Glenn Beck has started down a well-worn path, prodded by Pat Gray. They are building the case that Evolution is wrong.
The logic goes like this – Charles Darwin formalized the idea in 1859 that life forms have changed over the course of history. As the environment changes, random changes in individual creatures cause some of them to be better able to survive challenges and the better ideas will squeeze out the other creatures that don’t adapt or species that are not suited to survival. Charles Darwin died in 1882. DNA would not be correctly understood until the 1950s, and the sequencing of DNA in the past few decades has proven beyond any doubt the mechanism of evolution. Evolution does not state that the first life on Earth created itself spontaneously, but it is at odds with the Genesis creation story that all life was created in a period of 7 days.
After his death, his half-cousin Francis Galton built on that idea with his ideas of statistics and correlation and came up with the idea of eugenics – the notion that society should apply the same principles to ourselves that we do to dogs, race horses, and plants – use selective breeding to improve the quality of human life. Mr Galton was a brilliant man, making important advances in fingerprint identification, meterology, and measuring mental abilities.
His belief was that human civilization was causing human ability to “regress to the mean” because of human instinct to want to rescue the weak and the incapable, where in earlier times predators would have weeded out the weak humans. The goal of eugenics was the encourage people with “good traits” to have lots of children and to discourage people with “undesirable traits” to not have children or to die from the limitations of their abilities. In the United States, this idea was implemented with forced sterlizations of the mentally ill and laws restricting immigration from certain parts of the world.
The ultimate expression of this movement was in National Socialist Germany where things moved from discouraging reproduction to exterminating races and groups of people in concentration camps.
So looking at the end point, Glenn is now laying the foundation that since Darwin’s ideas ended up in mass executions of innocent civilians 80 years later, therefore the scientific basis of natural selection must be wrong or inspired by evil.
A very interesting notion from a person who is constanting fighting the battle that should anyone who listens to Glenn Beck do something bad, that those bad actions are the result of the decisions of that person, not that Glenn’s ideas caused the outcome. Let’s apply the same standard to Charles Darwin.
Well said, Art. The first comparison that came to my mind was less on target than yours. Using their logic, if a man used a hand tool, such as a screwdriver or a saw, to harm someone, then the creators of those tools must be wrong or evil as well.
I think that Mr. Galton’s ideas are far more misguided than evil, and he possibly only had good intentions when he thought them. You know what they say about good intentions, though…
One salient point here, however, is that Barack Obama has stated the “death panels” assigned to judge whether or not your life is worth preserving under Obamacare would use “science” as it’s justification. Eugenics was considered “settled science” in its day, much as global warming is considered by some to be irrefutable. I believe Beck’s point is that if we were mislead to the point where notables such as Margaret Sanger, Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh advocated Nazi principles, then we can be mislead again to a point at which Bill Gates would advocate withholding medical care from the elderly (which he has done) or those deemed “unfit.”