College Requirement: Four Years of Darwinism
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
My inbox has been graced with a special message from Gary North. North is a nut-job fundie with a PhD from a legitimate school (UC Riverside), which proves that you can misuse a real education as easily as a fake one. North’s degree is in economic history, which (of course) qualifies him to talk about something called “Darwinism”. I’m not sure what this “Darwinism” is. I checked the course catalogs of many schools, but I couldn’t find such a subject.
North seems to be the poster child of the pro-theocracy, pro-hate pressure group American Vision. North’s email to me is titled “Special Report: The key to winning back our country”. This report can’t be that special; I was unable to find a copy of it on their web site. But don’t feel left out! I’ll reprint the best parts of his email right here, so you, too, can bathe in the glow of his wisdom.
to your monitor, so you can bathe in his glowing wisdom.
He starts out with:
Every college student is required to take four years of Darwinism. What have you done to immunize your child?
Nothing. Religious nuts like you are opposed to immunizations.
Darwin’s book…was published in 1859.
Oh! He means Charles Darwin! What a dimwit! Schools haven’t taught “Darwinism” in over a hundred years. They do teach biology, though. This includes a much-revamped and updated theory of evolution, which is based, in part, on Darwin’s groundbreaking work.
That was the beginning. Within two decades, Darwin’s theory of evolution through random natural selection…
Wow! That economics degree sure served you well, “Dr.” North! You might want to learn a subject before forming an opinion of it. Evolution is not random! What a putz!
…had captured the thinking of the intellectuals of the Western world. Every academic field was rewritten in terms of Darwinism: law, history, political science, economics—all of them.
Well if that is indeed true, that is the fault of those other disciplines. You can’t directly apply a theory about the natural world to the social sciences. But I strongly suspect that Dr. North is not completely accurate here.
Most Bible-believing Christians are aware of this with respect to biology and geology. They are not aware of it in the social sciences and the humanities. Yet it is here that Darwinism rules with an iron grip.
The one who needs to get a grip is North.
Let me give an example. Anthropologists speak of primitive societies.
Uh… Not the last time I checked, they didn’t. The only people still using that term are the Christians, to justify their culture-destroying missionary work around the world.
In fact, let’s quote Wikipedia on the matter:
…describing a culture as primitive is often considered factually incorrect and offensive today.
Now let’s get back to Dr. North’s factually incorrect and offensive email:
But such societies still exist in jungle tribes. Why? Anthropologists do not point to the tribes’ rejection of biblical religion (after Noah) as the cause of their backwardness.
Considering that Noah never existed and the flood never happened, I’d say that’s a good move on their part.
They search for other explanations. They look to the tribes’ environment. This is pure Darwinism: man’s social evolution as the result of expanding population in the face of a hostile environment.
No. This is pure science. Look at the facts and see where they point. (In fact, if you’re interested in this subject, there’s a fascinating book that explores these questions: Guns, Germs, and Steel.)
Historians teach that civilization appeared first in Mesopotamia. Men learned agriculture. But didn’t Cain offer an agricultural sacrifice?
OK. Now I’m lost. I think he’s saying that those nasty historians are crediting the invention of agriculture to those offensive “primitive societies”, when everybody knows that God taught Cain how to plant crops.
Providentially, the scientific creation movement came into existence in the 1950s.…We have many books and magazines on six-day creation in the natural sciences.
…
We do not have even one book on creationism in the humanities and the social sciences.…We have yet to see a single textbook in history or government that is explicitly six-day creationist. [emphasis added]
You read it here first, folks! Gary North is suggesting that the radically-repressed now expand their assault on education to the social sciences! That’s one reason it was so important to stop their anti-education agenda at evolution. But like an overflowing toilet, it doesn’t matter how many towels you throw down. They still overwhelm your best efforts. They’ve made it out of the bathroom now, and they’re headed for the carpet!
