I just got pointed to Confronting Evolution’s Racists Roots via my RSS. This is a common tactic. And it might work for unsophisticated people on the margins. Just like a tract like “Christianity’s racist past” would also sell. Or, “Socialism’s white supremacist heritage.” But intellectually it’s a rather low-brow tactic. The real question is: Is It True? The racism of European intellectuals and the racialist inferences made from evolutionary theory are of historical interest, but not of scientific ones. It isn’t as if a tract with the title “Jesus Christ, Semitic Supremacist,” would disabuse most Christians of the truth of their faith.
This really doesn’t matter except in a meta sense. Many Intelligent Design proponents want to recast their movement as something separate & distinct from the crass lowbrow methods of Young Earth Creationism. John West, who is flogging Darwin’s racism in the article (and has done so elsewhere) is a fellow at the Discovery Institute. Of course it doesn’t surprise me that they’re going this route, but it confirms.
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