The Mendacious David Klinghoffer

To borrow a phrase: Either David Klinghoffer isn't very bright or he doesn't think his readers are. Over at Evolution News and Views, he has taken the tragic circumstances at the Discovery Channel involving the unhinged gunman who took the station hostage and turned them into an anti-evolution tirade in a post titled "James J. Lee, Hostage-taker and Darwinist". The gunman made a list of demands, many of them written in terse, angry tones. One such demand demanded we stop showing programs of the "

...birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed."

Another demand reads:

"Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn't, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??"

The point here is that the gunman clearly had a psychotic break with reality. What precipitated this can only be guessed. It is not the first time a mentally unstable person took hostages and it will not be the last.

But what got our esteemed Dr. Klinghoffer upset was demand number 7, which reads:

"Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people's brains until they get it!!"

He mentions Thomas Malthus three times, always in the context of overpopulation. One of the influences of Charles Darwin was the essay that the Reverend Malthus wrote about human overpopulation. Darwin understood that the reason that overpopulation HAD NOT happened was because there was competition for resources. Malthus' essay on population growth¹ was a hypothetical model only. The gunman wasn't concerned about evolution. That was not what was driving his anger. Overpopulation and pollution were driving his anger. That is obvious on the face of it—to everyone except David Klinghoffer, who then uncorks this:

My purpose here, of course, isn't to suggest that Darwinism drives people mad or anything like that, but merely to point out, as I've done in the past, the strange attraction Darwinian theory exerts on some people who are crazy, or wicked, or both. This is a truth that's suppressed again and again, yet it remains true.

This is a blatant misrepresentation of what the gunman's concerns were and if Klinghoffer doesn't know that he should. If he does, and I suspect he does, then that is mendacious behavior. His point may not be to suggest that Darwinism drives people mad but it is to suggest that there is a connexion between adherence to the theory and the kind of behaviour exhibited by the gunman.

Toward the bottom of the piece, he lists a litany of names of people supposedly informed by Darwin who have gone on rampages and killed multiple times before being either arrested or themselves, killed. That all of these individuals are mentally unbalanced is something that Klinghoffer conveniently leaves out. He also mentions both Hitler and Stalin as being inspired by Darwin, connexions that are easily rebutted, something else that Klinghoffer fails to notice.

But just for the sake of argument, lets say he is right and that "Darwinism" is an ideology that leads people to violence against their fellow man. I wonder what other ideologies might do the same thing? As I mentioned in a post several months back, Jeffrey Schloss has addressed this issue. He writes:

The historical record amply and indisputably confirms the fact that references to Darwin and to ideological principles attributed to the evolutionary process were frequently employed by the intellectual architects of the Reich, at the very least in this way. That Darwin was used (or abused) in Holocaust thinking seems uncontestable. But it is also not necessarily very interesting. Darwin has been used in this way for many other social movements very different from fascist eugenics: e.g., racial egalitarianism, feminism, anti-feminism, Marxism, and free enterprise capitalism. Big ideas can be used, or misused, for all manner of big causes, and Darwinism – like the Bible – has been claimed to justify or inspire many.

Klinghoffer seems to think the connexion between Darwin and Hitler is worthy of mention. What about the connexion between Christianity and Hitler? Richard Steigmann-Gall, in his article Apostasy or Religiosity? writes:

Many bishops of the Lutheran state churches saw in Nazism the explicit fulfillment of a Protestant politics. In 1931 the Lutheran Landesbisch of Mecklenburg, Heinrich Rendtorff, proclaimed:

"Many members of the Protestant Church today live with their complete thought and feeling in the National Socialist movement. The Protestant Church is therefore obliged, by its calling, to seek out the individual and to serve him, to seek him in his own circle, which means especially in the National Socialist movement.... The National Socialist movement passionately affirms social thought and brotherhood. Therefore it stands for a concern which is also one for the Protestant Church.... The Protestant Church must, for the sake of its calling, hear and thankfully greet the great intent coming out of the National Socialist movement."

After Hitler's appointment, Rendtorff was no less enthusiastic: 'The Protestant communities of Mecklenburg should know in this hour that their state church in its faith says ajoyful and strong yes to German Volkstum ... to the German nation'. Even many confessional Lutherans who would later join the Confessing Church subscribed to these political views. The most noteworthy in this regard was Otto Dibelius, the General Superintendent and later Bishop of Brandenburg. After the NSDAP's electoral breakthrough in September I930, he certified the Nazi movement as Christian: 'The National Socialists, as the strongest party of the right, have shown both by their programme and their practical deportment in Thuringia that they have a firm, positive relationship to Christianity ... We may expect that they will remain true to their principles in the new Reichstag.' After the seizure of power Dibelius continued to view Nazism this way, even to the point of excusing Nazi brutality.²

From this account, it is clear that the organized church was not just aware of Nazism but had wholeheartedly embraced this ideology that was responsible for the killing of over 6 million jews. What are we to make of this? If "Darwinism" is responsible for Hitler, than surely "Christianity" is as well. Are we to take from this that both ideologies are evil and we should actively fight against them and their followers?

