The Coral Ridge Hour
Posted on April 22nd, 2008 by blue collar scientistRon Britton over at Bay of Fundie today has a good post about peculiar (and as he points out, minority) Christian views of science. It is worth a read, and covers such topics as the necessity of science’s naturalistic approach, the strange way that some Christians become separatists (”They invent themselves out of the majority”), and the currently hot topic of how biologists are really Nazis and are conspiring to kill another six million people in the next holocaust.
One remark made in the post, though, caught my attention, and I couldn’t let it go. Eventually I felt it worthwhile to leave a comment. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not disagreeing with Ron in any way here. I’m just pointing out that evolution denialists are even stupider than he makes them out to be. After I wrote it, I decided it might be appropriate to publish it here as well. So here’s my comment in its entirety (quoting Ron first):
The only real connection between evolution and Nazi-ism is that a few people misunderstood evolution, and they misapplied their distorted knowledge to the social sciences. Darwin is not responsible for the misunderstanding and misuse of his theory….I don’t mean to be contentious, but even though it is technically correct, this is too generous to the evolution-denying religious whackos who want to link Darwin and/or evolution to Hitler and Nazism. Let me explain….
By Darwin’s time, it was already understood that species could change with time. This knowledge was put into practice in selective breeding of crops, flowers, livestock, puppy dogs, and so on, which had been done for centuries by Darwin’s time.
Darwin’s great insight, his big innovation and contribution to biology, was showing that nature itself served as a selective breeding engine - that instead of a human breeder making the choices about which organisms got to reproduce, in the wild it was nature that made such “decisions,” whether this was a result of the size and hardness of seeds that birds were eating, or the influence of storms, or what have you.
So yes, these people misunderstood evolution, and applied their misunderstanding in an evil way. But they didn’t misunderstand Darwin - they were, and are today, too ignorant to even know what Darwin was talking about, and what his contribution to science entailed. The Nazis applied the principles of deliberate, human-controlled selective breeding programs to what they thought were the problems of their society. Stupid people who know less than nothing about evolution somehow decided this was related to Charles Darwin.
The point I’m trying to make is that the evolutionary denialists - who are demonstrably (and sickeningly) gleefully happy about Nazism and the killing of six million people because it shows evolution is evil - are actually ignorant at a profoundly more fundamental level than they are usually called out for.
Let’s be clear here: Six million Jews Gypsies, and unfortunate others weren’t killed in the Holocaust by natural causes. If the denialists are genuinely trying link Darwin to the Holocaust, that’s what they’re saying - in essence, they are claiming that Holocaust victims died, and deservedly so, because they were unfit. Which is remarkably similar to what Hitler claimed.
But it isn’t true. Holocaust victims were killed by people, not nature; and people already understood well before Darwin’s time the effect that killing off a population - of people, or cattle, or whatever else - would have.
