Creationists (old school and ID) will stop at nothing in their frenzied attempts to discredit the theory of evolution. As I've noted before, the scientific realm is not their preferred area of engagement, probably due the fact that 1) they don't really understand how evolution works, making it difficult to critique and 2) they don't have a scientific theory to offer as a better explanation of biological diversity. Another reason creationists don't waste too much time discussing the science is that their primary audience, the public, won't be all that interested in the scientific banter, so why waste time on that when you can appeal to their emotions instead. This is where the Teach the Controversy angle comes in, and of course the We can thank Darwin for Adolf Hitler angle.
Recently at Uncommon Dissent, Bill Dembski and his gang thought a good way to discredit evolution would be to go over the writings of Charles Darwin with a fine-tooth comb, searching for unsavoury comments. How this was supposed to disprove the theory of evolution no one can really know. We can only assume that the creationist crowd believed that if they could show Darwin to be a flawed individual that people would believe his theory to be flawed too. In all, a clear example of trying to win people over to your side by pushing their emotional buttons rather than coming up with the goods in the scientific realm.
More recently, Bill Muehlenberg joined in with Darwin and Eugenics at his CultureWatch website....
While more sober minds see a clear line between Darwin’s ideas and many of the horrible social experiments of the twentieth century, including Nazism, defenders of Darwin argue that at best there is no connection, or at worst any such episodes are aberrations or perversions of what Darwin believed.
The Darwin-Hitler connection is getting so boring. It's truly facinating how someone making a natural explanation for observations of natural phenomena (in the field of biology in this instance) can lead to them being placed in the same basket as Hitler. All this demonstrates is the amazingly low depths religious right figures like Muehlenberg will go to discredit evolutionary theory and, so they believe, gain their deity of choice a little more street cred. Will they ever have the guts to play only the ball and not the man?
But is that the case? Most people are not even aware of the full title of his 1859 masterwork: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. That last half of the title, often overlooked, sounds like it could come straight out of a Ku Klux Klan manual.
A quick Google will fill anyone one in on what Darwin was actually talking about when he used the term "races" in that title. In Darwin's time naturalists used the term "race" to refer to distinct populations within a species, not necessarily human races. Muehlenberg hopes his readers will read this title out of its scientific (and historical) context and conclude that The Origin of Species is some kind of race-hate manual. More on this common misrepresentation here.
The article continues with heavy quotation from an article by Peter Quinn, which is really a quote mining operation similar to that carried out by Dembski & Co. All Muehlenberg and Quinn can prove is that my contemporary standards Charles Darwin had some racist comments and ideas. Mark Isaak responds to this common creationist charge at TalkOrigins:
Virtually all Englishmen in Darwin's time viewed blacks as culturally and intellectually inferior to Europeans. Some men of that time (such as Louis Agassiz, a staunch creationist) went so far as to say they were a different species. Charles Darwin was a product of his times and no doubt viewed non-Europeans as inferior in ways, but he was far more liberal than most: He vehemently opposed slavery (Darwin 1913, especially chap. 21), and he contributed to missionary work to better the condition of the native Tierra del Fuegans. He treated people of all races with compassion.
All creationists like Bill Muehlenberg can do is point out flaws in Darwin himself and hope that their readers will believe that his theory is also flawed. It's pathetic. If we learned tomorrow that Einstein deep down held a bitter hatred towards Chinese people would we throw the theory of relativity out the window?
Update: According to the latest wingnuttery, Darwin is not only to blame for the Holocaust but also for the Virginia Tech shootings in the U.S.
Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.