Or is it just possible that Schloss is right: that just because someone misapplies a scientific theory or even an ideology is not necessarily a reflection on those that promulgated it or even of the theory or ideology, itself. Darwin was no more responsible for the killings at Colombine than was Jesus for the gassing of the Jews. I, somehow, don't think that Klinghoffer would be willing to place the blame for racism, genocide and the evil of the twentieth century at the foot of Jesus Christ. Nor should he. The problem is not with the ideologies but with Klinghoffer's facile argument.

¹Malthus, T. (1817). An essay on the principle of population, as it affects the future improvement of society. With remarks on the speculations of mr. Godwin, m. Condorcet, and other writers. By TR Malthus.
²Steigmann-Gall, R. (2000). Apostasy or religiosity? The cultural meanings of the Protestant vote for Hitler. Social History, 25(3), 267-284.

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Charles Darwin, Social Darwinism and Columbine

Dennis Sewell has an article for Times Online about the link between Darwin and the recent spate of high school massacres. He writes:

In America, where Darwin’s writings on morality and race have come under particularly intense critical scrutiny because of the enduring creationist debate, he has been accused of fostering moral nihilism and scientific racism, and even of promoting an ethic that found its ultimate expression in the Holocaust. Most startling of all, a connection has now been drawn between Darwin’s theories and a rash of school shootings.

Morality? Race? Darwin not only failed to express some of the views against racism that were prevalent in his culture but was an outspoken opponent of slavery. The rest of the article painstakingly recounts all of the events that led up to each high school shooting and the fact that each of the shooters wanted to rid the world of people they thought were inferior and in the way. While interesting in its own right, it is not clear how much it actually has to do with Darwin's concept of natural selection, in which the environment plays a role in how species change over time.

It has been shown time and again that Darwin's views were not shared by either Hitler or Stalin and had nothing to do with the Holocaust. This meme is getting so old, it has whiskers, but creationists and ID supporters keep using it. Sewell also writes:

Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved — a set of sentiments or intuitions that developed from adaptive responses to environmental pressures tens of thousands of years ago. This does not merely explain the origin of morals, it totally explains them away. Whether an individual opts to obey a particular ethical precept, or to regard it as a redundant evolutionary carry-over, thus becomes a matter of personal choice. Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang “Randomness is good enough for me, If there’s no design it means I’m free” — lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel. Clearly they see evolution as something that emancipates them from the strict sexual morality insisted upon by their parents. But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.

This is a complete misread of Darwin's understanding of morality. While it is certain that, by the end of his life, Darwin was not a Christian, he did believe in a God and did have a high opinion of morality. In his autobiography, he wrote:

A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones. A dog acts in this manner, but he does so blindly. A man, on the other hand, looks forwards and backwards, and compares his various feelings, desires and recollections. He then finds, in accordance with the verdict of all the wisest men that the highest satisfaction is derived from following certain impulses, namely the social instincts. If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and this latter gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth. By degrees it will become intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather than his higher impulses, which when rendered habitual may be almost called instincts. His reason may occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others, whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost guide or conscience.

Darwin clearly understood the good of being kind to his fellow humans. In fact, without this understanding of morality, his kindness to his wife or love for his children and his opposition to slavery would have made little to no sense. "Let them die!" would have been a more appropriate response if, in fact, he thought that everyone should have his own morality.

Klebold and Harris were clearly not acting in anybody's best interest, even their own. Darwin never used the term "survival of the fittest." It was attributed to him much later when the misguided notion of "Social Darwinism" arose. Darwin's contribution to the scientific world was the theory that organisms in any given population expressed a variety of traits and that the environment acted on those traits in a way that some variations were positively selected, some were negatively selected and some were not selected either way. Over the course of many generations there was "descent with modification." That's it.

Sewell ends thus:

The more sinister implications of the world-view that has come to be called “Darwinism” — and the interpretation the teenage nihilists put on it — are as much part of the Darwin story as the theory of evolutions [sic]

This misses the central point about evolution, though. When nuclear power was harnessed in the 1930s and used in the 1940s to devastating effect, it ushered in the nuclear age and the raging debates about whether nuclear energy should be used, even for beneficial purposes.

