one hand, this is a lousy argument because it can be just as easily applied to Stein’s arguments — just posit that Stein and his ilk advocate their views simply for political purposes, and write them off. The ultimate end is that science becomes held hostage to politics (Google Lysenkoism sometime for an indication of where that leads).

On the other hand, when the science is not on your side — as it definitely is not for Stein — this is one of the few arguments left (in other blog posts, Stein picks up the other creationist meta-argument by attacking the idea of “materialist science” as if a “non-materialist” science makes any sense at all).

Similarly, Stein wants to smear Darwinism by blaming it for the Holocaust,

Alas, Darwinism has had a far bloodier life span than Imperialism. Darwinism, perhaps mixed with Imperialism, gave us Social Darwinism, a form of racism so vicious that it countenanced the Holocaust against the Jews and mass murder of many other groups in the name of speeding along the evolutionary process.

First of all, despite what the term implies, most of the Social Darwinist ideas preceded Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species and some were not even Darwinists at all. For example, the archetypal Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer was a Lamarckian who advocated a precursor to a laissez faire political theory.

And, of course, anti-Semitism and massacres of Jews plagued Western Europe for centuries completely unaided by Darwin. Presumably those who marched in the German Crusade of 1096 did not have godless natural selection in their hearts when they slaughtered Jews in the Rhineland. Edward I knew nothing of DNA or genes when he achieved in England what Hitler would try in German centuries later — the complete expulsion of Jews for almost four centuries.

Certainly Hitler wrapped his anti-Semitism in part in a crude distortion of Darwinism, but it was the centuries of Christian progroms and oppression of Jews across the European continent that created the fertile soil for the Holocaust to take hold.