It always amazes me how if you want to bash intelligent design, Discovery Institute, or Darwin doubters generally, you can pretty much say anything you want, however ridiculous, and everyone in the Darwin choir will sing hallelujah and never bother to fact check what you say. At the Huffington Post, science writer John Farrell debuts with an awkwardly written blog trying to pick a fight with John West on Darwinism’s sinister race-war theme (“Bad Faith (in Science): Darwin as All-Purpose Boogey Man?“). The post struck a nerve, garnering 1,266 comments as of this writing.
Says Farrell,
West wants his readers to realize that Darwin’s racism had murderous overtones and that therefore the science of evolution must be suspect.
Farrell means that West wants readers to “think” or “believe” not “realize,” which implies that he actually agrees with West. But never mind Farrell’s incompetence as a writer, the second half of his sentence is clearly false, an absurd straw man. I challenge Farrell to show me anything John West has written that implies such a thing — namely, that because Darwinain science is well suited to justify and inspire evil, that by itself makes the ideas “suspect” as science. What any reasonable person would say is that the racist element in classical Darwinism, along with the wicked uses it’s been put to historically, together form a good reason to take a second, fresh, and objective look at the science — evaluating it, however, strictly on its own scientific merits. That’s very different from the caricatured stance attributed to West by Farrell.
Farrell goes on to quote at length the famous passage from the Descent of Man that ranks human races in order of their being near or far from apes and that predicts that races closest to the apes — “negroes and Australians” — will be “exterminated,” leaving a more yawning gap than at present between “civilized” men and the lower apes.
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