I remember seeing Peter, Paul and Mary perform in 1985, here in Knoxville. Ever the protest singers, they sang one song called "Power." One of the lyrics was "Take all of your atomic poison power away." Above the protests, sat nuclear power, oblivious to all of it. It simply was. It existed. As Shel Silverstein put it: "Its all the same to the clam."

The same is true of evolution. It exists. It is observable and its effects can be quantified. Not only do we see evidence of speciation in modern-day organisms, we see evidence of it in the fossil record (fishapod, frogamander). How Darwin's theory, and the extrapolations from it, have been misused is irrespective of the actual processes, themselves. The implications may be part of the story of "Darwinism" but they are not a part of evolution.

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The Nonsense of Pat Buchanan

Former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has written a column that, sadly is all too common from conservatives these days. He has rolled into one column nearly every myth and misrepresentation about evolution out there. Let's start at the top:

"You have no notion of the intrigue that goes on in this blessed world of science," wrote Thomas Huxley. "Science is, I fear, no purer than any other region of human activity; though it should be."

As "Darwin's bulldog," Huxley would himself engage in intrigue, deceit and intellectual property theft to make his master's theory gospel truth in Great Britain.

And the support for this allegation is where? Not in this column, that's for sure. No matter. He moves on. Talking about Eugene Windchy's book The End of Darwinism: And How a Flawed and Disastrous Theory Was Stolen and Sold, Buchanan says:

That Darwinism has proven "disastrous theory" is indisputable.

"Karl Marx loved Darwinism," writes Windchy. "To him, survival of the fittest as the source of progress justified violence in bringing about social and political change, in other words, the revolution."

"Darwin suits my purpose," Marx wrote.

Darwin suited Adolf Hitler's purposes, too.

"Although born to a Catholic family, Hitler become a hard-eyed Darwinist who saw life as a constant struggle between the strong and the weak. His Darwinism was so extreme that he thought it would have been better for the world if the Muslims had won the eighth century battle of Tours, which stopped the Arabs' advance into France. Had the Christians lost, (Hitler) reasoned, Germanic people would have acquired a more warlike creed and, because of their natural superiority, would have become the leaders of an Islamic empire."

Charles Darwin also suited the purpose of the eugenicists and Herbert Spencer, who preached a survival-of-the-fittest social Darwinism to robber baron industrialists exploiting 19th-century immigrants.

Some of these are so old, they are getting whiskers. Hitler, once again, did not use natural selection as the underpinnings of his hatred of the Jews. He simply didn't. And to continue to peddle this nonsense only makes Buchanan look foolish. Herbert Spencer's adaptations of Darwin's theory was misapplied, since Darwin never meant his theory to be extrapolated outside of the biological realm. As Derek Freeman wrote for Current Anthropology in 1974:

The disparity between Spencer's "general doctrine of evolution" and Darwin's theory of the origin of species was thus immense. Spencer's doctrine, not having resulted from any kind of sustained empirical enquiry, was explicitly deductive in its structure, and rested on the metaphysical supposition that all evolutionary change was due to the persistence of an immanent "Power" that was (Spencer 1904 [1882], vol 1: 554) both "unknown and unknowable." In marked contrast, Darwin's theory, as he published it in 1859, was authentically scientific, for, without recourse, for all practical purposes, to metaphysics or "final causes," it postulated, on the basis of massive factual evidence, a non-teleological mode of evolutionary change and incorporated a precise definition of the mechanism of natural selection which (as has been conclusively demonstrated) does indeed result in the genetic evolution of populations of living organisms.¹

The problem is that Buchanan has no idea what evolution actually is and has confused what Spencer believed with what Darwin empirically showed. Buchanan continues:

Darwin also lied in "The Origin of Species" about believing in a Creator. By 1859, he was a confirmed agnostic and so admitted in his posthumous autobiography, which was censored by his family.

Darwin did not lie about believing in a creator. When his beloved daughter Anne died, it shattered Darwin's belief in a personal, loving God. It is also nonsense that Darwin's family suppressed it. Darwin wrote:

Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker. But then arises the doubt—can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience? Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.

I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

He didn't "lie" about his belief in a creator. That is a simplistic read of Darwin's thoughts on God. Darwin freely admitted he was an agnostic but that is a far cry from lying about it. The real clue that Buchanan has no idea what he was talking about comes toward the end, though, with this:

Darwin's examples of natural selection – such as the giraffe acquiring its long neck to reach ever higher into the trees for the leaves upon which it fed to survive – have been debunked. Giraffes eat grass and bushes. And if, as Darwin claimed, inches meant life or death, how did female giraffes, two or three feet shorter, survive?

