the sunday times gets an egg on its face

British pundit Dennis Sewell is back to blame all the evils of the modern world on the discovery of gradual genetic change in living organisms.





British pundit Dennis Sewell has drunk deep of the creationist elixir and cobbled together a terrible wreck of an article in the Sunday Times which is just one more manifestation of scientifically and historically dim and uninspired Darwin bashing we’ve all heard again and again. But that’s the thing with creationists. They have developed an immunity to facts and objective reasoning. You could prove to them a million times that Darwin had nothing to do with those who would mutilate his theory of natural selection to create the pseudoscientific Frankenstein of noxious pseudoscientific garbage in question. But after every single time, they will once again repeat the very nonsense you’ve just demolished like nothing happened. To give you an idea of how frustrating this is, allow me to present this bit by Lewis Black, who I’m pretty sure I’ll turn into over the next twenty years…

In his article, Sewell has the typical debate tactics of a creationist quote-bot down to a science, if you pardon the pun. His authoritative sources of the Darwin-is-evil tripe include Darrell Scott, who’s claims to fame are his woefully misinformed tirades about the evils of evolution which were brought to light by after his daughter was shot at Columbine and he found himself in front of a camera, and Ann Coulter who was the de facto definition of right wing insanity until we were introduced to Sarah Palin last year. What, was Ray Comfort not available to comment on this story? How about Dinesh “Couldn’t Think His Way Out of a Paper Bag” D’Souza with all his grand and inanely wordy insights? And what about Ben “Science Makes You Kill People” Stein? As long as we’re asking clueless demagogues, why not go down their celebrity roster? To make matters even worse, this insipidity was published in the science section as if it was in any way a legitimate scientific or historical piece as it casually links Darwin to every ignoramus to ever malign his theory.

On this blog, I’ve taken this issue up with Steve Newton, an expert on the subject at the NCSE and in the link included in the first paragraph, but I will mention again just how ridiculous this excuse for logic really is. If we decide that scientists and engineers are responsible for every objectionable use or misuse of their ideas, we should be blaming the Wright brothers for fighter planes and 9/11, John Dalton and all his work on the atomic theory of matter for nuclear weapons, Tim Bernes Lee and his prototype for the modern internet for spam and viruses, and Iron Age metallurgists for modern bullets. Last, and certainly not least, we should also blame the Bible writers for racism because so many of the texts it contains have been used to justify slavery, misogyny, genocide and ethnic cleansing. In fact, the Bible and Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s anti-Semitic tracts were cited by Hitler as his inspiration for the Holocaust. A horrifying mangling of natural selection was tacked on by those he employed based on loyalty and ideology rather than genuine education or scientific knowledge. So, when are the creationist hordes going to start holding Chamberlain responsible? Or just plain old bigotry?

And to think that Darwin wrote about the notion that helping each other and those less fortunate must’ve been a product of natural selection, opposed slavery, and while being raised into the standard mentality of Victorian men, his views on women were almost liberal at the time. His cousin Galton and ideologue Herbert Spencer created a pseudoscientific monster by combining the bits and pieces of Darwin’s theory that interested them in justifying their bigotry and snobbishness as noble or prescribed by nature, and we’ve been stuck with whole generations of snobs, racists and bigots who decided their skin color or the size of their bank account makes them better humans than those with darker skin or lighter wallets. For them, the issues of biology and natural selection as it applies to social animals is irrelevant. They just feel free to skip that part without realizing that a population which tries to preserve the “purity” of its genes actually becomes inbred and more prone to certain propagating genetic defects. Why do you think populations of Orthodox Jews who insist that only pure-blooded Jews should marry in their communities have a disproportionate rate of Tay-Sachs? They’re ignoring a basic principle of evolution which works best when genes are spread around.

If anything, evolution is like the hippie of scientific theories. The more genetic variety you have, the more genes you try to mix, the more likely you are to develop resistance to more diseases and avoid carrier genes for any specific genetic condition, so this condition will be less likely to fully activate and more likely to go extinct. This is what those focused on “purity” refuse to understand. Pure humans don’t exist. They never have. They’re just a fanciful concept with no place in reality. Instead, we all have our flaws and defects, and with a larger pool of genetic material available to a population, we’re more likely to overcome them, incorporate each other’s good genes and either mute or minimize the troublesome ones. The aforementioned bigots will resist it because it makes them feel less special as humans. The creationists will ignore that this is what evolution tells us when we actually focus on the science because accepting this fact doesn’t give them the opportunity to drag Darwin through their verbal manure yet again. So much so, that at this point, the Discovery Institute, AiG, Ray Comfort and now Sewell, aren’t just beating a dead horse but violating its bleached, skeletal remains with a disturbing and terribly misplaced zeal.

[ story idea via Jerry Coyne ]