Posted by
Jack Fisher on Thursday, July 02, 2009 3:10:50 PM
In the decades since Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, critics and zealots alike have been looking for any way to discredit it. Recently, Townhall's own Pat Buchanan entered the frey as one who makes the age-old appeal to conspiracy.
In this article Buchanan mentions Thomas Huxley, a contemporary of Darwin and is quoted as saying "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." This kind of appeal tries to discredit something by claiming it was promoted through deceit, ignoring the actual substance of the theory itself. It ignores the actual merits of the theory, in other words, the evidence. Darwin had the evidence. Men like Huxley just tried to market it. But no matter how he pushed it, Huxley had no bearing on the validity of Darwin's theory. It was vindicated by evidence, not good PR. And it has continued to be vindicated in the decades since.
When appeals to conspiracy don't work, men like Buchanan will try the old slippery slope argument. He references Marx and Hitler, two of the most despised figures in the 20th century and associates them with Darwin. This 'fraud by association' is another dishonest tactic that has the same problem as the appeal to conspiracy. It does not address the evidence. It is basically an ad hominum attack. It reasons that if A is bad and B is associated with A then B must be bad. It has no bearing on the validity of a theory either. It does not matter who formulated it or what they believed or didn't believe. What matters is the evidence. So whether Darwin was an agnostic, a Christian, or a Muslim, it doesn't matter. The evidence is what matters.
In addition, the association between Darwin, Hitler, and Communism is sketchy at best and non-existant at worst. In Hitler's own book, Mien Kamf, he redicules Darwin's work and makes many of the same arguments creationists use today. If he had any favoring of evolution, it wasn't Darwin. It was the evolution proposed of Jean-Baptiste Lemarck, who came before Darwin and proposed a kind of evolution where variation could emerge in a single individual within a single generation. But Lemarck turned out to be wrong. Darwin proved that populations evolve, not individuals. Lemarck appealed to Hitler and Stalin because it justifed the idea of propogating physically, racially, and nationally superior humans. It meant if they could make the citizens of their country into an ideal, they would evolve above the rest of humanity. As Darwin later proved, that is not how evolution works.
Regardless of what one thinks about Darwin and who he associated with, his theory has stood the test of time for one reason: evidence. Since his theory was first proposed, mountains of evidence have emerged to support evolution. This evidence includes verifiable observations in palentology, biology, biochemistry, taxonomy, comparative morphology, psychology, and genetics. Some like Buchanan would argue that scientists view it through a bias perspective, but this completely ignores the fact that no viable alternative has been put forth by creationists or intelligent design proponents that better explains what is observed. The evidence fits evolution. It also completely ignores the nature of evidence. Because even from the most bias perspective, evidence cannot be made into something it is not. Evidence stands on its own merits and what is drawn from it cannot be skewed without ignoring reason and logic, which in science always gets trumped by the process of peer review.
So for people like Buchanan who resort to these dishonest criticisms, they are hurting their own credibility. If they want to discredit Darwin, do what he did and use evidence rather than blatant personal attacks. Science is not the study of personalities it's the study of the natural world. The merits of an individual scientist do not matter at the end of the day. Only the evidence matters.