What Buchanan is actually recounting here is Lamarckian evolution. Darwin used Lamarck's example of the giraffe to show that Lamarck was wrong. The problem is that Buchanan doesn't know the difference. Darwin showed that the giraffe didn't stretch its neck and pass on the characteristic to its offspring. He showed that the giraffes with longer necks outcompeted those with shorter necks and this trait was passed on to their offspring. Not the same thing. As far as the females not getting any food, he makes it seem as if there was no food at the lower branches. This is nonsense. The giraffes evolved long necks over time because the ones with longer necks could exploit a feeding niche that no other animal could, which ensured their survival. As Buchanan, himself, says, giraffes also eat grass. Plenty of that around. He also trots out this lie:

For 150 years, the fossil record has failed to validate Darwin.

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontologists," admitted Stephen J. Gould in 1977. But that fossil record now contains even more species that appear fully developed, with no traceable ancestors.

If Buchanan actually knew anything about the fossil record, he would know that this isn't true. It is also absolutely telling that he uses a quote that is 32 years out-of-date. And it was even a controversial statement when Gould said it then. Furthermore, if Buchanan had done his homework, he would have discovered this quote of Gould's:

"Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists--whether through design or stupidity, I do not know--as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups."²

But that doesn't fit the narrative, so it has to be ignored. Buchanan simply swiped that quote from a stock of misquotes that creationists have been collecting for years. That Buchanan has been marginalized in the GOP is little consolation because this kind of thought keeps showing up in conservative sources. That so little thought, preparation or accuracy is put into such work is a very disturbing.

¹Freeman, D. (1974) The evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Current Anthropology 15(3): 211

²Gould, Stephen J. (1983) Evolution as Fact and Theory. Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes.Norton, New York.


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Adnan Oktar Interviewed in Uncommon Descent

Uncommon Descent is a site devoted to Intelligent Design. William Dembski ran the site until November of 2008 after which Barry Arrington took over. Dembski still posts to the site quite often, though. Recently, they ran an interview with the Muslim creationist Adnan Oktar (a.k.a. Harun Yahya), who I have posted about several times. The interview, by someone only identified as "O'Leary" (Denyse O'Leary) is loaded with softballs that would make Chris Matthews blush. for example:

O’LEARY: Many claim that if people do not embrace Darwin and his followers’ theories, they cannot have an advanced technological culture. Others point out that the United States, arguably the world’s leader in science, features a population of which the majority doubts Darwin. Would you care to comment on that?

ADNAN OKTAR: This is totally classic Darwinist propaganda. Darwinists often resort to the idea that anyone who thinks scientifically has to be a Darwinist. For one thing, Darwinism is a pagan religion whose roots go back to the Sumerians and Ancient Egypt. The Egyptians also believed that life emerged spontaneously from the muddy waters of the Nile. The theory of evolution is a superstitious belief that has been around ever since and that is not supported by a shred of scientific evidence.

On the contrary, no matter what branch research or investigation may be conducted in, it has every time been proven that evolution is not possible. It is in fact Darwinists themselves who fly in the face of science, reject the facts revealed by science and who blacken the name of science by frauds of one kind and another.

There is no coherence in his statements. Darwinism goes back to Egypt and Sumeria??? The other half of his response is equally unbelievable:

Yet we have come up with 100 million fossils, fossils belonging to fully formed and perfect life forms that all show evolution never happened, and they have no rational answer to give. A profound silence reigns whenever the subject of fossils is raised. And everyone can see that. That is why Darwinists are desperately striving to keep Darwinism propped up with slogans and propaganda.

He offers not a shred of evidence for this position and his statement flies in the face of mountains of publications to the contrary—publications I am quite sure he has never read. His Atlas of Creation is a testament to what unbridled enthusiasm and absolutely zero scholarship will produce. The amazing thing is that the interviewer doesn't challenge him on any of these points.

But that is not why this interview is important. Increasingly, the Intelligent Design movement has become more antagonistic toward evolution supporters, despite having at least one principle researcher in their midst who supports it, Michael Behe. This antagonism has made for some strange bedfellows. Charles Taylor at LGF points out something else about Adnan Oktar that seems to go unremarked upon by O'Leary: He has written a book on holocaust denial called the Holocaust Deception. It is astounding that the Intelligent Design movement, in its efforts to step up its campaign against evolution, will associate itself with anyone who also doesn't support evolution. To be fair, O'Leary does point out that controversy swirls by linking to several not so flattering articles on the man but then presents the excuse that "it is a messy business." Messy enough to accept the work of a man who has embraced one of the biggest canards of the century, holocaust denial? About one of Oktar's other books, The Evolution Deceipt, O'Leary writes:

"I will also shortly post a review of Evolution Deceit, the most succinct and comprehensive of the critiques of overblown claims for Darwinian evolution that I have ever read."

I wonder if it is as "succinct and comprehensive" as his holocaust denial book? Is this really the direction the leaders of the ID movement want to go?