Every couple of months a member of the unenlightened trots out this tired argument:
Evolution gives our kids an excuse to believe in natural selection and survival of the fittest, which leads to a belief that they are superior over the weak. Furthermore, they often argue, that evolution was used to justify Nazism and shit like that. Not so different, I'd argue, are the people at cocktail parties who chastise scientists for in some way, being responsible for slavery or the vague teleology that allegedly underpins race-based oppression. If you haven't yet stocked your blog roll with Pharyngula, I suggest you do because
PZ Myers is a solid science writer and an intelligent contributor in various political debates. Here he writes about the
comments of a City Council member, but his basic idea is the good one,
Rather than reducing our kids' exposure to evolution, let's increase it. The problem with what Bill Foster believes, a belief he shares with the Columbine punks, is that it has nothing to do with evolutionary biology — in their ignorance, they've swallowed a whole pop-culture, religious line of bullshit about the theory. Biology does not advocate killing the stupid and weak; it does not preach some kind of objective superiority of one class of people over another; it merely describes what happens in the natural world.That's right, the theory of evolution has as much to do with morality as the theory of gravity. If you want to blame scientists for something, I suppose you can blame them for insufficiently explaining to people that Social Darwinism is kind of an oxymoron, but don't tell me evolution is bad.
Labels: science
